Billy Bob and Hackberry Holland Ebook Boxed Set (17 page)

He disconnected the transmission. Had everyone in the courthouse lost their minds? He left the stalls in the cement building and went back outside into the twilight. Wyatt Dixon was laboring across the rough ground, a soft cowboy hat the color of chewing tobacco low on his forehead, a festive group of men and women on each side of him. They were the homeliest people Darrel had ever seen, their faces creased and work-worn, their teeth decayed, their eyesight diminished by injuries and diseases that were never treated. What did they have to be happy about?

But the faces here at the revival were not new ones to him. He had seen them in El Salvador, Guatemala, and northern Nicaragua. He had seen them staring at him out of windows in government jails, shantytowns, and miserable huts on the fringes of large pepper plantations. He had also seen them at the bottom of excavations just before a bulldozer shoved a mountain of dirt down on them.

His depression was coming back. Get rid of morbid thoughts. He remembered George Patton's famous admonition: You don't win wars by giving your life for your country; you win by making the other sonofabitch give his. For Darrel, that meant taking it to them with red-hot tongs. He waited until Wyatt Dixon was inside the entrance of the men's room, then braced him.

“Think you can just walk out of the hospital and say, ‘Screw you,' to the sheriff's department?” he said.

“Why, howdy doodie, Detective McComb?” Dixon said, straightening himself on his crutches. “We're fixing to have a potluck dinner. Dinner on the ground and devil in the bush. Want to join us?”

The men who had entered the restroom with Dixon were staring at Darrel as though he were a Martian. He held up his badge so all of them could see it. “This is police business. Get out of here,” he said.

But they didn't move. Not until Dixon turned to them and said, “Y'all go 'head on. I'll be there directly.”

“Why don't you leave him alone?” somebody in the back of the room said.

“Who said that?” Darrel asked.

But no one answered. Instead, one by one they left the room, their faces filled with hostility, their eyes lingering on his.

“You fool ignorant people, Dixon, but you don't fool me,” Darrel said.

“I got twenty-seven thousand dollars in the bank, own my own truck, personal gear, and a prize Appaloosa cutting horse. I'm on the square with the state and the Man on High, and you ain't got bean dip on me, Detective. Seems to me you're flirting with a civil suit. I've already talked to my friend Brother Holland about taking over some of my legal issues.”

“Holland is actually your attorney?”

Wyatt didn't reply. His shoulders were hunched atop his crutches, his head tilted at an odd angle. His eyes seemed to be peeling away the skin on Darrel's face now, burrowing into his mind, prying secrets from him Darrel shared with no one. Then Darrel knew why it was he hated Dixon so much. Wyatt knew his past and looked upon him as a fraud. “You think you know everything about me, don't you?” Darrel said.

“You hire men of my kind to hurt folks who get in your way. That's why I don't have no truck with the government. The whole bunch of you are hypocrites,” Dixon replied.

“Hear me real good on this, asswipe. People like you have no right to live in this country. You belong in a cage on an ice floe in Antarctica. You're one of those guys who's still dirty after he takes a shower. Both of us know you're up to something. I just haven't figured out what it is.”

“Least I ain't up to somebody's windowsill, looking at some young girl's boobs. Now, if you'll step aside, I'm fixing to take a drain that's gonna blow the porcelain off the bowl.”

Dixon creaked forward on his crutches toward a stall, his shoulder brushing against Darrel's. Then Darrel had thoughts of a kind that had probably been working in his unconscious all day, like yellow jackets trapped under a glass jar. Strapped to his ankle was a small holster with a hideaway .25 auto in it, all serial numbers acid-burned and ground off on an emery wheel. All he needed to do was say Dixon's name, wait for him to turn around, and use his nine-Mike to pop one into the center of his forehead. It would be a simple matter to fold Dixon's dead hand around the .25 auto.

“Dixon?” he said.

Wyatt stopped and turned slightly, the eagle on his shirt bunching with the twisted motion he made against the armrests of his crutches. “Spit it out. I'm tired of this game playing,” he said.

“You're a piece of shit,” Darrel said.

“I've answered to worse. If that's all you got to say, I got to urinate,” Dixon said.

A shaft of sunlight shone through the airspace between the restroom wall and roof and made Darrel's eyes burn and twitch. The trough against the wall stank of piss and through the open door of a stall he could see a toilet that was up to the rim with brown water. Outside, somebody had set off a string of firecrackers and they popped like lesions splitting on the surface of Darrel's brain. Darrel looked directly into Wyatt's eyes and believed he could actually hear Wyatt laughing at him, as though Wyatt had stolen his soul and wiped his feet on it.

