Outrider

by Steven John

  Hutton had made his first attempt at order ten minutes ago and then immediately left the stage, knowing it would take a good half hour before the boys approached anything near calm. There was much ground to cover but, despite everything, The Boss loved this time. His crew got together in one big group only a handful of times a year, and seeing the genuine affection and kinship among the men was as heartwarming as it was reassuring: these boys would die for one another just as soon as they’d bullshit about their exploits or fight over women.

  The Boss had made his way through the ranks, shaking hands and tossing a few punches (taking one or two himself) and reconnecting with the men he counted on every day. He’d listened to some gripes, taken a bit of praise, and generally tried to get a sense of things. There seemed to be remarkably little grumbling in the ranks. Which unnerved Hutton—this team was one of the best groups he’d ever worked with. Their lack of complaints and concerns didn’t mean they were slacking at the job; it meant that the drain was being orchestrated flawlessly. Hutton’s easiness dropped with inverse proportion to his comrades’ excitement and happiness. They don’t know a goddamn thing, he found himself repeating after each exchange.

  Finally he took the stage again. “OK you goddamn bastards! Enough!” Hoots and hollers and curses and smiles. If anything, the hall got louder.

  “Don’t make me start shootin’, lads! Y’all know I will!” Hutton counted out five Mississippi, then drew a small revolver from his back pocket. He fired three quick shots into the air. The reports reverberated deafeningly about the cavernous hall. For a moment, all was silent. Hutton lowered the pistol. Then came the first shout:

  “Blanks!”

  “Fuckin’ blanks!”

  “Blanks, Hut! Those’re blanks!”

  “He ain’t shootin’ shit, boys!”

  Uproarious laughter filled the room. Smiles a foot wide spread across every face. Even Scofield, seated in the very back row and in a very black mood up to that instant, found himself smiling and shouting: “Blanks!”

  Hutton flashed a shit-eating grin, then tossed the starter pistol aside. He paced back and forth a few times, his face growing serious. When he returned to the simple wooden podium, the men were finally starting to get the message. It was time to be serious.

  “Boys . . . time for Round Up!” Hutton barked. “Anyone other than Moses absent? Look around some . . . take a minute . . . this is important this time—always important.” Hutton shielded his eyes from the bright fluorescent lights and scanned the room.

  “All here? Good. Now listen, the first thing all you assholes are gonna ask me, I’m sure, is why’d I sound those damn horns. We’ll get to that. Don’t you worry about it. Maybe I was just testing you. Maybe I figured it was gonna rain for the next week and we might as well get a move on things. After all, when it starts to rain, ain’t so much work to do, and you boys tend to switch from business to bullshit pretty fast, fair? . . . Fair!?”

  “Fair enough!”

  “I sure as fuck do!”

  “Fair!” came the cries.

  Hutton nodded. He gripped the sides of the podium, praying no one could see how badly his hands were shaking. He had half hoped to be immediately overwhelmed with concerns and fears and reports of strange things out in the field. Going through the motions of Round Up—normally such a grounding, even joyous event—was draining the life from him. The boys didn’t even know what they were up against. But he had to bide his time: until Hutton knew for certain what was going on, there was no way he could unleash his dogs. They’d end up dead or end up killing senselessly.

  “So let’s get into the shout-out reports. Who’s got something worth all of us hearing?”

  “I caught six leeches in one burrow two weeks back!” Shouted Noah Fischer.

  “Yeah, then you fell off a colt and snapped your leg!”

  “Well what’s your count, Rush?” Noah raised his large carriage as much as he could given the cast on his leg, staring down his comrade.

  “Got me five in as many weeks—ain’t bad!”

  “Were they a team or just bunked, Noah?” Hutton asked into the microphone.

  “Team, I think,” he settled back down in his chair. “They all had the same kinda yellowy-like robes on, anyway. But all first-timers. Notched ’em and sent ’em.”

  “OK, that’s a start. Who else?”

  Gregory White stood up and stretched his bull-neck from side to side. His voice was like steel on granite, and no one ever spoke over him. “Had to take out a couple fellahs last month. They had horses and one of ’em was branded ours. Must have come out of the stable. Any of you boys lose a horse?”

