Billy Bob and Hackberry Holland Ebook Boxed Set (35 page)

“When you add it all up and it comes out to zero, you got to take your kicks where you can,” he said. “That make sense to you, Greta?”

“I don't know what I ever saw in you,” she replied.

He waited until they were at the red light before he stared directly into her face. “Say that again?”

“We had fun for a while, didn't we? It wasn't all bad,” she said. She let her eyes rove over his face. “Maybe there's still time.”

The light changed. “You almost had me going,” he said.

He pulled into the alley behind Brendan Merwood's law firm and parked between two nineteenth-century brick buildings. Then, with his large Styrofoam cup of coffee in his hand, he and Greta entered the back door.

Merwood had two law partners, but both of their offices were empty and the receptionist and secretary who usually worked behind a curved counter in front were gone as well. “Hello?” Darrel said.

Merwood stepped out of his office, porcine, solid, wearing a striped shirt with French cuffs, his brown skin shining as though it had been rubbed with tanning lotion. “Sit down. Please,” he said. When he smiled his mouth had the dislocated stiffness of a patient in a dentist's chair.

The Venetian blinds were closed, the soft tones of the walls, carpet, and furniture even softer in the muted light, the interior of the office humming with the sound of the air-conditioning vents.

“Where's Mabus?” Darrel said.

Merwood didn't answer. Instead, three men wearing business suits came out of Merwood's conference room. Darrel remembered having seen one of them at his health club, a silent, lean-bodied man with silver hair who had smacked the heavy bag with murderous intensity.

“What's this?” Darrel said.

“We need to make sure everybody's operating in a pristine environment here,” Merwood said.

“You know the routine,” the man with silver hair said. His accent was East Coast, from the streets, an over-the-hill wiseass who'd moved west after the collapse of the Mob, Darrel thought.

Darrel set down his coffee container on the counter, then placed his hands on each side of it. He spread his legs slightly, looking back over his shoulder. “I'm carrying, so don't get excited,” he said.

He felt the man with silver hair pull the Beretta from the holster clipped onto Darrel's belt and slide the sap and switchblade out of his side pockets. The silver-haired man's hands groped Darrel in the scrotum, between the buttocks, between his thighs, and down both legs, retrieving the .25 hideaway and its Velcro-strap holster from Darrel's right ankle.

“This guy's a walking torture chamber,” the man with silver hair said.

But Darrel was not paying attention to the man with silver hair. He was watching the other two security men as they searched Greta Lundstrum. They had told her to place her hands up against the wall and spread her feet, but they seemed to avoid touching her body in an invasive way, at least to any greater degree than was necessary. One man gingerly touched the inside of her thigh and stepped back.

“You want to deliver it up?” he said.

“Look the other way and I might,” she said.

With her back to them, she lifted her skirt slightly, bent over, and untaped the recorder Darrel had put on her earlier.

“We were hoping to have reciprocal trust here, Mr. McComb, but that fact seems to have eluded you,” Brendan Merwood said.

“That's a recorder, not a wire. It's just backup. This isn't a sting,” Darrel said.

“And you want to sell Karsten Mabus the whereabouts of Johnny American Horse?”

“That pretty well sums it up. But right now I need to use the can,” Darrel said, tapping the rim of his Styrofoam coffee with his fingernail.

“Do you believe this fucking guy?” one of the other security men said.

“Don't use that language in here,” Merwood said. He blew out his breath. “Go with him.” He gestured with his thumb toward the office restroom.

The silver-haired man and the one whom Merwood had corrected for his profanity went inside with Darrel. But Darrel did not go to the urinal. Instead, he began unbuckling his pants as he entered a stall.

“What do you think you're doing?” the man with silver hair said.

“I got to take a dump. I had clam linguine and a few brews last night. Want to hang around, be my guest,” Darrel said. He squatted on the toilet and blew a gaseous explosion into the bowl.

When Darrel and the security men came out of the restroom, Brendan Merwood was talking on the phone. He said something into the receiver Darrel couldn't hear, then replaced the receiver on the carriage.

“How much do you want for your information?” he asked.

