AHMM, July/August 2012

by Dell Magazine Authors

  But the portly man had already turned around and was inflicting pieties on the woman whose emotions had overwhelmed her.

  Nabu-zir turned to Nindada and said, “You should be pleased with yourself, Nindada. Your deed will never be written in clay, but you may have saved the throne of a king.”

  She looked alarmed, then lowered her eyes and said, “I only went to the tavern across the alley to talk to a friend.”

  Copyright © 2012 Donald Moffitt

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  Fiction: BURNING DAYLIGHT

  by David Edgerley Gates

  * * * *

  Art by Andrew Wright

  * * * *

  The two boys had been fishing the upper reaches of Kettle Creek, where glacial runoff from up in the Absarokas fed a loop of shallow pools, like spoons, the water very fast and cold. Kettle ponds, they were called, which gave the creek its name. The trout weren't that big, but they were quick to hit the lure.

  It was high summer, the air thick with insects, mosquitoes the size of a man's thumb, bees heavy with pollen, butterflies near the end of their breeding cycle, and they drew birds, swifts, and vireos. The day was hot and still, but crowded with life.

  Jesse Greyeyes was ten. His first cousin and best friend, Toby Pete, known as Rabbit, was nine, or nine and a half, he would have said. They were Northern Cheyenne, but they weren't reservation Indians. They lived on the economy, outside of Limestone, on the edge of the Gallatin National Forest. They'd fished and hunted these mountains since they were six, when they were old enough to carry a ten-pound pack, and understood their own responsibility. Both of them were excellent shots with a .22 bolt-action, although neither one of them was allowed to carry a weapon at their age without adult supervision, but it might be pointed out that they were probably more grown up about guns than a few grown-ups they knew.

  They were fishing catch-and-release, but if they got a fat one, they kept it. On a camping trip with one of their uncles they would have cleaned the fish right there, and fried it over an open fire. This time around, they gutted the keepers to take home to Jesse's mom.

  Halfway down, there was a double-wide at the far end of a shallow valley. They'd passed it on the way up, and the trailer had seemed abandoned. But now there were signs of life.

  Boys being boys, they snuck in to take a closer look. They had a good scouting position, from up on the ridgeline.

  There was a pickup parked next to the trailer, a GMC or a Chevy, an old beater, light blue, with primer on the fenders. They could see a smudge of smoke from the roof vent, which was weird. Even at this altitude, the temperature was in the low eighties. And there were a couple of propane tanks at the rear of the trailer. If you were cooking something with gas, the exhaust was colorless, and the smoke from the vent was a sort of dirty yellow.

  The wind shifted, and gusted the smell upslope.

  “Yuck,” Jesse said. It was like cat piss, but ten times as strong. It made him gag.

  “Gross,” Toby said. “Like he's boiling bones.”

  “This is creepy,” Jesse said.

  “Maybe he's a serial killer,” Toby said. “You know, like Hannibal the Cannibal? He's cooking up the victims, and then he eats them.”

  “Don't be a spaz,” Jesse said.

  Toby drew a bead on the trailer with an imaginary rifle and pinched the trigger. “Ka-pow,” he said.

  And the trailer blew up like a bomb had gone off inside it, an enormous burst of flame that sucked all the air out of the day, and punched the double-wide apart. The walls burst out in a metallic squeal and the roof collapsed. The noise rolled up the valley, and a cloud of raw, putrid smoke thickened above the wreckage of the trailer, hovering in the clear afternoon.

  “Holy crap," Toby said, awestruck.

  * * * *

  Hector and Katie were in a booth at the Hitching Post, sharing a pizza. She was drinking Gallo red. Hector was having a beer. They were both off the clock. It was nice to simply enjoy each other's company. Although they were an item, these days, they seemed to find less time together. Katie still ran the local clinic, but she was up at Montana State in Billings three days a week now, and Hector was on call twenty-four seven. Their relationship was relaxed, a little too relaxed, Hector sometimes felt. They were still getting used to it.

  “You hear from Lame Deer?” she asked him.

