Buffalo Jump Blues (24 page)

John felt a stinging sensation as blood from a cut forehead ran into his eyes. He shut them, and listened for the shot.

—

As John spoke, the shadow of the butte engulfed them. He kept glancing at the sun and picking distractedly at a scab on his elbow.

“I better get moving,” he said. Then, sudden resignation in his voice: “Shit, they're going to kill her anyway.”

“Don't think like that,” Sean said.

“How you want me to think?”

“Positively. Did you write a note before you left the house, make any calls?”

“No, I was just worried about getting here in time. I should have. That was dumb.”

“Forget about it. All that matters is now, what we do now.”

“You can't come with me. If they see you with me, they'll kill her.”

“They'll kill you if they see you carrying that Winchester. Did you think about that?”

“It's a Model 97, it breaks down. I can stuff it into the pack.” He rotated the magazine tube and unscrewed the barrel, putting both halves in his pack, from which they protruded only a couple inches. “Did you think I'd bring a bow and arrow?”

“I guess I don't know my shotguns,” Sean admitted. “Okay, I'll wait
until dark to follow you. Your job is to stay alive until I get there. You'll have to use your wits, play off what you know about them, anything to get an edge.”

“Brady's arrogant. He thinks he's right about everything.”

“Then use that to your advantage. Keep in mind that this is a game to them. They were stupid letting you go like that. They will do something else stupid.”

John nodded.

“You'll think of something,” Sean said. “I have faith in you. Now how do I get to the top?”

“You walk around the cliffs until you get to the back side. There's a game trail to the top, but I don't know if you'll be able to find it in the dark.”

“Won't they be looking to see if anyone followed you? Isn't that the logical place to watch?”

“Yeah, I guess.

“There's no other way up?”

“There's the pitons we practiced with. When we got run off, we left them in the rock. It's pretty scary, though, unless you have a rope.”

Sean had a rope. He thought about it.

“I'd better get moving,” Joseph said.

“What about weapons? Did you see anything besides the handgun?”

John shook his head. Sean saw him looking at the rifle with the brass tacks in the stock.

“That's Joseph's grandfather's gun, isn't it?” John said. “He told me his father shot white people with it, or maybe it was his grandfather who shot them. I told him it didn't look like it was good for anything but collecting spiders.”

Sean smiled. When he'd jacked open the action back in Heart Butte, he'd had to remove a crust of fossilized insect larvae from the chamber before using the bore cleaner.

“So what's the plan?” John said.

“If I make it up there, I'll either shoot or do something else to cause a distraction. You have to know what you're going to do when that happens. If you can get the brothers into a position where I might be able to crawl close by sticking to some cover, do that. The moon's in its last quarter, so it will come up around midnight. I'll make a move sooner than later, to take advantage of the dark.”

“Were you like a policeman before you became a detective?”

“Do you mean, ‘Do I know what I'm talking about?'”

“Yeah.”

“I'm a watercolor artist.”

M
artha Ettinger leaned against the stall divider.

“You're nothing but trouble,” she said to the sleeping calf. “And here I thought cowboys were my weakness.” She shook her head and muttered, “Humpff.” Cowboys, a cattle auctioneer, an artist, a certain Native American man—they had all been her weakness at one time or another.

The word had come from the horse's mouth just before her quitting time, the horse's mouth being Judge Arthur Orenko Sanchez, who had told Rosco Needermire, who had called Martha with a sigh in his voice. Lucien Drake, acting as agent for the Department of Livestock, had petitioned Judge Sanchez for a bench warrant to confiscate the bison on Martha's property on three grounds: One, bison management was the domain of the Department of Livestock, not private individuals; two, Martha Ettinger was in possession of wildlife in violation of state statute; three, her property did not meet requirements for quarantine. That she had promised to keep the calf inside her barn until quarantine standards were met did not, Drake had argued, constitute cause for denial of the warrant. In fact, any delay in granting the warrant would put cattle in the area at risk for disease transferred by the bison.

The last had elicited a roll of the venerable judge's eyes. Everyone in Montana knew that there hadn't been a single instance of bison transferring brucellosis to cattle, and that a bull calf posed no risk whatsoever. Still, he was inclined to grant the warrant, but had told Drake he would need to rewrite it, clearing up the inherent
contradiction of the first two grounds for cause. If bison were state-owned wildlife, what provision of law gave the DOL the right to manage them as livestock, rather than the Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks, which managed all other wildlife species? He needed that point clarified to his satisfaction.

