Greasy Bend

by Kris Lackey

  “Nnnnhh. So why are you following Roger Teague?”

  “I was following Richard James. He was carrying a blue duffel and something in a cartridge box to a cabin by Hennepin. Teague was staying there. It’s off the grid. I think it may be a …”

  “Wait, he’s moving the duffel.”

  “And now you’ve got cause.”

  “That I do.”

  “I’ll move to the top of the hill and back you up. He won’t see me, because of the sticks.”

  “Tell you when I’m done with him.”

  She put her phone away and completed the citation. Teague’s address was in Moriarty, New Mexico. For some reason, the name looked suspicious.

  When she handed Teague the aluminum citation holder with his documents and a pen clipped to the top, she kept her palm on the butt of her pistol. “You can take your license and papers after you sign. Keep the pink copy of the citation.” He did as he was told, handed the holder to her. She snugged it between her duty belt and her spine.

  She stood, impassive, while Teague stowed all his documents. He looked up at her blankly.

  “Where is the duffel that was on the back seat when I stopped you?”

  He blinked.

  Then he said, “It’s on the floor behind me. It’s a deer rifle.”

  “Which half?”

  “It’s broken down.”

  “Deer season’s over.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t hunt.”

  “I was gonna say. You’re some boots and a orange hat short of an outfit.”

  “I’m taking it to an acquaintance.”

  Bond stepped back and said, “Sir, please step out of your vehicle.”

  When she had frisked Teague, walked him to the bar ditch, and instructed him to sit there, Bond pulled on vinyl gloves from her duty belt and unzipped the blue bag on the Jeep’s roof. When Teague was looking the other way, she also pulled her phone out of her pants pocket. The duffel was deep enough to hide her hands and the phone from Teague.

  Inside, packed with squares of cardboard, she found the disassembled deer rifle. Except it was an AR-15 assault-style rifle. And bump-stock hardware that would legally turn the semiautomatic rifle into a machine gun. There was no serial number on the receiver. Two empty thirty-round magazines lay on the hard bottom of the duffel, beside a .30-06 cartridge box. Bond opened it and found a smaller, white box. Crude black type on the box said the contents were hollow-point .223 Remington cartridges. Beyond the ammo description, there was no other print on the box—no trademark or address. She pulled out its plastic tray and found only thirty-five rounds in the fifty slots. She photographed everything with her phone.

  She looked at Teague, who wore only a jacket against the cold. He flicked his eyes away and dug his hands deeper into his pockets.

  All the bag’s contents back in place, Bond zipped it closed. She stopped and shook her head. Then she reopened the bag and turned over the .30-06 box. On the bottom, in faint pencil, Bond read “137007 County Road 64783 Paris.”

  “Stupid,” she whispered to herself.

  She photographed the address and messaged it and the other photos to Maytubby.

  “You can get up,” she said to Teague. She handed him the duffel. “You’re good to go.” He took it and walked in front of her to the Jeep. When he had shut the door, Bond leaned down and said, “Deer rifle. That thing is gonna spew lead all over the ranch. I hope your friend knows how to field-dress a steer.” He nodded slowly. “Drive safely.”

  “I will, Officer.”

  After he had gone down the road, Bond called Maytubby. “I’ve got ’im, Hannah.”

  “He called that mess a deer rifle.”

  Maytubby crossed Turkey Creek, its banks creased with sleet. The Jeep was a half mile ahead, going the speed limit.

  “See?” Maytubby said to Bond. “Even with the blank receiver, if he’d just claimed the gun and bragged about how badass he’d made it.”

  “Doesn’t know the ways.”

  Where Oklahoma 1 veered north to Tishomingo, the Jeep went south on US 177 and then stair-stepped southeast toward the Red River. It passed into the Choctaw Nation, where Maytubby was cross-deputized, then crossed the Red River into Texas, where he wasn’t. Before it reached the outlying acreages of Paris on US 271, the Jeep turned west just where Maytubby’s phone said it should. Maytubby paused a few seconds at the intersection because other traffic on a back road was more interesting than it was on a busy highway. He watched steam draft off the distant towers of the Campbell’s Soup cannery.

