by Kris Lackey
“All of them,” Maytubby said, the vapor of his breath fogging the windshield. Mr. Volvo didn’t trust this middleman but didn’t want to make the swap himself.
Crum drove east on State 53, just south of the airport. A spanking new Embraer twin prop, not thirty feet above his van, yawed on its final approach to correct for a slight crosswind. Maytubby followed Crum across the Washita and north on US 177. It was clear where this was going, and Maytubby was grateful for a short winter day—the sentry at the compound on Powell Road knew his pickup. A bright moon, though, he might outwit.
At the top of the last hairpin, he turned off his headlights and drove on around the hillside. Through his binoculars, he watched Crum’s headlights slide toward the turnoff and then strike two vehicles at the gate—the guard’s blue Dakota pickup and the silver Volvo SUV. Someone walked twice in front of Crum’s headlights. There wasn’t time to transfer the big boxes. The smaller boxes seemed more important. Crum then pulled into the drive and backed onto Powell Road.
“Uhk,” Maytubby said, throwing the field glasses on the seat. He jammed the column shifter into reverse and fishtailed up the tight curve. Crum didn’t seem like someone who would question a cloud of dust when there was no wind and nobody had passed him going the other way. There were no passive reverse lights on the old truck, so he was searching for a turnout by moonlight, struggling to keep the truck as far as he could from the outside embankment without striking the hill on the inside. The truck briefly slipped into a bar ditch, and saplings shrieked along metal.
Maytubby glanced out the front windshield, saw Crum’s headlight shafts cutting through dust. When Maytubby turned around, he glimpsed a hurtling form in the moonlight. The young buck lit with a clunk in the pickup bed, lost its footing, fell, and slid against the cab. “Shit!” Maytubby said. As the buck struggled to regain its legs, it blocked the cab’s rear window. Maytubby slowed to a stop. The deer clattered around in the bed for a few seconds, then bounded into the brush. Switching on his headlights, Maytubby drove toward Crum and then passed him, slowly, with little room to spare. He could not see in the van’s tinted windows. At the first drive cut, he turned around and tailed Crum seven miles to a small cinder-block cottage set back from the road and partly hidden by cedars. Maytubby remembered that it was unpainted. Likely, it was once the milk house for a big frame house long gone to dust. Now it stood alone on the mile between section lines.
Crum still had boxes of something that didn’t belong in vending machines. Give him an hour. There was no natural cover for the whole mile. Somebody, probably not Crum, had chosen this place well—another reason to wait, but it meant looping through tracts of low-end vacation homes on Lake of the Arbuckles. Minnow Pause, Hasteys’ Retreat, Buggses Rug. For night visitors, each drive was marked by a pattern of reflectors—the Christian cross in all four reflector colors, initials, cattle brands. A few reflective-painted Uncle Sam whirligigs spun madly.
After each loop, Maytubby looked for traffic at the milk house. After his sixth pass by Hastey’s Retreat, he saw taillights leaving Crum’s driveway. Somebody, probably not Crum, had moved the boxes fast. When the lights were a quarter mile ahead, Maytubby saw they belonged to a black Ford Econoline. He grabbed his field glasses and memorized its New Mexico plates.
Never breaking the speed limit, the Econoline followed old US 77 parallel to the interstate a few miles to Oil City Road, then west. When the road was deep in the country and his truck was conspicuous, Maytubby turned off his headlights. There were few curves. The Econoline turned onto a dirt road that led to Healdton’s tiny airstrip. Maytubby stopped in the moonshade of some post oaks and glassed the only structure at the field: a metal hangar with three doors. One sodium lamp shone on the building and pooled on the ground.
The Econoline drove down the runway to the end opposite Maytubby, made a U-turn, and illuminated the runway with its headlights. It faced the north wind, as a landing plane would, so Maytubby searched the sky above it for a landing light. He waited less than fifteen seconds. The light blazed on just a few feet above the van as a single-engine plane, ghostly silent in glide, vaned and floated before scuffing the runway. The landing light quickly went out, as did the Econoline’s headlights.
