The church was empty, but down by the riverside a rock sweathouse was leaking with both steam and chants in a consonant-heavy language I had heard only two or three times in my life. I wanted to be kind in my attitude toward the members of Wyatt Dixon’s church, but as a person raised in the rural South I’d known many like them, and as a child they had filled me with fear. The severity of their views, the ferocity of their passion, the absolutism that characterized their thinking were such that I always felt they had one foot in the next world and were heedless of this one. I also believed that, given the opportunity, they would destroy the earth rather than let it be governed by a creed other than their own.
Moreover, Wyatt’s church had a singular reputation for inclusion of brain-singed mercenaries and war veterans who stayed off the computer and moved about like gypsy moths through the mountains and rain forests of the Pacific Northwest. Some of them were harmless Libertarians or survivalists trying to re-create a nineteenth-century frontier ethos; but others were tormented men who could not purge their dreams of memories that no human being should have to carry.
I pulled aside the tarp that hung over the truncated door in the rock house, squatted down, and stepped inside. The heat and steam and astringent odor of male sweat covered my face like a wet cloth. In one corner the pastor sat on a stool in an oversized pair of black swim trunks, his skin as pink as a baby pig’s, his face smiling, a jolly, innocent man among men whose backgrounds had nothing in common with his own. Wyatt sat across from him on an old rug, wearing only a jockstrap, his knees pulled up in front of him, drops of sweat as big as dimes sliding down his face. But it was the three other men in the rock house who bothered me.
Perhaps I had been away too long from hands-on involvement with law enforcement and the realities of the criminal world. Perhaps I had become too much like the ordinary citizen who sees criminals only when they are in custody—free of drugs and booze, showered, clean-shaven, their hair freshly barbered, their tattoos hidden by buttoned collars and conservative neckties and long-sleeve shirts. It had been a temptation to think of Wyatt as a slightly fried, engaging, hillbilly eccentric; but one look at his sweathouse friends was a quick reminder that his jailhouse past and criminal frame of reference were not abstractions.
One man was totally naked, head shaved, perhaps six and a half feet tall, snake-belly white, the edges of his eyes tattooed with blue teardrops. An Indian sat next to him, his braids, sopping with moisture, tied on top of his scalp, his chest pocked with two lead-gray circular scars that looked like bullet wounds, his arms scrolled from wrist to armpit with jailhouse art that convicts call “sleeves.”
The third man had the flawless gray proportions of a granite sculpture, his abs recessed, elongated like strips of stone below the curvature of his chest, his phallus huge, his eyes dancing with an inquisitional light as though my casual glance at him were a personal challenge to his manhood.
“See you outside, Wyatt?” I said.
“This is a prayer meeting. Can it wait?” he replied.
“No,” I said, and stepped back outside, my shirt peppered with moisture.
He followed me, standing up on a pair of walking canes, but before I could speak he lumbered into the Jocko and sat down chest-deep in the current, holding on to a boulder with each arm while the ice-cold water boiled over his skin. Then he hobbled back up on the bank and began pulling on his clothes, one eye squinting at me. “You got a beef about something?” he asked.
“I’m taking your weight,” I said.
“For what?”
“You found the goods from the Global Research robbery. But some guys think I’ve got them and they’re coming down on my family to get them back.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
“I’m in a bad mood, Wyatt. I don’t have a lot to lose at this point, get my meaning? You think you’re about to make the big score with the Global goods? Is that why you’re hanging with the Deer Lodge alumni in there?”
“I wouldn’t say that too loud if I was you.”
“You turn the goods over to the Feds or Karsten Mabus’s people, I don’t care which.”
“I thought you was a smart man, but I’m revising my opinion downward. I got a buddy to bust into them files. The day that Mabus fellow gets them files back, I’m a dead man and so are you.”
“Call The Washington Post or The New York Times. I’ll help you.”
“Yeah, they’ll run with that one—stolen goods turned over to them by an ex-con with a homicide in his jacket and a lawman who killed his best friend.”
“Nobody can accuse you of an excess of sentiment,” I said.
