Lizardskin (15 page)

He had just gunbutted a young girl. Maybe killed her.

He dragged her body out of the creek and set it down as gently as he could on a bed of prairie grass. He found the portable radio and flicked up the volume.

A burst of static and sound.

“—ister!! Where the hell are you? Five eleven!”

Eustace Meagher’s voice.

“Meagher?”

“Beau! Where the fuck are you? We heard that shot.”

“I’m just past the range here. Come up the coulee. I’m right at the creek, about five hundred feet due west. You find the cruisers?”

“I’m sitting in yours. Where the hell’s the Munchkin?”

“Haven’t found him yet. You bring some help?”

“Myron’s here. And a couple of Big Horn guys. You hold your position.”

“Who?”

“Greer and Harper.”

Beau had to smile. Harper and Greer were just the people he wanted to see. “Look, I’ve got a civilian loose in the area. Peter Hinsdale. He’s out there somewhere. I have one in custody. Got two adult male Indians, armed, and one older male, also armed. Older male possibly noncombatant but armed.”

“What’s the status of your prisoner?”

“Severe skull trauma. We need a Medevac out of Billings. Get ’em moving now.”

“Ten-four, Beau. Wait there, we’ll link up with—”

From the far side of the river Beau heard a sudden leathery thump, then a high cold shrill scream, the clear sound of ripping cloth, and the scream cut off in midflight.

Beau shut the radio off and scrambled away from the girl’s body, backing up into the shadows under the cottonwoods.

A full minute went by. Clouds floated upriver, casting ghostly purple shadows on the glittering river. He could hear the ragged breath coming from the injured girl.

Down in his lizard-brain, Beau knew he was being hunted. Knew it in his belly and in the skin on the back of his hands and in his lungs. There was somebody out there who was thinking of him the way a cougar thinks of meat. The silence came back up around him, and he struggled to still the sound of his own breathing.

He smelled blood and gasoline and urine.

He heard water over stone and wind in tall grass.

He saw blackness drifting like clouds across his eyes and starlight like silver coins floating on gunmetal water. The universe was shades of silver, black and purple, and a darkness without form or substance or bottom. Cold patches moved over his body as his nerves fired and burned and adrenaline pumped through his muscles and his tissues.

Suddenly everything had dropped away, the towns and the cities and lawyers and paychecks, even Bobby Lee and Maureen, they all fell away and Beau was out there in the middle of the oldest place on the planet.

Thinking of how the shotgun had only tangled him up in the river fight, he set it down on a tuft of grasses and slid his Browning out of the holster. He flicked the safety off and pulled the hammer back with the fat tip of his right thumb, feeling the metal grooves on the hammer and the slick glide of silicon grease.

There’d be two at least. If the old man had a cough, they wouldn’t want him out on a hunt. A cough would kill them all.

From far up the river he heard the sound of something crackling and popping. A pall of smoke came down on the dark wind. A glow showed above the cottonwoods upriver. A fire. A big fire.

Red sparks settled on the creek and hissed like little snakes.

Smoke began to move down the valley and glide out over the water. A wavering black shape seemed to move behind it.

Beau put the Browning on it and squeezed.

It kicked and flared. A blue-white flame and a solid boom.

He fired twice, as he’d been taught, letting his breath ease out, fighting the kick with his shoulder.

There was a snap and a whistle. Something slammed into the grass and buried itself in the dirt six inches from his right knee. He rolled left and crawled backward into the dark.

Two more snaps and two more rushing whistles. One so close to the other that they hit almost as one.

Beau backed away, pushing at the gravel, his belly tight as a drumhead, ready for another bolt, ready to see a hard metal
shaft sticking out of his body. His fear of that was something deep and paralyzing.

Now there was nothing on the water but pale smoke and starlight. He thought about going back for the shotgun. At least it would give him a wider field of fire. No. Whoever was hunting him, it was his style to get in close and do it with a knife. The shotgun wouldn’t help in close.

Two rounds gone. Twelve left. One extra magazine.

And every time he put out a round, he’d mark his own position with muzzle flare. He’d never see where the shaft was coming from. All things considered, for this kind of a fight, that bow was a pretty good weapon. These guys knew what they were doing.

