The Travelling Man (4 page)

The voice startled her and she looked up to find a man standing in front of her. It was odd because she normally had such honed instincts and yet this man had wandered right up to her in the middle of the day and she hadn’t even felt his presence.

“I’m sorry?” she said, momentarily flustered.

“Oh, I’m sorry, my dear. I’m afraid that at times my mouth runs away with me before I’ve had chance to catch it,” the man said kindly.

Cassie found herself drawn to his shimmering eyes that were full of gentle concern and she couldn’t help but feel slightly touched. His accent sounded pure Downton Abbey, a British TV show that her mother adored. Despite the heat of the day, he was dressed impeccably in a three-piece suit and hat, but his skin looked cool and untouched by the sun’s rays.

“May I?” he asked politely, indicating towards the bench.

“Please.” His age seemed difficult to pinpoint. When he had been standing, she had pegged him for around 60, but now sitting he seemed much younger, as low maybe as in his forties.

He sat down next to her. “This heat really is something, I must confess,” he said, fanning his face which Cassie thought unnecessary.

“You’re English?” she asked.

“I like to consider myself…, a citizen of the world,” he answered, smiling radiantly.

“Are you here on holiday?”

“Just passing through.”

“To where? It’s not exactly like we’re on the way to anywhere,” she asked, puzzled.

“Everywhere is on the way to somewhere, is it not?”

“I guess, if you put it that way. What is it that you do, Mr…?”

“I’m terribly sorry. Where are my manners? Grange. Gilbert Grange,” he said, offering a formal hand. “I suppose that you might say that I am in sales…, of a sort.”

She took his hand gently, considering his age, but his grip was surprisingly powerful and paper dry. “Catherine Wheeler. Cassie.”

“Oh, I’m well aware of you, Cassie,” he smiled.

“You are?” she asked suspiciously.

“Of course, Sheriff. I’ve only been here a day or so but you carry quite the reputation. Your town speaks very highly of you,” he smiled, putting her back at ease.

“What is it that you sell?”

“Whatever it is that people need,” he grinned.

“Are you staying locally?” she enquired.

“You know
Mrs. Fiorentino?”

She nodded.
Mrs. Fiorentino ran a boarding house in town. Several of the miners that had been brought in from out of town due to their expertise lodged with her. “She runs a tight ship.”

“As do I, Cassie, as do I,” Grange said standing. “Well, I have much to do. I just wanted to stop by and say hello. You have a lovely day, Cassie, and keep your chin up my dear. I’m sure that everything will be fine. In my experience, things do have a tendency to work out for the best,” he said, tipping his hat formally. “And do give my best to Ellie, won’t you?” he added as he strolled away.

Cassie watched him go, wondering just how the guy had known about Ellie. Maybe he just knew that she had a daughter; it was a small town, after all. But somehow she couldn’t help but feel that his concern had seemed more directed towards Ellie’s health than just general wellbeing.

She made a mental note to give
Mrs. Fiorentino a call and find out a little more about their new guest in town. He seemed like an interesting man, so dapper and polite, and there were precious few men like that around Granton.

The squawking static of her radio disturbed her thoughts and her mind got back on the clock as Kevin’s voice barked down the line.

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Marshall Dinkins ducked under the clumsy blow and avoided it easily. Al Draper was a big man but slow with it, especially now that his hangover was slowing him down further.

Marshall knew that he shouldn’t have crossed the line when ragging on Al but he had been feeding off the crowd who cheered him on and guffawed at his crude humor. Normally, he had a keen sense of where the line was, but today he had stepped over it with some particularly mean-spirited barbs about Al’s wife, Linda, who was a big girl to say the least. Al’s face had turned from flushed, to red, to purple and Marshall knew that the big man was about to start throwing those ham-sized fists.

It was the end of shift at the mine and everyone was bustling in line to use the showers before heading out. It was Friday afternoon and the end of the work week. Payday was today and while some of the guys were heading home for the weekend, some of the guys were keyed up to spend some of their hard-earned money at The Nugget. The bar did a roaring trade in booze, but the main attraction for some of the fellas was that the place offered private rooms with female companionship, for a price. Even though most of the guys who used the place were loud mouths by nature, the back rooms of The Nugget were a closely guarded secret.

Al came in low again swinging and Marshall was starting to feel his own temper rise. He was already increasingly pissed off with his lot in life. Dead end job with zero prospects except a lungful of God only knew what. Ross Daley, his line supervisor, had been ragging on him all day for some unknown reason and now Al Draper couldn’t take a joke, even if it was a bad one.

