Lizardskin

by Carsten Stroud

“The Browning being your service revolver?”

  “It’s not a revolver, ma’am. It’s a semiauto pistol.”

  “Was it loaded at that time?”

  “If it ain’t loaded, it’s a paperweight. Ma’am.”

  “And you pointed this device at Mr. Bell?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And you issued a verbal warning?”

  “Yes, ma’am. A loud one.”

  “What was the distance between you and Mr. Bell?”

  “About seventy feet.”

  “What happened then?”

  “Mr. Bell was moving around some and screaming. He was trying to raise the weapon and get off another shell.”

  “At this time, he had an arrow in his body?”

  “In his shoulder, ma’am.”

  “And yet you still considered him capable of formulating the intent to discharge his weapon in a careless or unlawful manner?”

  “He had already fired it once with an arrow in him.”

  “And he showed indications of intending to do so again?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And at that time, at that juncture, when you observed that Mr. Bell was not appearing to heed your verbal warning and seemed to be preparing to discharge his weapon again, what did you do?”

  “I took aim and shot him.”

  “At what point did you aim?”

  “Ma’am?”

  “At what part of Mr. Bell’s body did you take aim?”

  “At his … lower body.”

  “You aimed at his lower body. Can you be more specific?”

  “Yes, ma’am. I aimed—I aimed at his foot.”

  “At his foot?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “So your intention was to disable Mr. Bell?”

  “Yes, it was.”

  “It was not your intention to kill Mr. Bell?”

  “No, ma’am. It was my intention to use sufficient force so as to prevent the individual from continuing with his careless discharging of that shotgun.”

  “And where did the bullet strike Mr. Bell?”

  “He was moving around a bit.”

  “Yes, duly noted. Please answer the question.”

  “Ah—the bullet impacted him on his lower anterior quadrant of the gluteal muscle. At that point—”

  “The lower anterior quadrant of his gluteal muscle? That would be in Mr. Bell’s buttock, then?”

  “Yes, ma’am. In his right buttock.”

  “Am I to understand that you took aim at Mr. Bell’s right foot, then contrived to shoot him in the ass, Sergeant?”

  “Not actually in his ass, ma’am. More like in his wallet.”

  “Do you receive firearms training in your capacity as a Highway Patrol officer, Sergeant?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Twice a month. And you have to qualify once a year.”

  “Are you considered a marksman by your department, Sergeant?”

  “I am qualified to carry a weapon.”

  “Did you consider the—I believe the phrase is backstop? Did you consider what material or structures might receive the round in the apparently highly likely event that you should miss Mr. Bell’s prodigious ass, Sergeant?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “And what manner of devices did you observe to be generally within the region—I think we may use the term region to encompass the statistical probabilities suggested by your talents as a marksman—in this region, what devices were likely to receive an errant round from your less-than-surgical service Browning?”

  “Ah … there was a big empty oil drum and also some tires.”

  “Were there no gasoline pumps, Sergeant? Since Bell’s Oasis is referred to as a Shell gas station and since many citizens attend this location regularly to acquire gasoline, it seems reasonable to infer that one might expect to find gas pumps in the region. So were there?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And yet you saw fit to discharge your weapon nevertheless?”

  “I did.”

  “And you admit that you missed your target?”

  “No, ma’am. I intended to hit Mr. Bell, and I did.”

  “I see. I suggest to you that Yellowstone County owes its narrow escape from a large gasoline-fueled explosion at this location at least as much to the height and breadth of Mr. Bell’s butt as it does to your skill as a marksman, Sergeant.”

  “Well, ma’am.”

  “Would that be a fair inference from the facts as you have reported them here, Sergeant?”

  “Well …”

  “Please answer the question!”

  The intercom on Meagher’s desk buzzed. They all jumped. Ballard reached for the Pearlcorder and shut it off. Meagher leaned across her to answer the call.

  “What is it, Myron?”

  “Well … seems we got a problem with the County morgue guys.”

  “What about ’em?”

  “Vlasic called ’em out to get that kid, the one Bell popped?”

