“Well, in a sense. I wonder, do you have plans for the … well, of course you will.”
“I have to go downtown. But I have time.”
“Perhaps we could sit in your car, then. I’m rather an old fart, and the heat affects me.”
Beau looked at the old man. He looked back unblinkingly, an old bull buffalo with a bad heart. “What’s this about, sir?”
The man indicated Beau’s file folder. It was open, and Beau’s hard blue script was visible.
“You’re asking about the Sonesta Clinic?”
“Yes. I’m going there now.”
“I can short-cut some of this for you. I sent Edward Gall to the Sonesta Clinic. And about Picketwire—I had something to do with this.”
Beau looked at the man for a while. “Let’s get in the car. It’s cooler.”
Gabriel forced himself to look again.
It was as if Gabriel Picketwire had been erased. The eyes were perhaps the same, but the face—it was a ruin. It shook him to the core. His throat was thick and tight. He thought about the shotgun he had found in Bell’s tool shed. He could hardly look worse, and at least he wouldn’t be alive to spend the rest of his life behind a face like this.
But then, maybe he wasn’t alive. Maybe he was a walking corpse, and if that were true—and in this narcotic land many things seemed possible—then it wasn’t his life anyway.
So the first thing to do was to try and fix this ruined face, and to do it without a doctor or a nurse.
The nurse, however, would hear from him.
One of the people who would need to hear from him, if Bell had told the truth.
Naked, his legs shaking, he stood in the huge tiled space—Bell had spent a lot of money on his bathroom—and considered what he should do, how much morphine and how many Percodans he would need to do it.
He had a sharp knife on the countertop in front of him, along with some clear nylon thread and a sewing needle. And a bottle of hydrogen peroxide, clean towels, some cotton gauze, and a field dressing from his kitbag.
After … after he had finished with Bell, he had walked down the lane to retrieve his car. It had been a long walk, and the setter was still hiding from him. Of course, the dog would have known what had happened to Bell. At least, he must have heard it, since it went on inside the generator shed. And he would have smelled the blood, as the horses had.
Gabriel regretted frightening the dog. He would have to go find him. He couldn’t stay here for much longer. Someone was sure to come back, looking for Bell. Maybe the tall man.
Maybe the police.
Gabriel could not be here when they found what was hanging in the tool shed.
He’d started his car somehow and driven it back up to the house. Now he had his field dressing and some sulfa powder and even a vial of morphine, a little plastic vial with a built-in needle. Army issue. He had used these things a hundred times, years ago. Once or twice, on himself.
Morphine first.
He looked up at his reflection in the mirror. It shook him, but he held the look, trying to see it as a corpsman would. First, something for the pain.
He raised the ampule and carefully injected half the vial into the vein in his left arm.
It burned.
Pain again, as familiar as breathing now.
He stood there, head down, and waited for it to recede. Then he lifted his swollen lip and examined the upper jawline. Six, maybe seven teeth gone, and a couple of ragged stumps of root showing through wrecked flesh. The jawbone still worked, but speech was nearly impossible. The exit wound was terrible. He’d covered the neck wound with his field dressing after the shower. He’d need something antiseptic to use as a mouthwash.
He’d use the hydrogen peroxide for that.
Now the morphine was kicking in, a warm burning in his veins. He rode that as well.
After a while, it passed. He sipped at the peroxide bottle, feeling the burn, feeling the bubbling foam in his wounds.
He spat red blood and pink foam out into the sink.
He looked up again, seeing the ruined face, the shattered image. He was looking at someone he did not know.
Somehow that made it easier, and he picked up the small shiny steel blade. He began to cut, and after a long time, he began to stitch himself together. This was a bright red passage arced with blue-white sheets of pain and nausea. Gabriel never knew how long it lasted, and after a few hours could not even remember it clearly.
When it was over and he could walk again, he tried to clean up the bathroom, and he washed his hands several times. Then he dressed in the clothes he’d worn from Los Angeles, the black jeans and the black shirt with the Mexican silver. The water running from Bell’s gold tap was pure and bitterly cold. He swallowed three Percodans and an amphetamine caplet from his kitbag and walked out into the front room.