Plane and van met at the edge of the sodium lamplight. Maytubby recognized the craft as a 1969 Mooney Mustang. He memorized its registration number, which ended in “E”—Echo. The plane’s DeLorean hatch levitated. The pilot stayed put while the van driver stacked boxes in the plane. Less than a minute after it had landed, the Mooney was taxiing to the south end of the runway. Its landing light shone for only a few seconds, until the plane lifted off. Then its faint red and green position lights tilted as it banked west.
Maytubby watched it too long. When he looked for the Econoline’s brake lights, they were already at the field’s gate. Then they were gone. Even in decent moonlight, Maytubby couldn’t see which way the van had turned.
CHAPTER 20
Nichole Hewitt held a wadded tissue to her nose and motioned Maytubby to a chair at her dining table. Her eyes were scalded. “Look at this food from the church,” she said, moving her free hand over a dozen casserole dishes crowded on the table. “Five potato salads. The refrigerator is packed. Mom and I …” She shrugged. And the girls don’t like most of this. Onions, pimientos, mustard—some kid repellent in half the dishes. You have to take some for you and Jill.”
“How are the girls doing?”
“Natalie is three, you know. Things are different for her, I guess. Ella’s a year older, but she has never even had a pet die. She’s kind of lost right now.” She looked at the floor and bit her nail. “Oh, Bill, I’m afraid Ella won’t remember her father.” She sobbed into her hands, and Maytubby grasped her shoulder.
“I remember my mother,” he said. “I was four.”
She looked at him. “Really?”
“Yes,” he said. “In spite of my father, who never mentioned her. You will help your children remember Tommy.”
“Even that …” Her hands were shaking. “The idea of it …”
“After my dispatcher told me what happened, I drove some miles blind and deaf.”
“That’s where I still am, way up in the middle of the air. My own children seem far away, in some other dimension almost, even when they’re asleep next to me.”
“Can you sleep?”
“When I’m exhausted. I sleep and wake at wildly random times. Mom keeps the girls on the regular clock. I think they’re a little afraid of me right now.” She pointed to her eyes. “And it’s hard for me to read to them.”
“Grandma isn’t the same.”
She nodded. “As Tommy, either. He did the voices.”
“Nichole, I don’t know who did this yet. I’ve found a circle of men who are engaged in murky enterprises. They may be smugglers.”
“Jill told me about the uniforms.”
“I don’t know if these guys are behind the robbery. The FBI is looking in a different direction.”
“They talked to me a few hours ago.”
Maytubby laid a hand on the table and looked away. “Tillis and Sanchez.”
“They wanted to know if Tommy had told me about anything suspicious at the casino—any shady characters. Or if he was friends with anyone like that. Or if he had a gambling problem. They asked if Tommy was ever out late at night.”
“They have to ask those questions, but I don’t.”
“I was in no mood. I took that picture of the stickball tournament off the wall and showed it to them. I told them he practiced under the lights a lot. The young woman asked what he was doing.”
“Didn’t do her homework.”
“An electrician would case a building he wired—for a den of thieves. Doesn’t make a lick of sense.”
“No.” He looked over the covered dishes on the table. “Any of these have onion, mustard, and pimientos
?”
“This.” She handed him a ruby plastic container with the name Tigner penned on a piece of masking tape.
They stared at the red cube as a fresh norther howled down the Hewitts’ chimney.
CHAPTER 21
Hannah Bond paused in the lobby of the Johnston County Courthouse to send the newspaper photo of a young Richard James to her contacts. She stowed her phone and had started toward the front door when the dispatcher’s phone lines came alive. “Is anyone hurt?” the dispatcher said. “Okay. I’ll send an ambulance.” The phone continued to buzz. Bond looked at the dispatcher. “Vehicle-train, Hannah. Kelly Road and the Santa Fe tracks. Possible fatality.”
“I’ll radio the Highway Patrol on my way.”
