A Maidens Grave

them.
     
    “Let’s have a smoke,” Potter said.
    “Not me,” Budd answered.
    “An imaginary one.”
    “How’s that?”
    “Let’s step outside, Captain.”
    They wandered away from the van twenty feet into a stand of trees, the agent adjusting his posture automatically to stand more upright; being in the presence of Charlie Budd made you want to do this. Potter paused and spoke with Joe Silbert and the other reporter.
    “We’ve got two more out.”
    “Two more? Who?” Silbert seemed to be restraining himself.
    “No identities,” Potter said. “All I’ll say is that they’re students. Young girls. They’ve been released unharmed. That leaves a total of four students and two teachers left inside.”
    “What did you trade for them?”
    “We can’t release that information.”
    He’d expected the reporter would be grateful for the scoop but Silbert grumbled, “You’re not making this very fucking easy.”
    Potter glanced at the computer screen. The story was a human-interest piece about an unnamed trooper, waiting for action—the boredom and the edginess of a barricade. Potter thought it was good and told the reporter so.
    Silbert snorted. “Oh, it’d sing like poetry if I had some hard news to put in. When can we interview you?”
    “Soon.”
    The agent and the trooper wandered down into a groveof trees out of the line of fire. Potter called in and told Tobe where he was, asked for any calls from Handy to be patched through immediately.
    “Say, Charlie, where’d that attorney general get himself to?”
    Budd looked around. “I think he went back to the hotel.”
    Potter shook his head. “Marks wants Handy to get his helicopter. The governor told me he wants Handy dead. The Bureau director’ll probably be on the horn in the next half-hour—and there’ve been times when I’ve gotten a call from the president himself. Oh, and mark my words, Charlie, somebody’s writing the script right at this moment and making me out to be the villain.”
    “You?” Budd asked, with inexplicable glumness. “You’ll be the hero.”
    “Oh, not by a long shot. No, sir. Guns sell advertising, words don’t.”
    “What’s this about imaginary cigarettes?”
    “When my wife got cancer I quit.”
    “Lung cancer? My uncle had that.”
    “No. Pancreas.”
    Unfortunately the party with whom Potter had been negotiating for his wife’s recovery had reneged on the deal. Even so, Potter never took up smoking again.
    “So you, what, imagine yourself smoking?”
    Potter nodded. “And when I can’t sleep I imagine myself taking a sleeping pill.”
    “When you’re, you know, depressed you imagine yourself happy?”
    That, Arthur Potter had found, didn’t work.
    Budd, who’d perhaps asked the question because of the funk he’d been in for the last hour, forgot his dolor momentarily and asked, “What brand aren’t you smoking?”
    “Camels. Without the filter.”
    “Hey, why not?” His face slipped and he seemed sad again. “I never smoked. Maybe I’ll have me an imaginary Jack Daniel’s.”
    “Have a double while you’re at it.” Arthur Potter drew hard on his fake cigarette. They stood among flowering catalpa and Osage orange and Potter was looking down atwhat appeared to be the deep tracks of wagon wheels. He asked Budd about them.
    “Those? The real thing. The Santa Fe Trail itself.”
    “Those’re the original tracks?” Potter was astonished.
    “They call ’em swales. Headed west right through here.”
    Potter, genealogist that he was, kicked at the deep, rocklike tread mark cut into the dirt, and wondered if Marian’s great-great-grandfather Ebb Schneider, who had traveled with his widowed mother from Ohio to Nevada in 1868, had been an infant asleep in the wagon that had made this very track.
    Budd nodded toward the slaughterhouse. “The reason that was built was because of the Chisholm Trail. It went south to north right through here too, from San Antonio to Abilene—that’s our Abilene, in Kansas. They’d drive the longhorns along here, sell off and slaughter some for the Wichita market.”
    “Got another question,” Potter said after a moment.
    “I’m not much of a state historian. That’s ’bout all I know.”
    “Mostly, Charlie, I’m wondering why you’re looking so damn uneasy.”
    Budd lost interest in the swales at his feet. “Well, I guess I wonder what exactly you wanted to talk to me about.”
    “In about forty minutes I’ve got to go talk Handy out