“Here it comes.” Tippi Townsend craned her neck to see out the large plate glass window at the Cheyenne News Tribune.
Large, wet flakes slapped the face of the glass and stuck there, stubborn and not sorry.
“It’s starting to snow already,” she said again to the janitor. He was the only one there yet. The office didn’t open until 8:30 and most people would use the light dusting of the snow last night as an excuse to be late.
“How far do you live from here Paul?”
The janitor looked up and leaned on his wide broom for a moment like he had to think on it. He jerked his head in the direction of the police department just across the street from the historic paper building.
“Just on the east side of town. Won’t be no trouble fer me. ‘Sides, I don’t think it’ll be that bad. I think we’ll just git a little bit and it’ll just move on like it always does. We haven’t had a real blizzard here in years. I’m thinkin’ those kinda storms are a thing of the past.”
“I don’t know. Sure looks like some big flakes and the wind is picking up too,” Tippi came back.
“That’s Oklahoma, the wind is,” he said and began sweeping again. “Wind blows when there’s a storm, wind blows when there is nothin’, the wind just blows here.”
Tippi sat in her cubicle. She had been working on the story about the robbery since last night and was about done with it. She had written a short version earlier the day before, but she wanted a good follow up. It needed to be something with all the guts of the story to make it more interesting. It might win her an award even. But she still felt it lacked so much.
She leaned back into her chair allowing her blonde hair to fall over the back of it. She perched her feet atop the edge of the old metal desk while she read over her story once more.
She fantasized just for a moment, about the possibility of how good a story she might write, if she could be there when they caught the man who robbed the bank. Well, if they caught him.
The Cheyenne Police, County Sheriff and she had heard the FBI, still seemed to think it was someone who had been in the nearby prison at one time or another.
They had found a boot print matching the boots issued to prisoners there. The horse on which he had escaped had been a dark brown color with no white on it. Those who had reported seeing a man on a horse had said so, but that was all. The rest was a mystery.
Tippi didn’t know anything about horses so she didn’t know how common an all-brown horse was. All the ones she had seen in parades and other events she reported about were many different colors it seemed. But the color of the horse seemed to stump the police, so it must be uncommon.
So, here it is. They have a boot print, an unintelligible voice and $200,000 in missing cash. Wow, impressive. The only bank robbery to happen here in how many years and this is all we can get? In a town where everyone seems to know your business before you do, it seemed odd someone couldn’t have already known who did the crime, who his parents and grandparents were and who they were related to that made the Land Run.
“They’ll never get a conviction even if they find the guy with the money red-handed,” Tippi said aloud to herself.
But what else is new here, in the Land of Cheyenne County where our motto is “No crime is too heinous for deal making.” Even if they do find him, they’d do anything to avoid a trial, because no one here knows how to run a trial.
Tippi wondered if there ever had been a case tried here at all.
A yawn escaped and Tippi caught a whiff of her own breath.
Yuck, she said and cupped her hand over her mouth, breathed into it and sniffed. Coffee, mixed with candy corn, hard and stale, leftover from Halloween tinged her breath. It was almost a normal example of how she snacked overnight.
Nevertheless, combined with no toothbrushing for the last several hours – not good.
She hopped up from her desk and snatched her coat from the back of her chair. Digging in the large pocket, she withdrew her phone. It beeped and whined, its battery nearly dead from explaining to her mother that she was fine and “No, she did not need to have her come and nurse her back to health. She groped again in the pocket and found a container of mints and threw a handful of them in her mouth.
She was fine. But what she did wish for was some comfort.
She glanced furtively around her for a second and quickly dove into her editor’s desk for his bottle of Schnapps. It was one he kept buried under old newspapers so no one would ever find it. She unscrewed the sticky cap and tipped the bottle, swallowing long and hard. The warmth of it slid minty and sweet down her throat then burned her belly. Again, she tipped it up once more before returning the bottle no one else knew about but her.
Tippi shoved the glass doors to the newspaper office open and stepped out onto the sidewalk that curved around the building leading to the parking lot. She tiptoed in her insensible shoes, through the deepening snow. It was merely about two inches thick now-nothing too bad. She really did wonder if it could be as bad as they said.
