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  Thumps looked back at the refrigerator. “You think they’d miss a banana?”

  Ora Mae turned off the lights and held the door open.

  “I didn’t have a big breakfast.”

  “So? Eat a big lunch,” she said.

  Thumps followed Ora Mae down the hall. In the distance, he could hear Sterling’s voice growing louder, more insistent.

  “Just get it out of here,” Sterling was saying.

  “Can’t do that.” Duke’s voice was flat and pitched at an angle, the way a grown-up aims it when talking to a child.

  “He’s starting to smell.”

  “Then don’t breathe.”

  Ora Mae stopped just outside an open door that said Cataract and turned back to Thumps.

  “Don’t go chewing on Sterling,” she said. “Poor man’s had a hard day.”

  The apartment was filled with people. Sterling Noseworthy, Duke Hockney, and Hockney’s deputy, Andy Hopper, were standing by the window. Sterling was smiling and waving his hands around, as if he were trying to talk Duke and Andy into doing something fun.

  Thumps leaned toward Ora Mae. “What’s this one cost?”

  “You can’t afford this one, either.” Ora Mae pursed her lips. “We got a body, remember?”

  “It’s kind of small.”

  “Then buy the bigger one.”

  As soon as Sterling saw Thumps, he flew across the room. “Thumps!” he shouted. “Thank God!” Thumps was never prepared for a friendly Sterling. He preferred the man in his natural state, greedy and arrogant. “Did you bring your camera?”

  “Right here.”

  “Look, Duke. Look, Andy.” Sterling seized Thumps’ arm and began dragging him across the room. “Thumps has his camera.”

  Andy Hopper was one of those tall, lean young men you see in catalogues, posing in underwear and swimsuits. He had been a football star in high school. He had been prom king. He had been voted the man most likely to succeed. All that was missing from his arsenal was a brain. Which, in some ways, was just as well. So far as Thumps could tell, Andy hadn’t yet figured out that high school was probably as good as it was going to get.

  The sheriff, on the other hand, was a large man with thin hair, a body that resembled a pile of boulders, and a face that reminded Thumps of a bowl of remorseful oatmeal. But Hockney had a brain, and he knew how to use it.

  “Ora Mae get you out of bed?” said the sheriff.

  “I was up,” said Thumps. “Do I take them now, or do you want me to wait?”

  Hockney looked at Sterling, who was shifting from one foot to the other, trying to pretend he was in control of the situation.

  “Any time you’re ready.”

  Sterling stopped hopping and dragged Thumps back across the room to where Beth Mooney was squatting by a large wingback chair.

  “Hey, Thumps,” said Beth. “What do you think?”

  “Thumps doesn’t do that anymore,” said Sterling. “He takes pictures. Isn’t that right?”

  Beth Mooney was a handsome woman with dark hair and flashing teeth, but what Thumps particularly liked were Beth’s muscles. Most doctors whom Thumps had known thought exercise was a golf game once a week. Beth ran and she lifted weights. Even under the baggy sweatshirt and green hospital pants, you could see glimpses of hard flesh.

  Thumps sucked his stomach in just a little, so that it lined up with his belt.

  “Hi, Beth.”

  “Looks like you lost some weight.”

  “Started working out.”

  “Keep it up,” she said, “and you’ll be as pretty as me.”

  Sterling tugged on Thumps’ arm. “Can we take the pictures now?”

  The man in the chair wasn’t going anywhere. Except into the back of Beth’s station wagon.

  “He looks dead,” Thumps said, just for Sterling’s benefit.

  “Of course he’s dead.” Sterling’s hands were in motion again. “Do you know him?”

  The man’s face was the colour of stone, the way faces go when circulation stops and the blood settles. His hair was coarse and black and pulled away from his face in a ponytail. Jeans, T-shirt, sports coat. Thumps kneeled next to the chair and looked at the body. He had learned over the years that you couldn’t tell much about people from their face. Hands and fingernails were a different matter. The man’s hands were soft, and the nails were clean and trimmed. Whatever else he had done in life, he hadn’t laid bricks or dug ditches.

  “Any identification?”

