Coyote Wind (9 page)

She’d be maybe sixty now? Du Pré hadn’t seen her in more than twenty years.

Aunty Pauline.

Who Mama wouldn’t speak of after that one time.

Du Pré didn’t know what had happened. Long time ago.

Where was Aunty Pauline now?

Red River.

D
U
P
RÉ WAS FLICKING
his eyes over the brands, the cattle bawled in the chute. Funny job he had, no one needed him, then they opened the newspaper, saw prices up, or the banker didn’t want to extend the note and they all wanted him right now. He’d be working till midnight tonight, for sure.

Pretty dull, too. While I’m here, somebody within twenty miles is losing cattle. The thieves pay attention to the market price, too.

“Du Pré! DU PRÉ!” the rancher yelling, right in Du Pré’s ear.

Du Pré didn’t take his eyes off the stock.

“All hell broke loose up to that rich folks’ place,” said the rancher, “the Sheriff’s been shot dead.”

“What?” Du Pré took his eyes off the stock.

“I got a scanner,” said the rancher. “Deputies screaming, say the Sheriff’s dead on the lawn and people are shooting from the house.”

Du Pré looked back at the stock, found his place. Brands all OK. So what’s this? Shit.

“Don’t you need to get over there?”

“No,” said Du Pré. “I need to see this stock loaded, then I got to go over to Koch’s to see about theirs. There’s nothing I can do about … all that crap at Fascellis’.” Dumb bastard, that Sheriff.

So they loaded the cattle, Du Pré signed off, got in his car, cursed a while, turned on the radio.

“DUPREE DUPREE DUPREE GOD DAMN IT COME IN DUPREE DUPREE!” said the dispatcher, sounding hoarse.

“Yes,” said Du Pré, very quietly.

“DUPREE!”

“Yes,” said Du Pré, “it’s me. And the answer is no.”

“Get over to the Fascellis right away, the guy shooting says he will come out but he wants you there, wants to walk out with you. Won’t have anybody else. MOVE IT.”

Shit. SHIT.

“No,” said Du Pré. “I don’t do that, no.”

The dispatcher started screaming, so Du Pré switched off his radio. Rolled a cigarette. Smoked it. Spat out the window.

He switched the radio back on.

“What about the Sheriff, now?”

“DU PREE, he’s dead on the damn lawn. Look, I am sorry I yelled at you. Please go over there before somebody else gets killed. Please.”

“OK.” SHIT SHIT SHIT.

Du Pré thought maybe he’d drive over to Benetsee’s hideout, stay drunk for a week. What’s this all about, now? Huh?

He drove toward Fascelli’s, the Crossed Eyes Ranch. I look at cow asses, I don’t have to do this I don’t have to do this.

But I do.

Shit. SHIT.

He could see the house, spotlighted. A helicopter circled over it.

The Sheriff was on his back on the lawn, his head all bloody. He was wearing a bulletproof vest.

Seven deputies were crouched around, some Highway Patrolmen, lots of assault rifles and shotguns.

“Now, what?” said Du Pré. He had decided to address this to a silver-haired Highway Patrolman who looked so disgusted he likely had a fair idea of what was really going on. Du Pré guessed.

“You Du Pré,” said the HP. He had Scott Parsons on a nameplate above his left shirt pocket.

“Yes,” said Du Pré.

“Well,” said Parsons, “this guy keeps screaming that he won’t come out unless you go in, he didn’t shoot the Sheriff, and he also feels that we are a bunch of fucking assholes.”

“No shit,” said Du Pré.

“He’s probably right on all counts,” said Parsons.

“How many other people in there?”

“I don’t know,” said Parsons. “When I got here things were about like they are.”

“OK,” said Du Pré, “I go talk to him.” He walked out across the lawn, hollering “BART BART! It’s DU PRÉ.” He walked out into the lights, holding his hands away from his sides.

“That is you, Du Pré,” said Fascelli.

“I don’t got a gun,” said Du Pré. “Where’s your sister, the maids and all?”

“In the swimming pool,” said Bart. “It’s empty. When these idiot assholes started shooting I had them get in there. I got in there, too. Where do they find these people, anyway?”

Du Pré looked down at the Sheriff. His face was gone. So he’d been shot in the back of the head.

“OK,” said Du Pré, “I am coming up to the front door and I am arresting you and I am taking you to the jail. We do it fast, OK?”

“Sure,” said Fascelli.

