Lizardskin

by Carsten Stroud

  “I understand.”

  “So they take a look at us, and they tell Pete to get into the coffin. I tried to stop that, but the way it looked, I figured if they were gonna stick him into a coffin alive, then maybe they weren’t going to kill him. So I got him calmed down, and they put him in there. He was crying a lot, and they just slammed the lid on him. It was hard. They were hard people. Then they took me some ways up the creek. I figure, this is it, say your prayers and kiss your butt good-bye. But they just tied me to a tree. Did a good job, too.”

  He held up his wrists and pulled the sleeves of his suit jacket back.

  “No screwing around there. I’m down on my knees in the gravel by the creek there, all I can see is the tree bark in front of my face. I’m thinkin’, okay, one of them just reaches around, cuts me a new mouth, takes my scalp, and I’m tryin’ not to whine, you know, to go out with a hard-on—shit, ma’am, my language—”

  “Yes. It must have been terrible for you. Would you like a glass of water?”

  “I’d fuck a bobcat for a brew, ma’am.”

  Ballard looked across at Meagher, her thoughts clear. She asked Burt a few more questions, which soon became circular. Burt was earnest, but beyond his feelings about being tied to a tree all night, he had little to add. When she told him he was excused and thanked him, he let out a long sigh, like a deflating tire. It was all he could do not to run from the room.

  “What do you think’ll happen to Burt, Vanessa?”

  She shut off the tape. “I think Bob Gentile will probably get sued by Hinsdale’s mother, and she’ll sure as hell include Burt in that. I can’t see any criminal charges against him. He’s a victim, same as Peter Hinsdale. If Spellman Sterling’s defending him, he’ll do okay. I just don’t see how he can afford Sterling. I know he asks for at least a thousand as a retainer. I didn’t think Burt had that sort of money. On the other hand, he could pawn that Rolex.”

  “I saw that,” said Meagher. “Think it’s a fake?”

  “No. It’s real. Okay,” said Ballard. “Let’s wrap this up.”

  By the time they finished with the rest of the witnesses, everyone at the table could see that there was a pretty good basis for treating these shootings as justifiable use of force.

  There had been an assault, an armed assault witnessed by Marla LeMay and others. Missiles had been fired with malicious intent. Regardless of the actual sequence of events, it was obvious that these Native Americans had arrived on the scene with weapons, that some kind of confrontation had ensued. They’d present those results to the SPEAR people. Maybe they’d go away.

  Klein spoke up. “That’s true, Ms. Ballard. But we haven’t established whether Staff Sergeant McAllister had any call to shoot Joe Bell. And he did allow the Indians to escape. Seems to me we ought to suspend—”

  Meagher sat forward and slapped his palm down hard on the table. Even Vanessa Ballard jumped.

  “God-damn it, Howdy, will you get off that horse! You got corks in your ears or what? Haven’t you heard a thing said here?”

  Ballard stopped the exchange by making a display of turning the tape machine back on. Police officers hate tape recorders. They use them to tape snitches and criminals. Having to talk into one turns their world around, and they don’t like it.

  “Thank you. Perhaps someone will see if Sergeant McAllister is out in the hall?”

  Finch Hyam got up and went out the door. In a few minutes, he was back, followed by Beau McAllister in civilian clothes, a two-piece blue suit, a shirt and tie. He smiled at everyone, including Rudy Klein, and took a seat at the end of the table.

  “Sergeant, we feel the time has come for you to tell us, in your own words, in as much detail as you can recall, everything you can about the events subsequent to the apparent hijacking of the morgue wagon. Including and with a particular emphasis on the confrontation at Arrow Creek.”

  “All of it, ma’am?”

  “Yes, Sergeant McAllister.”

  Beau reached for a glass of water, took a drink, and set the glass down.

  “Okay, ma’am. Better put in a new tape.”

  Afterward, Lieutenant Meagher drove him out to Logan Airport in his blue Lincoin. They parked by the departures gate, and Meagher reached over to shake Beau’s hand.

  “Well, that went okay.”

  “Yeah. That Klein’s a real pain in the ass.”

  “So he is. You got everything? Cash, cards. The tickets?”

  Beau patted his suit pocket.

  “Got your piece?”

  “Yeah. You still willing to drive over to the Rosebud for me, see that George Cut Arms guy?”