  “Nothing,” said Beth.

  “Stick Merchant,” said Sterling.

  Thumps looked at Sterling. “This isn’t Stick.”

  “Of course not,” said Sterling. “But this is Stick’s fault.”

  The man had a ring on his right hand. Thumps had seen this kind of ring before. A school ring. The sort of gift that happy parents bought their children when they finished college or moved out of the house. Or both.

  “You know him?” Beth was flashing that great smile again, and Thumps made a resolution to do a couple of sets of sit-ups every evening, while he and Freeway were watching television.

  “Nope.”

  “You must know him,” said Sterling. “You know everyone from the reservation.”

  “He’s not from the reservation.”

  “Great,” said Sterling, “so now Stick’s bringing in Indians from the outside.”

  Beth looked at Thumps and shook her head. “He’s all yours,” she said. “Get a good shot of the entry wounds.”

  “It could be a suicide,” said Sterling hopefully. “People do that all the time.”

  “Not likely,” said Beth. “Suicides generally don’t shoot themselves more than once.”

  Thumps spent the next hour photographing the body and everything else in the room. Sterling alternated between giving Beth lessons on the differences between good publicity and bad publicity, and arguing with Duke and Andy about what they should and should not share with the press.

  When Thumps had finished, he wandered over to the window and looked out. Unlike the Cascade, the Cataract had no view to speak of. A few trees, the road into the resort, the casino, the parking lot, the top of the computer complex, and the sky. Thumps raised the camera and peered through the rangefinder.

  “You ever see any of Ansel Adams’ work?” Sheriff Hockney stood next to Thumps with his hands in his pockets.

  “He did mountains.”

  “I was in Tucson a couple of years back, and I saw some of Adams’ original prints at that big photography museum, and you know what?”

  “What?”

  “Adams knew the difference between a mountain and a parking lot.”

  Hockney’s given name was Benjamin, but according to folks on the reserve and in town who kept track of such things, his wife had decided that her husband bore an uncanny resemblance to John Wayne and had begun calling him Duke.

  “Sterling ask you if you knew him?”

  “He did.”

  Thumps had to admit that Hockney did look a little like John Wayne. He even sounded like him when he talked, and Thumps wondered whether the sheriff had always talked this way or whether he had taken on the slow, easy drawl to please his wife.

  “What’d you tell him?”

  “Told him I had no idea who he was.”

  Duke moved to the window and stood next to Thumps. The sun hadn’t hit the copper dome of the casino yet, and the sky was the colour of winter ice.

  “Sterling thinks the deceased is one of Stick’s bunch.” Duke rocked forward on his boots and sighed. “What do you think?”

  “You tell him the dead man is Asian?”

  “Nope,” said Duke. “Not my job to pass out information to idiots.”

  “He won’t be happy when he finds out.” Thumps flipped the lever on the camera and rewound the film. “I’ll get these to you as soon as they’re developed.”

  “That’s great.” The s
heriff turned back to the small group of people who were standing around waiting for some sign. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s move it out.”

  Thumps focused on the mountains. The camera had no film now, but it was reassuring to feel the focusing ring move smoothly and to hear the curtain slide in front of the pressure plate as he squeezed the shutter release.

  “Sterling thinks our dead guy is Indian.” Ora Mae always seemed larger the closer she stood to you.

  “I heard.”

  “Beth says he wasn’t killed here.”

  “Not enough blood.”

  “So you’re not just another pretty face.”

  “You ever see him?” Thumps caught himself. Old habits were hard to break.

  “You mean, was he a potential buyer?”

  “No,” he said, trying to back away from being a cop. “I didn’t mean anything.”

  “Don’t stop now,” said Ora Mae. “Sounds as though you’re on a roll.”

  “I have to get back.”

  “Is this where you tell me how you’re not a cop anymore, just a photographer?”

  “That’s me.”

  “So you’re not interested in who our friend is, where he came from, and how he got here?”

  “Nope.”

  Ora Mae shook her head and headed for the door. “You’re never going to get a woman if you don’t learn to lie better than that.”

