Lizardskin

by Carsten Stroud

Meagher cut in, his voice rising. “Are you going to tell me you had a videotape of the robbery, the whole action, and you forgot about it?”

  “No—no no no. It—I think Bell came in and shut the thing off, a few minutes before the whole thing happened. There was nothing on it, at least I didn’t think there was—”

  “Why the hell didn’t you bring it up at the board? Ballard would love that. It would show intent!”

  “Has anybody heard from Bell yet about the lawsuit?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Nobody’s heard from him at all?”

  “Not a word since Monday. He doesn’t have many friends. I’ll send a car out there. I’ll send Moses Harper. You haven’t answered my question about the videotape.”

  Beau said nothing, looking for a way to explain it that Meagher would accept. “I didn’t think it was important.”

  “Maybe next time you could let me in on your thinking, Beau. It would help me preserve my illusions about being the CO. Now you do think it’s important?”

  “Bell was in the tape talking to somebody in a big old Caddy. Can’t say what color, and I couldn’t see the plates. But I know the year, give or take. It’d be between 1975 and 1979. Black or dark brown or dark blue.”

  “The driver?”

  “Nope. But Bell was real pissed when he walked away from the car, and it was right after that he shut off the tape. Maybe there’s a connection.”

  “So what do you want? You want me to get Motor Vehicles to run off a list of Cadillacs in eastern Montana, see if the RO’s ring a bell?”

  “Would you?”

  “I don’t see the point. So Bell was pissed at a guy in a Caddy. So what?”

  “I think it would be good to talk to the driver.”

  Meagher groaned, yawned. “Sure, okay. We’ll give it a shot. Look, I’ve still got room on my page here, Beau. Anything else I can do for you? Laundry? Boil your cats? Tell you the weather?”

  “Yeah. How’s the weather?”

  “Actually, it sucks. I hear we got a big front coming in, a real howler. You should see it on the TV. Looks like black doom in a ’59 Roadmaster. You better get back here before it hits. Get your cats indoors.”

  “Yeah, I will. Are we still keeping an eye on Bobby Lee and Maureen?”

  “She’s okay. So far, nothing. She goes to work, she comes home. She’s having the house remodeled. Spending a lot of money.”

  “Tell me about it. She came along with Dwight when I was in the hospital. Gold chain, earrings. I know she doesn’t have a lot of money. Maybe it’s Dwight’s.”

  “Well, she’s spending someone’s cash. We have some Big Horn cars in the area, and Dell Greer stays around when he can. Bobby Lee likes him. By the way, I stopped in there, and she gave me a letter for you. Wait a minute.”

  The traffic had thinned out. Beau was running in the dark through low black hills and stunted green bushes. The artificial lushness of the place, the flowers and the twisted vines, the heavy dark of the night sky without stars, the rotten smell of the city—it weighed him down and made him hungry for endless grasses and a horizon without limits or hard edges.

  “Beau?”

  “Yeah?” There was a sudden trilling bleat in his ear. He held the phone away and looked at it. It was flashing LOW BATT at him.

  “You better hurry, Eustace. My battery’s going.”

  “Okay. Jeez—she says ‘Dear Daddykins’—Daddykins?”

  “Come on, Eustace. You can do it.”

  “The things I do for you. ‘Dear Daddykins, I got new shoes I am six now we have our own policeman his name is Dell can I have a gun for my seventh birthday are there goldfish bowls in hell I love you’—” Meagher’s voice cut off in a shrill beep.

  “Tell her hello,” said Beau, into the dead phone.

  Up ahead the road ran down a long decline toward a grid of lights and neon. San Berdoo. City of Dreams.

  Why hadn’t he told Meagher about the old Cadillac before now?

  He had stared at the tape for a while, trying to get around a terrible insight. He’d pushed it down and covered it over, but it was still there. He kicked some earth over the idea and put it out of his mind. He’d go to the hockey arena, see Los Falcones, have a good time. All work and no play.…

  Anyway, he was wrong about the tape.

  He was tired and overworked, and his leg burned and ached.

  Meagher would get Motor Vehicles onto it.