He shifted his hips, and a little rattle of gravel tumbled down the bank. He heard the snap and the thrum, felt the hammer blow in his right leg, a numbing freezing impact that jarred him from his toes to his ribs. His leg was pinned to the dirt.

Christ—the thing was all the way through him.

His pulse hammering in his right ear, he felt around the shaft. It was buried in the muscle and flesh at the inside of his right thigh, inches from his groin. The head had come right through. He could feel the razorblade edge in the dirt. Beau tried not to throw up.

Grasping the metal shaft, he tried to pull it free. Then there was pain, electric and complete. He cried out, bit down, turned it into a low growling moan.

That’d bring him. There was nothing to do but shut up and wait for him to come in.

The creek ran and tumbled in the banks and lees. That cold night wind sighed through the cottonwoods. In the east a pale green light was shining over the horizon. The moon was coming. When it rose, it would be like day. He could see what was coming. And what was coming would see him.

He waited, fighting nausea.

The light began to change. Shadows that were black became gray. An arc of moonlight had touched the creek far up at the bend. It would reach him soon. Where the hell was Eustace
Meagher? How long had he been waiting here? How long since the fight at the wagon? How much blood was he—?

He heard water swirl. A pebble slipped. A gray formless shape moved across the water, blotting out the starshine. Beau set his hands and pulled his leg free, rising with the arrow in him, bringing the Browning up, firing at the sound, seeing only the afterlight from his own blast, seeing red fire on the water, the Browning kicking in his hand, butting at his shoulder and his forearm. He squeezed off three sets of two rounds, the rhythm dulling his fear. Six rounds. Six dazzling blue-white billows. A sound like a fist against meat, repeated.

And a slow subsiding settlement, something heavy gliding into deeper water.

He lurched forward into the sound, into the smell of his own gunfire, through the gathering smoke across the water. Twenty feet in, he fell across a wet body, turning as he fell, the Browning under him.

He landed inches from a face with three black holes in it, two of them eyes and one a larger uneven wound full of black blood under the right eye. Something pulpy and gelatinous floated around the right ear, under a thick black braid. In the starlight the dark face showed nothing but death. He found a metal and fiberglass bow in the gravel a few feet beyond him.

Still sliding on his belly, the fletching of the shaft grating on stones, he moved, half-floated, downstream, trying to see through the dark and hear through the noise of the water. Something was moving, stopping and moving again, dragging a heavy weight. This was off to his left, on the riverbank.

He put his left hand down into the gravel and settled into a low pool as cold as winter. Cold fire flickered like gasoline over his chest and his right leg.

The current here was stronger. It tugged at him, an insistent clutching persuasion … come along, come along with the river.

It brought him a body from above the bend.

The body settled softly against him, a sailor home from the sea. It smelled of shit and cooked meat. Hamburgers. Blood.

Under the half-light something gray and loopy rose up from
its belly. The thin petulant face had frozen into an open-mouthed permanent complaint. Its dead eyes saw through the clouds, and the dead mind floated through the Milky Way. The education of Peter Hinsdale was now complete.

Through the gathering smoke, through the brightening night sky, from beyond the low black hills, Beau heard several cries and four deep percussive booms, like a storm in the high passes.

He crawled away from Hinsdale and rolled onto his back, half out of the water, the shaft in his leg scraping on bone. He set his head back in hard gravel and watched the stars turning above him. They moved in a slow magnificent arc, rising out of the black hills to his left, gliding in a glacier of time across the perfect blue silk of the night, falling like jeweled rain into the black hills on his right.

That dragging sound grew closer. He tried to care about that and found that he did not. A lazy langour was rising in him, infinitely sweet and deep. The pain in his ribs and in his right leg was there but not there, a memory of pain.

A face rose up over him, breathing heavily. A hand caught his shirt and pulled at him. Beau felt himself being dragged farther up the bank, out of the water. The shaft caught in the rocks and twisted in his muscle, and he sighed.

He felt hands on him, running down his body. They reached the arrow in his right thigh. He heard a short exhalation, a muttered curse. Over the hills a low throbbing sound, rhythmic and deep, carried on the wind. He could hear men’s voices in the dark.

