His voice touched something off in Wahoo Sue, and she stamped at him again. I turned from the horse and could feel my eyes getting a little wobbly. “Sorry to inconvenience you.”
“Yeah.”
“The boy.”
He gestured with his chin. “He’s in the truck with an old friend of yours.”
“Dog?”
He laughed. “No, not your damned dog. I tagged him with the four-wheeler, so I thought he wouldn’t be any more trouble. Besides, he wasn’t worth a bullet so we drove off and left him.”
I’d allowed my arm to fall to my back and made an attempt to roll toward him as if I were interested in the conversation. “The canteen.”
“Yeah, I wrote the note. It was a calculated risk, ’cause I wasn’t sure if you’d seen the old guy’s handwriting.” He studied me some more. “How are you still awake? It must be your size.”
I could feel my Colt, but I had to get my jacket out of the way to reach it. “I am a little drowsy.”
“You should be; I put enough sleeping pills in that canteen to drop a buffalo.” He started to rise, and I froze my hand. “Anyway, there’s somebody that wants to meet you before you knock off for the night. Okey?” He looked back into the darkness to our left and shouted. “Hey, hurry up if you wanna talk to him.” He looked down at me. “He’s going to love seeing you again-”
Cliff Cly came out of the dark and stood there with Hershel’s Henry rifle in his hands. I was happy to see that he was in pretty rough shape. He ignored me and looked at Barsad. “Where the fuck did you get this?”
A quiet second passed. “I got it off the cowboy.”
Cly looked at the old repeater and then back to Barsad. “You kill him?”
Wade shook his head, and I wondered why he was lying. “No. I told you Cliff, I don’t kill people unless I have to.”
Cly walked over closer and looked down at me. I noticed his face was pretty messed up and he was wearing a neck brace. I could see the individual knuckle marks on his forehead, and the swelling and discoloration around his eye was far worse than mine. I felt a little better.
I looked up at him. “How’s your head?”
He glanced at me in a dismissive manner. “Fuck you.” He turned and shouted to Barsad. “What about this asshole here?”
Barsad’s voice sounded a little farther off, and he must’ve been going toward the truck. “He’s got enough product in him that he’ll overdose, but we’ll shoot him with Hershel’s gun and come up with a story later.” The rodeo cowboy leaned down, holding the. 44 Henry on his thighs with one hand, and started feeling around my jacket with the other. “Check him for a gun. Okey?”
Cly’s face was very near my own. “That’s what I’m doing.” His hand froze against mine as I clutched the Colt at the small of my back.
Barsad’s voice faded. “I’ll get the kid.”
Cly’s eyes and mine locked, and I could feel my muscles tense as I got ready to make one last, desperate move. He didn’t blink and leaned even closer. “Don’t hit me again, you big son-of-a-bitch; the last time you practically took my head off.” He winked and then glanced over his shoulder, looked back at me, and smiled. “Relax, Sheriff, I’ve got us covered, just don’t shoot me. Okey?” He was grinning now. “Hey, kimosabe, can you understand me? I’m on your side.” He studied me for a moment more, and then stood and shouted. “He’s clean.”
I wondered what the hell was going on as Cly stood up. There was a lot of noise, and I listened as at least two doors were slammed. Barsad’s voice carried from the left. “What the hell… where’s the kid?!”
“What’a ya mean?”
There was more noise, and it sounded as if something was slammed into the bed of the truck. “He’s not here, Cliff!”
I tugged at my jacket and pulled the. 45, clearing it from my body but continuing to keep it hidden.
Wade came into my sight, and my ant’s-eye view made them look like giants. “Did you tie him up and put him in the truck?”
“No, there wasn’t time. I just taped him and left him on the four-wheeler.”
“I didn’t see the four-wheeler when I was just back there. Where’d you shittin’ put it?”
He gestured. “It’s back at the…” Just then, I figured I wasn’t the only one who heard it start up. “Oh, fuck.”
