by Neil Mcmahon
"He got his boot on my neck pretty good today," I said. "Well, I'm interested in your idea. But you're going to have to show me those horses."
His eyes got slippery again. "I can't do that."
"Why not? I know he threw me off the place, but we could sneak on."
"He made me go move them again today, soon as it got dark. I hid them good this time."
I hardened my voice a notch. "Then we're going to have to dig them up again. I'm not getting into it with Balcomb unless I know I'm standing on something solid."
"Oh, I can prove what I'm saying. When I went back the second time, I took my camcorder. I got it right here."
I blinked in surprise. I was getting more impressed with Kirk all the time, especially because he'd accomplished what I'd failed to.
I was even going to feel a little bad about taking the camcorder away from him.
He got it from inside the Jeep and gave it to me. His hand was shaking badly and his face was drawn so tight it looked almost skeletal.
The camcorder was a new model Sony, not much bigger than my fist. I flipped open the screen and pressed the start button, bracing myself for the sight of those ripped-up horses.
But sweet Jesus, what appeared was Celia rising up out of Lone Creek, naked and streaming wet and lovely just like in my memory.
I stared, stupefied, as she waded thigh-deep through the pool below the falls. Then it started to dawn on me that this wasn't Celia-it was Laurie Balcomb.
Kirk had been keeping an eye on her, all right.
She was hard to look away from, and maybe I stayed riveted to that screen a couple of seconds longer than I needed to. I barely heard Kirk's feet make a quick shuffling sound behind me.
Something slammed across the back of my head so hard it knocked the camcorder from my hands and buckled my knees. He hit me again as I tried to turn around, and maybe again after that.
21
When I started coming to, I seemed to be hanging in space outside my head, and for a few seconds I couldn't get back in. Then I connected, and the harsh ache in my skull brought me awake fast.
I was propped up behind the wheel of my pickup truck. The engine was running and the truck was moving jerkily down the sloping headland toward the lake-which ended in a sheer fifteen-foot drop into the water.
Kirk Pettyjohn was trotting along outside my open window, steering with one gloved hand on the wheel. We had about ten yards to go.
It took me another couple of seconds to start my legs moving. I got my right foot onto the brake and stomped it as hard as I could. The truck lurched to a stop, setting off a clatter of empty beer cans on the floor.
Kirk's hand tore loose of the wheel and he went windmilling onward. The truck bucked a couple of times, still in gear, and then the engine died. As I wrenched the door open, Kirk turned around, but instead of coming toward me he ran past me back uphill.
I knew damned well he'd have a gun in that Jeep.
I stumbled out and went after him, but he had a head start and he was moving faster. The only weapon I had was an old Schrade folding knife that I carried in my back pocket. I managed to claw it out as I ran, but I didn't have time to open it before Kirk reached into the Jeep.
He came out with the cold moonlit glint of metal in his hand-the blued barrel of a pistol. But he hadn't taken off his thick work gloves, and he fumbled, trying to force his finger through the trigger guard. I skidded on my knees, scooped up a handful of loose sandy soil, and flung it at his face.
He spun away, spitting and dragging his sleeve across his eyes, and took off again-but this time he was tugging at his gloves with his teeth. I managed to get my knife open as I chased him.
He stopped suddenly and gave his head a shake like a terrier killing a rat. A glove went flying. He started bringing up the pistol, with his right hand now bare.
I was only a step away by then, the knife clenched in my fist like a chisel, with the edge forward. I drove it at his hands as if I was throwing a right cross, with the last-ditch frantic hope that I could knock the gun aside or land a slash that would shock him into dropping it. But its upswinging barrel caught my wrist and sent the punch glancing off his chin.
I felt the blade drag just slightly, like I'd sliced its tip through an overripe pumpkin.
My momentum carried me a few more steps. I got myself turned around, ready to swing at him again if the boom and slam of a gunshot didn't knock me down first.
