The Dark Horse

by Craig Johnson

  “Hi.”

  Vic shook her hand and smiled. “How you doin’?”

  I felt compelled to continue. “Juana’s almost got an associate’s degree in criminal justice from over in Sheridan.”

  They both ignored me.

  La bandita flicked her eyes at my caved-in face and then looked back at Vic. “Is he really the sheriff ?”

  The Italian beauty’s head dropped in silent laughter, then raised and considered me. “Yeah, and believe it or not, most of the time he acts like one.”

  Juana looked at me again and then back at Vic. I felt like sonar readings were being made, but I wasn’t on the same frequency, even though I could see the pings bouncing back and forth between the two.

  “If you’re going to stay, I’m going to have to charge you the double rate for the room.”

  11

  October 30, 9:58 A.M.

  First there was pounding on the door, then Dog started barking, then my head fell off and rolled across the stained carpet and lodged itself in the corner against the chipped baseboard—at least that’s what it felt like.

  I got up in my boxer shorts, appropriately enough, pulled on a T-shirt from my duffel, and stumbled over Dog toward the door. If it was Cliff Cly looking for a rematch, I was going back to my bag, pull out my .45, and just shoot him.

  I swung the door open and looked at a man with glasses and a graying beard with mustache to match who was wearing a ball cap that read COFFEEN DYNO-TUNE. The name Jim Rogers spiraled in white thread across the left chest pocket of his dark blue coveralls. “You Eric Boss?”

  I stared at him. “What?” He looked at some of the other doors, and the number on mine, sure he’d made a mistake. I cleared my throat; what could it hurt? “Sure, I’m Eric Boss.”

  “No, you’re not; you’re the sheriff from over in Absaroka County.” He studied my face, which still felt like it had fallen off. I glanced at the corner next to the baseboard just to make sure it hadn’t. “At least, you used to be.”

  “And how do you know that?”

  “I got a speeding ticket last year—it was that nasty little brunette deputy of yours nabbed me.”

  The voice behind me was sharp. “You were doing seventy-three in a fifty-five.” I turned to look back at the bed I’d just vacated. “And you had no taillights.”

  I turned back and looked at the mechanic, who was desperately trying to see around me. “Can I help you with something?”

  He focused on me and threw a thumb over his shoulder. “Steve sent me over; I’ve got a horse trailer out here—we re-packed the wheel bearings, fixed the brakes, rewired, and put new tires on.”

  I reached up and cradled my face before my cheekbone reminded me about the pain. “Right, right . . .” I took a deep breath and recalled having the vehicle towed into Sheridan for a makeover. I looked over him and could see they had cleaned the old trailer off, and she wasn’t looking half bad. “Uh, you can just leave it out there, Jim.”

  He didn’t move.

  “Is there something else?”

  He nodded. “Ya gotta pay for it.”

  “Oh . . . you bet.” I closed the door. He was still trying to see who it was that had spoken to him from the bed. It was lucky that the wind was blowing and that he seemed just a bit hard of hearing. I dug into the jeans that I had left on the chair for my wallet as Vic rolled over and luxuriously stretched, revealing a perfectly rounded breast and alert nipple. She propped herself up on an elbow and used her red-nailed hand to support her tousled head; she made no effort to cover up. I stood there, unable to move, then remembered my mission, opened the door, and handed the guy my credit card. I stepped forward and got between him and the provocative room.

  I closed the door behind me as he finished writing down the numbers and totals. He handed the card back and ripped off a receipt. I took the slip of paper and looked at him. “Anything else?”

  He shifted his weight and gestured with the thumb again. “Just leave it out here?”

  “Yep.” I waited until he got the trailer unhitched and had climbed back in his truck before I turned and sidled into the room, closed the door, and looked at her.

  She was still lying on her side with one leg pulled up ankle to calf, one hand still supporting the mussed hair; the other was lazily making circles on the flat of the sheet. More than a little of her body was still exposed, and I took that extra second to take in the swoops and swallows of her general physique.

