Greasy Bend

by Kris Lackey

  Maytubby walked around the building and went in the front door of the little casino. A vortex of blue cigarette smoke spun in the sunlight of the open door. A very young security guard nodded at Maytubby and said, “Hey.” Security guards were not, as a rule, commissioned officers.

  Maytubby nodded. “Everett here?”

  “Not usually at this hour, but since …”

  “Yeah. Thanks.”

  Maytubby blinked in the sudden peripheral darkness. Only a few machines were playing their jaunty tunes, but dozens of high-def video screens blazed with color. Soon, he came to a door marked security. He entered and found Everett Briggs, the casino’s chief of security, bent over a laptop screen, drinking coffee from a paper cup. Briggs looked up.

  “Hell of a thing, Bill.” He looked back down at the screen and shook his head. “Guard who sits here was in the john when it happened. He got grilled. Will.”

  Maytubby rounded the desk and stood beside Briggs. They were watching security camera footage of a nation armored car and a few men in Chickasaw Nation security guard uniforms. The camera was mounted on the roof of the building. None of the uniformed men’s faces were visible. All were hidden by uniform caps, bills pulled low, and sunglasses. A flash of cheek showed a dark patch on one man’s skin. Maytubby made Briggs go back and freeze the video. Maytubby pointed. “A black triangle inked or stuck on his face. Foils photo recognition. In case the low caps don’t work.”

  “Driver, shotgun, back guard—no one said anything about it.”

  Briggs went back to just a few seconds before the arrival of the armored car. A late-model white Ford F-150 Supercab with a black, heavy-duty grille guard pulled slowly around the corner of the building into the back lot. Sleet whipped around the building’s edges and over its roof. The pickup was spattered with mud.

  “There,” Briggs said. “White, of course.”

  “The ‘medium build’ of vehicles.”

  Three uniformed men wearing sidearms—the front passenger and two from the back—got out of the pickup and walked quickly toward the locked back door of the casino. One, the pickup’s shotgun, was short, one middle height, and one very tall—maybe six-seven. They wore tight black driver’s gloves. That looked odd, but the sleet and wind made it look less odd. They also wore dark athletic shoes—not regulation, but inconspicuous. When the armored car appeared and neared the casino’s back door, the three men, hunched against the building funnel of cold wind, milled near the back wall, a dozen feet to the side of the door. They waved at the armored car’s driver. A guard and the “hopper,” the one who handles the cash, got out of the armored car and walked toward the door. The hopper was a woman. The bogus guards again waved at them, and the video showed the guard and the hopper nodding at them. The hopper and guard went inside, a real guard holding the door for them from the inside. The real guard’s face didn’t break the plane of the wall. The driver and his shotgun sat in the cab. They could not be seen on the video.

  When the door was opened from the inside, again by a real security guard, the hopper and her guard came out of the building. When the door shut, the impostors walked up to them and appeared to chat them up. The real guard points to the other’s face. He’s maybe asking about the black triangle.

  The turn of events was so quick, Maytubby could hardly follow it. One of the bogus guards, the tall one, grabbed the armored-car guard’s pump shotgun, the short one yanked his pistol out of its holster, and the middle-height guy clumsily maced the hopper and took two bags of cash from her. The shotgun thief and the money guy bolted for the pickup. Before the little pistol thief took even a full step, he spun on his heel and aimed the pistol toward the right of the screen. Tommy Hewitt was outside the camera’s field.

  The pistol thief fired one shot and bolted for the pickup. The shotgun thief threw the gun on the pavement, and he and the money thief floundered into the pickup’s bed. Only then did the driver and the passenger guard open their doors and draw their sidearms.

  The shooter dropped his gun on the asphalt as well, just before he fence-jumped the side of the pickup bed. Smoke rose from the spinning rear tires of the pickup as it did a doughnut. The three fake guards were invisible in the bed. Never was there a clear view of the pickup’s driver, though he had hairy hands. The license plate had been removed, no dealer sticker. Flame and smoke leaped from the armored-car driver’s pistol, but only once before the tailgate of the getaway vehicle vanished behind the casino wall. It was not clear whether the shot had struck the pickup. The driver and his guards holstered their pistols, then ran off the bottom right of the scene, where Hewitt lay dying—or dead.