He tucked his shirt into his jeans, his mouth twisted into a button. “I’m always on the receiving end of your insults, counselor. It gets to be a drag.”
“What’s in those files?” I said.
“Stuff about anthrax, Ebola virus, mustard gas, the Black Death. I done told you before, I ain’t got the education or the experience to deal with a man like Mabus. But the two of us can come up with a plan. It takes smarts to whip the devil.”
“Let’s keep it simple and save the Bible lessons for your study group in there. You dump the goods. End of story.”
“No, you listen to me,” he said, pointing a finger at my face. “Them three ex–fellow travelers of the Lost Highway in the sweat lodge? The Indian took two rounds from a .357 Mag and crawled a half mile in a hunnerd-degree desert to kill the man done it to him. The tall fellow who looks like a big Q-Tip done hits for the Aryan Brotherhood in Quentin and Folsom. Each one of them teardrops tattooed on his eyes is for a man he done for free, just a favor for the AB. The iron man you seen in there, one with the crazy look in his eyes, has done committed crimes both inside and outside you don’t want to even know about.
“What I’m saying to you is men like that, men like me, ain’t no threat to the likes of a Karsten Mabus. A man like you is. If I had your education, I’d own this whole fucking state.”
“You’re mistaken, Wyatt.”
He picked up his canes and stared at the river, the trees bending in the breeze on the hillside, the smoke that mushroomed into the sky as yellow as sulfur. His eyes looked prosthetic, impossible to read, the crow’s-feet at the edges like artistic brushstrokes that were intended to give his face the human dimension it lacked. “When I first come out of the pen, I wanted to hurt you for what you done to me,” he said.
“Let’s stick to the subject,” I said.
“Not hurt you like you think. I wanted to get close to you and bring you down to where I was, make you into the very kind of man you hated. I figured that was about the worst thing I could do to anybody on earth. Anyway, that was then, this is now. It’s gonna take the two of us to shovel Karsten Mabus’s grits in the stove. Get used to the idea.”
“I dimed you with the Feds this morning.”
“You’re too late. They tore my place apart yesterday. They ain’t found squat on a rock, either.”
I gave up. He was impervious to both my questions and insults, even my admission that I had informed on him. But there was still one other question I had to ask him. “Were y’all talking in tongues earlier?”
“Why you want to know?”
“Because I think you’re psychotic. That and the fact you’re injured is the only reason I don’t break your jaw.”
“You done let me down, Brother Holland. I figured you for more sand. Anyway, time for my chemical cocktail,” he said. He fitted on a peaked, slope-brimmed hat and hobbled toward the church on his canes, the pupils in his eyes like broken drops of India ink.
Chapter 21
DARREL MCCOMB did not know how he would do it, but one way or another he was going to get even. The Feds had treated him like the best-dressed man of 1951, Greta Lundstrum had played him, his own department had dumped him, Fay Harback had dimed him with I.A., and a jailhouse dickwad like Wyatt Dixon had sucker-dropped him with a replica of an antique rifle.
In addition, he’d almost
been killed trying to save Seth Masterson’s life, and the upshot had been an official reprimand and a departmental suspension. The ultimate irony was that he was probably the only cop in Missoula County who knew the score on the Global Research break-in. Or at least he knew most of the score. There was one element about the break-in and its aftermath that he didn’t like to think about, primarily because even consideration of the idea put him in a league with a psycho-ceramic like Dixon.
Greta had set him up the night a hit team had descended on Dixon’s place; she had not only known he would be on the premises, she knew there was a good chance he would be taken out along with Wyatt. But instead, the lowlifes had walked into a firestorm. In fact, Darrel had to give Dixon credit; when it came to inflicting carnage on the enemy, Dixon had no peer. What troubled Darrel was not Dixon’s humiliation of him but instead the possibility that Dixon’s perverse religious views had credibility.
On two occasions Darrel had noticed a red mark underneath Greta’s right arm, one she had tried to dismiss as a horsefly bite, an explanation that in itself was a problem: Greta wasn’t a horsewoman and had no interest in animals or being around them.