The red dog was sitting in the front yard. He got up as Gabriel came out onto the porch. The afternoon was almost gone, and it looked like a storm was coming up from the west. A huge front towered over the low hills, flat as an anvil and climbing up ten thousand feet into the purple sky. A lurid sun, like a bruise, lit up the belly of the cloud front.
He and the red dog climbed up the long hillside. The grave was still open, and the earth was caked with Gabriel’s blood. He stood and looked down at it while the dog chased insects and played in the long grass.
He smiled, a death’s-head grimace in his stitched and bandaged face. Bell had been sitting at a computer, staring at a list of shipping bills, when Gabriel had walked into the room.
The look on Joe Bell’s face was something Gabriel would take with him to—he smiled again, ignoring the pain—to his grave.
He wondered for a while how the County would react when they found Bell’s body. There would be a search. It would be hard for a man to move around the county. He’d need some help.
If what Bell had told him was the truth—and at the end, Bell would have told him anything at all just to stop the knife for a second—if what he had told him, about Danny Burt, the tall man who had shot him—and the nurses at the Julia Dwight Clinic—and the Rosebud, and Standing Rock—all the ones collecting their “finder’s fee”—the one at Julia Dwight who had been the sergeant’s wife, which explained the killings at Arrow Creek—if any of it was true, then he could go to these Tallbull people.
They would help him. The computer disk would also help. Bell had been looking at it when Gabriel took him.
A woman named Mary Littlebasket was on the disk. She was a Crow, and one of the women who had been … seeded? The shiny rainbow-colored disk had all the names, a record of a trade in human life. Bell and the tall man, Burt, they had taken the record to use against the people who were running this obscenity. Blackmail.
The Crow … were Crow. But all that was in the past, a hundred years gone. Lakota, Crow, what did any of that mean now? They were like cattle in a pen, raised for slaughter, with a wolf outside the fences. A Walking Wolf.
Even the Crow would want this Wolf killed. Mary Little-basket was Crow, and she was dead, and her uncle was a Crow, Charlie Tallbull. Gabriel remembered a man in one of the ICU beds beside Donna, a big dark man wrapped in casts and braces—that was Charlie Tallbull. Even if a Lakota man came to them, they would have to believe him. They could call it a Walking Wolf, or a witch, or a criminal conspiracy, or an abomination. It didn’t matter what you named it, as long as you stopped it. Jubal and the rest of the Shirt Wearers had been right all along, and now there was only Gabriel left to finish it.
The Percodans rolled through his blood like an amber flame, warming him, pushing the pain down below the level of thought. And the amphetamine bubbled and fizzed in their wake, like luminous foam in a subterranean river.
Gabriel kicked at the dirt piled up around his shallow grave. He reached down and picked up a handful of it and wrapped it in a white cloth. He tied it off and put it in his shirt pocket. The red dog watched him, unreadable and wary. The dog had seen and smel
led some very bad things since he had dug Gabriel out of the ground. The door to the tool shed was closed, but there was wind enough to bring the dog some news about his last owner.
“We’ll free the horses. Then we’re going, okay? We’ll go see this woman. You come with me?”
The setter listened without understanding, but the tone comforted him, and he followed the man down the long hill toward his green car.
In a few minutes, they had reached the gate to Bell’s property. Gabriel got out to close it and stood a few minutes, looking up the winding track leading to 90114 South Wyatt Drive. It was a long time since he had come to this place, although his watch was telling him it was only two days. This was Wednesday afternoon. He had come here on Monday.
He would have to come back here, if he lived this second life long enough. After all, he was buried here. It wasn’t often a man was given the chance to visit his own grave.
As he got back into the car, he saw the movement in the long grass by the wire fence, saw the thing standing there.
It was as if a man made of dust and smoke were standing there, dark and changing in the light. He was middle height, with long black hair, a solid muscular body, covered with ochre dust and reddish zigzag markings like lightning bolts. His face was marred. Broken. His left cheek was carved and furrowed, and his upper lip was scarred, twisted into a kind of shattered smile. The wind moved in his long hair as he stood in the tall grass and watched Gabriel. His hands were empty, the palms turned outward at his sides. In his long hair a single feather hung suspended from a leather thong. It was a hawk’s feather.
