by Rod Collins
***
BB shook loose from the memory of Cletus. He towed the canoe onto the newly green grass under the scattered pine trees that sheltered the west shoreline. He turned it upside down, slipped a light chain through the handle in the bow of the boat, wound the chain around a twelve-inch pine tree, and locked the ends with a Master Lock.
He picked up his fishing pole and followed the dim path from the lakeshore through the open scatter of young pine trees playing host to his new log home. BB still marveled at his good fortune in finding the five-acre lot, liking the sight of the reddish-stained logs, still looking fresh – even after a season of winter abuse. The house sat solidly on a point of land overlooking the lake.
I think I better call Dutch Vanderlin … if he’s still the SAC for Portland. Find out what the FBI has on this. And I best air out the guest room for Wildish. I wonder if he even knows what fresh air smells like?
Chapter 3
The Watcher
CLETUS ENDED THE CALL with BB, stuffed the cell phone in the belly pocket of his bright orange OSU sweatshirt, and then took a deep breath. He felt a degree of fear that was new and unsettling. It was one thing to get pounded on by bigger kids when he was growing up in north Portland. He developed a wariness. But you only got hurt; it wasn’t fatal. And in time, you had a chance to get even.
It was an entirely different matter when someone wanted to kill you. He leaned back on the bench at a bus stop on MLK Boulevard and suddenly felt very naked and very exposed.
How did they find Reggie? And what did he tell them?
He spotted a man wearing a dark hoodie watching him from the window of a McDonald’s across the street. Don’t know him. Why’s he staring at me?
Restless and edgy, Cletus jumped at the sound of squealing brakes. A Tri-Met bus was making a quick stop two blocks up the street. He looked back at McDonald’s in time to see the watcher head for the front door. When the man reached the sidewalk, Cletus saw him look for a break in the traffic.
Hands in his sweatshirt pockets, the tall bearded black man skipped off the curb and started across the busy street in the direction of the bus stop. When he was halfway across, the man hollered, “Hey, boy. You Cletus?”
That was enough to push Cletus from wary to panic. He jumped up off the bench and ran as hard as he could up the sidewalk, running parallel to the street. He looked back in time to see the man pull a silver pistol from the belly pocket of his sweatshirt.
Later Cletus would tell BB he didn’t actually hear any shots, but the gun was all the motivation he needed. “I saw the bus start down the street, and I just ran in front of it and into the middle turn lane. I got lucky. No cars hit me, and he couldn’t see to shoot at me with the bus in the way. Anyway, I catch me a break in traffic and run like hell up the other side and onto Knott Street. Ran until I thought I’d puke my guts out. Ran all the way to the Lloyd Center.
“Figured to get lost in there, hide in the back of a store. I bought a gray hoodie and ditched that orange one. Figured he couldn’t watch all the exits. Figured maybe I could sneak into a car in the parking garage and lay low there.
“And then I see an old black woman carrying way too many packages. I gives her my winning smile and offers to help her to the bus. She’s suspicious at first, but she finally nods and says it would be fine.
“I nearly crapped my pants when I see the same dude, the one with the gun, watching the door. But I ducked my head and walked right behind that old woman. Must have looked like a grandson helping his granny. The dude never even looks at me. I was shaking so hard I thought I’d drop the packages. Anyway, I just follows that old woman up the steps and onto the bus. Finds me a seat on the far side and rides away.
“That’s when I called my FBI friend Sara. I knew I had to get off the streets. I called Mama and told her to go visit Aunt Elsie up in Seattle and stay there until I called again. I didn’t want them coming after her. And Aunt Elsie’s husband, George, he keeps a loaded shotgun behind his closet door.”
Chapter 4
Nancy Sixkiller
NORMALLY, THE TWENTY-FIVE-MILE DRIVE from his A-Frame cabin on Dog Lake back to the town of Lakeview managed to cheer him up. But this wasn’t one of those mornings. Not even the sight of a big mule deer doe down in the willows along Drews Creek could work its magic.
A chestnut horse grazing in a pasture brought memories of his first manhunt in Lake County. Bud still felt bad about the horse, dead from a .30-06 slug intended for himself. But that was long past. The present was his major concern.
Molly, his little black Lab, was sick. For years he’d talked to Molly while he drove, sort of trying out his thoughts on her. In good weather she sat upright on the passenger seat of the pickup, head out the window, ears floating in the wind, nose searching for scents, looking back and grinning at him from time to time … like she understood what he was saying.
Henry (Bud) Blair, sheriff of Lake County, worked the kinks out of more than one case that way … and the kinks out of his love life – which, at the moment, wasn’t much to talk about. The vet had kept Molly overnight, and the pickup felt empty without her.