According to Rosco, Sanchez also let Drake know that the warrant was not a high priority and he need not be bothered with it during non-business hours. Drake had in fact presented Sanchez with his petition for warrant while his highness was on the first tee of the Riverside Country Club, and Sanchez had blamed his errant drive, a wicked slice that shattered a plastic hummingbird feeder on the clubhouse porch, on the intrusion.

That had been earlier today, late Monday afternoon, and Sanchez was taking the next two days off work due to trial cancellations. Which meant Martha had at least until Thursday before Drake pulled up with a horse trailer, which for all intents and purposes would serve as a hearse.

“Don't you dare let them take you and die on me,” she said to the bison, only a slight revision of the words with which she'd admonished Sean, could it have only been this morning? She could shut her eyes and still feel the kiss. He'd kissed her back; at least he'd done her the courtesy of losing himself to the moment. What if he'd pulled away?

“Don't you dare do anything stupid up there like die on me,” she said, her voice a harsh whisper.

She climbed over the divider and kissed the little bison on the top of his head, and, straightening up with his scent in her nostrils, not wiping her tears nor knowing for whom or for what they were shed, she walked back to her house as the moon drew the upper lip of a smile on the horizon.

S
ean was a spider on the cliff wall when he heard the voices. Indistinct, carrying from somewhere on the plateau above him. He stopped climbing and threaded the parachute cord through the rope hole in the uppermost piton he could reach. He was no mountaineer and didn't really know what he was doing, but the cord around his waist, knotted off short to the piton, gave him some feeling of security. One thing about climbing at night, at least you couldn't see where you'd fall if you slipped, though at this point he was so far from the ground that the point of impact was an academic concern.

Sean tried to smear himself against the rock face. Again, he heard a murmur, a rising and ebbing of sound like a wave. Was it a voice? He tried to put it out of his mind and remember the basics of rock climbing he'd learned as part of his search-and-rescue training.

“Use your legs to climb, your hands and arms for balance,” he recalled the instructor saying. “Nose over toes. Place your foot, shift your weight onto your foot, stand on your foot. Pick up your trailing foot only when there is no longer any weight on it. Repeat.”

It wasn't so bad. There were lots of hand- and footholds. The real danger wasn't slipping but the stone crumbling. The sandstone was “bad rock” in climbing lingo, about as stable as peanut brittle.

Sean searched for another foothold.
Place, shift, stand. Repeat.
And the spider climbed the wall.

—

Two hours had passed since John left him with a handshake. Sean had watched his progress through his binoculars, his heart beating against the ground, trying to squeeze his ears shut to the sound of a shot. The last words John had spoken before walking into the open were that he'd see Sean on the top. “I think they'll let me live at least until I get there,” he'd said.

And maybe they had. At least no shot had been fired as the figure worked around and out of sight, and Sean had waited for darkness, keeping his eyes on the sky as the sun caught on the horizon, bled while the twilight purpled, and then sank behind the mountains.

Only one piton to go now. He had a flash of panic as he lost a handhold and foothold at the same moment and swung out from the cliff face like a barn door, feeling the chasm yawning below him. Then, getting a grip mentally, he used all his strength to bring himself back to the wall. Another heaving effort and he'd drawn himself onto the ledge that formed the lip of the drop-off. He lay there, two hundred feet above the floor of the basin, feeling his chest rise and fall. For a time his mind couldn't seem to focus, his thoughts fleeting, like shards of broken glass. It took a while before he came back into himself, felt the rough rock under his hands.

The plateau, what he could see of it in the darkness, was studded with outcropping of rock, sage clumps, and dwarf piñons. He crawled on hands and knees to the nearest tree, where he sheltered and took stock. He hadn't heard any sounds for the last part of the climb and could hear nothing beyond the cool sifting of the downdraft. The moon was still behind the shoulders of the mountains and the darkness was nearly complete, as the big moving clouds had covered up Mars and the few early stars. The only light was some distance up the plateau, a reddish-orange glow.

A lantern? The gleam of a campfire? Nights set in cold in the mountains, and this was no exception, though the rocks were still warm to the touch. If it was a fire, then all to the good. Staring at fire made you night blind and he'd be able to approach with less caution.
Stooping low, he zigged from one tree to another, closing the gap. The darkness made the fire—it was a fire, he was catching glimpses of flame intermittently—look farther away than it actually was. In the direction of the flames he heard a voice, the words indistinct. But the tone struck Sean as cordial, even friendly.

