Chump Change (18 page)

“I’ve got full power of attorney. Right?”

He grudgingly nodded.

“Then let’s fill out the damn forms.”

The Future Home of the World Famous Eagle Talon Casino and Lodge was a veritable beehive of activity. Out in the middle of the site the EPA had two giant yellow backhoes digging eight-foot trenches, at six-foot intervals. They had recruited an army of interns, most likely local college students, and had them screening everything that came out of the ground, like some giant archeological dig.

Bain and his pet Indian must have had the morning off. The only two Keeler thugs I recognized were the car creepers from the night before last. I drove right by the indolent collection, and bounced the Blazer down to the Nez Perce encampment. Keith and I got out and made our way over to the fire. I sat down on a rock next to Herbert Lean Elk. He reached out and shook my hand.

“You know where I can hire any ranch hands?” I asked.

“What ranch you got in mind?” he asked.

I nodded my head toward the top of the butte. “The Flying H.”

“Sarah Jane got no—”

I cut him off. “I’m running the place for a while,” I said.

“You buy it?”

“Got me an option to buy,” I said. “And full power of attorney.”

He took a moment to digest the information. Looked over at the Keeler group.

“They know about this?”

“Not yet.”

His eyes crinkled in amusement. “They gonna shit.” He shook his head. “This ranch work . . . this for pay, or you lookin for indigenous volunteers?”

“I’ll pay the going rate.”

He broke into a small smile. “In that case, I believe I can help you out. Same boys used to work for Olley and Sarah Jane before the money run out. They know the place backwards and forwards.”

“First thing tomorrow?”

“Bright and early.”

I handed him a piece of motel stationery with my cell phone number.

“Have em call me when they’re on the way.”

Herbert Lean Elk pocketed the paper.

I leaned in close to Herbert. “I hear The Flying H’s got a big-time varmint problem,” I said.

“Ya hear that, do ya?”

“I was thinking that if these hands had guns . . . maybe they ought to bring them along. You know . . . just in case we run into any . . .”

“Varmints,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“These are ranch hands, Leo.” He threw his eyes over at the Keeler group. “Not roughnecks like those guys. Don’t want none of our boys hurt,” he said. “We lose enough of them to drugs and alcohol. Don’t need to lose em any other way.”

I said I understood.

“Tribal Council’s real touchy,” Herbert warned. “That boy . . . Tommy Lighthorse . . . the one that Pawnee Dexter beat the hell out of . . . there were those on the council wanted to tell us to back off. To just let them build their damn casino and forget about it, they said.”

“Sometimes you gotta make a stand,” I said.

“This is starting to sound like a bad western movie,” Herbert said solemnly.

“Still don’t see why we can’t stay in town,” Keith groused.

“
Cause we’ve got us a cattle ranch to run,” I said, with considerably more gusto than I actually felt. “Can’t do that from town, can we?”

“Don’t mean we got to sleep out there.”

I stashed the two armament bags where the spare tire used to be, pulled the carpet back over them, and threw my overnight bag on top.

“This is gonna get ugly,” I said as I walked around to the driver’s side. “These folks aren’t gonna take this lying down. They’re gonna come at us with everything they’ve got.” I waved a hand over the Holiday Inn parking lot. “This just makes it too damn easy for em,” I said. “They know which room we’re in. They know what we’re driving. Let’s at least make em work a little bit.”

We were faced off across the top of the car. The minute I’d told him we were checking out of the motel and moving our base of operations out to The Flying H, he went all sullen on me. Lust is the mind killer. I think it was Mary Poppins said that.

I pulled open the driver’s door. The digital dashboard clock read 3:42.

I swung up into the seat. “I’m guessing that, sometime in the next hour or so, some pretty pissed-off rednecks are gonna come stomping around here looking for us. Probably a good idea we make ourselves a tad harder to find.”

Keith hesitated. Trying to decide whether or not he was going to get in.

I decided to help. “Listen, kid . . .”

“Keith. My name is Keith.”

I heaved a sigh. “Listen, Keith. Maybe it’s time for you to get off the bus,” I said. “I’ll understand. Believe me; I get it. This thing has gotten a whole lot stranger than either of us bargained for.” I threw a hand into the air. “As of tomorrow morning, I’m running a friggin cattle ranch. How weird is that?”

He didn’t say anything. Just got in and buckled up.

Keith stayed in the Blazer, ear glued to his cell phone, while I went into the Home Depot and bought a six-foot length of chain that could have towed an aircraft carrier, and a high-tensile carbon steel lock.