Out a couple of hundred yards to the west, I could see the lights of the ATV as it turned and sped away on what I assumed was the road. Barsad took a few steps in that direction but then stopped and looked back at the two of us, then at just me. “Kill him, and I’ll get the kid.”
Cliff shook his head and fumbled with something in his pants pocket as he took a step toward Barsad. “I don’t think-”
Wade must have seen the move; he wasn’t a man to take chances, so he lifted the 9 mm and fired, the bullet hitting Cly squarely in the trunk of his body. He shuddered for a moment, then the big Henry repeater hit the ground and went off, the bullet going into the air, and he collapsed. As he did, I lifted my wavering arm and fired the. 45. I was wide and to the right but kept firing as Barsad made a rapid retreat in the direction of the truck.
I continued to throw rounds in Wade’s general direction, but he didn’t fall. I finished off the clip with a solid thunk as a round hit the truck. I watched as the cab lights came on in the Dodge, but the motor didn’t start. I guess he was fumbling for his keys.
I hit the button and watched as the empty magazine slipped from the Colt, and I slammed in the other one that I had put in my jacket pocket. It was like an out-of-body experience, as though somebody else’s arms raised and fired just as the big Dodge started.
I saw the passenger side window explode as I emptied the clip. Wade Barsad disappeared but only for a moment, and I was monumentally disappointed to hear the motor roar and the duellie spray dirt as its lights bobbed, and he sped away.
The horse was going berserk but was at the far side of the circle and out of sight. I watched as the chain, embedded in the rock, heaved and straightened in a direct line into the darkness. I fell back flat and lay there breathing and thinking-what the hell else could go wrong? I could feel my eyes closing and knew that if I didn’t get up soon, I wasn’t going to be getting up at all.
I looked at the spent semiautomatic in my lap, the slide locked in the open position. I ejected the clip and began refilling it from the loose rounds in my jacket pockets, the cartridge spring making a slight metallic sound as I reloaded.
With each breath I listed a little further, and I might have even fallen asleep if not for Cly, who spoke from the gloom, his words accompanied by a light giggle. “Don’t you think we’ve had enough shooting for one night?”
I’d thought for sure he was dead.
I rolled over on my stomach and began crawling toward him. He was clutching something over his chest. He was still giggling and spitting up a little blood with it as I leveraged an elbow-his face only a couple of inches away. “You should stop laughing; it can’t be good for you.”
He giggled some more. “How bad is it, Deputy Dawg?”
There was a fair amount of blood, but it was low and to the left-intestines, I hoped, not a lung. It was difficult to tell how bad, but he’d live, for a while, at least. I looked at his face. “Who the hell are you?”
He kept giggling and pulled his hand up. I noticed that he was holding his wallet, which he flipped open exposing a badge. His voice was singsong, and he sounded like he was an announcer on a bad fifties TV show. “Why I’m Cliff Cly of the FBI.”
14
October 31, 3:04 A.M.
He wasn’t giggling anymore. “How long do you think I’ve got?”
“Longer than you’re going to want.”
He swallowed underneath the neck brace and dropped the wallet. “God damn it, this hurts. I showed the kid how to drive the thing and told him that if I didn’t get back in a couple of minutes, to just gas it the hell out of here and stay off the roads.” His eyes closed, and he clutched his
stomach. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!”
I looked at the young man’s face. I had to admit that he was good; I hadn’t made him, but now, seeing the symmetry of his features under the stubble, and his general demeanor, even after being shot, it all made sense.
It also explained why Sandy Sandberg had called off the polygraph.
Another wave of exhaustion swept over me, and I started getting a little panicked about all the things I had to do before I fell over. I touched his arm, and he grimaced. “You have to let me take a look.”
“Fuck you, you one-eyed bastard. No way.”
I casually wondered if he’d looked in a mirror lately. “We have to put something in there to staunch the bleeding-your hands aren’t doing the trick.”
