“Then you planted the bomb-making evidence in his shack.”
Buford nodded. “I’d been collecting that stuff for months. Allan had bought most of it for me, so his prints were all over it. And after that job was done, I hauled his shiny little motorbike over to Montrose, stashed it behind a run-down bar. A few minutes before the GroundHog was supposed to blow sky-high under Patch Davidson’s ass—he shot his adversary an annoyed look—“Allan’s mortal remains got cremated in my house.” The killer’s eyes took on a faraway look. “And in case you’re wondering, I’m not even a little bit sorry. Nosirree, not the least fraction of a smidgen.”
The Ute took a deep breath, exhaled. “The senator trusted you—treated you like a son.”
“I only had one daddy.” He added in a whisper: “And one brother.”
“So this whole business was about your twin.”
The barrel of Buford’s carbine was pointing at a spot between the Ute’s boots. “What do you know about that?”
“Patch Davidson told me you believed your brother had survived that plane crash—”
“Believe, hell!” Pain spread over Buford’s face like a rash. “You ever hear of China’s Detention Center Number Twelve?” He shook his head. “No, I guess you didn’t. Well, it’s about ten clicks south of a dirty little burg called Binyang. Which is in Guangxi Province. Which I imagine is also not familiar to you. But you can take my word for it—I got some A-Number-One contacts in the intel community. DIA’s China Section knew exactly where Ed was, what kind of pig slop the Chinks gave him to eat, how he slept in his own filth.” His voice thick with emotion, Buford paused in an attempt to calm himself. “I went to the senator, told him about it—asked for his help. Patch promised me he’d check with the CIA. If they could confirm my brother’s location, he’d lean on the State Department, get them to confront the Chinese government—and demand Ed’s release. Few weeks later, Patch told me he’d done his level best, but the intel about my brother had turned out to be bogus.” Buford shook his head.
Moon watched the carbine barrel. “And you didn’t believe him.”
“That damned old politician was doing what he does best—lying through his teeth. My DIA contact told me what really happened. A deep-pocket special interest group was worried about upsetting trade negotiations with the Chinese. These businessmen were tight with a block of very influential congressmen. ‘Stop annoying our trading partners with these unsubstantiated charges about holding an American prisoner,’ these good ol’ boys tell Patch, ‘and you can have whatever you want for Colorado.’ Well, Patch feels which way the wind is blowing. So he trades my brother for some construction projects. Something sweet for his constituents.” He spat out the word.
“Like the preschool, where you filled your sock with sand.”
“I thought that was a nice twist—take a piece of what Patch had accepted in exchange for my brother’s life, and knock that lying politician in the head with it. But that was just for starters. Don’t forget what I did to his fancy new airport.”
Moon had not forgotten.
“It was sweet to behold, Charlie my man. I took the first of my supercharged storage batteries out there in the middle of the night. Blew the Patch Davidson Terminal Building all to hell and gone.” Buford smiled at his audience. “I hope you appreciate the delicate irony of my choice for a test site.”
The Ute held his silence. Let him talk.
The unhappy man was eager to talk. “But I’m getting ahead of my story. A few weeks after Patch accepted these bribes on behalf of the fine citizens of the great state of Colorado, my brother was executed. Shot in the head.” His eyes were oddly blank, as if he had been blind from birth. “It’s a queer thing—being a twin. The night Ed’s end came, it was daytime on this side of the world. I was over at the senator’s trout pond, working on the windmill pump. I felt the side of my head explode. For a moment, I thought, ‘My God, somebody has bushwhacked me.’ But there wasn’t any wound—and not a drop of blood. I realized it wasn’t me that’d been shot in the head. It was Ed. But that Chinese bullet didn’t quite finish my brother off.” He waved the carbine like a baton. “It was an awful experience, Charlie—worse than you could ever imagine.” Buford shuddered. “And then…then I felt the little knives.”
Though bathed in sunshine, Moon felt a dreadful chill. “Knives?”