  From the picture window, Thumps watched as Beth and Andy loaded the body into the back of the station wagon. Hockney came out of the main entrance behind them and walked to the top of the parking lot. He stood on the edge of the curb, shaded his eyes with a hand, and looked out toward the casino and the computer building. Then he walked back to his car with a purposeful swing to his arms, as though he had found something. But Thumps knew what Hockney was looking for. And from his vantage point, he knew Duke hadn’t found it.

  FOUR

  It was late morning by the time Thumps got back to Chinook, and the only people at Al’s were the usual stragglers left over from breakfast. Normally, quaint local hangouts with a reputation for good food and good prices, in interesting out-of-the-way places such as Chinook, turned into hot spots during the summer months, forcing locals to stand in line behind tangles of tourists bristling with backpacks, guide books, and road maps. But even though Chinook had its fair share of visitors, few of them ever made their way to Al’s.

  First of all, the café was difficult to find. It was sandwiched in between the Fjord Bakery and Sam’s Laundromat, with no sign marking the place except for the turtle shell Preston Wagamese had superglued next to the front door with the word Food painted on it.

  And even if tourists found the place—and some did—as soon as they opened the door and stepped inside, they knew, adventure aside, that they were probably better off with the French toast at the Holiday Inn.

  Not that the café looked threatening in any way. It was unremarkable, in fact, little more than a long, narrow aisle with plywood booths huddled against one wall and a run of scruffy chrome and red Naugahyde stools wedged tightly against a lime green Formica counter.

  To be sure, the place was dark. The only light came in through the screen door and the window next to the grill. And it was damp. With the sweet smells of grease, burnt toast, strong coffee, and sweat forming currents and eddies that ran through the café like tides. Thumps imagined that the main sensation people had who walked in off the street for the first time was that of being shoved underwater.

  There was no one at the counter. Thumps headed down the aisle, and when he got to the seventh stool, he sat down. It wasn’t superstition. It was experience. Some of the stools wobbled, and some of the stools had sinister lumps lurking just under the Naugahyde. One or two had tears that had been repaired with duct tape and then spray-painted red.

  The seventh stool was one of two still intact. Like Al herself. Worn but original.

  “Usual?” Al came along the counter, dragging the wet rag across the formica.

  “Easy on the sauce.”

  Alvera Couteau had a love affair with salt. It was the main ingredient in the “secret sauce” that she tossed into the eggs to brighten them up, and it was the backbone of her meatloaf special. In fact, Thumps suspected salt was the only spice—if it actually was a spice—that Al used in any of her dishes. Every so often, someone would remind Al that salt was rough on the heart, and she would point out that smoking would kill you quicker.

  Which was another reason Thumps came to Al’s. As impossible as it seemed, Al’s was a non-smoking establishment. Thumps knew that some restaurants in the east and in places such as California were smoke-free, but, in the west—the real west—where liquor, cigarettes, and guns formed a holy trinity, a non-smoking restaurant was an oddity at best.

  For Al, it was a simple matter of taste. “Don’t mind if you smoke,” she told everyone. “Just don’t do it in my café.”

  Three or four years back, Wutty Youngbeaver had decided to test Al’s resolve on this particular matter and lit up at the counter. Al asked him to take it outside. She even smiled. Instead, Wutty sucked the cigarette halfway down and blew a giant smoke ring that floated over the grill and settled on a fresh batch of Al’s famous hash browns.

  Al didn’t say anything. She shovelled the potatoes into the garbage and went about her business as if nothing had happened. Russell Plunket and Jimmy Monroe, who had been sitting on either side of Wutty, got up quickly and moved to a booth. If Wutty hadn’t been so busy congratulating himself, he might have seen it coming. But when his breakfast didn’t arrive and his coffee cup remained empty, Wutty got the message.

  “Can’t do this,” Wutty told Al. “This is a public building.”

  Al ignored him. Wutty sat there, determined to wait her out.

  “She can’t do this,” he told the rest of the breakfast crowd, but everyone had already turned away or was reading the newspaper. Wutty stayed on his stool for almost an hour, and then he left in a huff, vowing never to return.

