Craig Johnson: Cold Dish

“Yes, she is.” We sat there for a moment, allowing the crackle and roar of my parental self-satisfaction to fade into the soft glow of friendly conversation. Her hand was still on my arm when the phone rang.

“Looks like she’s tracked you down.” The hand went away.

I watched as Henry allowed it to ring the second time, his tele-signature, then snatched it from the cradle. “It is another beautiful evening here at the Red Pony bar and continual soiree, how can I help you?” His face pulled up on one side as if the receiver had just smacked him. “Yes, he is here.” He stretched the cord across the expanse of the bar and handed me the phone. His eyes stayed on mine.

I nudged it between my chin and shoulder with one hand, took a sip of beer with the other, and swallowed. “Hello, Sugar Blossom…”

“Hello, shithead,” the voice on the other end said. “It’s not a dead sheep.”

I stood there, letting the world shift at quarter points and then got a bearing and dropped my voice. “What’ve we got?” Every eye in the bar was on me.

Vic’s voice held an edge that I had never heard before, approaching an excitement under the grave suppression of businesslike boredom. “Male, Caucasian, approximately twenty-one years of age… one entry wound characteristic of, maybe, a. 30–06.”

I started to rub my eyes, noticed that my hand was shaking, and put it in my pocket. “All right… call the Store and tell them to send the Little Lady.”

There was a brief pause, and I listened to the static from a radio on 137 patched through to a landline in Durant. “You don’t want any Cashiers?”

“No, just the Bag Boys. I’ve got a highly dependable staff.”

She laughed. “Wait till you get out here. These fucking sheep have been marching around on everything; I think the little bastards actually ate some of his clothes. And they shit on him.”

“Great… Past the Hudson Bridge; you got your lights on?”

“Yep.” She paused for a moment, and I listened to the static. “Walt?”

I had started to hang up the phone. “Yeah?”

“You better bring some beer to quiet Bob and Billy down.”

This was a first. “You bet.” I started to hang up again.

“Walt?”

“Yep?”

“It’s Cody Pritchard.”

There’s nothing like a dead body to make you feel, well, removed. I guess the big city boys, cataloguing forty or fifty homicides a year, get used to it, but I never have. I’ve been around enough wildlife and stock that it’s pretty commonplace, the mechanics of death. There’s a religion worthy of this right of passage, of taking that final step from being a vertical creature to a horizontal one. Yesterday you were just some nobody, today you’re the honored dead with bread bags rubber-banded over your hands. I secure what’s left of my dwindling humanity with the false confidence of the living, the deceitful wit of the eight-foot tall and bulletproof. Yea, verily, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will live forever. If I don’t, I sure as hell won’t become an unattended death in the state of Wyoming with sheep shit all over me.

We had pretty much done our work, secured the area, lit it up, and finished taking pictures. There’s a kind of cocksure attitude that overtakes a man in the presence of the dearly departed, a you’re-dead-and-I’m-not kind of perspective. There’s something about a carcass of an animal like oneself, the post-shuffled, mortal coil that brings out the worst in me, and I start thinking that I’m funny.

“I’ve been thinking about a search-and-rescue sheep squad.” I picked some of the dried shit from my pants and flicked it from my fingernails. “The way I figure it, the sheep would work up a damn storm and never raise any hell about working conditions. Might even get rid of some of this leafy spurge.” I looked around at the frosted milky-yellow plants that had been half eaten by the baahing attending witnesses we had corralled at the base of the hill. I had been here for nine hours, and the sun was beginning to scatter the gray blocks that made up the eastern horizon. The crime scene was a slight depression at the middle of a wreath-shaped ridge. “What do you think?”

T.J. raised an eyebrow from her clipboard. “Cody Allen Pritchard.” She returned the eyebrow to the hunting license and wallet that were clipped to the official forms. “DOB, 8/1/81. Kind of has a ring to it.”

Cody had looked better. Whoever had dispatched the young man had done so with a smooth and consistent pull-off as center shot. From the back, it looked as though someone had drilled a perfectly round hole between Cody’s shoulder blades; from the front, it looked as though someone had driven a stagecoach through him. The body was lying facedown, all the limbs arranged in a normal fashion, arms at the sides with palms turned to the lemon-colored sky. I was tempted to see if Cody’s lifeline was abnormally short, but his hands had already been bagged. A green John Deere hat with an adjustable strap in the back had been carted off with the unfired Model 94 Winchester 30–30 that had been found at his side. His clothes were in bad shape, even for a person who had had more than ten cc’s of lead pushed through him at approximately twenty-five hundred feet per second. The sheep had done a number on him. The orange vest was torn where they had tried to eat it, the sleeves of his flannel shirt were shredded, and even his work boots looked as though they had been nibbled on. They had slept on him, gleaning the last energies of the late Cody Pritchard as his body cooled. Finally, much to the dissatisfaction of the crime lab people, they had shit on him.

I gestured to the sheep down the hill. “I’m assuming that you’re going to want to question all the witnesses.”

T.J. Sherwin had been the director of the Division of Criminal Investigation’s lab unit for seventeen odd years. I had always called her the Little Lady, as opposed to many of the other nicknames that periodically circulated through Wyoming’s law enforcement community: Bitch on Wheels, the Wicked Witch of the West, and Bag Lady. The last referred to the Division of Criminal Investigation’s home away from home, a converted grocery in Cheyenne, commonly tagged as the Store. Hence, DCI lab personnel were routinely called Bag Boys, and criminal investigators were Cashiers.

When I first met T.J., she had informed me that I was just the kind of dinosaur she was going to make a personal career of eradicating. As the years passed and we worked numerous cases together, I remained a dinosaur, but I was her favorite dinosaur. “So, what do you think?” She had finally lowered the clipboard.

“He doesn’t look like a deer.” I gave Cody another study.

“Walt, let’s drop the aw shucks bullshit. This is one of the boys that was involved in that rape case two years ago.” T.J. had held my hand through the Little Bird rape investigation, introducing me to the world of secretors, medical swabs, and gynecological exams.

“Yeah, well, I’ll follow up on the home front; he wasn’t any angel. We’ll go through the licensees, and, hopefully, find some poor, dumb bastard from Minnesota that got a little trigger happy.”

“You don’t think it was an accident?”

I thought about it. “Like I said, he wasn’t an altar boy.”

“You have a feeling about this?”

I started to give her the old Colonel-Mustard-in-the-library-with-the-candlestick routine, but thought better of it. “No, I don’t.”

When we got back, the Bag Boys had already zipped Cody up and loaded him onto a gurney; some of the others were still processing evidence into freezer bags. One of the boys was dropping a tattered eagle feather into a plastic envelope. He looked up as we approached. “Looks like everything out here’s been making a meal of this poor guy.”