Du Pré went to the big ornate carved front door, it opened, Bart stepped out. Du Pré took his arm.

“I don’t got no handcuffs,” said Du Pré, “but we play I do.”

“Hi, Mom,” said Fascelli, smiling out at the floodlights. He clasped his hands behind his back while Du Pré pretended to clap cuffs on his wrists.

Du Pré and his prisoner walked out to the silver-haired Highway Patrolman.

“I arrest him,” said Du Pré, “you drive us to the jail, huh?”

“You read him his rights?” said Parsons.

“Oh, yes, officer,” said Fascelli.

Du Pré and Fascelli got in the back of the car. Du Pré left the door open.

“You got some handcuffs I can borrow,” said Du Pré. “He ought to be wearing them we get to the jail.”

Parsons unsnapped the case on his belt, unlocked the cuffs, and handed them to Du Pré.

“You don’t have to do that,” said Fascelli. “I won’t give you any trouble.”

“Look,” said Du Pré, “you better be wearing these when we get there, these fools think you half-escaped or something.” He looked at the shot-up house, the milling deputies, all armed, all looking very lost.

He snapped the cuffs on Bart’s wrists.

Parsons drove fast all the way to Cooper.

The last sight Du Pré had of the scene of the siege was of four people standing around the body of the Sheriff.  But that Sheriff, he wasn’t ever going to get up.

“D
U
P
RÉ.” SAID
M
ADELAINE
, “you been having a rough time lately. Maybe you better go see Father Van Den Heuvel.”

“I need to build up my sins,” said Du Pré. “Big stack of them so that God handles this personally.”

Madelaine threw up her hands. All this means, Du Pré, he has to blaspheme.

“So what did Foosli tell you?”

“He said he’s inside the house, having drinks with his sister, the Sheriff is suddenly on the lawn with a bullhorn yelling for Bart to come out with his hands up. So he goes to the window, wondering who is playing this joke on him, and there is this shot, hits the Sheriff right in the back of the head, comes from behind the fence and the hedge. The other deputies go crazy, they shoot for a while or scream into the radio for a while, and Bart tells everybody in the house, get into the swimming pool—they got one there, middle of the house, cause they won’t get shot there. They get in it.”

Madelaine poured some more coffee for Du Pré.

“So then Bart say he shoot a few times over their heads, say he won’t surrender to no one but me. ‘They are stupid and crazy,’ said Bart to me, ‘so I know you at least.’ He trusts me. I don’t blame him, not wanting come out in front of them deputies.”

“But who shoot the Sheriff?” said Madelaine.

 Du Pré thought that he knew but he also thought he didn’t give a rusty shit at this point. Also he wasn’t going to tell anyone he damn well knew old Booger Tom had done it, see if he could get the cops so riled they kill everyone in the house.

“Whew,” said Madelaine, “What the Sheriff going to arrest him for, anyway?”

“I don’t know,” said Du Pré.

“This very mysterious.”

“This very stupid, what this is, I think. You seen Maria?”

“At the grocery store.”

Du Pré nodded. “I better go out to the house, see if she is there, tell her I love her, case she’s forgot.”

“Du Pré,” said Madelaine, “why don’t you tell me you love me, case I forgot.”

They held each other.

Du Pré went out, started up his old car, shifted into reverse.

Madelaine came after him.

“Du Pré,” she said, “you got a dirty temper, you keep it close for me and Maria and Jacqueline and all. You don’t got a mean bone in your body but you sure got lots of mad ones. Mad bones break pretty easy. All them cops, they are upset. One of them get shot dead, the others go crazy.”

Du Pré nodded.

“Give my love to Maria,” said Madelaine.

They all really take care of me, Du Pré thought. Now what I do for them? Really?

Maria was in the kitchen, cooking a goose. She’d washed the colored crap out of her hair and didn’t have any makeup on. She had enormous black eyes, like her mama. She moved like her mama. Du Pré suddenly went very sad.

“Lots of calls on the phone, I told everybody you went to the dog races, Spokane,” said Maria. She grinned.

Du Pré smiled. Maybe he would go to Spokane, hide out.

“Some lawyer for Fascelli called, wants you to call him. He’s staying in Cooper, the little motel.”

Du Pré grunted. Fascelli, he wasn’t guilty of anything but a busted life, got to be cold as the moon. Back of the head, the slug that got the Sheriff. Booger Tom? Could the old fart still see that well? Or did one of the deputies get the twitch, all the wide world to hit and the bullet gets the Sheriff?

