Lizardskin

by Carsten Stroud

  “Who do you mean?”

  Tallbull was silent, his eyes tired and pained.

  “Look, Mary wrote something on the mirror before she left,” Beau said.

  Tallbull’s mouth tightened. He looked at his hands.

  Beau pulled out his notepad. He flipped through it until he got to his copy of the drawing Dell Greer had shown him. He handed the book to Tallbull.

  “You see that drawing?”

  Tallbull’s face looked like a window with an iron gate coming down in front of it. It went from flesh to concrete in a half-second.

  “Well … Charlie?”

  “When you have trouble in the police, do you ask us to fix it for you?”

  “That’s not the same. If there’s something going on, something you know about, tell me and I’ll try to help.”

  “We don’t need you to help.”

  Beau looked at Charlie Tallbull, at his broken frame and the pain in his face. “You need someone, Charlie.”

  “Maybe we have someone. Now go away. I need some sleep.”

  He closed his eyes and said nothing else. After a few minutes, Beau walked away, passing the girl’s bed. He stopped there and looked down at her. Her breathing was steady and slow. The side of her face was swollen and purple.

  He thought about Saint Jude, the patron of lost causes. It wasn’t really a prayer, but he held the thought for a while, until he felt better, and then he left.

  Bell was bending over a Honda generator, wrenching at a pulley, his broad back wet with sweat. The generator was roaring and popping, almost deafening in the cramped room. The little outbuilding was a tool shed of some sort. A long bench was covered with oily rags, tools, and bits of machinery. As Gabriel paused in the door, Bell tugged at the pulley and the generator popped, stuttered, and settled into a steady muted rumble.

  Bell straightened up from the machine and arched his back, one hand on his right hip, cursing softly under his breath.

  Gabriel knocked twice on the doorframe.

  Bell jumped and spun—very fast for a big man with a wound.

  “Who the fuck are you?”

  Gabriel smiled and stepped into the room. Bell stank of whisky and old sweat. His face was bright red, shiny with sweat and fear.

  “The name is Picketwire. I’d like to talk to you.”

  “What about? There’s no work here, Chief.”

  “I’d like to talk to you about Friday.”

  Bell stared at him, a number of changes passing over his face. “You with Indian Affairs?”

  “No. Just an interested party.”

  Bell considered him for a moment. Gabriel saw his eyes flicker over Gabriel’s clothes, trying to figure him out.

  “How’d you find me?”

  “I asked the County cops.”

  “They know you’re here?”

  “I guess so. Can we talk?”

  “Just a minute, let me get cleaned up here.”

  Bell turned and walked over to the bench. He picked up a jar of cleaning cream and began to work it over his greasy hands. “What did you want to know, Chief?”

  Gabriel was watching him carefully.

  The generator muttered and rumbled in the corner.

  And a sudden white light exploded in his mind. He saw the wooden floor coming up at him—turning as he fell—he saw a tall man, a blurred shape, saw something like a pistol in the man’s right hand.

  Gabriel hit the floor and tried to roll, his vision red at the edges and dimming, and a large brown leather boot came at him—at his face—it hit him and his head snapped backward and he hit the floor hard, and there was a momentary flaring of bright white light and then there was a heavy black weight on him and he went down under it, trying to understand where the man had come from and how he could have missed him—feeling fear and confusion and a fleeting sense of professional embarrassment—and he heard someone say “asshole” and then there was nothing at all.

  “Now what the hell do we do?” said the tall man.

  “How’d you know he was here?” asked Joe Bell.

  The tall man reached into his jacket and pulled out a compact disk case. “I was bringing this up. I saw something in the wash there, by your gate? I looked. It was a car, under some pulled-up grass. So I figured, maybe you had somebody sneaking around. I decided to come in quiet. I saw this guy here come down the slope and walk in on you. That generator—shut it off, will you?—it was making so much noise, I guess he never heard me. You recognize him at all?”

  Bell shook his head, his face greasy and pale under the red beard. “No idea. Never seen him around.”

  “He’s Indian. That tell you anything?”

  “Yeah.”

  There was a long pause.

