Lizardskin (19 page)

Tom’s dark green eyes showed a small glint. “Dwight’s a real convenient boy, isn’t he?”

“Yeah, well, what’re you gonna do?”

“Time for a lawyer, Beau. You’re up to your ass in alligators, get a bigger alligator.”

“Hate lawyers. And who has the money?”

“Well, of course, you’re doing real well by yourself now.”

“Let’s drop this, Tom. I’m doing what I can.”

Tom eased his bony frame into a chair and grinned through his shaggy moustache.

“Beau, you think, just by lying down and making no fuss, they’ll go easy on Bobby Lee, stop poisoning her about you? These people don’t think like that. You be
nice
, they’ll think you’re afraid of them. Stop trying to get them to
like
you, Beau. Start making them
afraid
of you!”

“How the hell I do that?”

Tom sighed and rubbed his mouth. “Jesus, Beau—half of Montana’s afraid of you. The other half’s got money on you. Why don’t you stand up for yourself?”

Beau closed his eyes, and Tom decided to give it a rest.

“You see the piece in the
Gazette
?”

Beau winced. “About me?”

“So they say. Haven’t seen it yet. I called about you. They tell me Meagher’s gone over to Hardin to talk to the Big Horn County guys, see if they’ve got anything to add to the story. There’s a big fuss building up about all this, I guess you’d know that?”

“Stands to reason. Anything on the news this morning?”

“Radio says big gunfight at Arrow Creek. Mentions you, here and there. And they bring up that accident last week in Hardin, killed the young Crow girl and her baby? Sorta suggesting that you cops are trying to finish what the U.S. Cavalry started.”

Beau groaned again, and there was a silence that stretched out in a kind of calming, comfortable way.

After a few minutes, Blasingame got up and walked over to study the man in the next bed.

“Now there’s a feller, got a hard road under him.”

Beau nodded. “I’ve been wondering about him. That machine there, looks serious.” He lowered his voice to match Blasingame’s soft tones. “He conscious?”

“Not so’s you’d notice,” said Blasingame, stroking his handlebar moustache. “Got him on a respirator. I’d say it was a fire or something. He’s blue as a trout, and there’s hoses all over him.”

“Christ! It’s not Danny Burt or an Indian-looking guy, is it?”

Blasingame shook his head. “I know Danny. Just a minute.”

He picked up the chart, flipped the steel cover back, and read down the sheet. “Nope. Truck fire, it says. There’s a notation here from the cops, too.”

“Which branch?” asked Beau.

“Billings City. ‘Notify if conscious.’ ”

Beau sat up, some vague uneasiness stirring in his belly. “Let me see the chart, Tom?” Blasingame handed it across.

Beau read through the half-legible scrawl and the feathery
computer print. He found the name at the bottom of the sheet. He stared at it for a while, then looked up at Blasingame.

“Anybody seen my clothes?”

Blasingame smiled at him, reached down, and tossed him a big paper bag. It landed on his bed with a weighty thump. Beau pulled the top open. Jeans, boots, a fresh shirt. Deodorant, shave cream and razor, toothbrush and paste, socks, and underwear. And the Smith & Wesson .44 from beside his bed back in Lizardskin. And a belt holster. And a Speed-Loader spare.

“Jesus—no cats?”

“Feets and McAvity’re at your trailer. I fed ’em both before I came over. Stonewall’s staying with me till you’re back. They’re fine, Beau. What’s the trouble?”

Beau rang the buzzer for Hanrahan. “There’s something goin’ on, and nobody’s taking it seriously.”

Blasingame was staring at the sheet. “I don’t get it. You know this guy Bucky Blitzer?”

“No. But who does he work for?”

Blasingame searched the printout. “Mountain Bell? So what?”

“So somebody burned a Mountain Bell truck last night.”

“Yeah? Well, actually, some truck burned, is all you can tell from this. Why does this—what’s the problem with it?”

“Coincidences. I don’t like ’em.” Beau rang the call button again, hard and repeatedly. “I’m not waiting.”

“Waiting for what? Christ, Beau, you gotta stay in bed. This makes no sense at all!”

“I know! I know. I just got a feeling. Something’s going on, and nobody’s paying attention. It’s gone on long enough.”

