Lone Creek hd-1

by Neil Mcmahon

  But I was more certain now of what I'd suspected right off-that Doug Wills's stopping me didn't really have anything to do with the lumber, and neither did any of what had followed.

  I might have saved myself this trip to jail if I'd come clean with the ranch hands or told the deputies when they arrived-cast a cloud on Balcomb and his motives for bracing me. But my credibility was zilch. Nobody wanted to cross a rich landowner, especially the men who worked for him. And given his smoothness, he probably had a way figured out to deflect any blame even if the horses had been uncovered.

  But-more important-I was spooked worse than ever. The intensity of his reaction and his warning that I was out of my league had underscored my feeling that something really ugly was at work, and whatever I gained in the short term by exposing it might leave me facing serious trouble.

  There were plenty more questions, starting with who had done the killing and why. I had to think it was Balcomb himself. There were other employees at the ranch besides Doug who I didn't much care for, but I couldn't imagine any of them treating an animal that way. Kirk had that twitchy violent edge, and I could easily see him going ballistic and shooting somebody-like me-but I couldn't believe he was capable of that kind of brutality. Balcomb must have figured that the carcasses would stay safely hidden until they decomposed. He'd have been right except for some hungry coyotes and a construction worker dumping trash on a Saturday afternoon. I could only guess that Kirk had spotted me, known that Balcomb didn't want anybody around there, and alerted him. Balcomb had immediately given orders to get me stopped, used the smokescreen of the lumber theft to question me, then fired me to justify it.

  I could think of several reasons why he might get rid of a couple of horses-not pretty reasons, but at least they made some sense. The horses might have been old, costing more to care for than they were worth, or carrying a contagious disease, which he'd certainly want to cover up. There were insurance scams, too. A couple of his thoroughbreds, reported stolen, would be worth a sizable chunk of cash. The worst possibility that came to mind was a drunken rage or sheer insane cruelty. There'd been a few of those kinds of incidents around here in the past years. A group of hunters had slaughtered a sitting-duck elk herd, leaving most of them to rot; another time, some out-of-state executive types had chased a penned-up antelope herd in a jeep and run them nearly to death.

  But I couldn't imagine anything to explain why the horses had been sliced open. My scalp still bristled every time those images came back to me.

  I turned my mind to how I was going to handle this from here. I had an old friend named Tom Dierdorff, a respected lawyer in town and a thoroughly decent guy, who came from a big ranch family that had been here for generations, like the Pettyjohns. Balcomb needed to be accepted by people like that; and with any luck, Tom's influence would get him to drop the criminal charges. I'd get the lumber back to the ranch somehow and be done with this-no worse off except for a couple of hours in jail and the kind of memories that woke you up at three o'clock in the morning.

  I hated to be a coward, hated to let something so vile slide. But I couldn't get past that queasy fear, and this wasn't my fight, anyway.

  9

  After maybe forty-five minutes, I heard somebody come walking down the hall and stop outside my cell. I stood up, expecting one of the jailers.

  But a glimpse through the mesh window showed me that the man unlocking the door was the sheriff of Lewis and Clark County, Gary Varna.

  Gary was imposing-at least six-four, broad-shouldered, lanky, about fifty years old, but with no trace of a paunch. His forebears had immigrated from around the Black Sea a couple of generations ago and intermarried with the local Nordic stock. That might have explained his height and his pale blue eyes. But those slanted in a way that harked back to the tribesmen of the steppes, and had a way of fixing on you without ever seeming to blink.

  He was also cordial, and as soon as the door swung open, he offered me a handshake.

  "Come on out of there and stretch your legs," he said.

  I shuffled into the hall in my laceless boots, surprised that he'd even be at the jail on a Saturday evening. I wondered if he'd just happened to stop by for some other reason, or found out I was here and had come on that account. I hadn't seen him for quite a while, but there'd been a time when we'd crossed paths pretty often.