Darrel caught his breath. “I'm taking you in as a material witness. Then I'm going to get a warrant on your place and tear it apart. I'm also going to get your bank accounts frozen. That's just for openers. When I'm finished with you, you'll wish you were still a dirty thought in your father's mind.”

Dixon sucked a canine tooth, then turned back toward the urinal. “I don't think you got too many arrows in your quiver, Detective. I'm taking back my recommendation to President Bush. You just don't measure up, boy,” he said.

Darrel cupped him by the upper arm and spun him around. He could not quite believe the level of power he felt in Wyatt's arm and he wondered for a moment if he had made an irreversible mistake. But Wyatt didn't resist. Darrel snapped a handcuff on Wyatt's wrist, then locked the other manacle on an iron pipe that was anchored in the cinder-block wall and the cement floor. Wyatt was now helpless, balanced precariously on his crutches.

“I told you I got to urinate,” Wyatt said.

“Maybe you can start a new career doing adult diaper endorsements,” Darrel said.

He returned to the grove of cottonwood trees and started his car, his heart beating. What had he just done? Made a bust that wouldn't stick, allowed Dixon to treat him with contempt, and jammed himself up with the D.A.'s office. But it was too late to change course now. He had to brass it out or become a worse object of ridicule than he already was.

He drove his car to the restroom area, blowing his horn to discourage Dixon's revivalist friends who had started to reenter the building. He hit the redial button on his cell phone and heard Fay's voice on the other end. “I'm bringing him in. I'll do the paperwork in the morning,” he said.

“You're not doing this on my authorization,” she said.

“This guy is a menace. Are you going to back my play or not?”

“Come in tomorrow morning and we'll talk. In the meantime, I don't want—”

He snapped the cell phone shut, parked the car, and opened the back door so he could move Dixon quickly into the car and lock him to the D-ring inset in the floor before Dixon's friends could cause more trouble. He entered the restroom, then stared dumbfounded at Wyatt relieving himself in the trough, one manacle hanging from his wrist. The iron pipe to which he had been hooked up lay on the floor like a broken pugil stick, each end festooned with a chunk of concrete or cement.

Wyatt shook himself off and put his equipment back in his pants. Blood was leaking from the gauze and plaster on his thigh. “Best whiz I ever had,” he said, his face beaming with visceral satisfaction.

 

THAT NIGHT,
Darrel McComb ended up in a skin joint and got drunker than he had ever been in his life. The early dawn found him on Greta Lundstrum's doorstep, sick and trembling, afraid he would continue drinking through the day but even more afraid that he would get sober and have to look at himself in the hard light of day. The eastern sky was the color of a Tequila Sunrise, the mountains quaking with lightning. He sat on the steps and removed his piece from his clip-on holster and held it in both hands between his legs. He closed his eyes and imagined himself fitting the barrel between his teeth, touching the roof of his mouth, the astringent taste of gun lubricant mixing with his saliva.

Did Valhalla lie on the other side or only a great blackness? His life was a joke, hardly worth sustaining. One round fired upward into the brain would scroll his name on the wall, then it would be over.

Or perhaps he might take a few people with him. Behind him, he heard the door open.

THAT SAME FRIDAY
morning, as I headed to work, I saw Seth Masterson's Cherokee parked on the side of the dirt road that led from my house onto the state highway. The driver's door was open and Seth was behind the wheel, eating breakfast out of a McDonald's container. The sun had just tipped the mountains on the east side of the valley, and the light looked like a tiny pink flame inside the needles of the ponderosa tree he had parked under.

I pulled behind him and got out.

“You talk to American Horse and the Finley girl about giving up the computer disks they stole from Global Research?” he asked.

“No,” I replied.

He nodded, his impatience undisguised. He wiped his mouth with a crumpled paper napkin and dropped it into his plate. “Mind telling me why not?” he said.

“Because I've talked to Johnny about it before. He's not going to give up his friends or tell them what to do.”

“Don't tell me those Indians creeped that place without his permission. The girl's dirty, too. You know it, Billy Bob.”

“You want to send her and Johnny a message, go do it yourself.”

He poured his coffee into the dust and set the empty container on the floorboards of his vehicle. He stared at the coffee soaking into the dirt. “You used to be a good cop. Maybe you ought to rethink who your friends are,” he said.

“Sorry you feel that way, Seth.”

He shut the door and drove perhaps ten yards down the road, then stopped and got out, the vituperative moment gone. He had put on a tan cap with a green big-mouth bass imprinted on it and the cap's bill darkened the upper half of his face, but I could tell he was smiling. “My wife and I have a cabin west of Walsenburg. Come down sometime and help me deplete the rainbow population,” he said.