  I felt like I should carve a statue.

  I tossed the transaction papers and my wallet in my open bag, stepped over Dog, and sat on the corner of the bed as she watched me with the tarnished gold, vulpine eyes. “A horse trailer?”

  I nodded, and it still hurt. “It’s a mercy mission.”

  “You don’t even like horses.”

  “I do too—it’s just that they’re big, dangerous, and a poor form of transportation.”

  She bit her lip. “Two of the three could be said about you.”

  I reached out and pulled the sheet over the portion of her anatomy that was distracting me as the knocking began at the door again. “Jeez . . .”

  “You’re popular.”

  I stepped over Dog, who didn’t even bother barking this time, and cracked the door slightly open. I expected to see the mechanic: instead, it was Benjamin who stood there. The four-foot cowboy looked over his shoulder at the trailer.

  “Are you ready to go?”

  I squeezed through the doorway, drawing the door closed behind me again. I could see Hershel backing Bill Nolan’s red Dodge pickup to the horse trailer. I looked at the little bandito as his eyes traveled up and down my frame from underneath his sweat-stained cowboy hat.

  “I never seen anybody in their bedclothes at ten o’clock in the morning—you sick?” He studied my face a little closer. “Boy, that’s a shiner.”

  I held up a finger. “Just a second, okay?”

  He nodded. I turned, shut the door, and gazed at the exquisite female stretching luxuriously on the bed of the squalid motel room. I cleared my throat and felt the pain in my head increase. “After one of the best nights of my life, I think I’m about to pay for it with one of my worst days.”

  October 26: four days earlier, afternoon.

  She had been petting Dog, who had rested his head on the hospital bed, but she continued to ignore me.

  “Mary, if you don’t tell me what happened that night, then I can’t help you.” She looked up, and her expression made me wonder why I was trying. “If I go through the report, would you at least give me an indication as to what you agree with and what you don’t?” She continued scratching the dense fur behind Dog’s ears near the furrow of his bullet scar. “I know it hurts, but Isaac says you can talk.” I slumped back against my folding chair, picked the report up from my lap, and flipped the page. “In your initial statement to the investigators in Campbell County—”

  She rolled over on her side and continued scratching Dog under his chin. I watched her for a moment, then stood and patted my leg. “Dog.” The beast was by my side in an instant and followed me. I pointed toward Janine’s desk at the end of the hall. “Go.”

  I backed into the room, closed the heavy door behind me, sat in the hospital chair with the report in my lap, and tipped my hat back. “No talk, no Dog.”

  She looked up at me. We sat there staring at each other.

  I took a deep breath, thought about Cady and another hospital bed, and relied on my last, most secret approach when confronted by female opposition—I begged. “Please help me; I can’t do this alone.”

  The muscles in her face softened just a touch. She considered me, finally clearing her throat and licking her lips as if she hadn’t spoken in years. I stared at the bandages at her throat and thought about how she’d looked on the floor of the examination room just yesterday.

  When my eyes met with hers again, she barely nodded, and her voice was a fragile whisper. “Okay.”

  “I’ve got some q
uestions about the timing of that night.” I carefully avoided actually mentioning her husband’s murder. “Do you remember leaving the house?”

  She nodded, almost imperceptibly.

  “Do you have any idea when that was?” She shrugged and then lay there looking at me. “Before midnight, after?”

  “Before.” She didn’t wheeze quite so much with this answer.

  “You don’t have any idea when?”

  She shook her head and swallowed carefully. “Why?”

  “The volunteer fire department in Clearmont didn’t get a ten-seventy fire alarm until almost one o’clock in the morning.” I lowered the report and looked at her. “That seems like an awful lot of time between the fire in the barn and the anonymous call.”

  “I could have been confused about the times.”

