Judas Horse (13 page)

But before the mares can break across the ground like billiard balls, he’s galloping right at me, hanging off the side of the horse like he’s about to scoop a bandanna out of the dust, but it’s me he’s aiming for, and I am lifted off the ground in the crook of an arm of steely strength, lifted into the air, and swung into the hard leather cradle of the saddle, the cowboy riding behind me now on the bare rump of the horse, and someone has opened a narrow passage in the gate. We canter out, as if passing through the eye of the needle.

His chest is pressed against my back. I’m smelling chewing gum and sharp male sweat, and although I’m bouncing wildly, staring at a careening world through the terrifying space between the horse’s ears, his suede-fringed arm remains strong and steady, and I feel the anchoring motion of his hips in rhythm with the horse.
He won’t let you fall.

We come to a halt and I manage to slip off, completely dazed. Staring up at a man on a horse—rugged-looking, mid-thirties, five ten, 140 pounds, with stick-thin legs that jeans are made for and red leather cowboy boots you know he wears every day of his life—who has just saved your life can have that effect.

“Thank you, sir.” I offer my hand. “Darcy.”

“Sterling McCord.” He leans in the saddle to shake. “You okay?”

“Yes. Wow,” I say breathlessly. “That was quite a ride.”

“When are you people gonna get it? Messin’ with wild animals is not a hot idea.”

His rebuke is stern; more like a cop than a cowboy.

“I’m sorry. I guess you’re used to it.”

“I don’t like to see anyone get hurt.”

“I understand.”

“Hope your friend’s all right. You take care, now, Darcy,” he says, and canters toward some other pandemonium.

O
ver by the barn, the whirling lights of an ambulance illuminate a knot of paramedics around the SWAT team officer on the ground; a gurney waits, riderless.

Fifteen

Mike Donnato is waiting inside an interrogation room the size of an organic lentil. He wears a windbreaker with
FBI
across the back and greets me gruffly. The two grim sheriff’s deputies, who marched me over from the jail where we, the radicals, were held overnight, do not know I am undercover. The iron grip on my biceps makes that clear. Donnato instructs them to unlock the handcuffs, and we sit down and face each other across a small table as they pocket the keys and leave.

“We didn’t get breakfast,” I say right off. “And there are folks who need medical attention.”

Donnato just rubs his reddened eyes.

“These boondocks deputies are real redneck pigs. I saw them shove an old lady and withhold water when we repeatedly asked for some. It’s bullshit, Mike—”

“The officer who was shot last night died at the scene,” he says heavily. “His name was Todd Mackee, a sergeant on the Portland SWAT team. Single shot to the throat.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“Took his head right off.”

I wet my lips. “Must have been one monster bullet.”

Donnato nods. “Fifty-caliber. Not your average shooter.”

I resist the urge to say how relieved I was last night, in my panic at hearing the shot, to realize Donnato would be here at the command center and not with the tactical team at the barn.

“Makes you sick,” he says.

“Oh God.”

I’m losing my resolve. Between the primacy of the mission and the bond I’ve made with Lillian, Dot, Megan, and the others, I’m done. After a sleepless night crammed four to a cell and with zero food, I have a killer headache and my breath could melt steel.

“This was supposed to be a controlled operation. To lose a life—” I clamp both hands over my face. “I want to go home.”

“I didn’t hear that.”

I raise my eyes. “Lillian had a heart attack.”

“Who’s Lillian?”

His ignorance inflames me.

“The lady who got trapped in the corral!” I snap. “Elderly, a bird-watcher?
You don’t know about Lillian?
”

He shrugs. “I heard something about a protester being taken to the hospital.”

“But you were more concerned with Officer Mackee.”

Donnato’s eyes grow hard. “Frankly…yes.”

“Let me tell you about Lillian.” Finger pointing again. “She’s close to eighty. She had a heart-valve replacement, but she didn’t tell anyone because she was afraid they wouldn’t let her come.”

“Good idea.”

“Mike! She risked her life for the horses!”

Donnato settles into himself. “Ana,” he says very carefully, “you’re sounding a lot like the other side.”

“I
was
on the other side, and I think the deputies responded with unnecessary force.”

He waits.

“Think again.”

He doesn’t want to report what I’m saying.

“Mackee was one of those guys, ‘proud as hell to be a cop,’” Donnato says. “The one who organizes the department trip to Kodiak Island to fly-fish for salmon, know what I mean?”

I nod, understanding the message.

