“What causes it?”
“Christ. What causes anything? Something goes wrong in the fertilization. Genetic material is damaged. There are millions of cells in a single developing fetus. It’s amazing that any of them come out right. I’d say, poor nutrition has a lot to do with it. And drugs. The reserves are full of addicts, gas sniffers, glue sniffers, the gene pool’s a mess because of inbreeding. Families in decay. It’s a hell of a thing. Don’t get me started on it.”
“So the chances of there being two anencephalic babies in a couple of weeks, born to reservation women, that’s not out of the ordinary?”
“Who’s the other?”
“Mary Littlebasket. Her kid was anencephalic, too.”
“Yeah. Well, I don’t know. Sure, it might be pushing the odds. But I doubt it. Statistical regression, Beau.”
“What does that mean?”
“Things even out. If it gets real good for a long time, it’ll probably get real bad for a while. If you roll a chain of sevens at the crap table, you think it’s luck. But it’s just math. If you paid attention, you’d see the same dice roll out a string of random junk. It would all boil down to statistical averages. The only reason people believe in luck is because they don’t keep accurate records. They see what they want to see. If the reserve had several months of healthy babies, then a month of preemies and deformed kids, the tribe would say, look, this is evil, there’s something evil at work. They’d do something, have a sing, cast out someone they didn’t trust. Around the same time, statistical regression would see to it that the births leveled out again. The tribe would say, look, the magic worked. But a scientist would know it was going to stop and turn around anyway. That’s why there’s so much superstition in the world, why people believe in curses and astrology and runs of good luck.”
“So a couple of deformed babies, that’s nothing out of the ordinary.”
“Not if you take the long view, no. Poor bastards. They’re having a hell of a time down there. Hookers and dead babies. Makes you think a bit about SPEAR, maybe. If these guys are part of some kind of new Indian movement, they might believe they have a case to make.”
“Custer died for our sins, Marco.”
Vlasic twisted his mouth. “There was a hell of a lot of dying going on around here before Custer showed up. You know that, Beau. Better than most.”
Beau was looking at the young woman.
“Would there be records about the incidence of deformed births on the reserves?”
“Sure. Why not ask Doc Hogeland about it? He’s a friend of yours.”
“I will. What’ll happen to her?”
Vlasic raised his hands, a gesture of helplessness. “Nobody claims her, she goes to the hospital.”
“To the students?”
“That’s right.”
“How much to bury her?”
“Five, six hundred. Depends on the coffin. Are you going to spring for that?”
Beau hesitated a long time.
“No, no, I’m not. Goddamn it, I can’t afford it.”
Vlasic stared at Beau for a long time.
Finally he said, “Beau, let’s get you home.”
14
1800 Hours–June 16–Lizardskin, Montana
Every road leads homeward, angel. If you’re lucky.
Vlasic insisted on buying Beau a meal. They ate at the Muzzleloader and talked in careful generalities, settling on the Bobcats and their pennant chances while Beau toyed with a bowl of barley soup and a mug of Lone Star. By the time they reached the Lizardskin road, the sunset was casting yellow fire across the polished hood of Vlasic’s Cherokee. Ahead of them the hardtop gave way to stones and the stones gave way to dirt, to the red dust and yellow earth of the Whitman Coulee.
In the Far West, shreds of cirrus and altostratus spread across a teal-blue sky. The hills crowded close, dark as buffalo bulls on either side of the road. The air smelled of rain and lightning and pine trees. The headlights swept around the hills, picking out a sweep of sage or a stand of cottonwoods. Overhead a few pale stars glittered through the gathering dark.
Beau drifted in and out of sleep on the way back home, his head coming forward, then jerking back as he woke. Vlasic said little once they turned off the interstate at Hardin and climbed north up the Lizardskin road toward the Pine Ridge range.
Vlasic was humming a nameless tune, and the car’s motion rocked Beau gently. His face was still and set in hard lines in the light of the dying sun. He was trying to see his way through this thing.