  “I don’t think you were.” I allowed the pages of the report to fall against my chest. “Mary, you stated in the report that the hired man, Hershel Vanskike, was the one who found you.” I let the image sit there with her for a moment. “Was there anybody else there that night?”

  “No.”

  “You’re sure?” I leaned forward, closed the file, and dropped it flat on the floor between my boots as a symbolic gesture. “Mary, for me to really know what happened to you that night, I need you to think about it clearly—and tell me. See, I’m beginning to think that there were a lot more people there than you’re willing to say and possibly more than you know about.” I rolled my lip under my teeth. “Let’s start with the ones you do.”

  “Why is this so important to you?” Her voice was stronger with this question, even if it was without emotion.

  I stared at her and then nodded toward the manila folder on the floor. “This is your life we’re talking about.”

  I stood up and walked over to the window. I could see the back of Kyle Straub’s sign, where another meadowlark was singing. There was something about the sign that was bothering me, and not just because it was a reminder that the thought of Kyle Straub or his grammar made my ass hurt. I let it submerge in my mind and shifted my weight from one size 14-E to the other.

  “It’s going to happen like this: the statements that you’ve made to the Campbell County investigators are enough to—” I stopped speaking and turned to look at her. “They don’t get many high-profile cases like this one. Generally, it’s Bubba shot Skeeter while they were drinking beer in the cab of Skeeter’s truck and trying to figure out if Bubba’s Charter Arms revolver was loaded.” I leaned back and sat on the windowsill. “You see, the mechanism that I’m a part of—it feeds on high octane, and that’s what this case is. Everybody is going to want a piece of it—of you.” The sun cast shadows on the crown of my hat. “They’ll call for a change of venue, and they’ll get it; possibly Casper, maybe Cheyenne, and you’ll get a jury trial—and that won’t go well for you. I’ve stood through a lot of trials, and I can tell you that those prosecutors are going to tap into something—a virulent little strain of human nature that’s going to sway that jury into getting somebody, somebody rich, beautiful, and powerful—somebody they’ve never had a chance of getting before. It’s going to be you, Mary, and not just because you confessed.”

  She watched me intently. “Why then?”

  “Because you are incapable of showing the one thing that they are going to demand, whether you’re guilty or not—repentance. They want you to feel sorry; it makes them feel better about themselves.” I couldn’t look her in the eye, so I turned my face and gazed at the pillow beside her head. “Most people . . .” Her head dropped a little, but with my peripheral vision I could see she kept her eyes on me, on my polyester shirt and my dull and unpolished badge still with traces of her blood in the engraving. “They go through their lives believing in things that they never have much contact with—the police, lawyers, judges, and courts. They have an unstated belief in the system; that it’ll be impartial, fair, and just.”

  I could hear normal conversations through the door. It was good to know that normal conversations could still happen while I was engaged in this one. “But then there’s the moment when it comes to them that the police, the courtroom, and the laws themselves are just human, vulnerable to the same shortcomings as all of us, that they’re a mirror of who we are, and that’s the heartbreaking dichotomy of it all—that the more contact you have with the law, the less belief you have.” I took a breath. “Like some strange little religion all its own, the one thing that makes the whole system work is the one thing it robs you of—faith.”

  I turned my face and looked at her directly. “But you have to believe that justice is truly blind, and that those scales aren’t tipped.”

  She had taken a breath of her own. “Or what?”

  “Or else you’re in a dark place.”

  She looked at the sheets covering her legs. “But you haven’t answered my question: why is this important to you?”

  I smiled sadly. “This is important to me because I believe you’re innocent. And I’ve spent most of my life defending and protecting the innocent.” I crossed to the door and opened it. “I’ll let you in on another little secret—the sheriff of Campbell County believes you’re innocent, too. Otherwise he never would’ve sent you over here to me.”

  I allowed Dog to enter the room. The beast was waiting outside the door. He looked at her, then at me. I nodded, and he crossed to the bed and placed his broad head next to her hand. “Mary, tell me about that night.”