  He leaned back against the wall and folded his arms. He wore his uniform only when he had to, and he was dressed now in his signature outfit of sharply creased jeans and a button-down oxford cloth shirt-a sort of spiffed-up cowboy look that helped put people at ease. It was one of the many shrewd facets that made him what he was. He'd been in the sheriff's department close to thirty years, and probably knew more than anybody else about what people in this area were up to. He also excelled at working the political side of the street. He was known for being fair, but in the same way as a hometown referee-if there was a judgment call, you didn't have to wonder which side he'd come down on.

  "I hear you hit a rough spot, Hugh," he said.

  "I just took home some scrap lumber, Gary. Otherwise it would have gone to waste. I never tried to hide anything-I've been doing it for weeks, broad daylight, right in front of God and everybody."

  "That don't sound like much of a start on a criminal career."

  "I guess I'm too old to retrain."

  He nodded, maybe amused.

  "I'll get it back there Monday at the latest," I said. "Honest to Christ, I never dreamed anybody'd give a damn."

  Those unblinking eyes stayed on me.

  "Something about an assault?" he said.

  "Doug Wills, the foreman, came at me out of the blue like he'd gone psycho. Just about head-on'd me with that asshole big rig of his, started yelling orders, then grabbed my shirt like he was going to punch me." I touched the scar on my face. "You know I've got this fucked-up eye. I get hit there hard again, I might lose it."

  "Ever have any trouble with him before?"

  "We hardly ever even talked to each other. There was sure nothing to set him off like that."

  "So this wasn't personal, him trying to settle a score? He was following his employer's orders?"

  "Goddammit, Gary, I was just sitting in my truck."

  "That's not the point, Hugh. It sounds like he had good reason to make a citizen's arrest. And you resisted."

  My eyes widened in disbelief as what he was saying came home to me.

  "You're telling me that's how the court's going to see it?"

  His shoulders rose in a shrug that meant yes.

  "Fuck a wild man," I said, and turned away to stare at the hallway's dead end.

  "I'm afraid I don't have any better news. Judge Harris set your bail at twenty-five thousand dollars."

  I spun back around. "Twenty-five thousand?" The last time I'd been in this place, my pal and I had each paid a two-hundred-dollar fine, plus fixing the drywall.

  "It does seem tall, I got to agree," Gary said. "The judge likes his Saturday poker game and Wild Turkey, and he tends to get pissy about being bothered. You can see him Monday, tell him what you just told me, and I'd guess he'll reduce it. With this sort of thing, you're usually talking more like a couple grand."

  But that meant staying in here until Monday.

  "Everything I own put together isn't worth twenty-five thousand dollars, Gary."

  "That's why God invented bail bondsmen."

  "I've never done business with one."

  "I'm glad to hear that. You know how it works?"

  I did. You fronted them ten percent, which they kept as their fee, and they posted your bond to the court. If you skipped out, they had to find you and haul you back in or forfeit the entire amount. They got very serious about looking.

  "Yeah," I said sourly. "It costs me twenty-five hundred bucks right off the top."

  "Ordinarily. But you might be able to knock that down to a couple hundred."

  I perked up. "How so?"

  "Well, I'm not supposed t
o go recommending anybody in particular, but just between you and me, Bill LaTray's been known to cut a deal in a situation like this. You get him the twenty-five hundred, and if the judge does reduce your bail on Monday, Bill will cut his rate to ten percent of the lowered amount and refund you the rest."

  Bill LaTray, proprietor of Bill's Bail Bonds, was an extremely tough, heavily pockmarked, mixed-blood Indian who could quiet a rowdy bar with a look. He was built like a bull pine stump, and he favored a fringed, belted, three-quarter-length coat of smooth caramel-colored leather, a cross between native buckskin and something a Jersey mobster might wear. Besides his rep as a bar fighter, it was rumored that he'd done some time for armed robbery and assault when he was younger-sort of an apprenticeship for his later career.

  "But I've still got to come up with the twenty-five bills now?" I said.

  "That's about the size of it. But you don't stand to gain anything by waiting till Monday. If the judge drops the bail, you'll get the difference back. If he doesn't, you got to come up with the twenty-five hundred anyway. Either that or stay here till your trial, and the way the docket's looking, that ain't going to be for a couple months. So if I was you, I'd pony up and get the hell out of here."

