Lizardskin

by Carsten Stroud

  WINNER OF THE ARTHUR ELLIS AWARD

  for

  Best Novel of 1992

  from the Crime Writers of Canada

  The night wind had a strange scent of pine and eucalyptus trees and something sharp. The moon was still back in the east somewhere, shining for other people. The Milky Way showed through the thin cloud cover like sparks through silk. Beau felt the chill of the high plains night on his cheeks and the backs of his hands. The shotgun was a heavy bar of cold iron.…

  As he leaned into the driver’s side door to shut off the lights, the muscles of his back and shoulder blades coiled up and grew cold. He was listening so hard, he could hear his own blood in his ears, listening for that snap and the thrum of a shaft coming in from the dark. It struck him then that this was a very old experience in this territory—a man alone in the dark, waiting for an arrow to come whistling in from somewhere beyond the light.…

  from Lizardskin

  ———————————

  “Lizardskin is thrilling, authentic … a work of art.”

  —The Flint Journal

  “A bronco of a thriller.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “An excellent and exciting novel that is a cross between a police procedural and a conspiracy thriller.”

  —The Toronto Star

  “The plot is tight, the setting superb, and the characters well developed … it’s terrific.”

  —The Globe and Mail, Toronto

  This edition contains the complete text

  of the original hardcover edition.

  NOT ONE WORD HAS BEEN OMITTED.

  LIZARDSKIN

  A Bantam Book / September 1992

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to reprint lyrics from the following

  song: Wild Thing by Chip Taylor, copyright © 1965 EMI

  BLACKWOOD MUSIC INC. All rights reserved. International Copyright Secured. Used by permission.

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 1992 by Mair Stroud and Associates

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 92–833

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  For information address: Bantam Books.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-81527-9

  Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words “Bantam Books” and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, 1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036.

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  A Note on the Details …

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Dedication

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  A Note on the Details …

  I’ve walked a narrow track through this book, trying to balance the requirements of fiction with my affection for hard facts. Those Montana residents lucky enough to live around Billings and Hardin and the Crow lands will know that Pompeys Pillar is rather less than I’ve described, Hardin rather more, and the valley of Arrow Creek considerably changed. I hope they’ll understand I made these changes with care and out of a writer’s necessity. To my cousin Michael Spence, whose love for the West sparked this story two years ago, I offer my affectionate gratitude.

  And for those Lakota, Crow, and Cheyenne people who may read this book, and see the names of great men and women from their histories, and see those names carried into this age by some of my fictional characters, I want them to know it was done as a kind of remembrance, with the hope that their names might be spoken again by those who loved them, among their own peoples, and, with respect, among those people who are not of the First Nations but who, when the day is slipping away and a soft amber light is on the land, sometimes go to their windows and look out across the hills and the coulees and think about how much that was fine and true has passed away under the sweetgrass.

  Beyond these caveats, and always remembering how much I owe to my editor, Beverly Lewis, the book is mine and I stand or fall on what I have written.

  God made the universe

  out of nothing …

  and if you look real close,

  you can tell.

  —11 Bravo Helmet, I Corps, RVN

  From the high hill of my old age,

  I look back on the ways I have taken,

  and the rivers I have crossed,

  and the broad valleys under the mountains,

  and the people who once walked there,

  the voices and names of my youth,

  all gone now, and the hoop broken,

  and I say that it was enough

  that I lived to walk in these places,

  and come to the high hill at last,

  and see cloud-shadows on the peaks

  and the light that is in the world.

  —Blue Coat’s song

  Prologue

  Sunrise–June 7–Hardin, Montana

  When the light outside her window turned the color of milk and blood, Mary Littlebasket closed her eyes and pulled at the intravenous line. It came away from her vein like a snake letting go, a skin-pop sound, and then a small blossom of her blood rose out of the brown skin on the back of her hand. From the glittering tip of the needle, drops of clear liquid swelled and fell onto the wrinkled pink hospital linen. She closed her eyes again and for a long moment thought about putting her head back on the hard pillow and trying once again to drive her soul from her body by singing the leaving song. But there was no belief inside her to give the song power. She let out a long trembling breath through her taut lips, paused at the edge of this moment to summon her intentions, then rolled to her left, feeling the stitches in her belly as they tugged at her like hooks.

  Now she was on her feet. The room reeled, and a soft white cloud seemed to fill her head, dimming the pooled yellow light from the lamp over her bed. She steadied herself on the bedside table, seeing her hand and her bruised arm as if from a distance, oddly distorted and elongated.

  She found her clothes in a brown paper bag; her flower-print dress and the sandals and the blue ribbon that Charlie Tallbull had tied in her hair when the ambulance came to take her to town.

