The sun was nearly gone, a dim aspirin-sized pill trying to break through a screen of bare aspen.
He listened to the radio some more: the search in Colfax was done. The Dunn
County sheriff said blah-blah-blah nothing.
Still, nightfall was a relief. With night came the sense that the search would slow down, that cops would be going home. He found a stack of army blankets and draped them across the windows to black them out. After turning on the lights, he walked once around the outside of the trailer, to make sure he didn't have any light leaks, came back inside, adjusted one of the blankets, and climbed back to the bed. The silence of the woods had been forgotten, submerged in his years in a cell, and for a while he couldn't sleep.
He did sleep, but when he heard the tires crunching on the snow, he was awake in an instant. He sat up and took the Bulldog off the floor. A moment later, he heard footsteps, and then the door rattled.
''Who is that?'' he asked.
A woman's voice came back: ''Sandy.''
HER FACE WAS TIGHT, ANGRY. ''YOU JERK,'' SHE SAID. HE was looking down at her, the gun pointed at her chest. Coldly furious, she ignored it. ''I want you out of here. Now.''
''Come in and shut the door, you're letting the cold in,'' he said. He backed away from her, but continued to look out over her head. ''You didn't bring the cops?''
''No. I didn't bring the cops. But I want you out of here, Dick. ..''
''Tomorrow,'' he said. ''We're heading for Mexico.''
''At the funeral home, they said you were gunning for these cops that killed
Candy and Georgie.''
''Yeah, well…'' He shrugged.
''Why'd you kill the prison guard?'' she asked. His eyes shifted, and she felt him gathering a reason, anexcuse: ''He was the meanest sonofabitch on the floor.
If you knew what he'd done…''
''But now they're looking for you for murder .'' He shrugged: ''That's what I was in for.''
''But you didn't have anything to do with that,'' she said.
''Didn't make no difference to them,'' he said.
''My God, Dick, there is a difference…''
''You didn't know this guy,'' LaChaise said. ''If you'd known what Sand put my friends through back in the joint…'' He shook his head. ''You couldn't blame us. No man oughta go through that.''
He was talking about rape, she knew. She didn't buy it, but she wouldn't press him, either. She wanted to believe and if she pressed him, she was afraid she'd find out he was lying.
''Whatever,'' she said. ''But now you've got to move. Martin was bragging about how good his truck is: If you leave tomorrow, you can be in Arizona the day after, driving straight through. You can be in Mexico the day after that, down on the Pacific Ocean.''
''Yeah, we're figuring that out,'' LaChaise said, but again, his eyes shifted fractionally. ''What happened at the funeral home?''
''The police kept us there for a couple of hours-and two detectives from
Minneapolis talked to us-and then they took us down to Menomonie, to the courthouse. We had to sign statements, and then they let us go. A couple of deputies came around again, about dinnertime, and checked the house.''
''They have a warrant?''
''No, but I let them in, I thought it was best,'' she said. ''They looked around and left.''
''What about Elmore?''
''Elmore was at work,'' Sandy said. ''They already talked to him.''
''Would Elmore turn us in?'' LaChaise said.
''No. He's as scared as I am,'' Sandy said, and the anger suddenly leaped to the surface: ''Why'd you do it, Dick? We've never done anything to you, and now you're dragging us down with you.''
''We needed a place to ditch,'' LaChaise said defensively. ''We didn't know what the situation would be. If the cops were right on our ass, we needed some place we could get out of sight in a hurry. I thought of this place.''
''Well, I want you out,'' Sandy said. She poked a finger at him. ''If you're not out, I'll have to take the chance and go to the police myself. When you get out,
I'll come out here and wipe everything you've touched… and I hope to hell if you get caught, you'll have the decency to keep your mouth shut about this place.''
''I won't get caught,'' LaChaise said. ''I'm not going back inside. If I get killed, that's the way it is: but I'm not going back.''
''But if you do get caught… you know, shot and you wake up in a hospital. ..''
''No way I'd tell them about this,'' LaChaise said, shaking his head. ''No way.''
''All right.'' She glanced at her watch. ''I better get going, in case those deputies check back. I'll tell you something, though: one of the Minneapolis cops was this Davenport guy. The guy who's in charge of the group that killed
Candy and Georgie.''
