“So did anything much happen last night?” Spearfish Lake Police Chief Charlie Wexler asked Leo Jarwaulski, the part-time officer on the graveyard shift going into Monday morning.

“No, pretty quiet,” Leo reported. “Family disturbance over on Third Street right after I came on, but it had settled down when I got there. After that, nothing. It was a little hard to stay awake.”

At least it sounded to Charlie like Leo had tried to stay awake. There were part timers on graveyard who would head out to a quiet spot like the cemetery and spend the whole shift sawing logs. Of course, if Charlie caught them at it they most likely wouldn’t be working any more shifts.

Charlie mostly thought that the part-time officers were a major pain in the butt. He, since he’d been chief, and chiefs before him, had tried to convince the Spearfish Lake City Council to put on a fourth officer, but without any luck. The Council had stated more than once that they wanted twenty-four-hour police coverage. The only fly in the ointment was that another full-time officer would cost about $40,000 more per year than using much cheaper, although much less effective, part timers. No chief clear back to Harry Novato and maybe longer had had any luck getting past square one.

The big problem with the part-time officers was that for the most part they weren’t locals; some came from as far as south of Camden to take a shift. Sometimes a couple of weeks might pass before Charlie actually had face-to-face contact with his part timers, and that just wasn’t an effective way to manage the department. On top of that, their quality and reliability varied, which made things even more difficult, along with the fact that several of them struck him as arrogant young punks. Charlie and his two full-time officers could cover 120 hours a week, but there were 168 hours to a week, not counting vacations, training, illness, and times when it was a good idea to have two officers on, like the second shift on Friday and Saturday nights. Even a fourth officer wouldn’t do away with the need for part-timers, but it would mean that Charlie wouldn’t have to depend on them quite as much.

“Well, good enough,” Charlie said, checking out the clock on the office wall. “I came in early to catch up on the paperwork. Why don’t you take a swing around town until it’s time for you to knock off. You know, just show a presence.”

“I can do that,” Leo yawned. “God, what a dull night.”

“That’s really how we want it,” Charlie smiled. “In this business, I’ll take a quiet night over a busy one anytime I can get it.”

“Yeah, but it’s boring,” Leo yawned again. That could get catching, Charlie thought. “I’ll go burn some gas and be back in a bit.”

As Leo headed toward the door, Charlie turned to his paperwork. At least coming in early allowed him to get caught up on it a little, and maybe this weekend hadn’t generated too much. He still had patrol responsibilities on top of everything else, and the Council members liked to see him out and around, so sometimes keeping up on the paperwork was a real hassle. It would be worse today; while Charlie was normally off during the weekends, he usually stuck his nose in sometime over the weekend days to do a little off-clock paperwork and keep up on what was going on with the part-timers. But this weekend he hadn’t – his wife’s little sister was getting married here pretty soon, and they had to go to her mother’s to argue about everything the women had to deal with. That meant he had been out of touch since knocking off on Friday.

Charlie poured himself a cup of coffee and sat down at the front desk to see what had happened that might have interested the police over the weekend in Spearfish Lake. A brief overview indicated that there was nothing really pressing. Looking over the call log, he saw with continuing amazement that there hadn’t been a call to the Pike Bar on either Friday or Saturday night. That ran the record up to nine straight weeks, something that would have been totally unthinkable when Charlie started on the force. Back then, sometimes the duty cop would have to make a run out there two or three times. In those days, Harry Novato usually worked Friday and Saturday evenings; his attitude was that one cop was about the right number to deal with one riot, although if it sounded like it might be serious Harry sometimes took one of his civilian martial arts buddies along for the ride.

But back over the winter, Mabel Hargraves, who’d owned the Pike Bar, had decided to retire. To the surprise of a lot of people, the bar had been bought by a former Packer lineman who wanted a nice sports bar close to good hunting and fishing for semi-retirement. The guy was about as big as your average Budweiser Clydesdale, had a long history of eating quarterbacks for breakfast, and wanted a fun but respectable place. After a few busted heads, most of the rough trade had headed to Fern and Judy’s, out on the state road south of town. That meant it was out of the city and therefore not Charlie’s problem, which was a relief.

Harry Novato had been a big bruiser, and was willing to mix it up, if necessary. That wasn’t the case with Charlie – he was a little guy, 5’5”, and had a small frame, so was possibly a little light at 130 pounds. He had the basic martial arts stuff and some of the tricks – Harry had spent time with him on that – as well as the basic police procedures, but he was not a guy to put fear into the spine of a drunken pulp logger just by looking at him.

