Chapter One
The Death Trap
Sally Alder had never been all that big on the notion that
the two sexes were, in some fundamental way, opposites.
She tended to believe that men and women had a lot more in
common than, say, palm trees and golden retrievers, and
she'd always held that any woman had the potential to be
as big a jerk as any man.
But she was beginning to think that there might be some
differences between the genders that were hardwired. Take,
for example, the inability of male drivers to navigate
supermarket parking lots. Every time you came within a
hair of a head-on with some flea brain evidently unaware
of the fact that all the parked cars were pointing in one
(i.e., the other) direction, you just knew there'd be a
guy behind the wheel. Even Hawk Green, a man who could
find his way through the densest forest and navigate
across the most trackless desert with the confidence of a
man getting in an elevator, seemed to have a brain freeze
every time he had to tackle the grocery store lot.
On this lovely Wyoming summer morning, the parking lot of
the Laramie Lifeway was terrifyingly full of them, in big
rusting pickups and behemoth RVs and SUVs, half of them
hauling horse trailers, scaring the hell out of the
regular shoppers and the mild-mannered tourist families
who had the lack of imagination to be headed down the
aisles in the normal way. Sally'd decided to play it safe
and park halfway down an empty row, far from the store,
when a long-bed king-cab Ford swerved ass-backward into
the space right next to her. Just as she was opening the
doorof her mint-condition, 1964 1/2 Mustang and stepping
out, three happy cowpokes in plaid shirts and brand-new
straw hats leaped out of the Ford in a clatter of empty
beer cans, hauled a giant Coleman cooler out of the bed of
the pickup, pulled the plug on the bottom, and started
draining cooler water all over her new Italian sandals.
She looked down into the open cooler. A ballooning plastic
bag containing a loaf of Wonder bread and a half-open pack
of bologna floated in two inches of cloudy fluid.
Bologna water on her new shoes.
She gave the pokes a murderous look, but they were too
busy deciding that their lunch looked good enough to go
another day. Fine. Maybe they'd get botulism.
To be fair, the pokes weren't the only source of
congestion. Threading her way to the store, Sally first
ran afoul of a Winnebago with Nebraska plates unloading an
oversize couple, tempers inflamed by raging red sunburns,
fighting about whose idea it had been to spend Sunday by
the pool at the Little America campground, and who had
forgotten that the sun was stronger at high altitude. Then
she was nearly run down by a pair of spandex-clad mountain
bikers who were treating the parking lot like the rad-most
slickrock at Moab. And finally, wonder of wonders, a
vintage Volkswagen van sat blocking the handicapped access
ramp. The van had disgorged a tribe of pierced and
tattooed dreadheads in tie-dyed T-shirts and jeans,
panhandling shoppers for grub money.
Jubilee Days. Every July, for one week, it was the same.
Here it was only Monday morning, and already the multitude
was gathering for the feast. Laramie locals had three
choices: party down, hunker down, or get out.
Long experience had taught Sally to plan a combination of
the three, starting with getting out. She and Hawk were
taking the afternoon off and heading up to the mountains
for a hike. The Laramie Range, east of town on the way to
Cheyenne, wasn't as high or as breathtaking as the
Snowies, but it was a shorter drive. Hawk could get some
work done in the morning, and she figured she'd get in a
bout of grocery shopping. Pulling a cart out from the line
of them nested together, she nearly collided with the red-
faced Nebraskans. Yep, "bout" was the word.
Laramie had four supermarkets, and Sally had shopped them
all and settled on the Lifeway. It was closest to her
house, she knew where everything was, and now and then she
could even find a piece of fish that didn't look like it
had been forced to crawl all the way from the ocean to
Wyoming. Ordinarily she found the store well enough
stocked, spacious, and clean. The employees, if not
uniformly friendly and helpful, were at least not
generally surly and incompetent. A model consumer
experience, even though she and Hawk had the habit of
referring to the place as "the Death Trap."
Today the place was nearing overload. The aisles were
jammed. The shelves had already been denuded of high-
demand items like hot dogs and Oreos and Velveeta, and the
stock clerks were having a hard time keeping up. Sally was
rushing through her own shopping and trying to get the
hell out of there when, as was inevitable, she ran into
someone she knew, who wanted to yak. Amber McCloskey, a
University of Wyoming student who was house-sitting for
Sally's friends Edna McCaffrey and Tom Youngblood, was
bearing down on her with a cartload of trail mix, instant
oatmeal, and macaroni and cheese. "Hey, Dr. Alder! How you
doin'?" she said cheerfully, the metal stud in her tongue
flapping up and down in a hypnotic little dance.
"Hey, Amber," Sally returned weakly, registering two
facial piercings (lip and eyebrow) she wasn't sure she'd
seen before. "How's Edna's house?"
"Great! Gosh, I can't believe how big it is compared to my
apartment. I don't know how they keep it clean all the
time!"
Bad sign.
"And all those plants they've got -- inside, outside,
upstairs, downstairs, jeez, it's practically..."
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