This is the unedited, raw manuscript of the opening scene of the third Sherman Iron mystery. I’ve been stuck on this for a long time, and I hope by letting my friends and readers have a look at it, I can mobilize myself to finish the story. Remember: Unedited! Have mercy about the typos, they’ll get cleaned up long before it’s published. The cover and the “Forging Iron” title are also tentative.
***
The County Clerk and Recorder had a service dog, and it was a real struggle for me not to pet it. He was a golden retriever with a sleek, freshly-brushed coat, giving every impression of being asleep right next to me. If I could just scratch between those ears and whisper “who’s a good boy,” everything would be right with the world. I could feel it all the way to my bones.
Alas, it’s kind of a faux pas to distract a blind person’s guide animal, so I used my hands for taking notes instead. It was, after all, my job.
I’m Sherman Iron, I’m a reporter for the Hunter Post.
Tall, skinny, and entirely-too-light-haired for my own liking, I wore my jeans and hiking boots almost everywhere, including to the County Commission’s public hearing on zoning issues that evening. But in a change from my old addiction to T-shirts, I wore an oversize red and black flannel shirt, untucked, hanging loose and far past my belt.
The reason for that was riding in an inside-the-waistband holster on my right hip. The loose plaid lumberjack shirt concealed a revolver.
I covered the crime beat. Murders, burglaries, casino robberies — these were my stock in trade. With the tide of illegal drugs rising higher every day, the job got more dangerous all the time. Last summer I’d had to use an ancient over-under hunting shotgun as my only weapon against thugs carrying 9mm submachine guns, and I had vowed to change that. So a new acquisition nestled secure and invisible under my big wool shirt.
I liked my job. I liked cops. I particularly liked the prosecuting attorney. I liked writing about crime.
Politics? That I did not like. But tonight I had no choice. My colleague whose job it was had called in sick.
The Hunter Post had a guy who wrote government and election stories. He covered the Congressman and the Senators every time they came through town. He wrote up local races. He had all the big deal connections in both parties, and could get his call answered if he dialed the Governor’s cellphone.
He also had pneumonia. So my new city editor told me it was now my job, at least for the next week. My ill colleague dropped into my lap a brand new story about money in politics, a tip about the first question to ask, and a wish for good luck before he exhausted his energy and fell back asleep.
Thus, cell phone in hand, voice recording app launched, I left behind Rhonda Comings the Clerk and Recorder and her eminently huggable golden, and made my way to the front of the room as soon as the meeting ended.
With Halloween coming up and an election not long after, autumn had seized firm control of the local weather. The forced air heating of the county courthouse dried things out so thoroughly I was afraid if I blinked, my eyelids would stick to my eyes. Outside, yellow leaves reflected the streetlights back into the fourth-floor windows.
A gently curved head table dominated the front of the room. Rows of cheap audience seats stretched from it to the back wall. A podium and microphone stand poked up in the middle of the table’s arch, like a baby tree in the middle of a freshly-mown lawn. Members of the public and county employees who came to report to the commissioners were supposed to speak from there.
An unassuming, stain resistant berber carpet impressed no one but didn’t distract. Behind that curved table were three leather executive chairs that looked like each of them cost more than everything I owned, including that brand new handgun, which was not cheap. It seemed to me like someone spent the entire facilities budget on their chairs, and forgot about the people who’d have to attend meetings.
One of those chair-lovers scurried for the back door as I approached, but I caught him before he could get away. The classic monk’s fringe of silvery hair made a kind of halo of seniority around his head, while deep furrows crisscrossed his face like the famous canals of Mars. Spectacles slid down almost to the edge of his nose and distorted the sides of his eyes through their coke bottle lenses. A smartwatch poked out from under the sleeve of his jacket; the sportcoat and khaki slacks came from Wal-Mart; I knew because I had passed by the same choices when I went to buy my new flannel button-downs.
My disease-ridden colleague had told me what question to ask first, so I popped it out right up front.
“Commissioner, is it true you spent a hundred thousand dollars of your own money on your re-election campaign?”
His eyes widened a bit, and he eased backward, crossing his arms over his chest as he did, making the cheap jacket bunch up a bit. The corners of his mouth settled down like the foundation of a cheap house.
“That’s entirely legal under the campaign finance laws.”
Ole the political reporter had been right. Springing that on him out of nowhere caught him off guard.
“I know, Commissioner, it’s just a lot of dead presidents. I’m curious why.”
Commissioner Ambrose Pryor had recovered his verbal balance. When I asked him about the money, I apparently caught him off guard, and his defensive response about campaign finance rules reflected it. Now, he threw me some spin to try to recover.
“You can’t put a value on serving the people of Hunter County. I’ve invited Montanans to invest in my campaign, and they have. It wouldn’t be right for me to ask others to chip in if I wasn’t willing to bear as much of the burden as possible myself.”
I dutifully made a note of his answer, then, “What are you planning to do with the money?”
“I’m running for re-election because I have a vision for our community. Communicating that vision to the people is the heart of running for office.”
“So, TV ads then?”
“Our campaign plan calls for a diverse spectrum of markets.”