But that was less a big deal than it might have been. The Spearfish Lake Police Department and Spearfish County Sheriff’s Department had long had an excellent working relationship; in fact, they were located right across the street from each other. The Spearfish Lake City Council sometimes squawked when a Spearfish Lake officer went out in the county to back up a deputy, but it meant that Charlie usually had backup coming if something broke out in town. Not always; most times the county just had two cars on patrol, and only one in the wee small hours.

Charlie took a sip of his coffee and started to leaf through the duty log. It was mostly routine; just scanning it over it seemed pretty ordinary, although not a totally quiet weekend. The second shift Friday had been quiet: some kids squealing tires, a lost dog, a couple reports of fights that had evaporated by the time the officer got there. Third shift, Saturday morning, a Minor in Possession bust right after midnight, lodged in the minor unit at the county jail until picked up by the parents. Then nothing until 6:30, a reported assault. It wasn’t marked as closed, so Charlie made a mental note to find out about that.

Saturday’s first shift, during the day a lot of minor stuff that didn’t amount to a hill of beans. It kicked off with an assist to the Sheriff’s Department on a personal injury accident; no report filed since it was the Sheriff’s responsibility, another lost dog, a found dog – not either of the ones that had been lost, some other time wasters. Then another assist to the Sheriff’s Department, this time on a 10-14 out on the point. From the minor note the officer left, the body had been there for some time, and he was just glad to be out of there. Then another assist to the Sheriff on a personal injury accident, this time out south. It had been a busy day for the officer, if not productive of a lot of reporting.

Saturday evening, and oh, boy. Three, count ’em, three DUIs. Along with four speeding tickets, another Minor in Possession, and on top of that, a structure fire, which the police always responded to for traffic control. The officer on duty was one of those he thought of as an arrogant young punk who seemed to like throwing his weight around just because he could. At least none of the Driving Under the Influence charges were against locals; all seemed to be summer tourists of one kind or another. That would seem to make personal gripes to Council members less likely, at least.

Early Sunday, nothing. At least the officer had done nothing in particular to show up on the police log, but he was one of those Charlie wouldn’t be surprised to find catching a nap out in the back of the cemetery. He made a mental note to check that out sometime when the officer was on duty, and pressed on.

Sunday days and evenings were usually slow, and that was the case. The log showed another found dog, this time one of the missing ones from a couple of days ago, a noise complaint, those sorts of things, along with another assist to the county, this time on a property damage accident, no one hurt. A speeding ticket again during the evening, and then the domestic disturbance after midnight. All in all, except for the reported assault Saturday morning and the officer trying to rack up points on Saturday night, it really had been a pretty quiet weekend.

But that was just looking at the surface. Charlie knew he needed to go through the reports a little more carefully, especially the Saturday night ones, and see what that assault complaint was all about. There had been no note that it had been closed, or anything like that.

These days everything was done on computer, so Charlie brought up the “inbox” of reports filed since Friday night. Going through them file by file, he was a little relieved after seeing the DUIs – the blood alcohol content in each case was enough above minimal levels to be comfortable with the numbers. The limit was .080, but sometimes some young officer had a tendency to run someone in with a .081 or something, which was within the margin of error for the instrument. Lawyers could get a handle on that and the department could get egg on its face as a result. These were high enough to prevent that. The speeding tickets were pretty reasonable, too – the closest margin he could see was 31 in a 25. Charlie knew he’d be tempted to let the driver off with a warning if he was a local, but apparently the young officer didn’t operate like that.

As Charlie dug deeper into the in basket, he finally came to the assault report. The officer had done a thorough interview with the victim, his family, and the kid who had discovered the victim out on the old railroad grade south of the lake. The kid said he’d been attacked for no reason that he could tell by Frank “Frenchy” LeDroit, Matt Effingham, and Larry Coopshaw. Two girls, who the victim identified as Brianna Melbourne and Vanessa Robideaux had stood by watching but hadn’t taken part in the beating nor made a move to stop it. According to the victim, Effingham and Coopshaw had held on to him while LeDroit did the beating. After they’d gotten tired of hitting him, they’d thrown him in the trunk of the car and dumped him out on the grade.

Damn it, that was serious! The names, at least the names of the boys, were not new to him, not by a long shot. One of the problems in police work, especially in a small town, is that the list of things that you know is not necessarily the same as the list of things that you can act on. Charlie had been aware of these bad actors for quite a while; while they’d figured in a number of incidents, he’d never really had anything solid to hit them with.

