Brown-Eyed Girl (14 page)

He knew she'd be in a toxic mood. Who wouldn't be, if they'd just worked a double shift at Foster's Country Corner, one of Laramie's two very busy truck stops, on a night when they'd closed down I–80 going west and would close it eastbound before the night was over and half the truck drivers in the country had braved black ice and ground blizzards only to fetch up in Laramie when they were headed for turkey and pumpkin pie?

“Fifteen fucking dollars,” Brit snarled, tracking snow on the carpet, tossing off her hat and gloves, draping her jacket on the stair rail. She threw her tips down on the coffee table and slammed into the kitchen to pour herself a glass of white zinfandel from the wine-in-a-box Mary kept in the fridge. “The kitchen said they turned a Number Four Breakfast every three minutes. The problem was, we were taking like ten orders a minute. Daddy, I would testify in court that I personally served two hundred heartattack specials between seven and two. Those goddamn truckers must've been saving their change for the juke box. They played ‘Margaritaville' at least sixty times.” Dickie was glad he'd put on Les McCann and Eddie Harris before she'd gotten home—jazz was so much more credible than oldies.

“That does suck,” he agreed supportively. “Look, I know it's what you always dreamed of doing, but maybe it's time to give up your lifelong ambition of a career as a truck-stop waitress and settle for the barren existence of a soul-impaired but extremely wealthy finance capitalist.”

Brit snorted. She enjoyed the fact that her dad, who looked for all the world to see like Baby Huey in a khaki shirt and a holster, was a witty guy. “The civilians were even worse. At least the truckers know enough to tank up and go back to their sleeping cabs and get drunk and watch Letterman. The
families
expect you to, like, substitute extra turkey for bacon on their club sandwiches, run down to some jogger's supply store in Boulder to find them their fat-free mayonnaise, and make them a reservation at a motel with free continental breakfasts.” She glugged down the glass of wine and went back for more.

Dickie wasn't at all tempted to join her—pink wine was beyond even his addict's craving. Besides, he realized, his problem had been lonesomeness as much as anything else. He lifted his mug and for the first time in hours, tasted the coffee. It tasted terrible, but that was okay with him—he'd never made a decent cup of coffee in his life. She returned and flopped down in the brown plaid easy chair across from him. He wanted her to talk more. “So who were your absolute worst customers of the night?”

“That's way too easy,” said Brit, leaning forward, setting down her wine and taking off the thick glasses she wore to work, rubbing the lenses on the skirt of her dumpy uniform to clean off droplets of melting snow. “About eight-thirty, there was a little scuffle at the diesel pump. These trucks had come in that looked like part of a US Army convoy, but weren't. Seems like some guys had pumped thirty gallons into this big camo rig and the pump didn't shut off, so the diesel was, like, gushing out all over the ground.

“The guys with the trucks were, like, very scary—there were like a dozen of them, shaved bald and jarhead haircuts, really pumped up, really buff, and all squinty-eyed mean. A couple pretty tattooed up. It wasn't the army— the gas guys said the truck doors probably had some kind of logo painted on them, but they'd covered the doors with canvas. This real big ugly one got
really
mad about the problem with the pump. He went into the booth and grabbed the attendant out and, like, got all yelling about how he wasn't going to pay for spilled gas. The attendant went out and tried to make them pay, and they started doggin' him big-time.”

“Not smart,” Dickie said. His rule had always been when in doubt, give up or run. He'd changed the rule somewhat lately, but he wasn't all that sure he'd been wrong before.

“No, not smart. One of the camo guys punched his face in. He's in Ivinson Memorial.”

Dickie made a mental note to drop in on the hapless gas station attendant and get what information he could on the mysterious military convoy, when he went to the hospital in the morning to visit Maude.

“Why didn't you call me?” Dickie asked.

“Mr. Howitz said he didn't want ‘police involvement.' Here was one of his employees with his nose gushing out blood and the manager gets all exercised about how we weren't ‘servicing the customer,'” Brit said with disgust, taking a big hit of the white zin. She
hated
the manager at Foster's. “‘The customer's always right!'” she mimicked savagely. “Anyway, he said we had to give the whole sickass Oklahoma City–bombing batch of them a free dinner, in the interest of customer relations. So we end up feeding these scumbags steak dinners, all in my station, and they order all kinds of extras and desserts and all this shit they think of while they're slopping ketchup all over their porterhouses, and when one of their fearless leaders gets up to go, you know what he tells me?” she asked, clenching her teeth.

“I can't imagine,” he admitted.

