The Dark Horse

by Craig Johnson

  I recognized the card—it had rested on the seat of my rental.

  She read. “Eric Boss, Boss Insurance, Billings, Montana.”

  I looked at the little man and thought about the nerve it had taken to reach into a vehicle that contained Dog. His Cheyenne half was showing. “Did you get that out of my car?”

  He didn’t say anything but received a sharp look from his mother and a full Spanish pronunciation of his name. “Ben-hameen?!”

  He shrugged. “It was unlocked.”

  She was on her way around the bar when he launched off the stool and was out the door like a miniature stagecoach robber.

  She flung herself past me and across the room, yelling at her son from the open doorway. “Vete a la casa, desensilla el caballo, y vete directamente a tu cuarto.” The clatter of horse hooves resounded from the dirt street as she continued to shout after him. “¡Escuchame!” The young woman closed the screen door behind her and then crossed silently past me and back behind the bar. Once there, she slid the card across the surface. “I apologize.”

  “It’s all right.”

  She gathered a remote and switched off the cartoon, where a giant eye with spider legs was chasing people around in the desert. She reached over to a burner for the coffee urn. “Well, that pretty much settles that mystery.” I pushed my cup back toward her and watched as she refilled the buffalo china mug. “You’re here about the house that burned down, the barn with the horses.” She nudged the cup back. “That woman?”

  I sipped my coffee—it was still surprisingly good—and collected the business card from the surface of the bar. “What woman is that?”

  2

  October 18: nine days earlier, morning.

  The sheriff of Campbell County had laughed on the other end of the phone.

  “Doesn’t it strike you as odd, Sandy?”

  “Everything in that Powder River country strikes me as odd. It’s another world, Walt. Everybody’s got police scanners; do you know what it’s like to try and serve papers out there?” I could just imagine him seated in his luxurious leather chair in his wood-paneled office. What with all the energy development, I was beginning to believe the talk that Gillette would be the largest city in Wyoming in ten years.

  I raised my eyebrows. “Yep, but setting your barn on fire and then going to sleep?”

  Sandy Sandberg laughed again. He didn’t take anything all that seriously—it was one of his charms—and being sheriff of a county as busy as Campbell would’ve given anybody ample opportunity for seriousness. “Yeah, well . . . they say it was lightning, but Wade Barsad was known to be kind of reckless.”

  I studied the thin, two-page report on my desk. “Not local.”

  “Oh, hell no. No man from around here would ever do that to a horse, let alone eight of ’em.”

  “Why kill the horses?”

  “I think she cared more about them than she did him.”

  “That doesn’t sound too difficult.” Vic came in with her Red Bull, sat in my visitor’s chair, and propped her tactical boots on the edge of my desk like she always did. “Sandy, you mind if I put you on speakerphone? Vic’s here.” I went ahead and punched the button; I knew Sandy Sandberg liked to work a big room.

  His laughter tinkled from the tinny speaker. “How’d you like that little present I sent over for you, sweetheart?”

  Vic looked up from her energy drink and raised her head a little so she could emphasize each word. “Fuck. You. Sand. Bag.”

  Sandy roared again. I interrupted before the two of them could get any further. “Where was he from?”

  He took a breath to recover. “. . . Back east somewhere.” The way he’d said it, he might as well have been talking about Bangkok, and I was sure it was for Vic’s benefit.

  “What about the woman—Mary?”

  “Greenie from down in Colorado. She was one of those Denver Bronco girls, the ones that ride out onto the field after they score a touchdown? Not that the Donkeys have been doin’ a lot of that lately . . .”

  “Where’d the money come from?”

  “Oh, she had some, but he had more. To hear him tell it, he had more money than the rest of the inhabitants of the Powder River area combined.”

  I stared at the receiver. “What makes you say, ‘To hear him tell it’?”