  That made perfect sense, except I could no more come up with twenty-five hundred bucks than I could with twenty-five thousand. I didn't have a credit card. My crew got paid every other Friday, and yesterday had been the off one. That left me with about seven hundred in my checking account. I had some folding money stashed at home, that I'd been rat-holing whenever I had a twenty or two that wasn't immediately spoken for. It didn't amount to much over fifteen hundred, if that. My next, and final, paycheck wouldn't come until next Friday.

  Then I remembered that Bill LaTray had a sideline as a pawnbroker-his shop was conveniently located close to the jail. I had a couple of guns that I could hock to him to make up the extra few hundred. He probably picked up a lot of business that way.

  "I can do it, but I need to get to my place," I said. "If you guys will drive me-"

  Gary shook his head. "Sorry, we can't let you out until the bail's posted. I don't make the rules, Hugh. That's just the way it is."

  I ran my hand over my hair, trying to see a way through this. My forehead was still caked with dried sweat and grime.

  I could have called Madbird to get my guns and the bank money from an ATM, but the cash at my place was hidden, and it would have been damned near impossible to explain where. The only other choice I could see was to borrow it. I hated the thought, but I started going through a list of names in my head.

  My parents were passed on, my sisters had long since moved away, and no other family was left around here except a couple of shirttail relatives I hardly knew. Elmer would have helped me and so would some other older family friends and men I'd worked with, but I couldn't bear the thought of asking them. Most of my own friends weren't any better off than me. There were only two people I could think of who probably had that kind of cash available.

  Tom Dierdorff was one. But while I didn't mind asking him to talk to Balcomb-that was the kind of favor where it was understood that I'd insist on paying Tom, he'd tell me he'd send me a bill but never do it, and somewhere down the line he'd get me to come to his place and make some minor repair and he'd slip a check into my coat pocket that I'd tear up when I found it-tapping him for a twenty-five-hundred-dollar loan to boot would be pushing the envelope. I might have done it anyway, except he spent most weekends helping out on his family's ranch up near Augusta, about eighty miles away, and I sure wasn't going to ask him to make that drive.

  That left one more.

  "I guess I'll need a phone call," I said.

  "We'll have to make it for you. Those damn rules, you know." Gary waited inquiringly while I ran it through my head once more.

  "Sarah Lynn Olsen," I said.

  His eyebrows rose just a twitch. Sarah Lynn and I had a lot of history together, and he knew it.

  He pushed off the wall and unhooked his keys from his belt.

  "I've got to lock you in again," he said. "Sorry, but-"

  "Let me guess. Just the rules."

  He smiled slightly. "I'll try to get hold of her."

  Then he paused and fixed me with that pale steady gaze.

  "You sure there's nothing more to this, Hugh?"

  It was a perfect opening to blow the whistle about those horses and try to turn this around on Balcomb. I thought highly of Gary and I trusted him a long way. But my unease had kept on deepening. I wouldn't have believed that old Judge Roy Harris would set a twenty-five-thousand-dollar bail even for an ax murderer just because he was annoyed about his poker game being interrupted. It smelled of Balcomb's influence, and there was no telling how far that went.

  I decided to wait until I saw the judge on Monday. If it cost me a couple of hundred bucks to get this bullshit over with, I'd take it lying down. If he stood pat, I was going to have to think real hard about whether I was twenty-five hundred dollars worth of scared.

  "If there is, Gary, I can't think what," I said.

  He nodded and closed the door.

  It wasn't the first time I hadn't told Gary Varna everything I knew.

  10

  By the end of the summer that Celia was living here, she'd succeeded in getting Pete Pettyjohn's attention in a big way. Gary Varna had been a young deputy then, and Celia was the reason that he and I first got acquainted. Seeing him always jogged my memory back to those times.

  But oddly, the association that tended to hit me first was of an incident from before I'd met him. Some superstitious part of me had come to believe that I'd seen an eerie hint of what was coming-that it was the moment when the wheels had started turning in that direction.

