This Is What I Want

by Craig Lancaster

  “They find out that they won’t get hired because they have a criminal record, or they can’t pass a drug test,” Sidney mayor Brad Shulman says. “Meanwhile, they’ve used their last dollar to get here, and now they’re our problem.”

  And a problem they can be. Sidney has doubled its police personnel on the second and third shifts, when workaday citizens tuck into bed but the rig workers—overwhelmingly male and young and single—are most active. In Grandview, the town council recently hired a new police chief, Adair Underwood, who came to the small town from the sheriff’s office in Cass County, North Dakota. In a bit of irony, Underwood, 34, said she was drawn to Grandview for the challenge of getting its criminal problems under control after 12 years in the much more sedate—and much more populous—Fargo area.

  FRIDAY

  THE CHIEF

  Adair Underwood figured nobody had it better than she did. Here, in her police cruiser on a tree-shrouded corner of Clancy Park, she could watch, unseen, as most of Grandview breathed in peaceful slumber. The trucks moving through town at all hours provided steady fodder when she got bored, and she found a perverse delight in pulling the drivers over for riding their compression brakes or failing to heed the thirty-mile-per-hour limit through the heart of town. Chief Underwood always fancied herself a sociable sort, and depending on how much guff she got from the detained drivers, she’d let a fair number of those old boys go on with just a warning. Give her a little lip, and she could fill the city coffers right quick with a violation or two. Good cop, bad cop. Whatever she needed to be, whenever she needed to be.

  Her well-guarded view on this night came with another advantage, one particularly germane to her present attentions. If anybody was up to no good—say, stealing a dog for pit fights out in the fields, as the current rumor held—they’d be hard-pressed to get out of town without her seeing the attempt. The challenges of law enforcement here on the state line, with a mishmash of federal, county, and tribal land nearby, were legion, and frankly she had enough to do with only one deputy and one officer, and a town that lived bigger than its size would suggest. Still, she longed to tear into a piece of the big action. If somebody was sneaking into Grandview and stealing dogs, especially with such a nefarious purpose as pit fights, she would find out and bring the weight of her office raining down. Any vehicle that crossed her vision with out-of-county or out-of-state license plates tonight was subject to suspicion.

  She’d given her two underlings, Joe LaMer and Phil Sakota, the night off. They were family men, for one, and in a few hours they would be pressed to the limits of their service, along with a cadre of officers from Billings and Glendive whom the city had hired as security for Jamboree. LaMer, her deputy, would still be awake, she knew. They’d taken to trading the late shift and the responsibility for keeping each other engaged in the work.

  Quiet, she wrote in a text message. She was careful to use her personal phone. Back home in Fargo, she’d seen a colleague’s life turned inside out by her work emails slipping into the public realm. Adair had no stomach for that.

  The reply came back quick, as if Joe had been waiting for her to open the conduit. Enjoy.

  What do you think of this dog business? she wrote back. Real thing or no?

  Dunno.

  She liked LaMer. Maybe too much. He was rough around the edges and two college degrees behind her, but he had an earthy wisdom about him and about this place that Adair didn’t yet know as well as she would like. She smiled at the simple reply. He made her laugh.

  It’s just the one report, she rapped back. And that Chihuahua is older than Yoda. Maybe it just wandered off somewhere and died.

  Mebbe.

  Adair grimaced. She didn’t care for texting shorthand.

  Now came another message. WTF is Yoda?

  She opened her mouth, a squawked “What?” escaping it.

  Are you a real person? she typed.

  Seriously.

  OK, she wrote, that’s it. You’re ORDERED to report for a viewing of the first three Star Wars movies. Popcorn is mandatory.

  LOL. I was a farm kid. I didn’t go to movies.

  And you’re not allowed to talk to me again until you’ve absorbed them.