  She had laughed a sad exhale and scratched the fur on his muzzle as his big tail fanned in a counterclockwise circle the way it always did when he was happy.

  October 30, 2:20 P.M.

  We drove across the railroad tracks and headed south on Echeta Road, which went past the local cemetery. It was an odd place with an iron archway and two bands that went across the drive to which the words ABSALOM CEMETERY were attached. There were lights on either side, a ranch gate below that was closed to keep any stray cattle from grazing between the markers, and a cross affixed above, which was black against a sky so blue it hurt my eyes. Most everything hurt my eyes this morning, so I closed them and nodded off.

  It was a good thing that Hershel was driving. I woke up when we hit a rough stretch on the only road leading to and from the Battlement’s flat mesa, and I hoped we wouldn’t meet another truck as there was only room for one and a half. It was the kind of road where, if you met anybody coming up or going down, somebody was going to have to put it in reverse.

  My headache was subsiding but only commensurate with the increasing pain of my eye socket. I’d tried to cradle my face in my hand with an elbow resting on the truck’s windowsill, but the constant jolting of the uneven road only resulted in my periodically punching my damaged face with the palm of my hand. It was an ongoing battle, which had not gone unnoticed by Benjamin, who was seated on the bench seat between Hershel and me.

  I stretched my jaw and felt the unsettling pop in my temple.

  “I bet that hurts.”

  I glanced down at the little bandito as he leaned forward to get a better look at my face. I pulled my Ray-Bans from my shirt pocket and slipped them on in an attempt to hide the evidence. “You’d be right.”

  He nodded. “Have you decided what your name is today?”

  I shrugged. “I thought we’d all go by aliases.”

  “You mean nicknames?” He seemed excited by the thought and turned his attention to Hershel for approval.

  “Sure.” The older cowboy’s face remained immobile as he negotiated the grade, the oversized pickup, and the two tons of trailered horseflesh behind us.

  The boy struggled against his seat belt, which was my dictate, and peered over the dash at the road ahead. “I’m going to be El Bandito Negro de los Badlands.”

  I waited a moment before replying. “You don’t think that’s a little long?”

  He looked dissatisfied with my response. “Why?”

  “Well, if I have to say El Bandito Negro de los Badlands look out f
or that rattlesnake, you’re likely to already be bitten.”

  He swiveled in the seat back toward Hershel and pulled the stampede strings into his mouth. “Are there rattlesnakes up here?”

  The puncher shrugged. “Rattlesnakes everywhere.”

  We topped the mesa and turned northeast. The top of Twentymile Butte looked like a pool table for Jack of bean-stalk fame. If there had been dinosaurs up there, you’d be able to see them from a long way off.

  Hershel pulled the caravan to the left and slowed.

  The boy looked at him. “Why are we stopping?”

  He growled. “Because my nickname is Pequeña Vejiga.” Benjamin laughed as Hershel climbed out, unzipped, and began watering the broken rocks at the edge of the road.

  Thinking a little air might clear my lingering headache and figuring Dog could always use a leg-lifting opportunity, I decided to get out and stretch my legs. Benjamin followed us as we walked into the middle of the rutted and powdery two-track that stretched to the horizon; the only other road curled off to the right and disappeared into the distance as well.

  I thought about how we tilled and cultivated the land, planted trees on it, fenced it, built houses on it, and did everything we could to hold off the eternity of distance—anything to give the landscape some sort of human scale. No matter what we did to try and form the West, however, the West inevitably formed us instead.

  I watched the dust collect on the left side of my boots as the constant wind kicked up a dust devil about seventy-five yards down the road. Dog looked up at me and Benjamin took a few steps past us, and I could feel the palpable urge in him to go chase the miniature twister. “This is the biggest butte in all of Wyoming.”

  I had to smile at the absolute assurance of all his statements. “No, it’s not.”

  He looked up at me and pulled the stampede strings into his mouth again; I was beginning to see a pattern. “Is too.”