  They’d find the driver, whoever he was, and it would be someone else entirely. They’d ask him what Bell had been saying to him. He’d have some explanation that would either help them or turn out to be nothing at all—some stupid argument over an unpaid bill or a set of faulty plugs.

  And Beau wouldn’t have named … anyone.

  He slowed as he entered the San Bernardino turnoff.

  That was as far as he could go.

  22

  0415 Hours–June 19–Big Horn County, Montana

  Cold.

  And pain.

  There was a weight on his chest. It was crushing the breath out of him. His mouth was full of … something. He tried to spit it out but could not, tried to brush it away and his hands wouldn’t move. He turned his head, and a red sheet of searing agony flashed through his mind, convulsed his body, shook him violently and he tried to scream but his mouth was full of earth … something was close …

  … he could hear something …

  … scratching …

  … pulling and scratching … the noise was close, but he couldn’t see because something was in his eyes …

  … in his mouth …

  … something … was earth … he was covered with wet earth and then he remembered, and the fear crawled into his mind and began to eat … death but not dead … buried but not dead …

  … and the scratching … closer … he moved his head again … moved it through the sheeting red pain … and the earth fell away from his eyes, and he blinked up at a black sheet with thousands of tiny holes in … no … it was the sky … it was the night sky … he had known the names … Orion … Cassiopeia … something growled and bit at him and he felt warm breath and suddenly there were teeth—teeth—sinking into his shoulder, and he was being pulled … he twisted … the earth fell away from his chest … more pain, but still he moved and he felt the teeth, and now he smelled hot fetid breath and his body was being pulled by the cloth of his shirt … he arched and twisted again, and a hand came free, and he clawed at the earth in his face and his eyes and the ground seemed to open up and he was suddenly released, and he spilled out onto cold wet grasses—spiky against his cheek—he heard an animal growling and grunting and he felt the pull again … and the pain—shattering, it was a living thing that coiled in his mind and chewed on the inside of his skull, he could feel its teeth raking against the pink wet bone inside his skull … his face was a red mask … and the animal let go and came in again—he saw it against the stars, a blackness that frightened him to his core … every primitive fear … every dark thing that had ever slithered across the floor of his imagination, and he tried to bring his hands up, and then the animal was on his chest and digging—scratching—whimpering and tugging at his shirt and in the middle of his pain and his panic, the thought came to him like a soft warm light turned on in a childhood room.

  This was Joe Bell’s dog.

  His Irish setter.

  The animal pushed against him and snarled again, and bent down to bite his shirt … Joe Bell’s dog had found him …

  … in his grave …

  … and dug him up …

  Gabriel rolled to his left, spilling the dog off his chest, and he threw up on the grass, heaving and spitting until his throat felt like an open wound. Then he rolled onto his back and—carefully, like a man touching a glass flower—felt his face, his mind full of images of wounded men he had seen—terrible disfiguring wounds—teeth bare—jaws hanging and smashed—men opened to the backs of their throats—eyes burst and crushed and ch
eekbones blown away—he’d killed a man once, a friend, in a little clearing of the jungle growth ten miles from the Peruvian border—the man had tripped a perimeter mine and it had taken his face, and the terrible obscenity was that he could have lived and Gabriel did the only kind thing with a length of wire …

  He felt his face and gradually, delicately, he measured the damage. The round had hit him in the mouth, just under his left nostril and it had turned there—in the freakish way of lead shot in the human body—deflected by the jawbone—perhaps he had turned his face at the last second—the round had carved a path around his upper gumline—the jaw was cracked—he knew that from the pain and the deafness—and then it had torn out of his body under his left ear. He could almost follow the path. The exit wound was raw and he could not bring himself to touch it.

  If he lived, his face would be disfigured for the rest of his life. The pain was growing sharper. The shock was passing.

  The Irish setter was panting now, a black shape under the soft starlight. Gabriel managed to sit upright. The dog came over and tried to lick his face. Gabriel stopped him and ran a bloody hand through the dog’s ruff. He had no idea why the dog had persisted in his digging—whether the dog was looking for something to eat or someone to love, but Gabriel would see to it that this dog lived a long and happy life.