Same thing at Arrowhead Sporting Goods, where I bought four infrared game trail cameras, two rolls of electrical tape, and a pair of cheap binoculars. Only, by then, he’d moved into the backseat, so’s he could be more amorous than just mumbling “me too” every minute and a half or so.

He was still at it when I stopped the Blazer just inside the gate of The Flying H and retrieved my newly purchased gear from the rear of the rig.

I found a sturdy little mesquite bush about ten yards inside the gate and stuffed one of the game cameras down into the center. After a couple of misaligned trial photos, some serious limb pruning, and a mile or so of electrical tape, I was satisfied that the camera was more or less invisible and that anything coming through The Flying H gate, day or night, was destined to be recorded for posterity.

I chained and locked the gate behind us and climbed back into the driver’s seat. Anybody wanting to visit us tonight was going to have to walk the better part of three miles over high desert, on what was rapidly turning into a dark, cloudy night. Way I saw it, that amounted to advantage number one for the good guys.

About a mile and a half later, I stopped next to a little grove of scrub oaks. The ranch road looped north from here, doubling back toward the jagged peaks of the Idaho Panhandle in the foreground, and the ominous, snowcapped spires of the Rocky Mountains way out at the edges of the horizon.

The early evening air was thick with the promise of rain as I moved through and around the scraggly oaks, looking for the right spot for a camera. Turns out cameras and trees have something in common. Both are best approached with two working hands. Since my dog-chewed arm was barely functional, it took quite a while and a goodly bit of piteous groaning to mount a pair of cameras. One infrared, motion-sensing electronic eye facing in each direction. Getting them coming and going.

By the time I crawled back into the cab, Keith was off the phone.

“What’s the point of all that?” he wanted to know.

“This could end up being an ‘our word against theirs’ kind of thing,” I said. “I’m thinking a few extra pair of eyes on our side might be a help.”

He grunted and looked out the side window for the rest of the trip to the Hardvigsen house. I drove around the house and unloaded the gear onto the back porch. “I still don’t get it,” Keith grumbled. “What can we do out here that we can’t do in town?” He pulled his bag out of the car and slammed the rear door.

“We can give these yahoos a chance to do something stupid, without endangering anybody but ourselves,” I said.

“So . . . that’s our mission? Goad the locals into doing something dumb?”

“You got a better idea?” I asked. “State casino licenses and stupid are more or less mutually exclusive.”

He looked at me like I was speaking Farsi, so I kept talking.

“These guys have risked everything they own on a single roll of the dice. If everything goes according to plan, they end up with more money than some countries. If there’s a fly in the ointment . . . well, then things slow way down, and the slower things get, the more money it costs them . . . money I don’t think they have.”

“So . . . what you’re saying then is that what we’re doing is leaving these people no choice but to come after us?”

“Like I said . . . I’m willing to listen to other ideas.”

The Blazer’s engine was ticking like a metronome as it cooled. A northerly breeze was beginning to stir bits of straw littering the yard. Somewhere in the distance a bovine bawled.

“I thought we came out here to find out what happened to Gordon Stanley,” he said after a while. “I mean . . . we pretty much know who took his money and why . . . like, shouldn’t it be the police who take things over from here?”

I nearly laughed out loud. “In case you forgot . . . Deputy Rockland Moon is the local police,” I said.

Nuff said. Even as horny and out of his mind as he was, there was no way he could imagine getting any help from that quarter.

“Well, then . . . maybe we’ll just have to be content to know more or less what happened to him and let it go at that.”

I unzipped my overnight bag, rummaged around until I found what I was looking for, and pulled a manila folder out. I set the folder on the hood of the car and leafed through the contents until I came to the picture of Gordy’s back. I slid it out and handed it to Keith.

He looked at the photo, then uncomprehendingly up at me and then back to the photo. “Is that . . . ?” he asked.

I nodded. “Somebody I know . . . somebody with formal medical training . . . she thinks the scars were caused by repeated whippings.”

He tried to look away. Tried to banish the image from his mind, but just couldn’t do it. His eyes kept flitting back to the photo, etching the horror onto his psyche.

“If possible, I gotta know who did that to him,” I said.

He marinated the idea for a minute or so. Then looked me in the eye.

