Phantom Purloiners, page 5
O’Reilly had a real fear of the future. Working for the State of Wyoming was all he knew. He smelled the future, and it was a stink. Computerization was a way of getting rid of employees, not lessening their burden. He knew every one of the bureaucrats up the administrative food chain. All they were concerned about was their job. The rest of the departments be damned. If someone had to go to pay for the computerization, it would not be them. It would be him.
O’Reilly had no illusions of retirement. He would be making half of what he was today with nothing to do all day long, all week long, all month long, all year long. He was tired of the Badlands snow and sandstorms but did not have a plan B. It wasn’t that he hungered for the tropics or to retire to a little grass shack in Hawaii. He was not drawn anywhere. He was just driven to go, leave Cheyenne, Wyoming, and the Badlands. He had spent his entire life in a dull job and had nothing to show for it. He had never been anywhere, had no one special in his life. He was Wyoming wallpaper, always there, always dull, never changing, just getting older and older and fading as the year passed.
He wanted an adventure.
He wanted to be gone.
With the coming of computerization, he would be gone. But where could he go? He didn’t want to spend the rest of his life slogging the streets of Cheyenne with nothing to do. Somewhere out there was an adventure just waiting for him.
But could he find it?
CHAPTER 7
Harriet was exactly the kind of a matron Noonan expected to find in the Badlands. She was a no-nonsense individual who knew exactly what she was doing. Lanky from years of hard work on the prairie, she was still wearing what Noonan would describe as a smock that had stains he took for blood. Harriet towered over Noonan, and he was two inches over six feet. She had shoes more like boats than boots, and her hands were gnarled with the kind of knuckles a cowboy would have earned from years of ranch work.
While Harriet may have been a sight for sore eyes, she was a steely-eyed professional.
“I pegged Mr. Harrison for a man on the run,” she told Noonan. “No luggage, paid in cash, had a hard time writing his contact information in the log.” She pointed at the logbook on the hotel counter. “Asked a stupid question, which I figured he did so I’d remember him.” Again, she pointed at the counter. Behind the cottonwood slab was a large sign that read “NO ROOM SERVICES. CANTON RESTAURANT OPEN 24/7.”
“If this is the Frank M. Canton Hotel and the restaurant attached to the hotel is the Canton Restaurant, why can’t you get room service?”
“Family feud,” sniffed Harriet. “They’re still fighting over the kids. Ownership of the hotel and restaurant will come next.”
Noonan smiled. “Same as the rest of the world.”
“Just because we live on the badlands does not mean we get along with each other any better than city folks,” she snapped.
“OK,” Noonan shook his head. “Tell me about Mr. Harrison. Was he unusual?”
“We don’t have usual guests here, Mr. . . .”
“Heinz.”
“Mr. Heinz.”
“No. Just Heinz. That’s my first name.”
“We don’t have usual guests here, Heinz. We’re not on the interstate, so we get the slow traffic. A Greyhound every other day, but no one gets on or off. We’re just a pit stop. The only time we see a lot of folks is Fourth of July, rodeo weekends . . . got a balloon festival nearly every year, a rattlesnake roundup, and a few others. Get a lot of folks over Thanksgiving and Christmas, but they’re linked to locals.”
“You said you thought he was a man on the run. Anything about him strike you as odd?”
“Just everything. He came walking it. No car. No luggage. No credit cards. Paid in old bills, twenties mostly. No fifties or hundreds. Really nervous and then asked that dumb question. He wanted to be noticed. No telling why.”
“Did he ever go to the restaurant?”
“Not as far as I know. I checked when he ended up dead.”
“You sure he’s dead?” Noonan was puzzled how she’d know if Harrison was deceased.
“Can’t lose that much blood and live. If he’s lost that much blood, he’s dead.”
“Well, where’s the body?”
