Spotted Cats

by William G. Tapply

  I wandered around West Yellowstone all afternoon. I visited every fly shop in town. I made a pain in the ass of myself, buttonholing all the clerks, asking about current insect hatches at the rivers, the flies they recommended to match them, tying techniques to make those flies, anything that occurred to me. All my fly-fishing gear had burned up in my car. I supposed someday I’d mourn that loss, too.

  What bothered me was that I had no desire to go fishing.

  I stopped at most of the bars between fly shops. There are lots of bars in West Yellowstone.

  I avoided the Totem.

  After a while I found myself able to avoid thinking too much about what had happened.

  And so I passed the entire day.

  I was having breakfast on the patio the next morning, Tuesday, wondering what to do with myself on this my last day in West Yellowstone, when I saw Sheriff Hawkins approaching me. A younger man was with him.

  ‘Mornin’, Mr Coyne,’ said Hawkins.

  ‘Good morning, Sheriff.’

  ‘How you doin’ today, son?’ The sheriff squinted at me.

  I nodded. ‘OK. Better.’

  ‘Well, that’s fine,’ he said. ‘This here’s Mr Langley. He’s from the state police up to Bozeman.’

  I shook hands with Langley. He wore a summer-weight suit and carried a briefcase. ‘Coffee, gentlemen?’ I said.

  Hawkins shook his head. ‘Not me.’

  But he sat down at my table, and so did Langley. ‘I don’t mind,’ said the Montana state cop.

  A waitress came over and refilled my cup. I asked her to bring one for Langley, and she returned with it in a minute. After she left, Langley said to me, ‘How are you feeling, Mr Coyne?’

  I shrugged. ‘I’m OK.’

  ‘Bad experience.’

  ‘It was.’

  ‘You got any enemies out here, Mr Coyne?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Just asking.’

  I shook my head. ‘Not that I know of.’

  ‘What about Mr Dillman?’

  ‘I don’t think so. I can’t imagine Flask having an enemy. There was nothing to dislike about him.’ Hawkins was watching me placidly, nodding.

  ‘I hate to contradict you,’ said Langley.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘One of you’s got an enemy, all right.’

  ‘I don’t see—’

  ‘Your car,’ interjected Hawkins, ‘was blowed up.’

  ‘Well, sure,’ I said. ‘It caught fire and exploded. I know that.’

  ‘No,’ said Langley. ‘It was blown up, Mr Coyne. Dynamite. It was wired.’

  I frowned and shook my head. I had already thought of that and rejected it. It happened in movies, not in real life. It happened to mobsters and DEA agents, not gentle fishing guides and Boston lawyers. ‘That can’t be right,’ I said. ‘It would’ve blown up when I turned on the ignition if it was wired. We’d been driving for ten or fifteen minutes before it caught fire. There was a gas leak or something. Otherwise—’

  Langley reached across the table and put his hand on my arm. ‘Slow down, Mr Coyne. Listen. The way it was rigged, one of the wires was wrapped around the tailpipe. When it heated up, it melted the plastic coating on the wire, and then the wire made contact with the pipe, which completed the circuit, and…’ He shrugged.

  ‘You’re trying to tell me that somebody was trying to kill me.’

  Langley nodded. ‘You or Mr Dillman. Yes.’

  ‘They wanted it to happen somewhere on the highway, where it would look like an accident.’

  ‘That’s how we figure it,’ he said. ‘The way it was rigged, it wouldn’t go off for ten or fifteen minutes, enough time for you to drive out of town and get into the country. Your car would explode, go off the road, probably smack into a tree or roll over a few times. Most likely, no one would actually see it happen. When it was found, it would be in flames, of course, but it’d just look like reckless driving, like it caught fire after it crashed. Out here people drive fast. Too damn fast. Wide open spaces, all that. No way to patrol our highways. We have these kind of accidents. Probably no one would ever think to examine the wreckage too close, looking for a bomb, if it had happened that way.’

  ‘Where I come from they’d sure as hell examine it.’

  He shrugged. ‘This is Montana.’

  I shook my head slowly. ‘Jesus,’ I whispered.

  ‘So let me ask you again,’ said Langley softly. ‘Who’d want to do that?’