''I know who he is,'' LaChaise said. ''So?''
''He's awful hard,'' she said.
''I'm awful hard, too,'' LaChaise said.
She nodded: ''I'm just telling you,'' she said.
When Sandy left, she walked head-down to her car, and sat inside for a moment before she started it. Now she was guilty of something, she thought. As a hardworking, taxpaying Republican rancher, she should be in favor of sendingherself to prison for what she'd just done. But she wasn't. She'd do anything to stay out-the idea of a prison cell made her knees weak. If Dick had landed anywhere else, she'd have turned him in. But the trailer hideout would be impossible to explain, and she'd had the experience, in LaChaise's earlier trial, of seeing what vindictive cops could do.
Damn. She thought about the weapons in the hall closet back home, a. 22, a deer rifle, a shotgun. She'd never considered anything like this before, but she could go home, get Elmore's deer rifle, come back out here…
Get Dick outside.
Boom.
She could dump his body in a cornfield somewhere, and nobody would know anything until spring. And if the coyotes got to him, probably not even then. She sighed.
She couldn't do anything like that. She'd never wanted to hurt anyone in her life. But she wasn't going under. She'd swim for it.
WEATHER AND LUCAS ATE HANDMADE RAVIOLI FROM an Italian market while Lucas told her about the trip to Colfax. Weather said, ''Tell me that last part again.
About the eye-for-an-eye.''
Lucas shrugged. ''We have to take a little care. The guy won't be running around for long, there're too many people looking for him. But everybody involved in the shooting… I've told them to keep an eye out.''
''You think he'd come here, looking for you?'' she asked.
''I don't think so,'' Lucas said. Then he said, ''I don't know. Maybe. He's nuts. We've got to take a little care, that's all.''
''That's why you've got the gun under your chair. A little care.''
Lucas stopped with a forkful of pasta halfway to his mouth. ''I'm sorry,'' he said. ''But it's no big deal-and it's just for a little while.''
FIVE
EARLY MORNING AT THE BLACK WATCH.
Andy Stadic pushed through the front door, took his gloves off and unbuttoned his overcoat as he walked around the bar and through the double swinging doors into the kitchen. Opening the coat freed up his weapon: not that he'd need it, but he did it by habit.
Stadic was short, bullet-headed, with close-cropped hair and suspicious, slightly bulging eyes. In the kitchen, he nodded to the cook, who was chopping onions into twenty pounds of raw burger, ignored the Chicano dishwasher, turned the corner past the pan rack and pushed through another set of doors.
The back room was cool, lit with overhead fluorescent, furnished with cartons of empty beer bottles, boxes of paper towels and toilet paper, cans of ketchup, sacks of potatoes- the whole room smelled of wet paper and potatoes and onions and a bit of cigar smoke.
Daymon Harp sat in one of two red plastic chairs at a rickety round table, chewing gum, his feet stretched out infront of him, crossed at the ankles. He wore a bomber jacket, faded Levi's and purple cowboy boots with sterling-
silver toes.
''What'd you want?'' Stadic asked, standing, hands in his pockets.
''We got a problem.'' Harp uncrossed his legs, put a foot on the second chair, and pushed it across the concrete floor at Stadic.
''I don't want to hear about problems,'' Stadic said.
''Can't be helped,'' Harp said.
''Man, I hate even seeing you,'' Stadic said. ''If the shooflies walked in right now, I'd be all done. I'd be on the onestop train to Stillwater.''
''I couldn't help it. Sit down, goddamnit.''
Stadic turned the chair and straddled it, his arms crossed on the back.
''What?''
''Two guys showed up at my crib last night,'' Harp said. ''Put some guns on me.
They were looking for your name.''
''My name?''
''Yeah. They knew I was working with a cop, but they didn't know your name.''
''Jesus Christ, Harp…''
''They said they'd cut one finger off Jas every ten seconds until I came out with it, and had something to prove it by. They were gonna cut off two fingers just to show that they was tellin' the truth. And after they got all ten fingers, they said, they were gonna cut out her eyes and then cut her throat and then they were gonna start on me.''
''You told them?'' Stadic's voice rose in disbelief.
