Death Without Company Read Online Free

expected it. I scratched my beard. “Anything else?”
    Her eyes returned to the screen. “We’re putting together a petition to get you to shave.”
     
 
My desk was relatively clear for a Tuesday, and Santiago Saizarbitoria’s file was on the top of the nearest pile. Santiago Saizarbitoria. What did she think, he was Norwegian? I didn’t think the kid was going to make it, but I had ten minutes of the taxpayer’s time to kill, so I flipped the manila file open and looked down at the cover sheet. I hadn’t ever spoken to him. Ruby had gotten the application via priority mail with a letter of introduction and a résumé. All of the contact since then had been done by e-mail on Ruby’s computer. I didn’t have a computer; they wouldn’t let me have one.
    Vic would be responsible for half of the interview, which would probably resemble revenge for the Inquisition. If the kid was lucky tomorrow, he’d spend the day at the Flying J truck stop in Casper, go home to Rawlins, and continue his career in corrections.
    He was married, and his wife’s name was Maria. They had no children, and his starting salary had been $17,000, 18 percent less than the nationwide average. He was twenty-eight, five feet nine inches, weighed 183 pounds, and had dark hair and eyes. He obviously had a facility with languages; he spoke Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German. I would have to check on his Cheyenne and Crow.
    I flipped to the back page and locked eyes with the two-by-two photo. Swashbuckling. I guess that was the first strong impression that I had of the young man Vic had already tagged as Sancho. He was a handsome kid with a Vandyke that gave him a rakish and mischievous musketeer quality. He was thick and looked strong, although his features were fine. I always concentrate on the eyes, and these were sharp with just a little bit of wayward electricity in them. I had the suspicion that not much got by Sancho and what did was viewed with quiet irony.
    If we were serious about him, we’d have to call Archie, the chief of police in Kemmerer, and then the man who was his supervisor in Rawlins. He had lasted two years in the extreme risk unit in the high security ward at the state’s penitentiary. That told me something. We are for the dark, indeed.
    Whenever I read an application, I always found myself wondering what my answers to the questions would be. What impression would I have of myself, and would I hire me? I hadn’t had to fill out a form when I had gone to work for Lucian: he hadn’t had one.
     
 
We had been sitting at the bar in the lobby of the Euskadi Hotel on Main Street. It was late on a Friday night and Montana Slim sang “Roundup in the Fall” through his nose on the jukebox, and we were the only ones there. Lucian preferred the Euskadi, because the bar didn’t have any video pong games or customers, in that order. It was late October, and I had a new wife and thirty-seven dollars in a checking account.
    “So, you were a cop over there in Vietnam?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    I had caught him in midsip. “Don’t call me sir. I ain’t yer daddy, far as we know.” I watched him hold the glass tumbler and look at me from the corner of a webbed apex of sundried wrinkles and the blackest pupils I’d ever seen. He was about the age I am now; I thought he was ancient. “Is it as big a mess over there as I think it is?”
    I thought about it. “Yep, it is.”
    He sipped his bourbon and carefully avoided the wad of chew packed between his lower lip and gum. “Well, ours was probably just as bad. We just didn’t have enough sense to know it.” I nodded, since I didn’t know what else to do. “Seems to me with this Vietnam thing, you get yourself into trouble fifteen thousand miles from home, you’ve got to have been lookin’ for it.” I nodded some more. “Drafted?”
    “Lost my deferment.”
    “What the hell’d you do that for?”
    “Graduated.”
    He placed the cut-glass tumbler back in the small ring