by Kris Lackey
“I can’t come back, Hannah. Tommy Hewitt was shot to death a half hour ago. I’m on my way to tell his wife.”
“Got damn it.”
“Walked into an armored-car robbery at the Golden Play.”
“An electrician and an accountant. Regular people. Same day. It doesn’t seem hardly possible.”
“No.” Maytubby heard some people talking behind Hannah. He didn’t want her to hang up and leave him with the specter of Nichole, living the last few minutes of her life with Tommy Hewitt.
A white Crown Victoria approached from the north—no roof lights but definitely government. He checked its logo and told Hannah an ME investigator was ten minutes out.
“Fast,” Hannah said. “I’m glad for that.” Wind and sleet crackled through her voice.
“You’re not in your cruiser. It’s cold.”
“Yeah.”
Maytubby scanned ghostly dolomite outcrops shrouded in cold fog. “You can’t leave Alice by herself.”
“I sent ever’body up to the road. I don’t want ’em looking at her.”
“If it were you.”
“Yeah. If it was me. The dead deserve privacy. People think it’s a license to stare.”
“I’m in Mill Creek, Hannah. I’ll get back to you.”
Maytubby turned east on Main and was out of town in two blocks. A train hauling quarry rock blocked him. It rumbled and squeaked. He broke a sweat. He had eaten at the Hewitts’ table a dozen times, ridden the wild-haired girls horsey on his knees.
As he turned into the drive, which in summer was shaded by pecan trees, his gut fisted and his eyes got hot. The cruiser’s tires popped pecan husks, spooking a crow from one of the naked branches. Where late the sweet birds sang. Maytubby had read the sonnets.
Sleet collected under the dead Bermuda grass. The cruiser’s thermometer now read 32. He radioed Sheila and told her he was at the Hewitt house and would tell Nichole right away. As he parked in front of the 1970s red-brick ranch house, he saw Nichole peer through her kitchen window. His boots crunched on the flagstones, and a quarry whistle moaned like a wolf in the distance.
The front door opened, and Nichole stood behind the glass storm door. She was wiping her hands on a dish towel and smiling at him. Her strong nose, arch eyes, and small upper lip reminded him of a young Barbara Stanwyck. So did her dancer’s posture. He resisted the urge to smile back, in fact looked sternly into her eyes. Her face fell, and her eyes grew large as she pushed open the door.
In the hall, Nichole took his elbow and turned him toward her. He couldn’t hear any child sounds in the house. “Is it Jill or Tommy?” she whispered as she wrung the towel.
“It’s Tommy.”
“Bill, he’s a master electrician!” she stage-whispered, to prove he was wrong.
“He wasn’t electrocuted, Nichole.”
Maytubby took her into the kitchen. On the way, she dropped the towel and began to tremble. He steadied her and pulled out a chair. The overhead light was off, and the winter light was dying quickly.
“There was an armored-car robbery at the Golden Play in—”
“Wilson, I know,” she whispered. “He wired that whole site when it went up.”
“Tommy went out back of the convenience store to work on the box.”
“And he walked into it.” She put her hand on her forehead as if she were going to be sick. “Oh, my sweet Jesus. No.” Maytubby knelt by her chair as she pitched into shuddering sobs. She pressed her mouth against his shoulder so she would not wake her children.
CHAPTER 4
Cold arid wind buffeted the Lighthorse cruiser. Maytubby was driving into a low, brilliant winter sun. The sleet had ended just before Nichole’s mother arrived from Tecumseh, rolling a large black suitcase behind her. She was prepared, as Nichole herself always was.
The children had never awakened. By the time he left the Hewitt house, Nichole was pale and spent, lying on the couch in front of a cold fireplace. A framed photo of the stickball team hung over the couch. A beaming Tommy Hewitt held a trophy above his teammates, who were smeared with dirt and blood. There had been no good time to call Jill, recount the day’s red harvest. When he unmuted his cell, he saw she had called. So she knew.