A few minutes later he'd reached the last tree that afforded cover. It was still a long sixty yards to the fire, a belly-to-ground sixty yards if he didn't want to be seen. He shrugged the rifle off his shoulder and stuck a twig down the barrel to make sure the bore hadn't clogged with dirt. He'd removed the cartridge from the chamber before climbing the cliff and been so relieved after gaining the top that he had forgot to rechamber it. Lever-action rifles have complicated mechanisms, making a sequence of metallic clicks as the lever is operated, and he thought about retreating a distance before reloading. As a fisherman, he knew how far noises carried across water at night, but was less sure how they carried across land. But the rifle was old and well worn, and he had oiled the lever back at Joseph's house, and so he took the chance, working it open and shut with his shirt stuffed over the action to muffle the sound. He adjusted the carrying cord to snug the rifle across his back and started to crawl.

Fifty yards, forty. Again Sean could hear voices, but they were low voices, still unintelligible.

He stopped, determined to think things through before crawling closer. His hands and forearms burned with a hundred tiny cuts. What stung the worst were the spines of prickly pear cactus that had pierced his gloves to imbed into his palms, yet this pain, too, paled in comparison to his heightened sensitivity to the sound and feeling of his breath. Sean had heard hunters talk about going inside themselves when the rifle was lifted and the sights aligned, finding that calm, detached center that was the place from which they killed. When the moment came, he would try to will himself into that impersonal darkness.

But he would have to get closer yet to be sure of the target, let alone
to trust the accuracy of his aim. He took the rifle off his shoulder and held it in his right hand, using only the heel of that hand to crawl forward.

Thirty yards from the fire a saddle-shaped rock with a twist of tree root growing over it blocked his advance and he stopped in its scant cover. He could see the figures now, the slight silhouette of Ida, the men not so clearly differentiated. One sat next to Ida; the other two were side by side with their backs to Sean, on the near side of the fire.

“Are you sure you wouldn't like a s'more?”

Sean recognized Brady's voice, his supercilious mocking tone, the words taunting.

“I had a girlfriend, she liked a glass of wine before sex. Myself, I like a toke and a good s'more. Do I not like a good s'more, Levi?”

There was no answer.

“Levi is quite serious tonight, aren't you, dear brother? He gets this way. I used to think it was the moon, but I've seen him do things of a certain nature at all the lunar phases. Are you sure you don't want one, my dear? You with your contradictory eyes? Oh, come now. No need to cry. It will be over so quickly. Only an hour, even Levi can't go for more than an hour.”

Sean saw Ida's silhouette begin to sway.

“Really, you disappoint. I thought you'd be a firebrand, a raging squaw about it. I—and I speak for my brother, do I not, Levi?—had hoped for a little more . . . spunk.”

“Just kill us. Get it over with.” It was John, his voice thick. He was the one sitting beside Ida. He seemed to be listing to one side. Sean wondered if he'd been beaten or his hands tied behind his back. Regardless, it
was
him, and if John was on the same side of the fire as Ida, then Sean was looking at the backs of the brothers. Brady was a little taller than Levi, but sitting down negated the difference. Who was who here? Who held the pistol that John had seen back at Melvin Campbell's house? And what about the shotgun John had carried in his backpack? They had obviously taken it from him, but where was it?

Again, Brady's voice: “Don't you want a turn before we play ‘Blood Brother'? Surely, John, if one has to die, die satisfied, I say. Don't you agree, Levi?”

“I've got to pee,” Sean heard Levi say. He was sure it was Levi, and as one of the two figures with his back to Sean stood up, Sean immediately saw that both hands were empty. That meant Brady must be in possession of the weapons, Brady, still sitting, whose broad back offered a target even a hundred-year-old rifle could find. But what if the bullet passed through him to strike John or Ida on the far side of the fire?

Move away. Move just a few inches away.
Sean tried to squeeze the thought out, to emit it as a low-frequency wave, and then heard, in a mutter, “Goddamned smoke.” And the figure shifted a foot to the right.

Sean rested the rifle on the saddle-shaped rock, avoiding the root, and lowered his cheek to the stock. He caught a slight blur of motion as the root slipped over the rock. Even before it disappeared, Sean knew what it was. A brief pause, the spit and crackle of the fire against the silence of the night, then the abrupt whir of a rattlesnake.

Sean saw Brady launch himself over the fire at Ida, heard the impact of bodies and then the harsh voice. A command. “Show yourself. Right now! Count of three and she dies. One, two—”

A shot sounded. Sean heard the bullet richochet off a rock ten or fifteen feet away. He froze. The rattlesnake's buzzing seemed to be coming from directly underneath his chest. It must have slid into a hole under the rock.