  I sipped my coffee. McBride. He was the only candidate. I decided not to tell this to Langley. Not yet. I wanted to work on that idea for myself first. ‘I suppose there are people who don’t like me,’ I said. ‘Maybe some of them are even enemies. But someone who’d want to kill me? Anyway, they’re all back in Boston.’ I spread my hands. ‘I don’t know.’

  Langley nodded. ‘That’s a hard one, I realize. Listen. You think on it. We’ll talk again.’

  He stood up and Hawkins followed suit.

  ‘Mr Coyne,’ said Hawkins, ‘I want you to be careful. Best if you stick close to the Inn for a few days.’

  ‘Are you trying to frighten me?’

  ‘Mean to say you ain’t frightened yet?’

  I tried to smile. ‘OK. I hear you.’

  ‘We’ll be in touch,’ said Langley. He and Hawkins turned. I watched them walk away.

  I had one more cup of coffee. Then I left the table.

  I went up to my room, sat on my bed, and called Delta Air Lines. Then I called my office.

  ‘Julie, it’s Brady,’ I said when she answered.

  ‘I know, I know,’ she said. ‘You don’t have to tell me. The fishing is so terrific you’re staying another week.’

  ‘You’re half right. I’m coming in Saturday, not Wednesday.’

  ‘Oh, brother,’ she said.

  ‘It’s not at all what you think.’

  ‘Of course it isn’t.’

  ‘Julie, I’ll tell you about it when I get back.’

  ‘You’re supposed to be in court Thursday.’

  ‘Who’s the judge?’

  ‘Crowell. Your favourite.’

  ‘The Berger thing?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You know what to do.’

  ‘I ought to by now.’

  ‘Thanks, Julie.’

  I heard her sigh. ‘Well, you must really be having fun.’

  ‘You bet.’

  CHAPTER 15

  I FELT FOOLISH GETTING down on my hands and knees and twisting my head around to check the undercarriage of my replacement Lincoln Town Car, but feeling foolish didn’t stop me. I also lifted the hood and looked around among the engine parts. The fact that I wouldn’t know a bomb from a catalytic converter didn’t stop me from doing that, either.

  And the fact that I found nothing that looked as if it was designed to kill me didn’t stop my heart from pounding for the fifteen minutes it took me to drive out of town to the turnoff to McBride’s ranch. After bumping over the gravel roadway for a few minutes, I figured that any dynamite wired to my car would have gone off if it was going to, and I began to relax.

  I swung on to McBride’s driveway for the long, curving descent to his ranch. The road wound tightly through low scrub. It was barely wide enough for one car to pass, so I went slowly. I didn’t want to meet McBride head-on at a corner. I wanted a different kind of meeting.

  As it was, I nearly crashed into the brown Pontiac station wagon that had stopped in the middle of the driveway. I sat there for a minute, resisting my city-bred impulse to lean on my horn, before I noticed that the wagon’s hood was up. This time I turned off the ignition before I climbed out of my car.

  I went around to the front of the Pontiac. A man was bent at the waist, leaning into the depths of the engine. Both of his hands were reaching down into its guts. He was working with some sort of tool.

  ‘Problem?’ I said.

  The man grunted without looking at me.

  ‘I’d offer to h
elp,’ I said, ‘but I know absolutely nothing about engines.’

  The man said nothing.

  I cleared my throat. ‘Think you’ll be long here? Something I can do?’

  He grunted again. It sounded like a curse. I could sympathize. It was a lousy place to have engine problems.

  ‘Look,’ I tried again, ‘if we can push your car to the side a little so I can get by, I’ll go down to the ranch and phone for help for you.’

  The man muttered something and turned his head to look at me.

  ‘You look familiar,’ I said. ‘The Totem, right? You’re a friend of Tim McBride.’

  It was one of the two Indian types I had seen the night I met McBride. Up close the man looked more Mexican than Indian. He was squat, big-bellied, round-faced, with dark liquid eyes that I couldn’t read.

  ‘And you,’ he said in the careful English of someone who had studied it but used it rarely, ‘are Meester Brady Coyne.’ His Spanish accent was heavy.

  I nodded. ‘McBride must’ve mentioned me to you.’ I stepped closer to him and held out my hand.

