An American Outlaw (4 page)

Close up, it looked abandoned. An empty doorway, the walls bare stone, no glass in any of its windows. 

I picked my way inside, across a beaten-earth floor. Loose rubble of plaster underfoot. I stared at the sky through the broken roof. Listened to the wind moving in the salt grass. 

I put away Nate's M9 in my jacket. Thought of my own house. Lafayette. Each room; seeing it in my mind, like I was walking through there. Only sound, the heat ticking on the roof. Dust moving in the sunlight. Weeds and a bunch of oil stains in the yard.

My mother died, the place had come to me. There was no-one else. I slept at the house only if I visited on furlough, I was always gone. 

The last months, since leaving the service, I'd stayed there, but it was no home. I joined the Corps at twenty, never came back. My only real family was Nate and Michael. I'd known 'em both since second grade.

I left the house and took a walk around. 

A line of broken fence posts stretched out to a break of honey mesquite; seedpods hanging from the branches. Jack rabbits ate 'em. I cut some sapling wood, stripped it to fine lengths. Tied it together; to set a bunch of traps—I wanted to eat in the morning.

I worked my way back to the house. Stashed the back pack in an old window. I took off the jacket. Laid it, with the M9, in a dark corner behind a pile of rocks.

I drank a little water. Warm. I drunk some warm water in my time—out of canteens, metal cups, plastic bags. 

I caught some rest. Saved energy. Knowing I wasn't about to sleep. Thinking on Michael. On Nate. His little brother, Steven. Dead and gone.

I listened to the night sounds. Cicada and the wind against those empty stones.

Restless, I left the house again, to check on the traps. 

I traced a wide circle through the valley floor. Moon low at the south, the mountain sides sharp against the blackened sky. 

Before first light, I'd get moving. Make up the ground, before the worst of the heat. 

The wind started to pick up, scattering sand across the bone dry ground. I caught a boot in a snag of bush muhly.

I stopped. Stood rigid. 

A sound. 

Something on the wind.
 

It was gone again, as soon as I'd heard it. 

I looked for light.

There was nothing.

The nearest place would be miles away. Forty? Maybe more. 

Nothing could be out there, it was just the wind. I turned back towards the house, straining to listen, above the beat of cicadas. 

There was a muffled sound, now. Like an animal—a dog.

I felt the hairs rise on my arm. 

If it was a dog, it was shut up inside of something. A vehicle—it could be inside a vehicle. 

Nate's gun was in my jacket; at the house. 

I ran, smashed a path through the scrub, jumped a broken wall—hit the ground. 

I picked myself up, scrambled to the back wall of the house, to an opening, stepped in a room—no idea which. 

There was the faintest scent suddenly in the air.

“
Hold it
. Hold still...” 

A woman's voice. From somewhere out of the dark.

I couldn’t see nothing. 

I could see
something
. Through a rotted-out timber hole in the wall, the barrel of a twelve-gauge was pointing at me

“Who the hell are you? What’re you doing?”

I stared at the wall where her voice came from; the only sound that dog going crazy, locked up somewhere, in a car.

“Y’all are trespassing on private property,” she said. “This here’s my Granddaddy’s house...”

What kind of horseshit luck you got to take all inside of one day?

I tried not to act like any kind of a threat to her, considering. 

She held that twelve-gauge rock steady.

I’d have to talk my way out of it. Try to, anyhow. 

If I couldn’t, I’d have to hurt her or she’d have to shoot me. What else was there? 

“I was out hiking the trail, ma’am. Just figured on stopping for the night...”

The dog kept on barking. It stopped to listen every few seconds.

“Didn’t know this here all belonged to nobody,” I says.

I waited for her to speak again. She let me. 

The wind stirred in the long grass growing outside the house.

“You’re hiking the Mesa de Anguila? In summer? You’re pretty far off of the trail.”

“I was looking for water,” I said. 

Any hiker would be in July. 

“Supposed to be a tinaja around here someplace. According to the trail book.”

The barrel of the twelve-gauge moved a fraction through the gap in the wall. “There's nothing around here.”

She let the silence judge me while she thought it over. Dog sure wasn’t buying any.

