Lizardskin (16 page)

He nods to her and takes the knife, a Kay-Bar. The Palestinian child stands up and walks ahead of him to the open door. The monk watches and asks as they pass him, what is this boy’s errand?

He’s a messenger, says Gabriel.

To whom?

To his father.

Please, Mr. Picketwire, says the Thai girl, pulling at his arm. Special clearance has been obtained.

They walk to the door and Gabriel puts his hand on the boy’s shoulder, turning him. The boy’s face turns up to him. His cheeks are waxy and blue. His eyes are liquid and bright in the hard white spotlight over the door.

You understand your father’s work? What he does?

The boy nods. He has been told. It has been explained to him. Section felt it only fair. He seemed to understand.

You recognize the reasons for this? You lived in his home, ate his food. These sentiments are genetic. You are not innocent.

Innocere
, says the boy. From the Latin
nocere
, to be hurtful. The innocent are not hurtful. But no one is innocent. No one does not hurt something. Everyone is in agreement on this.

Yes, says Gabriel, this is the truth. No one can say they were not aware of this. But it’s also clear that something must now be done, that some steps must be taken to indicate our position. It’s important that your people understand that we have taken a new position. There’ll be no bargaining. Understand, we have no animosity for you personally. You personally have done nothing yet. None of us has hatred for you here. But you will indicate our new position to your father. I personally feel nothing in this matter. It’s selection. Husbandry.
My own people learned that. So will yours. People who think they are true children of a god should study the lives of sheep. Allah’s intentions for you seem to be unclear. He has been oblique on the subject of destiny for your people.

That’s true, says the boy, turning away to face the open door. Will there be pain?

Be more specific, says Gabriel, and he steps into him, using his left hand on the boy’s chin, the Kay-Bar held flat and level in his right hand, his right forearm tensed but fluid. He pulls back hard on the boy’s chin, smelling his hair, smelling the soap and the dry-grasses smell of young boys, and in the same motion drives the Kay-Bar through the blue wool of the blazer and the white shirt underneath, in through the elastic skin, into muscle and cartilage, feeling the tip slide along ribs, finding the gap there where it always is, as familiar as the steps of his own house, and up at forty-five degrees under the left shoulder blade two inches from the spine, to the hilt, once to the left, twisting with his wrist, once back to the right.

The boy’s mouth opens, and fresh blood spills out over Gabriel’s fingers, as hot as spilled coffee, over the back of his hand. Gabriel steps back, sets his bloody left hand palm-down against the boy’s back, and pulls at the Kay-Bar. It resists, then slides free with a liquid sigh, followed by a brief bubble of air and pink foam.

The boy falls forward through the open door. He drops through the night sky, tumbling, a hawk falling, and Gabriel watches him until he loses him against the immensity of the moonlit ocean far below him. A cold wind cuts his cheek.

He turns away and walks back to his seat, and the Thai flight attendant closes the door. One of the Japanese men watches him and makes a note on a paper in front of him. The man’s eyes are without content, wet stones in a muddy river. His hair is thick and blue-black and shines like polished iron. Heavy gold weighs on his wrists. An acid-green silk tie seems to glow against the snowdrift purity of his English shirt.

The Thai girl kneels in front of him, silk rustling against her thighs, a sepia hand resting on his knee, her perfect masklike face turned up into the light.

Can I get you anything, Mr. Picketwire? She uses a starched white napkin to dab at the blood on the back of his left hand, where it has matted the black hairs and seems already to be turning to rust against his sunburned skin. The blood smells of copper and ammonia. She carries a scent like an umbra, frangipani or hibiscus.

Yes, says Gabriel. An Evian, I think.

He woke as the United jet banked left, the huge right wing rising in the porthole, cutting off the russet and ochre hills that faded into smoky blue in the distance. Billings was a grid of wide streets and office towers and malls five thousand feet below. The interstate ran like a snaking cable through the center of the town, curving left, twisting again to the north, then west again out across the rounded hills and gentle valleys of central Montana, toward Big Timber, Bozeman, and Butte. Far in the south, the Bighorns emerged from blue haze, islands in a sea of grass. He looked to the left as they banked, trying to see the Powder River country in the Bighorn foothills. The rivers caught the slanting sun and burned like golden threads in a green carpet.

