Lizardskin (29 page)

It had taken him another hour to reach the bluffs overlooking the ranch-style house and the outbuildings where Joe Bell lived. Most of the way was marked by standing poles carrying power and phone lines. And on the nearest bluff, Bell had installed a huge white satellite receiver dish; it shouted his presence like a white flag or a pillar of smoke.

Gabriel wore tall boots with his jeans tucked inside, and he carried a stick to strike at the tall grass in front of him. He wanted to give the rattlesnakes plenty of time to hear him coming and slide away. Crickets leaped and fluttered out of his path, and now and then he stepped carefully over a field-mouse nest. Still the crows chattered about him, and any man who was really of this land would have known he was coming.

But Bell was not that kind of man. He could not live with the wind and the silences out here; the dish said as much.

Gabriel found a good place in the bluffs and settled in to watch Bell for a while, and think about what should be done with him. Gabriel watched the man hobbling back and forth from the ranch house to the barn. The light kept changing as clouds flew in front of the sun, the shadows chilled him, and up here in the bluffs the wind was cold and cutting. He shifted on the boulder and readjusted the binoculars, moving them to full power. The ground seemed to jump, and suddenly he was floating in the air in front of the big man.

The white man was big and bent. He walked like an old bear, head forward, intent on his path, favoring his right leg. The sergeant had shot him on the right side. Too bad he hadn’t killed him.

Through the glasses, Joe Bell’s face was a bright red circle of fiery hair and shiny skin. The blood was thick in him, and like all men of his kind, he carried it close to his surface, like the visible stain of his temper. He looked like a man who was used to shouting and hitting.

Bell was carrying bales of hay from a stack under a ram-shackle
lean-to, bringing them into a stable. Gabriel could hear the horses, and the strong smell of manure came on the wind. Bell did not keep his horses clean. The ranch itself looked haphazard, as if it had more or less fallen into these arrangements on the day it was built and Bell had not bothered to organize it.

Gabriel watched him for a long time, thinking about the man and what should be done with him. Somehow a straight-ahead talk with the man did not seem possible. Gabriel did not believe that Jubal and his people had tried to rob Joe Bell’s place. So Joe Bell had lied about everything. Therefore, Joe Bell had something to hide and was not likely to give this lie up freely.

There would have to be some sort of persuasion. A little threat, perhaps, in this isolated place.

Gabriel did not intend to hurt the man, but what had happened to Jubal and the rest, that was something that needed unraveling. So he must wait and see how the day went, see who came and who went, and get a feeling for the man.

Time passed. He saw only Joe Bell hobbling about, and the cloud shadows sliding across the scene, staining the bleached timber purple, then clearing it again when the sun came back. The wind here hissed and rustled in the tall grass. The grass smelled of sage and flowers, dust and spices, a good smell. He had missed that smell in Los Angeles, a city that smelled like rotting fruit and burning rubber.

By now, the sergeant would have found his picture.

It would give the man something to think about. If there had been a plan to kill Jubal, to silence him, then the sergeant was a part of it. He had done the actual killing.

So the picture would let the man know that it had not gone well, and there was a new element in the calculation.

He reached up and touched his shoulder, feeling the cuts that the cat had given him. That was some cat that sergeant had. A good cat. It said something for the sergeant that a cat like that would stay with him and fight for his house. Gabriel had held the big animal out at the end of his arms and thought about breaking it. Still the animal had asked for nothing. It tried to claw him with its hind legs, and it twisted in his hands,
trying to get those jaws into him. Its eyes were bright with murder.

Too fine an animal to kill. Gabriel had locked it in the garage and gone back to the trailer. The little cat inside was different, a toy. It ran as soon as he stepped inside and hid itself in a closet.

Gabriel would go see the policeman, after he had talked to Bell here. It was important to talk to Bell first, because once he had talked to the sergeant, they’d never let him get close to Bell.

