The Dark Horse

by Craig Johnson

  4

  October 20: seven days earlier, late morning.

  I had read the report that’d been faxed from the FBI field office in Denver.

  Vic stood over my desk and fidgeted as I looked up from the eighteen pages. “You want me to read aloud?”

  “I’ve already read it.”

  “So, what does it say?” My undersheriff’s distillation was always more entertaining than the reports from the Feds.

  She crossed around the desk and sat in her usual chair. “If she hadn’t killed him, it looks to me like somebody else would’ve, or he would have been spending the rest of his life in a place where there are no light switches and you have to ask to go piss.”

  “He was in trouble with the Department of Justice?”

  She sipped her coffee but didn’t put her feet up like she usually did; instead, she sat there with her knees bobbing up and down. “Worse.”

  I sighed and forced more coffee into my system. “What’s worse than the FBI?”

  Vic pushed her nose to her cheek with her index finger. Her voice was nasal, and she emphasized her South Philly accent. “He was made—the operative term here is made—the accountant in charge of operations for a casino operating firm, and in a matter of five years was able to siphon close to three million dollars out of the place.”

  “From the mob?”

  She released her nose and smiled; she always smiled when she was relaying information like this, the way sharks smile when they see snorklers wearing yellow. “Makes you wonder if he was dropped on his head as a child or if he was eating fucking paint chips like they were Cool Ranch Doritos, doesn’t it?”

  “Or he was a lot tougher than anybody gave him credit for.” I flipped to the photo on page two; the deceased was inordinately handsome and could’ve been Italian except for his name. “Barsad doesn’t sound particularly Italian.”

  She shook her head. “Wannabe. He started out as Willis Barnecke and worked for an accounting firm that did business for a number of casinos in Atlantic City, where he comes in contact with Joey ‘Suits’ Venuto and was offered a job. He took the job and the three-very-very-large, but when the Fed turned up the heat after a waterfront-based racketeering investigation where a competitor ended up shot to death in the trunk of his own car in Union, New Jersey, Willis’s name started popping up on FBI wiretaps like Whack-A-Mole.”

  “He killed somebody?”

  “Inconclusive.” She set her mug on my desk and laughed. “He gets locked up for a DWI in Atlantic City but as thick as he was spreading it, you’d have thought he was the capo of capos. He drove around with an Italian flag on his car, for Christ’s sake, and had Sinatra sound bites on his cell phone.”

  “How did he end up in Ohio?”

  She continued to smile the saltwater crocodile smile. “This is the good part. Now, just on the offhand chance, the feds bring Willis in and tell him that they know he was the one that did the guy in Union—and lo and behold, Willis ‘Canary’ Barnecke starts singing like Frank at the Stardust. He names names from exit 9A to 16B on the Jersey Turnpike and assists the DOJ in obtaining about a half-dozen convictions. He gives up a lot but not everything because I guess he’s just a certain brand of moron. Evidently, he had a list somewhere, and the DOJ wants it ever so bad.”

  “A list?”

  “In his short time in the slam, he got in the habit of making kites—notes on tiny pieces of paper. The agent I talked to in Denver said Barsad never got out of the habit and that they found a lot of them, but not the one with the names.” She paused, looked at her coffee, but didn’t pick it up. “Now, what do you do with someone like that once they’ve finished testifying as much as they’re gonna?”

  The hand that was holding up my chin slipped over and covered my face. I peeked at her from between my fingers. “Witness protection?”

  “Hello, Youngstown, Ohio, where Willis, now known as Wallace Balentine via the Feds, gets a job accounting for Central Ohio Steel, wears a tie, and reinvents himself as a pillar of midwestern society. Gets in touch with some of his old buddies in an attempt to make good, and in three years he accumulates another tidy nest egg before being fired and sued by the owners. Wallace Balentine settles out of court for an undisclosed amount, which the owners say is far less than the amount he embezzled, but that puts him in the papers and soon he has to reinvent himself once again, just a little farther west. First Las Vegas, then here.”