He ground his teeth, and I could hear the crunch of the enamel from a foot away. “No.”
“Look, I’ve got to roll you over and see where the bullet went.”
He shook his head violently. “No fucking way.” He glanced up. “Why? There’s nothing you’re going to be able to do for me, so just go get help.”
“If I don’t stabilize the wound, you’re going to bleed to death.” I continued to look at him. Something in my head started reciting organs along with percentages-kidney 22 percent, stomach 18 percent, bladder 12 percent, and small bowel 12 percent. Something stuck in my mind that these were bad numbers, and we should root for the smallest percentage.
He studied me. “What the fuck is wrong with you anyway?”
I tried to remember. “I think I’ve been drugged.” My cheekbone ached, and my neck muscles were still doing a pretty good imitation of a boneless chicken. “As a matter of fact, I know I’ve been drugged. Barsad said he put something in Hershel’s canteen.” “And I think something in my foot’s broken.”
“Get the fuck out of here.”
I could feel my eyes starting to close again. “Could you say fuck some more; it’s really helping.”
“Fuck you, I’m the one who’s shot in the gut.”
I fought with my jacket while trying to get the. 45 back into my holster with my other hand. I couldn’t really feel my fingers, which didn’t bode well for my fixing Cliff Cly of the FBI.
I tried to focus on the case, figuring that the cipher effect might keep me awake-that, and the thought of a man who was possibly dying. But he could still talk, if with a limited vocabulary, so I was starting to think that his lung hadn’t been nicked after all. Some more facts leapt up about a collapsed lung-something about air sucking into the chest where it can’t escape, which in turn pushes the heart aside, so far, in fact, that the vessels to the heart are pinched to the point that they are closed and there is no blood flow to the heart.
I thought about it and came to the conclusion that that was bad, but it was like somebody else was talking inside my head, somebody I’d once been other than the sleepy person I was now. “So, what’s a nice bureau boy like you doing in a place like this?” I attempted to move his hands again. “Let me see.”
“Fuck you, Deputy Dawg.” His chin planted against the brace, and I watched as he tried to concentrate on not clutching the wound. He relaxed just a little, which I’m sure was for the best, and allowed his head to return to the ground. “He was ours in the witness relocation program, but after the fiasco in Youngstown we let him dangle, in hopes that he’d give us the information on his pals back in Jersey since they were looking for him. He was in Vegas, and then here.”
With his hands out of the way, I slowly unbuttoned his shirt and then carefully tore open the T-shirt at the wound. There was no sucking sound, and the blood was pooling at the depression in his skin.
“Well?”
Trying to keep my eyes open, I stretched my entire face in spite of my cheekbone. “It’s not as bad as I thought.”
“Yeah? Well, I feel so much fucking better.”
The voice was telling me things, and I wondered how smart was the guy I used to be? Now he was telling me about how, if it was a low-velocity, low-caliber weapon like a 9 mm, then most of the tissue damage was confined to the bullet tract, as opposed to a high-velocity, high-caliber weapon like a rifle that would result in a lot of damage to tissues and organs just by passing by them. “Energy dissipation.”
“What?” His voice was gargled, but I was pretty sure it was just mucus.
I leaned forward. “We’re hoping for no major organs or large blood vessels.”
“Well, if it’s a major organ, hopefully it’s my liver; the little fucker’s indestructible.”
Liver-30 percent.
“I think we can stop the bleeding, but you’re not going anywhere and we’re going to have to get you medical attention pretty quick.” I looked around and noticed that Wahoo Sue had moved off to the far side of the ring, probably because of the blood. She wanted nothing to do with us. The lightning had moved to the east, and it appeared that all we were going to get now was wind. “I don’t think I can move you.”
“I don’t want you to.”
“Deal.” I pulled off my neck scarf and looked at it, hoping it wasn’t too full of bacteria, and began folding it up in preparation for placing it over the wound. I thought about Martha, who had given me the silk bandana, and sighed. It was then that I saw the roll of duct tape that Wade Barsad must’ve dropped.