The flight attendant had seen him waking. She smiled at him and leaned forward, her cornsilk blond hair held back in a tortoiseshell barrette, her pale skin luminous in the hard yellow light from the rising sun.

“You slept for a while, Mr. Picketwire.”

“Yes. What time is it?”

“Just after eight. We’re stacked up here for a little while. We’ll be landing at Logan International in twenty minutes. Can I get you anything?”

Evian, he thought. Or black coffee?

No, there was nothing she could bring him.

“Good morning, Mr. McAllister! Mr. McAllister!”

Beau came up from a wonderful dream that had something to do with a fireplace and a swing chair and a lady he hadn’t thought about in years. He had known her in the old days in Provo. What was her name? She had been the night dispatcher for Steiger. Black hair and violet eyes. They’d spent a couple of weeks in his cabin down on the Yellowstone. In the dream she was sitting in front of him, the fire burning low, her hair a halo of amber light and her face in darkness. She was pulling a cashmere sweater up over her head and Beau was leaning forward … leaning forward, and then he was shaking—no, somebody was calling him.

“Mr. McAllister, you’ll have to wake up now!”

He opened his eyes and met the large fleshy face of a creature who was more or less taking up all of his personal horizon. She was leaning over him, a huge, powdered moon face full of craters and heavy red lips, tiny black eyes staring at him while she whipped the sheet back to his toes, revealing a certain autonomous response to—
Irene!
That was the name of the woman he’d been dreaming about!

“Who the hell are you?”

The heavy face swiveled on a chicken-skin neck, and her starched white uniform crackled as she stared at something in his lap. “I’m Hanrahan! Are we feeling some bladder pressure?”

Beau looked down at himself. Captain Happy was wide
awake. He reached down and tugged the sheet back up to his neck and moved away from this apparition above him.

“What the hell is a Hanrahan?”

She frowned and tapped her nameplate. “I’m the head nurse here. Are you confused?”

“Confused? No, I’m not confused. Back away a little there, willya? I’m getting a neck crick.”

“Hhmmph! Have we had a bowel movement today?”

Beau thought about it.

“Well, Hanrahan, I can’t actually tell by looking at you, but my guess’d be no.”

“Funny. Perhaps we’ll need an enema.”

“Perhaps you’ll have to go get some help.”

“S’happened before, Mr. McAllister.”

“I don’t doubt it. You first. I’ll watch.”

She stepped back and pulled her glasses down off her forehead, where they settled into preset grooves in her cheeks and on her nose. Her tiny black eyes looked huge and wet behind the lenses. She pursed her thick lips and scowled at him.

“You’ll need a bath, sir. You smell like a horse.”

Beau inhaled. It hurt his belly. “Well, you look like a cow. Bath won’t do a damned thing for you, either.”

“Hostility. Sometimes indicates a toxic reaction to medication.” She pulled up a clipboard at the end of the bed and looked at the sheet. “Perhaps we should cut down on our painkiller.”

“Yeah. I’ll switch to beer. You switch to hemlock.”

“Hhmmph. Dr. Vlasic was by to see you.”

“Vlasic! He’s the coroner. Am I dead?”

“Not yet. But we’re doing everything we can. You’re on a liquid diet, so there’ll be no lunch for you. Now get out of bed in ten minutes and walk around. Don’t go so far you tear out that drain in your leg there. Tug on that, and it’ll open up a whole new world of sensory experience for you. You’ll have to stretch those muscles, or you’ll be all bound up. And see to it you move your bowels, or we’ll do it for you.”

“Hanrahan, I think you move me!”

Hanrahan gave him one last look over the top of her glasses
and sailed out the door. Beau sang another two choruses of “Wild Thing,” then trailed away into silence. Where the hell was Eustace!

Beau spent an undefined amount of time lying on his back, counting the holes in the ceiling tiles and trying to figure out what had happened to the guy behind the curtains in the next bed. Whatever it was, it had been massive. There was some kind of machine on a rollaway cart up against the far wall. Power cables snaked all around the linoleum and ran up the far wall to a bank of grounded plugs. It emitted a regular sound, kind of a cross between a belch and a sigh, and a bellows would descend in a plastic cylinder.

The guy himself was out of sight behind the curtain. The cables and pipes emerged from behind the curtain and ran into the machine. The machine had nothing to say. It had been there since Beau woke up this morning.