Gabriel had looked at that rifle in its locked steel brace. An unusual rifle, the McMillan. A single-shot rifle designed for very long-range shooting, for marksmanship and control. It fired a .300 caliber Winchester Magnum and had a muzzle velocity of thirty-three hundred feet per second. It would hit very hard, even as far out as a thousand yards. The scope was a fine one, a powerful Leupold. The combination would have cost the man close to twenty-five hundred dollars. Taken in all, it was a strange weapon to find in a double-wide trailer in Montana. It was in excellent condition as well, which said something for the sergeant. Gabriel had used one of these weapons on a project in Costa Rica. Shooting from a boat, at night, about five hundred yards offshore, he had killed a woman sitting at a table on the balcony of her house, drilled her through the left temple. An uphill shot into bad lighting, with a cross wind and the boat tossing in the swells. It had been a very fine shot. He had regretted the need to drop the weapon over the side as they drifted away. McMillan also produced a single-shot rifle in .50 caliber, a thirty-pound beast that could send a massive round over two miles, but it was too heavy for his kind of work.

So the man had good taste in guns.

And cats.

Maybe he was someone who could be talked to, a man who had some sense.

And maybe not.

Maybe he was just another Pinda-Lickoyee who needed punishment, like this one down here.

•  •  •

Beau drove Meagher’s dark blue Lincoln Town Car to the parking lot of Sweetwater General, timing his trip so that he’d be there before Vanessa Ballard arrived. They were scheduled to see Doc Hogeland, and then Beau was going to go down and look in on Charlie Tallbull. Beau had asked for Meagher’s car because, tell the truth, he was more than a little shaken by the Polaroid he’d found under his pillow, and Meagher’s car had a heavy tint on all the windows. It gave him a certain sense of cover. It also seemed like a good idea not to cruise around town in his regular patrol vehicle or the green Chevy wagon; whoever had entered his trailer knew too much about him already.

He’d spent most of the morning setting up a perimeter alarm system he’d gotten at the Sears in Billings, a combination of motion detectors and infrared photo cells. The cats would set it off every half-hour if he didn’t position the sensors just right, so it took a long time. Tom Blasingame had come over and asked him about it. Beau told him the whole story. Tom agreed to keep an eye on the place. He suggested taking the cats over to his place, and Beau thanked him for it. If somebody planned to come back, Beau wanted as clear a field as he could get. He was half-afraid he’d get himself so wired that when the alarm triggered, he’d leap out of bed and blow a large porthole through one of his cats. Blasingame had been impressed with the Polaroid.

“Nervy son of a bitch, Beau. Why you figure he did it?”

Beau had been wondering that as well. “My guess? The guy’s a games-player. Maybe a psychopath. You see some of that stuff, in some kinds of …”

“Killers, Beau?”

“Criminals. Sometimes ex-husbands will do it, just to show the wife they have the power. It’s intimidation. Control.”

“You intimidated, Beau?”

McAllister looked around the trailer, at the tangle of wires and sensors. Blasingame caught the look and grinned.

Beau had the photo in his pocket now, and he was also
wearing his full Highway Patrol uniform,
including
his Kevlar vest.

Whatever was going on, he was taking it seriously.

He looked up at the glass window wall where old Doc had his offices, right on the top floor of Sweetwater General. It
had
been his intention to do this all alone, but Hogeland had asked him to bring Vanessa along. He’d been vague about the reasons, but firm in the request. As for Ballard, she was anxious to get Dr. Hogeland’s reading on the survival chances of this Native American Jane Doe in the Sweetwater intensive care unit. If Hogeland and Seidelman thought she was likely to surface soon, she’d suspend the whole shooting inquiry until she could provide testimony.

If not, it was set for 2000 hours this same evening. With the ACLU and SPEAR snuffling around the perimeter, Beau and Meagher and Ballard had agreed that later was better than sooner. It all depended on this Jane Doe upstairs.

Beau was in the hospital parking lot a full half-hour before the appointment. He had gotten into the habit of reaching meeting places thirty or forty minutes before he had to be there when he was up in Helena at the FBI field training seminars. Until this weekend, he’d done it more or less out of habit.

It seemed like a good idea to take it more seriously now, even if he had learned it from the FBI. Deep in his heart, he firmly believed that most FBI people—with the exception of some operational guys and Lieutenant Eustace Meagher—were sententious drones with all the street smarts of gravel. What the FBI loved to do was give simple things complicated names.