I reached over, picked it up, and ripped a length from the roll. Maybe it was being witness to someone else’s suffering, or having a task, or all the voices in my head, but I was actually feeling pretty good-still sleepy, but more on the dopey side than the passing-out side. I attached the one-foot piece to my scarf and ripped off another. “This stuff is great; you can use it for everything.”
He shook his head. “Oh, God.”
I completed the makeshift bandage, took a deep breath, and wished I had some whiskey. “This is going to hurt.”
“Uh huh.”
I planted the bandage squarely on the wound, pressed down, and wrapped the duct tape in all directions. He didn’t move. “There, that wasn’t so-”
“Jesus-fucking-Christ!”
I thought I’d been gentle.
The old me in my head was talking again and said that, with the ambient temperature, the blood around the wound was coagulating quickly, but the drop in blood pressure would also increase his susceptibility to hypothermia. I smirked a little to myself but then thought about the fact that no matter how smart the old me was, it was the new me that was going to have to do something about the problem. I took off my coat and carefully placed it over him.
I sat there for a moment, listening to him breathe and feeling as if I’d accomplished one of my tasks. Now, if I could just remember the others. The chain clanked and moved left.
Horse.
Dark horse. Three horses. One rider.
The boy, Benjamin.
I leaned over. “Where do you think he’ll go?”
The FBI man looked at me with one eye opened and one closed. “Who?”
I thought it was a reasonable question. “The boy… Benjamin.”
He took a couple of shallow breaths and then answered. “I told him to stay off the roads, but I didn’t go into it much further than that.”
“Why did Wade take him?”
He moved a little and immediately regretted it. “Fuck… Wade said something about a list that he’d written and that he thought his wife had taken, but he couldn’t find it so I think he thought maybe the wife had given it to the girl at the bar; then he wanted to back you off, but I guess when it became apparent that the old cowboy was headed down the mesa, all bets were off.” He looked down at the stalled blood at his abdomen. The duct tape bandage was doing a grand job. “I really didn’t think I was going to get shot; he just didn’t seem like the type.”
I thought about that and the old me said something important, which I repeated out loud. “He killed his brother.”
He scowled, and there was a little bit of blood staining his teeth. “Yeah, I guess I misjudged him. I started getting re
ally suspicious when I found the old cowboy’s gun in the truck.”
Reminded of the Henry, I reached past him and picked it up, checking to make sure the muzzle wasn’t blocked and that it was still loaded. Loading and checking the Henry was a tedious process because the magazine tube was under the barrel, but Hershel Vanskike wasn’t the kind of man to load a weapon with only one round. “Well, he’s dead.”
“Vanskike?”
“Yep.”
He shook his head. “I was afraid of that. I brought the boy down here, but Barsad stayed back to wait for the old guy.”
“Hershel.”
He nodded. “Hershel. Said he just wanted to tell him he had the boy.”
“How did you find Barsad?”
He sighed. “Caught him returning to the motel after making one of his liquor deliveries to Bill Nolan’s place. I guess Wade couldn’t get used to keeping a low profile, so he schemed up this idea for getting Bill’s truck on a regular basis. Nolan told me about those mysterious whiskey deliveries, and it sounded like Wade.”
“So, he was staying in one of the rooms at the motel before I got there?”
“Yeah, I’m pretty good at hiding people even in a town of forty. I waited for him one night and even brought him into the bar when Pat was the only one there. Pat poured us a drink and vouched for me. That’s how we all got to be partners.”
“Speaking of drinking, that was quite a show you put on at the motel.”
“Show, hell. I was drunk.”
“Who was the girl?”
“Just a girl, but she figured out who you were before I did.”
“What about the fight?”
He laughed and then groaned. “They were getting suspicious, because I was backing away from the more severe aspects of the partnership.”
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