Lizardskin (44 page)

“That’s a fine old High Plains name.”

“And the rest—Jubal, Earl, that Cheyenne guy, Comes In Sight. And a couple of new faces I want you to look at. One guy here, he’s got that look on him you’re always talking about. The Hundred-Yard Glaze?”

Eustace snorted. “You mean, the Thousand-Yard Stare? Looks like a skull, and the eyes go all the way back to the bone.”

“That’s the look. I’m gonna get some prints, see if anybody in Billings has seen him around. He’s out there somewhere—he’s the joker in all this. I want to talk to him.”

“You get anything on Earl Black Elk? Did he live there?”

Beau thought about it for a while. His headlights carved a
blue-white tunnel out of the California dark. Eustace could hear the wind and the rush of tires.

“I’ll tell you, you get Duffy to go to the army and ask them, who sent in the 220 Ditman address, and when. I’ll bet you, Duffy finds out it was sent in by Earl Black Elk less than a month ago. He never lived there.”

“So why send in that address? That’s where his pension checks were gonna go. He’d need that money.”

“Yeah. But what if he thought something was gonna happen to him, and he wanted to leave a trace, leave it where no one could get at it, wipe it out?”

“Spooky stuff, Beau, that’s out there next to Pluto. Christ, he
was
a spook, wasn’t he?”

“MACSOG, you said? And Phoenix? That their kind of thing?”

“Absolutely! Only who was the message
for
? Not us. Duffy had to sell his firstborn to get it out of Quantico.”

“Off the top of my head, I’d say it was put there for someone who could get it. Someone who
did
have access.”

“Like another spook—another Vietnam vet, maybe?”

“We can run this wedding picture by the army. See if anybody recognizes the people.”

“Yeah. Like they’d tell
us
, Beau.”

“Yeah. Sounds pretty wild, right?”

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

“You get the feeling, Eustace, you get the idea, it’s real dark in the mountains and there’s this strange green light over the hill, and you and me are the old prospectors?”

“Beau, you’ve lost touch with the mother ship.”

“No, I mean, we’re the two old prospectors—you know, it’s the one where they see the green glow, and one guy says to the other, ‘Well, Jebediah, let’s go on over the hill and see what’s going on,’ and the other one says, ‘I don’t know, Jeremiah, that there’s a pretty funny-looking green glow there.’ Meanwhile, the credits are rolling up their backs, and we’re hearing this weird electronic music.”

“Leave Los Angeles soon, Beau, before it’s too late.”

“You’ll call Bucky Blitzer?”

“Yeah. I’ll do it all. So if I’m getting you, you figure this joke about the two lawyers, it ties into this somehow?”

“Nothing you can take to court. But jokes, you know, they go by word of mouth. So I’m thinking, suppose Bucky gets it from Hubert, both of them at Mountain Bell, and suppose Hubert—”

“Got it from Danny Burt. Yeah. I see it. Anything else I can do? I mean, since I’m up already?”

“How tight are you with Rufus Calder?”

“We humped the sixty together in Eye Corps.”

“That means something?”

“It means we’re tight. What do you need?”

“Do you think you can get him to scoop Jimmy Drinaw?”

“On what?”

“Well, he’s got an Ithaca riot gun. Last time I looked, they weren’t legal for security guards. That do?”

“For a start. It won’t keep him long.”

“It’ll keep him alive until we can roll this up. It’ll keep him from tipping Danny Burt.”

“Okay, I’ll try. Maybe I can get him to put some surveillance on 220 Ditman. See who comes and goes.”

“He’ll want to know why.”

“I’ll tell him what I know.”

“And what’s that, Eustace?”

“Not much. Maybe Farwest and Danny Burt are into some kind of contraband operation. Maybe drugs, you think?”

“Yeah, that would cover it.” Beau was struggling with his next request. No matter how it went, he was going to look bad to his boss, but he hated to keep things from Meagher.

And something had to be settled.

“One other thing. I don’t know if I ever got around to telling you, but Bell had a videotape in his VCR, hooked up to a roof camera, and—”

Meagher cut in, his voice rising. “Are you going to tell me you had a videotape of the robbery, the whole action, and you
forgot
about it?”