  Mary Littlebasket dressed herself, trying not to be frightened at the incision that violated her belly and the bandages that girdled her body.

  She stepped into the bathroom and turned on the shower. Pausing at the mirror, she stared at her reflection, at the ochre tint in her cheeks and the coal-fire light in her brown eyes, at the wild aurora of blue-black hair and her blunt strong face. Taking a tube of lipstick—Tahiti Dawn—she inscribed a sign on the chilly glass, doing it slowly and carefully, out of respect for the gesture, perhaps for her parents and her relatives if th
ey should ever hear of it, but it still seemed a slight thing, as futile as a rabbit’s shriek.

  Finishing, she came out again and closed the bathroom door. Perhaps they would be pleased that the stupid Crow girl had finally decided to take a shower.

  Out in the hall she heard the nurses talking at their station, bright brittle chatter and one voice carrying above it. They were changing the shift, each one describing her patient load and how they had passed the night. It would take them a half-hour, and then they’d spread out through the ward, full of cold comfort and metallic efficiency, like the sisters at the Mission St. Labre. Mary shook the memory out and stood awhile at the door, trying to transcend the white fog and the pain in her belly. She stepped out into the hall, turned to the right, and pushed her way through the doorway into the nursery, the heavy door closing behind her with a hissing reptilian slither.

  The hallway was empty. Through the plate-glass window she could see the plastic shells where they kept the babies. There was no one in the room. The attendant must be at the shift meeting. She came into the room and went over to the one where her baby slept. She stood over the alien machine, watching him draw in his breath and let it out, a small brown monkey-creature bound up in a web of tubes and needles and monitors.

  The monitors.

  If she pulled at the wires, surely a bell—an alarm—would ring at the nurses’ station. She studied the machine for a while, then she reached out and flipped a red switch on the panel. The tiny green screen went dark, but there was no change in the baby’s breathing. With her breath held and her heart pounding in her ribcage, she forced herself to look at the baby’s face, at the—wrongness—of the features, the flat misshapen skull and the eyes that seemed to be sewn shut. Yet there was breath and a heartbeat. He was alive. Surely this was a kind of life.

  She took the covering off him and carefully disconnected the monitors. She lifted him—so light! so delicate—yet warm, and breathing; he radiated a perfect sweet stillness, calm as a pool under a gliding moon. His body was hot and dry, and she covered him with a blue blanket, wrapping it around him, pulling him to her aching breasts; turning now, leaving, she glided, wraithlike, a sweep of cotton flowers and the whisper of sandaled feet on the polished floors. She passed away down the long hall, her blue-black hair shining with yellow lights as she moved into and out of the glow of the overhead lamps toward the glowing green sign that said EXIT.

  Holding the child in her right arm, she leaned into the door and popped it open. A warm wind coiled inside around the door, smelling of dry stone and dust and baking asphalt.

  In the security office on the second floor, a red light began to blink on a control panel showing a floor plan of the clinic. The guard put down his copy of USA Today and leaned forward in his chair, his leather creaking, the Ruger digging into his waist, hesitating, his right hand poised over a phone set.

  Mary Littlebasket went through the door and closed it with her back, feeling the lock set again. She was in a parking lot, newly painted white lines intense against the sticky surface. The air was warm and harsh against her cheek as she ran across it toward the street. Past the tiny brick homes and the stunted cottonwoods at the edge of the schoolyard, she could see the low weathered hills of the Arapooish, the grasses still soft and blue-green in the dying June days.

  The Changing Grass Moon, she thought, going out across the schoolyard, looking for the pickup truck, listening for a motor.

  The guard stared at the blinking red light for another thirty seconds. Sighing, he tapped the panel twice, hard. When the light did not go off, he picked up the telephone, spoke into it for a few seconds, then he pushed himself up out of his oak swivel chair and adjusted his belt. He sighed again, theatrically, for his own pleasure, put on his cap, setting it just right in the reflection of the office window, and stepped out into the stairway. He was halfway down the stairs when he met a nurse coming up around the flight, her face hard and white.

  Charlie Tallbull was slouching low in the driver’.s seat of his Ford pickup, a straw cowboy hat pushed back away from his seamed and craggy face, his big scarred hands crossed on his wide belly. He saw Mary Littlebasket crossing the dried grass of the schoolyard, a flutter of flowered cotton and black hair and a small blue burden in her arms. He started the engine of the pickup and eased it out into the side street.

  Dell Greer and Moses Harper were sitting in their Big Horn County cruisers a couple of miles away up the Whitman Coulee toward Lizardskin, parked driver-to-driver, drinking coffee laced with Bailey’s Irish Cream out of Styrofoam cups.