  White looked around the room for a minute. Not a single pair of eyes met his. He was a known killer, and not for anything done in the line of duty. Greg White had spent almost ten years behind bars for the murder of two men in an alley—the circumstances were lost to all but him and the corpses.

  “No one? Well it was one of our horses. They had it hauling cable.”

  “What do you mean?” Scofield called from the back of the room. Every eye turned to him, then back to White.

  “What?”

  “What do you mean hauling? What kind of cable?”

  “Never seen it before. Thick. A few inches around. Almost as big as my cock and just as tan.”

  A few outriders burst out laughing. Scofield rose slowly, lifting one leg and resting a heel on his chair. He hooked one thumb in a pocket and took off his hat, tilting his head to one side.

  “Well, cock aside, Greg, can you describe this . . . little wire? What did its, uh, head look like? The tap?”

  White cracked his neck slowly from side to side and drew a breath in through his nose. He glanced toward the stage and Boss Hutton nodded emphatically, raising one hand to bid him continue. “There was a few taps. Four or five. Little taps like you use for a toaster or whatnot.”

  Scofield saluted in mock deference. “That’s all I was askin’ about. Maybe Boss Hutton would want to know if anyone else saw anything like that. That’s the only reason I asked about your little wire, Greg.”

  “OK, what do we got?” Hutton called the attention forward again.

  Kretch rose looking proud and smug. While smiling usually makes a person easier on the eyes, when Wilton flashed his tiny-toothed grin, his visage grew harder to look at: new wrinkles formed and his cold eyes grew smaller, darker. “Bagged me a two-timer just this morning. Fellah I’d tagged myself some time back.”

  “OK, Kretch. I meant the tap cable Scofield asked about. Anyone else see any wiring like that?”

  Wilton’s shoulders curled in. He lowered himself back onto the plastic and aluminum chair gingerly, silently cursing its loud creaking. His face flushed red. Perhaps Boss Hutton had meant nothing personal—perhaps it was just business—but Kretch was deeply insulted. Profoundly angry. He reached down to where he’d stowed his hat behind his boots and jammed the black ten-gallon onto his head. The brim cast a shadow over his eyes, which fixed Hutton in a searing glare.

  C. J. Haskell stood up from the front row, clearing his throat. At just twenty-four years old, he already had six years’ experience under his belt and was widely regarded as a good shot and an expert horseman. His beard still grew in patches so he kept himself clean-shaven, which only accentuated his youth. But Haskell was adept not only at gunplay and riding, but also at rolling with the punches and shrugging off all the bullshit. Even the senior men knew he was the real deal.

  “I think I might have seen something like that, Boss. I found a few of these . . . kinda discs, I guess, that had receivers for four taps. There was a pile of them by a pillar out east. And there was a trail leading off a few hundred yards into the sand. Real thick—like ten feet wide and flat. Like something had been dragged.”

  “Then it just stopped? The drag mark?” Hutton asked, stepping away from the microphone and nearer to the young man.

  “Yeah.” Haskell looked down, fiddling with one of the buttons
on his starched white shirt. “Just disappeared. I took one of the discs. It’s over in my shack.”

  “Good man. Show me later.” Hutton winked at Haskell and turned away, sighing with his back to the assembly. He returned to the podium. “What else, before we break down for route debriefs?”

  “Hey, Hutton, y’know what?” It was Ryan Cannell, the second oldest outrider behind The Boss and a trusted friend. He coughed and wheezed as he half-rose out of his seat. His mind was quicker than his wrinkles and gray mustache suggested; Cannell’s dark eyes were sharp as they darted about the room, taking in every little detail. “I don’t think Tripp is here.”

  “What? Tripp, are you fuckin’ here?” Hutton spat in frustration. Every head turned from side to side looking about the room.

  “Don’t he usually ride with Moses?” Noah Fischer called above the murmurs.

  “Yeah, maybe he caught a touch of what Moses got!” Someone shouted from the back. Laughter filled the hall.

