Lizardskin (7 page)

“Not a bad idea, LT. I say, why wait till they call? I’m out there, I could just pick one at random, smoke him. Be like the lottery, only instead of going to Hawaii, you die.”

“You give them a running start?”

“Nah—just blast away at ’em. They’ll figure it out.”

“That’s true. Way you shoot, never know, they might just die of old age waiting for you to get the windage. Thornton tells me you were aiming at Bell’s foot.”

“Yeah. You can always tell what I was aiming at by what I hit. Take fifty feet of string and a piece of chalk, draw a big circle around the bullet hole. It’s probably in there somewhere.”

“Yeah. Shoot at his foot, hit him in the ass.”

“It was a larger target. Bell’s got an ass like a harvest moon. Bell gets any fatter, they’ll give him his own area code.”

“And while you’re popping away trying to hit Bell’s ass, three, maybe four armed robbers are zipping off into the hills. I’m gonna
love
writing this one up for the brass in Helena. So just for the record, why’nt you tell me—in your own words— just how this all happened?”

“This a Q and A?”

“You see a tape recorder? You see Vanessa down here?”

“Oh, Christ—Ballard catching today?”

“None other. She’s the duty DA all weekend. Your luck.”

“Jeez, I thought she was down at her place in Red Lodge.”

“Nope. So we better get this right.”

“Hell. Why can’t women just do what God made them for?”

“Beau, I tell you, that’s what God made her to do. She’s the best DA in eastern Montana.”

“I know that. She still makes me jumpy.”

“When they told you these were the nineties, Beau, they didn’t mean the
eighteen
nineties.”

“Damned affirmative action.”

“That’s not how Ballard got here. You saying that’s how I got here?”

“You know what I’m saying, Eustace. You didn’t get here because you’re black. You got here because you were a hotshot fed and a good cop. Nowadays, the only way to get into the force is to be a Native American lesbian dwarf with a wooden leg and an ACLU card. Cover a shitload of federal quotas there. Just don’t be tall enough to reach the pedals on the cruisers or help out in a bar fight. Last week, remember that go-round at Twilly’s?”

“I remember.”

“So do I—I’m getting the shit kicked outta me by Johnny Karpo and that huge Crow girlfriend of his, Brenda Roan Horse? Who shows up but the Munchkin.”

“He did okay, I hear.”

“Oh, yeah—pulled some of that oriental martial arts stuff, and Brenda comes up behind him and throws him over the bar. That was fun to watch. Only reason I lived, Karpo turns to watch and I maced him.”

“
Maced
him? Why the hell? Mace is for wimps.”

“Left my gun in the car, Eustace. Somebody’s always pulling it outta my holster in Twilly’s, and then I gotta kick ass to get it back. Lately I just leave it in the cruiser—all they ever wanna do is brawl. No harm in them.”

“How’d Karpo take to the mace?”

“He didn’t like it.”

“What’d you do then—hit him with a chair?”

“Nah, a bottle. Word of advice there, LT. Never hit a man with one of them foreign Scotch bottles. The ones with the dented sides? They don’t break.”

“What happened to the Munch—to Patrolman Benitez?”

“He got the cuffs on Brenda. Finally. Guy’s so dumb, he couldn’t pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were written on the heel. That’s not the point. We got a lot of stupid troopers.
That’s what traffic duty is for. Point is, he’s too short. He’s only on the job because he’s Hispanic.”

“Well, at least you didn’t say spic.”

“Don’t get on me about that shit, Eustace. You brought this up. I’m no racist. No sexist either. I think that Sonnette broad has the makings in her. And Myron out there, he’s one of the best we got. Today’s Friday, right? After six? That’s sabbath for Myron. You ever think of
that
when you’re setting up the duty rosters around here? You notice, he’s using the only manual typewriter we have so he can stay in line with the sabbath restrictions. He ever bitch to you about it?”

“Can’t say he does.”

“Can’t say? I know you can’t. Now Myron could pull some of that racial religious equal opportunity shit on you, say he’ll go to the union or the civil liberties people. But he doesn’t, because he’s a cop first and something else afterward. That’s all I’m saying.”

“Christ, Beau. You get up on the wrong side of your cage?”

Beau leaned back in the chair and let out a long slow sigh. “Not my best day, Eustace.”

The lieutenant thought it over for a second.