They all heard a brassy bellow from down the hall.

“Hold your water, Mr. McAllister! Others here worse’n you!”

“There you go,” said Beau. “Anytime I want to commit suicide, I’m just gonna check into a hospital.”

Tom Blasingame listened to the squeak and slap getting closer. A voice full of brimstone and methane boomed in the hall.

“I’m
coming
, Mr. McAllister! Don’t get your testicles in a twist!”

Blasingame reached over the footrail and lifted the paper bag off the bed. Beau watched him do it.

“Now, look, Tom.”

“Now nothing. Look at your leg, Beau.”

He looked down at it. The plastic tube was dripping darker fluid now, and more of it, and faster.

“That’s blood, Beau. That’s supposed to be on the
in
-side.”

Beau started to tug the tube free of his wound. The world went white in the middle and red around the edges. His skull filled with helium, and he began to drift across the room.

Blasingame caught him just as the Hanrahan chugged into the room. She took in the scene and seemed to rise up a few inches off the floor.

“Were we playing with our tube, McAllister?”

Beau had a nasty answer to that. He hoped he’d remember it if he ever regained consciousness.

There was a policeman sitting on a plastic chair, leaning back in it, bracing it on the wall beside a set of double doors marked:

He was young and soft-looking under the dark blue uniform. The crest on his short-sleeved shirt said
BILLINGS CITY POLICE
, against an embroidered background of mountains and cacti. He was wearing a big stainless-steel Smith & Wesson .357 on his black webbed leather belt and holding a copy of the
Billings Gazette
in heavy hands, frowning over the comics. Gabriel Picketwire stepped back into the elevator and rode it back down to the lobby.

Well, he should have expected that.

The sensible thing to do was to go to the cops and ask them to look into the background. Tell them about Jubal’s suspicions, tell them about the babies. If Jubal was right, the numbers would bear him out—at least enough to get their attention.

If
Jubal was right.

And if he was wrong, or if the local cops were as aggressive as they looked so far, then he’d find himself in a small room answering unfriendly questions. Once they had his face and name, his ability to act independently would be finished. They’d tie him up with questions and probably put a man on him.

Well, he’d decide later.

Right now, see about Donna.

He stepped out into the lobby and walked over to the directory.

Sweetwater General Hospital was a big-city hospital, sprawling through several wings in the west end of Billings. The directory showed a you-are-here map and named the various wings: Terry Wing, Viral Research, Cardiovascular, Ob-Gyn, Hogeland Oncology Wing, Bridger Wing, ICU North, Pathology. The map was pretty detailed about the layout, and Gabriel stood there in the middle of the deserted lobby, listening to the waxer whining down one of the shiny terrazzo halls, studying it with his mind as empty and still as he could make it.

He had come in earlier in the afternoon to scout it out. The registry clerk had been unhelpful concerning his fictitious Uncle William Roan Horse.

They’d had seven Native Americans admitted in the past twenty-four hours, as far as she could tell from the names. Native Americans usually had a federal Medicare number, and the only ones that had been admitted with that kind of notation bore no similarity to this William Roan Horse.

She had shuffled rather perfunctorily through a computer menu full of names, glancing sidelong up at him through the glass screen that protected her from contamination by the actual public out there. Gabriel asked to see the list, see if he recognized any family members. She recoiled and shook her head. He pressed her. She got angry.

“Look, mister. There’s no one here who sounds like your uncle. We had eight Native Americans in the past few days, none of them sound like your uncle. One young girl, a Jane Doe; one boy, fell off a tree limb chasing a cat; three for kidney dialysis; one Crow man, victim of an accident on the interstate, hit by a tractor-trailer; and two young Crow women having babies.”

“A Jane Doe?”

She gave him a hard look. “Are you asking for her?”

“No—just curious.”

“She was admitted last night at midnight. She’s in intensive care. Head injuries. Anyone inquiring after her is asked to contact the Yellowstone County Sheriff or the Highway Patrol. Are you inquiring?”

“No,” said Gabriel, shaking his head. He pestered her awhile longer, just to blur the issue a bit. His uncle was a drinker, he explained, and he’d been trying to reach him last night. Finally had to fly in, see if he was in the hospital. Sometimes he forgets his name, forgets to carry ID.

