Killing a Cold One

by Joseph Heywood

  Friday came back and Service leaned over. “There’s an ‘Officer Caution’ on him,” she whispered. “Felon: Exercise extreme caution. He did a major stretch for aggravated assault on a cop.”

  Service turned back to the man. “You armed, Carnie?”

  “Jes’ a lil’ ole scattergun inside the door is all.”

  Which he wasn’t allowed to have. “No handguns?”

  “Not on me. I ain’t licensed to carry.”

  “Have you tried to get a license?”

  “Wouldn’t do me no damn good.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Army retired me on account o’ my legs, and said my brain was totally fucking Mixmastered permanent, but that ain’t true. They just wanted me out so I wouldn’t tell the truth about the war. OWG, man: Those fuckers are behind everything.”

  OWG meant One World Government, a favorite conspiracy theory of the extreme political right lunatic fringe. It included government men in black helicopters and a plan for the United Nations to take over the world. Service had some international-relations thoughts of his own and wanted to point out to Bird that China already pretty much owned the US through debt, but he avoided the tangent.

  “Did Dog know the girls before the gun show?”

  “Hafta ast him,” Bird said.

  “These girls . . . they have any birthmarks, tattoos, anything special?” Service asked.

  “Not that I seen. Ast Dog. I think he seen all of ’em, if you know what I mean.”

  “What did you drive to Kalamazoo?”

  “Dodge truck with a camper in the bed.”

  “You stayed all night?”

  The man nodded.

  “The girls too?”

  “I went to dinner with some of them showpeople, and the sluts stayed with Dog. Never saw them when I got back, nor the next day neither.”

  “You bought guns from him?”

  “I guess, mebbe.”

  “M40s?”

  “Damn right, with night scopes. For them damned beasts over’n to zoo. Man got right to po-tackshun.”

  “But the rifles were stolen?”

  “Girls weren’t there when I come back from dinner, Dog was drunk, and them guns was gone. I never even got ’em home.”

  The man named Dog had been drunk? “How much did you pay?”

  “A grand each, cash, but Dog threw in beaucoup ammo.”

  “You’ve got a receipt?”

  Carnelian Bird laughed. “Ain’t no receipts for cash deals at gun swaps.”

  “Dog give you an explanation for the guns being gone?”

  “I ax him, but he beat on me so bad, I just shut up. He said cunts done runned off with them, but I’m thinkin’ he give them rifles to them to pay for they pussies.”

  “And you didn’t call the cops?”

  “They’d just pinch me. They all out to get me.”

  “I’m not,” Service said.

  “We done only just met,” the man countered glumly.

  Service looked at Friday, who shrugged.

  “You know you can’t possess firearms with your record.”

  “Don’t got more. They got stole, ’member?”

  “You have a shotgun inside the doorway.”

  “Since when is a shotgun a firearm?” the man shot back.

  Service poked Friday, and they backed off the porch and headed for their vehicle; then he turned around and went back to the house momentarily, came out to the car, and got in.

  Friday drove down the block and parked. “Boy,” she said. “We probably ought to take a look around for Mr. Truffle Dog. Why’d you go back?”

  “Had one more question; I asked him again about the tattoos—if either of the girls had a tattoo that looked like a dog or bear. He said one of them did. On her ankle.”

  Friday looked at him and raised an eyebrow. “Can this actually be working in our favor?”

  •••

  Dog’s house turned out to be a trailer southwest of Wayland, on pancake farmland in a sea of plowed cornfields. There were half a dozen chained, barking dogs near the house, and no signs of two-legged life.

  Friday called the Wayland Troop post on her cell and talked to someone. Service didn’t catch the name and could hear only her side of the conversation, which was short on information. Minutes later a Blue Goose slid up beside them. A female Troop got out. She had a long, splashy, bright red ponytail and extraordinarily long fingernails that glowed.

  “Name’s Delay,” she said, introducing herself. “Lindsay.”

  “Friday, CO Service. You know Truffle Dog?”

  “Prince of slimeballs. We know that fool, call him T.D., Total Dickhead.”

  “Got a history, does he?”

  “Long as a giraffe’s dick. Violent SOB, loves his guns. Funny how often those two marry up.”

  “Wife, family?”

  “Nah. Was a time he had two little girls around here, but just for a year or two—his sister’s spawn, I think. She was off serving a year plus for meth manufacture, and the kids landed with him.”

  “Arranged and approved by Social Services?”

  Lindsay Delay laughed out loud. “Truffle Dog’s an Indian, Detective. He doesn’t willingly cooperate with or even recognize white government agencies.”

  “We are to tribals what OWG is to some whites,” Service offered.

  Delay nodded. “I hear that.”

  “Indian from where?” Friday asked.

  The Troop shrugged. “Wherever he wants. Tends to move around.”

  “Somebody got names on the two girls, photos, anything? Details on him, what he drives, anything?”

  “Probably in his jacket back in the barn,” Delay said. “You want me to call my sarge, ask him to open files for you?”

  “We’d appreciate it.”

  “Not a problem,” the officer said, and went back to her patrol vehicle.