  The man straightened up and withdrew his hands from the bowels of the engine. He showed me the tool he had been using on it. It was an automatic pistol.

  I smiled. Then I frowned. ‘I don’t get it,’ I said.

  ‘That ees not important.’

  ‘Am I supposed to reach for the big sky or something? Is that how we do it out here in the Wild West?’

  ‘You will seet on the ground, please,’ he said without smiling. He gestured with his weapon. I did as he requested.

  ‘Your hands,’ he said. ‘Seet on them, please.’

  ‘Then I won’t be able to smoke.’

  ‘I am sorry. It will not be for a long time.’

  I sat on my hands. ‘Can I ask a question?’ I said.

  ‘No, please.’

  He leaned against the side of his car with his arms folded, the gun in one hand, and looked at me as if I was inert. He struck me as a man with infinite patience, a quality I lack. But I figured under the circumstances I’d have to do my best.

  After what was probably five minutes, but seemed like an hour, my hands and arms began to tingle and ache. It reminded me of having them taped to bedposts.

  ‘Can I move my hands?’ I said to the man. ‘They’re falling asleep.’

  ‘Poot them on top of your head.’

  I obeyed. After a few minutes of that, I removed them and folded them in my lap without asking permission. The man did not object.

  ‘You must be the guys who wired my car,’ I said. ‘Where’s your friend?’

  He did not change his expression or answer me.

  ‘What I don’t get is why,’ I continued. ‘I mean, does this have something to do with those jaguars? Because if it does, I assure you that I don’t want them that badly. You don’t need to blow me up. Hell, you can have the damn jaguars, I don’t care. I just want to know if McBride has them, that’s all.’

  This outburst caused his eyes to blink. I figured I was really getting to him.

  ‘Tell you what,’ I said. ‘Just let me climb back into my car, and I’ll be gone. I was hoping to go fishing today. That’s what I’ll do. I’ll drive away and go fishing. You can have the damn jaguars.’

  He shifted his weight from his left leg to his right. He continued to stare at me. I gave up.

  Ten or fifteen minutes later I heard the sound of a car coming up the hill from the direction of the ranch. It was a compact Ford, dark blue under its coating of road dust. It nosed up to the Pontiac and stopped. The second Indian I had seen at the Totem—this one, too, looked Mexican close-up—got out and came around to where I was sitting.

  He said something in rapid Spanish to the man holding the gun on me. I caught the name ‘Carlos’, which I remembered McBride mentioning. Carlos, I deduced, was the name of the man who was pointing the automatic at me.

  I thought I caught several other words, but the Mexican was talking too fast and his accent was too unfamiliar for me to sort many of them out. He repeated the word chinga several times until, from the various inflections he gave it, I caught its meaning. Gato, he said a couple of times. He pronounced ‘McBride’ with a Spanish accent. He used several other words and phrases that I thought I recognized but lacked time to consider for translation, so rapidly did he speak.

  Once Carlos interrupted him to repeat one of the words. ‘Muerte?’ he said, and the other nodded, glanced at me, and repeated the word. ‘Muerte.’

  This word I knew. It meant death. In Spanish it’s used as part of several unpleasant idioms. I did not like the sound of that word.

  When this little speech was over, Carlos nodded, waved his gun in my direction, and delivered his report in equally unintelligible Spanish to his partner, who, I deduced, was called Tomas. When Carlos finished talking, Tomas shrugged and said, ‘Sí. Ok.’

  With his empty hand held flat, palm up, Carlos gestured for me to stand. I did. Tomas moved in front of me. He was short, no more than Flask’s height, but broad and muscular. He wore a thin moustache, and a triangle of black hair grew from beneath his lower lip. He could have been Carlos’s older brother. He smiled broadly at me, showing large yellow teeth.

  ‘You are Meester Coyne,’ he said. ‘Why are you here, please?’

  ‘I’m a friend of Tim McBride,’ I said. ‘I came to—’

  His hand flicked out and caught my cheek. I staggered backward. My face burned, more from the humiliation of being slapped than from the pain.

  ‘Now, goddam it—’

  ‘Meester Coyne,’ he said. ‘The truth ees, you are not a friend of McBride. The truth, please, for you, will save more problems than eet will save for us.’

