Lizardskin (2 page)

Charlie Tallbull was slouching low in the driver’.s seat of his Ford pickup, a straw cowboy hat pushed back away from his seamed and craggy face, his big scarred hands crossed on his wide belly. He saw Mary Littlebasket crossing the dried grass of the schoolyard, a flutter of flowered cotton and black hair and a small blue burden in her arms. He started the engine of the pickup and eased it out into the side street.

Dell Greer and Moses Harper were sitting in their Big Horn County cruisers a couple of miles away up the Whitman Coulee toward Lizardskin, parked driver-to-driver, drinking coffee laced with Bailey’s Irish Cream out of Styrofoam cups.

Greer had a part-time cattle operation that he and his wife were trying to run up in the Bulls. He and Harper looked a lot alike, thick-bodied, late twenties, both blond and crew cut, as nicely matched as artillery shells. Harper was a little older than Greer, and maybe a little slower to get angry. They were arguing the relative merits of Black Angus and Aberdeen when the dispatcher came on the radio and told them there was a break-in alarm at the Julia Dwight Clinic.

Moses Harper took the call, and the morning being slow and the hours heavy, Dell Greer decided to follow along. They turned south onto the Lizardskin road, a couple of brown and tan cruisers with the gold crest of Big Horn County on their doors. Accelerating, they cleared the rise and saw Hardin in the flats, a collection of red-brick and wood-frame houses under twisted cottonwoods, hazy in the growing heat. Behind them a tail of yellow dust rose into the changing sky, burning amber in the hard light of the rising sun.

It was thirteen minutes after five, on a warming June day. A high-pressure area centered in Coeur d’Alene had spread itself out over central Montana, driving the thunderheads north
into Alberta and Saskatchewan and east into the flatlands of the Dakotas. The air was muted and gauzy, softening the edges of the rolling green hills and the spires and peaks of the Bighorn range into a wash of glowing blues, rich deep browns, wide bands of ochre, russet, and sage, the dusty blue of high pines, and the sudden bright arc of copper and black granite. A few miles north and west, the smoke and fumes from the Cenex refinery were drifting westward down the Yellowstone Valley between the Rimrock and the southern bluffs, settling down over the skyline and the railheads and the shipping yards of Billings like a dirty brown blanket. But here along the Bighorn the air was as bright and clear as the edge of a straight razor.

Except for the small shape of Mary Littlebasket running across the drying grasses of the empty schoolyard, and the rust-red pickup moving toward her along a side street, and a few blocks to the north near the I-90, the two Big Horn cruisers rolling into the little town, Hardin was soundless in sleep and dreams.

The security guard was a forty-nine-year-old man named Bill Haugge, three years divorced from a check-out clerk named Violet who had stapled weekly summaries of his serial shortcomings to his forehead for eleven years before he finally left their house in Billings and took this job at the Julia Dwight Clinic. Haugge was emphysemic and overweight and he drank too much, but he had good eyes and he saw Mary Littlebasket right away, running through the cottonwoods. At the same time he saw Charlie Tallbull’s old pickup come around the corner, and he remembered the nurse saying that a baby had been taken, and he knew right away that there was no way that Fat Bill Haugge was going to catch her in a footrace. So he tugged out his Ruger—first time he’d had it out of the holster since he’d passed the Highway Patrol Firearms Certification Test in Laurel two years ago—and he raised it above his right shoulder, muzzle skyward, and squeezed one off.

The muzzle blast blew his right eardrum in and knocked him sideways into the iron handrail to the left of the stairs, where he hit his head—hard—on the spur of it, and his Ruger
fell out of his hands and clattered down the concrete stairs to the pavement. The deep booming sound of the blast carried over the rooftops of Hardin in the dense warm air, and Dell Greer got on the horn with a shots-fired signal as they both accelerated.