He pushed the call button on his cell, put it on speaker, laid it on the console. As it rang, the medical examiner’s sedan passed him going north to Oklahoma City. There might be another like it heading north from Wilson. “Are you with Nichole?” Jill said.
“I stayed until her mother came from Tecumseh.”
“So is she in any shape I should talk to her?”
“Probably not. She’s been crying for a long time. The kids were asleep. But Nichole’s mother is like Nichole—head screwed on right. Calm.”
“When calm is a possibility.”
“Yeah.”
“Bill, it’s unthinkable. I heard about the robbery and murder on KCNP in my office ten minutes ago. I called Sheila, and she told me Fox had sent you to tell Nichole.”
The phone fell silent while they thought of what remained to be said. A gust of wind jolted the cruiser.
“Did KCNP say the body of Hannah’s friend Alice Lang was found on the Washita with a bullet wound to the head?”
“Yes. I mean, Alice Lang? A retired bookkeeper who worked in a food pantry? And Hannah Bond doesn’t make friends at the drop of a hat. Childhood of betrayals, sister killed by her foster father. I know that was a long time ago, but it seems like she’s being fate-bullied.”
“I just crossed the Washita, and I see her cruiser is still there. The ME passed me going back to OKC. I’ll stop down there and talk to her.” They agreed to meet for a late dinner.
Bond wasn’t in her cruiser. Maytubby stood outside the crime scene tape, which snapped and buzzed in the fierce wind. Small drifts of sleet crept around exposed bur oak roots. With his eye, he followed the tape down to the water’s edge, where it framed a snag. Bond was not there. Though she would not be assigned to the investigation of Lang’s murder, she wouldn’t wait until tomorrow to begin it. He swapped his Smokey hat for a black watch cap and picked up his flashlight. He turned his back on the sun and walked upstream, into the wind.
Soon he wished he had put on gloves. He walked more than a mile, under the highway bridge and along a marsh. Evening sunlight turned the light bark of the tall cottonwoods neon orange. The trees creaked in the wind like rusted vanes. A barn owl glided through the thicket.
As Maytubby watched rushes flailing in the gathering dusk, he felt the chill of death, a pang of superstitious dread. The abating glow gave the land the cast of a lurid dream.
He almost walked past Hannah Bond. The wind erased his walking sounds, and she was knee-deep in the marsh, bent at the waist and shining her flashlight on a clump of cattails. Her aviator hat and brown uniform made her look like a downed pilot from the first war. Maytubby whistled between his fingers. She didn’t turn around but raised her left hand, with the flashlight, to acknowledge the only person in her life who whistled at her. There was a brilliant stroke of light, and Maytubby realized both how dark it was and that Hannah was photographing something. When she turned to face him, the phone was already in some pocket. She waded toward him, her head high and tilted a little back, the way she held it when she was angry.
“One of her fake boobs,” she said. “OSBI and Sheriff Magaw would have my head on a platter if I touched it. It’ll be in Lake Texoma by midnight. Some peckerwood down there’ll think it’s his trotline.”
She pulled on examination gloves and took a small plastic bag from her duty belt. From the bag, she snapped out an elastic object, held it to Maytubby’s face.
It was a blue disposable glove, its index and middle fingers torn. “Found this before the fake boob. This can’t go floating down to Texoma. It stays with me. I photographed it wrapped around a cattail.”
<
br /> As she rebagged the glove, Maytubby nodded. “Lot of riverbank for OSBI to sift tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow won’t be the start of it. At least it’s wintertime—not so many folks going to the river.” Bond turned and walked with Maytubby toward the cruisers. “Alice was afraid of water. She had a thing about long bridges. That Roosevelt Bridge across Lake Texoma gave her nightmares. When we went to the outlet mall in Gainesville, she made me drive over the Red. And she shut her eyes while I did.”
“How did she get to the City? Can’t do it without crossing the South Canadian.”
“Alice tried to stay between rivers.”
“Did something happen when she was young?”
Bond was silent a few beats. “She never said. And you know I don’t ask.”
“I do.” He switched his flashlight on. When they had passed under the highway bridge, the blue strobes of her cruiser beat across the cold valley.
