Notches

by Peter Bowen

  “Makes you wonder why more kids don’t off their parents,” said Harvey. “But Rolly is no laughing matter. I almost busted him, but he done got clean away. I would dearly love to bust him. Can’t, though.”

  “OK,” said Du Pré. “Why you want to bust him.”

  “There was a time … look, the guy robbed banks. Damn good at it, too. Never hurt a soul. Most of those assholes are so stupid they can’t piss and whistle at the same time. Not Rolly. Never worked with anyone else, so we couldn’t get an accomplice to rat him out. Didn’t leave us anything nice, like fingerprints or blood or hair. Tell you about one of them. Little dink town called Bigfork, it’s gone to yuppies now, up on Flathead Lake? They had a little bank there. There was never any money to speak of in that damned bank but one time a year. They grow a lot of cherries up there, and the bank had to have cash to take care of the checks that the growers wrote the pickers. Cherry season lasts a week, maybe ten days. They had about a quarter mil in small unmarked there, that one fucking Friday, and some guy in a ski mask comes in and takes it. Soft voice, Montana drawl, big gun—I’d bet Rolly didn’t even load the damn thing—in and out in five minutes with a couple garbage bags full of twenties. He run everybody into one corner and loaded up, leaving the dye packet bombs. Pretty smooth. Out the door, into a car he’d stolen just ten minutes before, they find the car an hour later on a Forest Service road and the bandit is solid gone.”

  “Oh,” said Du Pré.

  “Now,” said Harvey, “I don’t want you to get the impression that I hate Rolly or anything. He’s a pretty nice guy, never did any of the things the assholes do. Just robbed banks some until he got a stake together and then he quit. I think. I got no proof. Or his ass would be in Walla Walla, but there it is. Actually, it could be a lot worse. Guy has brains and balls.”

  Du Pré laughed. Then so did Harvey.

  “I like him,” said Harvey. “Dropped by, asked him a few questions once, he looked me in the eye and lied and we both knew it. Now, there wasn’t a thing I could do, unless he decided to get clean with Jesus and confess, but Rolly ain’t the religious type and he just wouldn’t help me throw his ass in the pen for twenty years.”

  “Yeah,” said Du Pré. “Well, neither would I.”

  “So he made us look like assholes,” said Harvey. “Big fucking deal.”

  They chatted a few more minutes and Du Pré hung up.

  Agent Pidgeon, Du Pré drought. My Madelaine, she will like this.

  Du Pré looked off toward the lower pasture. Forty head of horses were running flat out across the rolling yellow grass. There was a lot of green in it, there was still water and it was still raining some.

  Good horses. Booger Tom had bought them over time. He pretty much ran the place, to lose money, so Bart could take some tax write-offs. Booger Tom said there was just nothin’ in the world easier than losing money in the cattle business.

  And Bart about had a cow himself when Booger Tom made money. Quite a lot of money, in the cattle business. The perverse old bastard.

  “I never been able to do nothing right,” said Tom, straight-faced, when Bart complained. “There it is. So shoot me.”

  Then Booger Tom had said he didn’t like cows all that much and he was sure he could lose money in the horse business.

  “You made seven hundred fucking thousand dollars!” Bart had yelled, “Which cost me three million!”

  “You want to lose money or not?” said Booger Tom, and he grinned.

  Du Pré chuckled. He looked again and saw Booger Tom on a big roan gelding chasing the horses. Man was probably seventy-five and he rode like a rider. No effort.

  Du Pré went in the house and he got a drink of water and some ham from the fridge and an apple and he ate out on the porch. He picked his teeth with a sliver. He looked down at the deck he had built and noticed a few of the pegs had started and were fair. Water in the punch holes. He’d have to pound them down. Reglue them. Maybe just cut them off, they had lasted a couple years and a few were always not quite right.

  Du Pré went to the tool barn and he got a hammer and he came back and whacked the pegs down flush with the redwood.

  It was a beautiful cool, sunny day.

  A golden eagle hung high in the sky, drifting.

  Now, Du Pré thought, where that god damned Benetsee is? I need to talk to him.

  Du Pré heard a siren, far off. It faded. Came back. Faded.

  The hills were muffling it.

  Headed this way.

  Why? Someone is sick.