“Three children, ages six through eight, and a wife of ten years who’s a parole officer for juvenile offenders.”

“Always the good people,” I murmur, and lay my head on the table, completely dissipated. “SWAT had to respond. You’re right. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Exhaustion.”

“Want some coffee?”

“Just shoot it in my arm.”

He opens the door and speaks to the deputies, giving them the message the suspect is at that point where the thing could turn on a friendly cup of joe. He comes back in and touches my shoulder, a signal to get it together.

“I’m okay.” I sit up, resuming the posture. “I’m past it.”

My partner nods.
Will he ignore the lapse?

“We located the shooting site beyond the perimeter,” he continues matter-of-factly. “It was a heavy sniper rifle, an M93, something like that. You can tell from the blast-pattern plume it left in the dust. It’s a sniping rifle, not for antipersonnel use, but antimatériel. They used them from fixed positions in the Vietnam War.”

“Why so heavy? It must be a bitch to break down and carry.”

“What the shooter had. How he was trained.”

“In the Army?”

“Maybe. Army snipers shoot from a tripod. This joker shoots off a pack. There was a depression on the ground and a trail in the dirt where he dragged it behind him. Still, it was a hell of a shot. Correcting for drop and wind? A thousand yards away in the dark? This is someone with the training and resolve to sit out there and make the shot.”

“Dick Stone?”

“Or,” says Donnato, “someone hired by Stone. Except he didn’t get his money’s worth. A good sniper never leaves his brass behind. And this guy did. We recovered the bullet casing.”

“That was a mistake.”

“Big-time. We have the slug from the roof. All we need is the weapon it came from. A suspect is in custody. Barnaby Nuñez, Native American, thirty-eight years old, priors for DUI and domestic abuse. Picked up three miles from the corrals. Fired from working at a filling station, claimed racial discrimination, arrested for trespass and making threats against the manager. Theory is, he uses the mustang protest as a way to make things right. Former Marine, which fits.”

The deputy brings coffee for the prisoner, hot and black as road tar.

When he’s gone: “Did you get anything in the cell from Megan?”

“Nothing hard. I wonder if she knows what Dick Stone’s really up to.”

Donnato sips the coffee. “Will she flip?”

“They’re in love.” I blush for no apparent reason. “Here’s what she told me in the lockup: ‘I don’t have a thing about cops. They’re human beings doing their job. But when they get into our face, they have to be stopped. We have a constitutional right to express our opinions without being spied on.’ She said there was ‘a fed’ hanging around Omar’s, but that Julius was ‘on to him’ and he stopped showing up.”

Donnato and I are silent, holding each other’s eyes. The heart-heavy sorrow I felt hearing of Steve Crawford’s death comes over me again.

“Dick Stone made Steve Crawford for an undercover,” Donnato says quietly.

“Megan says he did. But the way she makes it sound, Steve blew it from the start by coming on too strong.” Troubled, I add, “He knew better. He would not have been that sloppy.”

“You’re right—Steve knew what he was doing. He was like a low-flying missile when he was on to something. Remember the money he raised for Jane Doe?”

I remember looking up to find Steve Crawford bending over my desk with that look of earnest resolve. He was collecting money for a funeral. The funeral was for a little girl he’d never known, a Jane Doe, who wore teddy bear pajama pants and a T-shirt with sparkles. The remnants of a woven friendship bracelet circled the bones of her wrist.

She was badly decomposed. It took a team of forensic experts to reconstruct her age—between ten and fifteen years old. She was healthy and well fed, no drugs, strangled with a nylon rope. Steve Crawford and I were on the kidnap squad at the time. We worked with the Glendale sheriff’s department and NCIC and our own cold-case files, but we never got a hit. Nobody claimed the body.

Steve Crawford did not discover Jane Doe in a cardboard box in a hospital parking lot in Glendale, but he was the one who took her into his heart. He and Tina had just had their first baby, and here was a child abandoned, in the cruelest way. The idea of her being buried as an unknown in a common crypt ate at him. “She suffered enough,” he said, and took it upon himself to go from door to door, house to house, desk to desk to raise money to lay her to rest with dignity. Word spread through the media. Strangers donated more than eight thousand dollars.

Six of us from the office attended the funeral. It was pouring rain and the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. We lined up in our polished Bu-cars behind a donated hearse that held a small white casket. The Glendale police and fire departments followed in slow parade, and Jane Doe was buried under the epitaph “Here lies a child of God.”