“Hit him, Marsh!” one of the goons bellowed excitedly.

“Fuck him up,” another joined in aggressively.

Suddenly, pushing and shoving started amongst their various friends. Insults were thrown first, swiftly followed by eager fists as a week’s worth of steam was let loose. What had started as bad natured ribbing was now turning into an all out brawl.

Marshall didn’t want to fight to begin with but Al made no signs of letting up. He steeled himself and stepped into one of Al’s haymakers. The punch caught him mainly on the top of the head with a glancing blow, but he sold it well and dropped to the floor. The ruse worked and Al’s pride was seemingly restored and he waddled away exhausted from his efforts. The fight around them slowed down as the two main combatants finished with a decisive winner. Al’s cronies basked in the victory as Marshall’s cringed in defeat.

Marshall was waiting on the floor when the cops showed up to the aftermath.

“Everybody just stay where you are!” Sheriff Wheeler’s authoritative voice commanded and everyone stopped moving.

Marshall looked up and wasn’t surprised that nobody challenged her. She may have been a woman but she commanded instant respect and anyone who had ever tried to screw around with her soon regretted it.

“Dinkins, I should have known that you’d be at the heart of it,” she scolded.

“What the hell did I do?” he replied sulkily.

“Something wrong, I’ve no doubt,” she said disdainfully. “Alright who started it?” she demanded to a roomful of sheepish looks.

Marshall was dragged up to his feet by Deputy Bridges. The cop was a beast and if you didn’t want to screw with the Sheriff, you sure as hell didn’t want to fuck with Bridges.

“There we go,” Bridges said, dusting him off with painfully hard slaps across the shoulders.

Marshall was about the same size as Bridges, but whereas he was soft and doughy, the cop was all rock hard muscle.

“What’s going on here?” Jim Lesnar demanded, appearing from the shadows.

Marshall had always considered the guy to be a creepy dude and it didn’t surprise him to find the mine owner skulking.

“It appears that some of your boys thought it might be a good idea to start throwing a riot on your premises, Mr. Lesnar,” the Sheriff replied.

“I can assure you, Sheriff, that we only have a little misunderstanding here and certainly not a breakdown of law and order,” Lesnar said haughtily.

“I can assure you, Mr. Lesnar, that I don’t appreciate having my day wasted by having to drive out here to keep your animals from tearing each other apart!” Wheeler snapped.

Marshall watched the exchange with interest. While the Sheriff could undoubtedly be a hard assed ball breaker, she normally did so without prejudice or malice. Now it seemed that she was pretty pissed about something. The boys did tear it up sometimes over at The Nugget and he had spent the occasional night in the drunk tank himself, but the
Sheriff didn’t normally take it personally.

He watched on as a battle of wills took place within the silence and Lesnar blinked first.

“I can assure you,  that it was just a bit of horseplay that got out of control. Mr. Dinkins and Mr. Draper will be punitively punished,” Lesnar announced.

“Huh?” Al asked aloud.

“He’s docking our pay, genius,” Marshall told him quietly.

“Oh,” Al mumbled.

“Keep them in line, Mr. Lesnar,” the Sheriff said warningly as she left with her pet ape.

“Albert, Marshall, you can forget about heading home, you’re both on night duty” Lesnar said, not bothering to look them in the eye.

Marshall groaned inwardly. The night duty consisted of little more than being a token for the insurance company’s policy. Al opened his mouth to complain before Marshall could stop him.

“Two nights it is then,” Lesnar said before Al could speak.

----------

“Bit rough on him, weren’t you?” Kevin said as he stared down hard at a muscle magazine in his lap on the drive back.

Cassie knew that she was starting to let her personal problems interfere in her job and it annoyed her greatly. “Something about that guy just rubs me the wrong way,” she shrugged.

“Well, you should be careful. Jim Lesnar pretty much walks on water around here, and you know that,” Kevin said cautiously.

“Yeah, I know that,” she sighed.

“Sheriff?” the car radio spat.

“Go ahead, Jeanne,” Cassie replied, picking up the mic.

“I’ve had Susie Mackie on the phone twice already this morning and now she’s waiting in the lobby,” Jeanne’s cracking disembodied voice came back. “She says that her husband Davey is missing.”

Cassie sighed again. It was already turning into the busiest day that she could remember for some time in town with two callouts in one day.