  “Yeah. They not there yet?”

  “No, they showed up okay.”

  “So?”

  “So they left with the stiff an hour ago.”

  “So yeah?”

  “So nobody’s seen ’em since.”

  “So they stopped for coffee. Kid’ll still be dead in the morning. Vlasic got a heavy date or something?”

  “No, they didn’t. And they’re off the CB. Rowdy and Finch been all up and down the road between there and here.”

  “Oh, shit.”

  “That’s right, LT. That wagon’s gone.”

  4

  2100 Hours–June 14–Billings, Montana

  At the start it was no big deal. They figured one of the guys had remembered some business somewhere, or maybe they had detoured south to Hardin for a drink at Twilly’s, or they could have gone cross-county to Roundup for some God-cursed reason. They could have gone west to Laurel on another call, because Ron Thornton suddenly remembered that Danny Burt, Gentile’s senior driver on duty, had mentioned a pickup at Zweibeck’s Nursing Home in Laurel—that turned out to be wrong. Or maybe they’d gone up to Musselshell because Burt had a girlfriend in Musselshell, and Sugar remembered that once before Danny had taken a load of stiffs up to Musselshell and left them cooking in the wagon while he did the horizontal bop with this girl—what was her name, Lorraine? Something like that.

  When Sugar started talking about horizontal bopping, Ballard snapped the gold locks on her snakeskin briefcase and started to weave her way through the growing crowd in the squad room. She stopped at the glass doors and looked back at McAllister through the sweep of golden hair. McAllister thought she was going to ask him if he knew how to whistle.

  “You keep your notes, McAllister. I’m going to want a copy of your pages, too. When can I have that?”

  “I don’t like copying pages out of my notebook.”

  “I don’t like stories that go all pale and shaky in cross. When will I see them?”

  “Notebooks belong to the man, not the department.”

  “Your notes constitute a substantial evidentiary component of a pending civil action affecting the State. As such, they are subject to subpoena and may be seized by bailiffs.”

  “Hey, Vanessa—how about the bailiffs seize this?”

  She smiled at that. “God, McAllister. Mutate soon, will you? The suspense is killing us. Just get your story straight. Eustace will set up the shooting board, right? Internal guys are all your buddies anyway.”

  Eustace grinned. “I’ll put Finch Hyam on the board.”

  “Yeah. I’ll be in touch.”

  And she was out the door, a curved space in the air, and gone.

  Meagher set his phone down and looked across his desk at Beau.

  “You really have a way with women, Beau. You want to heat her up some more, we could use her to take paint off a wall.”

  “She gets to me. They all do.”

  “Who all?”

  “Women. I don’t seem to have
a handle on them.”

  “Yeah? Well, you’re the one with the handle. You keep wanting them to grab that—you don’t think about Tuesday morning.”

  “What’s Tuesday morning?”

  Meagher sighed, reached for his phone. “Any Tuesday. I mean the domestic stuff. You never think how it is for women, what they need.”

  “If you mean shifts, that’s why I married Maureen when she got pregnant. She was working shifts down at the clinic in Hardin. She was used to the life.”

  Meagher was listening to his phone ringing down the line. He put a hand over the receiver. “Look, Beau, we have to find this wagon. It’s probably nothing. Danny’s done this before. You had a party to go to—what’s left of it?”

  “I had a party. Now I don’t. I’m here. Let’s do it.”

  “Good. All your watch got their beepers now? Go beep ’em, the off-duty guys, see if they’ll ride around some, get a BOLO out on that wagon. Finch ran the plates on that blue pickup and got a registered owner named Jubal Two Moon, sixty-six, listed address on the Rosebud Reserve. Bought it in Pierre.”

  “Any priors on him?”

  “Dinged once, in Rapid City. Drunk and disorderly. June 25, 1976. Guy’s a carpenter. Might be something military on him, but we can’t get that after business hours without help from the feds. Rosebud Reserve makes him a Sioux.”

  “You mean Dakota. Sioux is a white name.

  “Okay. Anyway, the CIB guys’ll take care of that. You think about getting some men out there and find that morgue wagon.”