He liked to think he was a tough-minded, practical person, but he didn’t like what the doc told him yesterday. Molly was getting on in life and looking it: muzzle turning gray and gimpy in the hips. When the vet said “might be cancer,” Bud’s heart just dropped. He glommed on to the “might be” part, but he knew the doc was right. He was ashamed to admit his first sorrow was for himself, but he got that worked out in a hurry and started feeling sorry for his old canine partner instead.
For another thing, Nancy Sixkiller’s call last night knocked him off kilter, not a good thing for a cop. Distractions can get you killed.
Bud gloomily thought, So far, I’m zero for one in the marriage department and zero for one in the engagement department.
After the divorce from Linda, his first wife, it took most of a year and building his cabin on Dog Lake to get back to feeling like a normal person. And it took Nancy Sixkiller to put the bounce back in his step. For a while he had a picture of being married to the beautiful Yakima Indian woman, maybe having a child, living a normal life … whatever that was.
“Damn,” he said to no one in particular. He stomped the county’s pickup into passing gear, took it up to seventy in a short burst, and then sighed and let his speed drop back to a safer fifty. “I’m not mad at this pickup. No sense in abusing it, or in killing a deer.”
Last year, a long tall woman wearing a black jumpsuit and carrying a machine pistol punched a lot of holes in the windshield, the right-side doors, and the pickup box of the truck. His shotgun and a load of double-ought buckshot put a stop to that, but not before she shot a hole in the meaty part of his left shoulder.
That particular slug also punched a hole in his engagement to Nancy Sixkiller. After Nancy found Bud had been shot – again – she decided her mother needed her more than Bud did. She said it was because her mom had suffered a stroke. But she also said she couldn’t stand the notion of being married to a cop … specifically to Bud Blair. Too much “stress and worry” that he wouldn’t make it home at night. She concluded that conversation with the news she was moving back to Yakima, Washington.
So, he took the engagement ring she handed him, put it back in its little velvet box, and then unhappily tucked it away in the safe he kept hidden at the cabin.
He was so busy for a while, tracking a killer and fending off a bomb-wielding drug cartel assassin, that he didn’t have much time to think about Nancy or of what had transpired between them.
Or maybe that should be “expired” between us, he thought. But now that Lake County was living through a relatively peaceful spell, he had time to do a proper job of feeling sorry for himself.
Her voice on the phone last night brought all that business flooding back.
“Bud?” she asked when he answered.
“Yeah?”
“It’s me. Nancy.”
&
nbsp; “Okay. What do you want?”
“I want to hear your voice, and I want to let you know I have my old job back.”
Nancy thought he sounded startled when he said, “Here … in Lakeview?”
The sound of her old happy giggle and the vision of her dusty complexion, her beautiful green eyes, and her shiny auburn-flecked black hair tore his heart.
“Yes.” She paused, and then said, “Bud, I want to see you. I think I have some explaining to do.”
He was suspicious about what she had to say, but he suckered in anyway. “When?”
“How about tomorrow tonight … at the cabin?”
“Why?”
He heard the catch in her voice when she said, “Because I love you. Because I’m sorry. Because I worry about you as much as if we were married. Because … I just miss you. Are you going to be an asshole about this?”
That was a lot of territory to take in, especially after he thought the broken engagement was behind him, but he said, “Okay. Make it about seven. I’ll burn us a steak.” He didn’t know if it was the hint of tears or the hint of the old fire in her voice that reeled him in, but there it was. The rumors were true. Nancy was back.
He kicked himself several times for his lack of spine, but it didn’t dampen his excitement at all. He got busy picking up the newspapers and magazines that cluttered the cabin, sweeping the hardwood floor for the first time in a month, shaking out the area rugs, putting books back in the bookshelves, doing a week’s worth of dirty dishes, making a quick pass at the bathroom, and bagging all the paper plates and plastic forks he was living with.
He fired up his little CD player and listened to “Take Five” and Dave Brubeck’s marvelous syncopated rhythm while he tidied the cabin. He realized it was the first time in months he’d listened to any of his old jazz music.
Even as he cussed himself for being spineless, he used Windex and a kitchen towel to tackle the windows that looked out at the narrow north end of Dog Lake and the mass of willows that hid his small boat dock.
After Nancy left to go back home, it just hadn’t seemed like housekeeping mattered much. Feeling a bit pressured, he had to ask himself why it mattered now? He knew, but he didn’t want to admit it.
BB, his old partner from his detective days with the Portland Police Bureau, nagged him about letting things “go to hell.” And he wasn’t kind about the tummy bulge Bud was growing. “You need to get off your ass and start walking,” he’d say. “Or get a bike and start riding, if you’re too sorry to walk.”