Is it the caffeine from the sour jailhouse coffee kicking in that makes me flush with restless torment? I remember Steve’s look of disturbed satisfaction as he stood at the grave. Despite the clouds, he wore black wraparound sunglasses. The wind blew his blond hair, but the muscles of his face were motionless; a military stillness that said, I will stand. I will stand for this little girl. I will make it right.

Did Stone kill him? We don’t know. Climbing through the forest, nothing would have given Steve a clue that things were far from right. The fern glen that exploded into a debris field, and later became a field of snow, must have been silent. Steve would have had every reason to believe he was alone, but in fact he was being set up for an ambush—exactly like FBI Special Agents Jack Coler and Ron Williams in the mid-seventies, ambushed while driving a dirt road on a South Dakota Indian reservation. The siege by Native Americans at Wounded Knee was over, the FBI humiliated by an unwinnable takeover from which they had to withdraw, but a month later the two agents on patrol were gunned down with semiautomatics, because they were symbols of the U.S. government.

“The danger is high,” says Donnato. “You understand that, right? If Stone makes you, he will escalate fast.”

“Like he escalated when he made Steve.”

That is the nasty irony: By placing an undercover in Dick Stone’s orbit, not only did we wake the beast but we armed him with righteous fury, too.

“I have to tell you, as your contact agent, that it’s your choice as the undercover to decide whether or not you feel comfortable with the level of safety we can provide.”

Donnato’s look is deeply still and troubling. Feeling seems to overflow his eyes.

My head clears. Despite the fatigue, I find myself in a manic state of bungee-jump excitement. I want to get back—to the suspects, the drama, my role in it—to the roller-coaster ride. This is rapture, and there is no way back.

“It’s a go.”

“Then nail it,” Donnato says. “The prisoners are being released. Make sure you go home with Dick Stone.”

It is 112 degrees in the tiny interrogation room. As we haul to our feet, Donnato surprises me with a daringly swift kiss on the mouth, leaving the sweet salt taste of apprehension and longing.

T
he ragged activists are standing in the blustery sunlight outside the facility that houses the county sheriff’s department and jail. All the prisoners have been released on bail except for Bill Fontana, who is still being held for questioning. We gather in groups, our hair matted and our clothes mud-stained, survivors trading stories.

Megan hugs me good-bye.

“This is not the end of it,” she vows. “We’ll be back.”

“You will,” I say forlornly. “I have no idea what
I’ll
be doing. Maybe living in a crapped-up town like this.”

The sandstone building that houses the jail blends into a residential area, the single part of town that does not appear to have been completely desolated by the closing of the mill. There is a brick library and a new high school, where male youth wearing baggy pants and sporting goatees linger along the fence, glued to their cell phones, like everywhere else.

“What do you mean?” Megan asks.

She doesn’t have to turn around to sense that Dick Stone is standing now beside her, backlit, every thread on the shoulder of his white Navajo jacket magnified by the cold light. She reaches for his hand and their fingers entwine.

“Ready to get out of here?” he asks.

“Just a sec. What are you going to do, Darcy?”

“I don’t know, Megan. I’m totally screwed. My landlord’s kicking me out. The cops impounded my car because it was parked overnight at the rest stop. It’ll cost a hundred and twenty-five bucks to get it back, and I don’t have a job right now; plus, I’ve been arrested again, so
that’s
on my record. And guys like Laumann get off scot-free.”

“Be at peace and know that things are unfolding exactly as they should,” Dick Stone says enigmatically. He ties a bandanna around his big head. His tanned skin looks vibrant, as if it belongs in the daylight of the high desert; like he’s going out for pancakes, not as if he might have killed a man last night.

Wind slices our faces, bringing genuine tears.

“Really? The cops pulled my records. They saw I was arrested once before, for hacking a computer system down in L.A. They took me in for questioning and it got scary. They said if I didn’t want a felony charge, I’d have to give up names.”

The wind cuts like diamonds.

“Names?”

“In the movement. Don’t worry. I didn’t.”

A pause. They believe me.

“You should have seen her last night, Julius, when she jumped into the middle of the horses to save poor Lillian. You were so determined, Darcy. I was so proud of you! You were utterly selfless,” Megan says. “You have a calling for this work.”

We stand in silence in the shifting air. A big, fat, hairy tumbleweed gets stuck against the fence of the high school, where two kids are lighting cigarettes.

I hope they don’t set that thing on fire.