Henry Buford looked toward the clouded horizon, as if he could see far beyond it. “In the People’s Democratic Republic, nothing much goes to waste. Oftentimes, right after a prisoner is executed, useful body parts are removed from the corpse. Whatever the government can sell on the transplant market. Eyes. Kidneys. Heart. Even skin. Problem was—Ed wasn’t quite dead yet when those Chinese butchers went to work on him.” He blinked at the Ute. “Charlie, d’you have any idea what it feels like to have your eyes gouged out…strips of skin peeled off your back and legs…being gutted like a carp?”
Moon tried to speak. Words, if there were any, stubbornly refused his summons.
Buford licked at chapped lips. “Poor Ed. He struggled and twitched some, but he wasn’t able to yell…Ihadtodothe screamin’ for him. And I yelled bloody murder till my throat went dry as chalk.” Milky tears formed in the hard man’s eyes, trickled down leathery, sunburned cheeks. “After a long, long time, the torment was finally over. Ed’s spirit slipped away from the pain.” The man’s eyes went cold and flat. “And my soul drifted away at the same time—I don’t know where to. Funny thing is, my body still don’t know it. These old legs just keep on walking, this big mouth keeps on talking. But way down deep inside, I’ve been dead ever since that awful day.” He turned his head to stare at the silent, dark-skinned man. “You have a brother?”
The Ute shook his head.
“Even if you did, you still wouldn’t understand. Multiply a brother by ten times ten, you’ve almost got a twin. If the senator had done the right thing, Ed would’ve been released—sent back to the good ol’ U.S. of A.”
“I wish it’d worked out that way.”
“Wishes are free, chum, so let’s help ourselves. Me, I wish I’d never known about what happened to Ed. Knowing is what got me rolling downhill.” Henry Buford wiped at reddened eyes. “I spent hours on end just sitting in the dark, knowing I was slipping into the quicksand, but I couldn’t pull myself out. Late one night, I came within a gnat’s eyelash of putting a bullet through my brain.” He shifted his gaze to the young woman’s resting place. “That’s when I realized I had to get a firm grip on myself. What I needed was some serious work to occupy my mind. So I started thinking—how could I make a payback? It was kind of a daydream, where I’d even the score with Patch and the whole corrupt U.S. government.” Buford seemed mesmerized by the tombstone at the head of Wilma Brewster’s grave. He thought he saw something move near the granite slab. Something like smoke. “Long as I kept busy, it was almost like being alive. I just had to keep plugging along till the job was done.”
Charlie Moon found his voice. “You set yourself an ambitious goal—cutting off the head of the United States government.”
“Yes, I did.” Ed would be proud of me. “You know, it is just amazing what one determined sonofabitch can accomplish if he sets his mind to it.”
“Aside from murdering three people and crippling an old man, what did you accomplish?”
“Charlie, you have got a way of cutting right to the bone. Except for your interference, everything I planned would’ve worked slick as snail spit.” He pointed the carbine barrel at the tribal investigator’s left knee. “So I hereby hold you personally responsible for messing things up.”
“Thanks, Henry. But if I hadn’t figured out what you were up to, something else would’ve gone wrong. You’d never have pulled it off.”
Buford’s blood pressure spiked; his eyes popped dangerously. “Why would you say a mean thing like that?”
Keep him talking. “Your scheme was way too complicated.”
“It was not!” He stamped his
foot. “It was a nice, straightforward plan. If you’d left things alone, I’d have got it done right well.”
“Think so, do you?”
“I know so. That’s why I had to come down from the mountain—to square things between us.”
“There’s been enough killing.”
Buford lips curled into a mirthless grin. “How much is enough?”
“Henry—lay the carbine down.”
The killer squinted at the sky, where a red-tailed hawk etched an elegant ellipse over Pine Knob. “If I give myself up, what’s in it for me?”
“I expect you’ve got an even shot at living out your full threescore and ten.”
“Sure. With room and board provided by Uncle Sammy.”
“Wouldn’t be all that bad. Three squares a day. Clean sheets on the bed. Hot shower. A library. Better than living in a cave with lice and fleas.”
“And I’d have lots of time to pray about my multitude of sins.”
“There’s that, too.”