But he was stumbling away almost in slow motion, like a toy figure with its battery giving out. His dragging feet seemed to be trying to catch up and get underneath the rest of him. They didn't. His upper body sagged forward farther and farther, and he hit the ground like he was falling onto a soft bed.
I staggered over to him, gasping for breath, and knelt. His eyes were open but empty and his throat was pumping blood.
I fell over on the earth beside him and lay there, staring up into the cold night sky.
I'd only meant to disarm him. But that tiny drag I'd felt from the punch gone wild was the blade's tip catching him just under the jawbone.
My fingers were still clenched around the knife, slick and wet. Twenty-five years of bad blood was on my hands.
I was aware, in a distant way, that I should be panicked with horror at what I'd done. But except for my burning lungs and aching head, I felt like this was happening to somebody else. I got to my feet and limped down to my truck for a flashlight.
The key in the ignition was still in the on position. I switched it off, and noticed that Kirk had put the truck in third gear-the reason it had been moving so jerkily. There were a dozen of the beer cans I'd heard rattling on the floor, along with a nearly empty fifth of Jim Beam. None of them was mine.
And the disposable camera I'd bought, with the film I'd shot of the shed, was gone.
He'd been out to kill me, after all-and while I'd thought I was working him, it was just the other way around. He'd had a much slicker plan than lying in wait and blasting me. He'd probably watched enough true-crime TV to know that that was bound to leave an evidence trail.
So he'd spun his story to get me off guard and, idiot that I was, I'd gone for it. He'd set me up to look at the camcorder, knowing I'd be stunned by the sight of Laurie Balcomb. Then he'd clobbered me and planted the booze containers. I'd have been found in the lake, an angry drunk fired from his job and thrown in jail, who'd been driving wildly or had passed out. My friends might have been suspicious, but I had no family to push for an investigation and no status to warrant that kind of trouble and expense. It never would have gone any further.
I'd underestimated Kirk, all right.
There were more signs that for all his lack of talent at anything else, he'd staged this scene with real cunning. Whatever he'd hit me with was nowhere in sight. He'd probably hidden it or thrown it into the lake. It must have been flexible, a sap or old-fashioned sandbag-my head hurt, but there was no bleeding or damage. He hadn't fastened my seat belt, so if the lumps had been noticed, they'd have been accounted for by the crash. He'd even used a pair of my own goddamn gloves that he'd gotten from my truck, probably so he wouldn't risk losing or leaving traces from his own.
There was no sign of my camera, either. It might have been in the Jeep or one of his pockets, but I was guessing it was also in the lake.
In itself, the film wasn't important, especially now. But the fact that he'd taken it suggested strongly that Balcomb was behind this-that he'd called Kirk after talking to me and sent him to get rid of both me and the photos I'd claimed to have-and Kirk had turned my own lie right around on me, by claiming to have them, too.
The decision I'd put off was made for me now. I didn't have any choice but to take Balcomb to the law.
I didn't want to disturb any evidence, including my truck, so I started walking toward Canyon Ferry village to find a phone.
Then I stopped. A fresh tingle of adrenaline was starting through me, this time for a very different reason.
It was
coming to me how this was going to look.
There were no witnesses to the fact that I'd acted in self-defense. On the contrary, the obvious take would be that I'd lured Kirk here to get even.
Investigators would quickly establish that he'd torched my lumber. Plenty of people knew about the long-standing friction that was there between us anyway, and several today had watched his snitching cost me my job and send me to jail, with him holding a rifle on me in the process.
Including, especially, Wesley Balcomb.
By killing Kirk, I'd destroyed my only backup for my story about the horses. I had no idea where they were buried, and the photos I'd seen on that camcorder sure weren't of them.
I had nothing on Balcomb now. But he had plenty of reason-and plenty of means-to railroad me for homicide.
My gaze was pulled to the pistol, lying where Kirk had dropped it, about eighteen inches from his hand-a Smith and Wesson.357 Magnum, with a slug powerful enough to penetrate a car engine. The slightest graze would have sent me reeling, giving him plenty of room to finish the job.