  “We don’t have enough cars.”

  “So tell ’em to use their own. We’ll spring for the gas. Hello, Barney? It’s Eustace, over here in Billings—yeah! You got the printout on these Indians? Well, we’re all over the county looking for them. Now Barney, I got something else. Can you get your guys to keep an eye out for one of Gentile’s wagons?… yeah … Danny Burt … and some kid—” Meagher looked at McAllister, raised his eyebrow.

  “Peter Hinsdale. He’s nineteen.”

  “Hinsdale … yeah … no … we last saw them out at that ten-seventy in Pompeys Pillar, maybe ninety minutes ago … Yeah, he’s right here—Barney says hi … says your shot should have killed Bell … you hit him in the brains … Anyway, the plate is echo delta five niner tango four, a gray Ford wagon. Hell, Barney, even your guys can’t miss that … sure … same to you, only sideways. Have a good one.…”

  McAllister stood and gathered up his gear. “Okay, Eustace. I’m gonna go beep the watch. I’ll take a run out to Pompeys Pillar and do the back roads, see what I can see. You see to it your people in Commo get the best descriptions of Jubal Two Moon and the rest of them. I’ll ask the Big Horn County guys in Hardin to do a pass over in the Crow Reserve. They might make it that far. Can’t see a Dakota going to a Crow for help, but you never know these days. Somebody’ll know something … just do one thing for me?”

  “Sure, Beau.”

  “Rowdy and Finch’ll see this Bell thing as self-defense.”

  “Looks like that from here.”

  “Yeah, but I got—”

  “One of your feelings?”

  “Yeah.”

  Meagher looked at him as the squad room started to fill up with troopers and the first of the Friday-night prisoners. The tempo was rising as the citizens swallowed up a Friday-night skinful and started to take exception to each other in more direct ways.

  “You think it was … what? A setup?”

  “I think Bell had more on his mind than he was saying. The whole thing seems wrong. Has the wrong rhythm. I don’t know. And what’s with the hideaway disk? There’s something—”

  Meagher looked at him, his eyebrows raised.

  “Now that’s what I call a real professional assessment. And there’s nothing in the statutes that says a guy can’t hide something in his office. You know Bell. He’s got his finger in a lot of pies. He’s trying to get into that Rancho Vista development out near Musselshell. He’s moving money around on the market. There’s any number of reasons for the guy hiding something in his office, and not one of them is any of our business.”

  “Well, this Gall kid. No record. Now the RO on Jubal Two Moon, turns out he’s clean too, and—”

  “He’s not clean. He’s got a sheet.”

  Beau rolled his head and gave Meagher a pitying look. “He’s got a drunk and disorderly. Look at the date.”

  “Nineteen seventy-six. June 25.”

  “Ring a bell?”

  “No.”

  “Christ, LT. I talk about it all the time!”

  Meagher looked blank, then his face changed. “Oh, hell. The Little Bighorn?”

  “June 25, 1976, would be the centennial. Exactly one hundred years after. Jubal Two Moon’s a Dakota. Hell, I think there was a Two Moon at the battle. Probably an ancestor. I’d say, the guy who doesn’t get pissed on that day has no soul.”

  “Any other witnesses?”

  “Not really. The gas station was pretty empty. The truckers get their diesel over by the repair yard. No other citizens on that pump island. One other thing—”

  “Yeah?”

  “How’d you know Bell shot somebody? When you called me, you said you could hear Bell shooting.”

  “Yeah. I heard it on the phone.”

  “So he was on the phone when the thing started?”

  “Yeah—oh, I see.”

  “Yeah. Why’d he make the call in the first place?”

  “Actually, he didn’t. It was somebody else called.”

  “Who was it?”

  “A woman. Marla, the waitress. Didn’t she tell you?”

  “Must have slipped her mind,” said Beau.

  “Right. A little odd, huh?”

  “Yeah. They call in direct, or 911?”

  “911. Then Beth calls me in on it.”

  “So there’d be a tape?” Beau asked.

