Stony Mesa Sagas. Chip Ward

office door. He rolled down his window and leaned out.

      “Elias, I hear you’re looking into the Hineyman thing. Is that so?”

      “Otis is an old friend, Sheriff, and I’d like to help him. I can’t believe he did it.”

      Although Dunk Taylor was a friendly neighbor, Elias had learned that most cops appreciated a respectful tone. The disrespect they got from car thieves, shoplifters, truants, assorted punks, wife-beaters, drunk drivers and their lawyers took its toll. Most cops imagined themselves as their favorite television characters and were deflated when they ended up writing speeding tickets to pregnant soccer moms. So Elias massaged Dunk’s battered self-image by calling him “Sheriff” often.

      “I’d appreciate it if you share anything you learn. My guys are all tied up with that bass tournament at Jumpcut Reservoir this weekend and then the Boy Scout bike-a-thon comes through here on Wednesday. I’m so busy filling in gaps I don’t have time to do some background work on this Hineyman business.”

      Good grief, thought Elias, that name is a problem. Doesn’t go well with anything.

      “Sure, Sheriff. Is Otis still your only suspect?”

      “Unless you convince me otherwise.”

      “Just what I need,” muttered Elias to himself, “more pressure.” He remembered well how it used to be when he was working a story. Lots of dead ends and frustration, always deadlines looming. But if you keep following leads and stay on it, eventually there’s a break. A door opens.

      Kitty came out the post office door and was onto both of them. “And what are you two up to all secret like, huh?”

      Dunk waved goodbye and pulled out with tires spewing gravel. Elias turned toward Kitty, raised both hands in a gesture of surrender, and walked backwards away from her and toward his car.

      “Have a nice day, Kitty.”

      As he slid into his car and looked back at her he wondered if she hid a tinfoil hat in that handbag with the ugly dog and the handsome gun.

       Chapter 10

      Luna and Hoppy returned to their campsite distraught and exhausted. Neither felt like eating or talking so they crawled into their sleeping bags and tried to sleep. Luna couldn’t get the images of carnage out of her mind, the torn fur and knots of clotted blood in the grass. She remembered the sodden bodies of two beavers floating in the pond and the others strewn in gun-blasted pieces along the bank. An hour after she lay down, the dam holding back her rage and grief burst and she turned to Hoppy and sobbed uncontrollably. He could find no words to comfort her, so he just held her until she fell into a fitful sleep.

      She awoke and he was gone. She pulled her warmest fleece on and called to him. Nothing. His truck was gone. She made a pot of coffee and cooked oatmeal from a packet over an open fire. She thought she should tell others about the slaughtered beaver colony on Sleeping Maiden Mountain but she was at a loss for words.

      All morning she waited for him to reappear. She questioned how he left in his truck without waking her. She was not so worried about his absence as mystified. She came up with a half dozen plausible reasons; all of them had benign outcomes. She focused on the best ones.

      A day of nagging worry passed. That evening she needed to be back at the Tar Sands headquarters but couldn’t leave while Hoppy was still missing. She walked around the campsite and tried to get a signal on her phone but it was no use. She could receive text messages intermittently but could not send. She cooked some lentil soup for dinner and waited. She watched rock walls light up as they caught the last rays of the setting sun. Their rosy glow contrasted with the dark pools of shadow spreading under the cottonwoods below. I am like that, she thought. I am lit up but standing on the edge of darkness.

      Just after seven o’clock she received so many urgent text messages that her phone chimed continually. She couldn’t keep up. Tar Sands Alliance members who had caught the evening news learned that Drexxel was reporting sabotage at their Sea Ledges site. Sand had been poured into the gas tanks of heavy equipment and the bulldozer that was so threatening just days before had been driven over a cliff.

      The security guard at the site was interviewed and claimed that the man who did all the damage was wearing a hard hat with a Drexxel logo and claimed he was doing maintenance on the machines. The guard failed to mention that he spent the day playing Angry Birds on his phone, talking to his girlfriend, and downloading porn. He didn’t hear the low rumble of the dozer or the crunch of gravel beneath its treads because he was wearing ear buds and listening to a sad country tune about the loss of love and the subsequent over-consumption of alcohol mixed with self-pity. He didn’t look up until he heard the crash of the bulldozer as it rolled down the ridge. While he ran over to see what was happening, the mysterious worker in the hard hat set fire to the main house-trailer and then disappeared.

      Luna’s friends related these events frantically and waited for her to text back and make sense of it for them but she was too dumbstruck to reply even if she had been able to do so. Luna’s stomach knew before she did—Hip Hop Hopi was the saboteur. Damn him! She tried again and again to get a message out but although she could receive she still could not send at all. She considered climbing the ridge above her campsite and hoping for a better signal at the top but she was too shaken to risk climbing over broken terrain with bone-breaking exposures. She was in for another sleepless night as the twin shocks of the past two days mixed into a bitter stew of grief and fear. She lit a lantern after sunset and meditated, prayed, and cried some more. She wanted to run out and find him but wasn’t sure where to start. She wasn’t sure what to think, what to feel, what to do. The first rule when you are lost is “stay put.” So she stayed and waited.

      The world was present while she waited. Birds flew homeward at dusk. Bat wings in moonlight swept the air and crickets chanted. She listened to the rasping branches and the shuffling of dry leaves caught in a whorl of wind crossing the canyon floor. The night was all snap and buzz, whispers, and the music of mad croaking. She tried to will into existence the sound of him approaching. Nothing.

      As darkness fell she drifted into sleep for just a moment. She dreamed about a goshawk with brilliant eyes and a terrible beak. It was beautiful and she wanted to touch it but was afraid. She awoke to Hoppy standing there above her, backlit by the firelight with an incongruous halo of dim stars adorning his unkempt hair. When Hoppy was missing she calmed herself by breathing slowly and picturing anything but dead beavers, strip mines, and monkey-wrenched machinery. She found his sudden presence jarring.

      “Where did you go?” she asked. “And how come you didn’t wake me?”

      “I didn’t want you involved. This was my deal.” He looked down and away. He could tell she knew where he had gone and what he had done and he knew she did not approve. He had risked everything, including a promising relationship with her. On the way back to the campsite he had second-guessed his actions. He reviewed what happened at the mining site and worried that he had left incriminating evidence. One small mistake could lead not only to whatever punishment they could impose on him but could also mean separation from Luna. That consequence frightened him the most. Now that he was standing in her presence he was steeped in regret.

      Luna pulled herself from her sleeping bag and stood up. “Are you crazy?” she scolded. “Do you understand what you just did? We were so careful to keep it all by the book. Civil disobedience means you accept responsibility, you make a principled stand, and you do it publicly. Destroying their equipment also destroys our credibility and makes us the bad guys instead of them!”

      “Sorry, Luna, but seeing those dead beavers . . . I just can’t take it anymore. The people who are wrecking the planet write the rules. They own the system. They get away with murder and they have to be stopped. Resisting isn’t enough anymore, it’s time to stop them in their tracks. Now!”

      “Oh so you’re stopping them, huh? You alone, Hip Hop Hopi the superhero to the rescue! Well now you’re a fugitive and I’m probably a fugitive, too. We’re screwed, Hoppy, screwed!”

      Minutes