  “Hold up! Shut up! Is he really missing?” Hutton shouted. The timbre of his voice cut the laughing short. The Boss looked out at the dozens of eyes watching him attentively. It had been unlike Tripp Hernandez to be late; unheard of that he not show at all. He was an awful drunk when off duty, but when sober, Hernandez was a consummate professional, often the first one to arrive for assignments, in fact—especially Round Up. Fuck. Jesus H. fucking hell, Hutton said to himself. He chewed on the inside of his cheeks.

  “OK, I’ll deal with that. Break into your teams and debrief. I want a ten minute summary from each group in one hour. And not one of you slips out to the goddamn bars, you hear me? Not this time! I’ll personally drag any fuckin’ one of you I find shirking business today. And with my jeep!”

  Hutton hopped down from the stage, wincing as the sparse cartilage left in his hips ground between old bones. He made eye contact with C. J. Haskell and tilted his head toward the door. As The Boss walked hurriedly to the exit, avoiding any looks and waving off attempts at conversation, Hutton scanned the room for Scofield, but the outrider was already gone.

  Hale snatched up the phone on the first ring.

  “Hello? This is Timothy Hale.”

  “It’s Hutton.”

  “Boss Hutton?”

  “No, fuckin’ insurance salesman Hutton. Yes, Hale.”

  “Where the hell have you been, man?”

  “I said I’d call you back and here I am doing it.” Hutton rasped then coughed loudly into the earpiece. Hale held the phone away from his head for a second, collecting his thoughts.

  “You said you’d call me back three days ago.”

  “And lo and behold, I’ve gone and called.”

  A flash of anger surged through Hale. He gripped the edge of his desk and ground his teeth, desperately trying to remain decorous. He knew if he came at Hutton the wrong way, The Boss would just hang up and walk.

  “Alright. Fine. Thank you for checking in. Have you had your meeting yet?”

  “It’s ongoing.”

  “Well do you know anything yet?”

  “Let’s cut to the chase, Hale. Yeah. I know things and so do you—we’re being drained. Bad. I got horsemen with eyes in their heads and you got your computers and grids and whatnot; we both know what’s going on.”

  “Can we contain it?”

  “Contain it? What the hell does that even mean, kid? No. We can’t contain it—it’s not an ‘it.’ It’s a ‘who.’ We have to fight them to end it. There’s no containing.”

  “Alright, when can you be in town? We need to get a strategy together.”

  “I agree with the second part but there ain’t a chance in hell I’m coming into that city. Listen, Hale—I’m gonna send you my best man, though. He’ll be at your office within a few hours. You just be there and make sure The Mayor’s there too. We gotta hit this hard and fast.”

  “I think I should take a report first and then—”

  “No time for bureaucracy, Hale. No time.”

  “I . . . alright fine. I’ll make sure The Mayor’s here. What’s the man’s name?”

  “Scofield.”

  “What was it?” Hale asked, but the line was already dead.

  Boss Hutton shivered as he hurried across the cracked pavement outside the saloon. He tucked his chin against his chest and held his wide-brimmed hat down with one hand, trying in vain to keep the pouring rain at bay. But it found the space between his neck and collar, dripping down his back. It seeped in through the stitching around his boot heels. Everything was wet, clinging. Scofield pushed open the driver’s side door as Hutton reached the jeep and The Boss jumped in as fast as his aged body would allow.

  “Bad out today, boys.”

  “Haven’t seen rain like this in years,” C. J. Haskell said from the back seat. A small but steady leak in the canvas roof had banished him to the far right side of the worn bench. He leaned forward to hear over the throaty rumble of the engine as Hutton coaxed it back to life, his foot working the gas pedal ever so gently.

  “Bad day for the field,” Scofield muttered, as much to himself as to his comrades. “Arrays ain’t gonna suck down much power in this shit.”

  “Real bad day for the field,” Hutton echoed, his voice distant. He jammed the gear shift into first.

  They drove in silence for several minutes, heading roughly west. The jeep bucked and swayed as it slogged through puddles and patches of mud and over little ridges cut into the sand by sudden runs of water. In a matter of hours the whole desert had transformed from a flat, barren expanse of loam to a dynamic, surging patchwork of countless streams and rivulets and pools of brown-gray water beside crumbling dunes. The rain drummed incessantly on the flimsy roof and metal body of the vehicle.

