Billy Bob and Hackberry Holland Ebook Boxed Set (33 page)

“Nice of you to invite us in,” the shorter man said, walking past Elton into his home. His friend followed him, passing inches from Elton's chest, the burned area on his face puckered like dried-out putty.

Elton stepped inside but did not close the door behind him. “I got peanut butter and jelly, if y'all don't mind something simple,” he said.

But they seemed not to hear him. They looked at the meagerness of his possessions—the footworn carpet, the secondhand furniture, the imitation wood paneling on the walls—with the curiosity of people who might be visiting a zoo.

“Your wife here?” the truncated man asked.

“She died. Eight years back. In Arkansas. Say—”

“It's true y'all talk in tongues?” the tall man said.

This time Elton did not try to answer their questions because he knew they did not care about the answers he would give them. The truncated man sat down in a soft chair and clicked on the television, flipped the channels, his eyes like angry chunks of lead as he stared at several blurred images. He clicked the set off. “It's this Mideastern crap. That's all that's on there. Guys who wipe their ass with their hands shaking their fists at the camera,” he said.

Elton remained silent, knowing in his heart of hearts that everything that was about to happen was part of a higher plan.
Just don't be afraid,
he told himself.
Think of the children of Israel in the fiery furnace. Think of Dan'el in the lion's den. Think of Paul and Silas locked in jail, the angel of the Lord flinging back their door in a burst of light.

But he could not suppress the fear that was invading his body, stealing his courage and his faith, causing his face to twitch, his brow to break into a sweat, his buttocks to tremble. “It's Wyatt you're after, but he ain't here. He's trading some horses up at Flathead,” he said.

“
You'll
do just fine, Preacher,” the tall man said.

“Wyatt's friends are here. Three fellows y'all don't want to meet. They went up to the grocery for me,” Elton said.

“They
were
here,” the short man said. He was still seated in the soft chair. His elongated forehead was tilted forward. He raised his eyebrows at Elton, as an ape in a cage might. “But they're not here now. That's because they're locked in the back of a van.”

The room was silent again, so quiet Elton could hear his own breathing, an imperceptible creak under his foot when he shifted his weight. A drop of sweat ran into his eye, and he wiped it out of his eye socket with the heel of his hand.

The tall man took a carton of orange juice out of Elton's icebox, shook it, and drank directly from the carton. Then he glanced at his watch and exhaled his breath wearily. He wore a dark green shirt that was tucked into his khakis and dusty alpine boots, and his clothes gave off an odor like detergent that had been ironed into the fabric. He set the orange juice carton on the counter and looked at Elton evenly, his half-destroyed face seeming to study the forms of redress the world owed him.

“Wyatt took a lockbox that's not his and hid it someplace. We think it's on your property,” he said. “My buddy here is gonna fill up the bathtub now and then the three of us is gonna clear up this whole problem about where that lockbox is located. You'll be doing a good deed. I'm here to give witness to that.”

The eye that had been shrunken to the size of a dime by the scar tissue on his face glistened brightly.

“You was raised in the church, I can tell. Why do you want to do this, boy?” Elton said.

“ 'Cause it makes me feel good,” the tall man replied.

Outside, the evening light had gone from the sky, and through the open window Elton thought he could hear the dull clatter of stones under the river's surface and the sound of geese flying north, perhaps to a warm-water refuge that they would never have to leave.

 

I HAD NOT FORGOTTEN
our anniversary, at least not entirely. I had bought Temple an Indian concho belt and a new western saddle, one made by a famous craftsman in Yoakum, Texas. I had iced down a bottle of non-alcoholic champagne and arranged for flowers to be delivered to the house. But after the telephone threat on her life, I had lost all consciousness of the date.

Then, rather than act on my anger and take it to Mabus with hot tongs, I had made a sacrificial offering in the form of Wyatt Dixon, and I knew in all probability I would never feel the same about myself again. I told Temple all these things, brought the saddle from the barn and splayed it across the gallery railing, popped the cork on the champagne, flopped two heavy trout wrapped in perforated tinfoil on the grill, and slipped the concho belt around Temple's waist. She stared at me, bemused, perhaps concluding, as she often did, that the man she lived with had long ago severed his ties with the rational world.

Temple went into the bedroom and put on a white lace dress and I put on a suit, then we both put on heavy coats and ate dinner on the side gallery. The rain had stopped, and for the first time in six weeks the moon rose into a clear black sky chained with stars. The meadow was pooled with water, and elk were drinking from the pools, their tails flicking, their racks as hard-looking as sculpted bone in the moonlight. Temple lifted her wineglass to her mouth and drank, her eyes on mine. I had never known a woman who had shadows inside her eyes, but Temple did.