“No, you can't,” she said, tiring suddenly as she drank her wine and watched him light a cigarette. “Dad, these dickheads ordered like three hundred dollars' worth of food and didn't leave me
one dime
. This one guy told me I was lucky they were comping the meal, because truly free people despised tipping, and he usually calculated the tab by figuring the cost of the meal and taking off the tax, because, he said, ‘Free people don't pay for welfare chiselers who hold society back.' I should consider myself tipped because he wouldn't make me pay the tax, and furthermore, because it would make me struggle harder to prove my fitness to survive.”

“Jeez,” Dickie said. He'd seen some lousy tippers, starting with most cops, but this was a new and goofy one. “Your thoughts?”

“I thought about ripping his lungs out, miserable pig,” she said, “but I figured I'd lose my job.” She got up and poked the fire.

“That's my girl,” Dickie said, moving to the fireplace and putting on one more log. “You could be a finance capitalist yet.” Give it to Brit: She had a good feeling for the despicable. Dickie'd known his share over the years, knew they'd carved out a cavernous niche since the '80s, knew they found places to den up in wide, scarcely patrolled country. There were doubtless plenty of people in his own county who would piously quote the Constitution on the necessity of meeting potential government tyranny with a “well-regulated militia.” But Dickie had seen neighborhood thugs before. Anyone who couldn't spot them was either one of them or likely to be useless later on, Dickie thought, feeling more than a little paranoid. Hell, he was the sheriff. He got to decide what was worth worrying about and what to heave.

Definitely worth worrying about. And it made him want to heave.

It was after three, and time to get to bed. Tomorrow he'd pay a courtesy call at Ivinson Memorial, then chain up the county's Blazer and go out in the snow looking for Shane Parker.

Chapter 15
The Stay-at-home Soldiers

It was snowing a foot an hour, and they'd closed I–80 west of Laramie. Bobby Helwigsen had left Danny Crease to tip the waitress and sent Arthur Stopes off to get some motel rooms while he went to the pay phone at Foster's Country Corner. He could have used his cellular telephone (he was an oil and gas lawyer in Casper, and the firm had insisted he have one) but he never used it when he was out on maneuvers with the Unknown Soldiers. He assumed that the computer geek at Whipple, Hipple & Abernathy must have been ordered to wire everybody's phones to be able to listen in, to make sure all the employees were doing things that were billable but minimally actionable. He knew W, H & A, like all law firms, didn't give a gopher's ass for attorney-client privilege or any other kind of confidentiality when it came to billing employee hours and covering their pin-striped butts.

Number One answered on the first ring. “Where are you?” he whispered.

“Is somebody there?” Bobby whispered back.

“My grandchildren are watching
The Lion King
in the den,” said Number One.

“I love
The Lion King,
” said Bobby.

“Report, Number Two,” Number One whispered impatiently.

“We're in Laramie, it's snowing, and I sent Arthur to find some motel rooms,” Bobby reported. “As soon as I hang up I'll take Danny and Dirtbag and go debrief Shane.”

“Use numbers,” hissed Number One, a reactionary millionaire Teton County rancher named Elroy Foote, who had recently decided they needed more anonymity in the militia he was bankrolling.

“I can't keep the goddamn numbers straight,” said Bobby.

“No profanity,” warned Elroy. “The Unknown Soldiers stand for God and Freedom.”

“Whatever,” said Bobby, who had signed up chiefly in the hopes of getting a reasonable quantity of Elroy's money, and hated it when Elroy talked in capital letters. “Anyway, they've shut down the interstate, so we can't get to, uh, where we're going tonight anyway. Shane, er,” he racked his memory, “Number Sixteen carried out his first mission today, but we don't have any idea what he's got, so we have to go find out.”

“I don't like the motel-in-Laramie idea at all,” Elroy said in a flat voice Bobby was supposed to find menacing. “Somebody's bound to notice the trucks and wonder what you're up to. You could divert to Little America.”

“Right. Like every speed-freak trucker in the world not to mention the Wyoming Highway Patrol wouldn't notice our trucks, and besides, by the time we could get there, if they haven't by some miracle shut down the interstate east of here, there won't be a motel room left this side of Nebraska.”

Bobby wasn't all that tickled about it himself. He hated being seen in public with the Unknown Soldiers. He could always count on one or more of them for some kind of outburst. There'd been plenty tonight, that completely unnecessary business with Dirtbag at the gas pump, and Danny looking like he was about to wig out on the waitress. Bobby had kept his hat and sunglasses on, his eyes on his plate, and his mouth shut except when he was shoveling in steak and potatoes. He was not all that eager to be made as a member of Elroy's goon patrol. After four nights of freezing his ass off in a tent in the Laramie Range, just so Elroy's boys could say they were tough enough to defend Wyoming from invaders who had the bad sense to attack during the winter, he'd a hell of a lot rather have been hammering down for Casper, a good hunk of a bottle of scotch, and his own bed.