Apart from a few years spent working with the Interagency Strike Force—something he had done to distract himself from the apparently bottomless pain of losing Alice—Beau’s career had been a slow and, as far as he was concerned, seemly progression through the ranks. If he’d gone to war, he would have been a middle soldier, not on point and not on drag, just a trooper with the rest of the boys. Life was too short to get all fired up over promotions and corner offices. He did the job and cut no slack. Hooked them and booked them and never looked back. It was a steady and soothing rhythm, something he could depend on to give shape and structure to the formless reality of life. Nor would he engage in the thousand petty intrigues that make up the typical cop society anywhere in the world.
He longed for no one’s job, he coveted no man’s influence. Meagher could have the whole damned state. Run for governor, like old Doc Darryl had a few years back. He had even resisted a promotion to sergeant, but Meagher wouldn’t leave it alone. It was Eustace who had signed him up for the sergeant’s examination, and Meagher who had drilled him on the questions.
Nor was Beau inclined to run against the pack, especially if the pack was hunting for someone to blame. If the ACLU was getting involved, then you could kiss good-bye to any chance there might have been to find out what had really happened with Joe Bell anyway. All the ACLU ever wanted to accomplish was the crucifixion of as many police officers as possible in the time available. Meagher would fight that very hard, by any means, the best of which would be silence.
Anyway, did it really matter now? The dead were dead, and the dead had gone looking for death. Montana had simply obliged them, something Montana had been doing for a million years. Montana was soaked to the grass roots with blood and bitter outcomes. It was a wonder the well water didn’t run red.
So it was just a matter of bookkeeping now, of writing up the sheets and filing the proper forms and stonewalling the ACLU. Nothing Beau did would bring back the dead or ease the living. As for Joe Bell—there was a man, sooner or later, who would get into something that would take him down. That Bell was involved in something illegal, or unnatural, or both, was obvious. So what?
Most of the business west of the Mississippi River was run by some buried clique or cadre of semilegal operators, trading favors and passing around inside information on the golf course or at the Cattleman’s Club or in the hallways up at the capitol. That was the way of things ever since the Johnson County wars. The owners divvied up the oil or the copper or the cattle or the pine trees or the real estate. You played by their rules, or you left the territory, walking or carried, flying or buried. The only reason any of the western states had a capital was so you knew where to go to find somebody to bribe.
It was the American way, wasn’t it?
If there was any message in the last decade, it had to be that money made the rules. Free enterprise, a level playing field—all that shit was a cover, like having the feds regulate the stock market in New York. Campeau bleeds Bloomingdale’s, then splits to Europe to build a ten-million-dollar castle and moon the regulators. Icahn does the same to an entire airline. Keating and the rest find a way to personally screw practically every pensioner in the Southwest. Fuck it, was Beau’s attitude. Why raise a sweat over it? It was a zero-sum game anyway; the rich got obscenely richer by screwing the poor, and the feds stood by with their hands out, waiting for a cut.
Beau was going to go into Billings someday, get that message tattooed on his
chest, so he could rip his shirt open when somebody pressed some private grief or excess misery into his hands:
EXCUSE ME BUT YOU’VE OBVIOUSLY MISTAKEN ME
FOR SOMEONE WHO GIVES A SHIT
Yeah, that’s the ticket. Go home, have a Percodan and a bath and call in the cats, get a good night’s sleep.
That was the thing to do, okay.
Oh, Christ! And call Trudy. Be sure to call Trudy.
Or not to call Trudy?
No. Call Trudy. Try for a life, Beau. Show some backbone.
And forget about all this detective bullshit.
Yes sir.
So …
So what?
So, just for curiosity, what was that package under Bell’s desk?
Something so vile that even Joe Bell wanted to keep it hidden.
Christ, what would be vile enough to shame Joe Bell?
Something very vile.
Or something very valuable?
So valuable that he had gotten Hubert Wozcylesko to go back to the station and steal it for him?
Steal it? Why? It was Bell’s place, after all.
Bell couldn’t wait. Why?
Because the place was crawling with cops, and he wasn’t around to keep an eye on where they looked.