“This has been a day of shit, hasn’t it, Bill?”
“Yes, it has, Hannah.”
Her boots croaked as they struck the dry grama stalks. “Maggots,” she said.
Maytubby and Bond said nothing else. They got in their cruisers and drove to higher ground.
CHAPTER 5
Maytubby and Jill Milton sat across from each other at a small drop-leaf table and ate in silence. A tapered candle in a ceramic bottle was the only light in the garage apartment. Once, the candlelight had alarmed a neighbor living in one of the thirties oil-boom mansions on King’s Road, and he had called the Ada Fire Department. Maytubby’s gable-and-wing across town, built when its address was Indian Territory, funneled too many drafts for winter dining. The garage apartment was caulked, at least. Its first tenant was Jill’s great-grandfather John Milton, whose father was a Chickasaw freedman, a black man owned by a Chickasaw man. John Milton married a Chickasaw woman and chauffeured the millionaire who lived in the Tudor mansion up front.
Maytubby had cooked black beans and carrots with cumin and vinegar. Jill sautéed the rest of the carrots in butter and thawed basil. A single old-fashioned glass half full of Marietta Old Vine Red sat at the top of each plate. The large, dim room smelled sweet. On the evenings they spent together—most evenings—they read novels to each other or listened to Fresh Air or This American Life on KGOU-Ada. Sometimes, Jill played clawhammer banjo.
Tonight, the radio was off, and the novel they were reading, The Book of Ebenezer Le Page, about a curmudgeon on the Channel Island of Guernsey, lay unopened on an end table by the canvas couch. Maytubby’s uniform coat and Jill’s squall jacket hung from the backs of their chairs. The norther beat against the old clapboard and made the rafters snap.
Jill cleared her throat. “Nichole was still asleep when I called and talked to her mother. The kids were eating mac and cheese. They were asking about their daddy.”
Maytubby shook his head, looked at his empty spoon. “And the answers they get will make no sense.”
“Only what happens starting today.”
“When the air that they breathed …”
“Yes.” She looked down at her food and touched her upper lip. Below the King’s Road bluff, a siren dopplered away on the State 3 bypass. “Can you go over there with me tomorrow night?”
“I think so.”
“You don’t know if Fox will put you on Tommy’s case.”
“I won’t give him a choice.”
“What about the rustlers?”
“They’re rustlers. That also doesn’t give Fox a choice.”
“You can’t solve your friend’s murder, because you have to track down the guys who stole some cows.”
“Exactly.”
“You don’t know if the shooter is an Indian or not. And if he’s not, it’s on the US attorney.”
“That’s what Fox might say, you mean?”
Jill nodded.
“I’ll ask him how we’ll know if the shooter is an Indian or not until we find him.”
“You’re going to ignore the rules anyway.”
“Mmnngg.” He looked at her black eyes over the candle flame. They shone under a deep worry line. Maytubby felt a twinge of guilt when he recalled that the line appeared when they were making love. “Just division-of-labor rules.”
“The candle reminds me of Papa Gjorgjio’s.”
“I was thinking the same thing. Tommy mugging to that ridiculous Spike Jones song. Breaking his kids up.”
“If I put it out, that will be what happens starting today.”
“Let it burn?”
“Let it burn.”
Washing dishes, they looked out the window toward the south, down the valley of the Clear Boggy. Constellations of amber sodium lamps spun out to the horizon. In the clear, cold air, a gibbous moon cast enough light to make the land visible.
“One winter night,” Jill said, “I had Ahloso Road to myself, and I drove with my lights out.”
“The luster of midday.”
“Yeah, ‘the moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow.’ I’m glad we can’t see Mill Creek from here.”
“The curvature of the earth is repressing it for us.”
Maytubby dried the last dish and held it above his head. “It’s hard to see dirt in candlelight.”
Jill tapped at her laptop until a Café Noir song came from its tiny speakers. They liked the weird, calm fusion of old cowboy serenades and French cabaret music. She took his hand and led him to the small empty space in front of the couch. They held each other and slow-danced as the candle guttered.
