Lizardskin (12 page)

He bent down to study the VCR. It had a tape in it, and the illuminated panel said
STOP
. The tape had run through to the end.

Christ! Maybe he had the whole thing on tape!

He rewound the tape and hit the
PLAY
button.

The screen flickered and jumped, and then there was a blank screen with the
TIME-DATE
numbers running.

Today’s date. Thirteen hundred hours this afternoon.

Yes!

Then the picture came up. It was just a fixed camera image, cars and trucks gliding in, people walking around, the normal business of a truck stop. There was no sound.

Beau hit
FAST FORWARD
and everybody jerked into highspeed motion. The day-date-hour indicator flickered forward. Beau kept the button pressed, watching the screen.

Trucks. Cars. People. Senseless motion.

The time indicator ran through 1600 hours.

It was getting close now. Beau took his finger off
FAST FORWARD
and watched the screen.

Bell was in the picture, leaning in a car window, talking to someone, the driver; there was a truck blocking the view. Bell stood up and slammed the roof of the car. It was a big car, black or brown or dark gray. Maybe blue. It looked like an old Caddy. Bell came back up the line of pumps, and the old Caddy pulled away. Bell watched it go, turned back, his face
set and his mouth moving. He disappeared out of the camera line.

Beau hit the
FREEZE-FRAME
button.

Then he hit
REVERSE
and
FREEZE
again.

He leaned forward and looked at the old Cadillac for almost a full minute. The screen popped, and static arced and crackled across the image of the car, Bell leaning in the passenger window.

Beau shook his head and released the
FREEZE
button.

The car was—no, he thought. That’s a different car. Anyway, the image quality sucks. That’s another car entirely. He put the thought away and watched the video roll. Almost time.

Trucks were moving. Beau saw the J. B. Hunt tractor-trailer crossing the lot. More cars pulled away and—

The picture went blank—jumped—popped.

God-
damn
. Someone had shut the camera off.

Bell had shut it off.

Son of a
bitch
!

He ran the tape forward. Junk. Home movies. Some disconnected activities. Then a couple of women, naked, in a hot tub. This part in full color. Beau shut the machine off, and a terrible feeling washed over him.

He was already down on his hands and knees, feeling around under the drawers. He felt under there for a while, but it was just for something to do while he cursed himself out, cursed out Meagher and Joe Bell and the renegades and Vanessa Ballard and everybody else he had locked horns with today.

Because that packet was gone.

There was a sticky patch where the tape had been, and shreds of tape still stuck to the bottom of the drawer. But there was no package. Somebody had got to it. Somebody with the brass to walk through a police crime scene ribbon and take it.

Somebody with a uniform, maybe?

Somebody who knew where it was.

Oh, well, this is real irritating, isn’t it? There sure as hell is something going on, and now if Bell comes back here to look for it and it’s gone, the first thing he’ll do is come to Beau
and ask where the fuck it is. And when Beau doesn’t know, he’ll ask the LT, who sure as God made cold sores will come around and ask Beau what the hell
he
did with it.

And Beau couldn’t even go back to Eustace right now and tell him that the thing was gone because then Eustace would want to know
how
he knew it was gone, and Beau would have to tell him that he knew it was gone because he was down here on his knees looking for it. And he’d have to tell Meagher about the tape, and when you looked at it, the tape wasn’t really relevant. It might show that Bell deliberately shut the camera off, which
might
suggest that Bell knew something was about to happen.…

A lot of suppositions. Better to keep it simp—

“What’re you looking for there, Sergeant?”

Beau jerked up and slammed his shoulder on the edge of the desk. That made it twice today somebody had snuck up on him while he was here in Bell’s office.

“God-
damn it
, Hubert! Don’t tippy-toe around like that. Whaddya want in here, anyway?”

Wozcylesko twisted his large mouth sideways, a man with a party-trick face. “Nothin’. I was just sayin’ I gotta go now.”

“You leaving? Fine. You get it done?”

“Nah. They’re fucked good. Fucking truckers.”

“Truckers—what’d they do?”

“Jokesters. Think they’re funny as tits on a door.”

“Why?”

“Always doing that stunt, fucking up the coin slots like that.”