“Drop your weapon or I'll shoot again.”

Sean willed himself silent. The whirring intensified as the snake shifted its position. Sean could feel it under him, their bodies separated by inches, the vibration in his heart.

“You got him all riled up. Careful now, those things bite.” An edge of nervousness had crept into the voice, an uncertainty. Sean
wondered if the man only had the cartridges remaining in the pistol, that that was why he held his fire.

He gripped the rifle, his thumb on the hammer. Instinct told him to stay perfectly still.

“Get back over here, little brother. Pick up the shotgun. It's on the ground where we were sitting. And turn on your goddamned flashlight so I know where you are.”

Brady stood, dragging Ida up beside him. Sean could see the pistol in his left hand, raised to Ida's ear. The light of the flames licked up and down their bodies. Brady's right arm was around her, was squeezing her against his side, like he was presenting her at prom.
She's mine, isn't she pretty?

“That Levi,” Brady said, the bluster back in his voice, “he drinks too much beer.”

Sean saw Ida sag against him, her head lolling. Her right hand, dangling at her side, looked translucent in the firelight, possessing a silver finger. Sean stared at the glint, something about it, thinking back.

“See,” Brady said. He seemed to be speaking to Sean, or at least in his direction? “No fight at all. No
spunk
. No
juice
. It will be like fucking a bag of peanut shells.”

He squeezed her more tightly, his right arm around her back, the hand cupping her breast. “Feels like you've got a natural pair, darling. I'm a breast man, myself. Levi, though, niceties of the flesh don't matter to him so much. He's got a one-track mind, don't you, Levi?” Shouting now. “Get over here and pick up the goddamned shotgun. I'll tell you what I told that bastard out there with the snake. You've got to the count of three or you don't get another s'more.”

Then pouting, affecting indignation. “See what I have to put up with? It's like hunting with a dog who doesn't come when you blow the whistle.”

At the periphery of his vision, Sean saw the shape of Levi Karlson
extract itself from the darkness. He switched on a flashlight , its sudden beam illuminating his brother standing beside Ida. Sean saw the silver finger in her hand reflect in the firelight.

“One, two . . . two and a half.”

Sean saw Brady turn his head toward his brother, and in that moment Ida's right hand jerked upward, trailing a glitter like a shooting star. Sean heard Brady cough.

Ida's fist was to his throat and he coughed, wetly. The pistol fell as he reached both hands to his throat. She was now supporting him, and as she pulled away he looked around, as if he was seeking a place to sit. He sat down. His hands scrabbled at his throat, the blade black with blood as he drew it out. He looked at it, the knife that Sean had first seen when Ida had stuck the point into his desktop.

“Brady,” his brother said. “Brady, are you all right?”

Sean reached for the flashlight in his pants pocket and swiveled the barrel, turning it on, keeping its beam covered with his hand.

“Goddamn you!” Levi shouted in Sean's direction, his voice hysterical and wild.

Sean threw the flashlight to his right, its beam winking bright, pulsing as it turned over before sparking against the ground. He saw Levi grab at the ground and come up with the shotgun, heard its explosion, and in the vacuum of its echo a scream like a banshee wail, inhuman, piercing.

Sean ran toward the fire, the rifle in his hand but afraid to fire for fear of hitting Ida. He fully expected his charge to be met with another blast from the shotgun. But there were only Levi's sobbing wails, and Sean found the man on his knees, bent over, clamping his hands tightly. Firelight glinted off the shotgun lying on the ground a few feet away.

Ida had the handgun Brady had dropped and was holding it out toward Levi, her arm shaking.

“Don't.” Sean opened her fingers, feeling the tremor of muscles in
her forearm. He took the pistol and held it on Levi as the man staggered to his feet and moved closer to the fire, where his brother lay curled on his side. Levi pulled him to a sitting position and knelt beside him, his cheeks glistening in the light. Brady's eyes were swimming as the blood pulsed from his neck, and Levi shadowed over him with his arms wide, the way Sean had seen hawks mantle over a kill, spreading their wings to hide it from eagles.

Sean turned his attention back to Ida, who had picked up the blade where it had fallen from Brady's fingers. “It's to cut the cord,” she said. “They've got John all tied up with baling twine.” Her voice was steady. She walked toward the shadow of John Running Boy. “You listen to me, John,” Sean heard her say. “I don't want you trying to stand up. Once I cut you loose, you lie there and we'll figure out what's wrong. No, don't try to speak.” A pause. “You're going to be fine.”