“Long as ‘if possible’ doesn’t mean ‘even if it gets both of us killed.’ ”

I gave it some thought. When you roll into a strange town and find conflict under every rock, you gotta ask yourself what it is you’re trying to prove. Was I looking for justice, or looking to justify my own existence? Wondering what money had done to Gordon, or what it had done to me? Tell the truth, I wasn’t sure anymore.

“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that,” I said.

I returned the photos to one gym bag and opened up another. I set the .38 snub-nosed and two full boxes of ammo on the hood of the car. “I was you,” I said, “I’d either hitchhike back into town and play kissy-face with my girlfriend, or I’d load that Smith and Wesson and keep it in my pocket at all times.”

He didn’t agree to anything. But then again, he didn’t leave either.

Amazing what guilt will do.

The Indian ponies were all named Kawasaki. I don’t know what the hell I was expecting, but it wasn’t four ATVs strapped to the back of a flatbed trailer. Hadn’t expected to see Herbert Lean Elk either, but he was the first one out of the truck, just after five-thirty the next morning.

He stretched and then said, “I don’t sleep worth a damn. Figured I’d just come along with the boys.”

Keith and I had bunked in the nearest barn. Upstairs in the hayloft, just like in the old movies. Being city guys, our first instinct had been to bed down somewhere inside the house, but neither of us had gotten past the kitchen. Something about that old house, with its ancient porcelain plumbing and scratched crystal doorknobs—it was like you could feel them looking at you, Olley and Sarah Jane. Olley having his eggs and coffee at the table. Sarah Jane humming while she washed up the pan. We both felt it right away. The place was so saturated with their lives that nobody but them belonged in there. Just standing in the kitchen felt like some kind of sacrilege. Keith and I hadn’t needed to talk about it. We just hoisted our bags from the old linoleum floor and stiff-legged it back outside, where we belonged.

Seemed like I’d been asleep all of ten minutes when my cell phone began to beep. I gargled out some sort of greeting, then listened as a voice told me they’d be out front in fifteen minutes. I sat up and then immediately wished I hadn’t.

Took me several tries to stretch some of the ache out of my joints. Not only was my arm sore, but I couldn’t even remember the last time I’d slept on anything but a first-rate mattress. Mr. Sleep-on-Everybody’s-Floor of yesteryear had definitely gone soft with age.

I’d rolled up my sleeping bag and Tin Manned my way downstairs toward the Blazer. It had rained overnight, but the clouds had slid east, under cover of darkness, leaving the morning crisp and freshly clean from the shower, which was more than anyone could reasonably say about me.

If timing was, indeed, everything, then we got off to a good start. I was still unwinding the chain when Herbert pulled up with his trailer and my ranch hands. I walked the gate open and left it that way. I gave them a big head start, so I wouldn’t have to eat dust all the way back to the house.

By the time I pulled into the yard, they had the ATVs unloaded and were gassing them up from an overhead metal fuel tank between the barns. Herbert was taking it all in from his perch on the rear of the empty trailer.

“Cody and Winslow gonna check on the animals, while the other two . . . Robert and . . . what’s-his-name there . . . while they load up some feed and haul it up to the Evanston pasture where most of the stock was . . . last time anybody looked.”

“Everything I know about ranching would fit on the back of a stamp,” I said.

“At least you know it,” he said. “Half the folks running spreads around here don’t know heifers from Hefeweizen.”

I laughed and sat down next to him. I could see now that the Hardvigsens’ backyard used to be an orchard of some sort. Lines of squat, knotty trees, grown out and tangled at the tops, poked above the high, untended grass. Dotted among the trees and weeds were what looked like every car Olley and Sarah Jane had ever owned. Six or seven rusting remnants of simpler times.

We watched in silence as the four young Indians gassed up the ATVs and roared off in a cloud of fossil fuel fumes.

Try saying that three times fast.

Herbert looked around. “Somebody knew what they was doing could at least break even with this place,” he announced. “Get it down to about a hundred head. Have beef for personal use, some to sell for cash. Contract out the ranch work. It could be done. Long as you had a little money comin in every month. Something to cover emergencies.”

“Yesterday, I signed both of them up for Social Security,” I said.

He took off his hat. Stared down into it. “Sarah Jane know that?” he asked.

“Nope,” I said. I anticipated his next question. “I’ve got both of their powers of attorney. As far as I’m concerned, they’ve earned the damn money.”

“Any idea how much they might get?”

“Fred Simmons seemed to think they were good for maybe fifteen hundred apiece. Something in that range.”

“More than enough to keep this ol place running, if they scale back some.”