“I was just fixing to get some sleep,” I said. “Head on out again, first light.”

The shotgun stayed on me; dumb and black.

“These old houses,” I says, “most of ’em got a spring someplace about. I figured I could maybe find something in the morning.” 

She snapped on a flashlight. Shone the beam square in my face. 

I squinted into it; blinded. 

“Look,” I said, “I can just move right on out. Find someplace else to camp—seeing how I’m on private property, an’ all.”

She didn’t answer. The sound of cicadas beat in the night air. That dog howled out again and again. 

She must have followed my thoughts. “He knew there was somebody out here,” she said. “He knew.”

“Ma’am?”

“My dog. He always knows if there’s trespassin’.”

“Sure sounds like it.”

“He don’t care for it, neither.”

She shone the flashlight in my face again. Held it there.

I tried to look like I didn’t mind it, nothing to hide. But I couldn’t see now. She figure on that? 

I could hear her moving. The flashlight snapped off. 

I was blind and disoriented. I heard her feet on the ground, near me now. In front of me. But I couldn’t see a damn thing. I didn’t try to move.

“Thirsty man, huh?”

She was just a few feet in front of me. Wearing some kind of scent. 

I tried to focus on her. My eyes adjusting, slowly. The moon made shadows off the roof timbers. Lines and shapes across the dirt floor.

I could see her as a kind of silhouette. I could see she was tall. Long limbs, slender, sort of dark. 

I heard her feel for something, inside her clothes. 

There was a flare of orange light as she struck a match and lit up a cigarette. I could see a mass of long, dark hair. She swept a hand through it, brushing it back off her face. She held her head to one side as she cupped the flame. 

In the match-glow, I could see dark eyes, strong eyebrows. High cheekbones, full lips. Real pretty girl. She was Mexican or Spanish looking. Latin. The all-white of the cigarette stood out against her sun-brown skin. She had silver jewelry on her fingers and round her wrists. And I could see the shotgun balanced in the crook of her arm.

I didn’t try to talk.

She smoked her cigarette. Thought whatever the hell it was she was thinking. 

I slumped down on the edge of a fallen wall, adrenaline sinking out of me.

She pulled hard on the cigarette. Blew her smoke out extra heavy. “Somebody send you out here?”

“Ma'am?”

“Did Leon send you?”

I ran a hand through my hair. “I don't know anybody around here. I'm just...”

“Hiking the trail,” she cut in. “Right.”

I glanced at the shotgun. She was holding it loose in her right hand. I thought about how fast I'd need to be to get it.

“You don't have much gear,” she says. “For a hiker.” 

She ground her cigarette out into sparks. Swung the shotgun from her waist. Leveled it at me.

I raised my hands. “Take it easy...”

She says; “I'm getting my dog.”

She stepped out of the house. Disappeared towards the sound of the barking. 

I jumped up, straining my eyes to see, trying to feel my way through the darkened room. 

Where was it?
 

I heard a car door creak open. She was saying something, now, talking to her dog. 

There was no sign of the gun. 

I looked for anything laying around that I could use. A length of timber for the dog, if she turned it loose; her I could put down with my feet and hands, depending on the shotgun. 

She have it in her to shoot somebody? 

I didn't want to hurt her, but I had to get clear. There was no time, I could hear her, hear the dog running. 

And something's rising up inside me, a feeling from another place, another life—something I try to shut out, and never let back in. 

Tightness. Gripping my chest, like a steel band, ripping at me. Images flashing in my mind.

And the dog. 

The sound of the dog. It's stopped, somewhere in front of me. 

She snaps the flashlight beam full in my face. White-burn. Like tracer. Everything else black, red, out of balance.

Anger's starting to flood in me, weight moving forward, hands outstretched.

My head hit something. Pain like a hammer blow.

Everything burst in a shower of light and flame.

And I'm falling. Dead weight in the pitch black.

Then nothing.

CHAPTER 6

Alpine.

Outside the City of Alpine Morgue, Marshal John Whicher takes a last gulp at a carry-out cup of coffee. He drains it, crumples it in a big hand and tosses the screwed up remains in the trash. He checks his watch. Inside, waiting in a cold room, is Steven Childress. Age twenty eight.

