What Bobby Saw

Chapter 1: The Window

Bobby Mitchum couldn't sleep, and that was the beginning of everything.

It wasn't unusual. He'd been a poor sleeper since his wife Linda passed four years ago, the bed too wide, the house too quiet, the hours between midnight and dawn stretching like the panhandle highway outside his kitchen window. Most nights he'd lie there listening to the wind shove itself against the siding, or he'd get up and stand at the sink drinking water he didn't need, staring out at the dark nothing of Cimarron County.

This night — a Tuesday in early October — he'd given up on sleep entirely by two-thirty. He pulled on his robe and walked barefoot into the kitchen, the linoleum cold enough to make him wince. He filled a glass from the tap and stood at the window the way he always did, looking out across the two-lane highway at the shuttered Dawkins Feed & Supply building. It had been closed for going on two years now, ever since old Gene Dawkins had his stroke and his kids sold off the inventory without bothering to sell the property. The building just sat there, a flat-roofed cinder block rectangle with a loading dock on the south side and a hand-painted sign that was already peeling when Bobby moved to Kenton thirty years ago.

The moon was three-quarters full, bright enough to throw shadows. Bobby could see the gravel lot in front of the feed store, the rusted propane tank beside it, the dark cutout of the loading dock. He drank his water and thought about nothing in particular. He thought about the elevator, about the wheat coming in from the Phelps place — no, not Phelps, the family that had bought the Phelps acreage two summers back, the name escaped him — and about whether the bearing on the number-two leg was going to hold through harvest or whether he'd need to call the parts supplier in Liberal.

Then headlights swung off the highway.

A van — white or light gray, he couldn't tell which in the moonlight — pulled into the feed store lot and stopped near the loading dock. The headlights went dark. Bobby watched without particular interest. Teenagers, probably. Kids from Boise City or Keyes looking for a place to drink where nobody would bother them. It happened from time to time.

But then the side door of the van slid open, and two men got out. They moved to the back of the van and opened the rear doors. Bobby set his water glass on the counter and leaned closer to the window.

The two men pulled something from the back of the van. It took Bobby a moment to understand what he was seeing, because the shape didn't make sense at first — it was too long to be a bag, too limp to be lumber, and it moved wrong, with a kind of heavy, jointless sway that Bobby's brain resisted interpreting.

Then one of the men shifted his grip, and the shape resolved itself. It was a person. A man, from the size of him, with his arms hanging loose and his head lolling forward. The two men had him by the shoulders and ankles, and they were carrying him toward the basement entrance on the east side of the building, where a set of concrete steps led down to a steel door that Bobby had never seen open in all his years across the highway.

Bobby stood perfectly still. His hand was on the counter, his fingers touching the base of the water glass, and he did not move. The moon threw the scene in silver and black. He could see the two men clearly enough to know they were men — one tall, one shorter and thicker — but not clearly enough to see their faces. They wore dark clothes. They moved with purpose, not panic. The taller one descended the steps backward, taking the weight of the man's shoulders, while the shorter one followed with the legs.

The steel door opened. Bobby hadn't seen who opened it, which meant there was a third person already inside. The two men carried the limp figure down and through the doorway, and the door closed behind them.

Bobby stood at the window for a long time. He didn't know how long. The van sat in the lot, its doors still open, and nothing moved. Then, maybe ten minutes later, the two men came back out. They closed the van's rear doors, climbed in through the side, and the van pulled out of the lot without turning on its headlights. It went east on the highway, and the taillights didn't come on until it was a quarter mile away.

Bobby watched the red dots shrink and disappear. Then he looked at the feed store. It sat there the way it always sat there, dark and closed and ordinary.

He picked up his water glass and drank what was left. He rinsed the glass and set it in the dish rack. He went back to bed and lay there with his eyes open, listening to the wind, telling himself a story that was easier to believe than what he'd seen.

A bar fight. Three guys out drinking, one of them gets knocked cold, and his buddies need a place to let him sleep it off. That's all it was. Bobby had seen plenty of drunks in his time. He'd been one himself, briefly, after Linda died, before Dwight Colburn had sat him down and told him plainly that he was headed for the ditch and needed to straighten out. Drunks went limp like that. Drunks got carried.

But drunks didn't get carried into the basement of a building that had been locked up for two years.

Bobby turned on his side and closed his eyes. The wind pressed against the house. Out on the highway, a truck downshifted, its engine braking loud enough to rattle the windows, and then the sound faded and there was nothing again.