Blow it off. Maybe she found a lump she doesn’t want to talk about, he told himself. He wondered if he was starting to lose his sanity or, more specifically, if his own head hadn’t become a dark box where his worst enemies were his own thoughts.
Keep the lines straight, he thought. Dixon was nuts, Greta was a Judas, and the judicial system in this country sucked. That’s all he had to remember: meltdowns were meltdowns, women screwed you in more ways than one, the system copped pud, and good guys like Rocky Harrigan led us away from ourselves.
But the bump under her arm wasn’t put there by a horsefly. The lie wasn’t even close. He had touched the swollen place while they made love; it was hard, configured like a midsized, calcified boil. Why hadn’t she gone to a doctor and had it treated?
He had deliberately not confronted Greta about her betrayal. He still believed she was an amateur, and as such he had known her defenses and denial and explanations would be in place in the immediate aftermath of her treachery. But silence and unpredictability unnerved amateurs far more than confrontation did. You waited and let them think they had skated, then you dropped the whole junkyard on their heads. Usually, they crumpled like a piece of paper thrown on hot coals.
On the evening of the same Monday I had gone to see Wyatt at his church, Darrel dropped in on Greta at her bungalow without notice.
She opened the door, her hair unbrushed, her face stark, without makeup, her big eyes unblinking, her level of discomfort crawling on her skin.
“Where have you been, stranger?” she asked, her smile like a rip in a clay mask.
“Hanging out, watching a lot of baseball, staying out of the smoke. See, I’m suspended without pay, which is the same as being fired, so I got a lot of time on my hands and I thought I’d drive down and check out how things are with you. So how’s it goin’?”
He walked into the living room without being invited.
“I was starting to get a little worried about you,” she said. “I called a couple of times but your message machine must have been off. You been all right?”
He let the lie about his message machine pass. “I’m doing good. Got a beer? Why don’t we play some music and slap some steaks on the grill? You’re not doing anything else, are you, Greta?”
“I’ve got hamburger. I can chop some onions in it, the way you like it. I can fix a salad. Is that okay?” She didn’t know what to do with either her hands or her eyes. She coughed into her palm and waited.
“Wow, that smoke is something else, isn’t it?” he said. “My lungs feel like I’ve been smoking three packs of cigarettes a day. Hey, hamburger would be great.”
He put a CD compilation of 1940s swing music on her stereo and sat in a deep chair and gazed out the side window at the mountains while she began preparing dinner in the kitchen. Greta was a middle-class bumbler who’d strayed into the criminal world, and Darrel knew that by the end of the evening he would have everything from her he wanted. But he had to wonder at his own coldness and the ease and confident sense of calculation he felt as he went about dismantling the life of a woman he had not only slept with but had formed a strange affection for.
But that was the breaks, he told himself. She was about to join that four percent of the criminal population who actually paid for their crimes. Like most amateurs, she probably never believed a day would come when she would have to stand in front of a judge, her life in tatters, her bank accounts emptied by defense lawyers, and listen mutely while the judge told her she had just become a bar of soap.
If they did the crime, they stacked the time, Darrel told himself. Why beat up on himself about it? But he could not deny the rush of satisfaction he felt when he took down perps, any of them, not just Greta, blowing apart their shoddy defenses, exposing their lies, making them see for just a moment their own pathos and inadequacy. Sure, they were scapegoats, surrogates for all the grimebags and degenerates who skated, but that’s what scapegoats were for, he thought. Were it not for the scapegoats, the job would be intolerable.
Darrel could not count the number of unresolved cases in his career. In fact, often the worst of them never got to be “cases,” because they existed in a category of moral failure over which criminal law had little governance or application.
He remembered seven years back when he had investigated a one-car fatality accident by Alberton Gorge. The driver, a man who worked in a Spokane bookstore, was returning home from a funeral in Minnesota. On an empty highway at dusk, his compact hit a guardrail, gashing open the gas tank. The compact seemed to right itself momentarily, then a flame twisted from under the frame and a ball of light mushroomed out of the windows.