“Like how? They stick a slug in one? Bubblegum?”

He shook his head vigorously. Beau could almost hear his brain rattling around inside like a dried-up pea in a box.

“Nah … they put that Krazy Glue in ’em. You know, into the coin slots.”

Beau got to his feet and walked across to the phone banks. There were ten phones in a row, three of them electronic ones set up to take credit cards, the other seven coin-operated phones. The kid followed him over and was now putting his tools away in the box.

“How many were vandalized?”

“Just a couple. They’re junk now.”

“And you say the truckers do this? They do it all the time?”

“Yeah … well, not here. But—you know. I heard about this shit. It happens. Kids do it. Truckers. Tourists sometimes.”

“But not
here
before. Not that you know?”

“Well, no. Not here. This’s my route. But I seen it other places. Really.”

“These the only phones?”

“Nah. There’s three out by the diesel pumps.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“You check them?”

“Nah. Not on my sheet.”

“When’d you get the call?”

“To fix these things? Call came in this afternoon. So I hear a whole bunch of people got shot to shit here?”

“Nobody got shot to shit except one young kid. Come outside for a second?”

The kid flinched and twisted his mouth again. “What’re you gonna do? I didn’t do nothin’ wrong. I’m supposed to be here.”

“You go into Joe Bell’s office here?”

“Yeah, once. I hadda call in.”

“You look under his desk?”

“What the fuck’d I do that for?”

Beau stared hard at him. “Take the top off that toolbox.”

“What for?”

“Just do it!”

“Okay … okay … here.”

He lifted the top tray off. Beau knelt down and sorted through needle-nose pliers, bits of wire, fuses, and connectors.

“Okay. First we’re gonna go look through your truck. Then we’re gonna check out those other three phones.”

“You haveta have a warrant.”

“For what?”

“That’s a Mountain Bell truck. That’s a public utility, belongs to the government. I can’t let no civilian in there.”

Beau reached out and gently, very gently, took hold of the kid’s caterpillar moustache. The kid backed away and winced as the moustache stayed where it was, pinched in Beau’s fingers.

“Hubert. Woz. You gotta help me here. I’m being as civil as I can be.”

The kid started to squeal. Beau let him go, and he lurched back. Beau caught him by the arm and led him out toward the gas pumps. The kid was silent. He radiated sulk. Something else Beau would hear about next week.

Beau spent ten minutes rooting through the junk in the back of the Mountain Bell van. He found nothing. The van smelled strongly of solvent. It burned the nostrils and made his eyes run. And under that, another scent, spicy, like incense or …

Beau opened the glove compartment. The kid yelped at him, but he held up a hand to quiet him. He stepped back out and looked at the foil-wrapped package in the light of an arc lamp.

“What’ve we got here, son?”

The kid looked like he was going to wet himself. He backed away a couple of steps, absolute terror in his eyes.

Heartbeat ruffling, thinking maybe he had found Bell’s package, Beau ripped the tinfoil cover. The musky scent rose up out of his palm. Buds and dark-brown leaves rolled in the foil.

Suddenly Beau felt ashamed of himself. Why was he taking all this out on poor Hubert Wozcylesko? All the kid was trying to do was get away with his stash.

“Hey,” he said, putting his hands up, trying on his friendliest smile. “Relax, kid. I was looking for something else.”

The kid’s face went through a number of changes, settling on relief. “I didn’t mean nothing, Sergeant.”

“Son, I’ll never understand why we go to so much trouble to ban something that grows by the side of the road. Might as well ban wildflowers or dandelions, right?”

“Yeah … say, you’re chilly. You’re okay, Sarge.”

“Sure I am. Chilly as penguin shit. And we forget about our little snit-fit in there, too, right, Woz?”

“Oh, sure. All forgotten … say, … aahh?”

“Hope you’re not going to ask for your dope back, kid.”

“Oh, no, sir. No, sir! In no way, sir!”

“Kid, your truck smells of kerosene or solvent. You got a leak or something?”

Woz swallowed and looked a little startled, but his voice was steady when he answered. “No. That’s fixer for fiberglass. I’m doing some bodywork on my car, and I got a can of the fixer in the back there.”