“Wrapped in plastic and dragged out. There’s only one of me at night. It would be easy to drag a body out the back door. He wasn’t a big man. Angle a car correctly, and you could pull him down the hallway.”
“But he didn’t have a car.”
“The killer might have. How else would the body have gotten out of the room?”
Noonan shook his head. “I was hoping you could tell me?”
“If I knew, I could be a cop,” Harriet said snidely. Then she added, “Or one heck of a magician.”
CHAPTER 8
Though he had lived his entire life in Cheyenne, Darby O’Reilly had never met an Indian. Or, as some of them like to be called, Indigenous people, Native people, or Native Americans. He had certainly seen them on the streets of Cheyenne, all twenty-seven of them. Streets, not Native Americans. Streets he frequented, not all the streets in Cheyenne. But then again, O’Reilly was not the adventurous sort. He didn’t have a good idea of a good time because he had never had one. He had been born in Cheyenne in a home where Leave It to Beaver was an exotic television program. His mother was a housewife and Methodist Church volunteer. His father worked for the State of Wyoming in the documents department, the forerunner of the department where O’Reilly now worked.
In the same job his father had held.
In the same office his father had occupied.
For the thirty years before his father had died.
Now O’Reilly had been there for twenty-five years.
O’Reilly knew what he had.
Which was blah.
He desperately needed a change, but he could not afford it. Did not know how to get it. All he knew was he had been sitting in the same chair in the same office doing the same job as his father, and his life could be summed up in three windows: the front window of his parents’ house he had inherited after they’d died and the two windows of his office, front and back. All three windows revealed a street. O’Reilly didn’t even own a car. He had four sets of work clothes, all the same color; a dozen shirts, all white; and two dozen ties, all a variety of blue, gray, and black in solid colors. He had never had a girlfriend or taken a vacation. He had a drinking problem once. Six beers.
What he needed was an adventure!
But needing an adventure and paying for it were two different things.
Then, one day, the fetus of an idea plopped onto his desk. The headache of his existence one month and three years earlier had transubstantiated into an embryo. It had come in the form of the New York Photovoltaic Corporation. It was one of those businesses that only comes into existence because there is grant money available. The US government was taking a swat at solar power, and there was federal money for start-up operations. The New York Photovoltaic Corporation had a development grant and was looking at Wyoming as a base of operation for a number of reasons. First—and O’Reilly suspected most likely—was because the federal auditors were going to be located in New York and Washington, DC, not Wyoming. Distance had a tendency to reduce oversight.
Second, the land required for a photovoltaic operation was small, and there were few places in the United States where acreages of any size were available at minimal cost. But there was a reason land in Wyoming was so cheap. It had no value. If there wasn’t water on it, mineral under it, or a stunning view from it, the acres were just home to lizards, snakes, scorpions, wolf spiders, and jackrabbits along with a few coyotes howling at the moon. Worse, from a business point of view, even if the land could be acquired for a song, most likely a dirge, it was still a long way from users of the electric power. While it was easy to collect power from the sun, the loss of that power during transmission was as high as 15 percent. The further the power had to go, the less there was at the other end of the line. Anywhere in Wyoming was a long way from somewhere you could sell power. And if the cost of photovoltaic power was greater than that of coal, there was not much use in building the facility.
However, the concept had a singular advantage: it was on the inside track for federal-grant funding. What this meant was the up-front power-plant cost would be free. The feds would pay for the initial plant and transmission wiring. That made the cost of the first kilowatt of power produced just overhead, a fraction of what a coal-powered-generator kilowatt would have to charge.
Thus, it was a typical New York scam. That is to say, it was the type of scam that was both timeless and geographically appealing, and only within the last three centuries had it acquired the New York scam sobriquet. It required brains, balls, and balderdash. It was the same the whole world over. In fact, there was a very good chance that someday an archeologist would discover an Egyptian tomb artwork of a bridge and the hieroglyphics would read “When the pharaoh gives us a development grant, we’ll get the deed to both sides of the river from the Hittites and construction money from the Assyrians. We will make a fortune!”