  “Yeah. And I’ll talk to the Doc, see if he has those numbers for you.”

  “You think I’m crazy, right?”

  Meagher smiled, a sudden glitter of white teeth against his blue-black skin. “There’s something happening. Maybe it’s got something to do with SPEAR and these Shirt Wearers that Charlie Tallbull was talking about. There’s sure a lot of tension on the reserves these days. But an epidemic of birth defects, some kind of toxic dump in Montana, or a plague, or a secret federal plot to exterminate the Indians—bullshit.”

  “I don’t think that either, Eustace.”

  “Good. You go out there, see if you can get anything on this Gall kid, see if there’s anything that’ll help us. I’ll get out a composite of this dark guy Charlie saw. Guy like that, he’d stand out. You got the cellular?”

  “Yeah. What’re you, my mom?”

  “You better thank your stars I’m not. I’d have drowned you.”

  “There’s something else.”

  “Okay?”

  “I think we ought to have somebody watching Maureen.”

  Meagher studied Beau for a moment.

  “You think she’s in danger?”

  “I think she’s involved. I don’t know if she’s in danger.”

  There was a long silence.

  “Okay, Beau. I’ll get somebody on that.”

  “Thanks, LT.”

  Two hours later Beau had checked into a hotel in Anaheim—a psychiatric convention had packed the downtown L.A. hotels.

  From his room he saw a vast plain of low buildings and apartment towers and warehouse blocks, grids upon grids of them, floating in a lime-green sea of smog and fumes. Here and there a lonely spire rose up out of the green fumes, dark and hazy. In the distance, along the northern horizon, a low saw-toothed range ripped up the skyline.

  He opened the window and smelled the air.

  Christ. It smelled like a cathouse basement. From far below came the sound of sirens and traffic and car horns blatting, and under that the murmuring, roaring, rushing sound of an American city, like a huge machine running at the red line, pushing everything past the limits. And far away to the west, at the farthest edge of sight, past the smog and the low rectangles and the gray rising arcs of the freeways, a shimmer of golden light where the Pacific Ocean hid just below the horizon.

  Welcome to Los Angeles, Sergeant McAllister.

  Then he turned away from the view, back to the cool dark of his hotel room. There was a mini-bar by the television set.

  First things first.

  He poured a long cold Scotch and used it to chase a couple of aspirins down his throat. His leg throbbed and burned. He sat on the edge of the bed, looking at his watch. Oh hell, he hadn’t called Trudy back.

  He hadn’t even thought about her until now.

  “Nice, Beau,” he said to the empty room.

  He looked at the phone for a long time, and then he picked it up and dialed Trudy’s number.

  He listened to it ring for a while then set the receiver down again and finished his Scotch.

  Then he poured another one.

  17

  1300 Hours—June 18—Los Angeles, California

  Beau’s rearview mirror was filled to the edges with overheated iron and fly-specked grillwork. A tin bulldog with a cigar in his jaws and a riveter’s helmet was bolted to the
radiator behind him. Now and then, the driver would hit the airhorn and rattle Beau’s windows. When he did this, Beau would jerk reflexively and his foot would come off the accelerator, and there’d be more of that ugly grille in his rearview, and the psychopath behind the wheel would tap his own brakes, and then he’d hit that airhorn again.

  They were doing seventy miles an hour down the freeway, the tractor driver now inches from Beau’s tailgate. Two feet ahead, a woman with radioactive hair was combing it with an ice pick and talking into the carphone, flying along in her purple Cobra. Behind him, a massive tractor-trailer was climbing up his tailpipe. There was nowhere for Beau to go, unless he wanted to run his rented Town Car off the road, or drive over the Martian in the purple Cobra.

  It didn’t seem to matter to the guy on his tail; crash and burn, or dematerialize, but get the hell out of his way.

  Beau was giving some serious thought to dragging out his off-duty Smith and trying a few shots backward out the driver’s window when the Motorola cellular phone that was bouncing around on the passenger seat started to shrill at him. He had a moment of panic when it went off because he didn’t know where the hell the sound was coming from, maybe from his own throat, maybe a radar lock-on for a car-to-car Beau-seeking missile. Then the glowing green call light caught his eye.

  He cursed, swerved, and snatched the phone up, pressing the SEND button with his thumb.

