Three-Inch Teeth, page 8
Johnson’s eyes got moist and she wiped at them with the back of her hand. “You’ve got me,” she said.
“And I’m thankful for that,” he said. “Up there—that bar up on the hill. The lights are on. Let’s go there.”
*
IN THE GRAVEL parking lot on the side of Skinny’s Beer Garden, parked right in front of a faded painted mural of a tropical island scene, Cates asked Bobbi Johnson to go inside and get them a fresh bottle of Jim Beam and a six-pack of beer. He handed her two twenties.
“Don’t you want to go inside?” she asked.
“No.”
“Why the hell not? I don’t want to go in this place by myself.”
As she said it, she gestured toward the four muddy oil-field and utility trucks parked haphazardly in the lot.
He said, “You know what happened back there in that gas station, right? That guy recognized me. This is a little redneck town full of rodeo fans. I stopped by here with my buddy Cody once on the way to Steamboat. I’ve got to be low-key.”
“Why?” Johnson said. “What do you plan to do here?”
*
WHILE JOHNSON WAS in Skinny’s, Cates leaned against the passenger window and surveyed the town below. It didn’t take long before he spied what he was looking for. His rodeo buddy had described it as being almost directly below the overpass looking out at the train tracks.
The interior lights of the cab came on when Johnson returned and climbed back in. She seemed flustered as she plopped the bourbon and beer on the bench seat between them.
“You can only imagine the attention a woman alone gets in that place,” she said. “One guy wanted to dance with me and started feeding quarters into the jukebox.”
Cates smiled. “But you disappointed him.”
“Dude, I was out of there before the first song played.”
*
CATES DIRECTED JOHNSON to drive around the entrance to the overpass toward the tracks, through two blocks of clapboard houses that were dark and boarded up. Except for the ribbons of train tracks that reflected the moon out front, there was nothing in the field in front of the museum.
They took Front Street and slowly cruised by a neatly appointed white structure with three brick chimneys and brown trim around the doors and windows.
A sign out front read:
HANNA MUSEUM
SUMMER HOURS:
FRIDAY THROUGH SUNDAY 1–5 PM
WINTER HOURS: FRIDAY 1–5 PM
“There it is,” Cates said.
“A museum?” Johnson asked, exasperated. “We came all this way to go to a museum?”
“Yes.”
“It’s very clearly closed.”
“Drive around back and park,” he said. “We don’t want to be seen from the street.”
“There’s no traffic,” she said. “Not a single car.”
“Please, Bobbi,” he said in a quiet tone that others had described to him as menacing. As usual, it worked.
*
“YOU STAY HERE,” Cates said to Johnson after they’d parked. The overpass stretched over them and he’d asked her to position the truck so that it couldn’t be seen from above.
Johnson was clearly flummoxed. “If we were gonna rob someplace, why not that bar back there? Why not a damn ATM or something? I saw one on the way in. Why a museum?”
“It’s not for money,” he said, stepping out of the truck. Before closing the door, he leaned back inside. “Stay right here and keep your eye out. Turn the truck off so there’s no lights. And if anybody comes, let me know.”
“How long are you going to be?” she asked. “I’m getting hungry.”
“Ten, twenty minutes, I’d guess.”
“Hurry,” she said. “I don’t want to freeze in here.”
He closed the door without responding.
*
THE WINDOWS ON the back of the museum were shoulder-high, with old wooden frames and wavery glass. They were locked, but he could clearly see on top of the nearest window the inside metal latch that held it in place. It was obvious that the facility didn’t have a security system of any kind, at least not in the back of the building. There were no embedded wires in the glass or exterior cameras. Not in a town of six hundred and eighty-three people.
Cates found a rusted railroad spike in the tawny grass on the side of the building and carried it back. He used the spike to break through one of the panes of the window most deeply in shadow, then reached in through the hole and unlocked the hardware and slid it up.