 

AROUND 9 A.M.
that same day, Darrel McComb sat in an uncomfortable chair, staring across the desk at Fay Harback, trying to take shallow breaths through his nose so the alcohol deep down in his lungs did not blow into her face. He had showered at Greta's, shaved with her leg razor, and used her toothbrush to scrub the taste of tequila out of his mouth, then had driven at high speed through traffic in order to reach the office with a semblance of punctuality. But his jaws were nicked, his eyes scorched, and his shirt and suit smelled as though they had been pulled from a dirty clothes hamper.

“You busted Dixon, then turned him loose?” Fay said.

“Not exactly.”

“Then explain what exactly you did, please.”

“I drove him to the emergency room at St. Pat's and left him with the docs. I told him we wanted better cooperation from him, but he was free to go from the hospital. Look, Fay—”

“No, you look, Darrel. I think you need to go on the desk or get some counseling. It wouldn't hurt if you checked out a Twelve-Step group, either.”

“I don't drink.”

“Sorry, I forgot that the odor in here is from the rug-cleaning service.”

Only two hours earlier, he had entertained thoughts of killing himself and perhaps others as well. Now he sat hunched in a chair like a chastened schoolboy. His shoes were scuffed, one of them untied, crossed on top of the other. He straightened his spine, took out a handkerchief, and blew his nose. At that moment he would have traded ten years of his life for a Vodka Collins. “A university professor was up at the revival. He said Dixon was speaking in the language Jesus used,” Darrel said.

Fay propped her elbows on her desk blotter and rested her chin on the backs of her hands. When he looked into her eyes, he saw only pity and sadness there, and he felt a balloon of anger bloom in his chest, squeezing his heart. Weevil-like motes seemed to swim through his vision. “I'm telling you what the professor said. I don't need any skepticism out of your office. I don't need any Twelve-Step meetings, either. I'm a good cop,” he said.

“Go home, Darrel.”

“This all started with American Horse.”

“It started when you almost beat him to death with a blackjack. You want to get some sleep, or do you want me to call the sheriff?”

“The FBI isn't in Missoula to help us. They're here to shut down the investigation. That's how it works. We're little people and we're in somebody's way. Even Wyatt Dixon has that much figured out. I helped kill hundreds of innocent people. They were all Indians. I know how it works out there.”

His words sounded as though someone else were speaking them, as though he were in a windowless room full of white noise and a mechanical presence inside himself was playing a tape he allowed himself to hear only in his sleep. He looked at the blank stare on Fay Harback's face, then opened his mouth to clear the popping in his ears.

“Darrel—” she began.

“Leave me alone,” he said, knocking the chair askew as he went out the door.

 

HE SIGNED OUT
of the department, claiming a doctor's appointment, went to his apartment, ate six aspirin and one hit of white speed, showered for the second time that morning, and put on fresh clothes. He tried to file and categorize his thoughts, put the previous night into perspective, and somehow get a handle on it; but he couldn't. He had seriously blown out his doors, gotten drunk in a topless bar, and passed out with his face in a puddle of spilled booze.

He remembered a stripper and bouncer putting his coat on for him and helping him into his car, then leaving him alone in the empty parking lot, barely able to start the engine. Greta had taken him in, gotten his gun away from him, then had led him to her bed like a sexual beggar. Knowing full well she was involved with a criminal enterprise and that ultimately she planned to use him, he let her climb on top of him and haul his ashes, even though it was obvious that she could barely abide his breath and the stink of nicotine that rose from his hair and skin.

He took another hit of speed and felt it kick into his system, temporarily giving a brightly lit rectitude to his thoughts and the jittering energies that were beating in his wrists. Before he headed back to the department, he fitted five shells into a cut-down twelve-gauge pump shotgun, wrapped it in a blanket, and placed the shotgun and the box of remaining shells in the trunk of his Honda. If he had been asked to explain why he was carrying his own shotgun in his vehicle, he would not have been able to give a reason, except for the fact that the mountainous horizon circumscribing the valley seemed to tremble with a peculiar malevolence, and on this particular day that bothersome fact needed to be corrected.

He sat in his cubicle at the department and drank coffee, did paperwork, and answered the telephone in routine fashion, his scalp and forehead shiny under the fluorescent lighting. By noon he was sweating, his throat thick, his hands starting to shake. Maybe he should just go to a bar and get drunk again, he thought—but that was too easy. A dramatic event had to happen, something that would change the daily grief that constituted his life, that would make everyone out there understand where this country had gone wrong.

The phone on his desk rang.

The caller was a parolee, a Deer Lodge Pen dimwit and professional snitch by the name of Wilbur Pickett, who lived up the road in Ronan. “There're two guys here who went to a veterinarian to get patched up. The vet is a junkie and was in Atascadero with these guys. Somebody beat the living shit out of them. Maybe one guy's face is fried, like on a stove. You looking for anybody like that, Darrel?” Wilbur said.