Buford spoke barely above a whisper. “Would you come and visit me?”
“Yes. I would.”
“I don’t doubt it for a second.” The sinner pulled off the sock hat, shook his shaggy head. “But I could not live behind the walls.” He began to raise the carbine barrel. “I’d rather be hunted down and shot.”
Moon banged each word home with a hammer. “Henry, listen to what I’m telling you—being alive is better than being dead.”
He smiled at the tall, thin man. “Now tell me the honest truth—do you really care all that much about staying in this sad old world?”
The Ute had nothing left to say.
Henry Buford felt an electrifying thrill. Like on his eighth birthday, when he had climbed aboard the mammoth Greyhound bus to go see Indianapolis for the very first time. “Feels strange, don’t it, cowboy—standing here, straddling that Great Divide?” The wind had fallen utterly silent. The assassin thumbed the Winchester hammer, the metallic snap was audible for a hundred yards.
Charlie Moon closed his eyes. Oh, God…I do not want this.
Buford aimed at the Ute’s chest, his finger tightened on the trigger. Life in this world is nothing but pain and sorrow, Charlie. Just let it go…letitgo…
Moon let it go. The black hat dropped from his hand.
It was over in the flicker of sunlight off rippling waters.
BEFORE THE John B. Stetson touched the earth, a seven-millimeter hollow-point bee hummed past Moon’s shoulder. A fractional second before the rifle’s throaty bark boomed in from sixty-one yards away, the lead cylinder punctured the sternum dead center over Henry Buford’s heart. Before the man’s head hit the ground, the spirit had left him.
Charlie Moon knew this was so—he saw it go.
And he thought he saw something else.
Growing rapidly from a mere pinprick of intense blue light, it took on form. The luminescent mist assumed the appearance of a skinny, floppy-eared dog. The phantom canine licked at an unseen hand, the long tail wagged.
The Ute assured himself that the apparition was a product of his troubled mind.
SIXTY-ONE YARDS away, Griego Santanna stood up in a cluster of scrub oak. It had all gone according to plan. The jefe had staked himself out until the gringo came down from the mountains. Curiosity was very strong bait, but he wondered—had the tall man somehow called the bad man to the knob? The Mexican had known of stranger things happening. He yelled. “Hey, Indio, you cut that very close.” But another tick-tock an’ I was gonna pop him anyhow.
CHARLIE MOON closed his eyes, prayed to be blind to that which should remain unseen. This done, he peered through slit lids. The vaporous canine had departed. To some far place.
But the ghostly illusion had been replaced with something far worse—images of Henry Buford, sitting alone in the darkness, unable to put a bullet through his head. Henry Buford, wading into a dozen armed bikers, hot lead pellets flying like popcorn. Henry Buford, giving Allan Pearson the first shot. The final image was the most unsettling of all. Henry Buford, aiming a carbine at a man he did not intend to shoot? Moon tried to fight off the terrible, bone-gnawing suspicion. Henry tried to remove himself from this world, but couldn’t. So he was looking for somebody to do it for him. The murderous bikers. Allan Pearson. And maybe…me. The Ute investigator considered his options. I don’t have to know. I’ll throw his Winchester in the hole with him, forget about the whole thing. But he knew better. I wouldn’t be able to get it out of my mind…always wondering. Sooner or later, I’d have to come back up here, dig it up again. He reached for the fallen man’s carbine. It was as he had suspected. No cartridge in the chamber. The magazine was empty. Henry’s been scouting me. He knew Santanna was in the brush with a rifle. The troubled man had come to Pine Knob to die. And he’d got it done right well.
The shooter was approaching in hurried, eager strides. Griego Santanna paused three paces from the body. “He dead?”
Moon nodded, tried hard to sound pleased. “Good shot.”
Santanna rested a hand on the hilt of the bowie knife tucked under his belt. “Uh—I don’t guess you’d let me cut off his ears.”
“No. Don’t guess I would.” He frowned at the short, wiry man. “Where’re you from, Santanna?”
The Mexican pointed the rifle barrel southward. “I have me a little goat ranch near Camacho.”