  “He's teaching school, down in Wind River,” he said.

  Andy Lame Deer had been the FBI field agent they'd worked a case with, the year before. Now he was retired. Hector didn't know the new guy. All he'd heard was that Agent Child wasn't an Indian, not necessarily a handicap.

  “Not easy to have a conversation,” she said, smiling.

  “Hard to know what to talk about,” he said, smiling back.

  She slid her hand across the table and squeezed his hand in hers.

  “Deputy Moody?”

  Hector looked up.

  “I'm sorry to bother you.”

  A woman in her late forties. Hector didn't place her name.

  “Sylvia Greyeyes,” she told him.

  Hector slid out of the booth and stood. “Ma'am,” he said.

  She had two boys with her, both about ten years old.

  “Please,” Hector said.

  Katie made room, and the boys slid in next to her, looking both excited and nervous. Hector offered Sylvia the seat on his side. “Buy you a beer?” he asked her.

  “No, thank you,” she said. “I'm a dry drunk.”

  Lot of that going around, Hector thought, as they sat down.

  “This is my son Jesse, and my nephew Toby,” she said.

  “What's up, guys?” Hector asked them.

  So they told him the story, stepping on each other's toes a little, but they were by and large good witnesses.

  Hector asked a couple of questions. Had they ever seen the blue truck before? Did they know who lived in the trailer?

  They shook their heads.

  “Okay. I'll go up there.”

  “We can show you,” Toby said, eagerly.

  “No,” Hector said. “I want you to stay off of Kettle Creek for the next week or so.”

  Sylvia Greyeyes nodded a thank you.

  “What?” Katie asked him.

  “Meth lab,” he said. “Guy got careless with an open flame, blew himself into the back end of beyond.”

  * * * *

  Ice, they called it. Glass, or crank. Crystal meth, cooked down from pseudoephedrine. One of the byproducts was phosphine, another was acetone, both as easily ignited as a matchhead.

  Stillwater County was fifty miles across, and a good sixty miles deep. Hector Moody shared the responsibility with two other deputy sheriffs, and worked the Limestone substation. State police sent a HAZMAT squad. He met them halfway up Kettle Creek and took them in.

  The smell carried for miles, like carrion, or worse.

  “Far enough,” the sergeant in charge of the team said. Hector was fine with it. He didn't have to get any closer. The team suited up and went in. Hector stayed on the ridge.

  A big Ford SUV pulled up behind him, and the driver climbed out. No coat and tie. Dressed for brush country.

  “Hector Moody?”

  Hector nodded.

  “Frank Child, FBI.”

  They shook hands.

  “What've you got?”

  “Meth cooker, my guess.”

  “Anything else?”

  “With all due respect, this isn't the rez,” Hector said.

  He meant the FBI had no jurisdiction. On the reservations, FBI handled felonies.

  “No argument,” Child said. “I'm offering you my help.”

  “Thanks,” Hector said. “I could use it.”

  “I'm new here,” Child said. “I wouldn't want to get off on the wrong foot.”

  “I appreciate that,” Hector said.

  “They give the assignment to rookies, or guys on their last legs,” the FBI agent said.
<
br />   “Your career could end in the Absarokas,” Hector said.

  “I'd prefer it otherwise,” Child said.

  * * * *

  “What's he like?” Katie Faraday asked.

  “Young guy, a newbie,” he said.

  “You're not exactly an old crock.”

  Hector grinned. “Everything's relative,” he said. “It's his first field assignment, is all. He did a couple of years at NCIC, he told me, right out of Quantico.”

  “So you're thinking he's a computer geek or a lab rat.”

  “I'm thinking he knows how to research a database. Does he know how to work a criminal case?”

  “In other words, he's got something to prove.”

  “If only to himself,” Hector said, “but he didn't strike me as a know-it-all cowboy with a chip on his shoulder.”

  “First impressions are important,” Katie said.

  “And my first impression is positive.”

  “He told you the FBI was ready to help the investigation.”

  “Proof is in the pudding,” Hector said.