At first there had been great enthusiasm for Wyoming in New York—or, rather, enthusiasm in New York for the possibilities in Wyoming—when the Nimerigar were rumored to be receiving their land patent. The enthusiasm was multiplied one-hundred-fold when it was rumored that the Nimerigar were trying to build a casino. Casinos needed power, and if there was any one thing the Nimerigar land did not have, it was power. Photovoltaics were a viable option but a vain hope. The fifty thousand acres owned by the Nimerigar was certainly big enough for a photovoltaic plant in a remote corner, but the cost was astronomical. The Agua Caliente Solar Project in Yuma County, Arizona, only covered twenty-four hundred acres, but it cost $1.8 billion to build, and the power being produced was so astronomically large that casino usage would just be a drop in the bucket. To be truly economically viable, the photovoltaic project would need multiple casinos on the Nimerigar acreage along with transmission corridors to Washakie, Colter, and Bridger, and beyond those communities to the Wyoming power grid. But those transmission corridors would have to cross federal land—which was doable—and private land, which was not so much so.
But the New York Photovoltaic Company was not without persuasive enticement. O’Reilly was hardly on the path to becoming a millionaire much less a one-hundred-thousand-aire, so if he could “make things happen” for the New York Photovoltaic Company by approaching the Nimerigar about power possibilities, “there would be something in his Christmas stocking,” which would make him very happy. O’Reilly didn’t see anything that could be done, but since the New York Photovoltaic Company offered him “a paid vacation in Bridger” for a week—while he was on sick leave with the State of Wyoming—he decided to take the trip.
In Bridger, he met Sandra Trucco, and she turned out to be the adventure for which he had hungered. Trucco needed him to complete her enterprise. O’Reilly needed her for sex. For her, sex was a job. For him, sex was an adventure. For both, it was an escape hatch.
Whoever said that the gods did not work in mysterious ways?
CHAPTER 9
Sylvester Hernandez of Washakie Savings and Loan was just as worldly as Harriet and just as puzzled as to the happenings at the Frank M. Canton Hotel.
“At the risk of appearing rude, Mr. . . .” Hernandez had to adjust his glasses to read the small print on Noonan’s card.
“Noonan. But Heinz is fine.”
“Noonan. Mr. Noonan, I understand you are in town to see what happened to the man what got murdered over in the Canton Hotel.”
“That’s right.”
“Then why are you here? That man had nothing to do with the bank.”
Noonan sighed. “It’s been my experience that anything strange has to do with money. Sooner or later it comes down to cash. So I thought I’d put a peg in that hole early.”
“Well, I can’t tell you anything because I don’t know anything. I know there was a murder, and that’s it.”
“Any one open any accounts lately?”
“Sure. All the time. All local people. No one from out of the city.”
“How about wire transfers?”
“No unusual ones. It’s been business as usual for the past several weeks.”
“How about before that?”
“Nothing.”
“Since the death of Mr. Harrison?”
“Was that his name? I just knew someone got killed.”
“As far as we know, it was Harrison. Any unusual transactions after he was killed?”
“I would not call them unusual, but we had a flurry of transactions a couple of days after Mr. Harrison was killed. You know we had a couple of robberies.”
“So I’ve heard.”
“We, that is, the bank had to handle the financial end of the matter.”
“What end was that?”
“The coins and jewels that were stolen were insured by the coin and jewelry store. We handled the paperwork.”
“Is that something you do regularly?”
“No. But this is a small town. We all step in to help. Harry and Sam have been here since dirt, and neither of them is very good at numbers.”
“But they run stores.”
“Consignment shops. Not stores. They are small and somewhat profitable. But they do not require a lot of bookkeeping. The robberies took about sixty items, and we handled the paperwork.”
“I take it Harry and Sam are the ones who got robbed. Which one was the coin-shop owner?”