  I sighed the words. “Rancher Wade Barsad?”

  She picked up her coffee. “Powder River, let’er buck.”

  I played with the handle on my mug. “It all makes sense; people have been hiding in that Powder River country for over a hundred years.”

  She stood when I did and walked out to the dispatch desk where Ruby was going over the reports from DCI. I leaned against the counter, and Ruby started to hand them to me. “Did you read them?”

  She batted her neon-blue eyes over her lowered glasses with the pearl string, more than giving the impression of a second-grade schoolteacher. “Yes.”

  I nodded and then crossed to the wooden bench beside the steps, I preferred audio most times. “Let’s have it, Sparky.”

  Ruby frowned—she disliked nicknames. “She doesn’t stand much of a chance.”

  Vic had taken the report and was silently reading. She looked up. “His body was incinerated.” She crossed her legs and leaned an elbow on the counter. “But they found all six melted slugs in his skull.” Having sensed my dissatisfaction, Dog ambled from behind Ruby’s desk and came around to rest his head on my knee. “The report said that the fire, possibly started by lightning, possibly not, actually began with the barn and then drifted over and burned the house.”

  “That must’ve been a fun one for T.J. and the bag boys.” I petted Dog’s broad head. “Where was the confession taken?”

  Ruby blinked and watched me. “At the scene.”

  I nodded and stared at the pattern of the old wooden floor and at the sway in the marble step at the landing. I thought about how many times my boots had hit that step, having first noticed it when my daughter had picked it as the favorite place to sit her six-year-old butt.

  Cady hadn’t called recently, and it was weighing heavily on me. She and Michael, Vic’s younger brother, were seeing a lot of each other, and I was thankful for the attention the Philadelphia patrolman was lavishing on her, but I wondered where it was all leading. She’d been in an extremely bad relationship before Michael, one that had ended in her being severely injured. “And the statement was?”

  Vic read from the file. “ ‘I dreamed of shooting the son-of-a-bitch, I dreamed about it every night and I finally did it. I shot him, I shot him six times.’ ”

  It was quiet in the office as I repeated the words to myself. “I dreamed—”

  I’d come to terms with the fact that Cady had gone back to Philadelphia, but it didn’t make it any easier. I’d once again grown used to her company: the coffee in the mornings as I tried to get her to let me fix something for breakfast; the workouts at Durant physical therapy; the way she’d breeze into the office like Venus on the half-shell and pull everybody out of their bad moods; the way my deputies, Saizarbitoria, Double Tough, and Frymire, looked at her when they thought I wasn’t watching them; the afternoons in my office where she would sit with her legs curled under her to read another book in her read-a-mystery-a-day plan; the quiet dinners at home.

  “Walt . . .” I continued to pet Dog and glanced up at my undersheriff’s unforgiving eyes. “The last part—she says she shot him. She says she shot him six fucking times.”

  I nodded and looked at the two of them. Ruby weighed in, and it made me a little irritable to see how quick they were to gang up. “Walt, she repeated the statement en route to the Campbell County jail and once again to the investigators and then to DCI. All in all, she confessed four times.”

  Vic shook her head at me. “Walt, this is a forcible felony with purposeful and premeditated malice.” She p
aused for a moment. “Back in Philly, we used to call it a whack-job.”

  It was two hours later in Philadelphia but still early enough for me to make a phone call. I was being tough and not calling as much. I was doing really well and had held myself in check for a day at a time, only phoning her every other day. At least, I thought I had been doing really well, until the irritated Daaaa-dee on the other end told me otherwise.

  I went back to studying the floor and quoted the passage of the legal description of homicide that Vic’d omitted. “You forgot of sound mind and discretion.”

  She interrupted, tossing the report back onto Ruby’s desk. “Mary Barsad could be nuts, and I’m sure that’s the tack that the defense attorneys are going to take, but she shot him in the head six times; she shot him till she ran out of bullets, and she shot him just to watch his head bounce on the mattress.”

