MacAvity's Burning. Dan H. McLachlan
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for the RAF and for the US Air Force during the Vietnam War, when he said somebody was going to pay for damaging his pickup and destroying MacAvity’s, a person had better step back out of his way. And he wasn’t the only one to take dead serious. There were two others--Butte MacAvity himself, who had trained Special Forces and Navy SEALS, and Lieutenant Commander Eric Hammersmith, whom Smoke had served under. Hammersmith had retired and returned to his farm out towards Cup Hand Ridge northeast of town to sit back and chuckle at the antics of mother nature and human folly.
Standing in the wings, or on the wings I guess, were two others, Major General Flint Walden who’d commanded nearly all the air over Vietnam, and Huey Houston, a decorated helicopter pilot who had also served under Hammersmith. Hammersmith was Flint’s anvil, and when Flint said, “Fly them,” Hammersmith turned to Smoke and Huey.
Thinking of Huey derailed me from my narrow gage mental tracks. He had married Joy Chu, an FBI agent, and the two of them had taken flight to rebuild Huey’s Lutheran mission in Cambodia. And I doubted they would ever return to Huey’s farm which was now leased out. But that didn’t bother me as much as some things.
There were actually two things now working on my moods. The first was that Lana had taken a fancy to the idea of living in the jungles eating rice and bugs and swatting mosquitos. She loved the idea to holding beautiful Cambodian babies--probably because we hadn’t been able to have any of our own Anglo Saxon babies. So two years ago she threw a wok and a quart of Deet into her day pack and headed out to join the mission. I doubted she would ever return either, and I was thinking of leasing out her bedroom and couch to homeless border corgies.
The second thing that was breathing on my track switch was the sudden awareness that Smoke had come in without my notice and was standing directly behind me.
“Your tea water’s hot, Pardner,” he said.
He was right.
“And you’re standing in the kitchen in your starkers, which ain’t too hot,” he added
“It’s the way of my people, Smoke,” I said.
“Well, you and your people better make your tea and cover your pee pee because you and I have been summoned to Magnet by our dear friend and fearless leader, Sheriff Charlie Rand.”
He paused, looking me over critically.
“And Butte, incidentally, is presently wearing donated clothing that hasn’t been burned along the edges. You should follow his example.
I loaded an infuser ball with Irish Breakfast tea, poured the hot water into a cup, and dropped the tea in.
“What’s Charlie want?”
Smoke shook his head. “If you’d left your cell phone on ring, you’d not have been a missing link that needed to be repaired in the Ryback phone tree. And then you’d have been told there was going to be a town meeting in fifteen minutes.” He added, “Which we’re not attending.”
I was beginning to sense that Smoke was literally seething under his bonhomie exterior.
“To discuss the fire?” I ventured.
Smoke turned and pulled down a cup and a jar of instant coffee.
“Get dressed, Paul.”
Oh oh. Smoke never called me by name.
“What is it, Smoke?”
“Yeah, they’re going to discuss the fire.”
He took up the kettle and poured the water to make his coffee.
“And,” he added, “they’re going to discuss the fact that this morning our one and only Pastor Donnie Larken was found dead in the church--shot to death.”
Silence.
“Oh man,” I groaned.
“Yeah. Exactly,” Smoke said. “Thank God Alice was over-nighting at her sister’s in Walla Walla. Ten to one she would have been killed right along with Donny.”
He put the kettle back, took a sip, and looked out at the elevators.
“It’s crazy,” he said. “Butte called me from Hammersmith’s where he and Shiela are now bunked, and it seems while everyone was at the fire, Donny’s wrists were being duct tapped to his pulpit, and then he was double-tapped with a .22 to his spine an inch below his skull.”
He shook his head.
“Seemed whoever did it wanted him to know what had happened before his functions stopped completely.”
He turned from the window and sat at the table.
“And Butte says it had to be more than one guy and that they were probably the same guys that tried to kill Shiela and him.”
He nodded for me to go get dressed, then sipped from his cup.
I left for my bedroom. There was nothing else to say.
Chapter Three
When Smoke retired from the Air Force, he came home in a beautiful black 1978 GMC pickup. Or at least some thought it was a pickup. I thought of it as a fighter jet he’d walked off with from a military air field. He certainly flew it like one. And no one seemed to know what he had done to it under the hood. All we knew was that it sounded like a very dangerous cougar purring, and was the hottest rig in town.
So it was no surprise that we were up and over Cup Hand Ridge and had landed within thirty minutes in the parking lot of the county courthouse. The attached sheriff’s office sat atop a basement full of prisoners accessed by a secured delivery ramp.
Barbara, Charley’s new dispatcher, buzzed us in through the bullet proof glass door and motioned for us to open the secure inner door leading to the deputies’ work room and Charlie’s narrow office.
He looked up when we came in and motioned for us to take seats in the oak captain chairs that lined both sides of a dining room sized table. He came around and joined us.
We liked Charlie. In fact there wasn’t a person in Ryback or anywhere else in the county that didn’t either respect him or fear him. He was one of the sons of a large family of boys that owned a huge ranch east of Ryback tucked away in the Bitterroot Mountains, so he knew the character of our people and how to treat us. And when Charlie finally let his brothers take over the ranch’s operation, he took himself to Denver to study and practice law enforcement before returning to the ranch to become our lawman. But he never gave up his cowboy roots. He still wore his felt Stetson in the winter and his straw in the summer, and still wore his Justin boots, jeans, and his tooled belt that held his shield and Colt XSE .45 Commander.
He sat down and looked us over, shaking his head in wonder.
We waited.
He put both his palms flat on the table top and studied them for a moment, then looked up again.
“What is it about Ryback that invites so much grief?”
We said nothing.
“Look, I spent the night, just like you two did, at the fire, and all morning I was at the church. By now Sherman Vics has Pastor Donnie Larken on his slab, our almost competent fire chief has called in the Idaho fire marshal from Boise since MacAvity’s was obviously arson. Deputy Dale Romsland is making sure the scene is secure, and Detective Ross Bender is at the church.”
He paused.
“Am I leaving anything out?”
“We’re here because of why?” Smoke ventured.
“I’ll get to that in a minute. But are you two privy to any grudges or issues that would prompt someone or someones to attack MacAvity and Larkin?”
I shook my head.
Smoke thought about Charlie’s question for a surprisingly long time.
Finally he looked up and leaned in towards