“Oh, hell. You’re not even supposed to
be
here, are you? You’re supposed to be taking Bobby Lee over to Lizardskin for a party! Why’nt you
say
something?”

“Oh yeah—excuse me from the firefight, LT, I gotta take my kid to a party. That’d get me a citation for sure!”

“That why you were hiding out up at the Elbow?”

“Two hours left in the shift-well, there y’go.”

“You wanna go now? We can do this tomorrow when things are slower. I’ll call Vanessa, tell her some story.”

Beau tried to keep his smile in place, but inside he could feel that old blackness rising up. “No point now. Maureen pulled the plug.”

“She did? How’d Bobby Lee take it?”

“I don’t know. I never got the chance to ask her. I ended up saying something stupid, and Maureen hung up on me.”

“What’d you say?”

“She was quoting Hogeland at me. Guy’s all over me like
a bad suit. I said
fuck
Dwight Hogeland—and she said thanks, Beau, maybe I will.”

“Dwight’s getting real tangled up in this, isn’t he?”

“I think so. I think he and Maureen—hell … it couldn’t be worse, Eustace.”

“Ethically, if he’s involved with her—you know—then he oughta get someone else in the firm to handle her file.”

“Ethics are something Dwight doesn’t seem to have inherited from his father. Doc Hogeland—man, I can’t see how Doc can stand his own kid. Anyway, I screwed it up good with her.”

“This before or after you whacked Joe Bell?”

“After. That was when you came in on me, in Bell’s office. I sorta lost it and flipped his desk.”

“That I had noticed.”

“I
still
say there’s something rocky in his bedroll, LT.”

“That more of your cowboy shit? Don’t tell me. What’d you get from the witnesses?”

Beau ran it down for the lieutenant: the time of the call, their attendance at the scene, being fired upon by Bell, receiving hostile fire from the area by the propane tank.

Meagher nodded through it all, considering how it would look to the district attorney.

When Beau reached the point where he had fired to wound Joe Bell, Eustace shook his head slowly and made a couple of notes on his desk calendar.

Beau was wrapping up his story when the intercom on the lieutenant’s desk buzzed.

“Meagher here. What is it, Myron?”

“Ballard’s here. You want her to wait?”

“Tell her just a minute, Myron.… Well, Beau. This is it now. She’s gonna want to tape the whole thing. Not a formal Q and A, but it’ll be part of the official record. Also, she’s gonna be a tad pissed as well. I hear we’re getting sued. You want to go ahead now, or I can say you’re still in a reaction from the stress of the encounter, tell her to do this later tonight?”

“Oh yeah—tell the Dragon Lady I’m stressed out? No way, Eustace. Bring her on, and damn the torpedoes.”

“Well, I think we’re in good shape here. There’s a precedent for wounding fire if an officer perceives a danger to citizens. Just stick to your notes, and don’t let her get you rattled, okay?”

Meagher leaned over and hit the intercom button. “Please ask Ms. Ballard to come in.”

Beau and the lieutenant waited in taut silence for a minute. Beau tried to keep his heart from speeding up, tried to breathe slowly and steadily through his nose.

“Cut that out, Beau. You sound like a church organ—
Hello
there, Vanessa!”

Eustace and Beau got to their feet as the assistant district attorney for Yellowstone County came gliding into the room on a wave of poison and the squeak of rubber on hardwood.

Vanessa Ballard was a problem for Beau. He was always a little off balance when he was in the same room with this tall, slender horsewhip of a woman with a golden bell of blond hair and creamy white skin, eyes a little too far apart and as blue as glacier ice, a rich red dahlia of a mouth, always a little breathless, long-fingered surgical hands ending in blood-tipped nails as red as taillight glass, and legs that went, Beau assumed, all the way to heaven in a flawless sweep of jazzercise and good genetics.

Today The Ballard was exquisitely fine-tuned in an imperial purple suede suit with a radically abbreviated skirt and little touches of solid gold at the silky hollow of her throat and the supple turning of her wrists. She wore, as usual, one of what seemed to be hundreds of different pairs of expensive jogging shoes in a spectrum of shades. Today’s shade was pale lavender.

“Hello, Lieutenant Meagher.” She shook his hand twice, hard, making excellent eye contact. Ballard was radiating testosterone today, as she always did when she had to go out and tolerate policemen, a breed she seemed to consider an evil necessity, like tick birds on a rhino.