There was no gust of warm air from inside, he noted. They probably kept the heating system off when the museum wasn’t open, which was most of the time, it seemed. Before making his move, Cates looked around. Johnson sat behind the wheel in the dark cab, studying his every movement. He was grateful she wasn’t staring at her phone, reading Facebook. There were no cars on the road in front of the museum or on the side.
Satisfied they were alone, he deftly launched himself up and through the open window and he was inside.
*
THE MUSEUM WAS mostly dark, but what he could see was lit by the red glow of several emergency exit signs mounted over the front and side doors. They threw a pink light through the interior and created deep shadows. He didn’t want to turn the lights on and he cursed himself for not buying a cheap flashlight at the Shell station.
Cates waited for his eyes to adjust to the gloom. What he could see had been described to him by his buddy Cody. It was primarily a railroad museum, with dioramas of Union Pacific model train sets, old mining tools and equipment, and a corner filled with memorabilia from when Hanna was founded in 1889 to service both the mines and the Union Pacific. The displays were neat and orderly and no doubt interesting.
But that wasn’t what Cates was looking for.
Around a glass display case filled with local jade and other minerals, he saw it: Zeus the Grizzly Bear. The mount towered nearly eight feet tall, the top of its head brushing the ceiling.
Cody had told him the story that he’d heard from his mother, who at the time had been the volunteer director of the museum. Her name was Peggy Schantz. In the 1900s, the five-hundred-pound male had wandered down from Elk Mountain into the outskirts of Hanna and killed several cattle and a mule. A local killed Zeus, and a collection was raised among the new townspeople to have the bear mounted for posterity. Eventually, it wound up in the museum.
The grizzly’s coat was thick and dusty, but its massive claws and gleaming teeth glowed in the pink light. The creature had been positioned to look like it was roaring and about to lunge at the viewer. It was huge and menacing, even while frozen in time. Cates felt a chill shiver up his back, since Zeus was the inspiration for getting the grizzly tattoo on his arms in the first place.
It took less than a minute to locate a large crosscut saw that was hanging on the wall of the museum. It was in a display describing how tie hacks cut and shaped wooden ties for the railroad out of lodgepole pines that had been floated up the North Platte River from the south. As he pulled the saw from the wall, one of the teeth tripped a light switch and suddenly the interior of the museum was bathed in light.
Temporarily blinded and his heart beating fast, Cates located the switch and doused the museum back into gloom.
“Damn it,” he whispered.
*
THE GRIZZLY BEAR mount crashed hard to the floor when Cates pushed it over, the carcass narrowly missing two glass display cases. It landed between them and produced a cloud of decades-old dust from the thick fur.
He used the saw to cut off the huge front paws and he stacked them beneath the open window. They were the size of pizza pans.
It wasn’t quick work. While modern taxidermists used Styrofoam to replicate the body shape and mass of the animals, Cates learned that beneath the hide of this creature there was a heavy plaster mold. It was difficult to cut through and soon the interior of the museum was coated with a fine layer of white dust. He was grateful that he’d spent so many hours pumping iron in the prison gym to build up his muscles.
There were only about two and a half inches of the neck left to saw through when red and blue wigwag lights lit up the front windows.
“Dallas, there’s a cop out front,” Johnson hissed from somewhere. He looked up to see that she was at the open window, her hands pressed against the sides of her face in alarm. “He came out of nowhere,” she said.
“Now you tell me?” he said. “Were you staring at your damn phone when he drove up?”
“Come on, come on,” she implored. Then: “What in the hell are you doing?”
“Shhhhh,” Cates said, holding a finger to his lips.
She vanished from the open window, but he could hear her grumbling and cursing to herself just out of sight.
He stood up from where he’d been bending over the mount and working with the saw. The lights outside continued to pulse and spin, but the vehicle they came from was obviously stationary. He tried not to make a sound.
Maybe the cop would just move along.
Then there was a knock on the front entrance door, and an older male voice: “Hey, this is Marshal Bertignolli. Is anybody in there?”
Cates thought, Hanna has a marshal? A marshal?
“Peggy, are you in here tonight? Somebody called and said they thought they saw the lights flash and that maybe someone was in here.”