“I'll take that up with Mabus,” Darrel replied.

“Are you serious?” Merwood said.

“I told you he was a hardhead,” Greta said.

“These gentlemen here will take you to see Mr. Mabus,” Merwood said. “Go out the back door, if you would.”

“I want my twenty-five, my nine-Mike, my blade, and my sap back,” Darrel said.

“We'll sack 'em up for you,” the man with silver hair said. “Let me have your keys.”

“What for?” Darrel said.

“There's a guy outside who'll drive your car. You come in ours,” the man with silver hair said. He eased back the receiver on Darrel's .25-caliber automatic and looked at the round that was seated in the chamber. He laid his arm across Darrel's shoulders, tapping him good-naturedly with the pistol. “This is gonna work out, believe me.”

Darrel thought he could smell the sweat and deodorant in the man's armpit. For a second Greta's eyes settled on his, gleaming with victory.

 

AFTER I LEFT
Wyatt's place on the Blackfoot, I went to the office and tried to work. But it was no use. Why did I want to even pretend I was an attorney? My deeds had proved over and over again that I was little different from Wyatt Dixon or Darrel McComb. There was no psychological complexity waiting to be discovered at the center of my life. The truth was, I lusted to kill. It was cleaner, easier, and simpler than the drawn-out processes of the law. Jailhouses and prisons are filled with people who are ugly and stupid and who probably deserve to be there. But rich guys don't stack mainline time, and men like Karsten Mabus, no matter what they do, never ride the needle. So why not kick it on up to rock 'n' roll? I told myself.

I was almost convinced by my own rhetoric when Hildy, my receptionist, buzzed my phone. “I've got Amber American Horse on the line. Want to take the call?” she said.

I hesitated, then said, “Put her on.”

“Billy Bob?” Amber's voice said.

“Are you on a cell?” I said

“Yes.”

“My phones are probably tapped. Get off the cell and use a land line. Call me in fifteen minutes at a place where the bindle stiffs smile at you from the walls. You hearing me on this?”

She paused only a second. “Make it a half hour. I have to drive. It's dangerous,” she said.

“Hey, cowgirls never get the blues,” I said.

“What?” she said.

But I hung up the phone before a trace could be made, then went out the back door of my office and down the alley to Higgins Street. I walked past a newsstand and the Oxford Bar and crossed the street to Charley B's. The walls inside were hung with the work of a West Montana legend, Lee Nye, who had been employed there as a part-time bartender in the 1960s and whose photographs of seamed, wind-burned faces were like a pictorial history of the American West and the landless blue-collar men who had built it.

The phone behind the bar rang five minutes after I arrived. The bartender picked it up, then handed it to me. “Hello?” I said.

“It's Amber,” she said.

“How's Johnny?”

“His arm's better, thanks to Darrel.”

“To Darrel McComb?”

“That's why I called. We're going to split for Canada. I wanted to thank Darrel for what he did. I've treated him unfairly.”

“I'm just not reading you.”

“You don't have to. You see my father?”

“No,” I replied.

“If you do, tell him I said good-bye.”

“Don't hang up.”

“This is a great country, Billy Bob. But the bad guys are going to grind you up.”

“I'm still your attorney, remember? How did McComb help Johnny?”

But she had broken the connection.

 

IT WAS UNWINDING
fast now, but I didn't know it, either because I was too close to my own problems or perhaps because I still did not appreciate the level of fear that Karsten Mabus could instill in others.

Just before noon, Romulus Finley came into the office. He looked stricken, as though he had just been informed an incurable disease had spread through all his organs. He stood in my doorway, his lips moving soundlessly, dried mucus at the corners.

“You want a glass of water, Senator?” I asked.

He stepped inside the room and closed the door behind him. He sat down in front of my desk, looking about uncertainly. “Have you heard from my daughter?” he said.

“Yes, I did. This morning,” I replied.

“She called here?” he asked, his face lifting expectantly.

I didn't answer. At that moment I was convinced that not only did I have a tap on my line but Finley knew about it.

“Where did she call you? I've got to get word to her,” he said.