  Du Pré looked down toward Cooper.

  He saw flashing blue lights crest a hill and dip out of sight.

  Shit.

  Benny’s car.

  Du Pré went into the house and he got a canvas jacket and he filled a water bottle and put some jerked meat in his pocket. He went out to his car and he started it and turned around and headed down the long county road toward Benny.

  Du Pré stopped in a snowplow turnout and he waited.

  Two minutes later Benny’s car came flying over the crest of the near hill. Du Pré leaned against his old cruiser. He smoked.

  Benny saw him and he slowed and turned in.

  Du Pré walked to Benny’s car. He saw Benny’s white face through the window. Benny fumbled with the electric window openers for a moment, too upset to do small things properly.

  “Du Pré …” said Benny.

  “We got another one?” said Du Pré.

  “Yeah,” said Benny.

  “Well,” said Du Pré. “Why don’t you call me?”

  “I needed some time to think,” said Benny. Or not think, just drive.

  “Where?” said Du Pré.

  “Dry wash near town,” said Benny. “Cooper, I mean.”

  “OK,” said Du Pré.

  “Been there a while,” said Benny. “That little Morse girl who disappeared five, six years ago?”

  Du Pré nodded. He remembered that one well. The child was five or six, had gone out to play a little more at dusk. No one ever saw her again. She might have been taken by a mountain lion, there were some fresh tracks in the area. That was all that anyone could come up with. The cat ate all of her.

  Mountain lions did that. Ate children, skulls, everything.

  The child was the daughter of a schoolteacher. The schoolteacher had stayed another year and then had moved away. Du Pré didn’t know where she went.

  “OK,” said Du Pré. “We go there.”

  Benny turned around and Du Pré got in his car and he pulled up behind Benny.

  Benny roared off, a crazy speed for the bad road.

  The two of them shot down toward Cooper.

  Benny slowed near town and he pulled off the road into a big pasture which had a rutted track going cross it to a slash in the earth a half mile away.

  Another Sheriff’s car was there, lights slowly flashing.

  Benny and Du Pré drove slowly over the rocks and ruts up to the other car. They parked and got out.

  Du Pré walked up to the edge of the dry wash.

  Benny’s deputy was down in the bottom, near a rusted fifty-five-gallon drum.

  He was on his hands and knees, vomiting.

  CHAPTER 10

  “I HATE THESE MOTHERFUCKERS,” SAID Agent Pidgeon. She was looking at the photographs of little Karen Morse. What the killer had left of little Karen. Among other things, he had skinned the child and carefully rolled the skin up in salt and tied the package with the ribbons the little girl had had in her hair.

  Du Pré looked at the FBI agent. She was six feet tall, slender, with big tits and a narrow waist and legs, legs, legs. Heart-shaped face and big brown eyes. Long pale brown hair. Caramel. She had some Indian blood in her, long earlobes. Thick gold earrings. A nice stainless steel Sig Sauer combat 9mm in a holster hung low under her arm. She had her fitted jacket off. She was smoking.

  “Skeleton was in the bottom of the barrel, this was wrapped up and just lying off in the brush, right?” said Agent P
idgeon. “We’ll go out there tomorrow.”

  You and me and Madelaine go out there tomorrow, thought Du Pré, is how that will work, until Madelaine and you have a little talk. Not that you would want anything to do with a Métis grandfather, but what I think don’t mean shit here, yes.

  “Uh,” said Benny. “Ma’am, do you want to get some dinner?”

  “S’pose so,” said Agent Pidgeon. “Keep up my strength. Thanks. I get a little jacked, I see things like this.”

  “Yeah,” said Benny. “I know what you mean.”

  “Fuck,” said Agent Pidgeon.

  Benny’s glance kept returning to Agent Pidgeon’s tits. He was helpless before their magnificence.

  “Yeah, right, food,” said Agent Pidgeon. She slipped her jacket on and she picked up her attaché case.

  The rest of her luggage was piled out in the front of the Sheriff’s office. Three suitcases and a couple big aluminum trunks.

  “You screen the crime scene?” she said. “Run everything through a sieve?”

  “No,” said Benny.

  Agent Pidgeon nodded.

