The Last of the Smoking Bartenders

by C. J. Howell

  The coffee maker made sucking sounds and then beeped three times. Hailey poured her first cup of coffee. She knew this case didn’t track, and it would bother her. Maybe the two fires weren’t related, or maybe some random kids from Colorado on a road trip went on an arson spree. But now she wanted to know. She was curious, and Saint George was slow. Special Agent Hailey Garrett, Federal Bureau of Investigation, part time, let her Sunday be ruined by choice. She was, after all, part time.

  Hailey was the sole agent in the FBI’s Saint George, Utah office, an office that existed more figuratively than literally, consisting almost entirely of Hailey’s laptop that occupied her kitchen table. Agent Garrett had a special arrangement with the FBI on account of her plastic hip that never quite became a proper part of her body and caused her to limp slightly as well as no small amount of pain. Normally, Hailey would have had to ride a desk in Salt Lake City until her twenty years were up and she could retire with her pension at eighty percent pay. But her hip was a special circumstance she owed to a single car accident late one night four years ago. The driver was the Section Chief for the Western Division. He walked away without a scratch. So with a kiss on the forehead, Hailey kept her credentials, her gun, and her pay, and got to work one case at a time, when she felt like it, from her house in Saint George.

  Hailey was thirty-one, but she felt no different then she did at twenty-one, except she had the hips of an old woman. Her friends, who she kept in touch with via email chains and still spoke to on the phone every few months, implored her to leave Saint George. There were no eligible men to speak of. She wasn’t even from Utah. Wasn’t Mormon. She was still a young woman. But the truth was that she liked it here. She liked the wide open spaces, the long drives she was forced to take to get anywhere, the anonymous privacy of being an outsider in a tight community, even if she knew most folks in town. She liked the house she’d bought three years ago for $89,000. She’d be living in a studio apartment in any city in America for that price. And there was the dog to think about, some kind of weird desert dog. The dog liked the house too. At a hundred and ten pounds, Hailey didn’t think the dog would do well in the city, he needed room to run, and Hailey got instantly melancholy when she thought about taking the dog out of the desert. And she liked the job. Poking her nose into the little dramas that came across the scanner. At thirty-one she had found freedom, even if her friends thought she was hiding out.

  Sun streamed through the east facing kitchen windows. Hailey switched off the scanner. The dog watched Hailey. Hailey watched the dog. The dog had one brown eye and one blue eye. The dog looked at her sideways, suspiciously, the blue eye on Hailey.

  Hailey finished her coffee. Her Sunday plan had been to drive the three and half hours to the Ak-Chin resort and casino on the reservation just across the Arizona border and spend the next two days alternating between the spa and the blackjack table, sipping Coronas and taking advantage of the $29.99 mid-week rate. But she could put that off a few days. Arson at a federally regulated mine and another fire destroying utility infrastructure was worth looking into.

  The truth of the matter was that there really wasn’t that much to interest a Fed out here. There wasn’t much point to setting up taskforces and bringing down interstate meth rings. The meth heads would get themselves arrested or dead faster than the Feds could set a trap to catch them. You didn’t need to track them, conduct electronic surveillance, or infiltrate the organization, just walk down the street and you could pick them out on sight, rail thin and pockmarked and scabbed, twitching and restless. They’d get themselves locked up before the Feds could get a wire up. Take down a meth lab and four more spring up. Better to just sit back and watch them self-destruct. So two utilities attacked…could utilities be the link? No, that was stupid, might as well be random. No radical environmentalist or Islamic extremist would target a defunct mine…but even if it was random, it was new.

  Hailey got up. The dog got up. She thought about the cane but she left it. She could walk, just with a hitch. She moved toward the door. The dog whined with anticipation, spun a marionette dance, and crouched as if to pounce.

  I’ll be back. You stay be good.

  The dog’s head lowered. He knew he was to stay.

