Free A Murder of Crows by Jan Dunlap

bird-friendly wind farms.”
    Alan nodded. “And if Sonny Delite was as sharp an advocate as you say he was, he’d know about those turbine improvements, just like the utility company would. If birds colliding with towers was the problem, Altamont’s taller towers are the solution.”
    I stood to the side of the doorway as two students sauntered in.
    “Which means that there had to be some other reason Sonny was opposing the construction in Stevens County,” I concluded.
    “Who says he was opposing it?”
    I looked at Alan suspiciously. “Red did. She said he was Don Quixote jousting at windmills. Alan, do you know something I don’t?”
    Alan laughed. “I always know something you don’t know, White-man.”
    “Such as?” I gestured for him to elaborate.
    “Oh, let’s see … I could tell you about the formation of the Italian city states prior to the Renaissance and how their political structures—”
    “Alan.” I stopped him before he got to full lecture mode. “What do you know about Sonny and the wind farm plans for Stevens County?”
    He got up out of his chair and walked across the room to join me at the doorway.
    “According to a news article I dug up last night—or was it this morning?—on the Internet, Sonny Delite didn’t want to take any windmills down in Stevens County, Bob.”
    He gave me a soft punch in my right shoulder.
    “He was on the team wanting to put them up.”
     
     

Chapter Seven
     
    It was almost the end of the school day, and I sat in the back row of the Savage High School auditorium watching Mr. Wist the Amazing Hypnotist up on the stage telling eight students they were now chickens in a farmyard.
    “This should be good,” Boo Metternick, our new physics teacher, whispered next to me. “Was this assembly your brainstorm, Bob, or did the whole counseling department come up with it?”
    I assured him that my colleagues and I shared the credit for the day’s special activity.
    “We wanted to make sure students took advantage of our break this week to attend some college open houses,” I explained. “Mr. Wist came highly recommended. At the end of his show, he does some trick that really motivates students to think about life after high school.”
    “That would take a magician, not a hypnotist,” Boo pointed out. “The last thing high school students think about is life after high school.”
    I threw a quick look at Boo. “Are you sure you weren’t a high school counselor in another life?”
    Boo shook his head and lapsed back into silence beside me.
    Shoot. Even if I had tried, I couldn’t have come up with a better opening line than that for my new colleague to tell me he was the Bonecrusher.
    Me: “Are you sure you weren’t a high school counselor in another life?”
    Boo: “A high school counselor? No way. I don’t pretend to have even half of your brilliance and insight, Bob. But I was a famous wrestling celebrity once. They called me the Bonecrusher. Melodramatic, I know, but hey, it was a paycheck.”
    Instead, Boo continued to sit in silence in the next chair.
    I mentally reviewed the latest I’d heard through the faculty grapevine about him, which wasn’t much at all. He was single, he was new to the Twin Cities, and he’d only been teaching for three years, the last two in a rural school district in northern New Mexico. What he’d done prior to that, no one seemed to know. But he had dropped in to play some pickup basketball with me and Rick last Wednesday morning before school, and I could personally attest to the man’s strength and agility in an athletic contest.
    Oh, and there was one more thing I knew about Boo Metternick: his middle name was Charles, giving him the initials of B.C.
    Bonecrusher.
    Maybe I’d spend the ten dollars that Alan was going to owe me on something cute for Baby Lou.
    The sound of a rooster crowing filled the auditorium, pulling my attention back to the students on stage, who were now diligently pecking at invisible