I nodded, noted it down, and thought, TV, in other words.My sometime-semi-friend Gil Farshaw’s job was safe at least. He had been promoted from “weather guy with occasional news duties” to a full time real reporter. A hundred thousand bucks to his station ought to keep him paid for at least a little while. Heck, with what they paid local reporters these days, Commissioner Pryor’s hundred grand might just be paying Gil’s salary for years.
That could have been enough for a story. This wasn’t my beat, I was just filling in for a colleague. And I didn’t care about politics, except for my girlfriend’s re-election campaign.
But something was bothering me.
Commissioner Pryor bought his clothes at the big box discount store same as me. As one of three elected Commissioners for Hunter County, he drew an annual salary of $65,000 per year. Not bad… way better than a reporter makes. But how could he afford to part with more than a year’s salary?
Investment-wise, it penciled out. Six years as county commissioner multiplied by 65K was almost 400 grand. For him to spend one hundred grand to win four hundred grand definitely worked in terms of profit and loss.
But did he really have it to spare? And if he did, why was he buying “George” brand made-in-China sportcoats?
Curious, I made a small wager with myself.
The county courthouse had a parking garage right next door, and I was willing to bet that the Commissioners had reserved spots there. I left the commission’s public hearing on zoning behind, rode the elevator down to the first floor, resisted the temptation to stop in at the County Attorney’s office, and walked through the bitter October air to the parking garage. The open cement half-walls offered almost no protection from the wind. Cold I may have been, but I also won my bet. The first 10 spaces in the garage were all marked reserved, and the third one in particular bore a sign that said, “Commissioner Ambrose Pryor.”
Parked in it was a no-longer-white 1999 Ford pickup, rust all over the bumper, front fender painted in gray body primer rather than the same color as the rest of the vehicle. I looked through the window. Striped fabric seat covers failed to hide massive rips in the seat. Fast food wrappers littered the floor.
A faded, green hardbound book with no title, that looked a bit like an accountant’s ledger occupied the passenger seat. While there was no title, someone had scratched a word on the front cover with a knife. I couldn’t read it through the glass in the dimly lit garage, though.
But I didn’t need to know about his reading material to answer my own question: Pryor wore cheap clothes and drove a broken down ancient clunker. If he had a hundred thousand bucks to spend, why not spend some of it fixing this junkheap up.
I had one last item to check, but I needed a computer to do it. I headed out on the windy fall streets of my home town, watching golden leaves drift to the sidewalk in streetlamp haloes. The moon over the Rockies lit my path back to the Hunter Post.
My paper lived in a white and brown pebbled concrete building downtown bought and, fortunately, paid for back in the days when local dailies used to get fat on ads, literally and figuratively. Corporate was always talking about selling this building and making us rent space in a minimall, but thank goodness so far the rents on minimall space were too high to fit the budget.
At this hour, the front doors were closed. Entering through the employees-only entrance on the side, I left behind the chilly almost-winter evening, strolled across the newsroom to my desk and sat down to turn on the computer. Moments later, I was looking at the county treasurer’s property tax records, where I found the residence address for one Pryor, Ambrose.
Armed with the address, Maps Street View gave me a look at the house. Paint peeled off the faded wood, helped along by the winter air. A rain gutter had pulled away from the roof. The chain link fence to the back yard sagged and was pulling away from its frame in places.
It didn’t take an ace investigative reporter to reach the obvious conclusion. Ambrose Pryor couldn’t spare a hundred thousand bucks.
So where did it come from?
That question could wait. I had a story to file before deadline, and we can’t just randomly speculate about people’s financial health in the paper. I would need proof before I could do that, and it wasn’t going to come in before the morning edition.
I led with the “That’s perfectly legal” quote because it sounded defensive and gave the impression he had something to hide. His smoother lines, I tucked in at the back. Political talking points aren’t news, but sometimes honesty is. I clicked submit on the content management system, and my 600 words went winging off to the editor to prove that I had done as I’d been told.
Then, my job technically done, I put my feet up on the desk, put my hands behind my head, and let my mind go back to the question I’d been asking since I talked to him. How could Ambrose Pryor afford a hundred thousand bucks?
The picture of his house on Street View wasn’t necessarily 100 percent reliable. I’d have to go out there in person at some point, if I decided I cared enough about this story to work harder. But his truck? That I’d seen with my own eyes, and it was a piece of junk. You didn’t need a green accountant’s ledger on the seat to know that…
My train of thought stopped in its tracks.
All the hair on my arms stood up, followed by goosebumps. A profanity tumbled out of my lips, gravel out the back of an overfull dump truck.
The ledger!
At once I was out of my seat, pushing the employee door open and heading for the county courthouse. The night wind nipped at my cheeks, and I knew Montana weather well enough to know snow lay in our future, but at that moment I didn’t care. I walked as briskly as I could back to the parking garage next door to the Hunter County courthouse, but I was too late.
Pryor’s pickup was gone.
With it went my chance to take a look at that hardbound green volume with no printed title but a word carved into the cover with a knife.
Which was too bad, because I was pretty sure I knew what the word was.
I had seen that green book before, but not for almost fifteen years.
It belonged to my father.
And the word on the front was “Sherman.”
***
Like it? You can get the audiobook of Irons in the Fire, the first Sherman Iron mystery here on Amazon, here on Audible, and here on Apple.
You can get the e-book version of Irons in the Fire here, and the e-book version of Iron Law here.
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