The muzzle blast woke up every crow on the roof of the clinic. They exploded into the air, a black shout of crows shooting skyward. The concussive wave that traveled out across the schoolyard shook several hundred bats out of the cottonwood branches—they flew upward in a fluttering mass of leathery brown wings. Mary Littlebasket felt it as a puff of breath on the small of her back, and her heart flew upward in her chest until it slammed into the back of her throat and she was flying, flying, across the dry grass toward Charlie Tallbull, where he was pulling the pickup to a stop. The passenger door was now wide open—she could see him leaning forward at the wheel, a big old mahogany bull of a man in faded jeans and a straw hat, waving her on, and she was just slipping into the cab of the truck, her baby tight to her chest, when the two Big Horn cruisers came around the corner, flat-out and sliding a bit in the gritty ochre dust that covered Hardin in the summer. Moses Harper went for the pickup, and Dell Greer peeled off to check out the alarm call at the Dwight Clinic.

Charlie Tallbull slammed his accelerator down and cut the truck hard right onto the access road for I-90 and then hard right again, seeing the eerie geometry of the interstate and the infinity of the hills all around him and the smoky blue peaks of the Bull range far away at the vanishing point of the endless curving road. He powered up the ramp, and then he was running the
YIELD
sign and blue smoke was pouring out of the pickup’s tailpipe, and Moses Harper was getting blue smoke and raw carbon monoxide in his face as he pushed the cruiser right up the man’s tailgate.

Dell Greer slid his cruiser to a stop and ran across the parking lot to the clinic stairs, where Bill Haugge was just now sitting up with blood running from his right ear and his left temple. A small nosebleed stained his uniform shirt.

Moses Harper heard Dell’s voice on the radio saying that a
man had been shot at the Dwight Clinic and that 229 was in pursuit of a brown—Moses was thinking it wasn’t really brown, it was more of a red-rust color—1974 Ford pickup—Dell was really pretty good at identifying running vehicles. He was about to cut in with the license number—it was red and white, a South Dakota plate—victor alpha niner seven four—in fact, he was reaching down—now isn’t that—hell, that’s Charlie Tallbull’s truck—why the hell is—looking down for the handset—shouldn’t have done that—so when he looked up again, all he really saw was a massive blur of chrome and blue paint as a Kenworth eighteen-wheeler came over the hilltop, and then Moses saw Charlie Tallbull’s pickup dive—the tail-lights suddenly bright red—and then the blue Kenworth sounded its horn and that was all Moses could hear—that tremendous buffeting blast—he hit his own brakes and pulled hard to the right as the Kenworth skimmed his door, huge wheels spinning at his shoulder, a wall of sound and iron and smoke and it caught—met—
butted
the rusted pickup.

Broken glass flared in the sunlight like a spray of water.

Folding, the pickup bounced away, the Kenworth climbing up and over it. The pickup rolled over, a shimmer of sun on the black greasy underbelly as it rolled, and the Kenworth kept riding up on top of it. There were sparks now, as the cab of the pickup was driven into the road, the metal grinding away on the stones and gravel at the side of the highway. Moses got his cruiser stopped and sat there, maybe fifty yards back now—a ringside seat—as the Kenworth rode the pickup down the side slope and settled onto it like a cast-iron avalanche, and then the dust cloud rose up, billowed, spread, settled back down over the scene, shading it and softening it, tinting it amber and sepia so that it seemed to Moses that he was watching something through stained glass, something that took place a long time ago.

At the Julia Dwight Clinic, Dell Greer got Bill Haugge some help, and after a while he got enough out of the distraught nurses to figure out that Mary Littlebasket had simply taken
her own child out of the hospital and that what had happened here this morning could very well turn out to be the kind of career-blasting, sixteen-ton, great-bellowing-balls-to-the-wall fuckup that would pass into Big Horn County legend and make for interesting sunsets in eastern Montana for years to come. Dell Greer went up the back stairs to Mary Littlebasket’s room and stood in the doorway, thinking about it all, listening to Moses Harper’s voice on his portable radio trying to sound in control, Harper calling in Fire and Rain and the ambulances. The bed still showed the impress of her body. A pair of paper slippers sat neatly in the near corner. A damp handkerchief lay twisted beside a Bible on the bedside table. Greer went into the bathroom and saw Mary Littlebasket’s sign in lipstick on the dripping mirror.