“What's on your mind?” I said.

“It took courage for you to call Karsten Mabus. Back in the old days you and L.Q. would have done things differently. It's important for you to remember that, Billy Bob. Don't look back on what you did. You're a brave man.”

“No, I'm not.”

“I know you better than you know yourself. I always did. You fault yourself for your violence. But when you and L.Q. did those things down on the border, you did them to protect other people.”

“L.Q. paid the price for it, Temple.”

“He knew the risks going in. He was a brave man, just like you are. Don't treat him like a victim. Don't do that kind of disservice to either him or yourself.”

The wind came up and made a rushing sound in the trees on the hillside, and a shower of wet pine needles sifted down the slopes of the roof. I got up from my chair and went around behind Temple and bit her softly on the neck. She reached behind her and clasped the back of my neck, pushing her fingers into my hair, tilting up her chin, her eyes closed.

We left the rest of our food uneaten and went into the bedroom. I slipped her dress over her head and lay her back on the bed, then lifted a strand of hair off her eye and kissed her mouth and the tops of her breasts and stroked her thighs. Then I undressed and lay down close against her, my body against hers, our feet, thighs, and stomachs touching, my face buried in her hair, my fingers tracing the stiffened points of her breasts.

When I was inside Temple Carrol, I could never understand how any moment of anger, fear, resentment, or suspicion could have come between us. Temple's skin glowed with love for the man she was with. Her arms, thighs, calves, mouth, her womb, the warmth of her breathing against my cheek, were the most encompassing, unrelenting expression of loyalty and affirmation I had ever experienced. She went about making love with a selfless abandon that was both humbling and beyond what any man expects. She was never stintful, never sought her own satisfaction, and was never dependent, self-conscious, or embarrassed. In fact, she radiated a kind of visceral purity, even in the way she perspired, that made me think of flowers opening, sunshowers, a salty wave full of kelp cresting inside a groundswell.

Later I placed my ear against her stomach and listened. Her skin was moist against the side of my face, and I could hear the whirrings of the life inside her. Then I kissed her stomach and her mouth and pulled the sheet over her breasts. “Don't catch cold. We've got the best baby in the history of babydom in there,” I said.

She touched my cheek with her hand.

That's when the phone rang.

IT WAS FAY HARBACK,
and she wasn't doing well with what she had to tell me. “We've got another homicide on the res. At the home of a minister named Elton Sneed. You know him?” she said.

“He's a Pentecostal of some kind. Wyatt Dixon belongs to his church,” I said.

“He's dead, drowned in his own bathtub. I just got back from there. I don't know if I'm up to this damned job. Know that old joke about the definition of a liberal? A humanist who hasn't been mugged yet or something like that?”

“Start over, Fay.”

“It looks like somebody held Sneed down in the bathtub, then tried to make it look like an accident. Water was all over the floor and the walls. He'd been stripped naked and dropped in the tub, but his shirt and undershirt were soaked with water and stuffed in the bottom of a clothes basket. The pants had water on the knees, and there were abrasions all over his arms and shoulders.”

I was standing in the kitchen and had to sit down in a chair as she told me the details of Elton Sneed's death. There was a weak feeling in my chest, as though weevil worms had worked their way into my heart.

“You there?” she said.

“You have any suspects?” I asked.

“No, nobody saw anything. But that's life on the res. Nobody sees anything, nobody knows anything, but that doesn't stop them from complaining constantly about Whitey dumping on them and not enforcing the law. Look, Wyatt Dixon showed up while I was there and went apeshit. No, that doesn't quite describe it.”

“I need to confess something to you—”

“Let me finish. Dixon cried. I didn't believe he was capable of feeling anything about anyone. But tears actually ran down his face. It took four cops to get him back outside. The coroner wanted to tranquilize him.”

“Why didn't he?”

“We didn't want another homicide. What were you going to say?”

“Karsten Mabus knows Wyatt has the goods from the Global Research robbery. His people probably went after Reverend Sneed when they couldn't get to Wyatt.”

“That billionaire or whatever out on Highway Twelve again?”

“Right.”

“He's behind the attacks on Dixon?”

“Right. He owns Global Research. He plans to run for office here in Montana. Global Research is the outfit that sold Saddam Hussein part of his chemical and biological weapons program in the eighties. I told you all this.”

“Were you a fan of Marvel comics as a kid?”