“No—no no no. It—I think Bell came in and shut the thing
off, a few minutes before the whole thing happened. There was nothing on it, at least I didn’t think there was—”

“Why the hell didn’t you bring it up at the board? Ballard would
love
that. It would show intent!”

“Has anybody heard from Bell yet about the lawsuit?”

“Not yet.”

“Nobody’s heard from him at all?”

“Not a word since Monday. He doesn’t have many friends. I’ll send a car out there. I’ll send Moses Harper. You haven’t answered my question about the videotape.”

Beau said nothing, looking for a way to explain it that Meagher would accept. “I didn’t think it was important.”

“Maybe next time you could let me in on your thinking, Beau. It would help me preserve my illusions about being the CO. Now you
do
think it’s important?”

“Bell was in the tape talking to somebody in a big old Caddy. Can’t say what color, and I couldn’t see the plates. But I know the year, give or take. It’d be between 1975 and 1979. Black or dark brown or dark blue.”

“The driver?”

“Nope. But Bell was real pissed when he walked away from the car, and it was right after that he shut off the tape. Maybe there’s a connection.”

“So what do you want? You want me to get Motor Vehicles to run off a list of Cadillacs in eastern Montana, see if the RO’s ring a bell?”

“Would you?”

“I don’t see the point. So Bell was pissed at a guy in a Caddy. So what?”

“I think it would be good to talk to the driver.”

Meagher groaned, yawned. “Sure, okay. We’ll give it a shot. Look, I’ve still got room on my page here, Beau. Anything else I can do for you? Laundry? Boil your cats? Tell you the weather?”

“Yeah. How’s the weather?”

“Actually, it sucks. I hear we got a
big
front coming in, a real howler. You should see it on the TV. Looks like black
doom in a ’59 Roadmaster. You better get back here before it hits. Get your cats indoors.”

“Yeah, I will. Are we still keeping an eye on Bobby Lee and Maureen?”

“She’s okay. So far, nothing. She goes to work, she comes home. She’s having the house remodeled. Spending a lot of money.”

“Tell me about it. She came along with Dwight when I was in the hospital. Gold chain, earrings. I know she doesn’t
have
a lot of money. Maybe it’s Dwight’s.”

“Well, she’s spending
someone’s
cash. We have some Big Horn cars in the area, and Dell Greer stays around when he can. Bobby Lee likes him. By the way, I stopped in there, and she gave me a letter for you. Wait a minute.”

The traffic had thinned out. Beau was running in the dark through low black hills and stunted green bushes. The artificial lushness of the place, the flowers and the twisted vines, the heavy dark of the night sky without stars, the rotten smell of the city—it weighed him down and made him hungry for endless grasses and a horizon without limits or hard edges.

“Beau?”

“Yeah?” There was a sudden trilling bleat in his ear. He held the phone away and looked at it. It was flashing
LOW BATT
at him.

“You better hurry, Eustace. My battery’s going.”

“Okay. Jeez—she says ‘Dear Daddykins’—
Daddykins?
”

“Come on, Eustace. You can do it.”

“The things I do for you. ‘Dear Daddykins, I got new shoes I am six now we have our own policeman his name is Dell can I have a gun for my seventh birthday are there goldfish bowls in hell I love you’—” Meagher’s voice cut off in a shrill beep.

“Tell her hello,” said Beau, into the dead phone.

Up ahead the road ran down a long decline toward a grid of lights and neon. San Berdoo. City of Dreams.

Why hadn’t he told Meagher about the old Cadillac before now?

He had stared at the tape for a while, trying to get around
a terrible insight. He’d pushed it down and covered it over, but it was still there. He kicked some earth over the idea and put it out of his mind. He’d go to the hockey arena, see Los Falcones, have a good time. All work and no play.…

Anyway, he was wrong about the tape.

He was tired and overworked, and his leg burned and ached.

Meagher would get Motor Vehicles onto it.

They’d find the driver, whoever he was, and it would be someone else entirely. They’d ask him what Bell had been saying to him. He’d have some explanation that would either help them or turn out to be nothing at all—some stupid argument over an unpaid bill or a set of faulty plugs.

And Beau wouldn’t have named … anyone.

He slowed as he entered the San Bernardino turnoff.