Bond pushed her cruiser over the deserted straightaway of Oklahoma 1. The sun had almost set, but the high blue light was still strong. Her cell chimed with texts. She ignored it. A Highway Patrol Charger’s strobes flashed in her mirror, and the cruiser she had summoned passed her as if she were parked. She saw the knot of cars just before she passed the idling BNSF engine, scraps of metal and upholstery jammed against its steel pilot.
Wreckage lined the rail grade, and tufts of batting swirled like snow. The last tanker car had cleared the grade crossing, where the back half of an old van lay on its side. The panel said, ll janitorial. The front half had been sheared away.
A semicircle of people, including the train’s engineer, stood at the crossing, looking down into the drainage ditch. Bond recognized that formation. Only the state policeman descended the gravel. Then he stopped halfway down. Bond knew that, too. The patrolman she recognized, Jake Renaldo. She joined him, and they stared at a headless corpse, its legs bent over the shoulders. It was clothed in a dark green civilian uniform.
“The head’s over on this side,” said a man on the tracks.
“Hannah,” Renaldo said, nodding. “Broad daylight, no excuse for chicken.”
“He didn’t try to beat the train,” said a panting man in a yellow safety vest. Bond and Renaldo looked up.
“You’re the engineer,” Bond said. “Conductor still on the train.”
“Yeah. Son of a bitch in a big white pickup pushed that van onto the tracks. I couldn’t believe it.” His voice shook. He kept his eyes on the officers and out of the ditches. An ambulance siren lifted over the prairie. “There’s no lights or gates out here. When the van stopped, I relaxed and laid off the horn. Started looking further down the tracks. Then this white pickup turned off the highway and pulled up behind the van, real close, stopped. I didn’t think nothing about it. I wasn’t three seconds out when that pickup’s big old grille smacked the van’s tail and sent the cab onto the tracks. I don’t think the van driver had his foot set on the brake. The pickup was already backing away when the pilot hit the van.”
“You see the pickup driver’s face?” Bond said.
The engineer colored and looked at the darkening sky. He looked like bottled mayhem. “No,” he spat.
“You came from his passenger side; you were up high.”
“Uh, yeah. Right.”
“You just guessing it was a man because of the truck?”
“No. I saw his hairy fucking hands.”
Renaldo turned toward the half-dozen bystanders, who were walking toward their vehicles. One man leaned against the crossing sign pole and vomited. Renaldo said, “Any of you-all witness this crash?”
They all shook their heads and looked at the others to see whether there was a witness.
Johnston County EMS wheeled onto the grade crossing, followed by Garn’s tow truck and the sheriff’s accident investigation team. Bond led the engineer to the team and returned to Renaldo.
“Happened to him before, I can tell,” Renaldo said. “Young as he is. Afraid he’s got the curse.”
“What curse?” Bond said.
“Too many of those,” Renaldo nodded at the van, “for it to be just bad luck.”
Bond looked up the track. “Bullshit.”
Renaldo nodded to himself and walked back to his cruiser.
Hannah turned on her phone. Most of her local contacts had messaged that they didn’t recognize James’ face.
* * *
Bond was frying three eggs and a pork chop, listening to a police scanner, when Maytubby called. “Your embezzler has a little hipster soul patch now,” he said.
“Where’s he at?”
“State Fifty-Three, next-to-last driveway eastbound before the railroad tracks and the Ardmore airport entrance. White-and-gray mobile home. Clothesline, little broken red pickup. He drives a yellow Suzuki dirt bike with saddlebags and a stolen plate to X-Silica by Mill Creek.”
“I guess you weren’t fetching my water before you got the text.”
“No.”
“I should of texted you the picture yesterday. Outdoor work, huh?”
“Unless he wears coveralls to the office.”
“Felony embezzlement can get you throwed off the inside-job list. Hard to embezzle glass sand.”
“You think he was working alone?”
“Cathy Barker worked a little on this case. She told me the restitution checks were steady. All from the same Tulsa bank.”