  Hailey locked the door, the handle to the screen door wedged in her bad hip. She freed herself from the screen door and dug for her car keys. Outside it was bright. Not a sound on the street. The sunlight cast a halo around her dark gray unmarked Chevy Capris. She put on mirrored sunglasses. The daily Percocets made everything look overexposed. She ambled to the car. Inside it was hot. She saw the curtain part in the kitchen window, and the dog pressed its face to the glass. She turned the ignition. Too hot to take the dog. And she was having a bad hip day. She watched the dog and popped another Percocet.

  She backed the unmarked cruiser onto the street. To anyone who cared, the Capris was easily recognizable as a cruiser, red and blue lights still visible through the tinted rear window, two black antennas, one short one long. Inside, it felt hermetically sealed. Dashboard vents blew stale cold air at full power.

  She put it in drive. The car rocked slightly and uttered a low groan when she took her foot off the brake. She crept to a stop sign, spent an interminable amount of time deciding which way to go, thinking about nothing, and made a right onto Grant Avenue.

  The scanner crackled a low murmur. Even with the sunglasses and the tinted windows it was bright, and she squinted behind smartly cropped blonde bangs.

  The streets were wide. Saint George, at least as it was today, was shaped in the mold of the suburban west even though there was no metropolis to be a suburb of: low density, streets far wider than could be for any useful purpose, developers using cheap land and ample living space as a hook rather than quality. Grant Avenue ran through a commercial district, six lanes across and three businesses to a block.

  She wheeled the Capris at a casual thirty miles per hour. The light traffic passed her going fifty, at least the ones who didn’t notice the tell tale signs of a cop, the ones who wouldn’t need to know, with nothing to hide. Only criminals drove the speed limit.

  Right as she had forgotten what she was looking for she saw it, a yellow sign on the right past the Tractor Supply and Feed Store that read Patio Pancake. She signaled and came to a near complete stop before turning onto the gravel parking lot. She found a spot at the far end of a row of pickups.

  Inside it was busy. The woman behind the register smiled hello and nodded, clearly miffed that she could never remember Hailey’s name no matter how made times she came into the Patio Pancake. She showed her to a table by the window facing the road. Most tables were full with ranchers or families with prodigious young rolling over themselves and circling the tables. She received passive looks, displaying neither recognition or non-recognition. Part of the scenery but not the community.

  A new girl served her. Kimberley something, Echols maybe, she thought, remembering her yearbook picture and visualizing the name that went with it, junior at the high school. She thought she had dated the starting nose guard, she knew this from the nose guard, not the girl.

  She ordered coffee, bacon, and eggs over easy. She stared out the window and sipped her coffee. Grant Avenue looked like a highway running through town. Then she unfolded her map and spread it across the table. She looked again at the location of the two fires. Not that far apart as the crow flies, but a substantial distance on the grid of roads out that way. She ate her breakfast, moving the plate around the different sections of map.

  The bill was $4.79. She left a ten. She drove back to her house. The dog welcomed her return with a series of high howls. She pet him until he calmed down, lying on his back while she stroked his chest, her other arm lolling in his mouth, his sharp teeth gently probing her hand, his fangs bared and lips pulled back in a loving scowl, a vicious killer with the soul of a lonely child.

  She took his harness from the closet, and he sprang to his feet and danced in excitement all over again. S
he had to fight to get him in the harness. He wanted to go with her, wherever she was going, but he was a nervous creature, the world was wrought with danger.

  She got him harnessed and leashed, and wrangled him to her Toyota 4-Runner—the cruiser she needed to keep clean of the dog hair that coated the 4-Runner’s upholstery. The dog circled clumsily in the back seat, tangled in his leash, and collapsed mightily behind the driver’s seat, his head wedged in between Hailey’s elbow and the door.