  •••

  Delay’s sergeant was a light-colored, wizened Hispanic man who looked like his last meal had been several years before. His uniform hung off him like a flour sack. The whites of his eyes were yellow and pink.

  The officers introduced themselves. “Old T.D. up to tricks?” Sergeant Alizondo asked.

  “Not sure yet.”

  Service looked through the jacket with Friday perched by his shoulder. “Seems to have spent about half his life inside,” Service said.

  “Most like him get taken out of the gene pool somewhere along the way,” Alizondo said, “but T.D., he seems to have some kind of protective mega-mojo whenever he’s inside.”

  “Mojo?”

  “Inmates call him Spook-man.”

  “You guys know he was dealing weapons?”

  “No, but then, nothing about that fool comes as a surprise.”

  Service leafed through more pages. “Not exactly pedaling guns legally,” he told Friday. She said to the sergeant, “At one time he had two girls living with him. Are their names in the file?”

  “Gotta fetch us a different jacket,” the sergeant said, “but unless you have a warrant, I can’t let you see what’s in this next one. I can confirm the two girls were with him five years back. They were fourteen and fifteen, sisters. Kilani and Marlaeani Kit, his sister’s daughters.”

  “Photos?”

  “Can make you copies,” the sergeant said. “But the photos are five years old, hear?”

  “Were they placed with Dog by Social Services?”

  “T.D. set that up on his own, and Social Services thought it was a sign he was turning his life around, so they let it ride.”

  “Your department squawk?”

  “Shee-it. Why waste breath? Social Services does what it wants in this county.”

  “Any idea where the girls are now?”
/>   “Can’t help you. Try Social Services.”

  “No warrant to open doors.”

  “We all face challenges, and I don’t make the rules,” the sergeant said, and leaned over to them. “Social Services won’t have no record on them girls. They washed they hands of all that, left them girls’ fate to fate, hear?”

  “Their fate may be that they were murdered,” Friday said as the sergeant handed her some photocopies. She stared at them and passed them to Service. Neither of them could correlate the old photos with anything. Without heads, identification was going to approach the impossible.

  “Social Services should have prints,” Friday said.

  “Prints for what? No hands. And maybe they’d cough up if we have a warrant,” Service said. “I’m guessing. What we need is a break, not paperwork.”

  “What about the girls’ mother?”

  “Dead,” the sergeant said. “Wrapped her car around a pole week after the State kicked her.”

  •••

  Later that night they drove back to the tribal center in Grand Rapids and found Rose Monroe walking away from the front door. The woman turned, scowled, and waved them away, but Service flashed his shield and she reluctantly turned around and unlocked the door.

  “What is it you want now?” the woman asked.

  Service explained about the girls, and at the end of his story showed her the photographs from the campground. The woman showed no visible emotion. “I can’t help, and I got to close. We got rules.”

  “Think she recognized them?” Service asked as they drove away.

  “Couldn’t read her,” Friday said. “Okay, now that this day is done, there’s one lingering question,” she said.

  He looked over at her. Yeah?”

  “Just how long is a giraffe’s dick?”

  The two of them brayed like mules.

  11

  Friday October 24

  MACKINAW CITY, CHEBOYGAN COUNTY

  It was after midnight. “So much for initiative,” Friday said as she pulled into Mackinaw City off I-75. It had been snowing tapioca since Vanderbilt, and traffic had slowed to a crawl by the time they got to Indian River, thirty miles south of the straits. “I hate whiteouts,” she carped, pulling up to the city police building. Signs on the bridge’s approach announced it was closed, but not for how long. They went inside, brushing snow off their coats, and found Chief Minky Malette in his office on the phone. Malette waved for them to step in and sit, yelled at someone on the other end of the phone about closing the bridge, and how it had already made for trouble in town.

  The chief hung up. “You two lost?”

  “Stopping to get a room in the stable.”

  Malette guffawed. “Here? Dream on. We got no rooms left in town. You don’t mind, though, I’ve got a holding cell. Use them for prisoners until we can ship them to Cheboygan, or wherever. Got two, and one’s empty right now.”

  “Any port in a storm,” Service said.

  “I hate weather humor,” Malette said.

  “Good for local business, though.”

  “Screw the shopkeeps,” the chief said. “They get profits, and we get to clean up behind the whole mess while the town fathers shrink our budgets every year.”

  Service called Station Twenty in Lansing to let the dispatchers know where he was, and Friday called her office in Negaunee.

  Malette showed them into the cramped holding-cell area. One was occupied by a young woman with stringy black hair in a black leather skirt just short of the average male imagination.

  “Like . . . you one of them or one of us?” the girl asked Friday.

  “One of them,” Friday said. “Above the bridge.”

  “That’s cool,” the girl said. “I stuck my old man in the kneecap with an icepick. Come home from work, see, and, like, I found him pounding doggy on my BFF? Guess I sorta freaked?”

  “Should have stuck her instead,” Service offered.

  “Did,” the girl said matter-of-factly. “Thirty-eighties, they tell me? I din’t count, myseff? She, like, croaked? Minky, he say I murderize dat bitch?”

  The girl looked fourteen, couldn’t have been more than nineteen, definition of PWT. “Crime of passion,” he told her. “It may not go so badly for you.”