The weather had been good, the road dry, and the highway patrol concluded that the driver had fallen asleep at the wheel. But the driver’s wife would not accept the highway patrol’s explanation. Her husband had a perfect driving record, she said. He was a conservative, abstemious man who never drove when he was tired, never broke traffic regulations, and was always conscious of the safety of others. There could have been no mechanical failure, either; his car was new and the maintenance on it was done by her brother, a mechanic. Darrel believed her.
Darrel had the widow send him all her husband’s credit card records, and he re-created each step of the husband’s trip from Spokane to the funeral service in St. Paul and back home again. The dead man and his wife were people of humble means, and it was obvious the husband did everything in his power not to spend an excess of money on himself, hence his decision to drive the thousands of miles to attend an uncle’s funeral rather than fly without discount reservations. He bought gas at off-brand filling stations, stayed at the Econo Lodge and Motel 8, and evidently ate at cash-basis fast-food restaurants, since the credit card records showed almost no purchases for food.
Darrel began calling each motel along the husband’s return route. But no one could offer any personal information about the bookseller from Spokane, other than the computerized record that showed the time and date of his check-in. Then a casual addendum in a conversation with a desk clerk in eastern Montana opened up another scenario and suddenly gave a face, an identity, and a sad kind of history to a man who was about to be written off as the cause of his own death.
“Yeah, he checked in on a Saturday afternoon two weeks ago. It was colder than hell. Wind must have been blowing forty miles an hour,” the clerk said. “We were packed to the ceiling, hunting season and all.”
“Was he drinking? Was there anything unusual about his behavior? Did he seem sick?” Darrel said.
“Actually, he didn’t stay at this motel. When we have an overflow, we register guests at this motel but we send them to the motel across the road. See, we own half of that one with my brother-in-law.”
Darrel got the number of the brother-in-law and left a message for him. The next day, the
brother-in-law returned the call. “Yeah, I remember him,” he said. “He was a nice gentleman, quiet fellow, played with my cat on the counter when he came up to get some soap for the room. He do something wrong?”
“He was involved in a traffic accident. I was just checking out a couple of details for my paperwork. Did he have booze on his breath or seem to be sick?”
“No, I saw him early in the morning, just before he left. I’m sure he wasn’t drinking. I felt bad about the room I gave him and offered not to charge him for it, but he said it was no problem.”
“Would you explain that in a little more detail.”
“A bunch of loudmouth hunters were in the rooms on each side of him. They came in drunk about eleven o’clock, yelling outside the rooms, throwing ice chests around in their trucks, rattling the Coke machine, stuff like that. He must have asked them to be quiet, ’cause I think they beat on his wall or his door. No, that’s not exactly right. I know they gave him a bad time. These guys were real assholes. They got up at four in the morning and did it again before they left, I mean slamming doors and hollering at each other, racing their truck engines, like nobody else is on the planet, so I don’t think that poor fellow got any sleep at all.”
“You got names and addresses for these guys?” Darrel asked.
Over the next few days Darrel called up seven men who had stayed in the rooms close by the bookseller’s. Each denied any responsibility for the dead man’s sleep deprivation. Three of them hung up on him. If any of them felt any guilt over the bookseller’s death, it was not apparent to Darrel. In fact, none of them seemed to even remember the anonymous, faceless man who’d had the bad luck to be sandwiched between their rooms.
In Darrel’s opinion, the hunters might not have been the direct cause of the bookseller’s death, but they had certainly contributed to it. And that’s the way it would end, Darrel thought. The hunters would go back to their jobs, their families, their venison dinners, and their swinging-dick bravado; they’d get laid, knock back shots in loud saloons, slam poker dice down on hardwood bars, see the sunrise with the warmth of a wife and mother next to them, attend churches that were little more than extensions of civic clubs, watch their children grow up, and one day many years from now, just before all the cares of the world became as dross before their eyes, wonder why a vague memory of a Saturday night outside Glendive, Montana, should hover like a chimerical presence next to their beds.
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