  She wheeled out of town driving even slower now that the dog was with her. With the air at full blast, the heat quickly became tolerable. She found the on-ramp to I-15 and gently eased onto the wide expanse in front of her. She caught the NPR station for a good stretch of Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me until it was inaudible above the static and she switched to an AM sports talk station out of Salt Lake recapping the latest incarnation of the Utah Jazz. The dog perched his head on her left shoulder and drooled on her sleeve.

  She took the exit on to 616 and was surprised at the desolation of the road. Truly a road to nowhere. Ahead there were distant mesas, a barren mountain range to the southwest. She would have driven past the crime scene except for a Statey parked on the side of the road. The 4-Runner bounced as she turned onto a dirt pull off. The dog grew restless. A cloud of dust billowed over the hood. The dog jumped into the front seat and tried to bully his way out of the truck. His claws dug at her thigh and scratched her arm.

  Settle the fuck down, she hissed to no effect.

  The Statey got out of his car and leaned on the door. Too hot to leave the dog in the car. She cracked the door open and the dog vaulted into her chest. She pushed him back until she could get a hold of his leash and then opened the door wide so he could get free of the interior. He lunged forward but she was ready, bracing the leash against her good hip.

  The cop came over waving his arms in grand gesture.

  Ma’am, ma’am…

  The dog started one way and then the other, sniffing the air in excitement and confusion, stopping to inhale the ancient burial ground of some rodent or other desert dweller and then bounding to the next smell.

  You can’t be here, this is a crime scene.

  She fumbled through her purse for her creds. The dog saw the man for the first time and immediately stopped, sensing a threat. He backed up into Hailey’s legs. Standing at attention, the dog’s back was even with Hailey’s waist. She muttered underneath her breath, still fighting with her purse. The dog let out a low growl and a three-inch band of coarse hair running the length of his spine stood straight on end in a bristling mohawk.

  Ma’am, control your animal. You are interfering with police business.

  Federal ag — She coughed, her throat swollen by the heat and the painkillers. She realized she hadn’t spoken to anyone but the dog in a while.

  Federal agent.

  She pulled the badge from her purse. The dog backed up until his butt was pinned against her thighs. He bared his teeth in a snarl.

  The cop squinted at her creds.

  Agent, can you control that thing?

  Unfucking believable. She’d killed a man. This yokel had probably never drawn his gun except to scare truck stop hookers into giving him free head.

  Come on boy.

  She snapped his leash and dragged him past the cop and toward the tracks left by the fire trucks. She struggled up a low dune following the ruts in the sand and veering when the dog’s nostrils demanded. When she looked back, the cop was leaning against his cruiser, staring at her ass. She made it to the top of the dune and saw the fire blackened remains of a series of transformers. The sand was scorched in a starburst pattern from the epicenter of an explosion. The scene was crisscrossed with tire tracks and footprints, like the earth had been tilled.

  She didn’t know what she expected to find, but she found it always helped to look. What struck her this time was the incredible randomness. From behind the dune the road wasn’t visible. Nothing but desert for 360 degrees. Blue sky scraped with high clouds until the horizon. Vandals she thought. No motive.

  She watched the wind form zigzags in the sand for a while, and then she trudged onward, her arm flinging with the gyrations of the leash, until she saw something she recognized. A plastic cap, new, not yet disintegrated by the elements. She had seen it many times before. Old Crow. The cheapest brown liquor at the liquor store. Two dollars and ten cents at any Loaf & Jug. Half the price of a half pint of Jim Beam or any respectable whisky. She picked it up.

  As she put the cap in her pant pocket, something caught the dog’s attention and he bolted exactly when she held the leash loosely by her pinky. The handle to the leash snapped free. The dog immediately raced up the dune. Panic hit Hailey in the throat. She started after the dog. It moved like a predator on the savannah, back low to the ground, hind legs coming in front of front legs, like a greyhound or a Cheetah, covering ten feet each bound. The dog disappeared over the dune in the direction of the highway and that asshole trooper. A terrible image flashed across her mind’s screen. She went to all fours and fought her way up the dune.