  I studied the veins in the marble step and thought about the veins in Mary Barsad’s temples and then about the thoughts that resided there, the things that visited her while she slept. I could feel words creeping into my mouth, words that weren’t my own. “. . . But then begins a journey in my head, to work my mind when body’s work’s expired.” I thought I’d said it to myself, but when I looked up they were both looking at me like I was the crazy person in question.

  Ruby was the first to say something. “Walter—”

  “Twenty-seventh sonnet.”

  “Christ.” Vic had redirected her look from Ruby back to me. “Look, Shakespeare, I know you’re looking for something to do since Cady left, but this isn’t it. I hate to be the one to break the news to you after twenty-four years in law enforcement, but some people are in jail because they did it.”

  They had continued talking to me but their voices had diminished as if I were falling away from them even as their siren song continued.

  October 27, 11:36 P.M.

  Dog stood on the wooden walkway with me and stared into the empty motel room. I held the hollow-core door back with my right hand and looked around. There was a sagging single bed to the left and a dresser to the right, but what was of more interest was the bathroom door at the far end of the room, which was partially shut with the light on.

  There were noises coming from the bathroom.

  I stepped into the room and set my bag on the only chair beside a wobbly round table. Dog started toward the half-closed door, but I made a noise through my teeth that stopped him. There was the sound of metal on metal, a clanking of something into something, a shuffling noise, and then the door opened.

  Juana, the young woman from the bar, stood there silhouetted in the backlight of the bare, sixty-watt bulb. I smiled as I flipped the light switch, illuminating dead flies in the childish cowboy-and-Indian sconce above the bed. Dog wagged. She blinked and didn’t smile back at me or Dog. She held a toolbox in one hand and a pipe wrench like a weapon in the other. “Does he bite?”

  “Nope.”

  She continued to look at the beast as he did his best to convey an even disposition by continuing to wag. She still held the wrench, which looked massive in her small but steady hand. “I don’t like dogs.”

  I picked my bag up by the handles and tossed it onto the bed. It landed against the peeling painted headboard. “That’s too bad; he likes pretty girls.”

  She didn’t move. “I fixed your toilet.”

  I sat in the empty chair and listened to its recitative of creaks; I took off my hat and rested it on my knee. My head still hurt, and I massaged my eyes in an attempt to drive the headache down my neck. “Glad to be in compliance with the you-gotta-have-a-crapper-in-any-room-you-rent law.”

  “I felt guilty about charging you full price—figured you should have a bathroom that works.”

  I took a deep breath and looked up at her. She was placing the wrench into the toolbox. Dog sat on the worn, somewhat green carpet between her and the door. “I heard you didn’t work here anymore.”

  She smiled and stiff-armed a lean on the dresser; it shifted. “Pat fires me about once a week, but nobody else’ll work for him, especially for the nothing he pays.”

  I worked my jaw, lay the back of my head against the cool plaster surface of the wall, and rolled the dice of nationalism. “So, what’s a nice Guatemalan girl like you doing in a place like this?”

  “I’m not legal, and this place is under the radar.”

  I nodded and looked around. “It’s that.”

  She continued to study me. “Are you okay?”

  I took another breath. “I’ve got a headache.”

  She opened the toolbox and pulled out a small plastic bottle of aspirin, uncapped the container and tapped six small orange tablets into my outstretched hand. “Children’s, so you’ll need three times as many.”

  “You keep aspirin in your toolbox?”

  “Plumbing gives me headaches.” She started to turn. “They’re chewable, but I’ll get you some water.”

  “No need.” I popped the pills into my mouth and swallowed.

  She made a face. “How can you do that?”

  I half-smiled, which probably looked more like a smirk. “Practice. At a certain point in life, aspirin becomes a major food group.”

  She carried the bottle over and sat on the corner of the bed; she was careful to avoid Dog. “You’re making everybody around here nervous.”