  “Sure as hell not the only place in town that’ll feed a working man.”

  And this was true. If you liked your breakfast fried, you could swing over to Dumbo’s. Or the Holiday Inn. And if you didn’t mind driving out to Shadow Ranch, you could get a chuckwagon breakfast complete with flapjacks from scratch and real sourdough bread.

  But you paid for the privilege. Dumbo’s was cheap enough, but you didn’t get much for your money. Breakfast at the Holiday Inn cost you ten dollars without juice. And the chuckwagon breakfast out at Shadow Ranch was almost twenty dollars, even before you figured in the gas and time. Al’s breakfast special—eggs any way you liked them, whole wheat toast, hash browns with cheese and salsa, homemade sausage, and juice—cost three-fifty, rain or shine.

  Wutty was gone for a week. Then he showed up at the counter one morning, smiling, as if nothing had happened. Al was a reasonable woman, but she wasn’t about to let Wutty come waltzing back, easy as you please, just because he had pretty teeth. There were amends to be made, and to Wutty’s credit, he gave up quickly and apologized. Still, it was most of a year before Al filled Wutty’s cup as fast as she poured coffee for the rest of her customers, and a while after that before she went back to lavishing salt on Wutty’s breakfast or filling his shot glass of salsa right to the rim.

  “Haven’t seen much of you.” Al slid the plate between Thumps’ elbows. “You trying to eat your own cooking again?”

  “I’m a good cook.” Thumps dumped the salsa over the eggs and folded them into the hash browns.

  “People are still talking about that macaroni dish of yours.”

  “Old news.” Thumps looked around the café. “Don’t see any new faces. You stop feeding tourists altogether?”

  “This about the body up at Buffalo Mountain?” Al filled Thumps’ cup and put the pot on the counter.

  Thumps was always amazed at how fast information could travel. “You know who he was?”
>
  “You been out to Shadow Ranch lately? They’re shoving a couple million into the resort. New pool and a mountain slide.” Al looked back at the grill to make sure nothing was burning. “’Course, the casino is going to give Buffalo Mountain the edge.”

  Most of the time, Al would pounce on conversations. Other times, bringing her around to the topic was like trying to push a boulder up a hill with a spoon. Thumps scooped up the last of the eggs, ran a piece of toast around his plate, and waited.

  Al filled Thumps’ cup. “Floyd Small Elk’s out of jail.”

  “Cooley’s brother?” The last Thumps had heard, Floyd was doing time for assault.

  “Got out last month. Rockland gave him a job driving one of those resort taxis.”

  “The limos?” Thumps tried to imagine Floyd Small Elk behind the wheel of a limo. “Vernon Rockland gave an ex-con a job?”

  Five years ago, Vernon Rockland had shown up in Chinook and purchased the old Anderson place. A summer retreat, he told everyone, a getaway from the stress of the city. No one in Chinook thought much about it until an architect arrived the next spring, followed closely by a fleet of bulldozers. And before anyone in town had a chance to think about it, Rockland had turned a modest ranch into an ostentatious resort complete with a championship golf course.

  Al settled against the counter and closed her eyes for a moment. “Maybe you should drive out there and talk with him.”

  “Got nothing to talk to Floyd about.”

  “Suit yourself. You going out to the reservation?”

  “Maybe.”

  “How’s Claire doing?”

  “The body at Buffalo Mountain isn’t going to make her day.”

  “Then maybe she should talk to Floyd.” Al stood up and straightened her apron. “He’s been driving the guy around for the last two weeks.”

  Thumps used the pay phone at the laundromat. He let it ring until he was sure no one was there. The sun was up and bent on melting the parking meters before lunch. Thumps stood behind the door of the Volvo so that when he opened it, the hot air wouldn’t have to knock him down as it toppled out of the car. The newer Volvos came with air conditioning. The year he had bought his, air had been an option. At least the seats were cloth. Claire thought leather smelled nice, and Thumps guessed that it did. But there were drawbacks to sitting on split cowhide. Any temperature above seventy-five degrees, and leather stuck to your back and tore the skin off bare legs. Below forty-five degrees, it turned into plate steel.