It meant nothing to him.

Well, whatever had happened here, it looked like it was still happening. As he turned to leave, he looked down and saw a ribbon on the floor. Cornflower blue, grosgrain, it must have fallen from her hair. He left it there. It all belonged to the detectives now. He was just Patrol. The state boys would have to unravel all this. When it was over, maybe someone would tell him what it all meant.

Engine racing, rear wheels spinning in the dry wash, McAllister’s patrol car butted through a windbreak of gorse and dry sage. He hit the brakes. He was right at the crest of Bull Peak, and fifty square miles of Yellowstone County stretched away south and west, a watercolor wash of greens and blue-gray, ochre and amber and copper fading out along the distant horizon where the last of the spring snow on the roof of the Beartooth range glimmered pink and silver in the waning sunlight. It would have been a sight to raise a man’s heart if it weren’t for the little corpses scattered all around.

To the right of the cruiser, like a deep cut in old green hide, a massive crater scarred the slope. New earth and cracked rock covered the prairie grass. Prairie dog corpses were scattered around like pillows in a cathouse. Some of the bodies were about to pop. It looked like a tailgate party for crows and coyotes.

He powered down the window. The midafternoon heat moved across his face and down into the cool of the car.

Even McAllister could read this kind of trail sign in the roadway. The little tiptoed skitter of the coyotes. Those crisscrossing hatchwork trails under the coyote sign would be the crows. Shiny blue-black, as big as dogs. Waddling back and forth between the bodies like lawyers at a nine-car pileup.

And this track here … he leaned out the window to follow it. A kind of shallow trench with hills of yellow dust looking a little like waves. Fresh, since the wind up here in the hills was always pretty good. And big … a full-bore male.

So he’d be … close. Good to know how close. Not that McAllister was getting out of the patrol car. But it was an interesting problem. It was always good to know who was where. He shut down the engine and opened all the windows. The car needed an airing anyway. He tugged his garrison belt off and dumped it in a pile on the passenger seat, the Browning on top.

It would have been Walker’s crew. They were working up this slope, trying to cut a roadway through the crest over to Musselshell. God knew what for. The best thing about Musselshell was there were two ways to get out of it.

Walker must have hit bedrock here. No county bulldozer could have done this. McAllister had never been on a battlefield, not a fresh one anyway, but this was what he thought it would look like. Bodies all over the place. New earth ripped up in heaps and piles. New white stones that hadn’t seen the sun for a half a million years. Wind in the grasses—he looked up at the skyline, and as usual it hit him that this was possibly the finest work God had ever done, this fifty square miles of Yellowstone County, sea green and rolling from the massed blue line of the Big Horn Mountains in the south all the way west to the Beartooth range. Most of it as full of little murders as this ridge.

When Walker’s charge went off, it had blown away a section of this hillside up here to his right. It had opened up a prairie dog town and spread it down the grassy slope. Most of them had died right then. The rest, those who could, had split for a better neighborhood. But since it was June in Montana, everything that had lived through the winter was breeding furiously. There were some mothers with litters around, trying to get whatever was left of their broods into a safe place.

What had looked to McAllister like a pile of pebbles in the roadway was now sitting up and looking around. One large gray-brown prairie dog. The mama. And one—kit? pup?—at her forelegs.

And another about a yard away.

So where was the rattlesnake?

There he was—where the waving track went into a low screen of sagebrush. He must have been making his run when McAllister came up the hill and scared everybody. A
big
old son of a bitch from the look of him, a dirty-brown loop of thick rope with a pattern along his spine. A diamondback maybe, although the purple shadow made it hard to tell. He might go six feet, judging by how thick he was, coiled up there. Under the sage, Scratch was perfectly still, except for his tongue. Now and then, McAllister could see it flutter out and back. Scratch was tasting the air, tasting the oil and gas smell of McAllister’s cruiser. Calculating the odds and the distances.