Lizardskin (23 page)

“Is my credit good for a favor?”

“Yes. But you have to promise to call me. I want to see you again.”

That was direct. Times were changing, thought Beau.

“I’m … a little old for you, don’t you think?”

Trudy watched him for a couple of beats.

“God. I said I wanted to see you. I didn’t say I wanted to move in and rearrange your pictures. Anyway, I know what you’re going to say. You’re old enough to be my father.”

“Yes, so—”

“But the important thing is, you’re not. If I wait for you to ask me, you’ll dither and screw around thinking about it, and I’ll be sitting at home for a year watching
Jeopardy
, and then I’ll get mad and when you finally
do
call me, I’ll tell you I’m busy and then I’ll feel bad about that and try to call you back, and you’ll have the phone off the hook.
And
I know you’re not seeing anybody. I asked. You used to be married to Maureen Sprague, right?”

“Yes. ‘Used to be’ is the point to remember there.”

“Well, no offense, okay, but anybody who couldn’t stand her is okay with me. I used to work with her in the Julia Dwight Clinic. We all thought she was a first-class bitch. So we have something in common.”

Beau considered it. Why the hell not? He was a good guy. She was safe with him.

“Yes. Okay. I’d like that.”

“Good. Now what was the favor?”

“There’s a Crow man in here. His name is Charlie Tallbull. Can you find out where he is?”

“Why is he in? Wait! He’s the—that was a police chase, right?”

“Right.”

“He’s in the ICU. That’s in the Hogeland Wing. I can take you there, if you want?”

“If he’s in the ICU, will we be able to talk to him?”

“I can check.”

“When are you off?”

“God, Beau. So soon?”

“No. I mean, will you still be around later today?”

“I get off at four.” She handed him a handwritten note. “This is my number, and no, I don’t run off copies for everybody.”

Beau nodded, grinning.

“Why don’t you call me later tonight? I’ll tell you if we can see him.”

“Okay. While you’re at it, can you find out about the young woman—the Indian girl who was brought in by chopper last night?”

“They have her as a Jane Doe. She’s in the ICU, too.”

She saw something in Beau’s face and touched his arm. “Beau … this is a good hospital. If there’s anything that can be done, they’re doing it.”

“Thanks, Trudy. I’ll call you tonight.”

The doors slid back, and they walked out into the lobby. It was filled with visitors. A bright sun glittered on the windshields of the cars parked in the lot. A couple of Big Horn County cops were leaning against a cruiser beyond the glass doors. Moses Harper and Dell Greer.

“There’s my ride.” He reached down into the chair and handed her the vase of flowers. “You take these back to Bucky. Tell him I’m buying as soon as he gets out. Take care of him, okay?”

She looked up at him, frowning, holding the flowers to her chest. “Beau … who takes care of you?”

Beau stopped smiling. “How old are you, Trudy?”

“I’m twenty-eight. Don’t change the subject.”

Beau kissed her again, gravely, and stepped back, looking at her, swaying a bit on his legs.

“I’ll be fine, Trudy. You get on back there before Hanrahan has a stroke.”

“You didn’t tell me who takes care of you.”

“Saint Jude. You know who he is?”

She beamed at him. The elevator doors opened again. “He’s the patron saint of lost causes. ‘Bye, Beau. Will you be sure and call me?”

“As soon as I’ve seen the coroner.”

“Buy me a drink on it? Promise?”

“Sure. Maybe a cherry soda.”

She stuck out her tongue at him. “I drink black russians. I’ll be waiting. Bye-bye, Beau!”

Beau watched the doors shut with an odd hybrid sensation of risk and sadness and anticipation. Exhaling, he turned to face the broad marble floor. He crossed it like a kid on new skates trying out the ice.

Moses Harper saw him coming and came through the doors to help him.

“Beau. You look like shit.”

“Morning to you, too, Moses. Greer come with you?”

“Yeah. We don’t have a lot to do right now. We’re still on paid leave until the County sorts out what happened with that girl and her baby.”

“Yeah. That was what I wanted to talk to you about.”

“So the dispatcher said. Where you wanna go? The Muzzleloader? Or home?”

It was hot outside, and very still. The air smelled of ozone and copper. A blue haze screened the hills to the north. The sky was promising a storm, a promise it usually kept.

“Vlasic still at the morgue?”

