Deadly Waters Read Online Free

and to the river as Bob approached. The deputy took care to walk on the balls of his feet and stayed on the far side of the bridge.
    “These boots are made for walking,” sang Wayland, making use of only one note.
    “And that’s just what they’ll do.
    One of these days these boots
    Are gonna walk all over you.”
    As much as Bob hated the song, he was oddly charmed by Wayland’s drunken enthusiasm and the way the young man swayed while he sang. He let the singing continue and did not make a sound until he had crept across the roadway and grasped the rifle by its barrel.
    “Too much beer?” he asked.
    His words did not startle Wayland, who finished the final verse in his song and declared, “Once I learn to play the piano, I’m taking this show on the road.”
    “Been here long?” said Bob.
    Wayland staggered from the railing and sat on the concrete ridge that formed a curb
    below the steel buttress. He stretched his legs in front of him and exhaled audibly. “I’ve had quite a day, boss,” he told Bob. “First, there was that fist fight over in the KOA campground—”
    “What fight?” asked the deputy.
    “Forget I said anything,” said Wayland. “Then Henry got bent out of shape just ‘cause I couldn’t pay for my last eleven rounds. So I came out here to take a couple shots at the dam.’
    Mathers glanced up the river to the 708 high foot dam that held back 27,000,000 acre-feet of water and glanced down at the small carbine in his hand. “Did you hit it?”
    “I think I winged it a couple times,” said the young man. “Hard to tell with only those spot lights on it at night. The damn thing sure doesn’t seem to be hurt. You think I could get a bigger gun?”
    “Not tonight,” recommended Bob.
    He helped Wayland Zah stand upright and to walk to the patrol car. Regulations demanded Bob handcuff a reckless endangerment suspect, but he felt sorry for this sad young fellow. Wayland Zah was half Navaho and half something else, no one knew what; people only knew his mother lived on the giant Shiprock Reservation that lay east and south of Page and that his father was someone on America’s endless roadways who had stopped in Arizona for a couple days in the late 1970s.
    Because Wayland was wild and irresponsible, both the Navahos and Page’s white, and predominantly Mormon citizens, rejected him. He had, in other periods of his life, tried very hard to ingratiate himself to both groups.
    Wayland had once worn a wrinkled suit every Sunday to the Latter Day Saint Church in Page. The others in the congregation had left Wayland sitting by himself in a back pew, and he never got invited to the Wednesday night potluck suppers. When Wayland had grown his hair long and had gone to attend the ancient ceremonies on the reservation, the other Navaho said he was a disgrace to the tribal nation and he should go back to the drug dealers and motorcycle outlaws who were Wayland’s friends when he was a teenager.
    Bob Mathers was among the few in Page able to appreciate what it meant to be an outsider in a small town. After he had married Becky and had come to live in her home town, Bob had converted to Becky’s LDS faith--at least formally--and after three years in the local sheriff’s department he was still “the LA cop.” The other deputies made fun of Bob’s fastidious procedural methods and of his eagerness to check everything that appeared out of sorts in the lightly populated and almost crime- free community. “Eager Beaver Bob” the other lawmen called him, the galvanized Mormon known to keep beer in the back of his family’s refrigerator.
    Some in the community whispered that Bob had strayed so far as to have been seen smoking a cigarette and drinking a Coca Cola right in front of his infant daughter. The local church elders had told Bob to try harder to be an upright father and husband, even as the sheriff had coaxed him to be a little less serious about his work. Bob Mathers could only be as he