In the last twenty four hours, the details on Childress' short life show he's a former Alpine resident. Ex-employee at the Farmer's Bank. No criminal record. No previous. Some kid; dreaming of pulling off an inside job. ATF theory about a hard-core military connection, some bunch of vets turned rogue—where was the evidence?

A Marine-issue gun. Circumstantial. Who knew how it got there? 

The marshal squints into the low sun of a new day—it slants from the roof of a mid-rise office block.
Last thing anybody needs is a serial spree
.

From the street, Police Lieutenant Rodgers' Crown Vic pulls in. The lieutenant parks in the empty slot beside Whicher's Silverado. He steps from the squad car, hurries across the tarmac lot.

 “Sorry if I'm late, Marshal.”

 “Y'all don't worry. I'm early.” 

The young lieutenant pushes open the door to the city morgue. Inside, in a sparse reception room, a middle-aged woman in a business suit waits behind a desk. 

“Good morning,” she looks up solemnly. “Gentlemen.”

Whicher takes off the Resistol hat.

“Morning, Ann,” Rodgers removes his own cap. “Can we go straight in?”

“Room Four. Dr. Wendell.”

Whicher follows the lieutenant down a corridor to a wide set of double doors, hardly noticing the smell of disinfectant, the lighting, the sombre weight that hangs in the air. 

Beyond the double doors is a cold room, white-tiled. A man in his sixties working at a steel desk in one corner.

“Dr. Wendell,” says the lieutenant, “this is Deputy Marshal John Whicher.”

The doctor looks up from his desk. Lab coat over shirt and tie. Black-rimmed spectacles in his thinning hair.

 In the middle of the room is a gurney. On it, a body, covered with a sheet; a head of dark hair showing from under it.

Doctor Wendell crosses the room, on a bad hip, Whicher notices. He draws down the sheet on the corpse. Places his spectacles on the bridge of his nose. 

“Steven Wade Childress. Cause of death, multiple gunshot wounds.”  

The doctor slips a ball point pen from the pocket of his lab coat. 

“The fatal shot almost certainly entered here,” he indicates with the pen, “underneath the right eye. Causing extensive cavitation, penetration of the brain. Exiting wound here—the left parietal bone, at the back of the skull...”

Whicher glances at Lieutenant Rodgers. “Y'all didn't tell me your boys practically blew the guy's head off.”

“The severity of the facial injury is the reason I wanted you to take a look, Marshal.”

“How's that?”

“We've got witness reports now, from the supermarket shooting.”

“That diversion?”

The lieutenant nods. “The descriptions of the shooter are pretty close to this guy. Right age, right build.”

“Okay.”

“But I wanted you to see for yourself.. We don't know for sure if it was Steven Childress up there shooting, or if it could've been this other guy, Gilman James.”

“What about the ballistics fingerprint? You get one yet?”

“The shooter picked up the empty shell cases.”

Whicher frowns; “Y'all sure on that?”

“It's in the witness reports. Plus the scene techs couldn't find them.”

“What about the rounds?”

The lieutenant runs a hand over his buzz-cut hair. “The two rounds fired at the supermarket went straight through a suspended ceiling, passed through a cinder-block wall and ended up hitting the steel joists holding up the roof.”

“They're both trashed?”

“They look like a couple of beans my dog stepped on. Lab says there's no way to tell if they could've come from the gun we've got at the bank.” 

The lieutenant reaches to his shirt pocket. 

“Anyway, Marshal, I brought along this picture...” 

He brings out a photocopied head-and-shoulders shot.

Whicher looks at it. He's seen it before. The picture shows a man similar to the corpse on the gurney. Dark hair, dark skin. 

The lieutenant holds the picture close to the face of the corpse. 

They're close enough. Close enough to be confused for one another. Especially by a witness taking cover in a supermarket aisle.

Lieutenant Rodgers turns to Doctor Wendell. “What do you think of this? If a witness was describing Childress, could it have actually been this guy?” He taps on the picture of Gilman James.

The doctor peers through his glasses.  “There are similarities.”

“Yeah,” says Whicher, “we can see that.” He studies the picture again. “Hey Doc, we're not asking for an official identification. What's your best guess?”