Wild Animals

Robert Sims Reid

• Publisher: West 26th street Press
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9780786753239
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Crime & Mystery Literature
• Index: Literature

Good old by Merle Puhl is campaigning to be a United States Senator from Montana, and a former President is coming to Rozette to give him a hand. This means that the Secret Service is coming, too, and local police detective Ray Bartell is assigned to work with them. Bartell’s job: act as the security detail’s tour guide in the realm of local lunatics. The job starts out interesting, but takes a bad turn when Puhl decides to use one outspoken environmentalist, Henry Skelton, as campaign fodder. Skelton has a violent past, so the Secret Service—and consequently Bartell—must take him seriously. In response, Skelton seems determined to prove that everything Puhl does to portray him as a dangerous extremist is true. But where, Bartell comes to wonder, are the lines of extremism drawn? How do you recognize the difference between a patriotic fool and a foolish patriot? And how do you sort out the wreckage when the two clash?

October

Chapter 2

Election time was coming around in about a month, and as far as anyone could tell, Merle Puhl’s bid for the United States Senate was in the tank. Although Montana took up a huge geo­graphical area, its population could still be considered rather cozy when compared with grittier parts of the country, where lobbyists, investigative reporters, and crack dealers prowled the streets with frequency, enthusiasm, and dazzling success. Even so, running for the Senate in Montana was no small undertaking, and Puhl had lashed out against every evil known to mankind. Nothing, though, had been able to disturb the current electoral snooze.

And why not? Football season was in full swing, and in just two weeks it would be time for elk hunting. Not that electing a senator wasn’t important. The Constitution said you had to do it every six years, and people in Montana believe in nothing if not the Constitution. But Puhl was running against an incumbent so entrenched that people now called him simply “the senator.” It made more sense to bet on the Buffalo Bills actually winning a Super Bowl than to bank on Puhl in the Senate. Even if you didn’t get your elk, just trying at least got you a few days in the woods with your cronies, where you could get dirty and stink, talk about your boss and your wife—or your husband—with impunity.

But when Merle Puhl announced that the former president of the United States was coming to Rozette to help him get democracy back on track, more than a few people looked up momentarily from their box scores and hunting maps, and thought, well, maybe it’s about time.

“You just wait till I get within earshot of that sonofabitch,” Detective Ike Skinner was saying. As he spoke, Skinner fiddled with the strip of white adhesive tape that served as padding on the bridge of his heavy black glasses. “Far as I’m concerned, he’s just another swingin’ dick.” Skinner, who everyone knew had recently been transferred into detectives because he was considered to be a hazard on the street, was talking about the former president. His tone conveyed a conviction that calling the former president a sonofabitch and a swinging dick indicated a degree of political savvy that commanded respect.

“You’re right, Skinner,” Thomas Cassidy said, “you tell him.” Cassidy looked at Ray Bartell, then at Linda Westhammer, baring his teeth in a friendly manner before turning back to Skinner. “Play your cards right, Ike, you might even land yourself a job. Making license plates, maybe. Or do they make license plates in the federal pen?”

The four detectives were having coffee that Monday morning at the Green Parrot, a new restaurant along the Holt River about half a mile upstream from downtown Rozette. The Green Parrot was mostly a supper club that hadn’t yet caught on with the breakfast crowd. That meant there weren’t many other customers to be offended when the detectives started talking in loud voices as Skinner had just done. The loud-voices part wasn’t so bad, but the subject matter only rarely achieved such a high plane as national politics. More often than not, the subject was sex crimes. Or crude stories about the job that gave a peculiar slant—sometimes sexual, sometimes scatological, often both—to almost every other aspect of life on the planet Earth.

In the past, the detectives’ conversational habits had caused restaurant managers to ask them, in a very deferential sort of way, to take their morning trade elsewhere. Indeed, the list of restaurants from which they had not at one time or another been barred was fairly exclusive. The Green Parrot, on the other hand, still wasn’t established enough that the management could do without the detectives’ steady, if meager, business. If nothing else, the manager of the Green Parrot reasoned, the sight of a few cars in the parking lot could only help the morning trade. Despite this apprehensive hospitality, though, the cops weren’t completely sold on the place, since the tables all had white tablecloths and flowers, and the coffee was overpriced, too. Bartell and his buddies compensated for the overpriced coffee by refusing to tip—not that they would have tipped even if the coffee were dirt cheap. But the sense of being out-classed by floral dis­plays and starched linen was harder to resolve.

“This is a democracy, ain’t that right?” Skinner said. “I can say anything I want to the guy. And believe me, I got plenty to say.”

The former president was scheduled to speak at a Puhl rally this coming Friday. It was Skinner’s fondest desire that he land a slot on the security detail, and from there finesse a private audience with the visiting eminence. Kiss the great man’s ring, so to speak, then deliver up the gospel according to Ike Skinner.