  K. It’s a date.

  She came to a hard stop, looking at the words and the particular way they had been arranged. Once, twice, a third time. It was, of course, a pie-in-the-sky proposition. They never had the same hours off, for one. She hadn’t even unpacked the DVD player yet, for two. Julie LaMer, for three. And yet on a still night in Grandview, the last one Adair could count on seeing for a while, she felt as though she could indulge the fantasy for just a bit before practicality had to be given deference.

  She closed her eyes, and she imagined things she would never have to admit to, and she smiled deliciously.

  The sound came first, an awful, thunderous noise that jerked Adair out of her reverie. The discombobulating nature of it, and the thump in her chest from the sheer power of the concussion, seemed to slow everything down. Adair felt as though she were underwater and moving at half speed, as she looked first to the street to see if there had been a crash, then to the main stretch downtown, and finally skyward, where she saw the fireball snap off the propulsive stem pushing it into the sky. Once free from its tether, the massive orb made one last upward surge and then dissipated into flickering embers heading back the way they had come.

  “Jesus Pete,” Adair said as she gunned the car to life and tore out onto the highway, laying down a rubber scratch on the asphalt. She mashed the accelerator to the floor, and the car responded as designed, shooting like a bullet across the straightaway. She stormed past the Sloane Hotel downtown before she realized she hadn’t hit her lights, but that was of little import now. She slid her cruiser into an angled stop at the mayor’s office—or what remained of it, anyway—and got out, urging back those who had already emerged from their homes across the street.

  “What in the hell?” LaMer came running up to her, in a white T-shirt, sweatpants, and rubber flip-flops, his holster and gun strapped to his hip. From the lurching of his chest, she figured he’d covered the three blocks from his house in sprinter’s time.

  “We gotta keep people away from it,” she said, retreating to her cruiser to dig out the bullhorn.

  “That’s the fucking mayor’s office,” LaMer said. “He in there?”

  Adair took three steps toward him, eyes locked on his. “How should I know? Damnit, Joe, get them back.”

  Folks were streaming from their homes now. Gawkers, yes, but also people who tugged at Adair, asking what they could do to help. She didn’t know. Amid all the jostling, she took a moment to trace what remained of the building. The flattop roof was gone, blown clean off, and she now saw the trails of shattered masonry that spread out from the site like tendrils, and the collateral damage to nearby cars and windows. The back wall was blown out, too, and inside the remaining structure a blaze gobbled up the remnants.

  Adair did a quick inventory of the adjacent buildings and found them intact, if a little beaten up cosmetically. The pregnant question, of course, was the one she couldn’t answer just yet: What the hell had caused this? If it was a gas leak, she feared the chaos might just be starting.

  She scanned the crowd, now in the dozens, she reckoned, and saw that LaMer and a few helpers had managed to push everybody back.

  “Joe!” she called to him.

  He moved off the line of humanity and trotted back to her. “Yeah?”

  “You got your cell handy?”

  “Sure.”

  “Better call the Sidney Fire Department,” she said. “I don’t think the volunteers are going to be able to handle this.”

  LaMer placed the call, and Adair went back to alternating her attention between the growing throng and the devastation in front of her, until she found the eyes of someone she’d come to trust in her shor
t tenure. Sam Kelvig, standing on the periphery, gestured to her, asking if he could approach. She waved him in.

  “He’s not in there, I don’t think,” Kelvig told her. “I don’t see his truck.”

  “What happened?” She didn’t expect him to answer, but it was the only question that seemed worth asking.

  Kelvig shrugged. “Welcome to Grandview, Adair.”

  “Listen,” she said, deflecting things back to business. “Do you mind running out to his place and checking? I’d sure hate to be wrong about this, you know what I mean?” Swarthbeck was prone to dumping his truck wherever he found purchase for an evening, be it in the back of the Double Musky or in some lonely widow’s driveway. It didn’t mean he hadn’t made his way back here. If a body extraction was in the offing . . . Adair shook her head. One thing at a time, girl.

  Sam nodded at her and offered a little half smile that she decided was an apology of sorts for his cheekiness. Good enough.