“About what?”

“Everything. I think she's in harm's way,” he said, gesturing vaguely. “She's mixed up. Her mother was an alcoholic. That's why all these problems started.”

“I don't know where Amber is, sir.”

I waited for him to speak, to make the admissions that would perhaps change his life and perhaps even save his daughter's. He looked hard at me, but his vision was focused inward on thoughts that only he was privy to. The moment passed.

“Well, I'll just find her, then,” he said, rising from his chair. He glanced around the room like a man who was lost in the middle of a train station. “Her mother wouldn't stop drinking. I tried everything.”

“Senator, is there someone I should call?”

“No,” he said. “There's no one. No one at all.”

DARREL SAT
in the backseat of the Chrysler and gazed through the tinted windows as the city of Missoula slipped behind him. The man with silver hair sat on one side of him, a second security man on the other side, Greta up front in the passenger seat. The man with silver hair was named Sidney. He had taken off his coat and folded it neatly across his legs. There were bright stripes in his dress shirt, like thin bands of smoothed tinfoil, and a silver pin in his lavender tie.

“I know you from somewhere,” Darrel said.

“The health club,” Sidney said.

“No, before that. Maybe from Nicaragua or El Sal.”

“Could be. Lot of guys were looking for a job back then. You?”

“A little bit. Nothing to write home about.”

“Three hots and a cot, right?” Sidney said.

They went through Lolo and turned west on Highway 12, heading toward the Idaho line. Darrel was amazed at how green the hills had become after only one day's rain. Lolo Creek was boiling, the current filled with driftwood from the banks. Up ahead Darrel could see the blueness of the sky above Lolo Pass and snow on the tip of St. Mary's Peak.

Then he looked through the back window for his Honda. It was gone.

“They stopped for something to eat. They're gonna join us. Don't worry about it,” Sidney said.

“Yeah? That's my car. I want it back,” Darrel said.

Sidney didn't answer. But Greta turned around in the front seat. “You're in good hands,” she said.

When Darrel didn't reply, she said it again. But Darrel was now staring at the side of Sidney's face. “It was at El Mozote,” he said. “On the Honduran border. December 1981. You were standing by the trench where all those peasants were buried.”

“You got the wrong dude, Mac,” Sidney said, staring indifferently out the side window.

The Chrysler's tires hummed around a slight bend in the road and Darrel saw the entrance to Karsten Mabus's ranch, the white-railed fences and breeding barns shining in the sun. But the Chrysler kept going, climbing a hill, rounding another curve that was layered with outcroppings of gray and yellow rock.

“Mabus is the guy I need to talk to,” Darrel said.

“Sure,” said the man on the other side of Darrel, and plunged a hypodermic needle into his neck.

 

FOR THE NEXT
three hours Darrel McComb drifted in and out of a red haze that was like the sunrise down on the equator—hot, pervasive, blinding when you looked straight into it. Pain had become geographic, a conduit into past places and events, a tropical garden spiked with bougainvillea, lime trees, crowns of thorns, and rosebushes that bloomed in December. He saw the waxy faces of the dead, the firing-squad victims with their thumbs wired behind them, the sawed-off soldiers in salt-crusted uniforms and oversized steel pots, their M-16s leaking white smoke. And for the first time in more than twenty years he felt these images leaving him forever.

The pain his tormentors had inflicted upon him hadn't worked, and neither had the chemicals they had injected into his veins. At some point a cloth bag coated with insecticide had been fitted over his head, but that had not worked, either. In fact, it had even obstructed his interrogators' agenda.

“You think people are coming to help you?” Sidney said, bare-chested, squatting down eye-level with Darrel. “Take a look at who's having drinks by Mabus's pool.”

Two of Darrel's tormentors lifted up the chair he was strapped in and set it by a window in the log house high up on a mountain overlooking the back of Mabus's ranch. Sidney fitted a pair of binoculars on Darrel's eyes. “That's United States Senator Romulus Finley down there, pal. That's also your friend the district attorney, Fay Harback. They're on the pad, my man,” he said.

But Darrel's eyes were too swollen to see.