“Last we heard.”

“Okay. Take me there, willya? We’ll talk on the way.”

Dell Greer got out of the passenger seat as Beau hobbled around the back of the cruiser. He extended his hand and Beau shook it, sizing him up. Greer was solid and slow, with a broad Nordic face and a little caterpillar moustache even rattier than Hubert Wozcylesko’s, but he had clear eyes and a good smile.

“Sergeant McAllister. How are you?”

“I’m fine, Greer. Why don’t you call me Beau?”

Greer reddened a bit and smiled again. “Thank you, sir. The creek fight there, that was nasty. When we got to you, you looked pretty bad. We’re kinda surprised to see you on your feet so soon.”

“Hate hospitals. Thanks for coming over. I wanted to talk to you guys anyway, even before the thing.”

Harper and Greer looked at each other.

“Garner said so. Look, you get in the front there. I’ll ride in the back.”

Beau managed to ease himself into the cruiser without yelping or passing out. Harper and Greer pretended to see nothing,
but Harper went slowly over the speed bumps as he drove out of the parking lot. The sun was brilliant, glittering off the windows of the bank buildings and the courthouse tower downtown. They drove awhile in silence.

“Well, sir, what did you want to know?”

This was a tricky situation for Beau. He knew Moses Harper pretty well—they had been together on a couple of upgrade courses in Helena, and Harper had a brother-in-law on the Highway Patrol over in Bozeman. Harper was unmarried, but he showed up sometimes at Fogarty’s with a teacher from Yellowstone Technical, and he sat in on some of the poker games with Danny Burt and some of the Highway guys. He played the blues harmonica very well, and anybody who had the nerve to get up in front of a barful of Montana cowboys on a Friday night and play Chicago blues had to have character. Harper had that steadiness about him that made for good sergeants. He’d do well in Big Horn County. Beau had seen him once on a domestic call down in Wyola, a chronic call at an isolated ranch out by Little Grass Creek. The father was a Blood Crow with a gas-sniffing habit. He’d broken his wife’s collarbone once that year, and the call came from her seven-year-old daughter. Beau had come along as backup since the rest of the Big Horn cars were off on a bank alarm in Hardin.

Halfway up the dirt drive leading to the ranch house, the man—a boy really, no older than twenty-three, ragged and thin—stepped out onto the porch, weaving, red-eyed, stinking of gas and sweat and fear, holding a Winchester 30-30. As they got out of the cars, they could hear a child screaming in the house. The dispatcher had already told them that the child was talking about blood, and it was basically a very bad situation that showed every sign of getting a whole lot worse in about five seconds.

A lot of cops would have split right and left and shot the man down right there on the porch. It was a Big Horn call, so Beau just eased his Browning in his holster and waited for Moses to make a move.

Moses stood in the drive for a moment as the boy raised the Winchester and told them to get away. Then Moses stepped
around to the back of his cruiser and opened the trunk. He reached inside and pulled out a large brown teddy bear with a red ribbon around the neck. He raised it over his head and told the guy they were just here to deliver a teddy bear to his daughter.

The guy let them walk right up to him with the teddy bear, and after a low soft talk with Moses, the man handed over the Winchester and they cuffed him and that was that.

As it turned out, the man had stomach cancer, and they got him into the hospital for treatment. He beat the cancer and he beat his addictions, and now he was working for Charlie Tall-bull as a farrier and his wife was pregnant again. The little girl was in trade school up in Billings. She was going to be a dietitian for one of Hogeland’s clinics.

After the call, Beau had asked Moses what the hell he was doing. Moses just laughed and said that there wasn’t anybody in Montana wanted to go to Deer Lodge Prison and have to tell the rest of the guys that he’d shot a man for attacking him with a stuffed teddy. From that day on, Beau kept one in his own trunk, and he saw to it that everyone else on his watch did the same. It sounded stupid, but it was effective as hell—a cop coming up the driveway with a large pink rabbit just somehow changed the whole atmosphere in a domestic call.

Beau also made sure somebody else on the scene had the man in his sights. Just in case.

Greer he knew very slightly, but he had heard good things about him. Still, he was going to ask them about a car chase that had resulted in two deaths and one grave injury, with no evidence of a felony.
And
Harper and Greer were going to be appearing at the shooting board hearing—whenever
that
was —so there were a lot of potholes to be negotiated here. It was a sensitive inquiry, one that ought to be left to Bill Garner, the sheriff of Big Horn County.