Jeanne Rainwood took the calls and worked the radio from the station during the day shift. She was a quiet but reliable woman, widowed at 30 due to her wounded spirit finally rebelling and stabbing her wife-beating husband as he came at her with an
aluminum baseball bat for the umpteenth time. Cassie had tried more times than she could remember to get Jeanne to press charges, but it had always been a losing battle. Occasionally, Kevin had taken the husband aside for a quiet word that often ended in a bloody nose or a sprained arm and the beatings would stop for a while, but only for a while. Jeanne had been a high school beauty who’d existed in the realms of the popular and yet she had somehow ended up manacled to the wrong jock. A man who had discovered that his life had peaked as a teenager on a high school football field.

Cassie had made sure that Jeanne wasn’t railroaded at the trial and every medical record of her timeline of abuse at her husband’s hands was readily available before charges were even dreamt of. The case had been as transparent a case of self-
defense as Cassie had come across and thankfully those responsible for deciding such things had agreed. Cassie had kept Jeanne’s job open at the station during the investigation, as the woman had seemed so lost without her monster of a husband. Over the next couple of years she had watched as the woman had slowly emerged from her shell.  

Jeanne was a delicate woman with a cute freckled face that rarely cracked into a smile. She was a hard worker and if you gave her a job to do you could be assured that every “I” would be dotted and every “T” would be crossed several times over. She kept the wolves of petty squabbles from the door and Cassie’s desk from drowning under pointless paperwork. If Jeanne thought that there was a problem with Susie Mackie and, more aptly, her husband Davey, then chances were that there was.

“Tell her to head back home and I’ll meet her there,” Cassie said into the mic.

“Trouble?” Kevin asked, looking up from his muscle magazine.

“Jeanne thinks so,” she replied.

“Shit,” he said folding up the magazine.

“Shit indeed,” Cassie agreed.

CHAPTER
3

making a pitch

“Harris Hardware” had been in Harlan’s family for generations but he had been the first Harris to wise up and want more out of life. His father had been a kind and generous man, a pillar of the community and full of love for his fellow man; as far as Harlan was concerned, the man was an idiot. The world was full of fish and you either learned to swim fast or you learned to become a predator in the ocean and devour those around you. Harlan had wanted to become a shark.

He knew that he had far more to lose if the police started sniffing around about Davey. The man might have been a loser of the first order but he had a wife who would have surely by now noticed that he was missing. Harlan had buried the guy out near his makeshift lab in the desert, as it was the only spot that he was confident that he knew well enough.

The town’s Sheriff may well have been a woman, but she was Big Bob’s daughter and the apple had to fall a hell of a long way from the tree for her not to be taken seriously. Granton’s Police Department may have only been three people strong, but Harlan wasn’t a man who took risks, or at least he hadn’t been until Davey’s accident. It was a worry that his temper had slipped so quickly and so far. He still had trouble believing that it had been his own two hands wielding the sledgehammer that had battered Davey’s body into a bloody pulp.

The phone rang and he jumped, as his mind had been full of the savage joy of his explosion of violence. He snatched up the handset, dimly aware of the raging erection in his pants. “Hello?”

“Harlan? That you?” the voice asked at the other end of the line.

His temper flared at the call and the caller. Bud Burrell ran the meth lab out in the wilderness and was under strict instructions never to call the store phone, only a throwaway cell phone, in case of emergencies. While the cell phone could be monitored, he knew it far was more likely that his phone bill at the store would be checked, given the local cops’ budget and technology. “What the hell have I told you?” he barked.

“Huh?”

“You don’t call here!”

“Oh right,” Bud mumbled.

Harlan slammed the handset down hard with a loud clang. He pulled the emergency cell phone from his pocket and turned it on. A few seconds later it rang.

“Harlan? Is that you?”

He held his temper, but only just. “What is it, Bud? I’m busy.”

“We got a problem: a big one,” Bud replied.

Harlan waited in the pregnant pause. “Well, what is it?” he finally snapped.

“We’ve got some guy snooping out near the lab. He says that he’s doing some kind of study or something.”

Harlan gripped the phone almost hard enough to crack the plastic. The lab was bad enough if someone was poking around, but he had just buried a body out there. “Where’s he from?”

“I dunno,” Bud said and Harlan could picture the man’s moon face, bland and stupid.

“Well, did you ask?”

“Nope.”

