Lizardskin

by Carsten Stroud

  “Yeah.”

  “Go get it, load it, and keep it in your hand. Don’t put it down to pee, understand?”

  “Eustace, you trying to make me nervous?”

  “Yes! I sent a Big Horn County guy out to Joe Bell’s place today. He found Joe Bell. At least, he’s pretty sure it’s Joe Bell.”

  There was a long silence while Meagher listened to Sig Tarr’s breathing and the wind rattled the phone-booth glass.

  “Bell’s dead?”

  “Unbelievably dead, Sig.”

  Calder angled the green LTD in front of the Freightliner, partially blocking the left fender. Luis Freg was waiting at the side of the trailer. They could hear carts rolling into the trailer, and footsteps. A portable radio sitting on the loading dock, beside the sealed tarp, was playing a Bob Dylan song.

  It was “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.”

  Beau remembered the movie where he’d heard that song. It was a Peckinpah movie called Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.

  Beau figured it was a lucky thing he wasn’t superstitious. He tugged out his big blue Smith. Calder saw that and pulled out a matte-finish steel Colt Python. Beau figured Luis Freg for a fancy nine-mill. He was kind of surprised when Freg tugged out an army .45.

  Hey. A traditionalist.

  Freg went around to the far side of the truck. A driver sitting on his Kenworth saw Freg walk around and said “shit” and slid off the hood. Freg smiled at him.

  Beau nodded to Calder. Calder slapped the steel hull of the trailer. It boomed like a drum. The footsteps stopped, and a small Japanese man peered out of the folds of the tarp.

  “Yes. What you want?”

  Calder showed his badge, keeping the gun at his side.

  “Police? What’s the matta?”

  “You have a broken headlight out here, sir. Can you come down, take a look at—”

  They heard a voice from inside the trailer: “Who is it, Jenji?”

  The man turned and looked inside the tarp. “It the police. They—”

  Beau glanced up at the steel wall of the trailer, and maybe it was luck, but he happened to be looking at a panel where a line of rivets was showing a brown track of rust, and then there was a big star-shaped hole about two inches above the third rivet and a clap of thunder so loud, his ears were hurting, because something had slapped the side of his head very hard, and he could hardly hear for the ringing. A round slammed into the stake truck behind him—Calder was firing his Python, Beau saw him, his thin body crouched, the Python up and out, the cylinder working, the hammer going back, a sliver of blue fire from the muzzle. Beau fell back against the stake truck, felt it hitting him in the shoulder blade, and now he had the Smith up—the red bar was rock-steady, and then the gun bucked hard and another booming explosion hammered at his cheeks and ears and the red bar blurred into a haze of smoke and blue fire—he wondered what that was—when he saw his own wrist, the sleeve of his blue suit, and the Smith bucked again in his hand—he felt that in his wrist, it hurt and he knew he was firing. He straightened up, still firing, the concussions slamming around in between the trucks—dust jumping from the seams and rivets—the noise almost continuous now—seeing the rounds punch in—seeing daylight on the far side—more holes appearing like a conjurer’s trick—one-two-three-four in a ragged row—more rounds were coming out of the steel wall—he could hear them humming by his body, hear the wooden stakes of the truck behind him cracking, hear a tire squealing with escaping air—the trailer rang and rocked and clanged and shuddered and over that the solid pounded-earth booming explosions of weapons and someone was shouting a word and the word sounded like stop stop. Beau was suddenly aware that his Smith—there was something wrong with it—a dry metallic clicking, and then he knew it was empty, and he heard one more solid gunshot like a punctuation point, and he looked to his left where Calder was crouching, his mouth open, his right arm out and rigid, the steel Python vibrating from the muscular tension in the arm, and there was sunlight—sunlight—in yellow discs on Calder’s face and the material of his beige suit, and something caught Beau’s eye, a glitter of hard light, and he looked back up at the trailer and straight into a shaft of sunlight shining through the body of the trailer, and then a wave of absolute silence crashed in on both of them and they could hear each other breathing and Beau could feel his heartbeat in several different places in his body—a thumping under his left jaw and a hissing sound in his right ear and inside his chest a deep continuous rolling tremor and under that the sound of something wet dripping onto the crumbling asphalt.