  “Well,” she said. “Maybe there’s nothing there. You … I dunno. Look, I don’t mean to stalk in here, be a hotshot asshole from the FBI. But maybe he dropped something. Maybe there’s a piece of jewelry. Some damn thing. You got Boy Scouts? Let them help out?”

  “Help out how?” said Benny,

  “We could dig up all the earth around the site,” said Agent Pidgeon, “and run it through a screen.”

  “Oh,” said Benny. “I guess so.”

  Agent Pidgeon looked at Benny. She looked at Du Pré. She shrugged.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I am a little hungry.”

  When they went out the door of the Sheriff’s office they saw the tan government sedan that Pidgeon had been driving being towed to the garage. Pidgeon had driven at such a rate of speed from Billings that the car had blown up twenty miles down the highway. One rod and piston had gone right through the side of the engine.

  Du Pré had been closer, so he fetched her after she called Benny’s office on the phone.

  When he had pulled up to the steaming car, off in the barrow pit, he noticed all the luggage piled neatly by the roadside. Agent Pidgeon was sitting on one of the suitcases, legs nicely crossed, smoking a cigarette and looking like an ad for some filter-tip brand.

  “You Indian?” she said, when Du Pré had loaded her luggage, with her help, and loaded her, and driven off.

  “Métis,” said Du Pré, “French, Scottish, Cree, Chippewa—we are the Mixed Bloods.”

  “Hum,” said Agent Pidgeon, “I’m a Redbone myself. Black, Cherokee, white, Mexican, French …”

  “Oh,” said Du Pré. “You are Louisiana.”

  “Some of my folks were,” said Pidgeon. “Me, I’m pure California surfìn’ girl. Grew up in Coronado. Drink Dos Equis, get tan. Wear gold chains.”

  “How you get to the FBI?” said Du Pré.

  “They needed me,” said Agent Pidgeon, “I’m so many nice minority groups. Besides, after Georgetown Law School I was pretty well convinced that I would be a lot happier putting scum in jail than I would be keeping them out of it. Did a stint in the D.C. Public Defender’s Office. That’ll do it for ya.”

  “Oh,” said Du Pré.

  “I am not a nice person,” said Agent Pidgeon.

  “Uh,” said Du Pré.

  “You seem like a smart man,” said Agent Pidgeon.

  “Huh?” said Du Pré.

  “Yup,” said Agent Pidgeon.

  Du Pré shrugged. He rolled himself a cigarette with his left hand as he was shooting down the highway at eighty.

  Agent Pidgeon looked at him doing it.

  Du Pré lit his cigarette.

  “Let me try that,” said Agent Pidgeon.

  Du Pré handed her the papers and the little bag of Bull Durham.

  “You are a psychologist?” said Du Pré.

  “What do you think?” said Agent Pidgeon.

  “That Georgetown is a pretty good law school, yes?” said Du Pré.

  “They think so,” said Agent Pidgeon.

  “Where you get your psychology degree?”

  “Columbia,” said Agent Pidgeon. “They thought they were a pretty good psychology school, they said so.”

  Du Pré laughed.

  “OK,” said Agent Pidgeon. “What matters to me is we catch this guy and send him up forever or fry the fucker, either one’ll do. If we do that, then they were good schools, if not, they ain’t shit.”

  Du Pré roared.

  “Harvey said I’d like you,” said Agent Pidgeon. “He also said you were a good guy and not to beat up on Benny Klein, who is a good guy, too, but not that much of a cop.”

  “Benny, he is a small rancher,” said Du Pré. “He is maybe too kind a man to do this well.”

  “I imagine he does fine,” Agent Pidgeon had said.

  Du Pré thought about all this while he drove Agent Pidgeon to the bar in Toussaint, which had the only real food in the area.

  There were a few people in the bar. Agent Pidgeon looked around the shabby big room, at the mangy deer and elk heads and the ratty bear skin nailed to one wall. She nodded.

  She walked over to the bar and leaned over to Susan Klein and she said a few words and then she fished a little gift out of her attaché case. Susan laughed and took it and she turned it around in her hand and then she took the ribbon and paper off it. She lifted the lid of the little box and took out a pair of silver earrings, big circles of metal with strands of beads hanging in the center hole.

  Du Pré looked on and he grinned. That Harvey Weasel Fat, always sucking up to them women. Smart man, that Harvey.