  The guy in the tractor-trailer was coming around now, trying to pass on the left, his Kenworth filling up Beau’s side mirror, that horn shaking the earth.

  “Hello!”

  “Jesus, Beau! Where the hell are you?” It sounded like Meagher. Beau tried to slow down, but another vehicle, a blue station wagon, fired up into the space being cleared by the tractor driver, and now he was right on Beau’s tail.

  “Eustace! How are you?”

  “Why are you yelling at me? What the hell’s going on? What’s that noise?”

  The tractor-trailer hurtled past him, a Great Wall of China of dusty iron and spinning black rubber. He cleared Beau’s left fender and cut sharply in front. His brakelights flashed on, and Beau had to hit his own brakes. The blue wagon behind him jammed on his brakes, flashed his brights. Beau could see a hand in the forward arc of sunlight over the driver’s wheel.

  The guy was giving Beau the finger.

  “God damn!”

  “You in the car, Beau?”

  “So far.” The noise dropped to a muted roar. Maybe it was the end of the round.

  “Yeah. Jesus, this town is insane!”

  Meagher laughed, a short sharp snort.

  “Better you than me,” said Meagher. “How was the flight?”

  “You go up real high, then later you come down. What kind of question is that? If it was a bad flight, I wouldn’t be here talking to you. I’d be out in some farmer’s field looking for my right arm.”

  “What’s the matter with you?”

  “I don’t like this town.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Now? I’m going east on the freeway with what looks like an international convention of suicidal lemmings on angel dust. There’s a broad up ahead looks like she’d glow in the dark. And the town is neck-deep in some kinda vapor looks like Martian swamp gas. Can you die of culture shock?”

  “I demobed outta there, in ’69. Hated the place then.”

  “It hasn’t improved, Eustace.”

  Beau looked to his right, at the low grimy buildings and the packed bungalows, the bitter bare lots and the scrub bush and the yellow weeds and vacant lots packed with dead cars. Here and there a scruffy palm tree rose up out of the industrial sprawl and the barrios like a cavalry flag, wilted in the damp and smothering heat. Far away to the east and the north, the San Gabriel and the San Bernardino Mountains looked like smoking slag heaps rising up out of the limitless greenish-yellow smog.

  “Can you hear me okay?” Beau asked.

  “Five by five. They cleared you, you know.”

  “The board? Damned decent of them. How’s Vanessa?”

  “She’s okay. She’s holding off on the feds.”

  “So what was the upshot?”

  “The basic decision was to say, well, we aren’t sure it was a robbery, but it sure as hell was felonious assault and reckless endangerment. Benitez was pretty solid behind you, Beau. I had a meet with the SPEAR people this morning. A real ball-buster named Maya BlueStones. They didn’t buy it, but there’s not much they can do. There’s no question these guys had weapons and used them on police officers. It’ll sort out.”

  “Did Harper give you what he got on that Wozcylesko boy from the phone company?”

  “Yeah. I kicked it around with him. The report says the kid had lit up a joint and the fumes blew. They’re saying it was an accident.”

  “You know I took an ounce off that kid, just a little bit before the Arrow Creek thing?”

  “Nice to mention it, Beau.”

  Beau heard the sarcasm in his voice. “What’s that for?”

  “I cleaned out your cruiser after we got you to the hospital. I found a packet of weed in your glove compartment.”

  “You buy the accident thing?”

  “I got a full plate, Beau. Billings Fire Department has an arson investigator on it. If they get anything, I’ll know.”

  “When I took it from Hubert—the dope? When I confiscated it, I saw the kid had these little scabs all over his fingers. Like he’d torn his skin off?”

  “So? Maybe he got his finger caught in his nose.”

  “Somebody used Krazy Glue on Bell’s phones, right? You remember?”

  “Yeah—oh, I get it! You get that stuff on your fingers, you’re losing some skin. So you figure Hubert did the phones himself, just to cover his visit to the Oasis, get that package?”

  “It’s a possibility.”

  “So he was in on it? Whatever it was?”

  “I think he took the package from under Bell’s desk.”

  “And then somebody took it from Hubert?”

  “It fits.”

  “And then fried him? Why?”

  “Beats me. Maybe that part was an accident. Kid was stupid enough to light up with all that solvent around.”