The Ute looked toward Mexico. “Camacho, huh?”
Santanna nodded. “It is a village in Zacatecas State.”
“You have a family?”
Santanna rolled expressive brown eyes. “A wife who is a brujo. And six daughters.”
“I bet you’d like to pay them a visit.”
The Mexican grunted. “Last time I saw my woman, she put a spell on me that made my gums bleed.”
“No wife is perfect,” the Ute observed.
“She also stuck me with a butcher knife—and the children laughed when I bled.” He pulled up his cotton shirt to display a shiny, four-inch-long scar on his belly. “I am afraid of that woman—she is demente.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. But you’d better to go back to Mexico anyway. And stay south of the border till things cool down.”
“How long will that take?”
Moon thought about it. “Ten, maybe fifteen years.”
Santanna nodded sadly at the injustice of it all. Kill just one gringo and the American Federales never, never stopped looking for you. The sharpshooter squinted at the fresh corpse. “What about him?”
“Henry’s gone,” Moon muttered. And I helped him go.
Santanna gave the jefe a hopeful look. “Go on home; I will put the dirt on him for you.” After I cut off his ears.
“I’ll take care of things here.” Moon pulled the rifle from the Mexican’s hands, wiped Santanna’s prints off with a bandanna. “This should be the end of it. But if it ever comes up, you were not here. You don’t know a thing about it.” The Ute left a dozen of his own prints on the long gun—including one on the trigger.
“Jefe—even though you will not let me take his ears, I appreciate what you have done for me.”
The Ute blinked at the unpredictable man. “What?”
“When you did not let me shoot that motorcycle gringo, I was very angry. But now I understand that you are a fair man, and a wise one. You were saving this better one for me.” Sunlight glinted on the steel teeth. “It was a great honor to murder this hombre for you.”
Moon knew that he would never be able to explain the significance of what Santanna had done on the crest of this windswept hill. “When you get to the river, give your hands a good washing.”
The Mexican wondered whether this was some peculiar Indio cleansing ritual. “Okay, jefe—if it pleases you, I will clean my hands.”
The Ute stared at his own hands. Fancied he saw Buford’s blood dripping off the tips of his fingers. “And wash your face, too.”
Santanna touched fingertips to his cheek. “My face?”
�
�When you fire a rifle, you get more powder residue on your nose than on your trigger finger. If you get stopped by the police between here and the border, I don’t want them to find any nitrates on your hands or your face.”
Griego Santanna stared at the strange Indian, then raised a hand in solemn salute. “Adios, Señor Luna.” The man from Zacatecas State turned his face toward the river. This had been a very good day, and so he whistled as he walked. When he tired of whistling, the Mexican sang a happy song about a man who had slit the throat of his nagging mother-in-law, stole her sow pig, spotted billy goat, and seven dominiker chickens.
ONCE SANTANNA’S slight form was reduced to a speck on the horizon, Charlie Moon untied a fringed Circle of Life blanket from behind his saddle. He wrapped the corpse, tied the bundle with a length of yellow nylon rope, lowered Buford’s body into the deep slit. Digging the hole six feet into the rocky ground had been work enough. Filling the inhabited grave was hard labor indeed. Each scoop of sandy soil was heavier than the one before. When the hole was filled level, the laborer tamped down loose earth with the long-handled shovel, spread the excess soil around. By the middle of next summer there would be no evidence of a second burial.
Moon stood between the graves. It seemed both eerie and fitting that Henry now slept beside Wilma. He said an earnest prayer for those two souls whose paths had met at a violent intersection. But an “amen” was not the proper way to end this. His voice was just above a whisper. “Henry, I don’t know if you can hear me. But I got something I need to say.” He took a deep breath. “You needed killing.”
A raven landed on the crest of a dead piñon. Cocked its head at the tall, dark man.
After a pause, Moon continued his melancholy speech. “I will say this—when it’s too late for talking and there’s nothing left to do but break some bones, there’s no man I’d rather have by my side. I’m glad you were with me on Too Late bridge.” His final words were the hardest to say. “Truth is, Henry—I liked you.” And I’ll miss you.
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