Free Dead Letter by Jonathan Valin

kiddin’?" I said. "Stoner. Harry
Stoner."
    "Is the lady of the house home?" Lester
asked.
    "Miss Sarah!" I called through the door.
"You have a caller."
    Sarah came to the door. "Hi, Les," she
said. "I’ll be with you in a minute."
    The Cowboy gave her an "aw, shucks" grin
and crooked one foot behind the other. His pointed boots were
embossed leather and lethal-looking.
    "Y’all from hereabouts?" he drawled.
    "Hereabouts is a pretty big place. I’m from
Cincinnati, yeah. You?"
    "Bloody Basin, Arizona," he said proudly.
"It’s a mite south of Flagstaff?
    "You’re pretty far east, aren’t you? For a
cowboy?"
    "I’ve been doin’ a bit of travelin’ since
I got out of the service. I come up to Ohio last year."
    "To work?" I said.
    "In a way. Y’all a friend of Sarah’s?"
    I thought it over for a moment. "You could say
that. I’m working for her. I’m a private detective."
    "Na!" he said, like I’d just told him I
had kin in Bloody Basin. "When I was in ’Nam, I knew a fella
who wanted to be a private detective. A nosier man I never met.
Always stickin’ hisself in places he didn’t belong."
    Lester O. Grimes settled back on his bootheels and
stared at me with a kind of wry displeasure. "You even look like
this fella."
    "Coincidence," I said and started for the
car.
    "No," he said decisively and pushed me back
with one paw. "I wouldn’t call it no coincidence."
    "O.K.," I said. "Tell me about him."
    "Not much to tell. It got so that this fella
wouldn’t leave us alone. And there are times when a man has to have
his privacy. So we taught him a lesson."
    "Yeah?" I said.
    "We killed him," Lester O. Grimes said
softly.
    "You killed him," I said flatly. "That’s
a mighty hard lesson to forget, isn’t it'? Good thing I’m not in
that guy’s shoes."
    Grimes laughed heartily. "I’ll say. He was
practically begging us to finish him at the end." Cowboy made a
disgusted face. "Don’t like to see that in a man."
    "Does this story have a moral?"
    Grimes scratched innocently at his blonde forelock.
    "Yeah. I guess you could say it does. Y’see
life’s kind of like the Army. You got your job to do and your
buddy’s got his job to do. And people like ol’ Roger—that was
his name—who insist on messin’ where they don’t belong—asking
questions, talking to cops, taking pictures, maybe—they’re just
bound and determined to find themselves some trouble. Yessir! And
they always do."
    "What did you say you did in the Army, Lester?"
    "Oh, I wasn’t in the Army. I was in the Corps.
What they call a weapons specialist. Master Gunnery Sergeant. They’re
some good ol’ boys in the Corps," Lester O. Grimes said.
"Yessir, I’d still be in there if they’d of had me."
    "Well, nice talking to you."
    "My pleasure,"
he said as I walked past him.
    * * *

    On the way out to Batavia, which is a small community
about thirty miles northeast of Cincinnati, I kept trying to picture
Lester O. Grimes in a gray overcoat and a green ski mask. But it was
like trying to jam a size fourteen foot into a size nine shoe. He
wouldn’t fit; but his message would. When people start shooting at
you and threatening your life, it’s hard to miss the point. I’d
blundered into something big, nasty, and very private; and the Cowboy
and his three-gunned buddy weren’t going to let me lose my way
again. No sir. They sure weren’t.
    I was contemplating what that big, nasty, private
something might be when I spotted the huge A-shaped administration
building of Sloane Labs rising above the pine trees. Like the Gateway
Arch in St. Louis or the Mormon Memorial in D.C., Sloane is one of
those structures that takes you by surprise. Sixteen stories high,
all polished aluminum and tinted glass, it looks vaguely like a pair
of enormous hands clasped in prayer. Beside the building, a great
circular hillock, like an Indian burial mound, formed a large
circuit, maybe four miles in circumference. And inside this raised
oval, I swear, was planted a park,