“And you said he had a good attorney. So you’re thinking cahoots.”
“Pack of thieves robbing the Golden Play. You’re following James you must be thinking that, too.”
“Morning after the robbery, a propane jockey saw a pickup like the casino getaway truck drop a man at this trailer. I watched the guy a little, followed him to the quarry. Hoping he might stop at this place on Powell Road I’ve been watching. Sketchy folks, moving stuff in trucks and planes. But he went on by to the quarry.”
“Powell Road would suit a band of desperadoes.”
“Some of the trucks belong to Sentinel Vending in Ardmore.”
“Any of ’em belong to L. L. Janitorial?”
“It’s Gill Janitorial.”
“Then the first two letters of Gill’s name are wrapped around a Santa Fe freight engine on Kelly Road.”
“What?”
“You been away from your Lighthorse radio.”
“I’m in the ’sixty-five.”
“Engineer said the old janitor van was stopped at the crossing and some dude in a late-model white F-One-Fifty Supercab with a black grille guard—same as the Golden Play truck—pushed him in front of the engine. Van driver was decapitated.”
“You see what was in the van?”
“Didn’t look close. Lot of janitor stuff out on the ground—buffer, mops, yellow buckets. Not what you wanted to hear.”
“If this is the same van, whoever was driving it last night met one of my sketchy people at the Ardmore airport and gave him some packages. Not enough, apparently. My guy challenged him, and he handed over one more.”
“Your guy wasn’t in a white One-Fifty.”
“Sentinel van.”
“Jake called in the description. Still no tag. He said there was going to be an uprising if a fourth of the men in the county are pulled over twice in three days.”
“No witness besides the engineer and the conductor?”
“Jake asked nice. Ever’body said no. Except a guy who was barfing. He kind of shook his head.”
“Pickup go north or south?”
“North.”
“Tough customers, Hannah. Maybe we should leave this to the professionals.”
“Huh.”
* * *
Bond plated her supper and stood over the table, holding the skillet. She still wore her uniform. The Ardmore airport was not far as the crow flies, but the crow used to fly over Greasy Bend bridge before it was closed. The work-around was long. She wanted to drive her old Skylark to the embezzler’s trailer that minute, but what would she do when she got there? She imagined kickin
g in his door and dragging him outside.
The scanner erupted. Bond ignored it until she heard a pursuit description of Jeff Lang’s pickup. The pursuing officers, in separate cruisers, were deputies called Katz and Eph, a last name and a first—Ephraim. Katz said, “Gotdangit he don’t go over eighty, but he jigs right down the middle like a razorback hog. I’m afraid that boneshaker’s gonna fly apart and fill my cruiser full of holes. Phoo-oo!”
Bond learned in the next few seconds that the pursuit was approaching her house on the north side of Tishomingo and that the Highway Patrol was rushing to lay down spike strips south of town. She grabbed her coat and duty belt, slapped a portable strobe atop the Skylark, and was outside the city limits in seconds. The tappets in the old Buick’s little eight clattered like hail.
At the edge of the rock prairie, the cyclops topped a small hill. It wove slightly from side to side on the two-lane highway. Bond didn’t know which headlight she was looking at, but it didn’t matter. She calmly drove straight at it as fast as the Skylark would carry her. She flashed her brights a few times and then, for three seconds, turned her headlights off altogether. Hannah Bond seldom strayed from her pursuit training. But when she did …
Jeff Lang’s feeble horn dopplered toward her. She matched his swerves and slowed a bit to stay nose-to-nose, like a sheepdog. He swerved less and less and approached the Skylark head-on. She glimpsed his frozen grimace an instant before he veered off the road. Katz and Eph parted to avoid her. A third cruiser followed Katz. Bond made a noisy bootleg U-turn. By driving in the bar ditch, she struck the path of Lang’s truck before the others and followed it over a downed fence into a rocky pasture. Lang struck a boulder, and his monster rear tires bucked high and then came down hard.
