Clayton pressed his thumb to the phone to hang up before they got even more soppy with each other, though he was smiling just the same. Soppy was what he wanted, and what he'd been missing, though he'd not realized how much till now.
He puttered about the room, finishing his packing, taking his duffle bag out to the car. He checked his pocket for his phone, bundled up in his thin down jacket, and went to the front desk to check out.
It had been a pleasure using a real key on a large plastic tab while locking and unlocking his hotel door, and he made a point to tell the young female clerk this as he returned the keyand signed the final charge slip. To her, the real key probably reminded her she was in the middle of nowhere, and far away from bright lights and magnetic key cards that took all the magic out of staying in a hotel, so her unimpressed expression only made him smile.
"Thank you for the stay," he said to her, then got in his car and drove to the diner for another excellent breakfast of biscuits and gravy. He lingered there, drinking slightly bitter coffee out of a thick, white china mug, and treated himself to a post-breakfast treat of toasted English muffin with extra butter and jam. The diner was warm and only half full, so it was pleasant to linger, and nobody looked like they wanted to kick him out.
After a bit, he called the three guys who'd left messages about the reward. And, one by one, he realized they were shysters.
The first guy had a number listed with an area code from San Diego, and while he could have moved to nearby Montana, as he stated, he hadn't the first clue about the time it would take to drive from Billings to Dickinson.
"I can be there in ten minutes," the guy said. "Will you have the reward?"
Clayton hung up and blocked the number.
The second guy was more persuasive, but when Clayton asked him about the receipt that Clayton had tucked inside the sheath, he flat out lied.
"That must have fallen out, man," said the guy. Which was impossible, as the receipt had a bit of sticky tape on it that had snagged on the handle of the Bowie knife.
Clayton hung up on him, too, and blocked the number as well.
The third guy was a little bit more persuasive, with a tale of woe about needing the reward money to buy presents for his five children during the holidays. But beyond using the wordslisted in the ad on Craigslist, he hadn't the faintest idea what an Indian beaded leather knife sheath actually was.
Clayton let him ramble for a minute, then hung up on him, and blocked that number, too.
Around noon, just as Clayton was finishing up his third cup of coffee, the cops came by the diner. In a town as small and connected as Dickinson, it didn't surprise Clayton overly much that they knew where to find him.
He stood, laid a twenty and a five on the table next to the green-lined bill that didn't even include a charge for the English muffin, and watched the cops come in. Several people waved at them, and the cook behind the counter lined up two white china mugs and began pouring the bitter coffee for them.
"That ad your sister placed isn't doing much good, Mr. Nash," said the first cop, the same one from the night before who'd been so useless. "We're getting crank calls and getting no leads."
"Now you say that," said Clayton. "So I've wasted my time waiting for news."
"Sorry about that," said the second cop, though he seemed utterly uninterested in the issue at hand and more interested in the blue plate lunch specials that were being placed at the long counter lined by leather-topped stools.
"I'm on my way to my sister's, then," said Clayton.
He stepped around them, not waiting for expressions of sympathy or consolation. He had a ten-hour drive in front of him and he needed to get a move on.
CHAPTER 4
After gassing up the car at the last gas station on Dickinson's main street, Clayton drove out of town on Highway 22, a two-lane blacktop road that shot out across the high prairie with the single-mindedness of an arrow. It would take him a few hours of driving on coffee-jangled adrenaline before he'd need to stop, which would probably be in Reva, South Dakota, just at the point that the highway would begin to zig and zag its way into Wyoming.
From that point, being on the road would begin to feel like he was getting closer to Parker, where a sense of home and family awaited him.
Highway 22 turned into Highway 79 at the South Dakota border, where he noticed the grey-and-white snow clouds starting to lower in the sky. He stopped at the gas station in Reva, which, really, in addition to the feed store and the farm machine repair shop, made up the entire town. He got a cup of coffee in a paper cup with a plastic lid, and struck up a conversation with the cashier, who was waiting for the credit card approval to process.
"Where you headed?" asked the young man, his face earnest as he gave Clayton a ballpoint pen.
"Down to south Denver," said Clayton. He signed the slip the cashier gave him and looked up at the sound of dismay the cashier made.
"There's a storm coming," said the cashier. "It's on the news."
"Yeah, I saw the clouds and smelled the snow," said Clayton, and knew that the cashier would understand that in this part of the country, the smell of snow in the air and the direction of wind was sometimes more accurate than the weather station. "I'm hoping to beat it."
"It's already snowing," said the cashier.
Clayton looked where the young man was pointing, out through the large floor- to-ceiling window of the gas station.