  LaMer tugged at her shirtsleeve, and Adair turned to him. “On their way,” he said.

  “OK, thanks.”

  LaMer went back to crowd control, and Adair leaned against the hood of her cruiser to wait and worry. She took a long toke off the night air, a flavor reminiscent of campfire filling her senses. She was no expert, but she didn’t think she could detect a hint of gas. The pros would be on the scene soon, and they’d know.

  She reached back and pulled the scrunchie from her dirty-blonde hair, taking care to hold tight to the base of her ponytail. She pulled the hair taut and slipped the rubber band back into place.

  Off to her right, standing on the sidewalk outside the Country Basket, a group of teenagers, maybe five or six of them, broke into song: “Disco Inferno.”

  Adair looked at them, a bunch of skinny kids, linking pinkies and swaying to the chorus, and then she turned back to the fire, which seemed to be dying out on its own. The cinder block walls of the mayor’s office were splashed with black where the flames had licked at them.

  Now the kids moved on to “Burning Down the House,” and Adair couldn’t help but smile. Smart kids, queuing up songs that predated them, even predated her. She envied them for their carefree ways. Adair had a feeling she wasn’t going to get off so easy where this was concerned.

  “Quiet night,” she said, under her breath. “My ass.”

  THE MAYOR

  By four a.m., it was a done deal. The remnants of the mayor’s office stood there, a steaming heap of rubble doused by thousands of gallons of Yellowstone River water, a smaller crowd than before still milling around it, murmuring, wondering, engaging in conjecture. Swarthbeck stood there, too, close to the burned-out husk, shoulder to shoulder with Chief Underwood. He was most assuredly alive, no small comfort to the folks who’d been first on the scene.

  His eyes watered from the smoke, but he stared straight ahead through his blinking and wrestled with the implications of this awful thing. Nobody had been hurt, and nothing beyond the office had been harmed in a way that some new glass and a coat of paint wouldn’t fix. The real losses he couldn’t talk about, now or ever. The hooch, the still, the money that was not yet in his hands. Coltrane. Jesus, the record. Maybe that stung most of all, the last connection he had to a daddy he barely knew. Some things exist beyond monetary value.

  “Any idea what happened?” the chief asked him.

  He shook his head, silent.

  “We’ll figure it out,” she said.

  Now he nodded, even as he wondered what she meant by “we.” He could get to the bottom of that, he figured. There would be time enough for conversations.

  “Mayor!” a voice called out from the crowd. Swarthbeck turned and squinted. A man with a walrus mustache and the frame to match took a step forward. “I was just wondering, you know, about tomorrow, er, today. You know?”

  Swarthbeck broke into a half smile. He always did like the spirit of this place.

  “Nothing’s broke that can’t be fixed,” the mayor called out. “Hell, yes, the party’s still on.” He punctuated the final few words, and a whoop went up.

  “You folks get on back to sleep,” he said, ushering them to their homes by pushing his hands forward, palms up. “We got a lot of boogying to do in a few hours.” He caught a glimpse of Sam Kelvig and gave him a thumbs-up. Sam shook his head, laughing, and turned to walk up the street toward home. The mayor watched him move away and gain distance from the diffusing crowd. The burden of the next couple of days would fall disproportionately on Kelvig’s shoulders, the mayor knew. A good man, that guy. The only guy for the job.

  When Swarthbeck pivoted back to the devastation, the wrenched-up face of his new police chief met him.

  “What’s your issue, Adair?”

  “The party,” she said. “Jamboree. You sure that’s a good idea? We have a . . . well, I’m not sure what we have here. Maybe we should wait till we find out.”

  Swarthbeck squeezed his eyes shut, drawing his thumb and forefinger across them until they met at the bridge of his nose. “There’s nothing here that won’t keep till Monday,” he said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Adair,” he said. “Trust me. You gonna have somebody from the state fire marshal’s office come up?”

  “I hadn’t thought about it yet.”