Peggy Schantz. Cody’s mother.
Cates was still. He looked over at the two bear paws under the window, then at the nearly decapitated head at his feet. Another minute, and he’d have it off. The head was huge, and likely heavy, he thought.
There was a jangle of keys on the other side of the door, and for a moment Cates froze. Dive out the window without the paws and head, or confront the visitor?
*
THE FRONT DOOR cracked open and the beam of a flashlight lit up the dusty floor inside.
“What the hell?” the man said, pushing his way in behind the flashlight. As he reached out with his right hand for the light switch, Cates stepped out from behind the door and pressed the tip of a rusty railroad spike into the base of the marshal’s neck.
“Don’t move or I’ll blow your head off,” he said. “And keep that light off.”
The marshal, or whatever he was, stiffened. Cates could see in the undulating pulses from the vehicle’s light bar that the man wore a battered cowboy hat and a canvas coat with a patch on the sleeve that identified him as HANNA MARSHAL. He was armed with a weapon in a belt holster, but the safety strap was still fixed.
Cates pulled the marshal inside and closed the front door behind them with the heel of his boot. As he did, he reached down with his free hand and drew the marshal’s gun from its holster. A Glock 48 Slimline nine with a ten-round magazine. A solid piece.
“Let me go and we can work this out,” the marshal said. “I don’t know what you think you’re doing here, but there isn’t anything of value in here. Just don’t tell Peggy I said that.”
He was in his late sixties or early seventies, Cates thought. Tall but soft, no muscle tone, a weak chin, and a classic cop mustache. An unimposing man who happened to have a badge and a gun.
“I mean, there’s no cash,” the marshal said, his voice rising with anxiety. “This place runs strictly on donations, and I’m afraid to say there just aren’t many.”
Cates replaced the railroad spike with the Glock and he used the muzzle to push the marshal forward against a glass display case. As he did so, the marshal nearly tripped over the almost-severed head of the grizzly bear.
“What in the hell are you doing in here to old Zeus?” the marshal asked. His eyes slid from the bear to the glass, and Cates found himself looking into the man’s eyes in the reflection.
“Hey,” the marshal said. “I think I might know you.”
“You don’t.”
“I met you through Cody a few years back. You’re Dallas Cates.”
“I’m not.”
“Look—”
Cates grabbed the marshal by his opposite shoulder and spun him around until they were face-to-face, nose to nose, eye to eye. “I’m not going back to jail,” Cates said.
The marshal started to speak, when Cates shoved the muzzle under his chin and fired. The exit wound blew his hat off his head and painted the glass of the display case red.
Cates stepped back while the marshal slid down the glass case to the floor, where he sat with his head flopped to the side and his legs sprawled out.
“Dallas? Are you all right?” Johnson yelled from the window.
“Fine,” Cates said.
“I thought I heard a shot.”
“You did. Now start up the truck. I’ll be right out.”
*
BEFORE TOSSING THE bear’s head and paws out the open window, Cates returned to the marshal’s body and stood over it. He thought about staging a suicide, leaving the gun in the marshal’s hand. Cops killed themselves all the time with their own weapons, and it wasn’t out of the question that a small-town marshal, who probably got paid next to nothing with no further job prospects due to his age, might be the victim of depression.
But Dallas Cates wanted to keep the gun. He needed it.
Plus, his DNA was probably all over the museum. He hadn’t worn gloves, and his fingerprints were on the saw and his footprints were everywhere in the fine plaster dust on the floor. That idiot Shell station attendant could place him in the vicinity the night of the murder.
So, after locating several gallons of isopropyl alcohol in the storeroom and splashing it across the floor, Cates tucked the Glock into his belt and climbed out the window. He loaded the bear parts into the back of Johnson’s truck bed. That grizzly head was as heavy as he thought it would be.
Then he returned to the building and tossed a lit match through the open window. Not until the fire caught with a breathy whoosh did he jump into the truck and tell Johnson to get the hell out of Hanna, Wyoming, now population six hundred and eighty-two.