  Calder sat down on the ground hard and put his left hand on his forehead and lowered his head. Beau watched him do that without feeling any need to walk over or to say or do anything.

  More fluid was running from the trailer now, milky white with a delicate threading of pink and scarlet. It was pooling on the cratered asphalt, running down through the holes at the base of the trailer.

  Beau went down into a crouch and put a hand on the trailer—the metal was hot and slick under his hand—and he looked under it. On the far side, Luis Freg was on the ground, his olive-green jacket crumpled and disarrayed, bright blood bubbling and frothing out his burnt-orange shirt. His .45 was on the ground beside him, and he was turned slightly on his right side, holding himself in tight, his soft brown eyes staring hard at Beau, tugging at his belt where the black square of a portable radio was showing. Beau scrambled under the trailer. Wetness dripped over his face, and he felt the fluid under his hands.

  He reached Freg and rolled him onto his back, and Freg got the radio out. The wound in his shirt was frothy and bubbling, and Freg was trying to speak. Beau eased him onto his back and ripped the shirt open and saw the wound in Freg’s left side, a few inches below the collarbone. He took the radio from Freg.

  “Ten-thirteen this is a ten-thirteen at two two zero Ditman the food warehouse at two two zero Ditman a ten-thirteen!”

  “Identify yourself. This is an unauthorized use of an emergency system! Identify yourself!”

  “Hey look, butthead! I’m Sergeant McAllister of the Montana Highway Patrol, and I’m down here at 220 Ditman, and there’s been one hell of a gunfight down here, so get me some help, get me an ambulance and some paramedics, you’ve got an officer down with a sucking chest wound!”

  “What’s the location, sir?”

  “Two two zero Ditman. The warehouse. Detective Freg is down, and Lieutenant Calder may be hurt, too.”

  “Yes, sir. Please don’t break radio contact. We’ll—”

  “Fuck you, lady!” He set the radio down and got up onto his feet, looking for something he could use. He saw a crate of oranges sitting on the ground at the back of a pickup truck a few yards away. A man was lying on the ground beside it, staring at him. He got up and ran over to the crate. It was sealed with clear plastic. He ripped off the seal and ran back to Freg.

  He wiped the blood away with his right hand until he had the skin exposed. The wound was ragged and filling with bright blood. It looked like a little well of red water in the man’s chest.

  Beau stretched the plastic over the wound and held it down. There was suction against it as Freg drew in a breath.

  He pulled in another, and the plastic sheet held. Freg coughed and spat some blood, and pulled in more air.

  His color got better.

  Now they could hear sirens, and the people around were getting to their feet and dusting themselves off. Beau kept up his eye contact with Freg, his hand pressing down on the plastic, feeling the heat of Freg’s blood and his body, the dreadful wreck of flesh under his palm. It sent an atavistic shudder through him, and he trembled. He felt a hand on his shoulder, and he jumped. He wouldn’t look away from Freg, afraid that if he broke his connection with the man, he’d lose him.

  He heard Rufus Calder’s voice close beside him: “Luis, you hang on.”

  Freg tried to smile, and he reached up to hold Beau’s wrist. His fingers were cold.

  “Get me a tarp, a ru
g, something, Rufus. He’s going into shock.” Calder got up and went looking.

  “You gotta hang on now, Luis. We Irish, we gotta stay together, okay?”

  Freg tried twice and made it on the third breath.

  “I’m not Irish … I’m Mexican.”

  “I guess you got your cornada in the chest there, Luis.”

  “Si … I hope this … don kill me.”

  And then Calder was back with a tarp, and the narrow space between the trucks was suddenly full of people in blue and white. Someone pulled Beau out of the way, and he realized the paramedics were here. He watched them surround Freg until he couldn’t see anything of the man but his baggy brown slacks and his Italian loafers. He bent over and picked up the .45. It was empty, the slide cocked back.

  Calder was standing beside him.

  “Christ, McAllister. I haven’t been in a firefight since I got outta Da Nang. Let’s not do this again.”

