Notches by Peter Bowen

you I want to lose money. I get half of the crop, if it’s five-dollar wheat this year then I lose … oh, fuck it. Numbers, all it is.”
    “I keep tryin’,” said Booger Tom. “Tryin’ hard.”
    “I think,” said Bart, “that the old bastard is pulling my dick.”
    “Give the damn wheat to charity,” said Booger Tom. “Give it to them damn Rooshians.”
    “Yah, yah,” said Bart. He went inside.
    “It don’t rain, then maybe harvest in a couple weeks,” said Booger Tom. “Them combine crews are about a week behind.”
    Du Pré thought about the contract harvesters. Started down in Texas and worked north, on the road five or six months out of the year. Chaff and dust and itch and long hours. But damn good money. Good people, worked very hard.
    Then, a hailstorm could come up and knock all the kernels off the heads and you got nothin’. Don’t pay to comb the field.
    Farming.
    Ranching, you got your cows, looking for a place to hide, or your sheep, looking for a place to die.
    People here, they got to be tough some.
    Bart appeared at the screen door.
    “Du Pré,” he said, “phone. Harvey Wallace.”
    Du Pré flicked his butt out on the yard and he went inside and he picked up the portable phone and went back out. It crackled a little, not too bad.
    “Mornin’” said Harvey.
    “Yah,” said Du Pré. “Nice out here. How is that Washington, D.C?”
    “Foul,” said Harvey. “Sticky, full of slimy politicians and government titsuckers like me. The founding fathers hated the idea of democracy. They stuck it out in a swamp and waited for the mosquitoes to give everybody yellow fever and kill it off. I take it my man Rolly put you up to this?”
    “Yah,” said Du Pré.
    “Well,” said Harvey. “We are all low-rent riverboa? gamblers here, you know, and you want to peek at our hand.”
    “How is that Pidgeon?” said Du Pré.
    “Her of the gorgeous knockers and mean mouth?” said Harvey. “Thriving. I relayed your request to her and you know what she did?”
    “Uh,” said Du Pré.
    “Pulled out a computer printout and said she knew you were bright and would get around to this.”
    “Christ,” said Du Pré. “There are what, one hundred fifty of them crosses on that map? One hundred fifty?”
    “A lot,” said Harvey. “I doubt that all of them can be credited to one or two accounts.”
    “How long you know there are two of them?” said Du Pré.
    “Gabriel,” said Harvey, “quit spitting at me. I don’t know there are two. I know there are a lot of dead bodies. I thought I would let you just run and see what you came up with. If I had told you everything we think we know, that’s what you would have looked for.”
    “Uh,” said Du Pré. “Yah, well, I do not know either. It makes me sick, all those girls, this guy, these guys, years they do this. No one sees them.”
    “The Green River Killer out in Washington?” said Harvey. “Killed as many as ninety. Then stopped. He died or moved away. We doubt we will ever know. I have a collage of the faces of the murdered women. It is on the wall of my office. To remind me that there is evil in the world.”
    “These girls,” said Du Pré. “Not many of them, you know, we find out who they are.”
    “There are a hundred thousand runaway teenagers at least out there at any given moment,” said Harvey. “Some parents are just glad that they are gone. Some parents don’t have one single photograph of their child. Not one. Nothing. Some of them never report anything. They don’t care. Kids are gone, not eating, taking money for booze or drugs. There are some real pieces of shit in the world. Lots of them.”
    “That Pidgeon,” said Du Pré. “How come she has not called me?”
    “She’s in Europe,” said Harvey, “helping out Scotland Yard. They have some bastard dismembering prostitutes around Edinburgh. Jock the Ripper, of course.”
    Du Pré snorted.
    “We have some information,” said Harvey. “But in so many cases