  County Road 64783 wound through the buckskin grass and compact thickets of the Post Oak Savannah. Open hay barns were down to half their winter store. A rancher surrounded by red Brangus swung a pickax to break ice in a galvanized livestock tank.

  The road swerved sharply to the right and plunged into a shadowed alley of post oak and red cedar. A mile passed before Maytubby reached a creek bridge, its rusted guardrails splayed. A sounder of feral hogs moved down the stream bank, rooting in the leaves.

  As the destination approached, Maytubby slowed until he saw the Jeep, its brake light glowing, about a thousand yards ahead. He slowed, set his cell camera to full-zoom video, and held it against the driver’s-side window. Then he drove just over a conspicuously slow speed toward the black Jeep. He could see it turn left into a drive, where two figures met it.

  When he got closer, he saw that the figures were men in military fatigues, with assault-style rifles slung over their shoulders. They wore fatigue hats blazoned with an image he couldn’t make out. In case his camera was poorly aimed, he briefly moved his eyes to the Jeep just before he passed it. Teague was handing the duffel to one of the musketeers. There was a single flag atop each tall gatepost. One was the Confederate battle flag. The other he couldn’t recognize. It wasn’t burnt orange, so probably not a Longhorns flag.

  The jeep backed onto the road about a half mile behind Maytubby, then headed back the way it came. Maytubby pulled over, found on his phone another back road that returned him to US 271 north of where Teague would join it. But he had more distance to cover, so he had to speed.

  Parked behind a bait stand named Stinky’s, Maytubby watched 271 and his video. The logos on the caps and the second flag matched—a hand lifting a torch. It reminded Maytubby of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s tomb in the other Paris—the philosopher’s sculpted hand poking the torch of liberty through the wall of his tomb.

  He looked down the highway toward Paris. The most famous tombstone there was a statue of Jesus wearing cowboy boots.

  When Teague handed over the duffel, he had taken something from the man’s hand—maybe an envelope. That might explain why Teague duplicated the Cessna’s delivery route—if the Cessna did indeed fly to Paris. Also, there had been no bump stocks in the prepper cans. Maybe a gun considered truly badass got its own courier.

  Maytubby paused his video, looking at the musketeers’ goateed faces. He shrugged and started to click off the phone when it chimed for a text. Nichole Hewitt had written to Jill and him: Still shaky. Will let you both know when I feel up to talking. Mom is doing a great job with the girls. He clicked the screen black.

  The Jeep shot past and was almost to the Red River before Maytubby picked it up. Near the Choctaw Casino in Grant, the brake light glowed a few hundred yards before the Jeep passed a parked trooper. Teague did not turn west in Grant and retrace his route but continued north to the Indian Nation Turnpike. At Antlers, he exited at State 3, following the Muddy Boggy past Iron Stob Road and Atoka into the old mining town of Coalgate, where he pulled into the gravel parking lot of Lorenza Mercante’s liquor store on South Broadway.

  Maytubby watched the store through the window of a Grab-n-Go while he paid for a bag of roasted peanuts. Teague emerged with two paper sacks, which he set on the floor of the Jeep’s back seat. After he had driven away
, Maytubby parked in his place and watched as the Jeep turned into an auto parts store farther up Broadway. Taillight. Maytubby took off his cap and bounded into the store.

  Lorenza Mercante looked up when the door buzzed. She sat on a stool in the afternoon light, her expression pleasantly neutral as he walked quickly to the back of the store. Then she beamed, and her eyes widened and shone. “I didn’t recognize you with your clothes on.” She shook her head and fake coughed. “Not your uniform. You know. I mean.”

  “Mufti,” he said. “Old Chickasaw term.”

  “You’re pulling my leg.” She leaned toward him, squeezed his forearm, and stage-whispered as she pointed to the door, “That guy one of your desperadoes?”

  “I don’t know, Ms. Mercante. I am following him. Can you tell me what he bought?”

  “Lorenza. Same thing he bought a month or so ago: two bottles of Blanton’s Single Barrel, with the little jockey on top.” She tapped an imaginary jockey, then ran her fingers through her coffee hair. “He pulled a stack of hundreds out of an envelope and thumbed one to me.”