''Goddamn right I told them,'' Harp said. ''They cut her pointer finger off right there, on a bread board. She was all tied up and gagged and flopping around, and they were like they was killed chickens or something. .. couple of goddamn mean crackers. I been in the joint with these motherfuckersbefore. They got little tears tattooed under their eyes, one for each man they killed, and when you start tattooing them on, you better be able to prove it to the rest of the crazies. This crackhead kid's got three of them and the fucker with the knife got two.''
''You coulda said anything,'' Stadic said.
Harp shook his head. ''They wanted proof. I had a little proof.''
Now Stadic was very quiet. ''What proof?''
''I had some pictures taken.''
''You motherfucker…'' Stadic stood up, kicked the chair aside, his hand moving toward his pistol. Harp held his hands up.
''It was from way back when, when I didn't know you. And I had Jas's motherfuckin' finger laying there like a dead shrimp, all curled up. What the hell was I supposed to do?''
''You coulda tried lying,'' Stadic shouted. His fingers twitched at the gun butt.
''You wasn't there,'' Harp said. ''You don't know.'' Stadic took a breath, as though he'd just topped a hill, turned in place, then said, ''So what'd they want with my name?''
''They need some information from you.''
''Tell me.'' He was nibbling nervously at a thumbnail, ripped off a piece of nail, spit it out, tasted blood. The nail was bleeding, and he sucked at it, the blood salty in his mouth.
''They want personnel files,'' Harp said. ''From the police department.''
LACHAISE HAD SPENT WHOLE DAYS THINKING ABOUT it, daydreaming it, when he was locked up: the requirements of the coming wars. Us against Them. They would need a base. In the countryside, somewhere. There'd be a series oflog cabins linked with storm sewer pipe, six feet underground and more sewer pipe set into the hills as bunkers. Honda generators for each cabin, with internal wells and septic fields.
Weapons: sniper rifles to keep the attackers off, heavy-duty assault rifles for up close. Hidden land mines with remote triggers. Armor-piercing rockets. He'd close his eyes and see the assaults happening, the attackers falling back as they met the sweeping fire from the web…
The attackers were a little less certain; some combination of ATF agents and blacks from the Chicago ghettos, Indians, Mexicans. Though that didn't seem to make a lot of sense, sometimes; so sometimes, they were all ATF agents, dressed in black uniforms and masks…
Daydreams.
THE REALITY WAS A COUPLE OF TRUCKS AND A RUNDOWN house in a near-slum.
LaChaise and Butters drove down to the Cities in Elmore's truck, with Martin trailing behind. They needed two vehicles, they decided, at least for a while.
Butters and Martin caught Elmore in the barn, while Sandy was out riding, and squeezed him for the truck keys.
''Just overnight,'' Butters said, standing too close. '' Martin's got some warrants out on his car, if the cops check- nothing serious, but we gotta have some kind of backup. We won't do nothin' with it.''
''Guys, I tell you, we're moving stuff today…'' Elmore stuttered. Martin and Butters scared Elmore. Martin, Elmore thought, was a freak, a pent-up homosexual hillbilly crazy in love with LaChaise. Butters had the flat eyes of a snapping turtle, and was simply nuts.
Elmore tried to get out of it, but Martin put his hands in Elmore's coat pocket, and when Elmore tried to wrench away, Butters pushed him from the other side.
Martin had the keys and said, ''We'll get them back to you, bud.''
THE HOUSE WAS A SHABBY TWO-STORY CLAPBOARD wreck on a side street in the area called Frogtown. The outside needed paint, the inside needed an exterminator.
Half the basement was wet and the circuit box hanging over the damp concrete floor was a fire marshal's nightmare. Martin had brought in three Army-surplus beds, a dilapidated monkeyshit-yellow couch and two matching chairs, and a dinette set, all from Goodwill, and a brand-new twenty-seven-inch Sony color TV.
''Good place, if we don't burn to death,'' Martin said. The house smelled like wet plaster and fried eggs. ''That wiring down the basement is a marvel.''
''Hey, it's fine,'' LaChaise said, looking around.
No web of sewer pipe, no Honda generators. No land mines.
