Bad Company (6 page)

“Maybe,” said Delice. “I guess there’s a lot of that feeling going around. I know there’s a lot of us who’d like to see the guy who did it fry in hell.” Sally and Charlene nodded hard.

As they wheeled their groceries out to Delice’s Ford Explorer, Sally asked, “Do you think anybody could have done something to prevent this happening to Monette?”

Delice took her time answering. “I’ve never been a fan of second guesses. Even if I were, I’d say no. Monette was young, and in some strange ways incredibly naive. Maybe Dickie and Mary could have done more, but they really did try. Monette blew them off. She was hell-bent, and the world’s too full of devils. Whatever made her that way started a long time before she showed up here.”

Sally thought about that. “You know, Dee, it doesn’t really matter what kind of demons were driving her. She didn’t deserve to die that way. She shouldn’t just be thrown away because everybody’s got places to go and things to do. Her death has to mean something.” And we’ll never know what it means until we know what she did, and why she did it, Sally told herself.

Delice said nothing. But as they drove down Third Street, past the Loose Caboose bar and package store, Delice gasped, swerved, and nearly hit the car in the on-coming lane.

“What the hell!” Sally shouted, reaching over to grab the wheel. “Are you having a heart attack or something?”

“No! Goddamn it, take your hands off the wheel. I’m fine,” shouted Delice, pulling off the road into a vacant dirt lot. “Look over there, at the drive-up window of the Loose Caboose.”

Sally looked. All she saw was a beat and dusty old Dodge truck with Wyoming plates, a man with a cowboy hat leaning out the driver’s window as the liquor store clerk handed over a twelve-pack of Old Milwaukee and a bottle in a brown paper bag.

All Wyomingites knew that the state’s license plates began with a number that indicated the county in which the vehicle had been registered. Real license plate cognoscenti knew which numbers stood for which county. The state had twenty-three counties, and Sally, no connoisseur, knew only about five by number. “What’s county twenty?” she asked, knowing that Delice, a Wyoming native and lover of the state’s history and geography, would have the answer.

“That’s Weston County. Newcastle’s the county seat. Guess we were speakin’ of the devil. That there truck,” she said, taking a deep breath and glaring hard, “is being driven by none other than Pettibone Bandy. And it looks like the son of a bitch is stocking up for a party.”

Chapter 5
Differences of Opinion

So this was what it was like for the astronauts at liftoff. Before Sally had time to do more than squeak, Delice had peeled out across four lanes of traffic, fishtailed into the Loose Caboose parking lot, and screamed to a rubber-burning halt with the Explorer pointed at an angle, between the exit of the drive-up and the entrance to the street.

The driver’s door of the Chevy flew open, and Bone Bandy popped out, face red as a beefsteak tomato. Sally’s first thought: rabies. He was, it seemed, mad enough to be literally foaming at the mouth. But then, as she caught sight of the big bulge in his cheek, she realized why there was a big stringy gob of saliva hanging out of the side of his mouth. Like so many Wyoming men, Bone was a user of smokeless tobacco. He must have been getting ready to spit when Delice pulled in front of him, and ended up with his wad all over his face.

He was cussing some, too, damning Delice in ways that made Sally’s own use of questionable language look like
A Child’s Garden of Verses
. The words he was using, in the particular combination in which he was using them, brought back strong memories of dozens of guys like him, and reminded her why she’d quit making her living singing in bars.

Way back then, nothing had mattered more than the music. In return for the chance to get paid for singing, for doing something she’d have been doing anyway, she’d logged thousands of hard miles of road, spent way too many nights on rump-sprung mattresses in cheap motels, dealt with too many men whose intentions were not good. Five years of following the music and the money all over the Rockies had given her a substantially more pessimistic view of human nature in general, and of the character of the average American male in particular.

Sally had never really known Bone Bandy, but she’d known who he was, having encountered him in the Gallery bar, twenty long years ago. The first time he’d come in with a drilling crew working out by Elk Mountain, a bunch who’d drawn her attention because none of them had bothered to clean up after work, but come straight to town to party on a Friday night. Sally had been sitting at a table with Delice, Mary, and, now that she recalled it, Mary’s sister, Tanya Nagy, minding their own business but getting fairly happy at the hour of the same name. Bone and his friends had started sending drinks over to their table. Delice had wanted to send them back, but Tanya had said she never looked a free drink in the mouth, and then Delice had insisted that it was a better policy never to take a free drink from a horse’s ass.

Delice, Sally, and Mary had left at the end of happy hour. Tanya had stayed.

No second-guessing that one.

Now Bone was leaning in the driver’s window of the Explorer, wiping the dark brown clump of spit away with the back of one hand and grabbing Delice’s shirt with the other. “Just what the fuck do you think you’re doing?” he asked, red-rimmed blue eyes squinting back and forth between Delice and Sally in a hard flickering glance that made Sally hope that he wasn’t packing.