  “Why’s that?”

  A rounded shoulder shrugged. “You just are.” She flipped her hair. “Maybe it’s because they think you’re an insurance man.”

  “Hmm . . .” I swallowed again, feeling the aspirins finally hit bottom. “Do I make you nervous?”

  “No, but I don’t think you’re an insurance man.”

  “What do you think I am?”

  “A cop.”

  I nodded. “And what does Benjamin think?”

  “He thinks you’re a cop, too.”

  I yawned and covered my face with my hand. “How do the two of you figure?”

  She put the bottle of aspirin on the bed and reached out to take my hat from my knee. “When you’re a fugitive, you get a feeling for these things.” She examined the inside of the black fur felt: “7 ¾-LONG OVAL. TEN X, H-BAR HATS, BILLINGS.” The mahogany eyes, young but deep-stained with experience, looked back up at me. “If you’re federal, and I’m hoping you’re not, you flew into Montana and bought a hat so that you could blend in—or you’re from the FBI field office in Billings or Cheyenne.”

  I stared at her, the pain in my head resurging. “What, you taking a mail-order course in how to become a private investigator?”

  “Almost two years of law enforcement classes at Sheridan College.” Both shoulders shrugged this time. “Ran out of money.” I sat there without saying anything. “You could be state, maybe an investigator from DCI, but they were already here.”

  I nodded. “You and Benjamin have very active imaginations.”

  “Or you could be local, but I doubt it—the sheriffs around here couldn’t find their butts with GPS.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, strictly Barney Fife.”

  I smiled, this time with my whole mouth. “So, bringing the vast experience of two years of law enforcement education to bear—”

  She placed my hat back on my knee and focused on my eyes. “Oops . . . maybe you are local.”

  I laughed. “So, did you know her—or him?”

  “Both. I cleaned house for them for the better part of a year.”

  “What were they like?”

  “Night and day.” She leaned forward and rested her folded arms on her knees. “She was great. The house was always spotless when I got there, so I’d help her with whatever she needed help with, painting, planting—she had a greenhouse.”

  “I’ve seen it.”

  “She had orchids; I’ve never seen anybody around here with those.”

  “What about him?”

  She made a face. “Loudmouth. If you were around him, you got to hear about just how wonderful he was.
No matter what you’d done, he’d done it better. No matter where you’d been, he’d been there. That kind of stuff.”

  “I understand he had his fingers in a lot of pies?”

  “He owned this place at one point—the motel and the bar. It got to where if you came in for a drink you’d have to listen to him, so people stopped coming. After he died, Pat opened it up again.”

  “Who owned it before Barsad?”

  “Pat.”

  “Were they partners?”

  She thought about it. “I’m not sure. Wade’s business dealings were always a little complex.”

  “In what way?”

  She shrugged. “Wade was involved in everything but had this habit of making lists and stuff on little pieces of paper he called kites.”

  “Is that what you called him, Wade?”

  She studied me. “Sounds like you already know a little about what he was like.”

  “A little.”

  “He came on to me one time at their house; I passed, but he got more persistent and I got out a digging trowel to convince him of my lack of interest.”

  “Did it work?”

  “For a while, but then you had to remind him; he was like that.”

  “I heard a few gals weren’t exactly uninterested.”

  She was silent for a moment. “A few.”

  “Let’s say I was interested, just for argument’s sake; where would I find those women?”

  She studied me more closely. “I’m not naming names because I’m not sure, but if I was so inclined I’d check the immediate vicinity of the ranch. Barsad wasn’t one to go out of his way to look for female companionship; looking the way he did, he didn’t have to.”

  “Kind of like a journeyman outfielder—he’d catch it if it came near him, but he wasn’t going to stretch for it?”

  “Exactly.” She smiled. “There’s an auction over at Bill Nolan’s tomorrow morning at ten—I’d imagine everybody’ll be there. Might be an opportunity to meet all the players.”