LITMIR.BIZ

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His sleek sidearm barely protruded from his hip. The hard kick of Donald’s beefy .45 had surprised Chuck when he’d fired it with Donald at the park shooting range a few years ago, while Robert’s slender handgun looked as if it would deliver its shots with the same silky efficiency with which he performed every aspect of his job.

      “She just left,” Donald continued. “Waited to make a visual when they got the body up to the rim, then took off. I went over to check it out.” He made a face. “Guy’s hamburger, but she didn’t even flinch. Tough bird. She’s supposed to stick around ‘til the body’s shipped.”

      “Flagstaff?” Chuck asked.

      “Yep. Tomorrow, probably, by the time all’s said and done. You know me though, always the last to know. They’ve got me on perimeter, like anybody’s gonna sneak up on ‘em. But hey,” he aimed a thumb at the idling sedan, “I’ve got A/C.”

      “And 92.9,” Chuck added. He moved toward Donald even as he struggled to come up with a way to justify making his escape.

      “KAFF-FM, Flagstaff Coun-try,” Donald crooned in agreement. He sat back against the hood of the patrol car. “What the hell are you doing here, anyway? What’s it been? A couple years, at least. Figured you were all done with park contracts now that you’re sucking on the tribe’s teat.”

      Chuck ignored Donald’s good-natured jab. “I’m with my wife and kids.”

      “Wife? Kids?”

      Good. He’d managed to throw Donald. “Got myself one of those insta-families. All the rage these days.”

      “She cute, your new wife?”

      “’Course she is.” Chuck appreciated the opportunity to answer with complete conviction. “Knock-down, drop-dead gorgeous.”

      “I’d expect nothing less of you.”

      “There’s plenty out there for you, too,” Chuck said, covering territory he and Donald had gone over many times. “Get your butt out of your La-Z-Boy, throw away the bottle—”

      “And run my ass off like you every day? Fat chance.”

      “Fat’s what I’m talking about.” Chuck eyed Donald’s gut. The ranger had put on a few pounds since they’d last seen one another.

      “Hey,” Donald said defensively, covering his stomach with his hand.

      “I was wondering if maybe you could show us around tomorrow. I said I’d find out.”

      “As if you knew I’d be here.”

      “You or somebody else.”

      “Like Rachel, maybe?”

      Chuck shuddered. “I heard she transferred to the Everglades.”

      “She only lasted there for, like, six months. She’s been back here quite a while now.” Donald smirked. “Guess she forgot to tell you.”

      Chuck kept his tone even. “Guess so.”

      The ranger moved on. “These insta-kids of yours, any daughters?”

      “Two.”

      “Teenagers?” Donald leered.

      “Sorry.” Chuck held out a hand palm-down at his waist. “Five and seven.”

      “Damn. How ‘bout this wife of yours, any sisters?”

      “Nope.” Chuck couldn’t hold back his smile any longer. “You never change, do you?”

      “A little,” Donald admitted, patting his belly.

      Donald was divorced and likely to remain that way. The marriage rate for park rangers was near the lowest of all professions in the United States, and Donald was no exception. With its postings far from bright lights and big cities, the job attracted autonomous individuals set on their own paths through life. Fellow staffers in each national park served as a de facto family for most rangers, an ever-changing community gathered in the middle of nowhere by a shared love of the outdoors and by something else—the desire not to be sentenced to a life in suburbia “doing the deadly,” as rangers referred to the nine-to-five, Monday-through-Friday routine. But the tradeoffs of park-service life—working nights, weekends, and holidays far from hometowns, relatives, and lifelong friends—were significant, and they exacted a toll. Those tradeoffs certainly had taken their toll on Donald.

      Chuck first met Donald upon winning his initial Grand Canyon contract to assess and dig the route of a proposed connector road out of the village to meet up with the park’s South Entrance Road. That was twelve years ago. At the time, Donald was freshly split from his high-school sweetheart; she wanted kids, Donald did not. Fed up with Donald’s refusal to embrace parenthood by the time they’d reached their thirties, Donald’s now ex-wife had decamped for their hometown of San Diego.

      Donald was hard on the prowl when he and Chuck first met, trolling among female rangers and the unattached women who made up the bulk of the retail workforce in the village. Donald’s playboy ways cooled as Scotch took over as his mistress of choice. For a time, Chuck considered confronting Donald about his drinking. But it never reached the point where it affected his on-the-job performance, at least not overtly so. If and when it rose to that level, Chuck told himself, he would act. In the meantime, he did what came naturally and kept his mouth shut.

      Chuck glanced down at his own flat stomach. “You don’t have to run your butt clear off, you know.”

      “A life of denial’s not for me. Never has been.” Donald returned his hand to the butt of his .45. “There are certain finer things in life that call my name. Far be it for me to reject them.”

      “You count French fries and pizza as ‘finer things in life’?”

      “Like I’m gonna gorge myself on caviar on what they pay me around here.”

      “Still on the ‘oh, poor me’ jag, are you?” Chuck had listened to Donald complain of living paycheck to paycheck for as long as he’d known him. “You’ve got benefits far as you can see. Health insurance, free housing, paid vacations, overtime. You name it, the government’s throwing it at you. And still you’re bitching about how broke you are?”

      “You try getting by on what I make each month.”

      “There’s nothing to spend your big bucks on out here. Look around. You see a Ferrari dealer anywhere? You should be drowning in money.”

      Donald studied the ground at his feet, causing Chuck to wonder what his friend might have added to his off-duty routine over the last two years—not that he was going to ask. How many evenings had the two of them hung out together in Donald’s park-service duplex while, night after night, Donald sipped himself into whisky-fueled oblivion? And never once had Chuck said a word. He wasn’t about to start now, having run into Donald for the first time in more than two years, and with the full body bag waiting fifty yards beyond Donald’s shoulder.

      The rangers on the promontory were lining up on either side of the litter. “Looks like they could use your help,” Chuck said.

      Donald glanced back. “Right-o.” He reached inside the patrol car and shut off the engine, then stepped to the sidewalk. “Gimme a call in the morning, I’ll see what I can do. Where you staying?”

      “Mather.”

      “Still the cheap bastard, huh? A hotel room’s too nice for the new missus?”

      “It’s her idea. She wants to try camping.”

      “Sure she does,” Donald said with a roll of his eyes. “By the way, this guy’s girlfriend—” he gestured at the body bag behind him “—she’s staying at Mather, too.” He paused. “And Rachel’s assigned to keep tabs on her.”

      “I’m taken, Donald.”

      “Never stopped you before.”

      “I’m

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