So whatever it was, it was something so kinky that any cop who found it would start in asking rude questions right away.
So the Woz got in there and took it.
Then what happened?
Did somebody take it from the Woz?
And kill him doing it?
And what made Beau think he was going to be able to do anything at all about it?
And why did he care?
Perhaps that was why the road back to Lizardskin seemed different to him. Something had changed in him, some part of him had been altered by the last two days.
Vlasic was singing out loud now. He had a pretty good voice for a coroner.
What was different?
Vlasic was singing “Annie Laurie,” in a high clear tenor voice, softly, to himself, his young face uplit by the green dashboard lights, staring out at the road, his hands strong on the leather-wrapped wheel. Now a few heavy drops of rain were striking the windshield, and Vlasic, still singing, leaned forward to turn on the wipers. “Annie Laurie” was a lonely song, a soldier’s song really, from another time, another war.
“Marco.”
“Hey, Beau. I thought you were sleeping.”
“How recent is the word on how that girl’s doing?”
“The one you—the survivor?”
“Yes.”
“According to Klein, and this is a couple hours old, she’s still in the ICU at Sweetwater.”
“Klein say what her condition was?”
Vlasic looked across at Beau. The rain began to come down hard. It made a drumming noise on the tin roof and hissed against the glass.
“He says she—well, she has considerable skull trauma. She’s been in a coma.”
“Who’s her doctor?”
“Doc Darryl was looking at her. I know he had Nate Seidelman take a look at her, too. Seidelman operated to relieve the subdural pressure. Her heart was steady and her lungs were good. The question is—you know. Head injuries.”
“Yeah. I know.”
“She’s young, though. They figure no older than nineteen. Twenty. She’s strong, too.”
Beau knew that. Better than anyone. She had fought him in silence, the only sound her breathing and the grunt of muscular effort. She had done her best to slice him wide open.
So why did he feel what he was feeling?
Nobody fights like that for money. They fight like that for something stronger than money. Sometimes for freedom, to stay out of prison. Or for vengeance. To ease the pain of loss and extract a payment in kind. They fight out of belief. Out of fanaticism?
Lights were showing through the heavy rain, a scattered glimmer of smeared yellow lights in rectangles and circles. Windows and doors and the lamplights of Lizardskin.
Vlasic rolled the Jeep down the single main street past the outbuildings. Early lights were on at Tom Blasingame’s house, and a thin ribbon of wood smoke showed in the yard light. Up and down the long wandering line, house lights and yard lights shone in the rainy twilight.
Beau’s double-wide trailer was two miles up, at the far end of the street, in a little sheltered cleft hard up against the lee face of the ridge, out of the path of the winds that came down out of Canada in the winter.
Vlasic parked the Jeep close to the big canvas awning Beau had rigged over the doorway. The headlights lit up the garage, shining on his old green Chevy wagon and the brown tarpaulin he had tied over his Harley-Davidson. Someone, probably Tom Blasingame, had retrieved his wagon from the police station lot, where he had left it to begin his Friday tour of duty.
Vlasic put the brake on and sat back, looking at Beau.
“You get some sleep, Beau.”
“I will. Thanks for the ride out. You want to come in, have some coffee?”
Vlasic shook his head. “No, thanks. Jinny’ll be wondering where I am. You gonna be okay?”
“Why’s everybody I see asking me that?”
Vlasic grinned at him, a wolfish rictus in the dashboard light. Rain was now a low steady drumming on the roof of the Jeep. A low rumble of thunder slid down the hillside and a sheet of blue light snapped in the sky, freezing the cottonwoods in a flash of wet black leaves and threading tangled branches.
“You go in there, look in a mirror. That’ll explain it. You have any pain-killers?”
“I have some Percodan. A nurse gave me some when I checked out. And I have some Heinekens in the fridge.”
“Oh, that’s great. Mix yourself a cocktail. I’ll come back in the fall, bring you some moss for your north side.”
Beau made a face and maneuvered his leg out the passenger door. When Vlasic opened his door to help, Beau held up his left hand, palm out.
