if nobody is watching. Everyone, it seemed to Elias, was averting their eyes but him. But the worst part was this: the cops shoot to kill, he was told, because a wounded man is alive to sue and some opportunistic lawyer might take his case and hope to pocket a worthwhile settlement. And a wounded bum, a cop he befriended told him confidentially, could collect disability benefits. From the taxpayer’s point of view, the cop said, dead was better than wounded if nobody was looking, which was almost always the case. The cop’s attitude was that he was doing society a favor.
That was the story that broke him. His editor suppressed it. Too risky, he said, not enough proof. Buchman took a leave of absence. He couldn’t sleep and lost interest in the wonderful meals Grace cooked. She tried in vain to cheer him up, distract him. Nothing worked. He paced and mumbled, cried and shouted. Weeks went by and then he quit.
He took early retirement and they moved from the city to the quiet, far away canyons of Stony Mesa where he had camped with his dad when he was a kid. He and Grace told each other that they would reinvent themselves, or rather become the people they had always wanted to be before the detours that came with kids and careers. Grace painted and taught yoga. She was glad to get Elias out of that gut-wrenching career of his and start over. The kids were grown and they deserved some peace of mind.
Stony Mesa seemed a likely place to find it. The nearby national park was a tonic. They had visited the park on vacations with the kids as they were raising them. Their kids loved the park. If Grace had one wish for her retirement years it was to be close to her son and daughter. Her daughter spent a junior year abroad in Rome and fell in love with a handsome man there. After graduation she headed back to Rome. That relationship didn’t last but she fell in love with an American who worked at the embassy. He was set on a diplomatic career and Grace realized her daughter would always be moving. Their son also had wanderlust and traveled the world as an assistant to a man who starred in a television travel series. Grace figured that if she couldn’t chase them around the planet, at least Stony Mesa and the nearby national parks would serve as a magnet that would draw her wandering kids to her on annual visits.
Grace had doubts about Stony Mesa’s culture and lack of diversity. As a nurse dealing with all sorts of people, Grace learned to tolerate differences and appreciate variety. She knew that social life in Stony Mesa was dominated by the One True Church because most of the town’s residents were members. She was concerned that Elias was an odd fit for a local culture dominated by gun racks and mud flaps. Elias didn’t hunt or fish, drove a Prius, and preferred classic rock to country and western, which he described as codependency put to music. He didn’t visit the Fox News bubble. But she knew there were many so-called move-ins and locals who befriended one another despite their differences.
They made many friends and their social calendar had never been so full. They hiked and rafted, started a garden, and canned apples in the fall. Their grown kids visited and wanted to come back soon. Elias was sleeping through the night and eating enthusiastically. Laughter returned to their days.
“Look, Otis, I don’t know who you think I am but your problem is too big for me. I can’t go around interviewing people on my own. I would need credentials.”
“Sally at the Boon County Weekly will give you a press card if I ask her. She owes me. But you don’t have to interview anyone. There’s the Internet. You can find out lots of stuff on that. You’ve done it before.”
“I once had the skills of a veteran librarian but I haven’t done research for years. The technology keeps changing and I haven’t kept up. I don’t even do Facebook. I don’t tweet. I have maybe four apps on my phone.”
Otis looked miserable. The two men stood in silence. Otis stifled a sob and turned away. Elias caved. “Okay Otis, I’ll do what I can.”
“Thanks, Elias. I swear I’m innocent, man. Please believe me.”
Elias turned back into the house as Grace entered the back door from the garden. “Who was that?” she asked. “I heard a truck.”
“Otis Dooley. He claims he’s innocent and wants me to find Bo Hineyman’s killer.”
“Maybe you could do something about global warming while you’re at it,” she joked. “And then there’s always peace in the Middle East.”
“I know, I know. I tried to tell him. The poor man is desperate. Where is my laptop?”
Chapter 6
Nolan Mikesel often boasted that he was a fourth-generation rancher. Four generations are about as far back as white people went in his corner of the American West and if you didn’t understand that he would tell you his great-grandfather was a pioneer. Nolan knew that when he characterized himself that way it smacked of deep roots in local history, the stamp of venerable tradition, and the authority of long experience. It conferred a dignity and respect that he often didn’t get when changing tires at the Exxon station at the junction. There, he was better known for the gobs of gooey chewing tobacco he spit out on the floor and his penchant for using variations of the word “fuck” to supply the adjectives and adverbs he would have loaded into every single sentence he spoke if he knew any adverbs or adjectives.
Nole could have been considered ruggedly handsome if unrelenting anger had not twisted his face into a permanent scowl. A front tooth went missing after a bar fight and there was a scar over his left brow from the time his father clubbed him with a beer bottle after he caught Nole stealing a bottle of Jack Daniels from his dad’s stash. His father considered Jack Daniels an upscale choice in the days before he was reduced to drinking mouthwash if nothing else was attainable. Nole was twelve and had already acquired the family habit of killing brain cells whenever the opportunity arose.
His arms and torso were covered with tattoos of screaming skulls, dripping daggers, cobras, and tits with nipple rings. An American flag was tattooed across his shoulders and back. Underneath the flag in an unknown font invented by a fellow inmate during one of his frequent trips to the county jail were the words “American Patriat.” Yes, an a instead of an o. Neither the tattooer nor the tattooee caught the mistake. His cellmate Carlos, after all, just did tattoos on the side. His main gig was selling coke to bikers at the motorcycle shop he owned. Nole admired him for his entrepreneurial skills and all the cool biker stuff he owned.
The local cops knew Nole for hitting his wife, crashing his motorcycle, losing his kid, fistfighting on Saturday nights, and the memorable incident when he rode his horse into Foodtown and upchucked onto the cantaloupes before falling off his horse and crashing through the bakery case. When spring came and Nolan left his garage job to ride the range for Bunny Cleaver, every cop in three counties breathed a sigh of relief.
Bunny Cleaver had disputes going with every federal agency that touched his life. He let his cattle into areas on public land where his permit had been revoked because his allotment was so thrashed and cow-burnt. The precious springs on that allotment had been reduced to open sewers as time and again he put many more cows on public land than his permit allowed. He failed to pay fines. He used up water that wasn’t his and issued threats when challenged. His defense of every self-serving violation of the law and public policy was masked by an ideological mix that was by his own math-challenged account, “half libertarian, half God-fearing Christian, and half cowboy common sense.”
Nobody in those federal agencies would go after him because he kept a large arsenal and lived in a compound with several of his sixteen grown children and their spouses and kids. Bunny’s clan held to an incoherent ideology that was a disparate collage culled from the Fox News bubble they lived in, a handful of conspiracy theories they picked up on the Internet, a literal interpretation of cherry-picked Bible passages, their own selective and peculiar interpretation of