Warnings about electrical failure, impassable roads and even crime in a hard-to-defend small town had all been covered in the trite and predictable way the television media covered things these days.
Tippi knew it all too well. Weather was always a sexy story, especially when it might kill. But right now, Tippi was not thinking about the weather. She was suppressing another type of storm. A cataclysm she had promised herself she would not repeat and yet, the snow, being shot, and just a longing that chased her like a hungry, mongrel dog led her to her vehicle and to that thing from which she should turn.
She shoved a pile of old papers over and laid her large leather bag down on the seat beside her. She sat and stared, transfixed in her thoughts at the nothingness of the brick wall on the back side of the old news building.
This place was where she entertained all her private thoughts when the constant movement of the office became too much. She sat quietly behind the wheel of the new, sporty SUV she purchased on her own when she graduated from college.
It’s leather seats, now covered in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The New York Times was also the depository for numerous crumbs. Crumbs from meals, taken while waiting for news to happen in some corner of the town, insured that the interior bore little resemblance to the pristine vehicle it had been just months before.
Shoving her key into the ignition, “Red” roared to life, despite the cold.
Too fast for the slickening roads, she pulled out of the small parking area into the normally heavy traffic of one of the busiest streets in town. She liked the sound of it, the way the traffic stopped and growled there on busy days in the otherwise small city. It made her feel like she worked in the center of the action there, like for a second, she could pretend that she was in a big city working for a huge paper, covering real crime, real politics and real news.
She pulled up to the red light and hit the blinker to go left to her apartment, where she knew she should head for some rest. But she didn’t choose that. At the last minute, she cranked her wheels to the right from the left-hand turning lane and made a risky right hand turn toward his place.
It had been months. Would he even speak to her? She had to admit to herself, when he was down and out at the end of all the drama, she had distanced him. She had not even been courageous enough to tell him why.
Like a spooked racehorse wearing blinders, she hurried along the still mostly empty city streets toward his place on the far west side of Cheyenne. She would just go see him. She would let him wrap his arms around her, envelope her with his size and warmth. She knew she would lose her job if anyone found out. It had been a clear breach of the ethics rules the news company had put into written format and had forced everyone to sign.
She had met him many times before the tryst in his office for official business. But this time, he had become the center of a high-profile issue on which she had reported almost constantly. Their time together knitted the two in commonality.
After several liaisons in the small communities that surrounded the area, the two had become worried and stopped the affair.
Since then, about three months ago, she had grimaced every time she was forced to interview him and then he had lost the election. The news issue grew cold and she had let the romance chill with it.
She hated to admit that part of the reason was embarrassment. Now though, she was embarrassed for her own behavior. She had abandoned a friend, a lover.
Now she just needed him, she missed him. Would he even want to see her?
She pulled into his drive and drove past his two-story home into the shed to the rear of the place. Quickly, before anyone was awake, she slipped into the back door, dropped her bag silently on the counter and tiptoed through the hall.
His heavy, slow breaths let her know he was still sleeping.
A nearly empty bottle of Pendleton threatened the edge of the bedside table. Below it, his boots and spurs looked like he had walked out of them right into the bed.
Quietly, she kicked off her shoes, let her dress drop to the hardwood floor and slipped, smoothly into his bed beside him. She pressed her cool skin into the warmth of his back.
“We’re gonna git stuck out here,” Zeke said, holding onto the dash as Tawny ground the gears down to what he was sure would leave metal shavings behind.
“No worries. I’ve been doing this a few years now.”
The girl tried to sound confident but just as she spoke, the pickup and trailer slid sideways down a slope that she knew ended in a deep ravine. She gunned the engine and pointed the truck in the direction she had determined she would force it to head.
“You cock-sucker, git up outta here.” For a second, the ride for everyone was noisy and bouncy, with the horses in the trailer doing a tap dance to stay upright.
In a few seconds though, they found themselves perched back on a rough road in front of another, more aged gate to a pasture that seemed to have no end. It was the largest piece of connected land Morris owned. It was about 23,000 acres of Buffalo grass, sage and tamarack. She glanced at Zeke, whose amusement couldn’t be hidden.