But I had a different worry about it now. Both make and caliber were so common around here that they were generic-you could buy one for a couple hundred bucks in any pawnshop, and cheaper in a parking lot behind a bar. This one was fairly old and a little beat-up. It probably wasn't registered to him-which meant that I could have been the one who'd brought it here-and if it was his, I could have held a gun of my own on him and forced him to give it to me. All the staging he'd done-even using my gloves-could be seen as clumsy attempts on my part to bolster my claim of self-defense.
And without question, the knife that had killed him and the hand that had held it-both were mine.
I'd gotten a real good look at the criminal justice system when I'd worked the crime beat in Sacramento, and as if the vision that Madbird had joked about finally came, I found myself staring into into a tumbling kaleidoscope of probabilities that froze just long enough for me to see to the end with chilling clarity.
I'd be slammed back in jail as soon as the sheriffs arrived, and this time the bail would be astronomical. I'd sit in a cell for months or years while some overworked court-appointed attorney tried to wrangle with the smooth power of Balcomb's wealth and behind-the-scenes influence, and the outrage of Kirk's prominent family. If I was lucky, I might get off with manslaughter, but if suspicion was strong that I'd set this up in advance, then premeditation entered in. I'd trade the county lockup for Deer Lodge, with only the question of how old a man I'd be when-if-I got out.
The invisible grip that had held me all day tightened like a junkyard's car-crushing vise.
Then, through the chaos in my mind, came a thought so clear it almost seemed spoken by a voice.
Nobody knows about this yet.
A weaker voice protested that no, I couldn't, I just wasn't like that. But my body started moving, and gathered speed under the power of a whole new kind of fear.
I spent the next four hours working harder than I'd ever worked in my life.
22
A distant sound jolted me awake, too dazed to grasp where I was.
Then I remembered.
When I'd gotten home, not long before dawn, I'd come in quietly and made sure nobody was around, then gone into the woods to a spot that was well hidden and gave a clear view of my cabin and the road. I'd wrapped myself in a sleeping bag and sat back upright against a little berm, with my old man's pistol in my lap. I wouldn't have believed I could have closed my eyes, let alone slept, but my adrenaline had evaporated and exhaustion slammed down like the lid of a coffin. Now the hazy light of an autumn morning was filtering down through the pine branches around me.
The noise I'd heard was from a vehicle coming up my drive-a sheriff's cruiser.
It pulled up beside my truck. As the driver unfolded his lanky frame out of the car, I saw that it was Gary Varna.
He'd abandoned his usual button-down shirt and jeans and was in full uniform-counting his Smokey Bear hat, six and a half feet of khaki and leather. Ordinarily, you never saw him with a gun-he probably carried a small one concealed, like most off-duty cops-but on formal occasions he strapped on a more traditional Montana sheriff's weapon, a.44 Magnum that looked the size of a jackhammer. He was wearing it now.
I got up fast, shoved my gear into the brush, and hurried to meet him, keeping the cabin between us so it wouldn't look like I'd been so far away. My head, ribs, and wrist all reminded me of details from yesterday.
When I got to Gary, he had my truck's hood up and seemed to be admiring the engine.
"Morning, Hugh," he said. "I haven't seen this much of you in years."
"Sheriff."
"Out for a stroll?"
"Just to take a leak."
"Nice old rig," he said, patting the fender. "What you got in here, a 327?"
I nodded. "My dad had it bored and revalved for the changeover to unleaded, so it's a little bigger now."
"Nice," he said again. He closed the hood with a clang that made me wince.
"Come on in," I said.
His blue-gray eyes took in the cabin's interior without seeming to, in that practiced cop way. There wasn't much to see-the nook I euphemistically called my kitchen, just big enough for an old Monarch wood cookstove and a sink; a bed made of three-quarter-inch plywood with a worn-out mattress on top; a table and some other pieces of furniture; and some bookshelves and prints and such that I'd mounted on the rough log walls.
