Buffalo Jump Blues Read Online Free Page B

need, my dear fellow,” Willoughby said, “is a pint of Slow Elk Oatmeal Stout and a deluxe blue cheese bison burger, on me of course, though I’m still smarting from your snub.”
    â€œToday’s my father’s birthday. I like to make a few casts for him. I’m sorry for not telling you earlier.”
    â€œPerfectly understandable.”
    Willoughby nodded to the waitress, and when the beers came, they toasted to Sean’s father.
    â€œStill no one to play the piano?” Sean said.
    Winston raised a pair of sculpted eyebrows. “You’re in a mermaid bar and you’re worried about the piano player?”
    â€œActually, I heard they might be getting someone from New Orleans,” Willoughby said.
    â€œOh?”
    Sean had had an affair of the soul, the body, too, though perhaps not the heart, with a piano bar singer from Mississippi shortly after he’d moved to Montana. The singer, who went by Velvet Lafayette and whose real name was Vareda Beaudreux, had read the etched letters on the ripple glass of his art studio at the Bridger Mountain Cultural Center—
Private Investigations
—taken the sign literally, and hired him to find her brother, and then her brother’s killer, when the man wound up drowned with a Royal Wulff trout fly hooked in hislower lip. No, it couldn’t be her. Vareda had disappeared back into the Delta country from which she had come, but then she had mentioned singing in New Orleans once.
    â€œYou wouldn’t have caught the name?” he asked Willoughby.
    â€œNo, it was just something the Queen of the Waters said in passing.”
    â€œAh, queen of my heart,” Winston said.
    â€œI believe the body part to which you refer lies somewhere south of the heart,” Willoughby corrected.
    When Sean had entered the bar, the seven-thousand-gallon tank was empty, the mermaids who took turns taking dips changing shifts. Besides the Queen of the Waters—a copper blonde with Botticelli curls who had been coaxed from South Florida, where she swam with reef fish as a surprise treat for the patrons of a glass-bottomed boat—the mermaids included the Parmachene Belle and the Chippewa Nymph. All had taken their names from fishing flies, and with the exception of the Queen, who was seeing Sean’s best friend, Sam Meslik, Sean knew more about the histories of the fly patterns than of the women who assumed their names.
    Hearing a splash, he turned his head to see the Parmachene Belle enter the tank, trailing a fizz of bubbles. Her hair was platinum with dyed red streaks and her long white tail was scarlet-banded, the color combination of the trout fly. A muscular swimmer, she backflipped, bubbles blowing out of her nose, her candy-cane tail flowing. Sean turned his attention back his burger and the table’s conversation, which was about the bison falling off the cliffs, the Palisades being only a few miles downriver from the clubhouse and even closer to the bar. Robin Cowdry had broken the news, which thanks to Peachy Morris was up and down the valley in the span of a day. Sean’s sympathy for the buffalo already being voiced by those at the table, he nodded along, and when his eyes returned to the glass, the Parmachene Belle had kicked to the front of the tank, where she stared incuriously at the patrons of the bar, who stared back as if they wereobserving an orangutan in a zoo. When a man raised his camera, she beckoned him closer with the waving hands of a belly dancer.
    Sean felt his phone buzzing in his pants pocket—a surprise as this part of the valley was usually a dead spot for reception—and walked outside to take the call. It was Katie Sparrow, the search dog handler who worked as a backcountry ranger in Yellowstone Park.
    â€œIs dickhead one word or two?” she said by way of hello.
    â€œUh, one, I think.”
    â€œâ€™Cause I’m writing a text, and it starts, ‘Dear Dickhead, where