That evening, Butters sat in one of the broken-down easy chairs, his head back and his eyes closed. Martin sat crosslegged on the floor with his arrows, unscrewing the field points, replacing them with hundred-grain Thunderheads, a can of beer by one foot. He would occasionally look at LaChaise with a stare that was purely sexual.
''We're gonna do it,'' LaChaise said. He had a half-glass of bourbon in his hand. ''We've been talking for years. Talk talk talk. Now with Candy and Georgie shot to pieces, we're gonna do it.''
''Gonna be the end of us,'' Martin said. His beard was coppery red in the lamplight.
''Could be,'' LaChaise agreed. He scratched his own beard, nipped at the bourbon. ''Do you care?''
Martin worked for another minute, then said, ''Nah. I'm getting crowded. I'm ready.''
''You could go up north, up in the Yukon.''
''Been there,'' Martin said. ''The goddamn Canadians is a bunch of Communists.
Even Alaska's better.''
''Mexico…''
''I'm a goddamn American.''
LaChaise nodded and said, ''How about you, Ansel?'' Butters said, ''I just want to get it over with.''
''Well, we got to take our time, figure this out…''
''I mean, everything over with,'' Butters said. ''I can take my time with this .''
LaChaise nodded again. ''It's the end for me, for sure. But I swear to God, I'm taking a bunch of these sonsofbitches with me.''
Martin looked at him uncertainly, then nodded, and looked away. They worked together, comfortable but intent, like they did in hunting camps, thinking about it all, drinking a little, letting the feeling of the hunt flow through them, the camaraderie as they got the gear ready.
They checked the actions on their weapons for the twentieth time, loading and unloading the pistols, dry-firing at the TV; the good smell of Hoppe's solvent and gun oil, the talk of old times and old rides and the people they remembered, lots of them dead, now.
''If I lived,'' LaChaise continued, ''I'd do nothing but sit in cells for the rest of my life anyhow. Besides…''
''Besides what?'' Martin asked, looking up.
''Ah, nothin','' LaChaise said, but he thought, Mexico. He'd always planned to go, and hadn't ever been.
''It cranks me up, thinking about it,'' Butters said. His face was flushed with alcohol.
SA
NDY HAD BLOWN UP WHEN SHE'D COME BACK FROM her ride, and Elmore had told her about the truck. She jumped in her van and went after them, but they were gone.
She gotto the St. Croix, realized the futility of the chase, slowed, turned around and went back.
''What were you thinking about?'' she shouted at Elmore. ''You shoulda swallowed the keys.''
That night, Elmore was in the kitchen making a pot of Rice-a-Roni with venison chunks, and she could smell the chemical odor of the stuff as she sat in front of the TV. She heard the rattling of the dishes, and finally, Elmore stood in the hallway behind her. She pretended to watch the sports.
He said, ''We oughta talk to the cops.''
''What?'' She pushed herself out of her chair. She hadn't expected this.
Elmore's voice rose to a nervous warble: ''If we stick with this, only two things can happen. We get killed, or we go to jail for murder. That's it: them two things.''
''Too late,'' she said. ''We gotta sit tight.''
Tears came to his eyes, and one dribbled down a cheek, and Sandy suddenly didn't know what to do. She'd seen Elmore frightened, she'd seen him cower, she'd seen him avoid any serious responsibility, but she'd never seen him weep. ''Are you okay?''
He turned his head toward her, the tears still running down her cheeks: ''How'd this happen?'' he said.
She'd thought about that: ''My sister,'' she said. ''The whole of this is because of Candy. And because of your dad's trailer. It's because of nothing that means anything…''
''We've got to go to the police.''
''But what do we tell them? And why would they believe us?''
''Maybe they won't,'' he rasped. ''But you saw all those guns and all that other shit that Martin had. How're they going to Mexico with all that shit? How are they gonna get across the border with it? And if they do get across, what arethey going to use for money? They ain't going to Mexico. They're gonna pull some crazy stunt.''
''No-no,'' she said, shaking her head. ''They're out of here. Dick LaChaise is nobody's fool.''
''Dick LaChaise is fuckin' nuts,'' Elmore said. ''You want to know what's gonna happen? We got two or three more days, and then we'll be dead or in jail. Two or three more days, Sandy. No more horses, no more trail rides, no more going up to the store or running down to the Cities. We're going to jail. Forever.''
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