LITMIR.BIZ

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Nothing more than last time we talked. Folks just speculating on where she is, who she might have run off with.”

      “Her folks are mighty concerned. Say she never would have just run off.”

      Wheaton’s big hands twisted nervously around the cruiser’s steering wheel. “I know you’re busy with school and all and driving beet truck, but I was wondering if you’d have a couple minutes to run up to their farm in Shelly with me and see if you can pick up anything that might be useful. Mind you, I wouldn’t want you to say anything to her folks, just go up there with me, get a sense of them.”

      He watched a car on the highway speed past. They tapped on the brakes when the driver saw Wheaton’s car. Wheaton flipped on the police flashers. The car on the highway slowed even more. “Maybe they’ll think twice next time.”

      Cash flipped her cigarette out onto the gravel. Help me, echoed in her mind from her dream. “Okay,” she answered. “Follow me to Wang’s so I can leave my truck there and ride with you. You can drop me back at startin’ time?”

      Wheaton turned on his car. “See you there.”

      As he started to roll up his window, a little black dog popped its head up in the back seat.

      “What is that?”

      “Oh, him,” said Wheaton.

      “I didn’t know you had a dog.”

      “I didn’t. But I was out driving the other evening by the old Johannsson farm. I was just driving, you know, and I saw this gunny sack moving down the road.”

      “Gunny sack?”

      “Gunny sack. First I thought the wind was blowing it. But there wasn’t any wind, the sack was moving itself down the road. I pulled over and walked up to it, I could hear this pitiful whining. It was tied shut with twine. I thought maybe it was a bag of kittens that someone was trying to get rid of, but when I untied the bag this little guy was in there. Scrawny, must have been the runt of the litter that someone threw out and left for dead. Now he won’t leave my side.”

      Wheaton looked over his shoulder at the puppy. Wheaton was a big guy. He filled the front seat, his build like an ex-football player. He kept his hair cut military short and more often than not his face was stern, the face of a cop who knew he had to mean business. But when he looked at the pup his whole face softened.

      “Kinda cute—for a runt. What’d you name him?”

      “Gunner.” The little dog perked his ears up. “Gunnysack is too long a name.”

      “Now you have a full-time deputy to ride with you,” Cash said, shaking her head in amusement. “I’ll meet you at the farmstead.”

      She pulled out, spinning gravel just for the heck of it and took off about twenty mph over the speed limit for five miles before dropping down to the posted limit. She looked in the rearview mirror and saw Wheaton cruising up behind her.

      As long as she’d known him, he’d never had a wife or kids or a pet. Once she dared to ask him if he was married. He brushed off the question with a quick no and moved on to another subject.

      At the farmstead she hopped out of the Ranchero and got into the cruiser. Gunner jumped over the front seat and sat straight up between Wheaton and her, giving a low throat growl in Cash’s direction.

      “Look at him,” she said. “He’s protecting you from me.”

      Wheaton scratched the pup behind the ears. “Enough Gunner. She’s okay.” The dog laid its head on Wheaton’s leg.

      “Looks like a mix between a black lab and a shepherd, you think?”

      “Yeah, that’s kinda what I thought too.”

      Wheaton put the cruiser in gear and headed out of the farm and down the county road. Cash caught the pup’s eye. He gave another throat growl.

      “You better get used to me, mutt. I knew Wheaton long before you.”

      “What’s with you and strays on gravel roads?” she asked Wheaton. “You picked me outta the ditch when I was a kid. Haven’t seen my mom since she rolled the car there, but somehow I have the law on my side. Not complaining, mind you but…” She looked down at the pup. “And now here’s this guy. How could someone just put ’em in a gunny sack and leave ’em for dead?”

      “You know, folks do it all the time with cats. They want cats to keep the rats and mice out of the barns and grain bins, but after a few generations you can end up with twenty feral cats. Ain’t nothing to find a bag of them thrown in the river or down at the county dump. But this little guy, someone just threw him out like trash. He must have wanted to live, running down the road inside a gunny sack.” The pup laid its head back down on Wheaton’s lap.

      Wheaton turned the car north on the paved highway going toward Shelly, a small town north of the county seat. Like all the other small towns around, the actual town’s population was under two hundred. It had one main street and it was the highway they were driving on. The prairie was so flat Cash could see the water tower seven miles out.

      “Where’s their farm?”

      “Just a couple miles north of town, then east a quarter of a mile. Told them we’d get there about 4:30.”

      Wheaton checked his watch. They rode the last seven miles into town in an easy silence. Cash looked out her window at the fields that had been plowed under for the season. Corn and wheat, alfalfa and barley all harvested and either on trains to the Twin Cities or stored in barns and grain bins throughout the Valley. The only fields where men were still working were the beet fields. Even now, machines were out in the fields picking the beets. And trucks that only a month ago had been following combines around a wheat field were now loaded down and piled high with the grey-colored sugar beets, all headed south to the sugar beet plant.

      Beet season took a toll on the county roads that the other crops didn’t. The truckload of beets weighed a lot more than corn or wheat, probably because the beetroots were water dense. They also tended to have field dirt clinging to them even though the newer machines were better at cleaning the large clumps off the roots before they were ever loaded on the trucks. As a result of the weight and the mud and the sheer number of trucks running night and day during beet harvest season, the county roads got torn up bad. And the paved roads developed a sheen of mud. This close to the Red River, the mud was mixed with river clay that was slicker than ice if a rainfall or early frost or, god forbid, an early snow coated the road.

      They passed quickly through the small town of Shelly in the same easy silence. Main Street was bare of traffic. One lone pickup truck sat in front of the town bar. Cash felt the itch, wondering if they had a pool table. Not something Wheaton was likely to stop for. A trio of three teenagers walked down a side street. The yellow school bus that had just dropped them off was closing its door and pulling away. In towns this small, everyone knew everyone: those kids knew the Tweed girl. If not her, her brothers and sisters. Maybe they all went to the same church or 4-H club.

      Wheaton sped up as they reached the town’s edge. Within minutes he was pulling into a farmyard. The house was an older two-story farmhouse, not one of the ranch-style houses some of the better-to-do farmers were having built. Their wives had grown tired of living in the “old” farmstead house, which had been built when the farms were first homesteaded in this area. Over the years, rooms were added on. Indoor plumbing was installed. Attics were turned into bedrooms as the family had more children.

      Cash had lived in a few houses like that during her time in foster care. Once her room was a lean-to porch that was hotter than hell in summer and freezing cold in winter, while the social worker was made to believe she slept upstairs with the oldest daughter. In another home, her room was in a musty basement, the walls of fieldstone always damp to the touch. Cash hadn’t stayed there too long. Just long enough to be nursemaid to the foster mother after she gave birth to her seventh child. An ugly squalling bald lump of flour dough is how Cash had thought of the newborn.

      A

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