“More guns,” Skinner said. “More guns and less government.”

“Christ, Skinner,” Cassidy said, “we’re the government. You want to put us all out of work?”

“We’re not the government,” Skinner said. “We’re the cops. That’s different.”

Linda Westhammer looked at her fingernails, which were very long, and very red. “Hell, Skinner, you probably don’t even vote.” Like many women in the police trade, Linda had learned how to talk like she heard men talk. Men cops, at any rate. She came from a large family with many brothers, and had required few lessons in this regard. Linda was a compact, muscular woman, but not at all unfeminine. A stick of dynamite, some of the men called her, though never to her face, for fear she would detonate.

Skinner hoisted his eyebrows. “What’s that supposed to mean?” He replaced his glasses, which made his small, beady eyes look large and round. “Huh?” He had black, oily hair, and hairy hands.

“Sure,” Cassidy said, not wasting a beat. “They keep a list of everybody that votes, who they vote for. You’re not on the list, you don’t get to talk to the guy.” Cassidy spread a glob of peach jam on an English muffin that was oozing butter. He had a round, boyish face, graying sandy hair, and the remnants of freckles under his eyes, which gave him the look of Howdy Doody with a hangover. Because Cassidy had been lucky enough to publish several sensational detective novels, he had a habit of trying to convince some people—people like Skinner— that he was smarter than they were. Just last week Cassidy was boasting about a fan letter he’d received from a humanities professor in Alabama about his latest book, God on the Lamb, Satan in Chains.

“That’s right,” Linda Westhammer said. This month her hair was auburn. To match the autumn leaves, she liked to say. “A list.” She reached under the collar of her black silk blouse and discreetly adjusted the shoulder strap of her brassiere. “I even heard the IRS gets the names of all the unpatriotic slobs don’t vote at all.”

Skinner glanced at Bartell. “These guys hosin’ me, or what?”

“No, Ike. No, they’re on the level.” Bartell really didn’t care what Skinner might say if he came face-to-face with the former president. And he especially didn’t care that Skinner was getting hosed by Cassidy and Westhammer. It was Ike Skinner’s destiny to get hosed all the time by somebody. On his good days it was another cop, and not a criminal.

Skinner thought for a moment. “I mean, goddamn, I’m a life member of the NRA, that ought to count for something.” Skinner jerked his necktie loose and unbuttoned his collar. “Politicians. Nothing but a bunch of maggots, you ask me.” No doubt about it, his political acumen was completely irrepressible. He should be writing a syndicated column, perhaps even have a slot on talk radio.

Bartell smiled. There was a TV show he liked to watch, a show called Hunter. In reruns now. During the opening, after a bunch of shooting and car chases, the credits end with Hunter standing alone on a road high above Los Angeles. Mulholland Drive, Bar-tell liked to think. He’d never been on Mulholland Drive, but Bartell always had it in his head that if you wanted a vista overlooking the City of Angels, the kind of place where you could spend a few minutes thinking about life, then a storied street like Mulholland Drive would be just the ticket. Anyhow, this guy Hunter stares out at the smoggy, teeming city. He surveys the indescribable grime and sprawl, and a hard look settles over his already-hard face. A real cop face.

What, the viewer must wonder, is Hunter thinking at such a moment? What depravity is he trying to purge from his bloodstained soul?

Well, Ray Bartell had been a policeman now for over ten years, and he knew damn good and well what Hunter, the urban warrior, was thinking. Somewhere down there, Hunter grouses under his breath, somewhere in all that horror of crime and bureaucracy, somewhere in this godforsaken city of millions, there’s a decent place to have coffee.

“What I’ll do,” Skinner went on, tugging at the hair on the back of his left hand, “I’ll just kinda badge my way past all the bodyguards, tell ‘em it’s police business, his mother died, some­thing like that, and I gotta deliver the message—”

“His mother’s already dead,” Cassidy cut in.

“The hell,” Skinner said.

Cassidy shrugged. “Last year. It was in the paper.”

Skinner looked at Westhammer. “He hosin’ me again?”

Westhammer lit a cigarette, one of those long, skinny kind made especially for women.

“Never mind,” Skinner said. “But trust me, I’ll tell the scumbag just what’s what.”

“Never happen,” Westhammer said through a cloud of smoke. Her green eyes were like damp jade.