Delice was too furious to be scared. “Surprised to see you here so quick, Bone,” she said, all frost. “I realize it’s customary to notify the next of kin in case of death, but I’d never have believed they’d find you in whatever rat burrow you’re living in now, let alone that you’d come. Picking up a little something to contribute to the wake?”

Bone actually laughed. “Contribute? To a wake for Monette? I don’t know why in holy hell I should. My darling daughter let me know just last week, she didn’t need a goddamn thing from her old man,” he said, leaning in the truck window and spitting a stream of dark juice onto Delice’s left boot. “Called her up to tell her I was between jobs and comin’ in for the rodeo, and she told me—let’s see, what were her exact words—that she was in ‘tall cotton,’ and I better not come around wanting a loan or a place to crash, and I should just stay the fuck away. Kids these days got no respect.”

Delice was obviously using every ounce of self-control she possessed not to look down at her gooked-up Charlie Dunn, and instead to stare Bone down. “So what’d you do, decide to grab her and teach her some respect, like you did with Tanya?”

For a very long moment Bone glared at Delice, saying nothing. And then, in a low, flat voice, he said, “Maybe somebody oughta teach you a little respect, Delice. You’ve got a habit of getting up on your high horse and pissing people off, and that’s the kind of thing that can put people in mind to learn you a lesson. I know two or three guys who’ve given it some thought, over the years.” He moved closer, dribbling more tobacco juice down his chin, twisting his fist in Delice’s shirt and pulling her face close. “Might be they’re in town and in an educatin’ mood.”

Sally was very unhappy with the trend of the conversation. She glanced at the glove compartment. Delice was a staunch Second Amendment person who believed that antique weapons were a form of poetry, and who kept a couple of long-barrel Colt .45s, locked and loaded, by the cash registers in her restaurants, just in case there was a need for poetic justice. Sally felt certain that Delice would also have a gun in her truck. Sally could see her hand inching toward the glove box, could visualize Delice taking the gun out and pointing it at Bone, just to give him the hint that it was time to go away. To Sally, that seemed like a precipitous choice.

There was a large, heavy, chrome-plated flashlight mounted on a bracket on the roof of the Explorer, just over the passenger’s door. Sally snapped the flashlight out of the holder, brandished it in what she hoped was an intimidating manner. “That’ll be enough!” she commanded in an arrogant voice she’d practiced, in case she ever had to deliver a lecture at Heidelberg, or some university where they had professors who specialized in bullying. “Delice, we’ve got to get back to Mary and Dickie’s. Bone, if you like your knuckles the way they are, you’d better let go of Delice’s shirt, right now.”

Bone looked at Sally as if seeing her clearly for the first time. “Well, I’ll be. Is that the famous washed-up guitar whore, Mustang Sally Alder, wavin’ a flashlight around in there? I believe that it is. Just terrifying, Mustang. ’Course, just lookin’ at you two is all that.” He whistled between his teeth. “Ain’t you girls worried that both of you ridin’ in this truck will be so much ugly it’ll crack the windshield?”

But he let go of Delice and backed off. Score one for Fraulein Dr. Professor Alder.

Delice gave him a narrow-eyed scowl. “I’ll let Dickie know you’re in town, Bone. I expect he’ll be wanting to have a word with you.”

He was climbing back in his pickup but stopped, one leg still hanging out, and leaned out of the truck. “Don’t fuck with me, girls,” he said, his face a blank. “You really don’t wanna fuck with me.”

“Don’t mess with us!” Sally found herself yelling back, shaking the flashlight for emphasis, even as it occurred to her that this was the kind of conversation that ended up in the Laramie newspaper. One minute people were talking, and the next somebody was whacking somebody with a flashlight. It didn’t take much to get in the
Boomerang
police report; Sally had once chuckled over the story of a man who filed a complaint that he’d been out with some friends, drinking on the prairie, and somebody had punched his truck. Then again, with damn near everyone in the state carrying firearms, it didn’t take a whole lot for a routine truck punching to turn into deadlier stuff.

“Come on, Delice,” she said, hoping Delice wouldn’t decide to get out and try to beat up Bone Bandy. “Let’s leave him to Dickie.” She put the flashlight back up in the bracket.

Delice fumed all the way back to Dickie and Mary’s, muttering about how Bone didn’t scare her, about how curious it was that he happened to be in town just now, about what kinds of rotten business he’d done or was doing.

Sally only half listened. Of all the things that Bone Bandy had said in that short, unfortunate exchange, she’d gotten hung up on only one.

What had Monette meant when she said she was “in tall cotton”?

She could have been referring to her promotion. Checkers made good money, more than Monette could have expected to make in any other job. Bone had evidently told her he was unemployed. In what they called “the Oilpatch,” layoffs were like flat tires—never convenient, but something you came to expect on a rocky road. Maybe Monette had just been lording it over her dear old deadbeat dad. Did Bone know any more about it?