“Harry. He’ll talk your leg off. Sam’s his brother. Quiet as a mouse.”
“How much was taken?”
“Don’t know. Coins and jewelry don’t have hard-dollar values. Total value, no idea. The insurance checks totaled twelve thousand five something dollars. Not much.”
“You are right. Not a lot for a robbery.” Noonan paused for a moment. “Is that a lot for a town this size?”
“For this town, about right. You have to remember we’re not on the interstate. We’re back roads here. So twelve thousand five is not bad. But it’s peanuts in Casper or Cheyenne.”
“Anything big time here. I mean, money-wise?”
“Feds and the State of Wyoming are big. Hire a lot of people and spend a lot of money.”
“No other big money? I thought you were getting a casino.”
Hernandez gave a hearty laugh. “Pie in the mother-loving sky. Ever since the Nimerigar kind of, sort of, got their land, they’ve been strutting like prairie chickens. They’ll get the land ’cause there’s nothing there.”
“Could there be something there?”
“Naw. Doubt it. See, to get people to come off the interstate, it’s going to take a full-fledged road. All fifteen miles of it from the interstate. That won’t happen because the private land they have to cross is owned by a big corporation. Putting in an access road is legal. But a legal access road is no more than two ruts wide. If the Nimerigar want traffic—and they are going to need a lot of it—that road’s got to be at least two lanes wide. And paved. The feds and the state are not going to pay for it either. The road’s on private property. That’s just the road. Then they have to find water somewhere out there. And power.”
“You sound skeptical they can do it.”
“I’m not skeptical! I’m realistic I’m a nuts-and-bolts person. Just to get started building the casino, you’ve got to have a road wide enough and strong enough to handle the heavy equipment needed to build the casino. I’m talking cats and road graders and steam shovels and cement trucks and cranes. The building of the road is not going to be as easy as just laying down blacktop. You’ve got state and federal environmental regulations, and if the feds don’t like you, it will be a cold day in Hades before you get a permit. Then you have to convince the feds to have an off-ramp on the interstate, which will not be cheap. Since the road will have to be private, there are security concerns, and weather concerns. You are going to need round-the-clock patrols to make sure nothing breaks down. Then there are the gully washers in the fall and snowdrifts in the winter. Then, if the casino is built, it is going to need a large parking lot and a gas station and bus pullouts. Then it needs paved space for Winnebagos and trailers. And I haven’t even started to talk about water and power.”
“So a casino doesn’t sound positive.”
“I wouldn’t bet on it.”
“I’ve also heard that there is the possibility of growing marijuana on that land.”
Hernandez laughed. “You must have been smoking some of that locoweed. Come on. First, even if it were possible, by the time the crop is harvested, twenty other states will have legalized the weed. Second, this is desert land, the Badlands. It wasn’t good for the homesteaders one hundred years ago; what’s changed to make the land growable for marijuana? Then, again, there’s the question of water. No water, nothing grows.”
“So no big money coming from the Nimerigar?”
“Don’t get me wrong. I don’t dislike the Nimerigar. They’re trying to make a buck. I applaud that. But I think they’re doing the right thing the wrong way. I don’t know what the right way is but trying to turn fifty thousand acres of sagebrush into a gold mine just isn’t going to happen.”
“Is there any way of making the big bucks here? I mean, is there any idea that’s been tossed around for years and just never been tried?”
“Heinz”—Hernandez looked at Noonan’s card to make sure he had the name right—“Heinz, we may be small town, but we are not stupid. We have been trying everything to get money into this community. Someone here has tried everything you can think of—and a lot of ideas you would never have imagined, like rattlesnake ranching. Everything that could have worked is working, but it’s small. Even the robberies are small. The combined take from the coin and jewelry store, like I told you, was twelve thousand five. That’s six thousand per store. And not a dime of that went in Harry’s or Sam’s pocket.”
