Junkyard Dogs Read Free

gold-colored beast with more than a few rust patches but, as my deputies could testify, the drive train had been modified to the point that it wasn’t your father’s Oldsmobile anymore, and it ran like a raped ape. Ever since they’d gotten married a little less than six months ago, Duane and Gina had taken turns doing public service and going to driving school in attempts to keep their respective licenses.
    I noticed the untied yellow rope still leading to the ditch, felt the onset of another headache, and trudged on.
    I’d broken a bone in my foot back in October, and it was still giving me a little trouble. Struggling against the wind and attempting to get a good footing and a half on the ice, I lurched one of the back doors of the EMT van open. The vehicle was parked in the drive of Deer Haven Campground beside Vic’s unit, and I almost knocked myself out on the vehicle’s headliner.
    Vic stood by the other door. I looked at my undersheriff. Second-generation law enforcement, Victoria Moretti was the personification of the fact that ferocious things come in small packages. After five years in the Philadelphia police department, she’d landed in our high-altitude, currently permafrosted neck of the woods and had slowly begun defrosting my heart. She looked like one of those women you see draped over the hoods at car shows; that is, if you’ve ever seen one with attitude and a seventeen-shot Glock.
    Santiago Saizarbitoria—Sancho, as Vic had christened our Basque deputy—was seated on the wheel well and was watching as Cathi Kindt swabbed road debris from a few scratches and burns on Geo Stewart’s ear where he’d collided with one of the chrome-tipped tailpipes of the Olds.
    I looked at the assembled deputies and EMTs—it was either a slow day for civil service on the high plains or everybody was looking for a place to get inside. I put my gloved hands on my knees and leaned in for a look at the junkman. “You know, in this country we usually reserve this kind of treatment for horse thieves.”
    Geo smiled, red-faced and glassy-eyed. He was a ball of tendons and stringy muscle, tanned by the scorching Wyoming summers and freeze-dried by the winters into a living jerky. He had pale blue eyes, and the edge of his pupils looked like rime ice.
    The aged Carhartt coveralls hung from him like shed skin with torn openings that exposed a red lining looking like a subcutaneous wound. His logging boots were double-tied, and he sported a welder’s undercap in a faded floral print. A huge key ring, attached to a loop at his hip, jingled as he spoke. “Hey, Sheriff.”
    George “Geo” Stewart’s great-grandfather was one of the original founders of Durant and said to be the first Caucasian baby born in the territory, but it was Geo’s father who started the junkyard after the Second World War. When a mild amount of suburban sprawl overtook his collection of discarded automobiles and trucks in the early sixties, the county commissioners persuaded Geo the elder to take his rusting inventory and swap his in-town spread for a larger one farther east that they had acquired from Dirty Shirley, the last madam to do business in the county.
    The commissioners had retained some of the land next to the junkyard and had made it the town landfill, so when Geo the elder died, Geo the younger inherited the junkyard and the part-time position of maintaining the weigh-station scales and the municipal property.
    He had a knack for such things, and I only heard from him when people tried to dump without a city water bill, when they tried to skim on the amount of refuse they unloaded, or when kids got into his junkyard and tried to make off with vintage goods. “Hey, Geo, how are things up at the dump?”
    His expression took on a serious quality, but he was nothing if not unfailingly polite. “With all due respect, Walt, Municipal Solid Waste Facility.”
    I shook my head at the old man. “Right.”
    “He won’t go to the