From what Charlie knew, LeDroit was pretty much the leader; Effingham, Coopshaw, and a few others were more henchmen who weren’t up to going against him. Charlie knew that they’d been in a fair amount of trouble with kids at the school, mostly fighting and intimidation. Unfortunately, Charlie’s contact with the school wasn’t as good as he would have liked.

The former high school principal, Harold Hekkinan, had worked pretty well with the police in Spearfish Lake when trouble arose. Even in things that were mostly school- discipline related, Hekkinan had been perfectly willing to bring the police chief in to give a kid a pretty good dose of religion if it was needed. However, Hekkinan had retired and Bryson Payne, who had been hired in his place, was a panty-waisted twit who thought the police had no place on school grounds, and had even pitched a bitch about Charlie carrying a gun when he had to visit the campus. Payne, who had been hired out of some city some place, saw all student discipline as a school problem, even if it happened off school grounds, and for the most part wasn’t very cooperative with the police on anything.

Even thinking of Payne had Charlie relieved that Hekkinan had still been in charge when the Archer thing came down. When Payne came to the school he pitched a fit about Hekkinan allowing a deranged killer like him back into classes. Charlie had heard through the grapevine that the school board was not all that happy with Payne,

So clearly, LeDroit and his buddies could have caused a lot of trouble around the school over the past couple years and Charlie wouldn’t have heard about it except through the grapevine. If there was even a germ of truth to this assault report, then maybe the time had come to take a somewhat harder look at the situation.

While most everything was done on computer these days, Charlie liked to keep hard copies on file, just in case something crapped up with the computer. It had happened before, and he’d learned that a backup was nice to have. Also, rough notes or other things that didn’t get appended to the official file were sometimes attached to the hard copy, so Charlie decided to take a look at it.

It took a minute’s worth of digging through the in basket to find the hard copy, and a couple things became clear right away. There was a post-it note on it that said, “Sorry I had to pass this on to you but I had to stay after time to get this much done.”

Well, that was not surprising, Charlie thought. The original call on the assault was at 6:35 AM and the officer went off duty at eight, so he’d have been pushing it to get the interviews done and the report written in less than an hour and a half. Realistically, the daytime officer should have pursued the report in that case, but, remembering the log, he’d been tied up with assists to the sheriff and petty stuff all day, so it wasn’t surprising that he hadn’t gotten to it. Then, the evening officer had all those DUI and speeding busts, so the original file must have just been buried.

He shook his head. Boy, the kid and his parents must be pissed that the police hadn’t done anything about it. Although Charlie understood why something like that had gotten lost in the cracks, it didn’t make him happy that it had been lost at all. That was most likely felony assault, for God’s sake!

It was time to start catching up on what had been missed over the weekend.

It was a good hour down to the junk yard near Meeker, and Larry had to just sit in his truck and listen to Frenchy rant all the way about those fucking Eriksons, how they’d shafted him, and how bad he was going to kick their asses. Larry was getting really tired of it well before they got to the junkyard.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, when Frenchy wasn’t ranting about the fucking fuckers fucking with him, he was bitching about the amount of beer Larry had drunk and then puked up on Saturday night. It wasn’t like Frenchy and Matt hadn’t been knocking it back pretty good themselves. About a dozen times, Larry wished that he’d just loaned Matt his truck and let him go with Frenchy.

Frenchy was going to get him into trouble sooner or later; he was just about dead sure of it. Yeah, they were football buddies and hung out a lot together, and yeah, Larry had backed Frenchy up in a few fights here and there, but Frenchy more and more seemed to think that he was invulnerable and was a law unto himself. Anybody who disagreed with him was obviously fucking with him and deserved what he got.

So far it had worked pretty good as far as Larry was concerned. Being a football buddy counted for something. Frenchy had a nearly unending source of beer, and Larry had acquired a taste for beer long ago. For some reason, probably the football, Frenchy had a line on a lot of chicks, some of them cheerleaders who seemed to like the rough and tough sort of guys, and that didn’t hurt either. A lot of guys liked to hang out with them, and they got their jollies out of it.

But Larry was just about convinced that sooner or later Frenchy was going to step on his dick big time, and when that happened he was likely to take his friends down with him. Still, things had been going good so far, and maybe they’d hold through football season. After that, Larry thought, he might just think about backing away from Frenchy and Matt a little bit.

It was starting to warm up a little bit when they got down to the junk yard. Though there were closer ones, they’d gone to this one because the operators allowed people to pick their own parts off of cars. “What are you looking for?” the guy asked.