Or maybe it was something else. Did Monette think she’d finally caught a rich boyfriend? Sally knew that plenty of rodeo cowboys spent it when they had it. Sure, some of them were God-fearing Christian lads who lifted weights and toted along tiny house trailers instead of paying motel bills, and saved every penny they earned, knowing that they were making their living courting spinal injury. But lots of them were young enough to want to raise hell, and old enough to do it. They rolled along and rode for the purse every night, never knowing whether a saddle bronc would buck them into a traction bed in some dusty cowtown clinic, or open the door to a fine steak dinner or new tires for the pickup or just a wild night in a strange place.

If Monette had been willing to settle for the two pathetic specimens Sally had seen in the Lifeway checkout line, what would she have thought if some tight-butt bull-riding boy had paid one second’s worth of attention to her?

Over the years Sally had seen her share of relatively sane, judicious, intelligent women lose their marbles over the swagger between the hat and the boots. Take Delice, for example. There had been a time when Sally and Delice had gone through their share of the eligible men of Laramie (and in truth, some who weren’t legally eligible), but they’d agreed on many a penitent Monday morning that at least they weren’t marrying the fools. And then Delice had suddenly gone crazy and ended up hitched to, of all people, Walker Davis, a half-bright piece of range-fed beefcake whose annual income, when he was having his best years as a team roper, almost approached that of, well, a supermarket checker. Most times Walker kept it together stretching fences and herding cows and getting part of his wages in room and board in somebody’s bunkhouse, and, of course, sponging off besotted females like Delice. When Walker had finally lived up to his name and strolled off into the sunset with a blond barrel racer from Belle Fourche, Delice had little Jerry Jeff Walker Davis to remember him by. JJ was every bit as handsome as his big gray-eyed daddy had been, and already starting to wreak havoc with the ladies.

If even somebody as hardheaded as Delice could fall victim to cowboy sex voodoo, what of a bleeding bag of need like Monette?

Sally would have to get Delice’s expert opinion on the matter, but by now they were pulling up in front of Dickie and Mary’s, and the front door of the house was open. They could hear the argument all the way out in the yard. Delice slammed the truck into the driveway, turned off the engine, grabbed the watermelon, and rushed into the house, with Sally hard on her heels, toting grocery bags.

“I don’t know why you want to go and have some big public memorial thing for some girl who never amounted to anything, who nobody liked, who wasn’t even
from
here,” Nattie was saying. “It wasn’t like she was your daughter or something. Your sister made her bed a long time ago, when she went off with Bone Bandy. Have a little consideration for those of us who are still trying to make a living. Jubilee Days only comes around once a year. Besides, I’d have thought you’d rather have a quiet family service. It’s so much more tasteful,” Nattie added.

Nattie Langham talking about tastefulness was about as plausible as Bill Gates talking about business competition. Sally looked at Delice to see if she was appreciating the irony, but Delice was in no mood for either appreciation or irony. Her encounter with Bone had gotten her black powder primed, and Nattie had lit the fuse.

“Shut the hell up, Nattie,” Delice hissed between her teeth. “When we want advice from you on good taste, we’ll stop gagging and ask for it. What’s going on here?”

Dickie took the bags from Sally, reached in, and began his quest for the perfect jelly donut as he said, in a calming voice, “We’re just discussing the funeral arrangements. There seem to be some differences of opinion.”

“What differences?” Delice snarled, darting glances around at everyone.

Sally took in the scene. Mary Langham was back on the couch, wan and miserable, with Brit beside her, holding her hand. Jerry Jeff hunkered down on the brick hearth in front of the fireplace, waiting for Dickie, standing next to him, to hand him the donuts. Dwayne and Nattie sat in the overstuffed chairs facing the couch. Nattie was flushed, obviously angry. Dwayne’s face revealed nothing more than mild concern, but that was more emotion than Sally had seen him show in more than twenty years. Hawk occasionally played poker with Dwayne, and he reported that the best you could hope for was that Dwayne would win somebody else’s money.

Brit answered Delice’s question. “We’ve had, like, a hundred phone calls already this morning. Some of ’em are from people who just want to get in on the action, but some are from people who’re shocked and sorry, and outraged. That priest from the university and the Unitarian minister both called to offer to say something at the funeral, and Maude Stark wants to call a big community meeting about how to prevent violence against women. We even had one lady call and ask when the protest rally will be held.”

Sally wondered if the protest rally person would like being called a “lady.”

Nattie huffed out a disgusted sigh. “Protest rally. Classic. Of course it’s horrible what happened, but think about it. Some little slut who’s no better than she oughta be gets exactly the trouble she’s been looking for, and all the PC types come out of the woodwork.”

Nobody said anything. Finally Sally found enough control to offer the mildest version of what she was feeling, voice shaking. “That seems somewhat insensitive to me, Nattie. Monette didn’t deserve to be beaten and raped and killed, and everyone in this town ought to know they’ve got good reason to hope the killer’s caught, and to see that things like this don’t happen again.”