  “Anything written on the envelope?”

  She stared at the counter and frowned. “I couldn’t see the front of it.” Then she looked up. “He doesn’t wear a ring. So he irons creases in his jeans. Or pays somebody to.” She looked at the legs of Maytubby’s jeans.

  “Don’t worry,” he said.

  “After I sacked his Bourbons, he folded the top of each sack three times and then creased it with his fingers.” She bounced an index finger on her temple. “Pazzo.” Crazy. Lorenza Mercante was descended from Italian coal-mining families that had worked the Coalgate and Lehigh seams long ago.

  “If you think of …”

  “You’re still in my contacts, from the time I spied on the roughneck for you.”

  “I really appreciate it, Mm … Lorenza.”

  “There we go. Like I said before, nice airstrip right behind the store.”

  He looked over her shoulder and through the back window. Coalgate Municipal’s orange wind sock was stiff with the north breeze. “Right.” He nodded and smiled. “Thanks again.”

  The Jeep was turning onto Broadway when Maytubby left the store. Teague turned left on Ohio, which turned into Oklahoma 31. Maytubby had never told Lorenza Mercante he was engaged. He seldom saw her. He also left her out of his conversations with Jill Milton. He didn’t know whether these facts were important.

  Dropping south on State 48 at Clarita, Teague braked and then passed an enclosed Amish buggy. As Maytubby approached, its turn light flashed, and it wheeled onto Shellpit Road. The snowy-bearded driver wore a black watch cap.

  Teague turned onto Bromide Road, which threaded the limestone ruin of Bromide’s mineral springs resort. Then he went full rural on unpaved Coatsworth Road. For a New Mexican, he knew him some Johnston County Roads.

  Maytubby had to hang far back now. The road was deserted, the sight lines long. Teague passed Witch Hole and Houghtubby Spring, headed for Blue River. Maytubby reckoned that this back road trek would eventually get Teague to Powell Road or James’ mobile home. But then the Laredo jagged north on Deadman Springs Road.

  Now to see who got the next bottle of hooch.

  Forested knobs cast long shadows across dun grassland and silty green ponds. Just beyond the road’s dogleg west, the Jeep, almost a mile ahead of him, disappeared. Maytubby stopped and glassed the road ahead. Nothing but two turkey buzzards wheeling over the plain of the Blue. He looked up the satellite map of the land ahead. It was a summer photo. The knolls gave way to low, timbered hogbacks. A feeble trail left the road at the dogleg and vanished under the canopy. Except for a couple of deer stands, there were no visible driveways or structures for miles to the northeast.

  As Maytubby neared the road less traveled, he saw a padlocked steel livestock gate. Atop one of its stanchions perched two wireless security cameras, one of them trained on Deadman Springs Road. He stayed on the road through the dogleg and drove across the Blue to Connerville.

  From the parking lot behind the Chickasaw Nation Senior Center, he phoned Hannah Bond, who was off shift. “Where did Mr. Deer Rifle get to?” she said. He heard a train horn on her end.

  “White supremacists’ camp north of Paris. He’s back in Oklahoma.”

  “His license didn’t say corrective lenses, but if he didn’t catch on to that old Ford in two hundred miles, he needs ’em.”

  “Who did see me in the Ford was a pilot for this bunch. Flies out of a dirt strip in Cache. He shot my tailgate with a pistol from four hundred yards.”

  “The Ford would make a bigger impression than goober teeth.”

  “The master race paid Teague a stack of Franklins for the rifle. He used some of it to buy two bottles of that posh Bourbon James had on his counter. Had to leave him up in the hogbacks above Deadman Springs Road. Gate. Cameras. You watching the James estate?”

  “Found a back way in off Redbud Lane. Steiners doing the rest of the walking.”

  “I would need a spotter to lift those things.”

  A compact sedan drove into the parking lot. Maytubby watched a man his own age lift two young girls, clearly his children, out of car seats and walk them to the senior center.

  “Spavined Bronco at the single-wide. Tall tanks in the back. That rifle and bump stock were not worth a stack of Franklins. Maybe the blank receiver.”

  The father held open the door for his girls, who walked solemnly in.

  “Bill, you there?”