“I don’t believe I have heard you use that kind of language,” he said and chuckled again.
“Sorry. I’ve been tryin’ to stop swearing, but then I come out here.” In the same breath, she cursed again.
“Damn, the cattle aren’t down here.”
The two stared at the heavily trodden area around the old fashioned, upright hay and cake feeders that looked like they’d seen one too many welding jobs. Snow ground into reddish sand belied the obvious fact they had been here but seemed to have finished what hay was left and gone over the massive hill to seek shelter.
“Let’s hay ’em and call ’em and if they don’t come, we’ll go after ’em.”
“No shit?” Zeke shook his head when he said the words. He was already tired of the obvious.
This ranch “job” was going to make it difficult for him to do his real job. And all because this lady “boss” was going to waste time talking about what he already knew.
He hopped up on the truck and climbed to the top of the stack of alfalfa bales. Snipping wires and tossing the bales into the feeder, he hurried, hoping the cattle would hear her incessant honking, which was worsening his already pounding headache.
Already, it is going to take most of the day getting all these pastures ridden. How the Hell am I going make it to the town and start gettin’ the real take on the robbery? How long will the agents wait before they started leanin’ on me for results?
Snow fell steadily now, covering the bales and making the wires slip in their hands as each hoisted a 100-pound bale into the feeder and leaned, precariously off the slick surface of the flatbed cutting wires.
A quick glance at her watch under her now soaked and freezing leather gloves made Tawny work faster. It was already 8:30 a.m. and she was behind. She was releived she had left Maggie behind at the ranch. It would not be good for her out here at all today.
She and Zeke still had four more pastures and the heifers to check. She prayed there would not be anyone calving today.
She shivered in her Carhartt and thought about her coveralls in the pickup but didn’t want to waste the time.
The snow fell so heavily now, she began to become alarmed to see it was already piling up a little and blowing around the pickup.
“Were gonna have to hurry, it’s getting bad and the wind isn’t helpin is it?”
For once, since being here, Zeke didn’t mind her comments.
Even after years in Montana, with snow storms that made national news, this storm seemed angrier somehow. He glanced up at a bank of dark clouds glowering down at them from the north.
He jumped down from the pickup and reached to her.
She paused, a question she didn’t verbalize formed on her face. Awkwardly she placed her gloved hand in his and without looking at him jumped quickly into about three inches of snow.
The horses seemed nervous as they backed out of the trailer into the cold, slick wetness.
With numbing fingers, Tawny tightened the cinch on her gray, and gathered her reins to mount.
“It’s gettin’ pretty cold. You ought to change into those coveralls.” Zeke shouted the suggestion into the wind.
Just like a man, they can wear chaps and a cowboy hat with bared ears on days like this but thought that a woman needed to put on coveralls and wear something on her “sweet little head”.
“I’m fine. But if you want to wear them, that would be fine.”
“God, what a bitch.”
“What’d you say?”
“I said, I’m startin’ to itch.”
“Could it be a rash?” Tawny asked the question earnestly. She fully understood getting a rash under all these clothes.
Zeke shook his head. “Just forget it.”
This was going to be one hell of an assignment. Zeke sighed and swung his aching body onto the back of the piebald mare. She hopped and kicked her left hind leg out in protest and then struck a trot.
In the pickup, the two-way sputtered and crackled where it had been left on the gray leather dashboard.
The voice on it was Dwight Morris’s.
“One to Nine, Tawny?” A pause and then he tried again. “One to Nine Tawny? Get back here, this storm is gonna be way worse than they thought. Get back here.”
But the radio remained mute as the two trotted south from the black Ford.
On the highway north of the massive plot of land, two men peered through field glasses in the warmth of a black Chevy Tahoe as the pair of riders were swallowed by the blinding snow storm.
“I didn’t hear you come in.”
“I didn’t want to wake you. I was beginning to wonder why you hadn’t called me. You didn’t even call when I was shot in the bank robbery. Where have you been and why are you drinking so much?”
“Is this what I have to wake up to the first time I’ve seen you in three months; the third degree?”