  As they drew near his hut, Haskell leaned forward, ignoring the drops of water on his left shoulder to point through the windshield. “That’s it, Boss. The third one on the right there.”

  “Home sweet home, huh?” Scofield flashed a smile back at the young outrider.

  “Hey, it’s walls, a roof, and a shitter, right?”

  “This young buck ain’t so dumb after all, huh?” Hutton cackled. “Took me damn near six decades to learn that’s all you need.”

  When they pulled to a stop, Scofield leaned forward in his seat to let Haskell climb past and out of the vehicle. He ran to his door, keyed in the code, and let himself into the little concrete shack.

  Once C. J. was inside, Scofield turned to The Boss. “There’s one more thing I been meaning to tell you. Didn’t even occur to me until we were in Round Up this morning.”

  Hutton pulled off his hat and ran the fingers of one hand through his thinning gray hair. He closed his eyes. “Go on.”

  “A few weeks back—better part of a month—Kretch and I were out on the eastern end. We dug up a leech. Old guy. Maybe seventy, even—”

  “Hey now, I’ll be there myself soon.”

  “No offense, Hut,” Scofield said through a fleeting smile. “Anyway, I checked him and he didn’t have any marks. So when I brought him in I just . . . you know . . .”

  “You let him walk.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I trust your judgment. Sure it was the right call.”

  “Yeah . . . well, I thought so too. I sent Kretch to find his collector and took him back alone. I’d planned to let him walk from the moment I saw his arm was clean. Thing I just realized this morning: when I was leading him back in he was wheezing and stumbling and so I let him ride the last couple of miles. He thanked me.” Scofield glanced over at Haskell’s door. Then he pulled his pack of cigarettes from a pocket and put one in his mouth, offering the pack to Hutton. The Boss took a smoke and Scofield lit both of them and continued. “He thanked me by name. I never told him my name, though. And I’m pretty sure Wilton never said it aloud.”

  Hutton exhaled a plume of smoke through his nose. It swirled then seemed to freeze in the damp, thick air, curled about the old outrider’s face.

  “I can’t
believe I missed it until just today.”

  “There’s no reason for a man to be surprised to hear himself called his own name. Makes sense you’d miss it. You’re pretty sure he never heard the name though, huh?”

  “I’d stake a good deal, Boss.”

  “Well . . .” Hutton cracked the door and tossed out his cigarette long before it was finished. “A month ago, ey? That ain’t good.” Unconsciously, Boss Hutton rested a hand on the grip of his six-shooter. The grips were cream colored ivory and the metalwork on the pistol was all polished brass. He’d had the mechanical components of the weapon replaced or refurbished dozens of times but the handle and inlay along the barrel were original, well over a century old. Most of the outriders used semi-automatics and, save for their tendency to jam with sand or dust, there was no good reason not to. But something about carrying the same kind of pistol men had been using for two hundred and fifty years brought comfort to The Boss. It was grounding. Just like the jeep.

  “This thing is gonna get bloody. You know that, right?”

  “I do.”

  “I need you to get into that goddamn city and then back out here as fast as you can. We’re gonna treat this thing like—dammit . . . more to follow, bud.” Scofield tracked Hutton’s sightline and saw Haskell jogging back toward the jeep. He ratcheted his seat forward again and opened the door, allowing the young man to clamber past him onto the back bench.

  “Here it is,” Haskell said, panting as he held out a steel disc. Scofield took the piece from him and studied it. It had receivers for four taps and was cut with the same broad threading as the strange cord he’d found in the sand and seen on the wall of the massive apparatus he and Kretch had discovered.

  “Yeah. It’s one of them.” Scofield handed it to Hutton, who gave the disc a cursory glance, then handed it back over his shoulder to C. J.

  The Boss looked over at Scofield as he spoke, waiting for—and ready to accept—any signal to stop talking. “Listen, C. J. You’re about to learn some very privileged information. Very secret info. Like don’t fuckin’ share this with anyone until I say so, you got it young man?”