  The door opened behind Du Pré and Madelaine came in with Lourdes in tow. They were laughing. They hugged Du Pré.

  “That is that Agent Pidgeon,” said Madelaine, hissing into Du Pré’s ear. “Some set of tits she got, there. I think maybe I watch the two of you pret’ good.”

  “She don’t want some broke-down Métis,” said Du Pré.

  “Good thing, too,” said Madelaine.

  Agent Pidgeon had turned around and she was looking at Du Pré and Madelaine and Lourdes. She came over.

  “Madelaine?” said Agent Pidgeon. “Harvey said that you were the best thing about Du Pré, here. And this is Lourdes?”

  “Yes. Yes.”

  “Um,” said Agent Pidgeon. “We could get a table.”

  They found an empty table with four chairs and they sat. Susan Klein came over.

  “I know what they want, dear,” she said. “How about you?”

  “Red wine?” said Pidgeon.

  “Cabernet?” said Susan. “It’s pretty good. What I drink.”

  “Wonderful.”

  “Steaks are good,” said Susan. “The special is gone, sorry.”

  “Rare,” said Pidgeon.

  “OK,” said Susan. She went off.

  “Harvey sends his love,” said Pidgeon.

  “Ah, he is such a good dancer,” said Madelaine.

  Du Pré looked at the ceiling.

  “Nice man, too,” said Madelaine.

  “Harvey?” said Pidgeon. “Harvey maybe changes he comes out here. Back there he’s a giant pain in the ass. Always staring at my tits and wondering when I am going to get what he needs out of the computer.”

  “He is a guy,” said Madelaine. “They got only the two heads, think with the little one, they all belong, hospitals.”

  “Mama!” said Lourdes.

  “My daughter, she wants me in a cage,” said Madelaine.

  Lourdes was blushing.

  Why she run away? thought Du Pré. He hadn’t been told.

  “Lourdes,” said Pidgeon. “This Challis guy who brought you back here? How did he pick you up?”

  Lourdes looked down at her lap. Her lower lip quivered.

  Pidgeon reached over and she patted Lourdes’s hand.

  “It’s OK, honey,” she said, “as l
ong as you’re all right.”

  Du Pré looked at Lourdes.

  I wonder any of us know any of us, he thought.

  CHAPTER 11

  DU PRÉ THREW A shovelful of earth scraped from the hard ground near the barrel against the sieve. Booger Tom played a hose that ran from a spray tank on a big flatbed truck against the earth. The soil ran yellow from the screen. Gravels gleamed.

  Nothing.

  They had been doing this for three days.

  They had found one post from an earring for a pierced ear.

  Little Karen Morse had not had pierced ears.

  Du Pré thought about the skinned child. She had been white-blond.

  Five years old.

  He threw another shovelful of earth against the sloping screen.

  Bart and a couple of the ranch hands were walking slowly on each side of the rutted track that led back to the dry wash, stooping to look at anything out of the ordinary. There were a few condoms left by kids who had pulled off here to fuck. Beer cans and bottles, a couple bright paper bags that once held potato chips.

  Booger Tom had spotted a hank of the child’s hair stuck on a sagebrush a hundred feet away.

  “Moved wrong,” said Booger Tom. Tracking, you looked for what should not be there and was, or what should be there and was not.

  Tracking.

  Du Pré shoved the tip of the shovel’s blade toward a thick old sagebrush trunk. The earth parted easily. Something gleamed.

  A chain, the sort that made a bracelet. The links were bent flat.

  Du Pré whistled.

  He dropped down on his hands and knees and he stared hard at the chain peeking out from the broken earth.

  A green gemstone sparkled.

  “What you got, there?” said Booger Tom. He had come after he shut off the hose.

  “A chain,” said Du Pré. He took a pencil from his pocket and he put it through the loop of chain and he tugged it away from the earth that held it.

  Several clods came up with it. Du Pré saw a knife blade, a stainless-steel one, short and wide.

  “I’ll get some bags,” said Booger Tom. He limped off toward the cab of the truck.

  Du Pré waited and he stared.

  When Tom came back Du Pré dropped the bracelet into the first of the locking plastic bags. He took a pair of folding pliers from his pocket and he jabbed the needlenose points around the knife blade and pulled the knife away from the soil.