“I’m the head of the Honor Roll again,” said Maria. “So I thought today, this morning, I’d wash my face and be a good little Catholic girl again.”

Du Pré nodded. He’d never been fooled, but he had held his breath a few times.

“Also I don’t think you need to talk to Bucky Dassault again. You got plenty on your plate, Papa. I won’t let you down.”

“You never have let me down, Maria,” said Du Pré. “Maybe I let you down sometimes. I don’t know what to do, you know.”

“No, you love me good. You proud of me, proud of Jacqueline.”

“Yes.”

“Can I help you,” Maria said, “I would, too.”

Du Pré hugged her. Maria gave him a sunny wide smile.

Du Pré drove off to Cooper, see this attorney. Probably some expensive attorney from New York or something. Lizard briefcase. Manicure.

Platform shoes.

“T
HIS FARCE,” SAID THE
attorney, “confirms what I always believed to be the case of Montana.”

Young guy, lots of money, three-piece suit fit him so well he seemed to flow one place to another, like water. Long thin dark face. Deep, precise voice.

Probably never been on a dirt road before in his life.

“They don’t do things like this, Dee-troyt?” said Du Pré. He sipped his coffee.

The lawyer regarded his with loathing, like it had dripped out of a sick bull.

“Did you know,” said the attorney, “that Mr. Fascelli was holding the squadrons of the law at bay with a starter pistol? That there wasn’t a live round of ammunition in the house, for obvious reasons. Barbara Fascelli is at the Betty Ford Center for the nth time. Bart will be out on bond this very day, and I will take him to a quiet place in Michigan. The maids left in a body, the masseur left with the hairdresser, the refrigerator is full of rotting caviar, and there is no case whatever. Thank you, by the way, for saving the life of my client. Each time one or another Fascelli dies there is a protracted struggle over the remaining millions. The money is excellent, but the work squalid.”

Du Pré had never met a creature like this attorney, Foote. He thought about it. Probably didn’t matter who got elected president, this was one of them as ran the country. Quietly.

“What do you think of all this?” said Foote, leaning forward. He seemed genuinely interested in Du Pré’s thoughts.

“I don’t know,” said Du Pré. “I kind of like Bart. But he got not one chance in life he don’t run away, take nothing of that damn money, spend his days washing dishes or something. He’s not a bad guy, but he is in a very bad place.”

“No,” said Foote, “he is not a bad guy, and that is that.”

“But who shot the Sheriff?” said Du Pré.

“One of the deputies, probably,” said Foote. “I have yet to see the autopsy and ballistics report, but I would expect one or another of his faithful sidekicks misfired while loading one or another of the assault rifles.”

Booger Tom probably can’t see that well anyway, thought Du Pré, and I don’t care.

“One thing I still don’t know,” said Du Pré. “What was the Sheriff going to arrest Bart for?”

“Um,” said Foote, “you really don’t know? He was going to arrest Bart for murdering his brother, Gianni, who disappeared nearly thirty years ago.”

Du Pré nodded. “So the teeth match up?”

“Maybe they do, maybe they don’t,” said Foote. “Nothing back from the state lab. The Sheriff, mind you—he must have been pretty drunk—didn’t even have a warrant.”

Du Pré looked up, laughed. “You’re shitting me.”

“I am not. I suppose he spent a couple pleasant days at the jug, watching Clint Eastwood movies over and over. Like I said, I had always suspected Montana was a place chockful of people too stupid to walk downhill, which is where civilization is, if you are at all interested.”

Du Pré nodded. He wasn’t interested in civilization.

“Anyway,” said Foote, “I bear thanks to you from Bart, who feels you probably saved his life. So do I.”

 Du Pré shrugged.

“Bart only understands giving money away to express gratitude. He is astute enough to realize that you do not need or want money, and he fervently wishes that he was the same. But he did think that an offer to send your daughter to any school she can get into, all expenses, all travel, everything, contingent upon her making good grades—he is not prepared to render another human being as worthless as he feels himself to be—might possibly not be offensive to you.”

Du Pré’s eyebrows shot up. He suddenly realized that Maria would have her dream, if she wanted it, and she might not know even that it was her dream. She wanted the best, would work hard for it.

Now, Du Pré, he thought, don’t get the swelled head.

“Well,” said Du Pré, “it’s fine with me, but my opinion, it don’t mean shit, really, so he would have to talk to my daughter.”

Foote’s eyes shot up. Sideways. He tipped his chair back and laughed.