  “Okay,” said Bell. “Gimme a hand here.”

  They picked Gabriel up and carried him out into the yard. Bell looked around the ranch and up into the hills.

  “Up there.”

  They looked up the long hillside.

  “Shit.”

  They reached the crest of the slope fifteen minutes later. Bell’s chest was heaving, and his shirt was wet with sweat. The big man had taken off his suit jacket, revealing a shoulder holster with a large semiauto pistol in it. They threw Gabriel to the ground and stood over him, chests heaving, mouths open, looking at each other. Something final passed between them.

  Gabriel rolled over and tried to push himself up to a sitting position. The big man pulled out the pistol—it was a big Colt Delta. He and Bell watched Gabriel sit up shakily. The right side of his face was bleeding and one eye was blackening, the cheekbone swelling.

  “Who the hell are you?” said Bell.

  Gabriel looked at the two men, then at the hills around them. He’d come to his death, he could see that. It was funny, really, after all that he had seen and done—he was going to die like some effengee, cold-cocked and kicked senseless by a couple of redneck ranchers. It was funny as hell. That was what you got for lying around in the long grass, daydreaming about the past and conjuring up ghosts. The goddamned countryside had killed him after all. If they ever heard about it, the guys in Skull and Bones and the rest of Section, they’d put up a picture of him in the mess hall: Putz Death of the Year. He started to laugh.

  Bell stepped up and started a kick. Gabriel caught his boot in his right hand and froze Bell there, wavering on one leg, huffing and sweating. The other man raised the Colt.

  “Let him go.” His voice was raspy and flat. Gabriel couldn’t see his face. The man was just a large shape outlined by a soft mist of early starlight. The evening sky was a radiant screen of turquoise and tourmaline. The broken circle of the moon floated above his left shoulder.

  “Tell him to stop kicking me.”

  “Back off there, Joe.”

  Gabriel let go of the man’s foot, and Bell hopped backward out of reach.

  “Now one more time. Who are you?”

  “My name’s Picketwire.”

  The tall shape was silent, but Gabriel felt a kind of grim humor in the man’s voice.

  “Nice to meet you, Mr. Picketwire. Who you with?”

  Gabriel laughed again, looking around for the half-shadow, the man-shaped wind, the trick of the dark that had been keeping him company during the day. Nowhere around. See? What did he expect?

  “I’m not with anybody.”

  “Bullshit,” said Bell. “What are you, Indian Affairs? FBI?”

  “No Indians in the FBI,” said the tall man. “You with the reservation cops?”

  “I’m not a cop at all.”

  “Then why were you staking out my place?” said Bell.

  “I’m just out walking.”

  “Just a tourist? That your story?” The tall man’s voice was thickening, the humor evaporating. Gabriel could sense the aggression in the man. The muzzle of the Colt was rocksteady, and he was a good fifteen feet away. There was nothing to do but die politely.

  “He wanted to talk about last Friday?” the tall man aske
d Joe Bell.

  “Yeah. What you want with that, Mr. Picketwire? I thought you were a tourist.”

  Gabriel said nothing. He had handled it stupidly, and now he was going to die for it. It wasn’t a big surprise. He was overdue for it.

  “Why did you hide your car down at the gate?”

  “I didn’t want it stolen.”

  The big man was silent for a long time. Finally, he spoke. “Joe, you got a shovel?”

  “Yep.”

  “Go get it, will you?”

  Bell hobbled off down the long slope of the hill. Gabriel and the tall man watched him until he reached the shed at the bottom of the slope. His red setter ambled out of the main house and followed Bell inside. Minutes passed. The dusk was deepening. The wind was soft and warm, laden with sweet scent and pollen. The tall man watched Gabriel carefully.

  “You don’t seem too worried, Mr. Picketwire.”

  “Nothing I can do.”

  “This situation doesn’t bother you?”

  “Sure it does. But you’re too far away to get to, and you don’t seem like a man who can be talked out of his weapon.”

  Bell was coming back up the slope now, his setter trotting along behind him.

  “You could just tell us who you’re with. Maybe there’s something we can work out.”