  Greer had a part-time cattle operation that he and his wife were trying to run up in the Bulls. He and Harper looked a lot alike, thick-bodied, late twenties, both blond and crew cut, as nicely matched as artillery shells. Harper was a little older than Greer, and maybe a little slower to get angry. They were arguing the relative merits of Black Angus and Aberdeen when the dispatcher came on the radio and told them there was a break-in alarm at the Julia Dwight Clinic.

  Moses Harper took the call, and the morning being slow and the hours heavy, Dell Greer decided to follow along. They turned south onto the Lizardskin road, a couple of brown and tan cruisers with the gold crest of Big Horn County on their doors. Accelerating, they cleared the rise and saw Hardin in the flats, a collection of red-brick and wood-frame houses under twisted cottonwoods, hazy in the growing heat. Behind them a tail of yellow dust rose into the changing sky, burning amber in the hard light of the rising sun.

  It was thirteen minutes after five, on a warming June day. A high-pressure area centered in Coeur d’Alene had spread itself out over central Montana, driving the thunderheads north into Alberta and Saskatchewan and east into the flatlands of the Dakotas. The air was muted and gauzy, softening the edges of the rolling green hills and the spires and peaks of the Bighorn range into a wash of glowing blues, rich deep browns, wide bands of ochre, russet, and sage, the dusty blue of high pines, and the sudden bright arc of copper and black granite. A few miles north and west, the smoke and fumes from the Cenex refinery were drifting westward down the Yellowstone Valley between the Rimrock and the southern bluffs, settling down over the skyline and the railheads and the shipping yards of Billings like a dirty brown blanket. But here along the Bighorn the air was as bright and clear as the edge of a straight razor.

  Except for the small shape of Mary Littlebasket running across the drying grasses of the empty schoolyard, and the rust-red pickup moving toward her along a side street, and a few blocks to the north near the I-90, the two Big Horn cruisers rolling into the little town, Hardin was soundless in sleep and dreams.

  The security guard was a forty-nine-year-old man named Bill Haugge, three years divorced from a check-out clerk named Violet who had stapled weekly summaries of his serial shortcomings to his forehead for eleven years before he finally left their house in Billings and took this job at the Julia Dwight Clinic. Haugge was emphysemic and overweight and he drank too much, but he had good eyes and he saw Mary Littlebasket right away, running through the cottonwoods. At the same time he saw Charlie Tallbull’s old pickup come around the corner, and he remembered the nurse saying that a baby had been taken, and he knew right away that there was no way that Fat Bill Haugge was going to catch her in a footrace. So he tugged out his Ruger—first time he’d had it out of the holster since he’d passed the Highway Patrol Firearms Certification Test in Laurel two years ago—and he raised it above his right shoulder, muzzle skyward, and squeezed one off.

  The muzzle blast blew his right eardrum in and knocked him sideways into the iron handrail to the left of the stairs, where he hit his head—hard—on the spur of it, and his Ruger fell out of his hands and clattered down the concrete stairs to the pavement. The deep booming sound of the blast carried over the rooftops of Hardin in the dense warm air, and Dell Greer got on the horn with a shots-fired signal as they both accelerated.

  The muzzle blast woke up every crow on the roof of the clinic. They exploded into the air, a bl
ack shout of crows shooting skyward. The concussive wave that traveled out across the schoolyard shook several hundred bats out of the cottonwood branches—they flew upward in a fluttering mass of leathery brown wings. Mary Littlebasket felt it as a puff of breath on the small of her back, and her heart flew upward in her chest until it slammed into the back of her throat and she was flying, flying, across the dry grass toward Charlie Tallbull, where he was pulling the pickup to a stop. The passenger door was now wide open—she could see him leaning forward at the wheel, a big old mahogany bull of a man in faded jeans and a straw hat, waving her on, and she was just slipping into the cab of the truck, her baby tight to her chest, when the two Big Horn cruisers came around the corner, flat-out and sliding a bit in the gritty ochre dust that covered Hardin in the summer. Moses Harper went for the pickup, and Dell Greer peeled off to check out the alarm call at the Dwight Clinic.

  Charlie Tallbull slammed his accelerator down and cut the truck hard right onto the access road for I-90 and then hard right again, seeing the eerie geometry of the interstate and the infinity of the hills all around him and the smoky blue peaks of the Bull range far away at the vanishing point of the endless curving road. He powered up the ramp, and then he was running the YIELD sign and blue smoke was pouring out of the pickup’s tailpipe, and Moses Harper was getting blue smoke and raw carbon monoxide in his face as he pushed the cruiser right up the man’s tailgate.

  Dell Greer slid his cruiser to a stop and ran across the parking lot to the clinic stairs, where Bill Haugge was just now sitting up with blood running from his right ear and his left temple. A small nosebleed stained his uniform shirt.