  “But I done stuck dat ho thirty-eightie? You think dat a record? I ain’t never made me no record? I get pissed, I ack out, they tell me? She fuck my ole man, she dis me, see what I’m sayin’?”

  Indeed. The urban patois of a long-haul client of the state’s social welfare system rolled off the girl’s lips. Their fellow resident waved a piece of paper at Friday.

  “You want see my baby? Like, they took her from me, dude. I miss my baby,” she keened.

  Friday looked frustrated and whispered to Service, “I gotta call my sis about the kid and the animals, and this is how bad my life’s gotten, feeling bad for a hormonally driven teenage assassin. I sometimes disgust myself.”

  “Thanks?” the girl said to Service after Friday went to another room to make her call. “You want kneel down and pray thanks to the Big God Dude with me?” the girl asked.

  “I don’t think so.”

  The girl shrugged. “I always try to pray a lot?” she said. “I guess it just don’t take. You want shove yo junk through them bars? I’ll suck that big boy. I ain’t much good at much, but I’m real good at that shit.”

  “Rain check,” Service said with a wink, thinking, This is a fellow earthling? Someone leaving gorks in campgrounds, walking dead gorks in jail, bad omens everywhere for his granddaughter and Shigun. Thoughts of the future made him cringe for kids.

  “But it’s snowing and there ain’t like nothing to do here, dude, sayin’?” the girl whined. “I guess I ain’t so smart?”

  “Thus endeth social intercourse,” Service said.

  The girl looked perplexed and grinned. “I know I know dat word, and I’m sure we ain’t done that? Did we? But I guess we could?”

  Service sighed and sat back. It was going to be a long night. More and more the world felt like it was on the verge of coming apart. Friday came back, rested her head on his shoulder, and was asleep before him.

  12

  Sunday, October 26

  SLIPPERY CREEK CAMP

  The recent snow was melting under an intense south wind, and Service was on the porch with Newf. Karylanne had brought his granddaughter down from Houghton. Friday and Shigun had come out from Harvey, and all of them had spent two days in some semblance of a family. It was early Sunday, and he and Little Maridly were making breakfast for the rest of the clan. Shigun, Friday’s son, slept soundly like his mom. Maridly seemed to loathe sleep, a lot like her namesake.

  The cell phone rang and Service had an inkling to let it go to a message, but after so many years of being available to others, he reluctantly answered.

  “Grady, Lori. I’m very sorry to disrupt your pass time.”

  “I gave up trying to differentiate my time from the State’s too long ago to remember,” he said. “What’s up, Governor?”

  He’d met the governor years ago, when she was a state senator, just before she ran for the big job. They had been acquaintances since. Maybe even friends. The exact status seemed to vacillate, mostly based on his moods.

  “I’m told that Tuesday’s handling that ghastly case with the headless girls.”

  How does Lori know this? No details have been made public. Had this case climbed the State ladder up to the top?

  “You want to talk to her?”

  “No. I’ve been told you’re also involved in the case.”

  “You know we don’t handle homicides. I have what might be a possibly related weapons case, but we really don’t know yet. Possibly related isn’t the same as related.”

  “I’m a lawyer: Don’t split damn hairs, Grady. Y
ou hearing some dogman talk up there—a reward, all that panic-the-public nutcase crap?” The governor was a member of the exclusive Huron Mountain Club and had a first-rate network of Yooper informants who kept her tuned in to goings-on above the bridge, politically and otherwise.

  “Heard some,” he said, “but it’s been a while.”

  “What do you think?” the governor asked.

  “Think about what?” Why does she do this shit—come diving into law enforcement and cases without the slightest clue? But he knew the answer: She was in political hell, looking for anything to boost her basement-level public ratings.

  “Don’t jerk me around,” Governor Timms snapped at him. “I’m in no mood for your lip,” she added.

  “Okay,” he said. “Here’s my take: There’s no such thing as a dogman, Sasquatch, skinwalker, vampire, werewolf, windigo, zombie, whatever. They are all total bullshit.”

  “Yet many people ardently believe in zombies and vampires,” the governor countered.

  “So what? They believe angels are real, too.” Service affectionately patted his granddaughter’s head and whispered, “Tell your mum and Tuesday and Shigun it’s time to get out of bed. Breakfast on the table in ten minutes, max—and don’t jump on Shigun,” he added as she scampered away.

  “Listen, Lori, people also believe in the damn Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, and Santa Claus,” he said in a whispered growl. “Belief does not bestow biological reality.”

  “The latter examples are benign, the former are not.”

  “They are all bullshit, Governor.”

  “All of those entities you mentioned,” she said. “What do they have in common, Grady?”

  “They’re not real, and only kids, assholes, and jerks believe in them.”

  “You skipped over the fact that they are all animal forms.”

  “The Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus?”

  “Don’t quibble and don’t patronize.”

  “I repeat: None of them are real, Governor.”

  “People think they’re real, and perceptions matter. You’re not listening to me, Officer Service.”

  “Because you’re not making any goddamn sense, Governor. Your political advisors feeding you the dogman tidbits? Or did your people do a damn poll?”