Greasy Bend

by Kris Lackey

  Bond ran to the truck, reached up to open the driver’s door, grabbed Lang by his sweatshirt collar, and pulled him from the cab. She grabbed both his arms behind his back, kicked his legs loose, and let him fall. The fog from their panting swirled in headlight beams. Bond heard footsteps behind her. “Cuffs!” she called. A pair appeared, and she put them on Jeff Lang, who grunted and writhed.

  “Phoo-oo, Hannah!” Katz said. “You appeared out of the night like some kind of meteor!”

  Bond stood. She looked at Eph, who was holding his pistol loosely and pointing it in her general direction. “Holster that gun, Deputy,” she barked. “You’re going to shoot somebody.” He stared at the pistol for a second before doing as he was told.

  “Why are you chasing Jeff Lang?”

  “Here comes the man,” Katz said.

  Bond spotted the OSBI cruiser before she recognized Scrooby, puffing as he mounted the rise.

  “Hannah wants to know why we’re chasing this guy,” Katz said.

  Scrooby frowned at Lang, then looked at Bond. “I want to know what you’re doing at this party.”

  “Why, she run him off the road before we got to Tish, Agent,” Katz said. “She got the balls of a Brangus bull.”

  Scrooby stopped far enough away from the group so he wouldn’t have to look up at Bond.

  “I heard the pursuit on my scanner,” Bond said.

  “We tightened our case and attempted to arrest Lang in Wapanucka,” Scrooby said. “For his aunt’s murder.”

  “He fled,” Eph said. Bond and Scrooby looked at him.

  Scrooby said, “Lang was in possession of a Glock nine, a recently cut length of sisal rope matching the rope around his aunt’s wrists. He was his aunt’s sole heir, even though they didn’t get along. An agent recently saw him loitering near the scene of the crime. One thing he was not in possession of was an alibi.”

  “I’m fucking freezing over here!” Nobody looked at Lang. “Get me in a damned car!”

  Katz looked directly at Eph and yelled, “Deputy Bond’s car is nice and warm.”

  “You got ballistics on the nine?” Bond said.

  When Scrooby didn’t answer, she said, “You find any matching prints at Alice Lang’s house?”

  After a few seconds of Quaker meeting, Eph said, “I’ll take him into Tish.”

  “Meet you there,” Scrooby said, and walked away.

  “Deputy, you got any Little Trees in your prowler?” Katz said.

  “It’s against regulations,” Eph said.

  “Worth a write-up. Shit, worth a demotion. That guy was in my cruiser once. Phoo-oo. I don’t imagine Hannah has a spare hanging on her mirror,” Katz said to Bond’s back—a little louder. She walked to the Skylark, pulled off the strobe, twisted herself into the car, and backed down the hill. Katz elbowed Eph and snickered. “She don’t want to share.”

  CHAPTER 22

  The Heartland Flyer was picking up speed out of Ardmore when it blared through the State 53 grade crossing, its passengers’ silhouettes streaming across Bond’s windshield. She had stopped by her house to change out of her uniform, get her Steiner military binoculars, and bag some pork chops. When the gates lifted, she drove slowly past Richard James’ mobile home. The lights were on. She returned to the crossing and parked in Maytubby’s grove beside the tracks.

  The Steiners were the size of a toolbox and normally required a tripod. Bond held them in one hand while she fished for a chop with the other. For a half hour, she stared through the only uncurtained window at a nearly full bottle of brown spirits, the bottle faceted like an old glass doorknob and corked with a figure she couldn’t make out. The thrust reversers of a freight jet roared on the tarmac at Ardmore Municipal behind her. The Skylark’s windows fogged, so she rolled one down and let the cold wind in. A train horn blew a ways up the track.

  A thin, well-groomed young man with a blond soul patch crossed the kitchen. He wore a uniform like the janitorial van driver’s. When he reappeared, he had a quart of milk and an apple. After his snack, he disappeared, then reappeared in the doorway. By the faint light of the airport’s sodium lamps, she saw him lock the door, walk around the little red truck, and come directly toward her.