  Sandy laughed again. “You don’t miss much, do you?” I waited. “We had a little visit from some investigators from the IRS about Wade owin’ $1.8 million in taxes and penalties. We found about $742,000 in uncashed checks made out to him personally. DCI guys figured he was tryin’ to keep it away from the revenue boys, but I think he was tryin’ to keep it from his wife, since she’d already filed for divorce.”

  “She should have gotten herself and those horses out of there.”

  “Well, it was a race.”

  Talking with Sandy Sandberg was like sight-reading braille. “What’s that mean?”

  “Everybody in three counties wanted to kill that son-of-a-bitch—Bill Nolan bein’ number two.”

  I’d gone to primary school in a one-room schoolhouse with a Bill Nolan; it had to be the same man. “What happened?”

  “The bank was gettin’ set to foreclose on the Nolan place, so he put the majority up for sale and saved a little spread for himself.” I was sorry to hear that, knowing the L Bar X had been in Bill’s family for four generations. “And do you know that rat-bastard Barsad wouldn’t give Bill a right-of-way?”

  “That’s rough.”

  “They settled out of court, but Bill was home alone on his place the night somebody—and I mean anybody—could have ventilated Wade’s head.”

  “I thought the wife confessed?”

  “She did, but until we got the report back from DCI, it wasn’t a sure thing.”

  “Anyone else on the short list?”

  “Bill volunteered for a polygraph test and cleared it. There was another guy who showed up here recently and was working for Wade—fella by the name of Cliff Cly, who was in a bar over here tellin’ everybody how he did it. Unfortunately for him, we happened to have an off-duty deputy in the bar at the time, and then fortunately for him we brought his ass in and gave him the lie detector, which detected that he was drunk and full of shit.”

  Sandy rustled some papers—I was getting the feeling the other sheriff was losing interest in a closed case.

  “Hershel Vanskike might have been interested in killin’ the bastard, too. He was looking after Barsad’s herd, including what Wade had siphoned off the surrounding ranchers. From what we gathered, he hadn’t paid the man in three months—just let him live in a trailer out by the old corrals and dipping tanks off Barton Road, where we’re going to have the auction next week. Hey, do you need a tractor?”

  “Anybody else?”

  “What?”

  “Anybody else who would want to kill him?”

  “Oh, he screwed an old rancher, Mike Niall, by sellin’ him a dozen barren cows. . . . Jeez, Walt, I’d tell you to just get out a Range Co-op telephone book and take your pick, but his wife confessed. Game over.”

  “What’s DCI say?”

  “The Damned Criminal Idiots say that her fingerprints were on the weapon, powder-trace elements on her hands, and that she signed a confession sayin’ she shot him.”

  “Why use a .22?”

  Sandy sighed. “It was handy? Hell, I don’t know.”

  “Was it her rifle?”

  There was a pause. “No, it was his varmint gun out of his truck—I think it was parked out front.”

  “He have any other weapons in the house?”

  “Tons, but they were all locked up in a gun safe.”

  “Why would . . .”

  “He was foolin’ around with about three other women and that alone is enough to get your ass shot in that country.” He laughed again. “Hey, Walt Long-arm-of-the-law, protector of lost women, lost dogs, and lost causes, I know what you’re thinkin’ and some rats need killin’, but she made a mistake by gett
ing caught—then she made a mistake by confessing, and now it’s going to cost her the rest of her life.”

  It was silent, and I stared at the tiny, red light on the speakerphone. “Something just feels wrong.” This was a sticky business and not my jurisdiction, so that was all I said.

  Sandberg interrupted, as I hoped he would. “Walt?”

  “Yep?”

  “I don’t have the time for this.”

  I looked up at Vic with her five sworn in the Philadelphia Police Department and her consequent experience in interdepartmental politics as she silently mouthed the words “Back off.”

  “I’ve already got one murder, one rape, two robberies, fifty-four cases of aggravated assault, forty-seven burglaries, and a hundred and eighty-six cases of larceny. I don’t have time for mysteries that volunteer to solve themselves.”

  I had already formed an apology of sorts when the other sheriff spoke again. “But hey, you wanna look into it, I’ll pay your gas.”