  He tried to speak to the dog but could not move his face without cracking the bone, and the pain of it was almost enough to make him pass out.

  The light was changing as he watched. The stars were paling and receding, and a luminous wash of violet and pale pink began to bleed upward into the night sky. He pulled his shirtsleeve up and was surprised to see that he still had his watch, and even more surprised to see that it was still running.

  Now, there’s an endorsement possibility for you. A watch for Christ himself. Don’t be late for your next resurrection.

  He twisted his arm until he could get some starlight on the face. The motion sent another jagged blue bolt of agony up the side of his skull, and the image blurred. He fought to stay conscious, to concentrate on the dial, on the faintly glowing numbers.

  If he had come down from the hill on Monday evening … and then it had gone badly … if this was right, he had been in the … grave. Call it that. That’s what it was. For a full day and most of the following night.

  For thirty-three, perhaps thirty-four hours.

  And the thought came to him, slammed into his mind, left him trembling in its wake, that there was nothing miraculous about his resurrection, because it hadn’t happened.

  The bullet that should have killed him did kill him.

  Was killing him now.

  Maybe he was dying now … in the moment when the round struck him and all of this was just a few fleeting seconds of hallucinatory intensity, the last flaring of light and heat in a disintegrating brain. Maybe he was still falling through the air and the ground was rushing up at him … he felt his mind slipping, felt the thin cord of continuity and remembrance that binds the fragmentary images and disconnected moments of a man’s life begin to fray and twist. He could hear the thin high shriek as the silver wire stretched and snapped, and every glittering image, every memory and incident that had composed the life and times of Gabriel Picketwire went spinning off into a deep blue immensity. Weakness went through his arms and legs, and he fell backward onto the grass and watched the shards and splinters of his life shattering, like a mirror, into the night. They burned and turned, a fiery radiance that shimmered, dimmed, flared, and sparkled and faded.

  A rising wind stirred the grasses, hissing and rustling, feathering across his shattered cheek. The dog got up and trotted away down the slope toward the lights of Joe Bell’s cabin. He looked back and whimpered.

  Gabriel sat up.

  Pain.

  The pain was very real.

  Gabriel managed to get to his feet.

  The sky wheeled and steadied. He could see the warm yellow lights of the main house, bright against the purple hills under the pearl and opal sky.

  He took a step, staggered, caught his balance. The dog moved a little farther off, and waited.

  Gabriel pulled in a breath. His face felt like a mask of cracked ice and blood.

  He also felt hunger.

  If this was a kind of death, there were rules to it.

  He could still remember the black bulk of the gun and the dark shape of the other man against the evening sky, and Joe Bell with a shovel in his hand.

  The dog had been watching him, and now, seeing him moving, it ran a few yards down the slope, careless and buoyant. Gabriel came down behind it, his boots cutting a dark green trail through the silver grasses.

  As he reached the bottom land, he remembered that there had been a sensation—it seemed a year or more in the past, a part of someone else’s memory—of something beside him, of a bending in the daylight. It was gone now, he knew, gone back into the sea-green grassy hills that had carried him like a drowning man, that had taken him down beneath them and held him in the darkness and the silences and then raised him up again into the world of changing light and scented breezes.

  He smiled—the pain cut at him, and the ruined fragments of teeth and jawbone grated against his wound.

  Well, home is the sailor, home from the sea.

  And the hunter home from the hill.

  23

  0830 Hours–June 19–Los Angeles, California

  Beau ate an early breakfast in the hotel coffee shop, watching the tourist buses fill up with old men and women in lurid pastel combinations, dragging themselves up into the darkened interior of the bus, looking oddly like children in their shorts and flowered shirts, children zapped with an age ray on their way to a birthday party.

  The windows of the coffee shop were tinted dark gray, and the room was chilly with recycled air.

  A fiftysomething waitress in a Snow White costume plowed through the tables toward Beau, leather-faced under her heavy makeup. She pulled a pen out of her Snow White hair-ribbon.

  “That’ll be it for you, Tex?”