“Don't make light of this, Fay. He's an evil man,” I said.

“You said you were going to confess something to me? How does Karsten Mabus know Dixon has the stuff from the Global job?”

“I told him,” I said.

“To get the heat off yourself?”

“Read it any way you want.”

“I knew somehow you were involved in this. I just didn't know how. I have some crime scene photos. Maybe you should look at them.”

“By assigning indirect responsibility to me, you're conceding that Mabus sent his men after the preacher.”

“What I'm saying is—” But she had trapped herself and couldn't finish.

“Where's Wyatt now?” I asked.

“On the loose. You stop pulling strings on all these people. You stay out of a police investigation, too,” she said, and hung up.

The kitchen lights were off, and I could hear the easy sweep of wind in the trees and the clatter of a pinecone on the roof. But the tranquillity of the night would not ease the pang in my heart. My call to Mabus had brought about the death of Elton Sneed, a gentle, decent man who had honestly served his vision of this world and the next. Also, for the first time, I had begun to seriously wonder about my assessment of Fay Harback.

 

THE SHOOTER WHO
came onto Karsten Mabus's property that night would prove a mystery in many ways for both Mabus's security personnel and the investigators from the Missoula County Sheriff's Department. It was safe to say he did not enter the property from Highway 12, as the front gate was electronically locked at 9
P.M
. and a sophisticated alarm system, including sensor lights, that ran the length of the fence line automatically activated at the same hour. Two boys who had been camping up on a mountainside behind the ranch said they had seen a lone horseman come off a ridge and follow a creekbed to the back of the property, then enter the woods and disappear. They said the rider wore a hat and had binoculars strung around his neck and perhaps was carrying a rifle in a saddle scabbard.

Whoever the shooter was, he wore western boots, because sheriff's deputies found their pointed, deep-heeled indentations in the soft bed of pine needles behind a flat-surfaced boulder that he used as his sniper's nest.

Just before midnight Karsten Mabus, dressed in an Oriental robe, fixed himself a sandwich and opened a bottle of carbonated grape juice, then relaxed on an elephant-hide couch and read
The New York Times
. Through the rear living room window, which rose all the way to the cathedral ceiling, he could see steam rising from his swimming pool, the underwater lights tunneling below the lime-green surface, the arc lamps above his horse barns glowing with humidity, canvas windscreens flapping gently against the red-clay background of his tennis courts.

It was a beautiful night, the stars cold and white in a black sky that occasionally flickered with heat lightning.

Karsten Mabus put away the newspaper, sat up on the couch, and bit into his sandwich. The shooter had worked his way into place now, on a hillside that provided him cover and also a panoramic overview of the grounds, perhaps one hundred yards out and one hundred feet higher in elevation than Karsten Mabus. The first round pocked a neat hole in the window glass and missed Mabus's head by inches, burrowing deeply into the cushions of a large chair against the far wall with hardly a sound.

Mabus removed the sandwich from his mouth and set it down on the plate, focusing his eyes on the hole in the glass, seemingly unsure of the event that had just occurred.

The second round caught part of the window framing, blowing wood and large shards of glass onto the carpet, the bullet ticking Mabus's cheek just above the jawbone, flicking a thread of blood across his skin.

He rose from the couch, touching his cheek, looking at the balls of his fingers, then began punching buttons on a keypad by the fireplace. In less than thirty seconds at least five armed men emerged from either the shadowy edges of the ranch or the servants' quarters over the garage. One security man, who had seen a muzzle flash, pointed toward the flat-surfaced boulder a hundred feet up on the hillside.

Two of the security personnel mounted an all-terrain vehicle and, with the other three security men behind them, roared up the hill toward the sniper's nest.

The shooter stood erect, firing from a lever-action rifle, and shot the driver of the ATV off the seat. The next shot caught one of the running men below the knee, knocking his leg out from under him as though the bone had been clipped in half with a cold chisel. The ATV caromed off a tree trunk and spun crazily down the side of a gulch.

The two wounded men and their three friends took cover behind rocks and trees, flattening themselves into the bed of pine needles, while the shooter fired four more rounds through the woods, the brass casings tinkling on top of the boulder he stood behind. Moments later the security men could hear the sound of a horse's shoes clopping on stone, then thudding on hard-packed earth through the timber.

Karsten Mabus watched it all from the terrace by his swimming pool, in full view of the hillside, his plate in one hand, his sandwich in the other. After he finished eating, he wiped his hands, combed his hair, and used his cell phone to request an ambulance for his two employees who had been shot.