  October 27, 7:32 P.M.

  I stepped through the blackened timbers and tried to imagine what the ranch house must’ve looked like before it had burned. The binder that the real Eric Boss in Billings had given me said it was insured at over three million, which wouldn’t come close to covering the cost of rebuilding the mansion, and there would be no money at all if the fire was deemed a case of arson.

  Not that it seemed anybody would be rebuilding it.

  Wade Barsad had spared no expense, but I figured the home’s design had been his wife Mary’s. The ranch homestead stood a mile and a quarter from the rough-hewn timber and moss-rock archways that trumpeted the entrance to the aspen-lined, red scoria ranch road of the L Bar X. The 7,516-square-foot “rustic” ranch house had been built with two-hundred-year-old timbers and two-foot-thick walls of golden-faced stone in a piazza-shaped plan that included a courtyard wrapped with verandas, open to a view of the Powder River.

  I told Dog to stay on the rock patio as I carefully picked my way through the debris.

  The nearest fire department was the volunteer one in Clearmont, and obviously they hadn’t hurried in getting here; possibly they knew the man. The roof and supporting timbers were gone, but the majority of the heavy walls still stood with their windows blown out and shards of blackened glass scattered across the stone floors. I walked past the open front doorway, the side panels burnt and hanging loose on the hinges, the moonlight pulling the sheen from the flagstone walkway that led to where I’d parked the rental car.

  Through an antique glass door that was curiously still intact, I crossed a greenhouse atrium that separated the public part of the house from the bedroom where the deed had been done. Burnt houses bring out the melancholy in me, but it was possible that burnt greenhouses were even worse. The withered, dead plants hung from the beds as if they had tried to limbo under the smoke to escape the flames. They hadn’t made it. As I looked back from the door of the bedroom, I noticed the collective tracks of the Campbell County Sheriff’s Department, those from the Division of Criminal Investigation, and those from the firefighters in the fine, black dust that covered everything.

  The master bedroom suite was built over what must’ve been a root cellar, and most of the hardwood floor was gone, leaving only a vast hole that dropped to the charcoaled pit below. There was nothing left of the king-sized bed other than the inner frame and coils of the box spring. T. J. Sherwin and her DCI investigators must have had a time securing and processing the scene.

  I stood there for a long while, looking into the abyss and wondering what the abyss was making of me. I tucked the folder under my arm a little tighter and turned, making my way back to the courtyard.

  By the time I got there, I discovered that Dog’s idea of “stay” was disinterestedly springing a few western cottontails from the brush. He wandered back in my direction when I called him, marking each stand of sage as he came, and finally rested his muscled behind on my foot. I ruffled his ears, my hand stretching a full octave across his massive head. I peeled some fur back to look at the bullet furrow across his thick skull. “Is that your idea of stay?” He smiled up at me, revealing rows of teeth that shone in the evening moonlight.

  It appeared that with the prevailing wind from the river basin, the fire that was started at the barn had destroyed the main house, perversely leaving the courtyard. It was as if the elements had decided to ravage the enclosed areas but leave the open heart untouched.

  It was not lost on me that the most obliterated area of Wade and Mary Barsad’s house had been the bedroom.

  There was an outdoor fireplace with firewood stacked nearby and a willow chair that yawned with an open seat, but I refused its invitation, walked to the edge of the patio, and carefully leaned on the hand-adzed timbers that supported the cedar shingles and copper gutters and downspouts. Part of this roof was still there and blocked the view of the thick stripe of the Milky Way that was just beginning to trace its girth across the twilight sky.

  The courtyard wouldn’t be a bad place to live; well, at least until a month from now when it would be filled with snow and the wind would attempt to blow the whiskers off your face.

  It was getting chilly, so I looked at the fireplace again. It looked serviceable and almost as if it’d been used recently. Even if it hadn’t, it wasn’t like I was going to have to worry about burning the place down.