Tippi sat up, naked behind the sheet and looked down at him as he reached over, grasped the Pendleton bottle, tipped it expertly and sucked the last swallow like it was water.
He reached up with a calloused hand and touched the bandage that surrounded her shoulder.
“Does it hurt?”
“Not too bad. Not as bad as not hearing from you. I know we are not supposed to be seeing each other, but I at least thought you would want to know I was okay.”
“What’s the weather doing?” Landry asked the question, ignoring her comments about their former relationship.
“It’s already snowing like hell. I slid around a lot getting here. I guess I should have gotten four-wheel-drive on my car.”
“Aren’t you working at the paper today?”
“Yes, but I was there all night trying to put the last information I got on the bank robbery into a story we posted online and I already worked all day Thanksgiving day.”
Tippi settled back down into the warmth of the flannel sheets and his body.
“I just needed to see you and be with you, I mean, after the robbery I couldn’t find you. Did you go out of town?”
“Yeah, I had some meetings out of town.”
“I needed someone after the shooting. I needed you, and you weren’t here when I tried to call. I was scared and hurt, and I just realized I missed you so much when it happened. I’m sorry about what happened after the election.”
“You’re tough, you’ll be okay,” he said, ignoring her more personal references again.
She lay silent and troubled by his dispassion. She stared at him as he set the Pendleton bottle, empty now, back on the table.
He laid back into the bed with his back to her; and she wrapped herself around him; there was a misery she could feel was in him but could not touch it or understand it.
Dark red hide heaved at its sides, a deep bellow, haunting and final, carried with it her pain.
Two feet dangled and a tongue gave the slightest twitch.
The heifer went to her knees in the deepening snow. Another push and a rush of sweet water tinged with blood gushed from deep within. It stained the churned-up sand and snow around her.
A small head touched the icy blanket that covered the ground around them as the heifer strained again. She forced the shoulder of the calf from the warmth of her womb.
Resting now, the heifer laid on her side, eyes open and helpless. Large, wet flakes came to rest on the side of her face and pelted her iris.
The boots were just sitting there, not one foot from the bed.
Tippi didn’t know why she hadn’t noticed them when she came in. Her scalp tingled and her temple pounded as she halted next to the bed she was about to climb back into after showering.
Laced up Redwings-they had been the ones she’d seen in the bank when he held a gun to her head.
She stood frozen for a moment, afraid to make noise and wake him. He was asleep again and she was wide-awake. No, she was awake for the first real time since the robbery.
Could it be? Could he have been the one who had robbed the bank so violently and shot her?
She stopped breathing, afraid he would wake even from the sound of her breaths.
Like an intruder now herself, she eased over to her dress and stepped into it. He stirred, rustling the sheet then flopped his arm where she had been laying before he drifted into a sweaty sleep. He woke and turned his head.
“Where you headed?”
She froze, holding her dress in a protective way. Her hand paused at her chest as the bandage on her shoulder crinkled and dug into the wound.
“Oh, I uh, have to go back and work for the paper today.”
She fussed with the bandage tape to avoid his stare.
He studied her, his eyes narrowing for a brief second.
“On a day like this?” He sat up, stretching and yawning.
“Yeah, uh, I just need to cover the weather and make sure there is someone in there to write.” Her movements were jerky.
He sat up on the edge of the bed and reached for her hand.
“I’m sorry,” he said and grasped her hand, tiny and cold within his warm ones.
Like any habit that is hard to break, she reached her other hand to meet his.
“For what, what do you mean you’re sorry?”
“I’m sorry I didn’t check on you after the robbery. You’re right, I shoulda been there for you.”
Tippi looked at the man who just a second ago was someone she feared and took it all back in her mind.
It could not be him. I just must be mistaken about the boots. They had said the boots belonged to someone who had been at the county lockup and of course, he had boots like that. He had been the Sheriff after all. It was the shock of it all, making me think things that are preposterous.
He pulled her to the edge of his bed, between his legs and ran his hands from the back of her shoulders down to the small of her back and then softly, across her backside.
“Why don’t you put it off for a little longer, just an hour or so.”
The last of his words were muffled as he covered her lips with his and pulled her on top of him.