Light from the rising moon settled over them. Beau looked up to his left and saw who was holding him.

“Well, well. Hello there, Benitez.”

“Sergeant. Hold still. I hear the chopper.”

“No problem—none at all. You hurt?”

“Yes. He cut me up good. I walked right into him.”

“Me too.”

“You killed him.”

“That’s my theory.”

“He cut me, I fell down into the river. Lost my gun, lost my radio—lost everything. Some cop.”

“Hey, Benitez.… Fuck that. He’s dead, you’re not. That’s the way—it’s … supposed to go … okay?”

“Okay, Sergeant. I guess … we not in Kansas anymore, huh?”

Beau twisted to look at Benitez.

After a little while, Benitez smiled at him.

Gabriel slept eight inches from the brink of space, thirty thousand feet above the curving blue arc, the sun a thin orange blade. Beside his right temple, on the far side of the skin of the United jet, the air was brittle with ice crystals. Hoarfrost etched the oval plastic window. His long-fingered blue-veined hands rested on the fold-out tabletop in front of him, over a carefully creased copy of
USA Today
. A white cup half full of coffee sat at the edge of the tray. The coffee moved in a tidal way as the plane rose on a fold of air or trembled in a thermal, like a ship carving a reach through a sea of violet glass.

Under the wings old mountains broke into the light out of black valleys, cloaked in drifting snow. Far to the south a single volcanic peak lifted a secret crater lake high above the plains.

Gabriel’s chest moved in a slow rhythmic way, and his face had settled into rough-cut planes of bone and skin and muscle. His thin lips tightened and relaxed as his dream arced and crackled along the filaments of synapse and memory beneath his skull.

It is always the same dream. They are at thirty-eight thousand feet over the South China Sea. The Royal Thai 747 is as dim as a medieval chapel. They are flying east toward an elusive
sunrise that seems always to be just visible as a line of pink light at the farthest curving of the globe. Under the wings he can see tiny islets of white light against the moonlit furrows of the sea, cargo ships bound for Singapore and Ujung Pandang, Zamboanga, and Bataan, through the Sulu Arch to Sarangani Bay, where the long green rollers of the Pacific hammer and shatter on the cliffs of Mindanao and Dinagat. Here the islands ride like birch canoes at the brink of the Mindanao Trench. And in the Trench, seven miles down beneath the moonlit waves, crystalline constellations of luminous life flicker and glide between vast gray hills of dreaming monsters.

The lights on the islands below are different from American lights, which glitter in blocks and units and squares, the geometry of rationality. In the East the lights follow riverbeds, coastal chains, and mountain crests, so that the islands look like electric leaves floating on a great salt pond, delicate traceries of lights marking the patterns of life below. Here and there, in the clustered cores of the larger towns, a sliver of flame from a cracking tower or a coal-fired generating plant glints red against the pale blue of the street lamps and shipping yards.

There are twelve other men in the first-class cabin: a Buddhist monk in a saffron robe, wearing executive-length socks under his heavy leather sandals, a Vuitton briefcase open on his spinnaker belly; seven Japanese businessmen asleep over lukewarm sake and productivity graphs; a Malaysian minister and his languorous nephew folded together into a Thai silk coverlet that shimmers scarlet and golden under the reading lamps, their hands seeking and touching in absolute breath-held silence; an Australian developer nodding over his laptop computer; and Gabriel’s prisoner, the young Palestinian boy the section has been after for five months, still in his school clothes, thirteen on the Saturday just past, staring sightlessly out the porthole, drugged and dead in the eyes.

Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony is playing in the cabin. It constructs an alabaster Parthenon in the mind, floating in the clouds over the Sulu Sea. The flight attendant, a delicate flame in Thai silk as she moves down the aisle, brings the knife on
a carved wooden tray and, in Asian politesse, contrives to bring his attention to the time, Mr. Picketwire.

Behind her the door is open to the night sky, yet no wind tears at her
ao-dai
and her hair frames her still features like black onyx around an amber cameo. Thirty-eight thousand feet below, the freighters churn through the waves. The night wind moans past the curved plastic of the doorway.