  “Now I wish I’d let you take that package.”

  “What about the Fourth Amendment?”

  “ ‘A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,’ ” said Meagher. “Ralph Waldo Emerson.”

  A turnoff was coming up on his right side.

  MARENGO STREET

  CITY TERRACE

  “Hey, hold on a second. Here’s my street.” He jigged the car hard right and slid past a wandering pickup full of Chicano laborers. They cursed him out in shrill machine-gun Spanish as he went past. Beau rocketed around the off-ramp and brought the car to a stop next to a rundown Helpy Selfy. A crowd of rough-looking Chicano teenagers were playing soccer in the sun-baked asphalt lot. They stopped the game as Beau pulled up and watched him the way coyotes watch chickens.

  “Okay, I’m stopped. What have you got?”

  “Got a pad?” Eustace said.

  Beau reached over to the glove compartment, snapped it open, and pulled out a memo book in black vinyl with the gold shield of the Montana Highway Patrol on the front. He propped the Motorola phone under his chin, looked around at the neighborhood, and pressed the auto door lock.

  “Okay, shoot.”

  “Where are you?”

  Beau looked at the street signs. Around him the barrio streets wandered off into a crazy tangle of grubby homes and barred-up storefronts. Kids raced past on huge skateboards. Heavy-hipped women in polyester tees and too-tight jeans pushed rusted shopping carts around inside the Helpy Selfy. Garbage littered the crumbling pavement.

  “I’m at Pomeroy and City Terrace.”

  “Bad part of town?”

  “Kinda like Butte without the scenery.”

  “Why the hell you screwing around there?”

  “Here’s where I�
��m gonna find 1623 Vallejo Canyon Drive.”

  “I thought the kid lived in a good neighborhood. Had a Gold Card, didn’t he?”

  “They give those away with shipments of coke now. Times change, my son.”

  “Yeah? Okay, well, Duffy did some good work, for a change. He Fed Exed the prints from those guys you tangled with—”

  “We tangled with, Eustace. When SPEAR comes looking for me, you’re gonna be right there in the barrel with me.”

  “Yeah, anyway, somehow he got Washington to shift gears for us. The stuff on the Gall kid we got from the credit bureau in Los Angeles. The rest is from the army. Vlasic was right about the war vet angle. Take this down.”

  Beau looked around him. Four of the Chicano kids had left the soccer game and were now lined up against the Lundy fence, smoking homemade cigarettes and staring at him in flat Indio, hard black eyes and sullen twisted mouths. Beau shifted his weight and felt the Smith digging into him.

  Meagher read out the information that Duffy had brought down from Helena. Beau’s memo book filled up with his careful block printing.

  JUBAL TWO MOON

  D.O.B. 02-23-25 PARMELEE SOUTH DAKOTA

  ROSEBUD INDIAN RESERVATION—MINNECONJOU SIOUX

  SELF-EMPLOYED TRADE CARPENTER AND HANDYMAN

  HEREDITARY COUNCIL CHIEF LAKOTA NATION

  MILITARY SERVICE THIRD MARINES USMC

  SERVICE IWO JIMA AND PHILIPPINES SILVER STAR

  HONORABLE DISCHARGE 1946

  LAST KNOWN ADDRESS 1623 VALLEJO CANYON DRIVE LOS

  ANGELES CALIFORNIA

  ONE COUNT DRUNK AND DISORDERLY ENTERED RAPID CITY

  JUNE 25 1976 NO OTHER CRIMINAL RECORD

  NO WANTS NO WARRANTS

  EARL BLACK ELK

  D.O.B. 10-11-46 PIERRE SOUTH DAKOTA

  LOWER BRULE INDIAN RESERVATION—OGLALA SIOUX

  EMPLOYMENT VARIOUS

  COUNCIL SUBCHIEF LAKOTA NATION

  MILITARY SERVICE NINETEENTH ARMY CORPS

  TRANSFERRED AMERICAL DIVISION 1965

  VIETNAM SERVICE AIRBORNE RANGER LONG RANGE RECONDO

  ATTACHED SPECIAL FORCES PROVISIONAL ADVISORY MAAG

  LAOS MACSOG PHOENIX PROGRAM

  PURPLE HEART NATIONAL DEFENSE VIETNAM SERVICE