Situated behind Cooper’s desk is Cooper’s swivel chair, another perk of his position, and behind that, in a place of honor on top of a low-slung filing cabinet, sits the idle fax machine. Only Cooper gets to touch the fax machine. Since there’s no Internet and no cell service in Caesura, the fax machine and its dedicated phone line are the town’s only link to the outside world. Next to the fax machine sits an impressively sturdy paper shredder. If you get a fax, you read the fax, and then you feed the fax into the shredder’s hungry teeth. Once upon a time, not long after he arrived, Robinson nicknamed the fax machine Cain and the shredder Abel. Now Cain and Abel sit attentively behind Cooper’s desk, waiting, under his watch, like two heeled dogs.
Dawes rises from Cooper’s desk and returns to her own spot, a hardback chair by the wall. “I meant, what do we know about Gable since he got here?” she continues. “Any feuds? Debts? Disputes?” As she says this, she flips back through her notebook intently, as though the answers are already written there by some previous, wiser version of herself.
“Gable mostly kept to himself, best as I know,” says Cooper, unbuckling his gun belt and coiling it heavily on his desktop. Thus unburdened, he settles back into his swivel chair, where he twists idly, the king returned to his throne.
“I’ve always meant to ask—why is it that Deputy Robinson and I aren’t issued gun belts, sir?” says Dawes.
“Because you don’t carry guns,” says Cooper. “One sheriff, one gun—that’s the theory, anyway. We used to keep an emergency firearm in a locked safe but look how that turned out. Speaking of —” He unlocks his top desk drawer and slides it open and pulls out a box of .38 ammo. He shakes six bullets into the palm of his hand. Then he flips open the cylinder of his pistol and feeds the bullets, one by one, into the revolver. “Eight years, and I never had to load this thing.” He flips the cylinder shut, then slips the pistol back into the holster in his gun belt, and locks the box of ammo away again. “This belt isn’t even Institute issue. It’s my personal property, a souvenir from my last job, before I signed my life away to work for the Blinds.”
“And what was that?” says Dawes.
“Wish I could tell you, Dawes, but you know the rules.” Cooper raises a finger to his pursed lips like an old librarian shushing a rowdy room. “But this here? This was my lucky gun belt. Good thing I brought it with me, too. It’s hell trying to convince the Institute to supply us with anything.” He gestures to the ramshackle office. “As you might intuit.”
“So what’s your plan on informing people?” asks Robinson, continuing to torture those pants with the hissing iron. Cooper suspects that it’s taking everything in Dawes’s power, as the clear subordinate, not to leap up and offer Robinson remedial instruction in crease-making, given that her own uniform is always pressed to a military crispness.
“I’ll ring the bell and call a town meeting this afternoon,” says Cooper. “That gives us a little time to put our heads together and figure out what we’re going to tell them.”
“We might want to hold off until the agent from Amarillo has weighed in,” says Dawes.
Cooper stops swiveling. “Wait—someone’s coming out here?”
“Agent Rigo, from Amarillo. He’s on his way right now. He’s scheduled to arrive in a half an hour or so.”
There is nothing about Dawes’s statement that is welcome news to Cooper. “Who’s Rigo? What happened to Agent Brightwell?”
Dawes shrugs. “I called it in first thing this morning from the fax phone just like you asked me to. This Agent Rigo answered. Said he’s our liaison now. Said he wanted to come out personally to have a look at the crime scene.” She delivers all this with the slightly defensive, slightly befuddled tone of someone relaying news she had no idea would be controversial. “He also said he had some questions about Colfax.”
“Errol Colfax?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What about him? Colfax was months ago. Colfax was a suicide,” says Cooper.
“Agent Rigo was very insistent,” Dawes says, then looks to Robinson for reinforcement, but he keeps his head down, studiously trained on the ironing. She looks back to Cooper. “I just assumed—”
“Please, do not do that,” says Cooper. “This is just great. Dr. Holliday is going to be delighted.”
“We’d have to tell her what happened eventually,” says Robinson.
“Of course, we’ll tell her,” Cooper says. “I’d just—I’d like to have a little more to tell her when we do. Like a fucking suspect, for starters.”
“Sheriff, I don’t mean any disrespect—” says Dawes.
Cooper turns to Robinson. “Why do I suspect I’m about to be disrespected?”
“—but it would seem,” Dawes continues, “to be in everyone’s interest to follow procedure on this, yes? It is a homicide, after all.”
Cooper stands and leans forward on the desk. “While I’m certainly delighted to be reminded by you about the necessity of procedure, I am also interested in sparing the fragile residents of this town from a parade of nosy outsiders. Residents who, I’ll remind you, are made jittery by law enforcement agents who come bearing intrusive questions.”
Dawes has the quizzical look of someone being chastised for something she’s still confident was entirely right. “I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t—”
“No, you didn’t. That much is for certain.” Cooper picks up his gun belt and straps it back around his waist. The belt and its holster—and the pistol inside it—are almost entirely for show, but then Cooper’s learned that showmanship—the appearance of authority; the illusion of order—is a crucial part of his job. “Dealing with our citizenry’s sensitivity to these issues”—he pulls the belt tight and buckles it—“is something I have learned a lot about over my eight years of doing what you’ve been doing”—and here Cooper comically checks his watch—“for all of six fucking weeks. So, before you don your goddamned deerstalker hat and start the Sherlock Holmes act, will you please consider the nature of our situation. Which is delicate.”
Cooper also considers the nature of their situation. Now, instead of gathering the residents to give a calming, don’t-worry-folks-we’ve-got-this-all-under-control speech, he’s going to have to lead an officious stranger right down the middle of the main street while the entire jittery town looks on and speculates. He turns to Robinson. “Any thoughts you care to share on this subject, Walt?”
Robinson props the iron on its haunches, where it looses a long exhausted sigh of steam. “I never knew that’s what they called it.”
“Called what?”
“That Sherlock Holmes hat. A deerstalker. I never knew it had a name.”
“Any other thoughts?”
“It’s not good,” he says.
“No, it’s not good,” says Cooper. “It’s not fucking good at all.”
5.