Read Online 3 - Buffalo Mountain: Ike Schwartz Mystery 3 by Frederick Ramsay - Free Book Online

weather. Maybe he’s a pussy when it comes to cold.”
    “Take me home, James.”
    “Shut up.”
    ***
    Ike found a Denny’s open along I-81 and pulled off for a break. He needed time to think. He carried Charlie’s secure cell phone in with him and placed it on the table. Denny’s did breakfast. He knew they also served lunches, platters, dinners, and a great variety of menu items, but the only thing worth eating at a Denny’s, Ike believed, was breakfast. While he waited he pulled the phone from its case and read the instructions printed on the inside. The phone appeared to have been borrowed from a SEAL team. Or perhaps it had been issued to them and returned. Either way it was undoubtedly government issue.
    “Well now, it’s been a long time since I seen one of them old timey cell phones,” his waitress said as she placed silverware and a glass of water in front of him. “You get that at a yard sale?”
    “No yard sales in this weather, darlin’.”
    “Well, my daddy had one like that back in the day. Like, he was the first man in our town to have one. It didn’t work so good though. No towers out where we lived. Be right back with your coffee.”
    Ike pushed the phone back into its case and stared out the window. The sun hovered low in the west just above the mountains. The snow had stopped and tomorrow would be cold. He had no idea what he would do with the phone. Give it to Whaite? He, more than Ike, would likely turn up something useful. But it had been issued to him, to Charlie, actually, and was signed for. If it went missing, Charlie would be held responsible.
    Ike did not like the possibilities Kamarov’s death created. Someone killed him and that someone could be one of Charlie’s colleagues, from the presumed black program, or…it occurred to him, even a Russian sent to shut Kamarov down for certain. Where do you begin to sort that out?
    “Say, you’re that sheriff from down to Picketsville. I thought I recognized you. Here’s your coffee. I hope it ain’t too hot. You done had that big robbery with all them pictures and stuff, didn’t you?”
    “Yes, we did. You remembered.”
    “Well shoot, yes. It was on the TV and in the papers—even USA Today had you. I seen you on one of their pages. I get to read the papers the customers leave behind all the time. Never have to buy one. It’s like a perk or something.”
    “Yes, well…” Ike sipped his coffee. It was too hot.
    “So, how’d you catch the bad guys anyway?”
    “Routine police work. You ask questions, poke around, ask more questions, and get lucky.”
    “You don’t have to check their DNA and stuff like that? I watch the TV and that’s how they do it. They never, you know, bang into rooms and such. They sit in this lab-like place and do tests and then go arrest bad guys. And they’re always right. You don’t do that?”
    “Only when we don’t have any other choices. Mostly we ask questions and put people in the right place at the right time. Give me a Grand Slam, bacon crisp, please.”
    “Okay, coming right up. Well, it’s been nice talking to you. The manager’s giving me a look. He don’t like us fraternizing too much with the customers, but seeing as how you are a police, I guess it don’t matter.”
    Routine police work. He’d send Whaite and Sam out again. Starting tomorrow, they’d just have to grind it out.

Chapter 10
    Colonel Robert Twelvetrees stared at the predicament he had created with his car. It hung halfway in the driveway and halfway in the street, its rear end buried in a low snowbank that he had not seen, a snowbank created by a well-meaning neighbor plowing the street. Successive melting and thawing during the previous day had turned it into nearly solid ice. Now he could go neither forward nor backward and he needed to get to the store. He stood alone in the cold, squinting at the sunlight reflected off the car’s windshield. He’d mislaid his gloves somewhere. Luckily, his neighbors had