  Inside the bright trailer, he could not have seen the car. Now he would. Slowly she lowered the glasses and lay across the tattered bench seat, her face turned, listening for his footstep on the gravel. The train blew again, and her rearview mirror reflected its headlights, flooding the Skylark’s interior with light. Though the Skylark was not a cop car and its paint bore forty years of dings and sun, it was in the wrong place.

  The first crunch of roadbed gravel was very close. With her left eye, Bond watched through the windshield, expecting to see James’ face any instant. Instead, his footfalls accelerated. Then the train blew long for the crossing. Bond sat up. She watched James leap the tracks and disappear down the embankment just before the engine roared past.

  If she stayed where she was, she would see only what Maytubby had seen. When the train had cleared the crossing, she had a view of light-plane hangar stalls, one of which was empty. She drove through the airport entrance, down a feeder taxiway, and into the empty stall. She parked in shadow, hung the massive Steiners from her neck, and strode along the hangar’s shadow.

  Though it was past midnight, the freight terminal was hopping. Semis churned up and down the warehouse approach. Bond made her way to a row of aviation services lining a taxiway apron. Aside from a few out-of-town planes on the tie-down lot, this part of the airport was deserted. She sat on a shadowed bench and swept the freight terminal with the Steiners. A forklift beeped across the dock, and a few workers stood around a stack of empty pallets. Scanning away from the terminal, Bond paused to read the sign on a Quonset hut. custodian. It was lettered by an unsteady hand and lit by a single old clamshell light. The hut’s transom glowed dully. Snatches of country-and-western music drifted from the warehouse.

  The Quonset door opened, and James turned to switch off the light. A cluster of keys hung from his belt, and he carried a yellow janitor caddy holding some spray bottles. He walked fast away from Bond, toward the freight apron, and disappeared. No sooner had she set the binoculars on her knee than the caddy bounced back into view—James at the quick march. He covered the entrance road so fast, Bond had to walk in the light. He was clearly on a mission, didn’t seem interested in anything around him. He pulled his cell phone out, glanced at the screen, and put it back. Bond looked at her watch. 12:14. Coming up on a round minute.

  James passed the last hangar before the airport entrance and stopped. Bond edged into shadow and stopped as well. Dust swirled in the amber sodium light. James bent his head and turned his back to the wind. Very soon, headlights appeared on State 53, crossed the railroad. Was it a van, and would it have “Sentinel” painted on the side?

  It was, and it did. The driver parked it and left it running while he opened the tailgate. Short, bow-legged fellow. When James pulled packages from his caddy, the driver took them with his left hand and stowed them in the van. After the van drove away, turning toward the Washita and not the way it came, James did not return to the Quonset hut but walked briskly toward his home. Bond gave him fifty yards before she made for the Skylark. She was inside the hangar when James stopped at the place she had been parked near the tracks. Now he did turn around. Without the Steiners, she couldn’t tell where he was looking. She was counting the seconds the van had on her. James balanced on a rail a few seconds and then jogged toward his mobile home, the caddy bouncing.

  The Skylark was too old to have running lights, so Bond was well on her way to the Washita before James was indoors. At the edge of Gene Autry, she switched on her headlights. The state highway T-boned US 177. Bond grabbed her binoculars to look for taillights both directions, but she hadn’t even reached the stop sign when she remembered Maytubby’s band of desperadoes on
Powell Road. The Skylark shuddered through a sharp left and labored along the Washita for almost half a mile before it reached its top speed, ninety-two. Crooked cedar fence posts flickered at the cusp of her headlights.

  On Powell Road, after checking her odometer, Bond kept the van’s taillights far in front of her. In a few minutes, the brake lights flashed, pivoted to the right, off the road, and stopped. So the drive was gated. She kept the spot fixed after the van started moving again, away from the road. She slowed as she approached the turnoff, but when a pair of amber reflectors glinted in her headlights, she accelerated. A pickup blocked the gate. “Advertisin’,” she said as she looked at the odometer.

  Before it again found level ground, Powell Road mounted and then circled a knob. Putting the knob between her and the Sentinel people, she parked and grabbed the Steiners. The barbed-wire property fence sagged because many of its old posts had broken at the ground. Otherwise, Bond would have walked until she found a tree for a stile.