  Briggs sped up the video—casino guards piling out the back door, fishtailing cruisers from Oklahoma Highway Patrol and the Carter County sheriff, an ambulance. “Not much more,” he said, clicking off the video and bringing up his screen saver—Hereford cattle on a hillside. “What do you see?”

  Maytubby stared at the Herefords a few seconds. They had really curly hair. “That truck pulls a trailer pretty regularly—new truck but dents over the hitch. But the bed isn’t used to haul livestock—no shit stains and no skinning where the cage poles would fit. Mud is light colored—and gritty. Not from the redbed. The short impostor, the shooter, is left-handed even though he wears his holster on the right. He has a pronate step—walks on the outsides of his heels. Skilled marksman, we can see that. Did you zoom his neck tat for the feds?”

  “Some kind of goat-man. Evil red eyes. High-def is good.”

  “It have a woodie?”

  “What?”

  “The goat-man.”

  “Curved.”

  “It’s a satyr. A mythical creature.”

  Briggs shrugged. “You say so. Who would paint a triangle on his face to fool the camera and not cover that tat?”

  “Maybe a clever fellow. Could you Google ‘temporary tattoos’ and ‘s-a-t-y-r’?”

  Briggs matched the design at the second site. Maytubby said to the screen, “Doesn’t mean it’s not permanent.”

  “Just that if it is, he’s dumb as a ditch carp.” Briggs returned to the security video.

  Maytubby pointed to the screen. “The very tall impostor cares that his clothes fit. He shaves his neck, and he doesn’t like to step in water. His sneakers are new and clean. He has a cold, and I can’t see any hair below his cap. The middle-size guy is either poor or doesn’t care about his looks, or both. His hair hasn’t seen clippers in a long time, and it’s oily. His whiskers are scraggly, and he’s wearing Reeboks from ten years ago, maybe thrift store. And orange socks. Don’t think the mastermind thought he needed to mention black socks in the memo.”

  “Here comes the IP camera in the armored car. Lower angle but less coverage.” Briggs bent and moved the mouse around. The video filled the screen with gray light. As the pickup appears from behind the wall, the driver is visible, but he is pulling something down over his face. “We looked—it’s a pirate mask.”

  “He’s the pirate king.”

  As the armored car and the truck move toward each other, the pirate king’s shotgun passenger yanks his fake uniform cap down over his face. He has average-size fingers and a softish chin. Even seated, he is much shorter than the pirate king. About the same age. Before he opens the cab door, he twists in his seat and jabs a black-gloved index finger, his left, in the pirate king’s face. Maytubby sees now that he is not wearing driving gloves, which have a stylish strap at the wrist, but tactical duty search gloves—cop gloves—which are plainer and have a thin utilitarian elastic band at the wrist. Then Shotgun gets out and joins the other two fake guards. They wear the same duty gloves.

  The same scene he has just watched from above plays out, but from this angle he notices that the short fellow’s gait is a swagger, which may have something to do with his pronate step. He may be running the show—or at least the troops on the ground.

 
“Banty rooster,” Briggs said.

  When the action moved to the back of the armored car, Briggs switched cameras.

  “Gold piping is missing on the fake uniforms,” Maytubby said.

  When Shotgun grabbed the guard’s pistol with his left hand, paused, and spun to shoot Tommy Hewitt, a slightly larger swatch of the shooter’s face flashed between sunglasses and collar. Wheat complexion, long upper lip, strong cheekbones. Ropy neck muscles. For a fraction of a second, when he grimaced as he pulled the trigger, he showed a row of cockeyed teeth. This last detail tipped something in Maytubby’s memory, but the noise was faint and far down a dark hallway.

  Briggs brought the Herefords back up on the screen.

  Maytubby stared at the Herefords. “Any of those guys—I know you can’t see their faces—remind you of anybody who worked here?”

