The halogen beams of police and firefighters illuminated shafts of swirling smoke
rising from charred rubble — all that remained of Wild Bill Hiccup's Drink 'n Drool.
To Pamela Travers, to see the smoking ruins of this place, to walk through its
ashes, was just about worth the long drive in the middle of the night. When her family
had lived in the county, her father had always longed to shut down this disgusting dive,
with its "Girls! Girls! Girls!" neon sign flashing across the boondocks. The scummy
establishment had been the cause of many a police call, nearly always a walk into danger
for the minions of the law. Its nihilistic, rough trade clientele of biker gangs and
permanently disenfranchised ex-miners frequently brawled with lethal weapons. Usually,
they were drunk, and arguing over who had paid the "girl!" the most, and who therefore
deserved her sexual favors for the night. Pam had heard her late father grumble, more
than once, about brown-bag money and the failure of the courthouse to shut this place
down once and for all. Now it looked as if fate had, at last, taken care of that job.
Sheriff Montrose shone the beam from his club-length flashlight over the
shattered remnants of a battered and charred Acura, a Lincoln town car in a similar,
dismal condition, and most surprisingly, the debris covering them. Now being removed,
bit by bit, by fire department personnel and volunteers rousted out of their own cozy
beds, the Sheriff explained to Pam that these metal shards were fragments from a
military Bell helicopter -- a type used in search and rescue missions.
"Figure they come down from the Mountain Home Base," muttered the perplexed
Sheriff. "Now, why they flew down here and what in the world took them out, nobody at
the base'll say. But -- I think I might have an answer laying back at the hospital -- if we
can only pull that answer out."
"Sheriff!" called one of the county rescue workers from inside the burned-out
shell of Wild Bill's.
Montrose went inside, cautiously, shining a light long enough to allow Travers to
stand in the doorway. "What is it, Ted?" asked Montrose.
"What's left of a Cobra, Sheriff."
" That's a king-hell combat fighter," Montrose muttered.
"Was. Now, it's just pieces of junk," Ted intoned.
"Can you give me a lift to the county hospital, Pam?" Montrose asked.
Travers shrugged, and they climbed into her car. It had covered a lot of miles
this dark night.
She had been dreaming an exhilarating dream of flight when the phone
rang, waking her at 1:30 AM. Her eyes blinked, adjusting from magnificent vistas of the
cascading sections of countryside far below, to the bleary, static, rectangular vision of her
clock radio's glowing LED. The phone again rang, a once silent companion turned rude
mechanical intruder. It had to be a wrong number at this hour. She lifted the receiver and
listened.
"Pam? Hello? This is Sheriff Montrose down't Mountain City. Are ya there?"
Travers had never thought to hear this voice again. Randy Montrose was an old
crony of her dad's when he was alive and on the police force in the state to the south.
Now a Sheriff, Montrose was suddenly calling her after eight years. He didn't want to
give her much information over the phone, he said. She felt her father would have
wanted her to respect the sheriff's wishes. She grudgingly agreed to make the trek south
from Boise to meet him.
And so she had driven, down along Highway 51, through the Shoshone
Reservation into Elko County, blaring Whitney Houston on her CD player and eventually
catching glimpses of the shimmering waters of the east fork of the Owyhee River. Now
she fixed her eyes on the road, grim and wordless, as she drove Montrose to the hospital.
She braced for whatever she was going to see there, telling herself she had surely seen as
bad or worse in her daily line of work.
"I've got a live soldier upstairs, a survivor named Lieutenant George McIntire,"
Montrose drawled as he and Travers strolled through the hospital corridors. . "McIntire
caught a bullet in the arm at Wild Bill's," he added, as they boarded an elevator. "Now, I
don't know who pulled that trigger, yet, but I got me a suspicion it might've been this
two-ton lug we hauled in from on down the road about a half-mile. That guy's in the
burn unit." Montrose shuddered slightly. "I assume he was burned in the fire from the
copter crash," Travers replied.
"Nope, didn't look like it. We found him a mile down the road, in the wreckage
of a truck that blew up. In fact, it was the bartender's pickup."
"Good grief, Sheriff. I'm almost surprised we made it here," Travers replied.
"I haven't got to the good part, yet. The reason I called you. Finding those two
guys was strange enough. But, wait'll you see who we found with 'em."