  Beau nodded and looked around him at the trailer and the stake truck. “I think I’m gonna stay away from truckyards. This is the second time in a week I almost got shot in one.”

  Beau looked down again at his right hand. It was hot, and it was shaking as if it were alive. There was blood on it, and it seemed to Beau that he had pushed this line of work as far as it would take him.

  “I guess we better go look inside,” said Calder.

  “Oh, right,” said Beau. “I forgot.”

  They pushed their way through the crowd and walked back to the rear of the trailer. The tarp had been pulled back, and four uniform cops were standing inside the trailer at the back, staring into the interior of it. One of the cops, a sergeant with yellow stripes on his dark blue shirt, turned to watch Beau and Calder climb up onto the dock.

  “Rufus—how’s Luis?”

  Calder shrugged, looking past the man into the trailer.

  “Jesus,” he said, and let out a long sigh.

  The walls and roof of the trailer were full of holes, ugly star-shaped rips and punctures. The late afternoon sun was pouring in through the holes in one side, piercing the wreckage.

  The Japanese man lay on his side, pressed up against the back of the trailer. He had taken at least one round in the back and another through the side of his skull. He was holding a furniture pad, and it looked as if he had been trying to pull it up over his head when the rounds came in. He was dead.

  Farther inside the trailer, his back supported by a stainless-steel cart that was lashed securely into a wall brace, Danny Burt was sitting on the floor of the cart, in the middle of a spreading puddle of milky-white fluid and blood. Brass cartridge cases lay scattered around in the fluids. There was a large blued weapon on the floor in front of him, a semiauto pistol. The slide was racked back and the magazine was out. There was a second magazine in Danny’s left hand, and it looked as if he had been trying to slide it into the receiver when the rounds finally found him. He was wearing a black suit and a white shirt. His gold Rolex glimmered on his left wrist. He had taken several rounds. The one that took away his left cheek and most of his forehead might not have been the round that killed him. The round that had blown away most of the inside of his right leg just below the crotch, that round would have opened his femoral artery for a good six inches. Given his excitement, the adrenaline pumping through him as the rounds came in and he fired blind through the walls, most of his heart’s blood would have jetted out of that wound in a few seconds.

  Well, whatever.

  The point was, he was dead, and Beau walked over to look down at him, his boots squelching in the fluid on the floor.

  A Colt Delta. A ten-mill.

  That’s not a handgun. That’s artillery.

  He thought about all the hours he’d spent drinking with Danny Burt, at Pike Twilly’s or Fogarty’s, Danny always in the middle of a crowd, leaning on the bartop, always a fresh frosty bottle in his big hands, delight and humor in every line of his face, telling some outrageous story about one of the stiffs, what they’d done with it, tricks they’d played on the other guys, or the latest joke from the morgue attendants. Or sitting rapt, just part of the crowd, while Beau, or Tom Blasingame, or Moses Harper told a war story, or one of the funny things that happened to them on the shift; bar talk, the smoke hanging heavy in the amber light, the music playing some cowboy honky-tonk got-tears-in-my-ears-from-lyin’-on-my-back-starin’-at-the-ceilin’-an’-cryin’-over-you, a chilly wind scraping at the frosted windows, and six feet of snow in the streets, a great muffled quiet lying over everything, like God’s particular blessing.

  And now here he was, good old Danny Burt, with his guts in his lap, and blood all over his Rolex, and all his secrets fading in his shattered skull.

  Beau wondered how much he really knew about any of his friends, about Meagher or Finch Hyam or Fogarty. How much did he know, really know, about Maureen, even when she was soft and naked with him, or sitting curled up in his left arm eating popcorn and watching White Cargo where Hedy Lamarr steps out of a velvet-dark tropical night and says the line—they’d say it with her—“I am Tondelayo.” God, he must have loved her, that felt like love.

  And drinking with the guys, that had felt like friendship. And if it wasn’t, if it could all go down like Danny here, in a puddle of his own piss and blood and white water, then you could lose everything and have nothing and never even know what was real and what was just life being gentle with you, leaving the flesh on the skull face of things.

  He prodded Danny’s leg with his boot.

  Well, fuck all that.

  Better you than me, Danny.

