The Dark Horse (13 page)

The Basquo handed the receipt to Ruby and looked at me. “You going to try today?”

Despite our brief conversation, Mary Barsad was on the fourth day of trying to starve herself. Dog followed me back to the holding cells and to the bag of food that would most likely go uneaten.

She was sitting in her usual position when I turned the corner, and I pulled the folding chair over to sit with her. She momentarily uncovered her face from her hands to glance at Dog but then once again disappeared behind the long, thin fingers.

“Lunch.” I opened the bag on my lap and looked inside. “Grilled cheese sandwich, fries with seasoned salt, a salad, and an apple.” Dog looked at me expectantly, having been the beneficiary of Mary Barsad’s resistance so far. “You know, I’m going to stop giving your food to Dog—he’s getting fat.”

She didn’t say anything.

I took a breath. “Mary, if this situation continues I’m not going to have any choice but to have you transferred back to the Campbell County jail and then to Lusk and the women’s prison, where you will be forcibly fed with a tube.”

She still said nothing, and her hands remained covering her face as I sat there holding her lunch. Maybe it was the phone conversation I’d just had, or the situation she was putting me in, but I was getting a little irritated. “You don’t talk, you don’t eat—what exactly do you do?”

To my surprise, her hands slipped down a little. Her voice was perfectly reasonable. “Haven’t you heard? I shoot people in the head.”

The unearthly azure eyes had focused on me for the first time in ninety-six hours; I thought about another tall blonde I’d been unable to save and swallowed a little of my past.

Hershel was looking at the horse trailer Benjamin wanted that neither of them could afford. “How you feeling?”

A somewhat unfocused picture of hung over, he turned and looked at me as he rolled himself a cigarette. “So, why did you let my twelve-year-old horse step on my head?”

“I think it was that twenty-year-old scotch that stepped on your head.” I looked at the powdered paint that was flaking off of the four-stall horse trailer. “What’s it worth?”

The old cowboy shrugged, and I think it hurt. He pulled the trademark Blue Tip match from his hat and lit the hand-rolled cigarette. I counted six matches in his hatband and figured Hershel was pacing his cigarettes these days. “ ’Bout a thousand, maybe.”

Two shotgun stalls with butt-bars and a rotten wooden floor, questionable tires, and broken plastic windows—I figured the auctioneers would be lucky if they got seven-fifty. Benjamin scuffed a boot in the sand of the arena. “I heard you were thinking of taking this little outlaw up to the Battlement?”

Hershel looked at the boy and then back to the faded cobalt paint of the vintage trailer. “Might as well be a million.” He smiled bitterly at Benjamin with his missing teeth. “I’m so stony broke that if they was sellin’ steamboats on the Powder River for a dime apiece, all I could do is run up and down the bank yellin’ ain’t that cheap.”

I glanced at Juana and she rolled her eyes, and the two of us watched the auctioneer attempt to get another twenty dollars out of a manure spreader before moving on to the object of our two cowboys’ affection. “Why do you suppose Nolan is selling his place?”

She leaned against the trailer and pushed her hair back behind her ears. “He was going to get rid of it because he didn’t want to deal with any more of Wade’s crap.”

I joined her and leaned against the trailer. Bill looked pretty satisfied; evidently the sale was going well. “Has anybody told him that’s not much of a problem anymore?”

“Yeah, but I think he got used to the idea of selling the place, so he’s just going ahead with it.”

The familiar auctioneer’s voice echoed in the confines of the building. “Now we have a prime example of a nineteen-and-sixty-eight, dubya-dubya brand, straight-load, bumper pull trailer. What do I hear, what do I hear! Gimme a thousand to start, a thousand to start! Here we go!”

We weren’t particularly going, because no one was bidding.

Larry Brannian was the auctioneer. He was from my county, and from where I stood I could read BRANNIAN AUC-TIONEERING SERVICES, DURANT, WYOMING, on the PA system. He was a comfortable old cowboy and the best auctioneer in the state, with a turquoise and coral bolo tie that bobbed up and down on the freshly starched opening of his white dress shirt when he spoke. He was a little embarrassed at having opened the bid too high. “Eight-fifty, do I hear eight-fifty, eight-fifty, eight-fifty, eight-fifty—”

The crowd remained unmoved.

