Читать книгу MacAvity's Burning - Dan H. McLachlan - Страница 5

From somewhere far off, namely my night stand, the nasty sound of my alarm was ringing me into the brilliant noon sunshine that was pressing on my eyelids.

I opened one eye cautiously to glare with annoyance at the bedroom window. When my other eye joined the party, I swung my legs onto the floor only to be overcome by a wave of sickening awareness of what had just happened that very night. It felt as if my brain had jumped naked into a blender and someone had turned it on mince. It seemed impossible that Ryback had just had its heart cut out in a puff of smoke. And staggering to the bathroom and glancing at Lana’s closed empty bedroom door, I nearly upped from mince to liquify.

Oddly, my reflection in the medicine cabinet’s mirror refused to admit to what I was feeling like. I still looked only seventy, not like I’d been 86’d. And it gave me a ray of early afternoon hope that needed to be laced thoroughly with a full pot of tea.

Ollie, the Wonder Dog and the product of a canine Maypole dance between a corgie and a border collie, nosed the bathroom door open and informed me she hadn’t had any breakfast for six hours.

I ignored her and walked buck naked out through the living room and into the kitchen. I filled and switched on the tea kettle and then got out Ollie’s mixture of cooked oatmeal, hamburger, brewer’s yeast, and ground egg shell, and I spooned the concoction into her stainless chow bowl.

Staring out the kitchen widow at the looming walls of the grain elevator across the street, an eagle’s view of Ryback came to mind without a smoking pile of rubble that had once been MacAvity’s Pub.

Ryback nestled in a stand of trees like an oasis on the side of a valley that had a stream wandering through it. The town had been built in the late eighteen hundreds around MacAvity’s Pub as if the Pub were a lighthouse calling prairie schooners filled with Northern European settlers in to anchor. And what the Pub marked was a bench of rolling farmland, rich and untouched, over two thousand feet above the Clearwater River that drained the Bitterroot mountains.

For some time now Ryback had been occupied by just us older folk. But even though the school had been closed and the playgrounds had fallen silent, things felt as if they were changing. Still, the Lutheran church standing over the town like a watchful owl had only scant services. We had become so successful and clever at farming, hardly any manpower was needed anymore, so our children wandered off--many to die in wars and many more to return as decorated warriors.

Smoke was one of those warriors. As an ace fighter pilot for the RAF and for the US Air Force during the Vietnam War, when he said somebody was going to pay for damaging his pickup and destroying MacAvity’s, a person had better step back out of his way. And he wasn’t the only one to take dead serious. There were two others--Butte MacAvity himself, who had trained Special Forces and Navy SEALS, and Lieutenant Commander Eric Hammersmith, whom Smoke had served under. Hammersmith had retired and returned to his farm out towards Cup Hand Ridge northeast of town to sit back and chuckle at the antics of mother nature and human folly.

Standing in the wings, or on the wings I guess, were two others, Major General Flint Walden who’d commanded nearly all the air over Vietnam, and Huey Houston, a decorated helicopter pilot who had also served under Hammersmith. Hammersmith was Flint’s anvil, and when Flint said, “Fly them,” Hammersmith turned to Smoke and Huey.

Thinking of Huey derailed me from my narrow gage mental tracks. He had married Joy Chu, an FBI agent, and the two of them had taken flight to rebuild Huey’s Lutheran mission in Cambodia. And I doubted they would ever return to Huey’s farm which was now leased out. But that didn’t bother me as much as some things.

There were actually two things now working on my moods. The first was that Lana had taken a fancy to the idea of living in the jungles eating rice and bugs and swatting mosquitos. She loved the idea to holding beautiful Cambodian babies--probably because we hadn’t been able to have any of our own Anglo Saxon babies. So two years ago she threw a wok and a quart of Deet into her day pack and headed out to join the mission. I doubted she would ever return either, and I was thinking of leasing out her bedroom and couch to homeless border corgies.

The second thing that was breathing on my track switch was the sudden awareness that Smoke had come in without my notice and was standing directly behind me.

“Your tea water’s hot, Pardner,” he said.

He was right.

“And you’re standing in the kitchen in your starkers, which ain’t too hot,” he added

“It’s the way of my people, Smoke,” I said.

“Well, you and your people better make your tea and cover your pee pee because you and I have been summoned to Magnet by our dear friend and fearless leader, Sheriff Charlie Rand.”

He paused, looking me over critically.

“And Butte, incidentally, is presently wearing donated clothing that hasn’t been burned along the edges. You should follow his example.

I loaded an infuser ball with Irish Breakfast tea, poured the hot water into a cup, and dropped the tea in.

“What’s Charlie want?”

Smoke shook his head. “If you’d left your cell phone on ring, you’d not have been a missing link that needed to be repaired in the Ryback phone tree. And then you’d have been told there was going to be a town meeting in fifteen minutes.” He added, “Which we’re not attending.”

I was beginning to sense that Smoke was literally seething under his bonhomie exterior.

“To discuss the fire?” I ventured.

Smoke turned and pulled down a cup and a jar of instant coffee.

“Get dressed, Paul.”

Oh oh. Smoke never called me by name.

“What is it, Smoke?”

“Yeah, they’re going to discuss the fire.”

He took up the kettle and poured the water to make his coffee.

“And,” he added, “they’re going to discuss the fact that this morning our one and only Pastor Donnie Larken was found dead in the church--shot to death.”

Silence.

“Oh man,” I groaned.

“Yeah. Exactly,” Smoke said. “Thank God Alice was over-nighting at her sister’s in Walla Walla. Ten to one she would have been killed right along with Donny.”

He put the kettle back, took a sip, and looked out at the elevators.

“It’s crazy,” he said. “Butte called me from Hammersmith’s where he and Shiela are now bunked, and it seems while everyone was at the fire, Donny’s wrists were being duct tapped to his pulpit, and then he was double-tapped with a .22 to his spine an inch below his skull.”

He shook his head.

“Seemed whoever did it wanted him to know what had happened before his functions stopped completely.”

He turned from the window and sat at the table.

“And Butte says it had to be more than one guy and that they were probably the same guys that tried to kill Shiela and him.”

He nodded for me to go get dressed, then sipped from his cup.

I left for my bedroom. There was nothing else to say.