That was as far as he could go.

Cold.

And pain.

There was a weight on his chest. It was crushing the breath out of him. His mouth was full of … something. He tried to spit it out but could not, tried to brush it away and his hands wouldn’t move. He turned his head, and a red sheet of searing agony flashed through his mind, convulsed his body, shook him violently and he tried to scream but his mouth was full of earth … something was close …

 … he could hear something …

 … scratching …

 … pulling and scratching … the noise was close, but he couldn’t see because something was in his eyes …

 … in his mouth …

 … something … was earth … he was covered with wet earth and then he remembered, and the fear crawled into his mind and began to eat … death but not dead … buried but not dead …

 … and the scratching … closer … he moved his head again … moved it through the sheeting red pain … and the earth fell away from his eyes, and he blinked up at a black sheet with thousands of tiny holes in … no … it was the sky … it was the night sky … he had known the names … Orion … Cassiopeia … something growled and bit at him and he felt warm breath and suddenly there were teeth—
teeth
—sinking into his shoulder, and he was being pulled … he twisted
 … the earth fell away from his chest … more pain, but still he moved and he felt the teeth, and now he smelled hot fetid breath and his body was being pulled by the cloth of his shirt … he arched and twisted again, and a hand came free, and he clawed at the earth in his face and his eyes and the ground seemed to open up and he was suddenly
released
, and he spilled out onto cold wet grasses—spiky against his cheek—he heard an animal growling and grunting and he felt the pull again … and the pain—shattering, it was a living thing that coiled in his mind and chewed on the inside of his skull, he could feel its teeth raking against the pink wet bone inside his skull … his face was a red mask … and the animal let go and came in again—he saw it against the stars, a blackness that frightened him to his core … every primitive fear … every dark thing that had ever slithered across the floor of his imagination, and he tried to bring his hands up, and then the animal was on his chest and digging—scratching—whimpering and tugging at his shirt and in the middle of his pain and his panic, the thought came to him like a soft warm light turned on in a childhood room.

This was Joe Bell’s dog.

His Irish setter.

The animal pushed against him and snarled again, and bent down to bite his shirt … Joe Bell’s dog had found him …

 … in his grave …

 … and dug him up …

Gabriel rolled to his left, spilling the dog off his chest, and he threw up on the grass, heaving and spitting until his throat felt like an open wound. Then he rolled onto his back and—carefully, like a man touching a glass flower—felt his face, his mind full of images of wounded men he had seen—terrible disfiguring wounds—teeth bare—jaws hanging and smashed—men opened to the backs of their throats—eyes burst and crushed and cheekbones blown away—he’d killed a man once, a friend, in a little clearing of the jungle growth ten miles from the Peruvian border—the man had tripped a perimeter mine and it had taken his face, and the terrible obscenity
was that he could have lived and Gabriel did the only kind thing with a length of wire …

He felt his face and gradually, delicately, he measured the damage. The round had hit him in the mouth, just under his left nostril and it had turned there—in the freakish way of lead shot in the human body—deflected by the jawbone—perhaps he had turned his face at the last second—the round had carved a path around his upper gumline—the jaw was cracked—he knew that from the pain and the deafness—and then it had torn out of his body under his left ear. He could almost follow the path. The exit wound was raw and he could not bring himself to touch it.

If he lived, his face would be disfigured for the rest of his life. The pain was growing sharper. The shock was passing.

The Irish setter was panting now, a black shape under the soft starlight. Gabriel managed to sit upright. The dog came over and tried to lick his face. Gabriel stopped him and ran a bloody hand through the dog’s ruff. He had no idea why the dog had persisted in his digging—whether the dog was looking for something to eat or someone to love, but Gabriel would see to it that this dog lived a long and happy life.

He tried to speak to the dog but could not move his face without cracking the bone, and the pain of it was almost enough to make him pass out.

The light was changing as he watched. The stars were paling and receding, and a luminous wash of violet and pale pink began to bleed upward into the night sky. He pulled his shirtsleeve up and was surprised to see that he still had his watch, and even more surprised to see that it was still running.

Now, there’s an endorsement possibility for you. A watch for Christ himself. Don’t be late for your next resurrection.