“Seven-hunerd, seven-hunerd dollars for this fine piece of equipment with tires that . . .” He peered to get a better look at the bald and dry-rotted tires to our left. “Tires that hold aieeer!” There was a smattering of laughter from the crowd as his eyes caught mine, and he laughed. “Well, we must have some trouble around here somewheres.” I ducked my head and pulled my hat down just a little; I looked behind me as if Larry must’ve been talking about somebody else. The auctioneer was nothing if not quick on the uptake and rapidly changed the subject back to matters at hand. “Seven-hunerd?”

Another disaster averted, I watched the abject misery that passed between Benjamin and Hershel as the old cowpuncher started to raise his hand but then thought better of it. A spotter raised his arm and pointed toward an area we couldn’t see, which was blocked by the trailer itself. “Hup!”

“I got seven-hunerd, seven-hunerd, gimme seven-fifty?”

Mike Niall, who was leaning against the far wall, raised his head and nodded. Another spotter caught the gesture. “Hup!”

“Seven-fifty. Do I hear eight-hunerd?”

He looked back at the party we couldn’t see to the right, and the spotter rang out again. “Hup!”

“Eight-hunerd. Eight-hunerd. Do I hear eight-fifty?”

Mike Niall raised the brim of his sweat-stained straw Resistol and spat on the sand-covered floor.

“Hup!”

“I got eight-fifty.” Brannian looked toward the mystery bidder, and his spotter cried out again. “Hup!”

“Nine-hunerd, nine-hunerd! Now we’re talkin’! Rubber mats, padded walls, hay manger, and a tuck-under saddle rack!” The spotter swung back toward Niall, but you could see the rancher’s will was rightly weakening.

I watched Hershel and Benjamin, cowpokes separated by a good sixty years but joined in a brotherhood of horseback and by a thing we all shared, the want of a journey to a mystical place.

“Nine-hunerd once!”

There was a lesson my mother had instilled in me at an early age, which had been reinforced by my experience in Vietnam and by my twenty-four years as sheriff of Absaroka County. She said that I should protect and cherish the young, the old, and the infirm, because at some point I would be all of these things before my own journey ended.

“Nine-hunerd twice!”

So far, I was two for three.

I raised my hand above the crowd.

“Hup!”

I left it there as a tall, handsome Cheyenne man peeked around to see who he was bidding against now. The young woman and the two cowboys looked up at me in surprise. Henry Standing Bear glanced at our little group and shrugged. Hired on faith, one is obliged to be more than expected.

It looked like UPS with all the boxes in the kitchen of the old Nolan ranch house, and it was all I could do to find a place to sit down. I chose a foldout stool, which was leaning against the wall, and sipped my can of iced tea. I turned down a slug from the bottle of rye whiskey that Bill had offered before he spilled himself a double shot into a tumbler—it was his second since I’d arrived. I wondered what it was that caused old cowboys from around here to resort so readily to drink. He alternately sipped and wrapped plates, stacking them in cardboard boxes.

“I tell you, if you ever want to talk yourself out of buying anything ever again, just be forced to pack up everything you’ve already got.” He held up a dish for my inspection. “You need any dishes, Mr. Boss?”

I shook my head no and thought about all the boxes still in my own life that were lined up against the walls of my cabin. “Where you headed?”

“Believe it or not I bought a condo in Denver, down in LoDo.” He stopped packing for a moment and toasted the Queen City. “Thought I’d try urban life; see if it agreed with me. Eat in restaurants, drink five-dollar cups of coffee, and see if the Rockies can ever win the big one.” He smiled.

I felt a little guilty about raising the next subject. “Being neighbors with Wade Barsad turn you against ranching?”

He thought about it. “Oh, there wasn’t much of the ranch left after I sold the majority to him. All I had was this old place, two hundred and sixty acres, and the new house.” He glanced around. “I got it all listed in Gillette and Sheridan, and it’ll probably be sold by next week.”

I sipped my tea. “You ever think about buying the other part back instead?”