OCTOBER 17
He is like a man
In the body of a violent beast.
Its muscles are his own …
—Wallace Stevens, “Poetry Is a Destructive Force,” 1942
CHAPTER NINE
Jeffrey City
LEE OGBURN-RUSSELL LIVED in Jeffrey City in the home he’d grown up in, for better or worse. Dallas Cates wanted to find him.
The wind howled across U.S. Highway 287 as Cates and Bobbi Johnson approached the town from the southeast. Tumbleweeds the size of medicine balls rolled across the asphalt and a massive dust devil descended from Green Mountain to the south, its tail tethered to the ground and its funnel top splayed out like an opened fan. Waves of wind buffeted Johnson’s pickup from the side and rocked it while they drove. To the north were two central Wyoming landmarks: Devil’s Gate and Independence Rock, both on the Oregon Trail. Devil’s Gate was a severe slash down the middle of a granite mountain where the Sweetwater River flowed. Independence Rock was a lone turtle shell–like rock formation covered with initials and carvings made by pioneers headed west a century and a half ago. Both faded out of view as the pickup got closer to the town.
“Slow down or we’ll miss it,” Cates said to Johnson. “There ain’t much there anymore.”
“Why do we keep going to places like this?” Johnson whined. “Can’t we go to someplace with people in it? Someplace to eat and shop? And maybe someplace a lady can take a shower?”
“I’ll tell you why,” Cates said. “Because a guy like Lee can’t live among actual human beings.” Then: “You’ll see.”
*
JEFFREY CITY WAS a post-nuclear-age ghost town that was remarkable for its isolation, even in Wyoming. It was sixty-eight miles from Rawlins, ninety-seven miles from Casper, and fifty-eight miles from Lander. Once a uranium mining town of nearly forty-five hundred residents in the late 1970s, the population had dwindled to fewer than thirty since the mines shut down. No one lived in the vandalized two-story apartment buildings or abandoned trailer homes, and despite the street grids and signs that had been laid out with Germanic precision, the only life on the streets were roaming pronghorn antelope, jackrabbits, and coyotes. Paint had long ago been blasted off the exteriors of the empty single-family homes by grit-filled wind and horizontal snowstorms.
A battered roadside motel claimed on a hand-painted sign that it was open, and beer signs were lit in the windows of a bar with two muddy pickups parked outside.
“There,” Cates said, gesturing toward a metal square attached to the side of a long-closed service station. It read LOR AMUSEMENTS, 0.7 MILE.
Under the sign was a steel arrow pointing south down Rattlesnake Street.
“LOR Amusements,” Cates said. “LOR stands for Lee Ogburn-Russell.”
“What’s amusing about him?” Johnson asked.
“I’ve got to think about how to answer that,” Cates said. “‘Amusing’ probably isn’t the word I’d use. Maybe ‘eccentric’ or ‘on the spectrum,’ but not necessarily amusing. He can fix anything mechanical and he can make anything you ask for, though. I’ve never met anyone like him.”
“And why are we here to find him?” Johnson asked.
“He owes me,” Cates said. “He owes me his life.”
*
WHEN OGBURN-RUSSELL HAD been assigned to Dallas Cates’s cell, he was cowed and recovering from a severe beating at the hands of several La Familia members who’d caught him in the yard. The gang members claimed he’d smirked at them in the lunch line, where he was a server. When he showed up, Ogburn-Russell wore a patch over his right eye and his face was a road map of recently removed stitches. Cates had no regard for the man and told him so.
It wasn’t until three weeks later that Cates discovered his cellmate’s value. That was when he saw his new cellmate kill a mouse with a device he had fashioned from parts pilfered inside the prison. The little zip gun–like weapon, which had been constructed using a length of metal conduit, a spring removed from his mattress, a trigger fashioned from a ballpoint pen, and a handle melted down from a plastic container, had fired a steel pellet seven feet across the cell and nailed the rodent in the head, killing it instantly.