Gabriel knew him, knew that if he walked up to him, he would see that the man had a small pebble tied behind his ear and another under his arm. No picture of him had ever been taken, but Gabriel knew him, and a fearful coldness came over him as he tried to make himself believe that this was only a twist of light and shadow, and he watched the figure turning, moving now—seeing it as brighter air in the glowing afternoon sun, its ruined face turning away from him, and it passed away up the green slope, a bending of the grasses, a dry rustle, a cloud-shadow. It moved soundlessly up the long hillside toward the crest, stood for one moment against the sky, and drifted into nothing.
Gabriel closed the door on it, no longer sure that it had ever been. In another portion of his heart, he was quietly, deeply afraid to find out who was staying here and what was leaving.
Beth Gollanz sat up and arched her back, twisting to the left. Harper looked away from her blouse, trying to keep his mind on the work. It wasn’t easy.
Motor Vehicles had kicked out a total of 3,673 registered Cadillacs in the Eastern Montana Regional Records Division. He had split the records with Beth, and they were sitting on opposite sides of the lunchroom table, papers and coffee cups scattered around, running down the sheets with highlighter pens, underlining every listed Cadillac that fit McAllister’s description.
Maybe fifteen years old.
Dark blue or dark brown or black.
Harper had tried to narrow the terms a bit by suggesting that they look for owners who lived close enough to Pompeys Pillar to get their gas at Bell’s Oasis, but Beth had pointed out, regretfully, that Bell’s Oasis was just off the interstate, so it was possible that the Cadillac driver they were looking for lived a long way from Pompeys Pillar.
“Christ,” said Harper. “He could come from anywhere!”
“True,” said Beth. “Even out of state.”
“Hell, this is ridiculous. We don’t even know what we’re looking for! Look at this—some of them are owned by corporations or leasing companies. Anybody could have access to the car we’re looking for. Didn’t Beau get any part of a license number?”
“Not that he told us about, Moses.”
“Listen, maybe I oughta go see Joe Bell myself. Put some heat on him. He saw the goddamned guy. Let him tell us!”
“He’s suing the department. He’s not going to tell you a damn thing! You’re just trying to slip off, leave me with the whole job!”
Harper leaned over the papers, put a hand on her cheek, and kissed her on the lips.
“You know, Beth, when you’re right, you’re right! Welcome to the wonderful world of law enforcement!”
Dell Greer was taking a walk around the front of Maureen Sprague’s house, partly for security reasons and partly just to give his hormones a break from Maureen.
The storm front was ten thousand feet high, blue-black and ugly as sin, a hundred miles wide. It had been coming on all night. It had just kicked hell out of Idaho and Utah, and it looked like Montana was next on the agenda.
There was a peculiar intensity to the daylight. The colors seemed to glow. Greer pulled in a long breath.
The air reeked of ozone and heat, the smell of twisters.
He heard a small voice from the porch. Bobby Lee was out there, hands on her hips, in jeans and a pink cowgirl shirt, heavy concern showing on her face.
“Uncle Dell!”
Greer came up the walk, grinning. “Yessirree, ma’am. What’s on your mind?”
“Where’s Uncle Moses?”
“He has to look up something for your daddy. He’ll be along this afternoon. See that cloud there?”
Bobby Lee came down the steps onto the lawn, shading her eyes. “Why is it colored like that?”
“Well, that’s partly the sun shining on it, and partly all the rain it’s carrying, honey.”
“Does Daddy have his cats inside?”
“Oh yes, you relax about them. Those cats, they’ll be inside under your daddy’s bed, rolled up in a big ball.”
“Where’s Daddy now?”
Greer ruffled her blond hair and stood up as another car turned the corner at the bottom of the hill and started up the long curving street. Another Volvo station wagon. There were more Volvo station wagons in this neighborhood than there were in Oslo. Or was it Stockholm?
“Well, I’d say your daddy’s working. Has he called you?”