  I shrugged. ‘Sure. What the hell.’ I rubbed my cheek. ‘I came to see if he owned some art pieces.’

  ‘Good. That ees better. What art pieces, please?’

  ‘I think you know.’

  His black eyes stared at me. ‘Continue, please.’

  ‘The jaguars.’

  ‘Ah, yes. You intend to steal them, no?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘To purchase them, then.’

  I shook my head. ‘No. I pretended to be interested in buying them. But I just wanted to know if he had them.’

  ‘Continue, please,’ he said when I hesitated.

  ‘I’m a lawyer. One of my clients back in Massachusetts owned a set of Mayan jaguars.’ I spoke more slowly, and enunciated more carefully, than usual. Tomas studied my face as I talked. He had intelligent eyes. I was certain that he understood everything. ‘The cats were stolen from him. He was hit on the head by the thieves, and he is in a coma. They do not expect him to recover. They hit me on the head, too. I’m not really interested in the jaguars. But I am interested in the men who stole them.’ I paused and cocked my head at Tomas. ‘I know you weren’t those men. I would recognize your accents. I figure McBride bought the cats from the thieves. I was hoping I could persuade him to tell me who they are.’

  He smiled again. ‘Gracias, Meester Coyne.’ He turned to Carlos and said something. Carlos handed him the gun. Then Carlos opened the door of the wagon and brought out a length of rawhide, while Tomas pointed the automatic at me. Carlos came to me and pushed me down into a sitting position. He began to tie me up. I hadn’t liked it when I had duct tape wrapped around me, and I didn’t expect to enjoy this much, either. He wound and stretched the rawhide around my legs, then extended it through my crotch. He pulled my arms behind me and tied my wrists and wound the thin rope up my forearms, pressing them together painfully. When he was done I was immobilized.

  He stood up and Tomas returned the gun to him. Carlos took up the task of pointing the automatic at me, while Tomas climbed into my rented Lincoln. He started it up and drove it completely off the road so that it was half hidden in the roadside brush. He shut off the engine and got out. He jangled the ignition keys in the palm of his hand for me to see, then shoved them into his pocket. He reached into the car,
unlatched the hood, then went around to the front. He bent inside. A moment later he emerged. He held something in his hand. He showed this to me, too, before putting it into his pocket. I guessed it was a distributor cap, or something equally essential to the running of the engine.

  Then he nodded to Carlos and went back to his dusty little Ford.

  Carlos came over and squatted in front of me.

  ‘You gonna kill me?’ I said, with considerably more bravado than I felt.

  Carlos grinned.

  ‘I sure hope not,’ I added more humbly.

  ‘Meester Coyne,’ said Carlos, ‘we did not put a bomb in your automobile. We do not want to keel you. You are not our enemy. You are in our way, but you are not our enemy.’

  ‘Well, then—’

  I didn’t see it coming. The crack on the side of my head tumbled me on to my side. It hurt terribly. The second blow separated me from my consciousness, and from the pain, and from the confused memory of a previous time when I had been lying in bed in Jeff Newton’s house…

  I was probably out for no more than a minute. When I regained consciousness, I heard the high-pitched whine of the Pontiac moving up the hill in reverse and I saw the rear of the blue Ford disappear around the corner behind it. I listened to the engine sounds fade. Then there was silence.

  The side of my head hurt terribly. My vision was clear, however, and I felt no nausea, so I figured I had not suffered a concussion. I manoeuvred myself into a sitting position. I tried to move my arms, but the harder I tried the tighter the rawhide bit into my flesh. I shoved myself backward by digging my heels into the ground until I backed myself up against a boulder. I felt for a sharp edge, then began to rub the rawhide around my wrists against it. It was awkward and painful, since every movement tugged the rawhide into my groin, but I kept at it until I felt the rawhide behind me snap. This served only to loosen the wraps around my wrists, but it was enough for me to wiggle my fingers and hands. With great difficulty, I twisted and picked at the loosened strands of rawhide behind me until my hands and arms were free.

  I quickly unwrapped my legs. I rubbed circulation into them, then stood up. The two Mexicans were gone. They hadn’t killed me. I found that confusing, not that I wasn’t appreciative.