  Gabriel sat up a little straighter. His head felt like a cylinder full of helium, and he was losing the vision in his right eye.

  “There’s no deal to make. Why don’t you just get it done?”

  “And you got no idea what’s going on? A goddamned Indian?”

  “Not a clue. Anybody hungry? It’s way past dinnertime.”

  The man stood up, sighing. “Get up.”

  Gabriel got to his feet slowly.

  “Now what?”

  “Now nothing,” he said, raising the Colt.

  Gabriel saw the muzzle come up. The big man was going to shoot him right in the face. He heard the setter barking, and Bell’s boots rustling through the long grass. Think about your training, try to remember what they told you. What was there to do?

  In this situation?

  You died.

  There was a blue-white flare—silence—a massive blow—cold as ice—the night sky revolving—the stars a blurring wheel of brittle cold lights—sound now, a distant rumbling falling away down the slopes—something slammed him in the back, and the stars rained down in his eyes like a shower of stainless-steel needles.

  Blood filled his throat.

  He had a picture in his mind—a bending of the light.

  Now we’ll see, he thought.

  We’ll see if

  16

  2000 Hours—June 17—Billings, Montana

  The Criminal Investigation Bureau shooting board convened at 2000 hours on Monday evening, in the boardroom of the Yellowstone County Courthouse. The largest thing in the big room was a twenty-foot-long redwood table that had once been part of the household of a cattleman-king. He had donated it to the County as part of a final burst of philanthropy, a desperate and unsuccessful attempt to propitiate the cancer god.

  His portrait had a prominent place out in the hall: a rake-hell’s face with hunted eyes and a prodigious beak, the required black handlebar moustache, and a suit from Savile Row that he had been buried in a year after the picture was done.

  The boardroom was lined in more redwood and had a row of leaded-glass windows that had also been looted from an old Montana establishment, an army whorehouse in Billings. The glass in the frames was so old that it had thickened at the bottom, and its yellow tint cast a suitably jaundiced light over the business of the courts.

  Vanessa Ballard held the upper end of the table, her snake-skin briefcase open beside her, her Pearlcorder and a little seed mike propped up on the briefcase.

  Eustace Meagher sat at the opposite end of the table, a chart-board propped up on an easel behind him with a detailed map of the Ballantine side road and the relevant sections of Arrow Creek marked off in green ink. Meagher’s garrison belt and service piece hung on the back of his chair, and he had his clip-tie off and the first two buttons of his tan patrol shirt open. A pile of computer fanfold paper lay at his elbow.

  On Meagher’s right, Finch Hyam slouched in a wrinkled beige sports jacket and dark brown trousers, his lanky frame limp and his lean face shiny with sweat.

  “Howdy” Rowdy Klein, Hyam’s partner in the Criminal Investigation Bureau, sat beside him, head down, lips set, writing something on a yellow legal pad, working hard to convey the impression of a man with heavy burdens that he would neither shirk nor share. Sweat stained his armpits and the hollows of his dark blue suit.

  In the long wood-paneled hallway outside the boardroom, a large group of men and women sat or stood in various combinations, according to their moods and friendships.

  Beneath the portrait of the dead cattle-king sat Dell Greer and Moses Harper, stiff and starched in blue County uniforms, their Stetsons on their knees, hands on the Stetsons. They looked like nervous bookends. They were here to tell their stories and, they sincerely hoped, offer support for Meagher’s contention that he had no choice but to shoot the Indian male who had confronted them in the hills above the creek. And they hoped—even more sincerely—that there wasn’t some kind of unexpected career-terminating bear-trap hidden inside Vanessa Ballard’s briefcase.

  Next to them, sitting up straight and looking around the hall with unconcealed fascination, his large black-booted feet barely reaching the hardwood floor, was Trooper Benitez—now blooded and proven—tightly wrapped in a torso bandage under his pressed tan uniform, bruised about the face and freshly scrubbed, his shiny black hair combed straight back from his blunt Indio features.

  Standing next to Trooper Benitez, slouching bonelessly against the wall, Myron Sugar ran through the Friday-night action again and again, trying to see the traps and snares and get it all straight in his mind.