Harlan had picked Bud because the guy had enough brains to follow orders and be loyal, yet wasn’t smart enough to be ambitious. He was a skinny guy somewhere in his mid to late thirties, but his age was always impossible to pinpoint as the man spent most of his life in darkened rooms breathing in all kinds of fumes that weren’t meant for public consumption.

His emotions had undergone a rollercoaster ride in the last 24 hours or so. From losing control and murdering a man with savage bloodletting joy, to burying the body and feeling the cold fingers of fear at his imminent discovery then disappear as no one came knocking. Now, just when he had hoped that he might be heading towards the clear, here came another knock.   

Harlan Harris heard the bell ring over the hardware store door and looked up in annoyance. The afternoon heat was strong and the air conditioning was operating at full blast. The interior of the store was blissfully cool but the outside heat rushed in as soon as anyone opened the outside door.

He looked up at the silhouette in the doorway and wondered just who had decided to bug him when he needed time to think. He had buried a dismembered corpse out in the desert and while the Sword of Damocles was hanging over him, it had yet to fall.

----------

Cassie drove hard out to the Mackie place. If she was completely honest with herself, she was glad of the distraction. Two call outs in one day may have been out of the ordinary, but at least as long as she was moving she didn’t have to think about the impending battle with Great National Insurance over Ellie’s bills.

The Mackie house was a rundown shack in the poorer part of town. Susie worked in the local supermarket as the oldest checkout girl possibly in the county and Davey worked part time at the hardware store. Susie was a tough and hardworking woman with a bitter face that looked like it was constantly engaged in warfare. Davey, on the other hand, was a mellow fellow with a permanent alcohol infused grin. The man was a millstone around his wife’s neck as far as Cassie was concerned and he had spent more than the occasional night in the station’s cell block sleeping one off.

Cassie had never understood women who shackled themselves to useless men and then continued the charade and the uphill battle until the grave. She wasn’t personally opposed to the idea of marriage; she had just never met a man that she could see herself growing old with. Ellie’s biological father had been a passing one night stand and she had never sought to track him down.

She pulled up in front of the Mackie’s house. The lawn was overgrown and despite Davey working at a hardware store he clearly wasn’t much of a handyman.

The front door opened and a woman burst out. Cassie recognised her as Susie and climbed out of the police truck.

“Want me to wait here?” Kevin whispered hopefully.

Cassie took a look at the worried wife with her pinched and angry face. “Yeah, better hang back, Kev,” she answered.

Cassie took a walk across the sidewalk and up the Mackie’s driveway. There was a strong chemical smell coming from the concreted ground and patches of the dull and dirty surface looked bleached clean. She may have been a small town Sheriff, but she wasn’t stupid and her professional brain made a mental note.

“Have you found him?” Susie asked, wringing her hands anxiously. “Have you found my Davey?”

Cassie towered over the much smaller woman. Susie Mackie was all skin and bones with a smoker’s mouth and a hard leathery face that had spent too much time in the sun. Her hair was cheaply bleached blonde with the sort of home kit that Kurt Jennings sold at the pharmacy. Her clothes were cheap and hard worn and her eyes were prematurely dulled with life’s unfairness.

“I’m sorry, Susie, no,” she said as kindly as she could manage. “I’m just here to find out what’s going on.”

Susie fixed her with a harsh glare. “Davey’s missing is what’s going on so why are you here talking to me when you should be looking for him?”

“Shall we talk inside?” Cassie offered, pointing to the house. “A little privacy, perhaps?”

Susie shrugged and turned. Cassie followed her indoors.

The inside of the house was a pleasant surprise and Cassie found herself mentally chastised for her preconceptions of the Mackie’s lack of pride.

Susie led her into the kitchen and pointed to a chair. The furniture was cheap but well maintained. The surface gleamed with polish and was buffed to a sheen. The kitchen units were all old but clean and all hung smoothly and still in perfect unison. The oven was stainless steel and shone as though far younger than its age. It was like the whole room had undergone the finest face lift that a Beverley Hills surgeon could supply where you couldn’t see the join.

“How long has it been since you’ve seen Davey?” Cassie asked, taking out her police issue notebook that was full of shopping lists and reminders.

“I’ve been away visiting my sister over in Holbrooke. She hasn’t been well,” Susie answered. “I spoke to Davey three days ago on the phone, but nothing since. I got home early this morning and he wasn’t here.”

“Don’t you think that it’s a bit early to raise the alarm?” Cassie asked gently. “I mean, Davey quite often is…, out late,” she said, trying to be delicate.