An accident, maybe? Or kidney dialysis?

Beau hated hospitals. When he had been courting Maureen, back when he was just another gentleman ranker in a pinto car, he had spent a lot of his time dragging cut-up or shot-up or banged-up kids into her clinic in Hardin. Most of them survived, but the main impression Beau took away was of thinlipped nurses in white polyester using stainless-steel scissors on bloody jeans and scorched shirts, tearing away at underwear, opening up the victim like greedy kids ripping away at a Christmas present. The gift was always bloody meat. The nurses were cranky, combative, unpredictable.

So why had he fallen for Maureen?

Well—one thing, she was a tiger in the dark. Beau felt a certain kind of heat in his lower belly as he remembered that part of their relationship. He shifted his weight in the hospital bed and felt a sharp tug at his left wrist.

Just what the hell were they dripping into him anyway? These hanging bottle things always made him think of that injured airman in
Catch-22
, the guy all wrapped up like a
mummy. The nurses would come in and change his bottles around twice a day.

He tugged the sheet back and looked down his body, half afraid to see a tube coming out of his essentials.

No. That part of him was okay. The rest was a mess.

He had a vague memory of Eustace Meagher standing in a cone of hard light as something huge floated overhead and a massive beating sound hammered the cottonwoods up on the bank. Then he was being lifted onto a board as the
hutt-hutt-hutt
boys shoved him inside the chopper. Meagher had been trying to tell him something, but the chopper blades were beating them both into the ground.

He had watched them working on Benitez until some kid who looked about thirteen stuck something in his arm and the rest was more than a little vague. One thing for sure, he figured Benitez had beaten that nickname.

Well, he was still alive. And they’d gotten the arrow out of him while he was unconscious. He appreciated that. His leg was wrapped in gauze and a yellow plastic tube stuck out of the mound, dripping pink fluid into something underneath the bed.

He felt like a gunny sack that used to have a man in it but they’d taken that out and filled it with broken glass.

The girl … not that she didn’t deserve it. But still—and the kid—Christ what a slaughter. What a Friday. Edward Gall, the young boy Joe Bell shot. The girl Beau had gunbutted. The nameless man he had shot. Probably others.

Peter Hinsdale.

Cops, like some professional athletes, most combat soldiers, and half the civilians in America, were always trying to organize the terrible
randomness
of bad times into a predictable matrix. It was all delusion, of course, and they knew it, but that never stopped them from giving it a shot. Full-moon Fridays were going to be crazy. Four guys in a car is a hostile stop, even if they turn out to be seminarians going to a vasectomy clinic. Bad things come in threes. If you always put your gun on last, you’ll never have to use it. Always get up on the same side of the bed every morning, or you’ll be off balance
all day. If things start to go sour in a neighborhood, they’ll get a lot worse before they get better.

It seemed to Beau that something ugly had come to visit in Yellowstone County.

He spent some time trying to drag an insight up from the bottom of this pool of disconnected events. He had a stray feeling that there was a unifying theme here, but the only one he could come up with was the obvious one—all the events had involved some kind of collision with Indians. Mary Littlebasket, if he remembered the family correctly, was from the Whistling Wind clan, the same clan that Alice belonged to. So that was Crow.

Charlie Tallbull, the man who’d been driving the pickup that Mary Littlebasket was killed in, Beau knew from his patrol car days. The Tallbull clan held a grazing tract down on the Wyoming border, and they leased it out to local ranchers from a little office in Wyola. The Tallbulls were Crow as well, but they were mainly businessmen. In the middle of the sun-parched desolation of the southern reaches of the Crow Reserve, the Tallbull operation was actually making money for the tribal collective. He and Charlie Tallbull had known each other slightly when Beau was assigned to speed patrol along the stretch of I-90 that ran from Garryowen to Wyola. Charlie Tallbull was the one with bail money or fine money for the young bucks Beau would catch driving drunk or racing on the interstate; Beau’s impression of Charlie Tallbull was a good one, a solid hard-handed older guy with a deliberation to him, a slow and steady balance, and a brilliant smile that he showed rarely. How Charlie Tallbull got himself involved in a police chase was a mystery to Beau. Now Charlie Tallbull was here in the same hospital.