The Cold Dish

No chance of this being a dead ewe or lamb. Wouldn't be a coyote with the other sheep milling around. Where are you guys? About a mile past the old Hudson Bridge on 137. All right, you hang on. I'll get somebody out there in a half hour or so. Yes, sir. Hey, Sheriff. I waited. Dad says for you to bring beer. We're almost out. You bet. I punched the button and looked at Ruby. Where's Vic? Well, she's not sitting in her office looking at old reports. Where is she, please? Her turn to sigh, and never looking at me directly, she walked over, took the worn manila folder from my chest, and returned it to the filing cabinet where she always returns it when she catches me studying it. Don't you think you should get out of the office sometime today? She continued to look at the windows. I thought about it. I am not going out 137 to look at dead sheep. Vic's down the street directing traffic. We've only got one street. What's she doing that for? Electricals for the Christmas decorations. It's not even Thanksgiving. It's a city council thing. I had put her on that yesterday and promptly forgot about it. I had a choice. I could either go out to 137, drink beer, and look at dead sheep with the drunk Bob Barnes and his half-wit son, or go direct traffic and let Vic show me how displeased she was with me. We got any beer in the refrigerator? No. I pulled my hat down straight and told Ruby that if anybody else called about dead bodies, we had already filled the quota for a Friday and they should call back next week. She stopped me by mentioning my daughter, who was my singular ray of sunshine. Tell Katie I said hello and for her to call me. This was suspicious. Why? She dismissed me with a wave of her hand. My finely honed detecting skills told me something was up, but I had neither the time nor the energy to pursue it. I jumped in the silver bullet and rolled through the drive through a Durant liquor to pick up a sixer of Regnier. No sense having the county support Bob Barnes' bad habits with a full six-pack, so I had screwed off one of the tops and took a swig. Ah, mountain fresh. I was going to have to drive by Vic and let her let me know how pissed off she was bound to be, so I pulled out onto Main Street, joined the three-car traffic jam, and looked into the outstretched palm of Deputy Victoria Moretti. Vic was a career patrol person from an extended family of patrol people back in South Philadelphia. Her father was a cop, her uncles were cops, and her brothers were cops. The problem was that her husband was not a cop. He was a field engineer for Consolidated Coal and had gotten transferred to Wyoming to work at a mine about halfway between here and the Montana border. When he accepted the new position, a little less than two years ago, she gave it all up and came out with him. She listened to the wind, played housewife for about two weeks, and then came into the office to apply for a job. She didn't look like a cop, at least not like the ones we have out here. I figured she was one of those artists who had received a grant from the Crossroads Foundation, the ones that lope up and down the county roads in their $150 running shoes and their New York Yankee ball caps. I had lost one of my regular deputies, Lenny Rowe, to the highway patrol. I could have brought Turk up from Powder Junction, but that had appealed to me as much as gargling razor blades. It wasn't that Turk was a bad deputy, it's just that all that rodeo cowboy bullshit wore me out, and I didn't like his juvenile temper. Nobody else from in-county had applied for the job, so I had done her a favor and let her fill out an application. I read the Durant Current while she sat out in the reception room, scribbling on the front and back of the damn form for half an hour. Her writing fist began to shake, and by the time she was done, her face had turned a lively shade of granite. She flipped the page onto Ruby's desk, hissed, fuck this shit, and walked out. We called all her references, from field investigators in ballistics to the Philadelphia chief of police. Her credentials were hard to argue with. Top 5% out of the academy, bachelor's in law enforcement from Temple University, with 19 credit hours toward her master's, especially in ballistics.