On the second floor, they walked to a guarded room. Another deputy also stood
guard over the next room. "Go on back to the station house, Jake," Montrose told his
deputy. "I ain't goin' nowhere for awhile."
"The pictures gonna come out good, you think, Sheriff?" asked Jake.
"Well, I hope so, but the drug store ain't open for another few hours," replied
Montrose. "I put the roll of film in the chute, though. Now get along home. We'll talk
about this tomorrow."
"And, probably for a long time after," shrugged the departing deputy, with a nod
to his blatantly envious colleague, standing guard at the next door.
Montrose opened the door, switched on the light, and entered the room, along
with Travers. There, lying on the bed with his wrists strapped to the side rails of his
hospital bed, lay a handsome young man with red hair and vibrant, completely blue skin.
Travers nearly swooned. She felt perhaps her dream of flying had merely taken a
detour into a dream of driving to Nevada. Perhaps, while flying, she had collided with an
angel from some remote echelon of Heaven, and he now lay here, in a hospital bed,
recovering.
How long has — he been here?" she asked the Sheriff.
"´Bout five hours now," Montrose replied, checking his wristwatch. " He's
already had a couple o' sedative shots, though the nurse said one would keep him out for
twelve hours." The sheriff opened the room's closet and pulled out an olive drab military
undershirt and fatigue britches. "He was dressed in these," he commented, eyebrows
arched upward. "What d'ya make of ´im?"
"I don't know. Is he really — real?" Travers stammered, lightly touching the
youth's forearm.
"It don't wash off, if that's what you mean," sighed the Sheriff.
"Okay. That's strange, all right. But, uh, why call me down to see him?"
"'Cause I've heard some talk about the work your doing in the prison system.
Figured this kid might tell us somethin'. But in a case like this, well, it might take a well-
trained professional to know how to ask the questions right, know't I mean? I mean,
puttin' the suspect in the right frame of mind to cooperate, don't you know." Montrose
cocked his head, eyebrows raised hopefully.
Travers tensed. If word of her techniques had reached the Sheriff, her entire program
was in danger. If it were shut down, she felt it would be a tragedy for the criminal justice
system in Idaho.
Travers had been something of a prodigy in psychology studies. Her grades had
allowed her to skip her senior year into college, and thanks to intensive work-study, she
had her doctorate before her twenty-third birthday. She was considered within the
professional community to be immensely dedicated, with a pioneering mind and an
intensely disciplined attitude. Two years into her prison work, the low rate of recidivism
she had developed among her parolee "patients" had proved this assessment correct.
None of colleagues knew that her "special" applications were a winking arrangement
with Warden Whitsell — for now. She saw no harm in them, and hoped that one day
they would be commonly accepted in penal systems nationwide.
Meantime, Idaho's prisons were exploding with inmates. The Republican-
dominated legislature continued to pass ever-more punitive laws, mandating longer
sentences for every imaginable offense. The sparsely-populated state had over 4,000
prisoners in its penal system, more than three-quarters of whom were imprisoned for non-
violent offenses. Most of these were minor drug users, and an occasional dealer, but
people were also serving years-long sentences for such Idaho-specific felonies as passing
bad checks under $50.00, or driving on suspended licenses. With each new felony placed
on the law books, the guard union made additional large donations to the incumbents' re-
election campaigns.
Idaho had attracted her due to its severe legal system, but Travers now found her
workload wearing. She had followed a series of critical articles in the Boise Spokesman-
Review and regretted that the schools had lost a quarter of their money while prison
construction allocations had tripled. With little money for rehabilitation and vocational
training in the system, Warden Whitsell was hard-pressed, squeezed between the
skeptical press and citizens' pressure groups on the one hand, legislators, police and
prison guard unions on the other. And now, she realized that the small light she and the
warden were shining into the system was in danger of being snuffed out. She decided to
ignore the implications of Montrose's statement if she could, and react merely as a trained
psychologist.
Yet, what was the meaning of the sight before her eyes?
"Is he — an alien? I mean, could those ´copters have been shot down by a UFO?
Sweet Joseph. I can't believe I'm saying that!" Travers' laugh had a slightly hysterical
tinge.
At that moment, the blue youth groaned and stirred. Drowsily, he shook his head, then
opened his eyes. Travers gasped. Their irises were large and yellow-orange, and in their
centers, he had the slitted pupils of a cat!