  “Should be. You want me to get it?”

  “Well, is it evidence now?”

  “Not till I say so. What’re we looking for?”

  McAllister took a long breath and set his Stetson back on his head. He hooked his hands in his garrison belt.

  “This is all CIB territory now,” said Eustace. “You’re just patrol. And when Bell’s lawyer gets to the courthouse on Monday, you’ll be warned off anything to do with this investigation until it’s settled.”

  “Both ways? Civil and criminal?”

  “Depends. Don’t get into any more trouble in the meantime.”

  “You’ll think about what we been talking about?”

  “I’d rather not.”

  “But you will?”

  “Yeah, Beau. I will.”

  • • •

  McAllister spent a few minutes rousing the off-duty troopers and talking them into doing some cruising around the county. He told them to watch out for any Indians on foot or hitchhiking, and if they did spot any, to use the CB to call it in. There was to be no attempt at a singlehanded arrest. Not even a check-out. Just mark the location, get to a phone, or get on channel nine of their own CB and call in some backup.

  Out in the waiting room, the citizens were belly-up to the duty desk, all bitching and whining at once about illegally parked cars or missing dogs or noisy parties or kids drag-racing on the back roads. The radio in the squad room was crackling with more of the same. Cowtown Friday nights. McAllister pushed through them and walked out into the evening.

  The air was clear and soft, with that first faint scent of spring grass and bitterroot flower. The sky was a mist of red fire and deep green night, showing a few stars. There was a little evening dew on the window of his cruiser. He leaned against the door for a minute, filling his Petersen pipe with some Virginia tobacco. He fired it up with a kitchen match, the flare lighting him up under the brim of his patrol Stetson, deepening his lines and creases. His hands looked blunt and rough. A glint of old gold on his left hand. He looked at the wedding ring for a long moment.

  A way with wo
men … no, that he did not have. Either loving them or keeping them safe. The match flared, and pain lanced along his finger. He shook it out and dropped it on the ground.

  It had been like a bright white flower suddenly blossoming in that late afternoon two decades ago. Way off down the lizardskin ribbon of blacktop, one truck had swerved, a big silver tube. There had been one short, shouted curse on channel nineteen of the CB. The silver tube met a square blue bus. They locked. That flower grew in a massive silence. He remembered feeling the wheel under his hand, and Alice saying his name, and then the Kenworth rocked and the windshield blew apart in a scintillation of tiny prisms, and in each one there was a bright flower growing, like a bitterroot flower, yellow as sulphur in the center, then white and purple at the petals.

  He had instinctively reached for her, leaning across the cab as the windshield came in and that huge silence followed, and then a massive wall of packed air as tight as hardwood had hit them both. Turning that way, turning to his right, to Alice, and trying to cover her, that had saved his eyes. But the seat belt had stopped him and he had never reached her, just got one hand on her arm and then he was close enough to see the glass hit her full on, like a shotgun loaded with broken glass. She rocked back and her face disappeared … another-color flower.

  Laurel had been two then. He remembered the long hospital time in Sweetwater, and then the night there had been an empty bed in her room and a nurse saying, why, Mr. McAllister, I was sure someone would have called you.…

  Alice Manyberries had been a full-blood Crow from the Whistling Wind clan, who held the Little Bighorn River country as much as any Crow holds his own land. She was working in the bookshop of the Custer memorial near Crow Agency when Beau first saw her.

  He had been with Steiger Freightways for a couple of months then, back in 1968. He was still angry about the army turning him down for bad knees. Football knees, they said, as if it were a lucky break for him. You’d never clear boot, son. Thank your stars. McAllister hadn’t seen it that way at the time, although later on he’d learned to live with it. Not every young man finds his war.

  So it had been high summer, on a long haul from Gary to Coeur d’Alene with a flatbed of steel rods. The load had been shifting on him for days, and he had pulled off I-90 at Crow Agency to warp it down some. Although he had passed it many times, off in the blue distance, that day he had been drawn by the sight of it: a little cluster of white marble beneath a stone pillar on the side of a brown hill.