The clock read 7:39 AM. I hadn't expected this visit so early, or that Gary himself would come. But I'd known that somebody would, and I'd done a little staging of my own, rumpling the bedding and leaving a bottle of Old Taylor and some empty beer cans around.
"Sorry to interrupt you," he said, hooking his thumbs in his gun belt. "You look like you could use some more sleep."
"I got pretty fucked up last night." I didn't have to pretend much about that. I was bleary-eyed, rumpled, and still wearing dirty work clothes-although not the same ones as yesterday.
"The kind of day you had, I can't blame you," he said.
"Thanks. I'll make some coffee."
"Don't worry about it on my account. I already drunk a gallon." So. He'd been up and on this for a while.
I started filling the kettle, mostly to give my hands something to do. "You're looking very official," I said.
"Not by choice-just in case something comes up. I got a call about five this morning from Reuben Pettyjohn. He'd just got a call from Kirk's girlfriend. I guess she didn't want to talk to our office directly-she's got a couple little drug issues pending. Anyway, seems Kirk never came home last night."
I kept my hands moving and did my best to put on a wry face.
"I don't find that too hard to believe," I said. Kirk had a well-known penchant for sliding around on his live-in squeeze, Josie. Even Helena had its meth whores, and he was popular with them.
"That's what me and Reuben would of figured, and so did Josie, at first," Gary said. "She drove around town a while, checking the bars and other gals' apartments and all that. She kept calling his cell phone and he wouldn't answer, which ain't hard to believe, either.
"But then an hour or two after midnight, her calls started going straight to the phone's answering machine. Now, it's possible he turned it off or it ran out of juice, but she says he was crazy about that phone and he made damn sure to keep it working twenty-four seven, no matter what."
Son of a bitch, his cell phone. He must have had it stashed in the Jeep. I'd rummaged through there quickly, looking for my camera, but I hadn't found that and I'd never even thought about the phone.
"The only other way I know of that can happen," Gary said, "is when they get damaged."
Sitting at the bottom of Canyon Ferry Lake would damage a cell phone, all right.
I glanced at Gary, wrinkling my forehead in concern.
"You think something happened to him?" I said.
"I got two minds about it. I'm still mostly willing to bet he
fell in love for the night. Maybe he did turn it off, or dropped it or stepped on it or run over it. But together with him not turning up-that's unsettling. So we're asking around." Gary's gaze stayed on me.
I shrugged. "Last time I saw him was yesterday afternoon at the ranch, right before I came to visit you."
"He was holding a rifle on you, is that right?"
I'd suspected that would get thrown at me sooner or later, too, but it was still the hardest jolt yet.
"Well-yeah," I said.
Then I swung around to face him.
"What are you getting at, Gary? Nothing happened between Kirk and me-we never even talked. He was just there in the background, doing his job."
"That's all I'm doing, too-just my job. This is informal, but if you don't want to talk to me, you don't have to."
It didn't look informal, with that uniform and hogleg.
"Sure I'll talk to you," I said.
He lifted his chin in approval. "Why don't you give me a quick rundown of what you did last night?"
I'd rehearsed this over and over during the drive back here and the hour or so before I'd fallen asleep, but it was still like walking through a minefield. I spoke hesitantly, as if I was trying to remember.
"I got home from jail. I was pissed off and restless. I went down to O'Toole's and had a couple. Then-can we keep this private?"
"For now," Gary said. "Not if it comes to bear legally. So think it over."
"It's nothing that serious. I went out to the ranch and picked up my tools."
"Am I remembering right that Balcomb eighty-sixed you from there?"
"Yeah, but the way he was fucking with me, I was nervous he'd impound them or some goddamn thing and I'd never see them again."
Gary pushed his hat brim back and scratched his forehead.
"I can't say that was a good idea, but I can see it," he said. "Give me a time frame to hang this on."
"I probably left the bar around ten and got back to town around midnight."