“Okay, first, this is none of my business. I know that.”

“So do we,” said Greer, from the back seat. “How come you don’t take this to Garner directly?”

He was watching the shoppers and the tourists on the streets, but he was listening hard and he was wary.

“Like I said, because this is none of my business. But
there’s something happening around the county, and I’d look real stupid trying to make this official. I just have a bad feeling.”

“Look, Beau,” said Moses. “Would you do us a favor? You tell us how it started at Arrow Creek, we’ll tell you about Mary Littlebasket and Charlie Tallbull. And we never had this talk, okay?”

“Okay.”

Beau took a deep breath and told them about what had happened at Bell’s Oasis and his part of the fight down at Arrow Creek. He told it simply, but it took a while. He was telling it partly to make them understand what was on his mind, but as he was telling it, he also realized he wanted to hear another cop’s reaction to the whole thing. Had he been right? Could it have gone another way?

The two Big Horn cops listened to him without any reaction but an occasional nod or a short question about a place or a time. Beau ended with the chopper coming down. They were stopped at a red light about a block from the Yellowstone County Courthouse and the morgue.

Dell Greer let out a long sigh. “Better you than me, Sergeant. It was hairy enough, watching Meagher take that one guy on. Next time, I’m staying home.”

Moses was watching Beau carefully. “How are you taking this?”

Beau considered it. “I guess I’m ducking the whole thing. I mean, back in the Strike Force, we had a lot of gun calls—”

“Twenty-seven for you personally,” said Greer.

“That many? And then that screwup at the Hilltop last year. After a while, you ask yourself, am I … 
causing
some of this shit? You know what I mean, Moses. I’d never have come out of that trunk with a teddy bear.”

“What’re you supposed to do, Beau? Way I heard it, you never shot at anybody wasn’t shooting or about to shoot.”

“Yeah … Ballard says I provoked the Hilltop thing. If I’d just let it go, they’d have caught him on the interstate or taken him down someplace where there weren’t so many citizens around.”

“Or he’d have killed a few people in the mall, or taken a hostage. Anyway, you know there isn’t a guy around who would have dodged a call like that. If you hadn’t taken him, he might have killed some poor trooper who didn’t have your experience. I admire Ballard. She talks rough, but she’s a cop’s DA. But she’s not operational. Nobody’s ever shot at her. She’s never shot at anybody—”

“I wouldn’t bet on that,” said Greer.

“At least she’s not admitting it. I think, what’s getting to you is the girl.”

Beau said nothing. This was getting a little out of hand.

“Hey, I know … I know you don’t want to get into all this. But—way I see it, you’d have something to worry about if you
didn’t
feel like this. That’s the guy I worry about, the guy who never has any doubts, always charges right in there. Sometimes you gotta shoot, but the day you
like
it, that’s a guy I don’t want in my car.”

Greer coughed and shifted, a creak of saddle leather.

“Anyway, there you go. What can we do, Sergeant. Beau.”

“Thanks, Dell. I guess what I need to know is, what happened last week? How did it start?”

Greer had his notebook out. “Okay. We take the call at 0505—day—date—it’s just a ten-seventy—Reason we’re onto it is the clinic has had a lot of theft from the pharmacy. Ritalin, Valium, Percodan—the usual shit.”

“Hell of a lot, actually,” said Harper.

“Yeah. So, you know, you gotta jump when you hear it, even though you know it’s probably gonna be nothing. So we’re up the Whitman Coulee—near your place?”

“Yeah. And?”

“And we’re rolling, you know, not burning it, just coming in for the paperwork, and we hear this gunshot.”

“
Big
round, too,” said Harper, pulling into the Yellowstone morgue lot. Vlasic’s four-wheeler was parked at the rear doors. The muddy gray morgue wagon was in a compound, smudged with fingerprint dust and wreathed in crime-scene ribbon and CIB seals.

“Yeah, big round. So we know Bill Haugge—the Rent-a-
Cop at the clinic? He has this Ruger, big as a toy truck. That makes it a little more urgent. We burn it in the Hardin road. Come around the corner. There’s this brown pickup pulling away—”

“Rusty-red, it was,” said Harper.

“Brown. It was a brown pickup.”