Elroy said nothing for a moment, and Bobby could hear “Circle of Life” faintly in the background. He hummed along in his head, knowing Elroy would give his order quickly because he thought every telephone call over two minutes long was recorded by the FBI.

“Go debrief Number Sixteen and then call me from the motel. For God and Freedom!” he whispered fiercely and hung up.

Bobby shook his head. Sometimes he wondered how he'd gotten into this Unknown Soldiers idiocy. He was not a right-wing antigovernment conservative or a biggovernment liberal or anything else for that matter. Privately, he described his politics as “acquisitive.” Less than a year ago, he'd been down in Cheyenne during the legislative session, schmoozing and drinking and moaning about the crushing burden of state tax and regulatory laws. Bobby had been working out of state for the past few years, but had come back to Casper to take the job with W, H & A, and he was trying to make connections.

One of the senior partners had introduced him to Elroy, an old Harvard buddy and a very important client of the firm. “Young Helwigsen,” whispered the partner, “suck up to Mr. Foote from Teton County. He has more money than God and less sense than your average hunting dog.”

Bobby Helwigsen was six-foot-three, two hundred pounds of Nautilus-perfect muscle, blessed with sincerelooking blue eyes and a winning smile. He looked just like the kind of guy Elroy Foote imagined must be an icon of patriot virtue, like Ollie North, really, only bigger and more handsome.

Several Johnnie Walkers into the evening, after working the Harvard connection right into the ground, Bobby had figured out that Foote was a wacko. This made him very optimistic that a savvy guy like himself could lighten the old man's wallet. Within a month, Foote was insisting that Bobby handle all his legal affairs, and within two, Bobby was also handling some things that might not have quite met everyone's prosaic definition of legal. Being an Unknown Soldier was stupid, but at least it was billable.

Through Elroy, Bobby met some guys who had gotten no closer to Harvard than the college pennants on the walls of the weight room at Elroy's ranch—or in one case, the federal penitentiary at Attica, New York. Elroy was backing a secret militia operation that called itself the Unknown Soldiers, or U.S., as Elroy called them in fond informal moments. They were dedicated to defending the cause of freedom, religion, and Elroy's expansive property rights, as far as Bobby could tell. Most of the Unknown Soldiers were intellectually challenged good ol' boys and mentally rearranged Vietnam vets who thought for various reasons (too many wilderness areas, too many missile silos, the advent of bad cappuccino at the local Diamond Shamrock) that foreigners and the federal government were engaged in a secret plot to take over Wyoming. Bobby figured that if he had to at some point excuse himself from the U.S. and enter the witness protection program, they would be way too dumb or insane to find him once he was established as a Cuban émigré corporate lawyer in a posh seaside suburb of Miami.

Some of the others, however, gave one pause. Number Three, a.k.a. Arthur Stopes, looked like a small-town schoolteacher, which was what he had evidently been, in a small Powder River Basin town, until God had spoken to him. God told Arthur that he should give up his position as a minor bishop in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which was, in case Arthur hadn't noticed, being taken over by liberals who thought blacks could be saved. Even those who still claimed to cling to true religion had gone nuts for money and basketball. The next Revelation, God told Arthur, would come directly to Arthur, somewhere on a mountaintop in the state, but only after Wyoming had been liberated. Shortly after this, Arthur had been having lunch at the Burger King in Casper when he'd happened to see a tabloid Elroy Foote was publishing, featuring some of Elroy's impassioned writing about black helicopters and U.S. Forest Service employees and other threats to Wyoming. Elroy could come close to orgasm while denouncing the horrors of the federal government, even though, as Bobby knew well, he'd made his hideous fortune gravy-training government contracts and sucking up every federal subsidy in the West for the last forty years.

Sitting in that Burger King, eating a Whopper, wiping a splotch of ketchup off the now-precious tabloid, Arthur Stopes told Bobby, he had been so moved that he'd driven straight to Teton County to find the author, who had instantly recruited him for his militia. Arthur was a skinny, pale-haired, goose-necked man with very thick glasses. He looked harmless until you got close enough to see his eyes. He had been Number Two until Elroy found Bobby, so Bobby flattered Arthur and tried not to get too close.

Then there was Howard “Dirtbag” Robideaux, who had played on the defensive line of the Dallas Cowboys during an era in which being a lineman described what you put up your nose as much as who you disabled on Sunday afternoon. Dirtbag had done some of both, on and off the field, and had managed to get himself sentenced to three years in prison for several errors in judgment. There he had learned all about race from some Aryan Brothers who referred to him fondly as “Soap Boy.” Dirtbag was not the brightest of the Unknown Soldiers, but he could bench press a car and would do anything his superiors told him was necessary to beat back the encroaching power of (fill in hate term for ethnic group here). Even though he had been recruited early, he was automatically moved down in the numerical order every time somebody new joined up. Nobody wanted Dirtbag Robideaux thinking he was in charge of anyone else. He was currently Number Seventeen.