“You not into sniffing or anything, Woz?”

Woz rose up in righteousness. “
No, sir!
I seen what that shit does to you. Some of those poor Crow kids, they get into that. Fries their brains! That stuff is poison. I’ll get that can outta there soon’s I get back to the yard!”

“Good. Now let’s see about those phones.”

They were fine. It troubled Beau that the kid was out here, rooting around in a crime scene, and it troubled him even more that the kid
might
be leaving with that disk from under Bell’s desk.

Beau felt a new wave of fatigue. He had been a cop for a very long time, and the more he saw of people, the more he disliked them. Anybody who wanted to be a cop ought to be required to spend a few days cleaning up in the monkey house. He’d learn all he ever had to know about human beings while he was working in a monkey house. There were only three reasons a monkey did anything! Food. Fuck. Or fight.

In human terms, that’d be money, sex, or revenge. Beau had never seen a crime that didn’t come down to one or the other, or sometimes two out of three.

Maybe the kid was just a kid, and the phones had nothing to do with anything. He thought for a long while about calling Ident to get some prints off the pay phones but finally decided against it. He could hear Vanessa Ballard taking that one apart in a prelim.

“Now, let me get this straight, Sergeant McAllister. You
found fingerprints belonging to Joe Bell on these pay phones?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“These pay phones that actually belong to Joe Bell?”

“Ah—er,… well, not to him technically.”

“Pay phones placed on or around his legal business?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And you suggest that you found it suspicious that these pay phones, which were placed on Mr. Bell’s property, actually had Mr. Bell’s prints on them?”

“Along with others, ma’am.”

“What others?”

“Well, we haven’t been able to determine that yet.”

“Haven’t been able—Sergeant McAllister, I submit to you—”

God, he hated it when Ballard submitted to him.

Well, actually, if you put it
that
way …

Putting it
that
way, it was clearly time for a beer.

He saw the kid off in his Mountain Bell truck, did a final walkaround to secure the premises, and climbed back into the cruiser. It was now close to midnight, and he had been on duty since six that morning. Close to eighteen hours in the saddle. Time to call it a night. Whatever the hell else was going to happen, it could happen without Beau’s help. He thought about the sound of Emmylou Harris coming from Fogarty’s New York Bar. There’d be enough time to drop in for a couple of cold beers, see how Fogarty was doing.

“Five eleven to Central. You there, Beth?”

“Hi, Beau.”

“Anything on that wagon?”

“Not a peep. Heard from Tony Pietrosante a while back. Said he was on his third tank, and that you could … that you’d know what you could do with this search.”

Beau laughed. “He’s got that right. Anything from Trooper Benitez?”

“Trooper Benitez seems to have gotten his vehicle stuck in a coulee somewhere off the Ballantine side road, Beau.”

Shit.

“Somewhere?
Somewhere?
Benitez doesn’t know his ten-twenty?”

“That seems to be the sitrep, Beau.”

“
Sitrep?
Jeez, Beth. We got anybody out looking for him?”

“Negative, Beau.”

“You gonna talk like that, Beth, you gotta say nega
tory
!”

“Negatory, Beau. All the Charlie cars are either doing patrol around Twilly’s or along the interstate. We have no one to clear for him at this time.”

“What about traffic?”

“No cars at this time. Benitez has one. The others are on a RADD program down the line.”

“You hearing from him?”

“Ten-four, Beau. Last time was ten minutes ago. Says he’s up to his ax-holes.”

Beau could feel that smile stretch his tired skin all the way to his sideburns. “Up to his ax-holes, Beth?”

“Actually, he said he was ‘stock up to my focking ax-holes in theez focking ay-
roy
-oh!’ Beau.”

“Yeah? Well, Beth, my dove, I am looking at eighteen hours in the saddle, and I feel like somebody put kitty litter in my boxer shorts. I propose that I reconnoiter in the vicinity of Fogarty’s New York Bar to see if I can identify any undesirable elements such as might be contemplating the violent overthrow of the sovereign State of Montana and the tugging down of the pants and garters of our appointed representatives. I will be OTA should Trooper Benitez manage to clarify his locationary
die
-lemma. Five eleven is OTA, my darling.”