For example, they called this tactic “sector preemption,” a means of providing their “field agents” time to “assess tactical and terrain advantages” and to “determine the probabilities of counter-preemptive action” that might “adversely affect mission viability” and “negate conflict initiative capability.” That was how the academy dinks liked to talk.

Beau had once listened with a straight face while a special agent in charge talked about a DEA raid in which a chopper had gone down in Belize. The agent said that the DEA chopper had been “vertically deployed into the terrain.”

That meant it had crashed.

The men in the chopper were carried on the revised roster as “negative assets.”

Translation: They were dead.

If there was a short way of saying something, they’d hunt it down and kill it. And take longer to tell you about it than it took to do it. The years after Helena had taught Beau that very little in the real world worked the way they thought it did in the FBI, but a few of the tricks were useful.

He sat in Meagher’s Town Car listening to the radio chatter, reading the
Billings Gazette
, and feeling the weather roll around Billings as if there were monsters upstairs.

There had been a storm during the night, and now the sky looked bruised and used; ragged tatters of clouds blew crazily across a lemon-yellow sky. The Rimrock cliffs to the north were obscured by a drifting fog bank that never rose above the horizon line. Leaves and dust swirled in the parking lot. The wind blew warm and wet as breath, then cold as a corpse’s cheek as it shifted around to the north and caught currents from the high plains. Down along the river, kids would be playing hookey and fishing for trout in the shallows. The next few weeks would be unpredictable.

There would be days when the sky would be blue and boundless, as full of bright promise as a hooker’s smile, and then there’d be the other days, days when the front would pile up so high, you could see it a hundred miles away, a big black anvil of cloud and thunder. The street would be full of little devils of whirling dust, the sky would turn low and ugly, and suddenly the hammer would come down and lightning would crackle in the air like burning trees, and everything that could move would find cover and dig in. Summer had come to Montana in its usual style, alternating patterns of sunlit mornings and thunderstruck nights.

He had just reached the editorial page and seen the headline:

Fortunately for Beau’s peace of mind, Vanessa Ballard arrived, a few minutes early, in her silver BMW 635 csi, wheeling it into the space beside Beau’s Town Car like a Harrier pilot coming in for a night landing.

Beau folded the paper, got out slowly, and came around to watch her gather her papers and unwind herself from the car. Ballard had the best legs in the High Plains and knew it. She lit up Beau’s face with a white phosporus smile, perfection in a gray silk suit that harmonized with her silver BMW. She shook her golden hair out in a flare that caught the sun and shattered it in a fan of bright light.

“You do that on purpose,” said Beau, adjusting his uniform slacks and silently cursing his hormones. Ballard seemed not to notice her effect.

“Do what, Beau?”

“Never mind. You ready for this?”

“Did an hour on my Power-Step this morning. Then I had a long laze in the sauna, and a rubdown with eucalyptus leaves. Smell me. Do I smell like eucalyptus?”

She leaned forward into Beau and exposed the right side of her neck. A delicate dusting of fine blond hairs floated on top of her snowdrift skin like sunlight on a frozen lake.

“You know, Beau, you’re really not all that repulsive, are you? For a fascist, I mean.”

“I’m not a fascist. I’m a misdirected flower child. I took the wrong turning long ago. I need to be taken in hand. I need someone to lead me to self-actualization.”

“You self-actualize any better, there’s going to be no one left alive in this area code.”

She swiveled gracefully and joined him as he walked, heavy-heeled, across the black tarmac toward the pale sandstone towers of the hospital.

“Why do you drive that Nazi car, Vanessa? Makes you look like one of those Yuppie stockbrokers. I hate those things!”

“Leave my Bimmer out of this. Besides, it’s an excellent car. I’d put it up against that freighter you push around any day.”

“You put it up against the Town Car, Vanessa, won’t be
anything left but a streak of sauerkraut in the middle of the road. Anyway, we’re supposed to be buying American, aren’t we?”

“I’ll buy American when America builds good cars.”