  “Why don't you call him?” she asked.

  “Frank Child?”

  She shook her head. “Andy Lame Deer.”

  “We wouldn't have much to say to each other.”

  “No, you just have to figure out how to say it.”

  “Not my strong suit,” he said, smiling.

  “You said the right thing to me.”

  “You were willing to listen.”

  “But it took you long enough,” Katie reminded him.

  * * * *

  Of course it was awkward, as he knew it would be. Lame Deer had gone out on a sour note, and Hector felt partly responsible.

  Once they got past the initial stiffness, though, and started talking cop to cop, falling into a more familiar ritual, they were on safer ground, and began to relax with each other.

  “Big problem, here in Wind River,” Lame Deer said. “It's a serious problem in Indian Country, all over.”

  “Some enterprising Mexican dope runners figured it was easy pickings,” Lame Deer went on. “You got a history of alcohol dependency, it's a ready market for crank. They began shuffling it wholesale, now it's homegrown.”

  “How many cookers have the local cops shut down?”

  “We've got shake-and-bake,” Lame Deer said. “A cooker you can target, it's a physical location, but we have guys making it in their cars, in an empty plastic soda bottle. You find the residue by the side of the road. It used to be bikers, or some other lowlifes, but this has turned into mom-and-pop. You have the demand, the supply follows.”

  “What else?”

  “There's a gang presence,” Lame Deer said.

  “Skinheads?”

  “Indian kids. Wind River, Pine Ridge. Down in the Navajo Nation, the Big Rez, you know how many gangs they have on Indian land? Tribal police can't handle the numbers.”

  “You're not giving me much room for optimism.”

  “I said it was intractable, not hopeless.”

  “There's a difference?”

  “When the going gets tough, the tough get going,” Lame Deer said.

  * * * *

  The preliminary report from state forensics indicated traces elements of phosphine, acetone, chloroform, ammonia, hydrogen iodide, and other dilute solvent gases, all consistent with methamphetamine manufacture, and with a high risk of spontaneous ignition.

  The blue pickup had been incinerated in the fireball, but they still managed to pull a VIN, and working through Motor Vehicle, a name. Lloyd Threadgill, last reported address a post office box in Livingston, just this side of Bozeman.

  * * * *

  Livingston had been founded on the west bank of the Yellowstone in the 1880s, when the Northern Pacific came through. It was a cow town, then as now.

  Hector liaised with a Park County deputy. Her ID tag read pacheco. She introduced herself as Ruby.

  “What have you got?” she asked.

  Hector handed her the fax from MVD, with the driver's license photograph. White male, age thirty-nine, blue eyes, red hair. Five eleven, one fifty-five.

  “Not a lot of meat on him,” she remarked.

  Hector nodded. “Long and narrow,” he said.

  “Hillbilly genes,” she said, smiling. She herself was tall for a woman, and big boned. “What's the approach?”

  “Go door-to-door. Show people his picture. See if anybody can give us a line on him.”

  “You figure him for a Crispy Critter.”

  “If he was in the trailer,” Hector said. “State lab hasn't made a positive identification on his remains.”

  “Dental records?”

  “Guy with meth mouth might not have any teeth.”

  They took both their vehicles, in case Ruby got a call from her dispatcher and had to respond.

  Lloyd Threadgill had let his P.O. box expire, and left no forwarding. All his first-class mail had been returned to sender, and even if it hadn't, Hector had no claim to it without a warrant. The postmaster let him have a couple of stacks of old second-class they were ready to throw away, outdated supermarket coupons, catalogs from Victoria's Secret, back issues of Shotgun News. Gun classifieds and underwear. Nothing that gave them a handle on him personally.

  MVD, on the other hand, required a physical address to issue a license and registration, as well as proof of insurance, so they had another starting point.

  The trailer park was on an island, in the shadow of I-90. The river broke into a series of narrow loops, channels with sandbars, before it went down into canyon country, and picked up rapids and whitewater boils. Here it was placid, slow moving, and almost still.

  “You part Indian?” Ruby asked.