“Light him up again,” Sidney said.

Someone behind Darrel poured a bucket of water over his head, then an electrical surge struck his genitals and his nipples like a blow from a jackhammer. They hit him again. And again. And again. When he awoke, he was bleeding from the mouth.

Sidney had pulled up a straight-backed chair in front of him. He leaned forward, his lean stomach ridged, his chest patinaed with gray monkey fur. “Don't be a hardhead. I don't want to keep doing this to you,” he said. “Just tell us where American Horse is. You'll get to live and make yourself a few spendolies at the same time.”

The sun had gone behind the mountain, and in the shade the trees on the hillside looked cold and dark. But on a flat outcropping that jutted out over the canyon, Darrel thought he saw Rocky Harrigan gazing at the countryside, his heavy physique and the ledge he stood on bathed in sunlight. Rocky was wearing slacks, penny loafers, his aviator glasses, and his favorite goon shirt, a Hawaiian job printed with bluebirds and palm trees, the way he always dressed for an evening out.
Been waiting on you, old partner. Come on, we're going to have a fine time
, Rocky said.

Darrel saw him remove his shades and give the thumbs-up sign, then beckon Darrel to walk across the air and join him on the lip of a canyon that opened onto green valleys Darrel had never seen before.

Darrel's eyes closed, then opened briefly. “Got to tell you something, Sidney,” he whispered hoarsely.

Sidney leaned down, his eyes close to Darrel's. “Go ahead, pal. You got the right attitude. Let's get this behind us,” he said.

Darrel tried to muster the words but could not get them out. His teeth were red with his blood, his breath fetid, his eyes like slits in tea-colored eggs.

“Take your time. You can do it. You're almost home free,” Sidney said.

Darrel lifted his lips an inch from Sidney's ear. “I was a good cop,” he whispered, grinning self-effacingly at the effort it took him to speak.

 

ONE WEEK LATER,
a rock climber found Darrel's Honda and his body inside it at the bottom of a canyon just west of the Idaho line. The car's roof was crushed from the three-hundred-foot fall it had taken down the mountainside, and Darrel's body had been degraded by magpies and putrefaction, relegating the particular cause of Darrel's death to guesswork. But when the paramedics lifted the body into a vinyl bag, one of them felt a hard object behind Darrel's left calf muscle. The coroner scissored away the fabric, exposing a miniaturized recorder and microphone taped behind Darrel's knee.

 

THE NEXT THREE WEEKS
passed for Johnny and Amber American Horse with little or no contact from the outside world. They stayed holed up in a cabin on the edge of the Bob Marshall Wilderness, a woodstove for heat, their water drawn by hand from a rock-dammed creek at the base of a canyon wall that stayed in shadow until late afternoon. The water from the pool was always cold and tasted like stone and fern and snowmelt, and at the bottom of the pool were schools of cutthroat trout pointed into the current, their bodies as sleek as silver and red ribbons. When Amber threw the canvas bucket heavily into the water, both her reflection and the schooled-up trout splintered into the rocks.

Years before, Johnny had built the cabin in a thickly timbered gulch that gave shade in the summer and protection from cold winds in winter and was hard to see from either the lowlands or the sky. The abandoned log road that led to the cabin had caved along the edges and was considered treacherous and unusable by both hunters and U.S. Forest Service personnel. On the first day of Johnny's escape from federal custody, he and Amber had parked Amber's vehicle behind the cabin, pulled a tarp over it, and covered the tarp with pine boughs. They used the woodstove only in the daylight hours and gathered only fuel that was dry and worm-eaten and would burn with maximum heat and little smoke.

The cabin was snug and watertight, stocked with canned beef and vegetables a cousin of Lester Antelope's had backpacked over the crest of the mountain. In wistful, self-deceptive moments Johnny and Amber almost believed their geographical removal from the outside world had somehow changed the legal machinery that was waiting to grind them up.

But if Johnny and Amber had forgotten the relentless nature of their enemies, Lester Antelope's cousin had not. He had left Johnny a Lee-Enfield carbine, a British officer's model with peep sights, a lightweight stock, and a bolt action that worked as smoothly as a Mauser's.