  Briggs stared at the screen saver, too. “Huh. I never thought about it.” Now he looked left, down at the busy wine-colored carpet. His eyes moved and stopped and moved as if he were examining faces in a lineup. His head lolled, and again he said, “Huh,” and looked back up at Maytubby. “The slob,” he said. “The way he bobbed his head like a cow when he walked.”

  “Think you could pull up his picture?”

  “If I could remember his name. It’s been a while, and he wasn’t here very long. Hold on. I’ll ask Meg in the travel stop.” Briggs laid his palm on top of his head while he waited on the intercom phone. “Meg, Everett. What was the name of that slobby kid who worked here a couple of years ago? Stinky? Couldn’t match his socks?” Briggs moved his palm back and forth on his head. Then he made a fist and rapped his desk. “Yeah. Thanks.” He hung up and said, “Lon Crum. He stole canned food from the convenience store. I showed Meg the pictures, and she fired him.”

  A few clicks, and they were looking at the face of a young man in his early twenties: mottled pale face, scraggly blond facial hair, blue eyes under drooping lids. His mouth was open.

  Maytubby pointed at the computer. “Can I run him?”

  “Be my guest.”

  Maytubby logged on and searched the name and the photo in all his databases. He memorized a vehicle registration and tag number for a red 1991 Ford Ranger. The only tribal place Crum appeared was in the nation’s HR files. He wasn’t a member of the nation. Maytubby memorized the address in Ada. “The nation didn’t prosecute the theft. And otherwise, he looks, uh, unconvicted.”

  Briggs smiled. “Never will be clean.”

  “Could you print this mug?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How many times you replay this robbery?”

  “Huh. FBI and Carter County sheriff watched it half the night.”

  “What’d they say?”

  “Nothin’. Just tapped shit into their laptops. Deputy had to leave for an hour to work a car-heifer accident in the sticks.”

  “You mean this is not the sticks?”

  “The sticks sticks.”

  “Aha. You think the shooter looks like an Indian?”

  Briggs spread his fingers and waggled his hand. “Eh. Can’t see his eyes.”

  “Pickup look familiar?” Maytubby smiled.

  Briggs shook his head, lowered it, and gave Maytubby the side-eye. “I’ll get stopped ten times before I get home to Ardmore. My two brothers have the exact same truck. It’s about a quarter of the vehicles in Carter County. Smart crook.”

  “Maybe he just always wanted to fit in.”

  “Huh.”

  “Thanks, Everett.”

  Maytubby put on his sunglasses in the dark of the casino. Even so, the sunlight outside was dazzling. He checked his watch and found that he had time to take a back way back to Lighthorse headquarters in Ada.

  Witnesses had seen the pickup speed west on US 70. That wouldn’t have lasted long. The robbery was too well planned. Likely either a safe house or a vehicle change somewhere in the sticks sticks. Maytubby was blessed with perfect geographic recall. The way some savants could describe what happened on some random Monday decades ago, Maytubby could follow, in his imagination, every road he had ever traveled. So fixed was his memory that when he encountered any change on later trips—a new building, a sapling grown into a large tree, a missing road sign—he felt vaguely disoriented and had to slow down. And afterward, his memory would never accept the changes. For this reason, he never rearranged the meager furniture in his house and hated it when Jill moved hers.

  As the tonneau of his cruiser warmed, his mind’s eye watched the pickup going west very fast, the heads of the impostor guards bobbing up into the Bernoulli vortices of sleet. Suddenly, the brake lights flashed; the truck swerved left through a median cut, then south a couple of miles, then back east. Whiskey Lane, Bullrun Road, Anshultz Road. The route began to get fuzzy. Before it blurred completely, though, he saw the pickup, now going north on a deserted stretch of Jehovah Road, slow and stop near a small bridge. The fake guards got out of the truck and began to take off their uniforms, which they had been wearing over other clothes. They had trouble because of the gloves but did not remove the gloves. One of the guards gathered up the uniforms, carried them down the embankment and under the bridge, and returned empty-handed. Maytubby recognized Caddo Creek, which entered the Washita just above Greasy Bend.