  “My grandmother's Crow,” Hector said. He thought it was an unnecessary question, maybe even an insulting one.

  “The reason I ask,” Ruby Pacheco said, “is that we've got a mixed bag here, so it depends what you bring to the party. Let's say we figure Lloyd for a cracker. Then there are Native Americans, washed up in shoal water, and illegals, muled up from Mexico. Not the happiest melting pot.”

  “What are you trying to tell me, Deputy?”

  “We're not going to get any sympathy. I talk to some gal, she doesn't see me, she sees the uniform. These are people who don't trust the Migra. You being Indian might be helpful.”

  “It's your turf,” Hector said.

  “Let's walk the walk,” Ruby said.

  She was right, of course. They got nowhere. If not at first outright hostility, then a sullen, sulky mulishness, or grudging cooperation. It was like pulling fingernails. Hector didn't let it discourage him. A lot of cop work involved shoe leather, and a lot of people weren't eager to invite police contact, generally because their past experience with the police had brought unhappy results.

  Three hours later, Hector's stomach was growling and he was ready for lunch. They'd started at the north end, by the main entrance, and quartered their way south down the west side. Now they were working their way back up the east side.

  The trailers were in general well maintained, some with flower boxes, more than a few with kitchen gardens. There was an occasional junker up on blocks. Most of the people here seemed to be barely scraping by, but they had a certain pride of place, and hadn't let their homes go to hell.

  Hector and Ruby had talked to a couple of dozen residents, with nothing to show for it. They'd circled halfway back to the front gate when they knocked on Violet Halfpenny's door.

  She was a widow, Gros Ventre, a fair piece off her historic graze, Fort Belknap, up by the Canadian border.

  They learned this in the course of the interview, over coffee and homemade peanut butter brownies. Violet wasn't shy with information, and she had no embarrassment at all in talking to them.

  “You come about those punks?” she asked.

  “Which punks, Mother?” Hector asked.

  “The cretins who drove through my garden.”

  “Do you
want to make a report, ma'am?” Ruby asked her.

  “I made a report, two days ago,” Violet said.

  “Who were they?” Hector asked.

  “Georgie Ramirez and his little brother, Teo. They run with that pony herd of Assiniboine, gang-banger tattoos, listen to that god-awful hip-hop, like they're coloreds. Indian kids, I swear, no more than fifteen or sixteen years old.”

  Violet herself was probably in her early sixties, Hector thought. Not one to suffer fools gladly. “Are they into dope?” he asked.

  “They're huffers, some of them,” she said. “They like to do goofballs, beer and oxycodone. They steal prescription drugs from the mailboxes.”

  Hector nodded, almost smiling. For a gal her age, she knew the talk. Came with the territory, he guessed.

  “The dealers use them for runners,” she said.

  Hector nodded again. “Because they're juveniles,” he said.

  “You have dealers living in the trailer village?”

  She shook her head. “Users. The boys bring the stuff in.”

  Hector gave her Lloyd Threadgill's picture.

  Violet sighed. “Poor, dumb bastard,” she murmured.

  Hector and Ruby exchanged a glance.

  “They ran him off,” Violet said.

  “Who did?” Ruby asked her.

  “The boys. Lloyd was strung out on speed. He sold product to support his habit.”

  “So they eliminated the competition,” Hector said.

  “I suppose,” Violet said, “but I think it was more to keep the police away. They were afraid Lloyd selling would bring the cops down on them.”

  “Which is why you say you've got no dealers here.”

  “With all due respect, cops don't much care about junkies,” she said.

  “When did this happen, the pony herd running Lloyd off?”

  “His trailer's been empty for a month.”

  “Which trailer is that?” Hector asked her.

  * * * *

  The place had been trashed. The utilities had been shut off, no electric or gas or running water, but the smell of cigarettes and dope smoke was strong. There was an ice chest in one corner filled with lukewarm water and cans of stale Tecate.

  “The gang's using it for a squat,” Ruby said.

  Hector shrugged. “Let's see what we can turn up,” he said.