Then one night they heard sounds whose source they couldn't identify—a footfall in the woods, a tree branch snapping, shale sliding over rock surfaces on the hillside. Johnny walked out in the trees and listened, the moonlight as bright as a flame on the pool where they drew their water. He came back to the cabin, poured a cup of cold coffee, and told Amber he had seen the freshly churned tracks of elk in the pine needles.

The next morning Amber saw Johnny oiling the carbine on the back step, pressing cartridges with his thumb down into the magazine, his skin netted with the sunlight that broke through the canopy overhead.

“We have plenty of meat. I wouldn't squeeze that off up here,” she said, stepping into the doorway.

“A griz might try to get in at night. They can smell food a long way,” he said.

“I'm not afraid of jail,” she said. “Don't do what you're doing, Johnny.”

His face was bladed, his cheeks slightly sunken. “You're not afraid of anything,” he said.

“Losing you.”

“If they nail us, it'll be for good. No second chances this time,” he said.

“Don't say that. They don't have that kind of power.”

“I let them take me without a fight. They asked me what I thought of the Atlanta Braves,” he replied. He lowered his head and rubbed the oil rag along the carbine's barrel, his thoughts hidden.

She remained standing above him in the doorway, the wind blowing down from the crest of the mountain, through larch trees whose needles had turned yellow and were starting to fall. He locked down the bolt of the Lee-Enfield, a piece of cartilage pulsing on his jawbone.

“If they come for us, we go together,” she said.

“That's no good. No good at all,” he said.

She placed one hand on his shoulder for balance and sat down beside him. She picked his hand off the carbine and held it between hers. “If they come for us, we'll run. There're places in British Columbia they'd never find us,” she said.

“That's right,” he said, taking his hand from hers. “We don't have to worry about the griz, either. They're looking for food down low. They won't bother us.”

He worked the bolt on the Lee-Enfield and jacked the cartridges from the magazine onto the ground. “See? All this was about nothing,” he said.

But five minutes later, when she looked out the kitchen window, she saw him picking the cartridges for the Lee-Enfield out of the dirt and wiping them clean on his shirt before he stuck them in his pocket. That night, after she and Johnny went to bed, she thought she heard the engines of helicopters high above the trees.

She woke at false dawn. The cabin was cold, the woodstove unlit, and Johnny's side of the bed empty. She put on her jeans and Johnny's Army jacket and went out into the backyard. The privy door hung open, squeaking on its hinges. Her vehicle was still under its tarp and cover of pine boughs, the canvas stiff with frost. In the grayness of the woods she couldn't see the movement of a single warm-blooded creature—not an owl, a rabbit, a deer mouse, a hooded jay, or even robins, which only yesterday had filled the trees in flocks on their way south.

She went back inside the cabin and absently let the door slam behind her. The sound was like a rifle shot in her ears, and out in the woods she heard a large bird, perhaps an eagle, take flight, its wings flapping as loudly as leather in the dead air.

The carbine,
she thought.

She went into the bedroom and pulled open the closet door, where Johnny had put the Lee-Enfield before he went to bed last night. But it was gone.

She dug her cell phone out of a drawer, then hesitated before clicking it on, trying to remember what she had heard once about law enforcement agencies tracking cell phones by satellite. Billy Bob had told her to get off the phone, that his own line was tapped. He had also told her to use a land line, she thought. She had done what he'd said, pulling the tarp and pine boughs off her vehicle and driving to a truck stop, taking a risk she didn't want to take again. No, satellite track or not, she would not leave the cabin again.

She activated the phone. As soon as she did, its message chime went off. She hit the retrieve button.

“It's Billy Bob. Call me at the office or home. Everything is okay,” the recorded voice said. Then the transmission broke up.

There were three other messages with the same callback number on them, each of them impossible to understand. She rushed out the back of the cabin and climbed up the gulch until she was out of the timber, standing on a crag that overlooked a long, sloping mountainside covered with Douglas fir. She hit the dialback key on the cell and waited, her heart beating, her breath fogging in the cold.