  “You know, I never trusted that prince.”

  “Huh?” Snow White’s pen stopped on the notepad.

  “Your prince. He took off, left you with the palace and the bills?”

  She sighed and looked down at her costume. “Disneyland’s down the road. The tourists like it.”

  “Listen, the Seven Dwarfs are visiting the Vatican, right?”

  She cocked her hip and leaned against the banquette. “Okay. The Seven Dwarfs are visiting the Vatican.”

  “And they’re there for a few days, you know, seeing the city, looking at St. Peter’s, doing the tour, and finally on the third day, they get an audience with the Pope.”

  “You gonna have anything else?”

  “No, that’s it. So each of the dwarfs gets to ask the Pope one question.”

  “One question.” She had her head down, writing.

  “Yeah. And it comes round to Dopey, he wants to know, does the Pope have any midget nuns?”

  “Yeah?”

  “And the Pope says, no, no midget nuns. So Dopey says, okay, you have any dwarf nuns? The Pope says no. So Dopey starts to look really worried, and he says, do you have any real real short nuns? Again, the Pope says no. And from the back of the line, Grumpy yells out—‘Dopey screwed a penguin!’ ”

  She grinned at him, her teeth too bright and even, Hollywood teeth. She dropped the bill on his table.

  “Yeah? Well, Dopey was always like that. Have a nice day.”

  Eustace Meagher watched the pickup truck work its way over the landscape toward him. It was like watching a bug crawl across a tabletop. Meagher took another pull from his Thermos and wiped the back of his neck. The wind out here was as steady as a river, smelling of dust and clay and grass. In the far southwest sky, a low bank of black clouds shimmered in the heat haze. Heavy weather back in Montana.

  He looked around him. Parmelee, South Dakota. An outpost of peeling cement-block stores li
ned up like tombstones on a rotting asphalt street. Treeless and flat, South Dakota stretched away in every direction until it faded into a blue horizon of heat and wind. A few miles to the south, Nebraska offered more of the same.

  In the town, a few old Sioux men sat under the shade of a sheet-metal porch and rocked and talked in low thick voices. Meagher figured he was the most exciting thing to happen in Parmelee since the end of the Indian wars. A buffalo soldier in a tan uniform, driving a blue Lincoln with Montana plates.

  They’d talk about it for weeks.

  He looked back up the highway. The pickup was closer now, maybe only a mile away. George Cut Arms and his people.

  Or a scalping party?

  Meagher wiped the sweat off his bald head.

  Well, he was safe, anyway.

  Moses Harper leaned back in the oak swivel chair and threw a ball of waxed paper at a framed picture of Henry Kissinger. Kissinger was smiling. Someone had drawn a tiny pen-wiper moustache on his lip. He looked a lot like Hitler’s older brother.

  Harper had his gun off, and his harness was hanging from the back of the chair. The Highway Patrol squad room was nearly empty this morning. It was close to ten, and the shift change was over. The six-to-six night shift had gone home, and the overlap units were wandering around in the yard outside, cleaning out their squad cars and eyeing the storm building up in the southwest. Sergeant Sugar was off this morning, and Meagher’s office was empty, the door locked. Somehow, his chair seemed to radiate authority even without Meagher in it. It was strange for Harper, sitting around with all these state boys. There was a friendly rivalry between the two units, but deep in their hearts the Big Horn guys always felt a little like poor cousins next to the well-funded state troopers. Now here he was, one-third of a three-man task force. Served him right for volunteering.

  Moses went back to his paperwork.

  Farwest Beef and Dairy.

  Kellerman Cold Haulers.

  Merced Industries.

  And Danny Burt.

  They’d put out a bulletin on Danny Burt. He wasn’t anywhere around. Bob Gentile hadn’t seen him for a week, but he wasn’t surprised. Danny had taken a week off after the Arrow Creek thing, saying he was too nervous to work. Gentile figured that was fair. Anyway, Gentile was having enough trouble without having Danny around asking stupid questions. Gentile was being sued by Peter Hinsdale’s mother, and he wanted his goddamned morgue wagon back from evidence storage.