Free Lizardskin by Carsten Stroud Page B

stopped for coffee. Kid’ll still be dead in the morning. Vlasic got a heavy date or something?”
    “No, they didn’t. And they’re off the CB. Rowdy and Finch been all up and down the road between there and here.”
    “Oh, shit.”
    “That’s right, LT. That wagon’s gone.”

4
2100 Hours–June 14–Billings, Montana
    At the start it was no big deal. They figured one of the guys had remembered some business somewhere, or maybe they had detoured south to Hardin for a drink at Twilly’s, or they could have gone cross-county to Roundup for some God-cursed reason. They could have gone west to Laurel on another call, because Ron Thornton suddenly remembered that Danny Burt, Gentile’s senior driver on duty, had mentioned a pickup at Zweibeck’s Nursing Home in Laurel—that turned out to be wrong. Or maybe they’d gone up to Musselshell because Burt had a girlfriend in Musselshell, and Sugar remembered that once before Danny had taken a load of stiffs up to Musselshell and left them cooking in the wagon while he did the horizontal bop with this girl—what was her name, Lorraine? Something like that.
    When Sugar started talking about horizontal bopping, Ballard snapped the gold locks on her snakeskin briefcase and started to weave her way through the growing crowd in the squad room. She stopped at the glass doors and looked back at McAllister through the sweep of golden hair. McAllister thought she was going to ask him if he knew how to whistle.
    “You keep your notes, McAllister. I’m going to want a copy of your pages, too. When can I have that?”
    “I don’t like copying pages out of my notebook.”
    “I don’t like stories that go all pale and shaky in cross. When will I see them?”
    “Notebooks belong to the man, not the department.”
    “Your notes constitute a substantial evidentiary component of a pending civil action affecting the State. As such, they are subject to subpoena and may be seized by bailiffs.”
    “Hey, Vanessa—how about the bailiffs seize this?”
    She smiled at that. “God, McAllister. Mutate soon, will you? The suspense is killing us. Just get your story straight. Eustace will set up the shooting board, right? Internal guys are all your buddies anyway.”
    Eustace grinned. “I’ll put Finch Hyam on the board.”
    “Yeah. I’ll be in touch.”
    And she was out the door, a curved space in the air, and gone.
    Meagher set his phone down and looked across his desk at Beau.
    “You really have a way with women, Beau. You want to heat her up some more, we could use her to take paint off a wall.”
    “She gets to me. They all do.”
    “Who all?”
    “Women. I don’t seem to have a handle on them.”
    “Yeah? Well,
you’re
the one with the handle. You keep wanting them to grab that—you don’t think about Tuesday morning.”
    “What’s Tuesday morning?”
    Meagher sighed, reached for his phone. “
Any
Tuesday. I mean the domestic stuff. You never think how it is for women, what
they
need.”
    “If you mean shifts, that’s why I married Maureen when she got pregnant. She was working shifts down at the clinic in Hardin. She was used to the life.”
    Meagher was listening to his phone ringing down the line. He put a hand over the receiver. “Look, Beau, we have to find this wagon. It’s probably nothing. Danny’s done this before. You had a party to go to—what’s left of it?”
    “I
had
a party. Now I don’t. I’m here. Let’s do it.”
    “Good. All your watch got their beepers now? Go beep ’em, the off-duty guys, see if they’ll ride around some, get a BOLO out on that wagon. Finch ran the plates on that bluepickup and got a registered owner named Jubal Two Moon, sixty-six, listed address on the Rosebud Reserve. Bought it in Pierre.”
    “Any priors on him?”
    “Dinged once, in Rapid City. Drunk and disorderly. June 25, 1976. Guy’s a carpenter. Might be something military on him, but we can’t get that after business hours without help from the feds.