  He left the cruiser running and jogged back inside the casino. He asked Briggs to replay the second video. Only a few seconds in, he saw bits of other collars and sleeves peeping out from the uniforms. Not the neat guy’s. “They put on the uniforms over other clothes,” he said. He touched the computer screen in a couple of places.

  “Damn. You’re right,” Briggs said. “You got a snitch in the lot?” He laughed dryly.

  * * *

  On his way back to Ada, Maytubby skipped the first part of the pickup’s imagined journey and drove east and then north to Jehovah Road. Twenty minutes later, as he neared the creek bridge, every bois d’arc tree and oil service road he passed was in place. Nothing made him feel disoriented. When he came to the bridge, he switched on his strobes, got out of the car, and heel-slid down the grade. Even in this cold, he could smell the creosote in the bridge timbers. In the stark shadows they made, he saw nothing but beer cans and dead leaves. He looked up and down the creek. Nothing.

  CHAPTER 7

  Hannah Bond sat across from Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation agent Dan Scrooby in a black-and-white striped booth at Hamburger King in downtown Ada. They were drinking coffee, waiting for their orders. It was just past eleven, but country people who chored at 4 a.m. were already working on saucer-size cheeseburgers. The air was sharp with fried onions.

  Scrooby was wearing khaki pants, a navy jacket with the OSBI star embroidered on his chest, and a Heckler & Koch P30 in a nonregulation Texas cross-draw belt holster. An open laptop with a USB antenna angled away from his right hand. As he waited for their burgers to arrive, he spread his meaty hands on the gray Formica tabletop and exhaled loudly. “Some of these young agents we got now, Hannah, I don’t need to tell you. They can’t work five minutes in a row without …” He air-texted. “I try to talk to them …” He shot a glance at his laptop screen. “They start groping their phones and looking around like they’re in pain. ‘Hey!’ I say.” Scrooby then whistled loudly with his tongue. Every head in the restaurant turned. “That gets their attention.”

  “I bet.”

  He exhaled a gust of discontent.

  “Last night about dark,” Hannah said, “I found one of Alice Lang’s fake boobs in some water weeds about a half mile up the Washita from her body.”

  “Did you …”

  “No. I took a picture of it and emailed it to you last night. It was gone this morning when I went back.”

  Scrooby frowned and squinted at his laptop. “Did the subject line have ‘boob’ in it?”

  “That was the subject, so yeah.”

  “
I thought it was spam. Just a sec. Okay. Got it. GPS, too. That’s good. Listen, Hannah, Magaw’s turned the investigation over …”

  Bond was pulling her phone from her jacket pocket. She switched it on and turned the screen toward Scrooby. Before considering the phone, he stuck out his lower lip and looked at the ceiling for effect.

  “It’s a nine Luger casing on Greasy Bend Bridge. And no, I didn’t touch it. It’s wedged real good in a rusted truss seam below the driving surface. I think somebody thought they kicked it off the bridge.”

  “Send the picture to me. We’ll have a look. Like I was saying, Sheriff Magaw has turned the investigation over to OSBI. I wanted to talk to you because you were a friend of the victim.”

  “Do you know where Greasy Bend Bridge is?”

  “No.” Scrooby turned in his seat and looked at the kitchen door. Then he looked at his watch.

  “It’s three river miles above where Alice Lang’s body hung up. Old camelback steel bridge, long way from houses, closed to car traffic. Young people go to the dead-end approaches to drink and hook up. Gun nuts go there to shoot stuff against the bank. Lots of vehicle tracks in the sand, lots of casings, lots of shooting.”

  “Sounds crowded.”

  “Not after dark in a norther. And hardly anyone shoots from the middle of the bridge. And the casing was new. I leaned over and smelled it. Fresh.”

  A thin young man in a white apron slid their plates onto the table. Scrooby leered at his chicken-fried steak and white gravy. Bond knew from the few lunches they had had through the years that he would not hear a word she said until he had finished his food. She also knew that she wouldn’t have to wait long.