  “Well, look,” he said, “it’s Friday morning, and Helena’s seven damn hours away. I’m telling you, it’ll keep for a few days. Meanwhile, we have a couple thousand people set to come into town. Let’s keep our eye on the ball.”

  “It’s the couple thousand I’m—”

  “Adair,” he said, “it’s been a hell of a night. You got any coffee at the station? My pot’s suddenly on the fritz.”

  Swarthbeck sat in a molded plastic chair, gripped his thighs, and ran his hands down to his knees. In the harsh white light of the police station, away from the din outside, he realized how silly he must look. He wore a white T-shirt, holes chewed in the neck of it as the manifestation of a nervous tic. His pajama bottoms were multicolored and striped, reminiscent of the pants his mother used to put on him when he was a boy. And his feet were snuggled into faux-fur-lined slippers. He hadn’t had time to consider wardrobe when Sam, panicked, had come rattling his door.

  Chief Underwood handed him coffee in a Styrofoam cup.

  “Thanks, Adair.” He took a tentative slurp as she slipped to the other side of the desk and found her seat. At once, he felt ill at ease at the juxtaposition.

  “How’s it going, Chief?” He cocked a smile at her as he said it, both to calm her a bit and to remind himself of her underlying position. Otherwise, it would be too easy to think of her as just a girl, two years younger than his own daughter.

  “Tonight aside, just fine.”

  “You’re settling in, then?”

  Her return smile, showing up at last, was unyielding. “Yep.”

  “That’s good. Real good.” He took a full-on swig of the coffee now, letting it play on his tongue before swallowing. A little weak, but it’d do in a pinch.

  Swarthbeck liked her. Liked the job she was doing. If anybody ever said the mayor wasn’t capable of changing his mind—not that anyone would, to him—he could present Adair Underwood as his counterpoint. When her application crossed his desk several months back, she had two big strikes against her. One, she was a woman, and Swarthbeck figured the liberals of the world could cry him a fucking river if he didn’t think some jobs were best handled by a man. Two, she was young as hell. But this being America and all, other people had a say in the thing, and sure enough, the town council drew a bead on Adair as one of the finalists. On three consecutive nights, the candidates met with the council and anybody in town who cared to drop in and ask questions, and Adair Underwood made the assistant chief from Glendive and the twenty-year officer from Colstrip look like right fools. The vote was unanimous, the job was hers, and Swarthbeck figu
red he was entitled to wave his feminist flag around a bit if he damn well wanted to.

  “OK,” he said, “let’s talk about it.”

  Chief Underwood ground into the seat and fixed him with a hard gaze. He liked it, respected it, the way she’d always look him in the eye when they spoke. A lot of people wouldn’t.

  “It wasn’t a gas leak,” she said.

  “No.”

  “Does somebody want to hurt you?”

  Swarthbeck smiled. “That question coming from any particular place?”

  “Just routine,” she said.

  “You think there’s a bomber in town?”

  The chief rocked forward in the office chair. Swarthbeck, in turn, pushed back and cupped his hands behind his head. Call and response.

  “I don’t think anything,” the chief said. “Wouldn’t do any good to have a theory at this point. It gets in the way of the questions.”

  “I don’t know of anyone who would try to hurt me,” he said.

  “So what’s your theory?”

  He stared at her for ten solid seconds. He counted them off silently. He wanted this to stick. “I don’t have one. Maybe it wasn’t a leak at all but an exploding gas main. Maybe it was a hot-water heater. You know Jordy Jameson?”

  “Yeah, I think so.”

  “His water heater blew clean through his roof a few years back. That thing was like Sputnik.”

  “OK.”

  “My point being, it’s done, and nobody got hurt, thank God, and”—he looked at his watch—“it’s 5:37 in the a.m. and I’ve got bigger fish to fry.”

  “I hear you.”

  Swarthbeck let his shoulders fall. Indignation took a lot out of him. He offered a rueful smile and shrugged, and Chief Underwood at last gave him more than a puckered mouth in return.