But before he went back inside, he saw a horseman silhouetted on a ridgeline. The horseman seemed to stop, framed against the sky, the constellations bursting overhead, and look back at Karsten Mabus, perhaps through binoculars.

Mabus formed a pistol with his thumb and index finger, pointed it at the horseman, and winked.

 

AT 1:15 P.M. WEDNESDAY,
I looked out the window of my office and saw two detectives from the sheriff's department escorting Wyatt Dixon in handcuffs through the rear door of the courthouse. But rather than accept the role of chained culprit and miscreant, Wyatt was the bucolic king in captivity. He was dressed in gray razor-creased western pants, a long-sleeved maroon cotton shirt, a wide silver necktie, and a soft-crowned hat tilted low on his forehead. His upper arms looked like hams inside his shirt, his sideburns etched against his jaws with a fresh haircut. He limped along without his canes, grinning at everyone he saw, his eyes manic, the manacles on his wrists like scrap metal he could snap in half if he chose. Jailhouse riffraff smoking cigarettes on the lawn cheered him as he walked by.

I crossed the street and entered the courthouse just as the elevator closed on Wyatt and the two plainclothes. I walked down the corridor to Fay Harback's office. She was talking to her receptionist, wearing a black suit, her small hands knotted in fists on her hips.

“What's the deal on Dixon?” I said.

“He's being interviewed.”

“Not unless I'm present, he's not.”

“You're Wyatt Dixon's attorney now?”

“Ask Wyatt.”

“I don't have to. Now go fiddle with a divorce case,” she said, turning her back to me.

“Why'd you bring him in?”

“We have two guys in Community Hospital with bullet holes in them. Our chief persons of interest are Dixon and Johnny American Horse.”

“The gig out at Karsten Mabus's place last night?”

“Nobody's catching any flies on you,” she said.

I rode the elevator upstairs. Wyatt was in an interview room with the two detectives, the door partly open, his wrists uncuffed. The interview was not going as planned by the detectives, both of whom were standing while Wyatt sat. Their names were Boyle and Regan. Both of them had been investigators with Internal Affairs and were not well liked by their colleagues.

“It's real good of you fellows to bring me in and talk this thing out,” Wyatt was saying. “I have invited Vice President Cheney to go duck hunting with me this fall, and I'll be telling him of the good work you boys are doing. I know he'd appreciate y'all's hep in chasing down them A-rabs what's been throwing camel shit through window fans all over the Mideast.” Wyatt pushed a paper napkin across the table toward the detectives. “Write your names down so I can alert the Vice President to the kind of high-quality smarts that's on the job here in Missoula, Montana.”

The larger of the detectives, Jimmie Boyle, slapped Wyatt's hat off his head. “You simple fuck, we're the last thing between you and a twenty-five-year jolt,” he said. “Cop to it now, claim temporary insanity over the death of the preacher, and you might even skate. In the meantime, you pick the hair out of your teeth and show some respect for the only friends you got.”

Wyatt reached down for his hat and set it crown down on the table. Once again, I witnessed one of those mercurial transformations that seemed to take place in Wyatt, as though someone had clicked a switch in the back of his head. Between the time he stooped over for his hat and the time he looked back at the detectives, the clown's grin had gone from his face, replaced by the lifeless mask and glasslike eyes that made one think of the quiet that comes before a storm.

“I'm done here. Don't y'all be trying to use Reverend Sneed's death to jerk my chain, either,” he said.

“You believe this asshole?” Boyle said.

“You heard him. You're done,” I said, stepping into the room. “Charge him or cut him loose.”

“How'd you get up here?” Boyle said. He had a large nose, the rim of one nostril threaded by a scar that looked like a piece of string.

I started to answer but didn't get the chance. Fay Harback came up behind us, her face tight with anger. “I want a word with you,” she said, walking toward a coffee room.

When we were inside, she turned on me. “You don't listen, Billy Bob. You think you have the franchise on morality and can do and say whatever you want because you represent clients who have some kind of social handicap,” she said. “The sniper at Karsten Mabus's ranch crippled one man and put a hole through the rib cage of the other. That said, my intuitions tell me Wyatt Dixon isn't the shooter. But he's told a number of people, including Darrel McComb, that Karsten Mabus may be the Antichrist. That means we have to clear him as a suspect, even though personally I think he's of diminished capacity and belongs in a mental institution.

“Regardless, I can't go forward in the investigation until he's excluded as a viable suspect. So while you're obstructing our investigation, you're also hurting your client…I seem to be losing your attention. Is this too complex for you to follow?”