“Mommy got it. She said I was playing, but I wasn’t. I was right there. Mommy’s real mad at Daddy.”
She sat down on the step and cradled her chin in both hands, propping her elbows on her knees. They both watched the Volvo cruise by. A little girl waved at Bobby Lee through the back window, but Bobby Lee didn’t wave back.
She looked sideways at Greer, the clarity in her blue eyes shining through him. In the strange storm-changed light, she looked as if she were cut from alabaster. Luminous.
“Uncle Dell, how hot is hell?”
Greer rocked back and squatted down to get eye-to-eye with her. God, the blue in those eyes. It was hard to concentrate on what she was saying, her eyes were so bright and blue. He tried hard to take her seriously, because he knew that children were very quick at sensing condescension. You had to talk right across to them, because like it or not, there was a real person in there, just as real as any grown-up.
“Well, now, Bobby Lee, I’m not real sure there is a hell.”
Risky talk, that. Greer had to work hard to keep the rest of the guys on the Big Horn force from finding out he didn’t really believe in God. Not their brand anyway, a hard-handed man sitting in the clouds, dealing out thunderbolts and grief for technical infractions while terrible men did vicious things without any punishment at all.
Bobby Lee considered his statement quietly.
“Mom says there is a hell and that Daddy is going to go there. Do you think Daddy is going to go to hell?”
Greer sighed and felt a kind of sadness for the sheer mean-mindedness of saying such a thing to a little girl.
“No, honey. I don’t think your daddy is going to hell. If you wanna know what I think, I think your daddy is a real fine man, and I’m proud to have him as my friend.”
Bobby Lee was watching the storm front now. “Will there be lightning?”
Goddamn that Sprague bitch anyway.
“Uncle Dell, are you listening?”
Greer looked around at the storm system. Chri
st, bigger and blacker by the minute. “Oh yeah, I’d say so. Are you afraid of lightning?”
“No. Lightning is when God lights His pipe.”
“Your daddy smokes a pipe, too.”
“Yes. Mommy says it smells like a outhouse. What’s a outhouse?”
The screen door slammed open. Maureen was standing there, her shiny tanned skin flushing pink, her green eyes wide, and her mouth torqued in an angry twist. She was wearing a tiny G-string bikini in some shiny green material that matched her headband. Her hard little body glistened with suntan lotion and sweat. Her nipples showed like tiny bullets through the snakeskin fabric. Her breasts were hard and round, her stomach ridged and leathery. She had oven mitts on, and she was holding a goldfish bowl away from her face, out toward Bobby Lee and Moses.
The water was steaming. Bits of skin and flesh floated in a murky brown soup. The smell of fish and sewage drifted down the steps. Bobby Lee stood up and faced her mother, her mouth open and her eyes wide.
“Bobby Lee! I’ve told you never to play with the microwave!”
Greer stood up and backed away, trying to hide the grin.
“Well? Why did you put your goldfish in the microwave?”
Bobby Lee’s face closed up defiantly. “You said Daddy’s going to hell!”
“What does that have to do with it?”
“So I’m gonna go with him!”
“Don’t be stupid, Roberta Lee!”
Bobby Lee’s face was bright with childish anger. “And I’m gonna take Pete and Mikey with me!”
“I don’t understand!”
“They have to like it there, don’t they?”
The doctor’s sleeves were pulled down to the edges of his palms, French cuffs, closed with gold and lapis lazuli cufflinks. His hands, broad and ridged with blue veins, rested in his lap like a pair of fat pink pets. Beau could see several puncture wounds on the backs of both hands.
Apparently Sifton was on some kind of intravenous medication. Beau looked back up at the doctor’s face, seeing the gray in his skin and the pallor of his lips. Sifton was talking about Edward Gall.
“A very fine boy. Quite intense. He and his wife have a little house down in East Los Angeles. They had me down there once, for a dinner. Actually, it was to meet some singing group. I suppose Edward thought I might use my influence, get them something in the industry. Anyway, the point is, they were trying to have children, and there seemed to be something amiss.”
Lizardskin Page 37
