Craig Johnson: Cold Dish

She laughed, a wispy, hollow laugh like air escaping from a tire, and the sound went through me. I turned slightly to the right and leaned in a little more and, through the dim light of the dusty, forty-watt bulb, I could see her. She was sitting on a series of wooden steps, the kind that grooms use to assist foxhunters in mounting their horses. They were a dark, hunter green with gold trim and looked as if they hadn’t been used in a while. I couldn’t remember the last foxhunt in the county, but I remembered the white-painted fences, and I remembered the glasses of pulpy lemonade that Vonnie’s mother had brought out to us when my father had shod their horses. She had put Maraschino cherries in the bottom of each glass, and I remembered how her hand had lingered on my father’s arm as he had taken his.

Vonnie was wearing a pair of dark coveralls that had been unzipped and peeled down to her waist and tied with the sleeves there. She had on a pair of Vasque hiking boots, and the blood had dribbled on them too. I wondered how she was still conscious. Then I noticed the Sharps buffalo rifle that was propped up between her knees with the butt resting on the floor. It was angled slightly in my direction. I knew how heavy the things were, but those fingers still wrapped around foregrip and trigger with a terrible determination. I could see that the massive hammer was pulled back and the rifle was ready to fire.

I eased the rest of the way into the room. She was against the wall, and there was a counter to her left where her shoulder was. The surface was strewn with medical supplies, most of them for horses. There were blood-saturated gauze pads, plastic bottles of topical antibiotics, and even a couple of syringes. They looked as if they had been pushed aside with a sweeping gesture when she had lost interest in the procedure. There was also a police scanner sitting on the table and, from the illuminated dial, I could see that it was set to our frequency of 155.070.

More saddles rested on log racks to her right, and the layers of grime made it clear that they hadn’t been disturbed in years. The ceiling was low, and I had to lean to one side to see around the naked light bulb that hung there. The glare from the proximity of the bulb was irritating. I was standing in the only door in the room, and there were no windows. There wasn’t anywhere to go, for either of us. I looked down and studied her face and could feel the sympathy twinge in my own. The damage to the left side of her head was only slightly evident in the tangle of blood-matted hair that stuck to the side of her face and strung down past her shoulder where the blood continued to drip. I was pretty sure her ear was gone and could only guess as to the extent of the rest of the damage.

“Hello, Walter.” She stared at the automatic in my hand that pointed down at the wooden plank floor and then to the Sharps that hung loosely in my other hand. “Are you going to shoot me again?”

I glanced down at the hammer of the Sharps she held but quickly looked back up at her eyes. With the dim light, I could barely make them out and wasn’t sure if they were dilated or constricted. “No.” I slowly lowered the hammer, placed the. 45 back in my holster, and pulled the snap over and clicked it shut. I raised the Cheyenne rifle muzzle up and leaned it against the wall beside the door. “It’s department policy to only shoot people once a day; it’s a budgetary thing.”

“I’m glad to hear that.” She laughed. “At least what I can hear..”

“Got your ear?”

Her blood-covered hand started to come up but then rested back on the rifle beside the set trigger; if it had already been pulled, it wasn’t going to take much to set the thing off. “Yes.”

I watched her hands for a moment. She was hurt and the effect was gruesome, but her movements were still sharp and, so far, the loss of blood hadn’t robbed her of any of her mechanical skills. “Pretty impressive. Getting hit like that would knock most people down and out.”

“It did.” Her eyes twitched in response to the wound, but she rolled her head back a little so that I could see more of her eyes. “I was out for a minute or two…”

“Pretty tough.” I waited for a moment, but she didn’t say anything. “We’re a pair, aren’t we? You with your ear and me with mine?”

She nodded slightly, smiled, and the effect of the bright white teeth against the blooded gore made my heart trip. “I don’t think this relationship is going to work out.” The smile broadened and then relaxed, as the muscles in her face must have disturbed the ear. “You play too rough.”

“Vonnie…”

“I’m glad you’re here, though. It wouldn’t have been right if you hadn’t been.”

I nodded and stepped to the side just enough to get the light bulb out of my face. “You’ve lost a lot of blood.”

She nodded slightly and glanced at the medical supplies scattered on the counter. “Not much of a Florence Nightingale, am I?” A moment passed. “I suppose my talents lie elsewhere.”

As I started to move again, the muzzle of the Sharps leveled up between us and hung there. “No.” I stopped, still too far away to grab the gun. She leaned a little, the slope of her back resting against the wall. “We could just… talk.”

“Well, we’ve got an awful lot to talk about.”

I waited, and after a while her face shifted a little, saving me the view. “Why couldn’t I have met you a day earlier?” She readjusted her weight against the wall and turned a little farther. Almost none of the damage showed now, except that the blood continued to saturate her thermal top. “Maybe none of this would have happened.”

“Vonnie…”

“One day earlier, that’s all we would have needed.”

“I don’t…”

“Twenty-four hours, and maybe I wouldn’t have made all this mess.” She glanced over at the medical supplies. “Why you? Why did all this have to do with you?”

“It’s my job.”

She looked back at me. “Yes.” Her attention dropped to the barrel of the buffalo rifle. “We all have our jobs, don’t we?”

I tried changing the subject. “What’s the story on the feathers?”

“Oh…” She blinked and refocused. “A bit of dramatic effect, symbolic really… life and death… I had hoped that the eagle feather would heal Melissa, the breath of life to make her better.”

“You took a lot of chances placing them.”

She didn’t move. “That was the hard part, seeing them up close.. ”

I thought about not telling her, but we were telling the truth and maybe it would keep her going. “They aren’t real. The eagle feathers, they’re fake.”

Her eyes glazed over, and the stillness of her was betrayed only by a sharp nod. “Well, doesn’t that fit…”

I glanced down at her feet. “The boots?”

“I was in the store when George was buying his. We have the same shoe size and I thought it might be handy later.”

“You knew where he was going?”

“I told him and his brother that they were welcome to fish at the old family place on the Powder if they wanted to.” She glanced at the scanner. “I also knew it was where you thought he was going.” Her eyes returned to the rifle. “Is he going to live?”

“Probably.” I waited what seemed like a long, long while. “We need to get you into town…”

“Walter, don’t.”

I waited. “Okay.” I looked around and gave it a resigned quality. “Why are we in here?”

“Why not here? This is where everything happens.” I looked at her, hoping that if I kept my eyes on her, she wouldn’t drift. She smiled just a little, started to laugh, and then stopped herself. She kept her eyes away from me. “He built it himself. He never built anything else in his life; he just wasn’t good at it. But we had this older cowboy who was working for us at the time who helped him…”