“I’ll need the desk,” she said, and seated herself behind it.
She began to riffle through her black snakeskin attaché case, head down, a glittering sweep of heavy golden hair hiding her face. Her voice was a velvet growl, her enunciation as honed as a glass blade.

“This situation, gentlemen—I’d say the word
sucks
catches the essence of it. Joe Bell is sitting on his ass in Sweetwater”—at this point she looked up through her waterfall of cornsilk hair and fixed Beau with one steel—blue eye—“perhaps I should say lying on his belly over in Sweetwater General, having a seance with Dwight Hogeland even as we speak. And if I know Hogeland, that man will do his level best to sue us all into Go-Home Bay for his two-thirds contingency fee and all the troopers he can butt-fuck. This means
you
, McAllister!”

“Hey, Vanessa!”

She slammed a tape recorder down on Meagher’s desk and threw her hair back in a kind of wild-horse twist Beau could feel in his belly.

“How many times are we going to have to explain this stuff to you, McAllister? If you
must
shoot the citizenry,
shoot to kill!
It’s a hell of lot cheaper to kill one—only eighty cents a round for your revolver, use as many as you want—plead
you
criminally stupid, for which we’d get the thanks of the regiment
and
the Nobel Peace Prize,
plus
, all we pay for then is some bereavement settlement, and we’re all off to the Ramada for blabbermouth soup. But
noooh!
Our Beau must have his jest! And
another
opportunistic scumsack limps straight to a lawyer, and
bingo
—we find ourselves up to our earrings in alligators!”

Beau sat up and raised a hand.

“Now, Vanessa, if you’re gonna get into that thing, the guy from Deer Lodge last year? I did shoot to kill on that one. It’s just that when you’re being shot at, it affects your concentration. And everybody was screaming and running around.”

“It was the Hilltop Mall, Beau! Of
course
people were running around.
And
screaming. Not to mention, it was a
County
call you should have left to the Yellowstone guys.”

“I was
shopping
, for God’s sake. I was off duty.”

“And you got involved anyway. You could have ducked it.”

“He was endangering the citizens, Vanessa. I’m supposed to stop that kind of thing. Anyway, I’m just making a point.”

“I agree. And
my
point is, if you’d just plain
killed
him, then there’d have been nobody around to sue us for excessive force. He didn’t have any relatives.”

“So why’d you let ’em settle?”

“Beau, nine times out of ten, the County settles out of court, and the County settles because it’s just plain
cheaper!
”

“Even when the plaintiff is a paroled con committing an armed robbery? Even when he’s firing on a law enforcement officer?”

“I’ve seen worse. And you fired first.”

“Jeez, Vanessa! What do I do—give him a free one? I’m
supposed
to fire first! That’s how it works!”

“Beau, read the papers. Everybody has rights except those who really need them. It’s the American way. You used your firearm in a crowded mall. The guy said he was just trying to get away, that you provoked the exchange.”

“You actually
believe
that?”

“What I believe and what I can prove in an action are different things. The law isn’t about belief. It’s about advantage and disadvantage, about technical distinctions between separate realities.”

“Well, that asshole was sure as hell trying to separate me from
my
reality. With a Delta ten-mill, too.”

“That was real for then. It wasn’t real for later.”

“So what was I supposed to do?”

“Learn to shoot straighter.”

“So I should have killed Joe Bell?”

She sat back in Meagher’s leather wing chair and swiveled back and forth in silence, looking across at Beau. The lieutenant leaned against the wall and tapped a finger on his brass buckle.

“No … look, Beau, I’m sorry to come on so hard here. The County barely has enough money to run a decent court system as it is. You guys are still hung up in Helena trying to get two
officers in a car for night patrol. And you need three more troopers we can’t give you. Over in Big Horn County, we have two troopers on administrative leave while we sort out what looks like a police chase that didn’t have to happen and got a young Crow girl and her baby killed. Indian Affairs is onto us for
that
one. Now Joe Bell’s talking to Dwight Hogeland about another lawsuit.
This
we don’t need.”

“You mean Harper and Greer?”

“I do.”

“What happened there, anyway?”

“A woman named Mary Littlebasket was killed, along with her newborn baby. Her uncle—Charlie Tallbull, Eustace, you know him, don’t you?—he’s in Sweetwater General with internal injuries. The whole thing was just one overreaction after another. We’re going to—hey! Don’t try to change the subject, Beau. I’m saying we didn’t need another law enforcement sideshow right now.”