  “Sorry. Say again.”

  “At James’ trailer. A crapped-out blue-green Bronco with tanks in the bed.”

  “Welder from out by Lone Grove. The casino thieves, likely including the guy who killed Tommy Hewitt, burned their fake uniforms in his shop. In a barrel. Another pickup came later, and the driver dumped the ashes in Caddo Creek.”

  “Some greenhorn Assistant US attorney’ll be waving fly zippers in the jury’s faces. Wonderin’ if she took a bum turn in life.”

  The Laredo turned onto US 377. It passed the senior center and turned west.

  “Here’s Teague.”

  “No flies on Ironed Man.”

  “Headed west on Spring Creek Road.” Maytubby cranked up the Ford.

  “You’ll see whether he stops at Powell Road before he gets here.”

  “Yeah, but I won’t know why.”

  “Those goobers don’t even get some whiskey. Later.”

  There was only one way west over this stretch of the Rock Prairie—one bridge over Pennington Creek. Maytubby could straggle. In the distance, the Laredo threw a scud of yellow dust across the low, cold sun.

  When the Mill Creek water tank appeared, Maytubby remembered that the route to Powell Road passed the Hewitts’ home. He slowed to let Teague negotiate the village. Behind a front-yard fence, two motionless sorrel horses gazed southward.

  Thumping over the quarry train tracks, Maytubby saw, beyond the Hewitts’ bare pecans, Nichole’s mother bundling her grandchildren out of her car. Nichole was not in the car. Maytubby turned his eyes to Daube Ranch Road.

  Climbing out of the thicket of Bee Branch, the road wound between dolomite outcrops as it skirted a quarry. It swung into darkening swales of grassland. When Teague turned onto Powell Road, Maytubby gave him an even longer lead.

  In deep twilight, Maytubby watched from the knob east of the compound as the guard’s blue Dakota pickup pulled aside to admit the Jeep. The pickup followed Teague back to the compound. Hannah would tell Maytubby if Teague joined the welder and James in Gene Autry.

  CHAPTER 28

  As Maytubby climbed the stairs to Jill Milton’s garage apartment, he could hear her frailing the mountain minor chords of “Shady Grove.” When he came through the door, she looked up from the couch, frowning. She played a little softer.

  “It’s our soundtrack these days,” h
e said.

  She nodded. “The road is dark.” At the end of the chorus, the drone G lingered as she set the old Deering in its cradle.

  Maytubby sat beside her. He spread his hand over her back and pulled her toward him. “What’s in the oven, sweet potatoes?”

  “I love it when you talk dirty.” She kissed him. “Butternut squash from the nation’s garden last fall. I’m giving it a little head start on the stuffing. You smell like oak smoke and cigarette smoke.”

  “Since it’s so close to dinner, I’ll say only that a certain person was smoking at the gas pump next to mine.”

  “Why don’t you just lie and spare me pain?”

  “I didn’t want to raise suspicion.”

  “Like about a smoking girlfriend with a fireplace?” She narrowed her eyes.

  “For example.”

  “Hah.”

  “See how it sounds: ‘There was this guy smoking …’”

  She gave him the fake side-eye when she rose.

  Maytubby scanned ramekins on the kitchen counter. “Ah, the tony stuffing. You find crystallized ginger at DK’s?”

  “Yes, and you see those are native pecans. I saw them in my headlights leaving Nichole’s.”

  “I know they’re sweeter than papershells, but we’re gonna need the big hammer.”

  “You can start on that,” she said, nodding at the pecans and taking a sweating bottle of white wine and some peach salsa out of the refrigerator. She set the salsa on the counter. With her free hand, she tapped on her laptop. Café Noir’s cover of a Stravinsky andante began quietly.

  Maytubby stood and walked to the counter. Jill Milton set a wineglass in front of him. He held up a hinged lever nutcracker from early in the past century. “Really? This job calls for a bench vise. Do you have a bench vise?”

  She set out the salsa and a few chips, poured wine into his glass.

  He canted his head to read the bottle’s label. “Our own Waddell’s Vineyard bottles a wine I’ve never heard of?”

  “Viognier. It pairs with butternut squash.”