The look on his face hardened, but it was having a difficult time combating the liquor. “Not really. My family had this and an old gas station up on the east side of the Powder River forever, but it always seemed like they were working three jobs just to make ends meet.” There was a resignation in his voice I recognized. “I guess I’m just tired of it.”

“No family?”

“Nope, I’m the last one stupid enough to stay. I had a wife.” He looked around as if she might be in one of the boxes. “But I must’a misplaced her somewhere.” His eyes finally rested on the tumbler of rye, with more than a little meaning.

“Kids?”

“Yeah, but it appears they went the way of their mother.”

I studied him. “Footloose and fancy-free.”

“That’s the way of it.” He continued to gaze at the amber liquid intermixed with the ice cubes for a while longer, then rattled the tumbler, sat it down, and began wrapping more dishes. “You don’t have to dance around it; you can ask me about Wade, I don’t mind. I got nothing to hide.”

“General consensus was that he needed killing.”

He breathed a short laugh. “I’ve heard that from more than one source.”

“You don’t seem overly bitter toward the man.”

He folded the flaps on the box, pulled up another one from the floor, and glanced at the large and mismatched stack of dishes on the counter. “Hey, you sure you don’t need any dishes?”

“Yep, I’m sure.” I continued to look at him.

He picked up the bottle from the counter, refilled his glass, and took another swig for emphasis. “I got my money out of him.”

“Meaning?”

He shrugged. “Most of the people around here who hated his guts, hated him because he cheated ’em in one way or another. I got my money up front, when he bought the ranch. Maybe I just caught him at the head of the curve, while he was still flush.”

“Lost it quick?”

He sat the bottle back on the counter and gazed at the unwanted dishes, but his enthusiasm for packing seemed to be waning—mine would have. As he ruminated, he reached up, unplugged, and plucked from the wall one of the ugliest metal sunburst clocks from the fifties that I’d ever seen. “Oh, yeah.”

“He didn’t know a lot about ranching?”

He looked at the clock, greasy from years of ticking above the range, its cord dangling to the floor, and it was like time had died. “You need a clock?”

“Nope.”

He looked disappointed. “You don’t start taking some stuff, I’m going to stop talking to you.”

I held out a hand for the clock—it was even uglier on closer examination.

He smiled, satisfied that there was at least something in the kitchen he wasn’t going to have to pack. “He didn’t know heifer from steer as near as I could tell, but he came rolling up in that big, black Cadillac of his at a time when it didn’t seem like anybody else was doing anything but leaving.”

I rested the clock on a box and hoped he wouldn’t notice if I left it. “He wanted your place?”

“Hey, he was a godsend to me. The bank was getting ready to foreclose; damn right I was glad to see him.”

“Where did the money come from?”

“Out of state, both times.”

“Both times?”

“He bought half of my ranch about four years ago, and the other half about a year or so back.” He sipped his refreshed whiskey, set it on the counter with the bottle, and began packing dishes again. “But you know all this stuff.” He glanced up at me. ”I mean, you insured him, right?”

I didn’t answer the question. “Did he ever say where the money came from?”

He reached for the packing tape. “There was a lot of talk about that. Some folks puzzled over the fact of how such a lousy rancher could keep coming up with money.”

“What’d they say?”

“Oh, the usual stuff. Some said drugs, some said the mob, and others figured he was in the witness relocation program.”

“Really?”

“Wouldn’t be the first one who showed up out here.” He finished taping the last box and put it with the others on the linoleum floor. “He got sued about a half-dozen times, once by the hospital in Gillette, once by the propane delivery people, once by Mike Niall, once by Pat down at the bar, and twice by me.”

“What was the hospital one about?”

He picked up the bottle of rye and refilled the tumbler, which was four times, by my count. “That was tied in with Niall, who ’bout kicked his ass over some cattle Wade sold him. There was a fight, and Wade went and got a rifle out of his truck and Mike broke his hand takin’ it away from him.”

“That would be the rifle that his wife Mary used to allegedly kill him?”

His eyes avoided mine as he picked up the glass. “I’d rather not comment about that.”

“What about Pat at the bar?”

He leaned against the counter and propped an elbow on a folded arm, glass by his head. He was still staring at the floor. “Pat owed Wade a small fortune and rather than pay him money, he just gave him half the bar.”