  At the top, out of breath, she rose to her feet. Below, the dog was circling the 4-Runner. The cruiser was gone. No traffic on 616 in either direction. She sighed with relief and hacked up sand she had inhaled. The dog stood up with its paws on the window of the driver’s side door. Finally free, and the only place the dog wanted to go was home. He looked back at her and wagged his substantial tail.

  When she reached the truck and let the dog in she found it odd that the trooper was gone. She flipped on her police radio and found out why. There was news from the mine fire. A body had been found. The case was now being treated as a homicide.

  Chapter 4

  The Malibu was out of gas or broken. Either way, it wouldn’t start. Tom pushed open the heavy door. It creaked with rust and wear. Tom got out slowly and stretched. He lifted his pack from the passenger seat, cinched up his wool coat, and started to walk.

  The dirt road had hit a stretch of loamy sand in which the Malibu had come to rest. There were a few houses around, marked by flood lights or telephone poles. The sky was an inky black, just before dawn. The coldest part of the night. Tom’s joints were stiff. He could see his breath. The road was dark. As the sky gently lightened he could see that the sand was red, surrounding him in a contourless sea.

  The road was marked by a low barbed wire fence buttressed by wind blown sand drifts. Tom walked, sand filling the cuffs of his trousers. He was fully awake now. The crisp air taking away the dull beer ache. Tom felt good being alone again. Mobile as only a man on foot could be. Hard to save the country spending half his waking hours in bars. As dawn broke, Tom could see the road he was on, washboard track for as far as the eye could see. No houses now, just occasional jeep trails leading deeper into the desert. He picked up his pace. The road would lead somewhere.

  The sky briefly turned orange and the sand yellowed. Tom became aware of birds chattering in whistles and phrases of song. A desert mouse scooted across the ruts in front of him, its footprints disappearing behind it.

  As the morning chill melted away, Tom felt his skin tingle and hum, and eventually sweat. His breathing became easy, the air suddenly rich and humid. His muscles relaxed, the tension releasing in his neck. It was no longer painful to swivel his head, and he looked from side to side in wide sweeping arches. He noticed lizards scamper between rocks, and birds hop from cactus to cactus. There were flashes of movement everywhere. Yucca fronds and clumps of tall grasses and bottle-bush waved with the wind.

  There was a road sign in the distance. The sun was well on its path by the time he reached the sign. A small tin plaque on a wooden post read Navaho 63. He was hot now. The wool coat his cross to bear. He listened but the birdsong was gone now. Too hot already he guessed.

  He heard the whine of an engine. It stood out immediately from the faint insectual buzz that always seemed to keep Tom company. There was nothing ahead. He looked behind him and waited until hi
s saw a faint dust cloud following the road. He briefly thought about hiding. But he could die in the desert before reaching a town and fresh water. He also quickly realized that the approaching vehicle was too big and moving too slowly to be police. It took another twenty minutes for the truck to pass him on the road. An old Ford dually eased to a halt. Tom waved to the cab and scaled the wooden cargo crate framing the bed of the truck. He joined six or seven men in the back. Three of the men appeared to be asleep with their backs against the rear window of the cab. The rest stood, leaning against the wooden planks, watching the horizon. They held on tightly as the truck lurched into gear and rumbled forward down the road.

  Hours later the truck bounced once and then the ride evened on a stretch of pavement leading to a town. The truck ground to a dusty stop in front of a general store. The men climbed out of the back of the truck, handing their small backpacks and parcels to each other. They stretched and shuffled to the cab of the truck where they each handed the driver a dollar. Tom withdrew four quarters from his pocket but the driver held up his hand, took a look at him, and waved him away.

  The General Store was a long white washed one-story adobe with wooden beams notched beneath the ceiling that extended out to also support a covered awning that stretched the length of the building. A group of Indians crowded against the wall in the shade. Three women sat on a bench next to the door, a cluster of children at their feet.