“Stay there, Marco. I need a nurse, I know where there’s one right now, waiting for me to call her. Say hello to Jinny for me. Thanks again.”
Vlasic leaned across the seat to pull the door closed. Before he shut it, he looked up at Beau. “You talk to Meagher in the morning. Tell him what we talked about. SPEAR and all that. Get his take on it. He’s a good cop. He’ll know how to handle it.”
“Sure, Marco. Drive safe.”
Vlasic shut the door and backed down the laneway. His lights cut across Beau’s body as he turned and drove off down the Lizardskin road, Beau stepped carefully up the porch to the door of the trailer. An empty cat dish sat by the screen door. The overhead light was on.
Something heavy dropped down out of the awning brace and landed on his shoulder. It snarled in his ear, and Beau felt claws sinking into his back.
He raised his left arm and let the cat walk out along it, like a tightrope walker. It was Stonewall, a massive Maine coon cat, striped and colored like a raccoon. By the time Stonewall reached Beau’s elbow, Beau was bracing his left hand on the doorframe. Stonewall had gotten into this game six years back, when he was still a kitten. Now he was full grown and weighed almost twenty pounds, but he was in no way inclined to give up the greeting.
They had a kind of game Beau called Constant Vigilance. Stonewall would hunt Beau, sometimes taking an hour or more to set him up and close in. Or he’d lie in wait for Beau to come home and spring when he thought Beau was looking somewhere else. He’d done it a couple of times when Beau was in bed with a woman, twenty pounds of crazed cat landing on Beau’s bare back, usually at a critical moment. It had soured a couple of promising relationships, which was probably Stonewall’s intention.
Beau stroked the big cat under his jawline and Stonewall stretched out, raised his rear, and sank his foreclaws into Beau’s wrist.
“Hey, you’re soaking wet. How come you’re out, anyway?”
Stonewall dropped heavily to the porch and looked up at Beau, baring his teeth and growling softly.
&n
bsp; Tom must have forgotten to let him back in. McAvity was probably over at his place now, cadging free food and lazing around on the wooden floor in front of Tom’s fire. McAvity was a yellow tom, long-haired and lynxlike, with tufted ears and a big belly, lazy as a flatland river.
Stonewall was a hunter, a solitary. Perhaps that was why he wasn’t inside with Feets. Feets was a small black-and-white ball of fluff and attitude, a female, whose idea of roughing it was a nap without her blanket. Feets never left the trailer unless she was dragged, and she’d head back for it as soon as she got some traction and a clear run. Feets was smart enough to know that out in the country here, a puffball like her was snack food without the cellophane. Feets would be inside the door right now, yowling and bitching about the lateness of the hour and the deplorable condition of the kitty litter.
Except she wasn’t.
Feets had a very distinctive call, a short rising bleat, almost like a bark. The sound of it was as much a part of coming home for Beau as Stonewall’s game. Beau wasn’t hearing it.
Stonewall yowled some more. Then he got himself tangled up in Beau’s legs, extricated himself, and stood up to sink his claws into Beau’s leg wound. Beau yelped and brushed him off.
Stonewall snarled again, flattening his ears. Beau leaned down and picked him up, holding him in the downlight. His green eyes were huge. He swiped at Beau’s head with a paw, claws retracted, and snarled again, a greeting in Stonewallese. He had blood in his paws and in the fur around his jaws.
“Jesus, Stonewall. What have you been into?”
Stonewall bared his fangs again, tried to get his rear paws into Beau’s belly, and started to purr. His ears flattened back, and he twisted in Beau’s big hands. Beau let him go.
“Feets? You in there?”
He reached for the screen door. Stonewall went back down the steps and turned around to watch, both ears forward, his body very tense. Something chilly ran down the small of Beau’s back.
He tugged out the old Smith and thumbed back the hammer.
Paranoia, he thought.
Beau carefully unlatched the screen door and pulled it open. It emitted a rusty groan. He braced it with his shoulder, unlocked the main door. He lurched in on the bad leg, ignored the pain, cut to the right, out of the light, the Smith out and up.
Lizardskin Page 21
