Henry smiled. “I do not have the slightest of ideas.”

The room was silent for a while, and then Lucian leaned toward me in a conspiratorial manner. “C’mon, get me out of here. It’s just that observation shit. Hell, you don’t stay in here for more than twenty minutes, and I been in here bein’ observed for over twenty-four hours.”

“No.”

He didn’t move but his voice dropped a few octaves, and he attempted to sound innocent. “I’m gonna start causing trouble.”

I turned and looked at the Bear, both of us knowing the width and breadth of the type of trouble of which Lucian Connally was capable. “Lucian, it’s not up to me. What if I took you out of here, and you had another attack on the sidewalk?”

He worked his jaw. “There’d be a great deal of celebration in some quarters.”

“Not from your granddaughter.” The first lesson of sheriffing—when in doubt, defer. “If Isaac says you can go, then you can go.”

“All right then.” Satisfied with the track of the conversation, he leaned back onto his stack of pillows. “Lot of blood?”

“A few drops.”

“Any other traces?”

“Nope.”

He thought about it. “No drip, spray, or splash?”

“Nothing.”

He ruminated on the scene he hadn’t seen. “That’s queer.”

“I thought so, too.”

“Thinkin’ somebody just cut themselves beatin’ the livin’ daylights out of that computer.” I nodded and let him continue to think. “So you got the Highway Patrol out on the girl’s vehicle?”

“Yep.”

He shook his head. “Well, it ain’t gonna do you a hell of a lot of good either way; them triple A with guns couldn’t slap their ass with a patented ass-slapping machine.” He thought about it a while longer. “You want my learned opinion on this?”

“Sure.”

“Runner.”

I crossed my scuffed boots and studied him. “I thought about that.”

“Got served a subpoena by the FB of I and figured she was going to have to testify against her friends over there at Jurassic Park.”

“The High Plains Dinosaur Museum.”

“Pile of bones in an old carpet store is what I call it. Whatever. She took that vehicle of hers and has it parked in the middle of nowhere. Hell, she’s one of those archeology types, so she’s sittin’ out there somewhere with a pith helmet, a piña colitis, and toilet paper.” He glanced up at Henry. “In my experience, a woman won’t go anywhere there isn’t toilet paper.”

I looked back at the Bear, who shook his head at the malapropism.

The old sheriff continued. “I bet if you check the grocery stores around here, they’ll tell you that she loaded up and headed out for the territories.”

“What about the blood?”

“Hell, I don’t know. Maybe that dog of hers killed a pack rat back there or something.”

I shook my head. “There would have been more of a mess.”

“Well, maybe somebody butchered a western cottontail.”

The door opened, and the chief of medicine entered the room and adjusted his glasses, but before he could say anything, Lucian spoke. “Isaac, I gotta get out of here.” He gestured toward me. “The current sheriff and full-time layabout and his redskin sidekick need my help.”

The old doctor glanced at us. “Is that true?”

Both Henry and I answered simultaneously and with a great deal of emphasis. “No.”

He shook his head at Lucian and adjusted his glasses. “It’s blood, all right.”

“How old?”

“Less than twenty-four hours.”

I turned to look at Henry, who in turn looked at Isaac. “Human?”

“Within the ABO group with two distinct antigens and antibodies, B-type. With my limited facilities it could also be another primate, but here in Wyoming monkeys are rare so the chances of that are slim.”

Lucian pushed his rolling tray away. “Well, thanks a lot, Doc. You just shot my theory in the ass.” He looked at me, snapped his fingers, and pointed one at me like a gun. “She got a pet monkey?”

“No.”

He dropped the weapon and turned back to Isaac. “What the hell else can you tell us?”

Isaac pulled his ever-present clipboard up and pretended to read from it. “Female, blonde, approximately twenty-six to twenty-eight years of age . . .”

“Damn, you’re kidding.”

He lowered the clipboard. “Yes, I am.”

Lucian turned to me. “You know, the smart-ass quotient in this county has sure gone up since you took over.”

I stood, and Lucian cleared his throat, which forced me to direct my attention to the doc, as much as I was trying to avoid it. “Isaac, he wants to know if you’ll release him.”

“Please.”

I stared at him, hoping I had misheard. “What?”

“Please get him out of here this afternoon—I’ve got two RNs in this wing who are threatening to put him out of their misery.” He gestured toward the door. “If he stays any longer, I really can’t vouch for his safety.”

 • • •

“So, what are you going to do?”

Sharing the information that my son-in-law had been killed might not have been prudent, but it didn’t seem right not to tell him, as Lucian was Cady’s unofficial great uncle and ersatz grandfather. “Wait for word from Philadelphia to see if there’s anything odd about what happened.”

He sat back in his seat as I made the turn on Fort and drove on toward the first grocery store on the way toward the mountains. “I don’t have to tell you what I’d do if somebody shot my son-in-law.”

“No, you don’t—you’d go to Philadelphia and shoot somebody whether it was the right person or not.”

“Makes you feel better when you shoot people . . . You ought to try it sometime.”

I pulled up and waited at one of our three stoplights. “I’ve shot people before, old man, and the last thing it ever made me feel was better.”

He turned and looked at the Cheyenne Nation. “What do you say?”

“Leave him out of this.”

He nodded as he turned back in the seat. “That’s just what I thought.”

“When I first started out, you taught me to make sure I was right and then go ahead with all of my abilities. Well, this is the make-sure-I’m-right part. I’m not going to go kill a man because I’m angry about losing Michael.”

“The son of a bitch has already got an irrevocable contract out on you, and you don’t think that’s reason enough to go exterminate his ass?”

“If I go after him, it’ll be for a specific reason and not a general feeling.”

“Well, till that time, you and yours are going to be marching around like tin bears in a shooting gallery.” He glanced back at the Bear. “No offense.”

Henry rumbled, “None taken.”

I pulled my truck into the grocery store lot and saw the SAVE JEN! banner on the side of the building.

The old sheriff leaned forward, looking through the top of the windshield in the other direction and pointing toward the towering fork and spoon with the words SETTINGS FOR YOUR TABLE outside the IGA where we sometimes shanghaied jurors for court duty. “I remember around the Fourth of July back in ’60 when Robert Taylor backed his Cadillac into that sign.”

“No, you don’t.”

He turned to look at me, the indignation sharp in his eyes. “The hell I don’t; it was a big ol’ boat of a thing, white convertible with a red and white interior.”

I pulled my truck up in front of the sign and parked. “You might remember the car, but you don’t remember the incident because you weren’t there.”

He unclicked his safety belt, pulled the handle on the door, stepped out with his new four-prong cane, and then opened the suicide door for Henry, who slipped out but left Dog inside. “And how the hell do you know that?”

Having climbed out myself, I came around the front and joined them on the sidewalk. “Because I was there, and it was later than that. I remember because he was filming a movie called Cattle King.”

He shook his head, looking up at the bulbs that ran the circumference of the kitschy sign. “Nope, you didn’t start working for me till in the seventies, after Vietnam.”