There were all kinds of special security requirements, of course, presented by the former president’s two-day stay in Rozette. The Secret Service crew would be at the heart of things, but the local cops and sheriff’s deputies could look forward to a variety of special assignments. Still, of the fifteen city police detectives, Ray Bartell was the only one so far to land a job that attached him directly to the Secret Service. Bartell’s task, he’d been told, was to assist his Secret Service counterpart in identifying people who might pose some special threat. Proactive evaluation of potential sources of security breach. That’s what Vic Fanning, the captain of detectives, called Bartell’s assignment. Bartell called it the lunatic patrol. What the detail amounted to was doing local record checks, pointing out known head cases in the crowd, that sort of thing. Giving the feds a leg up on ferreting out the next Lee Harvey Oswald or John Hinckley before the shithead had the chance to get his rocks off. Bartell thought about expanding the scope of his duties to include morons, but that would mean he’d have to round up Fanning too. Not a bad idea, but administratively ticklish. He could take it up with the chief, except that there was a better than even chance that the chief was a moron too, you got right down to it. Christ, there was no end in sight.

Personal views aside, Bartell wasn’t about to voice anything truly disparaging about his job with the Secret Service. Promotions on the Rozette Police Department were done strictly by seniority, and came about as fast as death from old age. So like most of the other cops, Bartell had trained himself not to waste any mental energy contemplating the impossible. Being a detec­tive, though, was only a lateral transfer, often based on nothingmore than administrative whim. Detectives had the chance to get inside the skin of things, and Bartell’s desire to keep that assignment was just about the only leverage anybody on the depart­ment had with him.

Not that getting the transfer had been easy. During his early days on the department, Bartell was tagged as something of a golden boy. Then, one winter night seven, eight years ago, when he was still a new cop, and already angling for a slot in detectives, Bartell had been held at gunpoint by a fugitive killer named George Rather. After several fast moments of urgent ne­gotiation, Bartell believed he’d talked Rather into surrendering. But at the last instant, Bartell’s partner, Paul Culp, had ridden to the rescue and shot Rather dead.

In the days and weeks after the Rather shooting, Culp had been subjected to an exercise in departmental hero worship, while Bartell ended up being shunned as a goat, the one-time golden boy now an eternal rookie. His transfer to detectives, by all accounts a lock until that night, was shitcanned. For his own good, his bosses said. So the other cops wouldn’t think he was running away from the street. Instead, they’d transferred Billy Stokes, hiding him out from yet another excessive-force beef.

In the aftermath of that winter night, Bartell soon learned that there was no course open to him but to remain silent and to persevere, no remedy for his condition save time and work. Sev­eral months later, though, when Paul Culp was killed on the job too, it felt as though time had run out. That left only work.

Despite his transfer to detectives two years later, Bartell still carried a bitter and risky secret from that earlier experience. How good, truly, was his ability to shape a dangerous situation by simple force of will? Tucked away in the attic of his memory, he maintained those few terrifying, frigid moments, when he’d faced a man who was certain to kill him, and brought that man to the brink of surrender. That night, however it might be interpreted by others, had infused Bartell with a sense of purpose that managed to be both defiant and restrained, an overall effect that sometimes left him feeling so earnest, he could puke.

Enough. Bartell studied Skinner’s long, drooping face and tried to decide just how much territory the term lunatic covered. Finally, he said, “I was you, Ike, I wouldn’t push this idea of democracy too far.” Bartell was scheduled to meet Arnold Zillion, his Secret Service contact, later that morning. Maybe he could start right in by pointing out Skinner.

“No shit,” Skinner said. “The goddamn liberals took care of democracy.”

“Oh, Christ,” Cassidy moaned, “here it comes.”

“It’s true,” Skinner said. “When’s the last time they executed somebody in this state? Huh? The last time you ever heard of somebody in the joint going all the way to discharge?”

“What do you care?” Cassidy said. “It’s not like you ever actually sent somebody to prison. Right, Linda? Ray? Am I right?”

“Eat shit, Cassidy,” Skinner said.

“Boys, boys . . .” said Linda Westhammer.

Again, Bartell’s attention wandered from the conversation of his three partners. He was tired. He and Helen, his wife, had been late getting back last night from a weekend visit with his father on the Hillegoss ranch, a big outfit along the east slope, over in the Big Belts south of Cascade. Cash Bartell had been with Hillegoss for almost a decade, and a weekend of elk hunting with the old man had become the closest thing to a family tradition that Bartell had ever known. If, that is, you didn’t count Cash’s bouts of bottle flu as a family tradition.

Recently, though, the Hillegoss family had sold out to Brandon McWilliams, the tough-guy actor, and the big news was that McWilliams had divined that he would save the West by selling off all his newly purchased cattle and sheep. Buffalo, that’s what Montana needed. Just get those buffalo roaming again, and everything would be all right. Cash was indignant as spit about the whole thing.

It also turned out that McWilliams’s vision of the New West included making sure that none of the wild animals on his spread died from gunshot wounds. Bartell had decided to make the trip anyway, and compensated for the lac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Epigraph
• April
• October
• Winter
• Also by Robert Sims Reid
• Copyright