So try Detox. She gave him the address. Told him it was always full of Indians. She gave him a look that implied that he’d know all about Detox, know the color of the paint in the shower and the kind of soup they served on Tuesdays.

He thanked her and walked away. Sorry to bother you.

He felt her watching him as he walked across the expanse of pale marble toward the glass doors, seeing only a tall lean man limping away in a long black raincoat, black slacks and boots, his long shiny blue-black hair pulled back in a ponytail caught in a Navajo silver ring.

She’d remember him, certainly. He should have brought clothes that suited the region. He should have waited until his knee was better. He had to credit Dr. Sifton, though, for turning him around. When a man like that thinks poorly of you, you’re sliding. If he looked West Coast to her, that was too bad. But if he moved fast enough, it wouldn’t matter.

The evening air was soft and full of the smell of growing things. And gasoline and smog, like any city, like all the High Plains towns. They all looked as if they’d been put up last week. No old buildings that hadn’t been turned into tourist snares. All the new buildings looking so new, your eye slid right over them. It was a characteristic of these places that sooner or later you found yourself looking away from them, up to the hills and the buttes, where you could still get a feeling of permanence and stability.

Billings was in a long low valley, cut by the Yellowstone ten thousand years ago. Ten thousand years ago, this land had
belonged to no one. Maybe ten thousand years from now, things would get back to normal around here. Gabriel hoped so, although he didn’t really believe it and didn’t feel that it was something he had a part in.

Still, it felt good to have made a decision, to have resolved to act in this thing. Dr. Sifton was—there was more to him than you saw right away. The doc had fixed him up with some Percodan and some amphetamines and written him a note to show Nigel Hampton and the rest of the crew. He was on full pay but released for injury. The director had just been relieved that Gabriel wasn’t talking about a lawsuit. Sifton even drove him to LAX and saw him on the plane.

Well, he’d find Donna, see about a sing for her. She’d like that. It would help her to get better. He’d taken the sing from a record he’d found in the ethnology library at USC in Irvine. Some busybody scholar had traveled the plains taping the old sings.

He’d made a cassette of it and listened to it on the plane. The sonorous drone and the rise and fall of it were strangely comforting. It meant little to him, perhaps as little as the words of the old Latin Mass meant to modern Catholics; relics of a dead age, empty sound and ritual, something they did in memory of a god who had forgotten them before the planet had cooled.

Well, he’d give it to Donna. She could listen to it, try to make it work for her. Donna was a believer.

Head wound … intensive care …

He found a bar across the street and waited until the shifts changed. At ten, the place had filled up with off-duty nurses and interns, having a frantically good time at the tops of their lungs, drinking white wine and imported beers, and talking all at once about the day’s disasters and intrigues. They reminded him of the film crew, chattering birds in bright colors, wild in the eyes and brainless, full of herky-jerky motion, driving their bosses wild with sloth and union arrogance.

Sitting in the midst of them, radiating a certain stillness, he knew they had given him a circle, staying away in a kind of atavistic recognition of the—oddness—of the man in the black
linen slacks and the black shirt buttoned up to the collar, the Navajo silver at his neck and his waist.

Gabriel leaned forward onto his arms and studied his reflection in the long etched mirror behind the bar, seeing the shadows in his bony face and the darkness where his eyes were, the mahogany-skull look he never managed to soften. There was no point in trying to stay unnoticed. It never worked.

They looked soft and satisfied. Probably the night shift would be just as soft, and lazier. The visitors would be gone, too. He’d have the place to himself.

So he drank a bit and tried not to think about Jubal and Earl and James. They’d come to him, tried to get him to listen to their story. He had listened long enough to dismiss it as one more paranoid fantasy. And Gabriel was tired of all the old paranoias, the conspiracy horses the old men liked to ride, tired of every whining Indian complaint.

The Pinda-Lickoyee were responsible for every evil thing that had overtaken the Dakota? Tell
that
to the Crow or the Pawnee, the Ree or the Ute or the Flathead, all of whom had seen their villages burned and their young men flayed in the Kakeshya by the Santee and the Yankton and the Teton people for a hundred years before the Isanhanska soldiers had come. Slaughter had been the entertainment of the Great Plains.