  I glanced around, looking for a bit of fresh kindling, and found a big bunch of tiny astrological scrolls that you see for sale in grocery-store checkout lanes. I noticed they were all Sagittarius—which was as far as my knowledge of astrology went—then wadded them up and tossed them into the makings of a fire. There were a few long-stem matches by the mantel in a tin container, and soon I had a blaze where no more than a month ago there had been far too much of the stuff to contain.

  Dog, knowing a good thing when he saw one, curled up at the hearth and watched as I pulled the chair closer and unfolded the insurance binder to the middle where I had carefully concealed some faxed sheets from DCI. I was lucky that T.J., the wicked witch of the west, as she was known in some of Wyoming’s law enforcement circles, had done the general on the deceased. She had included some disturbing and detailed photographs on how the rancher had gone not so gently into that dark night.

  Six tangential shots from a Savage .22 automatic rifle had done the trick but, for all practical purposes, the first one had been enough.

  Probably not a suicide.

  Close range, but not that close—four feet to be exact—and there may have even been a little powder dispersal, but we would never know. The body of Wade Barsad had burned along with his home, his barn, and her horses. Dental records had hung the name on Wade’s toe in lieu of upcoming DNA testing. I was just getting to the meat of the report when Dog growled with a sound as deep and resonant as a powwow drum.

  I closed the report and listened to the soft pop of the fire and the chirp of the crickets. “Hello?” I placed a hand on Dog’s back to keep him from disappearing into the darkness and into whatever it was out there. “I said hello.”

  The outline of a battered cowboy hat shifted from the partial shadow of the burnt juniper tree at the edge of the house, and I could see the octagonal barrel of a heavy rifle move in emphasis. “Make yourself at home, why don’t’cha.”

  Dog growled again, but the repeater was cradled in the man’s arms as he lit a hand-rolled cigarette, so I figured the threat from it wasn’t too great. The glow showed orange on the large, flat face, stubbled with whiskers as prodigious as my own, and on a set of ears that pushed forward from an oversized, flat-brimmed, Powder River-style hat.

  I rested the folder on my knee with the label facing out as he came closer. Dog continued to growl. I squeezed his neck and he stopped, even going so far as to sniff at the stained jeans of the stranger’s leg as he stood there in the intermittent light of the fireplace. I tipped my own hat back and looked up at the fence-post-thin man, his clothes and entire body tapering down from the buttoned co
llar at his bobbing Adam’s apple. “You burn my fortunes?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “My damn fortunes I had sittin’ on that hearth, did you burn ’em?”

  I remembered the tiny scrolls I’d used for kindling. “I’m afraid I did.”

  “Well, that’s another trip to the Kmart.” He said Kmart like it was Mecca and studied me for a while. “They told me you was askin’ questions down at the bar, earlier tonight, and that you might be by.”

  “They?”

  He didn’t answer but leaned against a support timber with the old Yellow Boy wedged in his folded arms—I figured the Henry was probably a reproduction. “Lot of insurance money, I guess.”

  “Around three million for the house alone.”

  He glanced at the folder on my knee again. “Some racket, I’ll tell ya.” I waited. “That stuff, jus’ a protection racket near as I can tell.” He took a puff on his cigarette, cupped in his hand European style. It was a gesture he’d probably learned from the local Basque sheepherders—with a name like Vanskike, the chance that he was Basque himself was slim. “I guess it’s all jus’ a big protection racket, the government, the insurance companies.” He looked straight at me. “So, how come you’re up here sneakin’ around in the dark?”

  “There was more light when I got here, and I guess I didn’t feel like sitting in a motel room.”

  He pulled the wrinkled cigarette from his lips, flicking some ashes into the dried grass. “I can understand that.” He nodded and looked off toward the river. “It’s a nice spot. I been coming up here since the fireworks when the weather’s good—sit in that very same chair and drink beer.”

  I took a deep breath and started to rise. “Well, we’ll get out of your way . . .”

  “No, no.” He looked genuinely panicked and motioned for me to stay seated. “I don’t get too many visitors, and sometimes I forget how to behave.”