  There were three carts in the trailer, three stainless-steel carts about four feet high by two feet wide and three feet long. They had hinged lids held down by six pressure clamps. They looked watertight. The pressure clamps were tied off by small silver wires, and the wires were clamped with tiny customs seals. Two of the carts had several punctures in them. This was where the white liquid was coming from. It dripped out of the holes and trickled down to the bottom of the carts, and dripped onto the wet wooden flooring of the trailer. One cart had a long gouge on the side but no puncture. Beau put a hand on it. He could feel heat and a low steady vibration. There was machinery inside, probably running on a battery. There was a label stuck on the lid.

  The sign read:

  OCEANIC FROZEN FOODS

  CUSTOM CLEARED AND BONDED

  PERISHABLE DO NOT BREAK SEAL

  He put the barrel of the Smith into the silver wire of the customs seal and twisted it off. Then he unsnapped the pressure clamps and lifted the lid. The smell of chemicals was strong, and there was a lot of wet warmth coming from the interior.

  Inside the cart, under a secondary lid of clear glass, misted with water and fluids, he saw a baby floating in a thick white fluid. Maybe it weighed a pound. Maybe two. Feeding tubes ran into its belly, and other tubes emerged from its lower intestinal tract.

  This one was a baby girl. Her skin was pale yellow, and her hair was a delicate dusting of black lace.

  Above her eyebrows, her skull seemed truncated and oddly shaped. The word came back to him.

  Anencephalic.

  Under her pale yellow skin, even through the thick milky fluid in which she floated, Beau could see the tiny flutter of movement in her chest. She was alive.

  They used a forklift to take down the steel door inside the cold room. There they found six more carts. Inside each cart was a baby connected to some kind of life-support system. Two were dead. By this time, the yard was full of cops, and people were being questioned everywhere.

  Beau had found a place to sit, out of the way of the officials and the uniform guys. He was thinking about how much money he had saved and what his life added up to now that he was getting older and fifty wasn’t just a vague destination a long way down the line. Calder walked up to him and cleared his throat.

  Beau looked up at him. “How’s Luis?”

  “I think he’ll be okay. He’s in the trauma ward now. But look, Beau,
you gotta go back to Billings. They got a plane waiting for you out at LAX.”

  “What’s the rush? Why am I leaving? Am I in trouble?”

  Calder looked down at his hands and then up at Beau. “There’s a Learjet waiting for you at the airport. They sent it all the way from Billings.”

  “Why? I have an open ticket. Anyway, this is my case. What’re we gonna do about the babies here? We gotta save the ones we can save.”

  “That’s for the medics. They got them now. Nothing we can do about that.”

  “Then we’re going to the Sonesta Clinic.”

  “The Sonesta Clinic! Is this their shit?”

  “Some of it. At least, they’re involved.”

  “Then we’re fucked.… Look, right now, you gotta go. Come on, I got a cruiser here. They’ll run you right to LAX.”

  “You got some bad news for me, Rufus?”

  The black man turned and faced Beau. Beau could see him steeling himself, pulling back from the emotion. It was something Beau did when he had to tell someone something very bad. He braced himself.

  “Is it about my kid?”

  “No, she’s fine! She’s just fine. It’s your ex-wife. She’s … some Indians have called a press conference, and she’s going to be the center of it. Meagher says to call him.”

  Calder looked back toward the trailer, at the obscenity it contained. Beau was blank-faced, shell-shocked.

  “Is it about this?”

  “That’s what they’re saying.”

  25

  2005 Hours–June 19–Los Angeles, California

  The Learjet was parked far away from the main terminal and the big airliners, at the seaward edge of the airport.

  In the cruiser, Beau shaded his eyes against the glare as the car wheeled through the security gate and accelerated across the runways. Overhead, a silver 747 rose into the deepening night on a trail of superheated air and kerosene smoke. In the east, the city lights were on. Sunlight burned in a thousand windows from the northern hills down to the beaches and the low brown slopes to the south. On the freeway the traffic had been a solid chain of red taillights. The sunlight glimmered off car windows and polished chrome. The air was full of noise and wind, and it reeked of burning oil, salt, melted rubber.