“Sheriff, my husband is a drunk, you don’t need to tell me that,” Susie replied tersely.

“Maybe he had a late night? Maybe he’s sleeping one off somewhere?”

“No,” Susie shook her head firmly. “I know that something’s happened to him, I just know.”

“Well, that isn’t exactly information that’s actionable by the Police Department, Mrs. Mackie,” Cassie said, shutting her book.

“You’ve got a daughter, right, Sheriff?” Susie probed. “Little Ellie?”

Cassie flinched slightly at the invocation of her daughter’s name.

“If something happened to your little girl you would know, wouldn’t you, in here?” Susie said, thumping her reedy chest hard with a bony clenched fist. “When you love someone deeply enough you just know when something is wrong Sheriff, you just know.”

----------

Harlan drove as quickly as he dared out to the site. Even using every ounce of restraint, he still turned a few heads in his eagerness.

Bud was waiting in the desert along with their makeshift lab and a recently buried body, and now someone was sniffing around. Whoever the guy was, he was an unknown quantity and there was nothing that Harlan hated more than the unknown.

He managed to keep his heavy foot off of the gas until he broke through the cover of town and then floored it. The SUV leapt forward eagerly and he kept his foot to the floor, hoping that one of the three cops in town wasn’t sitting in a speed trap today.

The barren landscape whipped past the window at breakneck speed and he was soon out in the middle of nowhere. His temper was fraying around the edges and he made a determined effort to keep it under better control than when it had befallen Davey.

The lab was a converted Winnebago that, despite its elderly appearance, was still fully operational and could be driven off at a moment’s notice. He had resisted telling Bud to drive off before he’d had a chance to speak to whoever the guy was that had been sniffing around. There was a heavy duty fence that enclosed the mobile home, offering protection and privacy.

He reached the turning and pulled off the road heading towards the lab. He could clearly see new tire tracks currently unobscured by the strong winds that shifted the sand on a daily basis. There were always so few vehicles that ventured this far out that any new tracks made the same day would be seen.

He pulled up to Bud’s travelling home and immediately saw the extra vehicle parked outside. Bud drove an old beat-up pickup truck that had seen better days and was
discolored by the blasting salty sands. The other vehicle was a newish looking SUV that seemed more robust than its cosmetic cousins that soccer moms favoured. Hooked up to the rear was a smallish trailer that looked like it held a trail bike of some kind.

He was pleased that they were currently on a cleanup phase of the operation as the last shipment had only just been transported out of town. As such, there were no guilty fumes drifting on the desert winds that may have implicated the vehicle.

Harlan saw Bud emerge out of the Winnebago looking nervous and tense. The man’s emaciated face was drawn and pale despite him being a desert native. He waved anxiously and Harlan covered the short distance between them quickly, eager for an update.

“Where is he?” Harlan asked his twitchy employee.

“He’s out yonder,” Bud replied, pointing off into the distance. “Took off on a bike with a big bag strapped to his back.”

“What the hell is he doing here?” Harlan asked mainly to himself.

Bud had a flash of rare inspiration and stayed quiet as Harlan pondered.

“And he didn’t say what he was up to?” Harlan asked.

“Nope.”

“You get the feeling he was a cop?”

“Not really. I mean, he seemed friendly enough but it wasn’t like he was asking questions or anything,” Bud shrugged. “Oh, there was one thing though.”

“What?”

“When I came this morning before he showed up, there were some tracks leading out past us and into the sands,” Bud said eager to please. “It looked as if someone was up here late yesterday.”

Harlan remembered the trip that he’d taken yesterday with the bagged remains of Davey stinking up his back seat. “Yeah, don’t worry about that,” he said dismissively.

“I could follow the tracks, see where he went,” Bud offered brightly.

“No, don’t worry about it,” Harlan replied quickly.

“It’s no trouble, really.”

“Leave it alone.”

“I could go now,” Bud said eagerly.

“I FUCKING SAID NO!” Harlan roared.

Bud looked suitably chastised and hung his head.

Just then, Harlan heard the faint approaching sound of a bike’s engine and his mind raced into overdrive. He was far more scattered than he wanted to be. Whoever the guy was, Harlan wanted his wits in full working order to make an assessment. 

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Deputy Tom Lassiter woke with a yawn and a catlike stretch. His apartment was small with only one bedroom, but he lived alone. He had yet to christen the place with a member of the opposite sex.