  Sugar liked to stick to his desk, and he’d gone along with Meagher that night with his heart in his throat. Maybe it was punishment for ignoring the sabbath. Maybe if he’d been a better Jew, he wouldn’t have been working that night at all and someone else would have had to go and get involved in an Indian war.

  Rita Sonnette and Ron Thornton and a couple of other cops were slouching around fanning themselves with their hats and grousing about the time this was taking.

  In a far corner of the hall Marla LeMay sat in a railchair, staring straight ahead, her hands in her lap. She was wearing her waitress uniform. Rita Sonnette had picked her up at Bell’s Oasis, where she had been acting as the boss for Joe Bell until his wounds healed enough for him to come back to the station.

  Next to her, but not with her, Danny Burt sat in a hardback chair, reading an old Sports Illustrated. He wore his usual morgue wagon uniform—a black suit, single breasted, over a pale gray shirt and a thin black tie. Black brogues carefully tied, and a gold ring on the third finger of his left hand.

  Danny Burt was a large man with a hard little potbelly and thick hands covered with fine blond hair. His head was shiny with sweat in the stuffy room, and thinning blond hairs stuck to his scalp. His face was pale and blunt, and his eyes, which at first meeting might have been mistaken for friendly and warm, were actually cool and remote-looking, gray-blue and flecked with green, like mountain onyx. At his wrist a gold Rolex caught the light from the lamp next to him, illuminating his hard face and the roughness of his unshaven cheeks.

  The wedding ring was less than it seemed; Burt said he wore it to keep the women in line. He wasn’t married, although he maintained that he had been once, back in La Crosse, Wisconsin. His wrists were exposed as he held the magazine. Fresh bruises showed on them, red marks and raw skin where the ropes had held him. There was a purple bruise above his left eye, and a butterfly stitch held a section of his eyebrow together.

  Normally he liked to mix it up with the cops, and he was always a welcome addition to any barside chat. Today he kept to himself and answered
Ron Thornton’s conversational leads with noncommittal grunts.

  Ron assumed he didn’t like official business, even less since it was Danny Burt’s carelessness that had gotten the wagon hijacked in the first place and Peter Hinsdale killed.

  Standing alone at the farthest reach of the hallway, leaning against a wooden railing that overlooked the lower rotunda and the front doors of the courthouse, a short fox-faced man in a dark brown suit and heavy brown shoes stood watching the other witnesses. Frank Duffy, special agent in charge, of the FBI’s Montana liaison office in Helena.

  Crimes involving possible interstate flight or federal installations were part of the FBI’s jurisdiction. But even if they weren’t part of this one, the arrival of SPEAR and the ACLU on the scene would have brought them into it. SPEAR was on a list of subversive organizations with possible terrorist connections. Had been ever since 1973, when Russell Means took over at Wounded Knee.

  Duffy’s brown hair was thinning into a blade shape, exposing a high sunburned forehead. His ears were huge and projected straight out from the side of his skull. He had a sharp nose and a narrow jawline. His skin seemed stretched over his skull, and Duffy projected a general air of guile and suspicion.

  Beau McAllister, in a sense the star of the evening—the way an aristocrat is the star of the activities around a guillotine—was back in Lizardskin, packing a bag and talking to Tom Blasingame about his cats.

  A large white wall clock at the end of the hall ticked loudly in the hush and murmur, tinny and relentless.

  Vanessa Ballard poured herself some water from a silver pitcher. She drank it all and set it down, and something about the motion stopped the small talk between Finch Hyam and Rowdy Klein. Meagher waited with an expectant look on his face, his eyebrows cocked. He knew Vanessa was still angry about the scene in Doc Darryl’s office. Beau had gone over the top and down the far side on that one. Meagher hoped his career could survive it. Yet Meagher felt that Beau had been set up to do that, aimed and fired like a 105. Why would the old man want his son worked over like that? It was ugly.

  On the other hand, the kid needed a beating, and if he was going to get one, why not let Beau have the pleasure? The kid had caused him enough grief over the last couple of years.