* * *
Hannah Bond sat alone at the kitchen table in her frame postwar cottage on the north side of Tishomingo, drinking coffee from a mug that said, “Van’s Pig Stand.” The eastern sky had a little light in it. She watched delivery bobtails upshifting on their way out of town—Hiland Dairy, Ben E. Keith, Coca-Cola. The gas wall heater clanged on and beat a tattoo.
Bond still wore her uniform. After midnight, she had finally drifted to sleep in her recliner, only to start up minutes later. Television audiences laughed at late-night comics. She didn’t hear what the comics were saying. She walked the floor the rest of the night, occasionally kicking a chair.
CHAPTER 6
Before dawn, Maytubby ran from Jill’s apartment to the Chickasaw Nation Medical Center and back—six miles and change. In warm weather, in the daytime, he ran country trails barefoot, like the Tarahumara, whom he admired. On short winter days, when he had to run on shard-strewn roads in the dark, he wore gray New Balance runners and a Petzl headlamp.
After he had showered and dressed, Jill’s cell alarm played a banjo tune, “Blackberry Blossom.” When she stirred, he turned it off.
Maytubby scraped frost from his cruiser windshield with his Pontotoc County Library card. When he set off for the Golden Play in Wilson, the sun had just cleared the roofs of the King’s Road mansions. His shift would begin in six hours, so he didn’t have to think about Chief Fox. To make sure Fox didn’t make a preemptive strike, he turned his police radio off.
Looking down on the Washita from the State 1 bridge a half hour later, he saw Hannah Bond’s old Skylark in the frosted grass. She was making hay before Sheriff Magaw took her off the case and sent her to investigate livestock on the right-of-way.
In Ardmore, Amtrak’s Heartland Flyer trundled above him on its way to Fort Worth, its buffed aluminum filling his cruiser with reflected light. Maytubby and Jill had boarded the Flyer once at Pauls Valley and ridden it to see a Caravaggio exhibition at the Kimball Museum in Fort Worth. The Flyer didn’t so much fly as taxi on double track, waiting for a freight to pass.
US 70 was four-lane, and deserted as Maytubby drove through Lone Grove. The path of a rare winter tornado a few years earlier was still plain in the little town named for a desolate stand of cedars. The townspeople had thought a malfunction set off the storm
sirens in February. One of the dead was a trucker whose rig was lifted off the highway.
A few miles of rolling country and then, on the outskirts of Wilson, Maytubby saw the Black and Gold Casino and the Wilson Travel Plaza. Both were Chickasaw Nation enterprises, and they shared a gabled building that was designed to look rustic. The sign on US 70 was a squat faux oil derrick, and the font was hillbilly.
The nation van that Tommy Hewitt drove was parked at the edge of a mostly empty lot. A decal of the nation’s seal, with its purple band, was affixed to the driver’s-side door. Crime scene tape, strung between signposts, fenced the van. Maytubby parked, ducked under the tape, and looked inside. It was spotless—no cups, not even a peanut shell on the seat. Though the van was a few years old, the cabin looked spanking new. It was clear Tommy had vacuumed the carpet. A small acrylic box in one of the cup holders contained an assortment of pens and mechanical pencils, all of them blue. Tucked in beside the box was a black-bound New Testament with some plastic bookmarks. Tommy was active Church of Christ. Maytubby was secular. They almost never talked about religion. The driver’s visor was up because Tommy would have driven to work with the morning sun at his back. An elastic band around the visor held a recent 5 × 7 color photograph of his wife and children.
Maytubby walked to the rear of the building and saw that a large swath of the loading area was also taped off. In the middle of the pavement was a single small white pylon with the numeral “1” painted on it. A single casing. The low sun glinted off a few frozen puddles. The door of the electrical box Tommy Hewitt had been updating was still cracked open. Maytubby pulled out a pencil and opened the door all the way. He could see Tommy’s handwriting beside the most recent breaker switches. The last he had identified was “WALK-IN 2.” A red-ocher stain followed the lot’s drainage slope and disappeared at a round drain grate.