Bud’s initial enthusiasm over BB’s plans to build a new log home on a pine-covered lot next to Bud’s A-frame faded after BB took to nagging him. It wore the shine right off his welcome. They were still friends, but they were working up to another fist fight, like the one years ago at The Greek’s, a cop bar in Portland.
His friendship with BB was starting to read like a scene from the film, Grumpy Old Men … only he didn’t know whether he was Jack Lemmon or Walter Matthau.
Between the new mountain bike he found leaning against his garage door yesterday – which he didn’t doubt for a minute was BB’s doing – and the phone call from Nancy, he knew his days of self-indulgent pouting were about to come to an end. And he wasn’t sure he wanted them to. There was a certain amount of freedom in just not giving a damn.
Chapter 5
Fussed
BUD PULLED INTO his reserved parking spot in the rear of the county courthouse, a flat-roofed, two-story, brick veneer building sheltered by tall deciduous trees of some variety. He admitted his lack of knowledge when it came to ornamental trees.
A dozen California quail, dark plume feathers bouncing, skittered across the lawn in front of the library entrance and east up Bullard Street in the direction of the town’s swimming pool.
When he opened the metal entrance door, the first thing Karen Highsmith said was, “Have you heard that Nancy Sixkiller is back at her old job?”
He lied and shook his head because he wanted to hear what Karen thought about that. “No.”
“Well,” she sniffed. “I know she’s pretty good at running the Emergency Services Center, and I suppose the Colonel will be glad to retire again, but I’m not impressed with the way she treated our sheriff.”
She paused and looked up at Bud over the booking counter, her light brown curls bouncing a little as she shook her head and pursed her lips. “If she comes crawling, are you going to take her back?”
He just frowned and said, “As if that’s any of your business.”
“If it affects you and interferes with the way you run the Lake County Sheriff’s Department, I think it is. Not that you’ve been paying much attention to your job these past few months anyhow.”
She paused … and Bud waited … because he knew there was more to come. She worked as Bud’s technical deputy in charge of the jail, and she also worked as his unofficial administrative assistant. Mainly, what he knew, she knew … and she knew what to keep to herself. Most of the time. It gave her license to say things Bud wouldn’t allow any other person.
Native to the town of Lakeview, Karen was a fountain of information about who was doing what, with whom, and why. Between her, Agnes Lynch-Connor, and Police Chief Augustus Hildebrand, there wasn’t much chance of anything staying secret for very long in the little town of Lakeview.
They did miss the business of a local banker killing old man Goodman, but that was the only miss he could point to. And he didn’t feel too bad about that, because he solved that homicide with only a minor error in logic.
Karen took a deep breath … and in a softer tone said, “Bud, we just don’t want to see you hurt again. You need a girlfriend, but not Nancy.”
He tried not to growl and settled for a glare instead. “You got anybody in mind?”
He knew that was a rotten thing to say. Michelle Trivoli told him, when she was still working as a Lake County deputy sheriff, that Karen had a hard crush on Bud. All his nasty remark accomplished was to make him feel small and mean. But he didn’t like all the interest Karen was showing in his empty love life.
Finally, he broke eye contact and just felt bad. “Oh, hell, Karen. I’ll admit I haven’t been much of a sheriff since Nancy pulled out.”
“You’ve tried to act like it didn’t matter,” she nodded, “but your heart hasn’t been in your work.”
He nodded in agreement, remembered the mess at the cabin, and thought she was probably right … but settled for, “Enough, Karen. I’m back in the saddle, so you watch my dust.”
Karen looked skeptical, but stayed silent.
“Where’s Bea and Lonnie?” Bud asked, mainly to break the silence and put some sense of normalcy back in the conversation.
Karen looked at her notepad. “Bea is in Adel investigating a break-in at the store. Amy O’Fallon called and said she was burglarized last night.”
“Doesn’t Amy live in the back of the store?”
“Yes, but she said she stayed here in town last night. Too many deer down along Deep Creek to chance a trip back home. Says her eyesight isn’t what it used to be.”
Bud admired Amy O’Fallon, a small Vietnamese woman who married Army Sergeant Patrick O’Fallon in the fine city of Saigon many, many years ago. O’Fallon sent Amy home to his parents in the USA, and when he was discharged, he used his GI Bill to buy the Adel Stage Stop Tavern and Store in the isolated Warner Valley.
Bud still didn’t know why O’Fallon never lost his liquor license, since his habit was to drink his way through each day. He finally had the good grace to die before making himself and Amy totally destitute. After Patrick’s death, Amy worked the store alone. Recent rumors said one of Amy’s granddaughters was coming to help.