  There was still enough moonlight for her to decipher rocks and clumps of yucca. She was over the top of the knob in a few strides. The guard pickup was easy to see, but the driveway grew faint under a canopy of leafless bur oaks. Bond closed her eyes a while to get her night vision, then slowly glassed the trees. Gradually, faint reflections of moonlight gave shape to structures under the trees. Pretty large structures. No need for tractor barns. Not an inch of cultivated soil for miles. And if there were anything valuable in those structures, they would be floodlit. A match flare briefly illuminated an exterior brick wall and silhouetted a man. The glow of his cigarette was too dim to follow.

  She watched until the moon set.

  CHAPTER 23

  “New silver Volvo SUV,” Hannah Bond said.

  She peeled back the lid of the red cube and examined its contents, resealed the lid, and pushed the box aside. Maytubby, in civvies, sat across from her in the Aldridge Coffee Shop, a densely mirrored survivor from the twenties. Dishes rattled into bus tubs as downtown Ada merchants donned their coats and left to open for the day.

  “Now maybe I can return the favor for telling me where the embezzler lays his sorry head. Volvo driver chunky, half bald, fancy clothes?”

  Maytubby nodded.

  “Pulled him over two days ago, outside Wapanucka. Doing over a hundred. He hit a hawk, and the rabbit the hawk dropped cracked my windshield.”

  “In keeping with the whole low-profile shell-company program.”

  “New Volvo SUV in Wapanucka at all. Funny last name. Sounds like ‘sumac.’ Cache address.”

  “Courteous, I bet.”

  “I told him he killed a bald eagle.”

  Maytubby smiled. A server set a bowl of oatmeal and a portion cup of peanut butter in front of him. Bond scowled at his breakfast and shook her head. “I don’t know how you live on that crap.” The server returned with Bond’s breakfast—a waffle, four rashers of bacon, hash browns, and three eggs over easy. She bit one of the bacon strips in half. While Maytubby was salting his oatmeal, Bond raised her index finger. She swallowed and said, “Sulak. Fred, Frank. Something.”

  “The guy who brought the packages in the Sentinel van last night—what did he look like?”

  “Bandy-legged. Wiry. Short.” Bond tore the waffle in two and folded an egg into one half. “He didn’t waste energy. Moved real efficient.”

  “Not the last person who made the same run. Right-handed?”

  Bond looked out the window and then down at her hands. She moved the waffle burrito from one hand to the other a few times. Then she held it up in her left and nodded at Maytubby.

  “So this guy and Sulak are showing up for graveyard at the Powell Road compound. Tommy Hewitt’s shooter was left-handed, short, and bandy-legged. Anything else stand out about the guy? Marks?”

  “Too far away.”

  “Beard?”

  “Clean shaved. Like I said, he could do two things at once, had good balance. You got a word.”

  “Agile.”

  “That’s it. Hard for tall folks. James had a fancy bottle on—”

  “Blanton’s Single Barrel Bourbon. Jockey on top. Expensive for the boondocks. I saw the cheap stuff in the kitchen, too. What bush is OSBI beating?”

  “Alice’s stinkpot nephew. He’s mean enough but dumb as a stump. And not even in the same county as agile. He would’ve made a pig’s breakfast of killing her.”

  Maytubby spooned peanut butter into his oatmeal and stirred it in.

  Bond said, “I run the nephew off the road for Scrooby last night. Your favorite lawmen was in on the pursuit.”

  Maytubby looked at her.

  “Katz and Eph.”

  “Phooo-ooo.”

  Bond nodded, then shook her head. “And Eph. That man needs a brain transplant.” Then she murdered her waffle burrito. She held up her coffee mug to show the server, put it down, and said, “What does our US government think?”

  “Inside job, apparently. Agents asked Nichole Hewitt if Tommy had a gambling problem or if he hung out with sketchy characters.”

  “Sorry sons a bitches.” Bond shook Tabasco on her hash browns. “This stuff tastes good on eggs but nasty on waffles. Somebody called Dispatch in Tish, said before the train wreck she saw a man fiddling with a license plate on the back of a white pickup. Roadside park just down the road from the Kelly crossing. Burly guy. She didn’t see his face. Wouldn’t give her name. ’Course, it was right on the screen.”