He told himself it was nothing.

---

Morning came the way it always did in October, pale and cold, the sun taking its time clearing the flat horizon. Bobby was up at five-thirty, same as always. He made coffee in the percolator that Linda had bought at a church rummage sale in 1994 and that still worked fine. He fried two eggs and ate them standing at the counter because he'd gotten out of the habit of sitting down for meals. He put on his boots and his canvas jacket and drove the half mile to the elevator.

The Kenton Grain Elevator was a concrete column that rose a hundred and twenty feet above the prairie, visible from ten miles in any direction. Bobby had worked there for twenty-six years, the last eight as sole operator since the co-op had cut staff. He knew every sound the building made — the hum of the motors, the rattle of the leg chains, the deep groan of grain shifting in the bins. He knew when something was wrong before the gauges told him, the same way a man knows his own house.

He spent the morning checking moisture readings on the last load of hard red winter wheat and updating the inventory log. A farmer named Lowell Briney came by to discuss storage fees, and Bobby had a twenty-minute conversation about the price of wheat and the dryness of the fall and whether the co-op was going to hold or sell, and the whole time he was talking, part of his mind was across the highway, looking at the feed store.

At lunch he drove back to his house and made a sandwich. He stood at the kitchen window and looked at the Dawkins building. In daylight it was the same as it had always been: squat, ugly, closed. The parking lot was empty. There was no van.

Bobby ate his sandwich and went back to work.

That evening he sat in his recliner and watched the news out of Amarillo, then switched to the Oklahoma City station. The weather report said no rain for the next ten days, which was no surprise. There was a story about a highway construction project near Woodward, and a story about a high school football team in Enid that had won twenty games in a row.

Then the anchor said: "Authorities in northwest Oklahoma are asking for the public's help in locating a Woodward County prosecutor who has been missing since last Friday."

Bobby set down his coffee.

The screen showed a photograph of a man in his late forties with a square face, thinning hair, and the kind of expression that suggested he'd been asked to smile for the camera and had done his best. His name was Howard Sennett. He was an assistant district attorney. He'd left his office in Woodward on Friday afternoon, telling his secretary he had a meeting in Liberal, Kansas. His car — a dark blue Chevrolet Impala — had been found at a gas station in Turpin, near the Kansas border, with the keys still in the ignition. His phone was off. His family had not heard from him.

The anchor moved on to sports. Bobby sat in his recliner and felt something settle into his chest like a stone dropped into still water. It wasn't panic. It was slower than panic, heavier, and it came with a kind of recognition that he didn't want.

Turpin was sixty miles east of Kenton. A man driving from Woodward to Liberal would pass through Turpin. And if something happened to that man — if he was taken, if his car was left behind to suggest he'd simply wandered off — the panhandle highway would carry him west, through Boise City, through Keyes, through the empty miles where nobody lived and nobody watched.

Except Bobby had watched.

He turned off the television and sat in the dark. The house was quiet. The wind had died down for once, and the silence was worse than the noise.

He went to bed and didn't sleep.

---

In the morning, Bobby drove to work the way he always did, east on the highway for half a mile. But instead of turning into the elevator lot, he kept driving. He told himself he was just going to look. That was all. Just a look.

The Dawkins Feed & Supply building sat on the north side of the highway, set back fifty yards from the road. Bobby slowed as he approached. The parking lot was empty. The building looked exactly as it had looked for two years — windows dark, loading dock bare, Gene Dawkins's faded sign hanging crooked above the front entrance.

But the padlock on the front door was new.

Bobby had driven past this building ten thousand times. He knew its details the way you know the furniture in your own living room — not because you study it, but because it's always there. The old padlock had been a Master brand, heavy and brass-colored, and it had hung on a rusted hasp that Gene Dawkins had installed sometime in the 1980s. This padlock was silver. It was shiny. It caught the morning sun and threw it back.

Bobby kept driving. He went another mile east, then turned around and drove back to the elevator. He parked his truck and sat in the cab for a long time, looking at the steering wheel, feeling the stone in his chest grow heavier.

Then he got out and went to work.

The bearing on the number-two leg held. The wheat kept coming in. Bobby weighed trucks and checked moisture and recorded bushels in his logbook, and he did not call the police, and he did not drive past the feed store again, and he did not let himself think about the shape of a man being carried down concrete steps in the moonlight.

He told himself that was the end of it.