“Tires,” Frenchy said, trying to be on his good behavior a little, which Larry thought was strange for him. Frenchy told the guy the size he needed, and that he’d like Goodyears if possible.

“Yeah, we got plenty of them. You want something halfway decent, or something to get you through?”

“Depends on the cost,” Frenchy said. “They’re gonna go on a ’96 Eagle Talon.”

“Well, if you want to sort through the tire pile, I’m sure you can find some decent ones for five bucks a pop, and they’ll cost you that much again to get them mounted. On the other hand, it’s ten bucks a pop if you can find them on rims, ’cept you can’t take them out of the corral out back. You go farther out, though, out past the corral and to the left a bit, about five rows back toward the end, there’s a Chrysler LeBaron that has a set of pretty good Firestones. I’m thinkin’ those might be the same rims as a Talon. Been thinking about taking them off myself, ’cause I could charge more, but I just ain’t had time to it.”

It sounded pretty good to Larry, and must have sounded pretty good to Frenchy, because he said, “What color is that LeBaron?”

“White,” the guy told him. “Only thing is you got to walk out there, I don’t want you taking your truck so I can see what you’re bringing back.”

Frenchy looked a little disappointed; Larry knew his knee was hurting him and he didn’t want to walk that far. But ten bucks apiece, mounted, seemed like it was worth a look. “OK, we’ll check it out,” Frenchy said. “Come on, Larry, let’s go.”

When they got out in back, they found that the junkyard was bigger than they had expected. They walked back about five rows, turned to the left, and started for the far fence. There were hundreds, perhaps thousands of junk cars out there, some fairly new, some old, all with weeds growing up around them, with plenty of dents, broken glass, and missing parts. Here and there a car sat without a hood and engine. “Jesus,” Larry said. “You don’t have to wonder why they call it a junk yard.”

“All kinds of shit,” Frenchy agreed. He glanced at a green car with a black vinyl top. It was badly crushed, and the glass was missing, as were the front fenders, the hood and the engine. “Shit, that’s about a ’72 Camaro,” he said. “Fix that thing up and it would be worth some bucks.”

“And then it would still cost more to fix it up than it would be worth,” Larry snorted.

“Yeah, no shit,” Frenchy agreed. “Shit, I hope this is worth the walk. We’re probably going to fucking get out there and find the fucking tires are all rotted to hell from sitting so long.”

“I don’t know,” Larry replied thoughtfully. “Just from looking at things, it looks like the stuff gets more recent the farther we go. That’s just a guess, though.”

They walked on, clear to the end of the line, without finding a white LeBaron. “Shit, a fucking wild goose chase,” Frenchy snorted. “Might as well go up and start digging through the tire pile.”

“Maybe not,” Larry shrugged. “I don’t know that we’re on the right side of the fifth lane. Why don’t you go back up the other side of this lane, and I’ll go over to the next one.”

“Sounds good,” Frenchy agreed. “Take your time and don’t miss nothing.”

“The guy said it was out toward the end of the line, so let’s not go all the way back if we don’t find anything. It might be worth the effort to search around out here a bit.”

“Shit, I’m not searching around out here any more than I have to,” Frenchy snorted. “My fucking knee is killing me, I don’t fucking know how I’m walking on it as it is. Fuck that little Erikson shit, anyway. There weren’t no reason he had to go fucking up my knee. I’m gonna fucking kick his ass.”

The two of them split up and headed back up the lanes. Larry walked slowly, mostly because he knew Frenchy was walking slowly, and gave each car a good looking over. About twenty cars from the end of the row, he found a likely suspect. The whole front clip was missing, and the engine sat there uncovered. It was hard to tell if it was a LeBaron, although he could see that it was at least white. It was worth a look.

He walked over to it, and could see that the tires looked pretty decent – at least the ones he could see. He had to look in through the glass to see the “LeBaron” on the dash. “Hey, Frenchy!” he yelled. “I think I’ve got it! ”

“Lemme come take a look,” Frenchy yelled from a couple rows over. In a minute or so, he’d joined Larry checking out the tires. “Shit!” he said. “Check out these fucking rims. Are they cool or what?”

“Now that you mention it, they are,” Larry said. “Shit, they look better than the ones on your car.”

“The tires don’t look too awful fucking bad either,” Frenchy grinned. “Maybe that fucking Frankovich did me a favor after all. Shit, those rims have to be worth a couple hundred bucks apiece. Now all we’ve got to do is get them off.”

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