  “Bar owner I know ID’d the guy who made the airport pickup before the one you saw. He drives a truck for Sentinel. She called me when he came in, and I eavesdropped on a conversation between this guy and your hawk man, Sulak. Now, I think Sulak was telling the guy—his name is Crum—to make sure the janitor wasn’t skimming.”

  “So, ‘Crumb’ as in bread?”

  “C-R-U-M. Crum found out he was and snitched. Sulak, or whoever the boss is, killed him or had him killed, and brought James in off the quarry bench. They can’t call him ‘Richard’ out in Hog Waller. Did Justice Barker ever mention another name?”

  “No, but I bet he called himself Richard. You know anything about Gill Janitorial?”

  “Subcontractor for night services, two years. Stavos Gill signed the papers. Or someone calling himself that. I can’t find anyone in the state by that name.”

  “Stick-out first name. Sounds foreign.” Bond mopped the last puddle of yolk with a scrap of waffle and bolted it. She laid a ten on the table and stood. “I better get back across the county line before the damn pow’rs of darkness lay waste to Connerville.”

  CHAPTER 24

  “Thorny died two years ago. Who’s this, again?”

  “Bill Maytubby. Mr. Tillotson was my landlord when I was at St. John’s.” Maytubby had parked the pickup at a convenience store in Lawton. He rebound his shabby little address book with a rubber band and stuck it back in his shirt pocket.

  “I’m his niece. Nobody ever calls on this old rotary phone. You one of his old hooch buddies?”

  “No, ma’am.” The old Ford’s heater fan soughed.

  A Zippo lid clinked. “Mmnnn,” the niece said. Then she exhaled. “The old dotard loved his Johnnies. Called people his own age ‘the Dead.’ Maytubby. Sounds like that Faulkner character …”

  “Ikkemotubbe.”

  “God, if you and Thorny were in the room, he would roll his eyes over to me and say, ‘You see, Carol, the Dead have no interest in such things. Ikkemotubbe was not a golf celebrity; they are not interested.’”

  Maytubby smiled.

  “So you are Choctaw—no, wait—Chick, uh, Chickasaw?”

  “Half. I’m a tribal police officer.” Maytubby heard church bells over the old rotary phone.

  “Did Thornton Tillotson have an even darker side I don’t know about?”

  “I have no idea,” Maytubby said. “I was
calling about the handyman who worked on my apartment—and others, I assume. He’s turned up here in Oklahoma, in fishy circumstances.”

  “I’m afraid I didn’t know any of them by name, though he sent some to my casita on Otero before I moved into his house.”

  “I don’t know his name anyway. Short guy, thin as a cattail. Never spoke. But if he hit a glitch in the job, his eyes bulged, and his face got really …”

  “Twisted. Oh, my God,” Carol said. “And those teeth. Just when I had him good and forgotten.”

  “Sorry,” Maytubby said.

  “Oh. Duncan Calls. Last name as in ‘several telephone.’” She paused, but Maytubby did not have to write the name. “He’s still alive? I read in the New Mexican he was thrown from his pickup when it rolled during a pursuit in the Manzanos. Maybe I just assumed he died. That was a good while ago.” The church bells stopped ringing.

  “He have a lot of trouble with the law?”

  She exhaled into the phone. “Even before Thorny hired him. Thorny didn’t know he’d done time in Laramie for assault.”

  “You’d leave that off the handyman résumé.”

  “You would. One of Thorny’s tenants told Calls that his caulking bead was too large. Calls broke the guy’s face and disappeared.”

  “He struck me as volatile.”

  “Thorny would pet a rabid dog.” She whistle-exhaled.

  “Do you remember if Calls hung with other people who might have been in trouble with the law?”

  “I got nothing. Give me your number.”

  He did. “I’m sorry about your uncle.”

  “Me, too. He was a wiseacre.”

  Maytubby pocketed his phone and bit into the apple he had just bought. He pulled onto Quanah Parker Trailway, shifting with his apple hand. The address on Frank Sulak’s license was near the foothills of the Wichita Mountains. Computer images from street and space were taken in summer, and mesquite leaves obscured some of the acreage.