Danny Crease, Number Four, was the one who had found Dirtbag back when they'd pledged him for Phi Beta Aryan. Although Danny had once been as big an opportunist as Bobby, his incarceration had transformed him into a devout neo-Nazi. He would have started the Fourth Reich in Colorado, where he'd grown up, but there were already too many Jews and homosexuals and Mexicans there. He required a rugged, potentially viciously Darwinist white man's country like Wyoming as his heartland. All the other Unknown Soldiers knew what Danny believed, but they weren't all that worried about it. Gleefully, they had told Bobby all about a little act of ethnic cleansing the previous summer, when two illegal aliens in a Ford Fiesta had blown a tire on the Snowy Range Road. When Danny and the others got through making their point about Wyoming being for Americans only, there wasn't much left of the wetbacks. Too bad, huh?

Bobby knew that Danny had a brief history in Wyoming that predated his current affiliation with the Unknown Soldiers. Danny had told him the story to pass the time while they were shivering in the hills. Danny had once been a leg-breaker for a Boulder dope distributor. Many years ago, Danny and his fellow enforcers had driven up to Laramie to collect a debt owed their boss, and the chiseling bastard who owed them the money had skipped out and left them squeezed into an orange plastic booth in a pretentious restaurant. The boss had held the four of them responsible, and since the chickenshit bastard owed fifty grand, they each had to come up with $12,500. The Laramie guy hadn't been the first or last chiseler to stiff Danny, but he was the only one currently alive.

Danny considered himself a thorough man. Therefore, even as he was working to purify the nation for the white race, he was awaiting the chance to capture, torture, and murder a white, Anglo-Saxon protestant Wyoming native whom Danny referred to as “a scum-sucking born-again law-abider.” Danny intended to collect, and soon. He figured that with sixteen years' interest compounded daily, that amounted to pretty much the price of the guy's life, to be paid one fingernail at a time.

Bobby didn't take Danny's vendetta very seriously, but at the same time, the Harvard lawyer didn't much care for the Colorado cutthroat. Bobby was somewhat worried that he'd have to shoot Danny in the back before things got too far. The good news was that absolutely no one except Elroy would miss Danny, and Bobby knew he could handle Elroy.

Their current operation, Bobby knew, was the product of chance. A couple of the Unknown Soldiers had been drinking at the Torch Tavern in Laramie one Saturday night last August. They had run into Shane Parker, a local skinhead who was pounding down Seven-and-Sevens and raging about how he'd been denied his inheritance. He'd shown them a clipping from the
Daily Boomerang
about some broad who'd gotten some bogus job at the university, and they hadn't paid much attention to Shane until he started yelling about how there were millions involved, and for some reason, the money really belonged to him. An old lady named Meg Dunwoodie had died and left a bundle, and Shane was her closest living relative. Old Meg's father, who'd after all been the bastard who'd
made
all that money in the first place, would surely have wanted Shane to have it, because if Mac Dunwoodie had believed in one thing, it was that Wyoming ought to be a white man 's country, of the white man, by the white man, for the white man. Shane's own great-granddaddy, Shep Parker, Jr., was a cousin of Meg Dunwoodie's and had been in the Klan with Mac Dunwoodie back in the '20s.

Instead, the money was being wasted on charity, and some of it was going to a Jew whore who would get what she deserved before it was all over.

Shane moaned that he'd never have the money to hire a lawyer to get his inheritance away from the fucking university. But everybody knew there was a fortune in Krugerrands and who-knew-what-else buried on old Mac's Woody D ranch in the Sierra Madre. If they could just get into Meg's house and have a look around, they would probably find a map or some kind of clue to where Mac's treasure was hidden. He'd been watching the house, keeping track of this Sally Alder bitch, and even, he said, snickering, fixing her wagon.

The boys told Bobby about Shane and his problem when they passed through Casper on their way to Elroy's ranch. They were hot to help out a fellow American, but Bobby thought it was typical U.S. nuttiness. He thought the likelihood of somebody leaving a treasure map (or the treasure for that matter) lying around an empty house, waiting for a stranger to move in and start snooping around, was about the same as the chance of the Unknown Soldiers ever doing anything except wasting a lot of Elroy's money on trucks, fatigues, camping gear, and automatic weapons. Elroy, however, liked the idea of looking for the white man's treasure and it turned out that his own grandfather had been in the Klan with Mac and Shep. So Elroy had a personal and nostalgic interest in the matter.