  It happened on one of my last afternoons working at the ranch that summer. The older hands were sitting around the shop drinking beer like they always did on Fridays. I'd become sort of a mascot, the tall skinny kid who both exasperated and amused them. But I'd gotten to where I could handle eighty-pound hay bales all day and be reasonably useful doing other chores, and to those men, that kind of help was worth a lot. They pretended not to notice when I sneaked a beer out of their cooler.

  I walked off by myself to one of the other buildings, a small house where family members stayed when they came to visit, and sat on the steps. I hung out there quite a bit when the place wasn't being used. The view was long and clear, good for watching what was going on around the ranch, or staring at the mountains beyond.

  The only person moving around just then was Reuben Pettyjohn, the ranch's owner, and father of Pete and Kirk. He was doing something I'd seen him do a lot-taking a slow walk that seemed aimless, but really he was checking things out. He'd stroll through the used equipment yard and stop to tap an old engine block with his boot toe, then he'd hook his thumbs in his belt and move on, pausing again to scan some cattle waiting to be shipped off. He was always looking for ways to use or improve things, and probably he was thinking about much more than that.

  Reuben was in his mid-forties, bull-shouldered and physically formidable. His beak nose and clipped mustache added to the effect. When I started taking college literature classes years later and saw a photo of William Faulkner, Reuben's face came immediately to my mind. His presence was striking, too, a dense aura that you could feel. He was genial, but tough and shrewd-the epitome of a cowboy businessman, and a state legislator for several terms. You'd see him downtown or at the capitol, carrying a briefcase and wearing a big white Stetson and a western-cut suit with that rolled piping that looked like it was made of Naugahyde. But he was just as likely to be on the ranch, working cattle with the hands.

  I sat there on the steps for a few minutes, slipping into daydreams. The afternoon was hot and I was thirsty. I went through my beer pretty fast and started working up my nerve to go score another one.

  Then Celia and Pete appeared, walking from the stables toward his pickup truck, probably on their way to town to party. She w
as striding along playfully, almost skipping, bumping her hip against him. Everybody knew they were an item by now, but they seemed to be having one of those boy-girl wars about public affection. She wanted to advertise it, and she was always trying to hold his hand or drape herself over him. He still tried to act like there wasn't really anything going on, but you'd have had to be blind not to see them up against a fence or shed, groping and dry-humping. I suspected that they'd also been going swimming at the waterfall, and that Pete had gotten treated to repeat performances of the show she'd put on for me. I'd been staying away from there, and from him in general.

  Celia looked electric, wearing a halter top and cutoffs, with her auburn hair gleaming and tossing as she danced along. They passed within plain sight of Reuben, but they were too wrapped up in each other to notice him. He watched them go by, with that same thoughtful attention he paid to the other things that caught his eye.

  Then behind me, I heard the door of the guesthouse open. I jumped up, trying to hide the beer behind my back.

  Reuben's wife, Beatrice, was standing there with her arms folded and her eyes narrowed. Beatrice was another person I tried to avoid, even when I wasn't caught red-handed drinking pilfered beer. It hadn't occurred to me that she'd be inside the house. She must have been cleaning up or getting ready for some visitors, although with her, you never knew. Years later, she would be diagnosed with Alzheimer's, and she was already starting to act in ways that didn't add up.

  But back then she was a handsome, accomplished woman who came from another landed family and considered herself aristocracy. By her lights, Pete was destined for much bigger things than poor-girl Celia, and she seemed to blame me for bringing that bad influence into his life. She was also oddly sexless, even prudish-one of the camp who'd have much preferred it if children never found out that roughly half the people on the planet were anatomically different from the other half. I had the feeling that she'd borne her first son out of a sense of duty, and then Kirk because having only one didn't look socially proper. Otherwise, she'd wanted nothing to do with that undignified business. Besides her other quirky behavior, she'd taken on an accusing air, especially toward young people-maybe because she figured, correctly, that they were obsessed with getting their hands on each other.