Ten minutes later Darrel signed out of the office and was on the way to Ronan, up in the Mission Mountains, up in Indian country.

 

WHILE THESE EVENTS
were occurring, I was at my office, convinced I would probably not see or talk with my friend Seth Masterson again, at least not until he had retired to a cabin and trout stream in southern Colorado. But at 11:14
A.M
. I heard his mellifluous voice when I answered the phone. “I left American Horse a message on his machine. His wife just called me on my cell and told me to come out,” he said.

“Amber told you to come to their house?”

“That's right. Why?”

“She doesn't tend to get along with authority figures.”

“Who's an authority figure? I quit the Bureau after I talked with you this morning. My leave time will take up the slack in my thirty-day notice. You know the greatest thing about quitting a job?”

“No.”

“You walk out the glass doors and it's like you never worked there. Then you wonder why you ever did in the first place.”

“Why'd you call?”

“To tell you I quit.”

An hour later I saw Amber walk past my office window, a full shopping bag hanging from her hand. I went outside and caught her before she got to her car.

“You invited Seth Masterson up to see Johnny?” I said.

“That FBI moke? What are you talking about?” she said.

 

DARREL FLOORED
his Honda up Evaro Hill. His day was improving by the second. He was back on the edge of the envelope again, the green countryside speeding by him, just like when he and Rocky went in low over a Nicaraguan jungle, their kickers scooting crates of C-rats, AK-47s, frags, and ammo out the bay, the parachutes blooming like the tops of white mushrooms above the foliage down below.

As he topped the hill and entered the Indian reservation, he saw a black Jeep Cherokee parked at a filling station island and that FBI drink-of-water Masterson pumping fuel into the tank. Time to check it out, Darrel thought, and swerved in behind him.

Masterson wore shades and a fishing cap. He glanced up at Darrel. “Fine day,” he said.

“You bet. Get anywhere on that Global Research break-in?” Darrel said.

“Call the Bureau. I'm off my tether now.”

“Seen American Horse recently?”

“Not really. You know how it goes. Some investigations just don't pan out.”

“His place is up on the Jocko. Thought you might be headed there.”

“All my official duties are over, Detective.” Masterson seemed to gaze wistfully at the row of mountains that lined the valley. He tapped the nozzle of the gas hose on his tank and hung it up on the pump. “Have a good one. Think I might flip a dry fly in the riffle this afternoon.”

Darrel watched Seth Masterson drive away, the waxed black surfaces of the Cherokee shimmering with heat. Flip a dry fly, my ass, he thought.

 

WHEN SETH DROVE
across the iron cattle guard onto Johnny's property, he saw horses in the shade by the barn, a half-dozen goats eating knapweed and dandelions in a pasture, a water sprinkler whirling in Johnny's side yard, boxes of petunias and impatiens blooming in the windows of his clapboard house.

He parked his Cherokee and turned off the engine. In the quiet he could hear the humming sound of the Jocko River, the wind in the trees up the slope, classical music from a radio that was propped in an open window. Wash flapped on a clothesline and a calico cat with kittens lay in a cool, scooped-out place in the dirt under the front porch. Seth walked toward the house.

Then he paused. The curtains in the house puffed whitely in the wind and he heard a door slam in the barn. What was it that bothered him? The absence of any movement in the house, although the front door was open and a pickup truck was parked in back? Or was it the hot reflection of the sun on the tin roof, the flicker of a bright object up in the trees, or the sudden flight of birds from the canopy? In the corner of his vision he saw a red pony sprinting through a field of tall grass toward its mother.

In his youth, during a war few cared about anymore, a glimmer of moonlight on a trip wire, a smell of recently eaten fish, a glimpse of a conical-shaped hat in the elephant grass, had made the difference between seeing the sunrise and walking into an ambush that on one occasion was so intense and certain in outcome that Seth had called in a napalm strike on his own position.

Had he survived the war and twenty-seven years as a federal agent only to develop a case of short-timer's nerves while trying to do a good deed? He fixed his collar, as though it were chafing his neck, then continued toward the front porch. When no one responded to his knock at the open door, he walked up the dirt drive, stooped under the wash on the clothesline, and mounted the back steps. Behind him he thought he heard a dry, metallic
klatch
, not unlike a sound he had heard on night trails in that forgotten war. He turned and stared at the wooded hillside behind the house, momentarily unsure of where he was in time and place, his hand reaching inside his windbreaker.

 

DARREL HAD FOLLOWED
the FBI agent up the state highway through the res, until the agent turned on a dirt road that led to Johnny's ranch. At that point it was impossible to continue the tail without being seen. Darrel continued up the state highway another half mile, then caught the service road and doubled back. By the time he approached Johnny's property, Masterson had already arrived.