Wind soughed through the fields of wheat. I rested my arms on the steering wheel and my chin on my arms, peering up through the patrol car windshield at the open sky. Baby blue, like the paint Cal had spilled when he fell from that ladder. (He’d turned, grinning, wiping his nose with his sleeve. It left a streak of paint like the tribal smear of a colourblind hunter.)
I blinked. Remembered my coffee in the cup holder, cold now, but I took a sip of it anyway. Too early to be daydreaming.
I heard the car before I saw it. Sort of a dusty mumbling. Tilting my head I could pick out through the passenger side window a pair of dust clouds rising along the cattle track that ringed the wheat. My eyes followed the clouds until the cars jostled lazily into view. A hatchback and another patrol car. A couple of kids oggled out of the back seat of the hatchback. It slowed a little near my patrol car and I flashed a palm in greeting. The driver raised a couple fingers off the wheel, craned his neck a bit at the END DETOUR sign, and turning back onto the main road rumbled off. One of the kids was smearing chocolatey fingerprints on the back window. I squinted. He'd drawn a flying saucer.
The other patrol car rolled up and Eddie stepped out. He waved, striding over, and I wound down the window.
‘All fine?’
‘Ten-four,’ I said. ‘Not a peep. You?’
He stuck a thumb in his pocket and lifted his sunnies with one index finger, looking back down the road we’d cordoned off. I followed his gaze. A dirt road jagged off the main a little ways down, the powerline astride it, both terminating in a cozy two-story house. Another patrol car sat outside.
‘Reckon I’m heading in,’ Eddie said.
I knew Eddie well enough to know he was testing the waters, so I said to him, ‘I wouldn’t.’
The sunglasses dropped and he looked down at me. I took another sip of the cold coffee, wrinkled my nose, then set it on the dashboard and climbed out of the car.
‘If they needed backup we’d have heard about it,’ I added. I crossed my arms and leaned back against the door, turning back to the little house at the end of that dirt road. ‘Last thing you want to do is frighten the old girl.’ Tiger in a corner, and all that.
I could feel Eddie eyeing me. Wondered if he’d listen this time. I was making a point not to look like I was watching him but the guy looked fidgety, and whether that was out of worry or a hunger for action I didn’t know him well enough to say. If he barged in there and gave the farmer a scare maybe that shotgun she was swinging around might go off, and once it started, I figured, it probably wouldn’t stop easy.
‘Don’t really get it,’ he said. He chuckled a little, but it was tense and a bit weird, and I arched an eyebrow at him.
‘Well, what don’t you get, Eddie?’
‘You’re pretty damn calm, that’s all. Right? Pretty damn . . . .’ He flapped a hand at the house. ‘That’s crazy to me. I guess it’s rookie stuff to be saying that, it sounds a bit that way, anyway, but you know what I mean?’
I squinted at him for a while. The guy was usually awful quiet, which is fine by me, so this little outburst seemed out of the ordinary for him and I didn’t want to just brush it off.
Finally I shrugged and said, ‘Don’t know what you mean much at all, actually.’ I was going to leave it there to start with. I frowned at what might have been either a shadow moving behind one of the house’s windows or a reflection from the flock of crows passing overhead. Maybe I was a little annoyed at him—it was an odd, naive sort of thing to say. What the hell did he expect out of me? And anyway I wasn't calm, which was why I said what I said next.
‘I talked to her last week, man. She made me tea. You want to know what's crazy? That's crazy.' Shook my head. I was about to say something else, but caught myself, started over, gave up, said: 'I don't know.'
Nothing much else got said until that whole business was over, but Eddie waited, so I guess that's something.
