Lone Creek

by Neil Mcmahon

  Then, abruptly, I glimpsed the subconscious reason that I’d judged her harshly. I didn’t so much dislike her—I resented her, and I had since the first time I’d seen her with Kirk.

  Reuben Pettyjohn was in his seventies now. Kirk had been the only surviving heir. When Reuben died, the purse strings that he kept such a tight hold on would finally come open. And if Kirk had married Josie, or if they’d had a child, a big piece of that fortune would have fallen to her.

  But deep in my mind, absurd but unshakable, lay the conviction that it rightfully should have gone to Celia. Every time I’d ever looked at Josie and known that she was likely to get it instead, I’d felt a little stab in my guts. Seeing her in action tonight sure hadn’t added any new respect.

  I decided I’d process her information and come back if it seemed worth pushing farther.

  “One more question,” I said. “When was the last time Kirk made one of those runs?”

  “Three, maybe four weeks.”

  “OK,” I said, and held the fifty toward her. “You keep quiet about this, too, huh?”

  She pulled it from my hand with a roll of her eyes that said, finally.

  I’d gotten about halfway down the stairs when I heard her call, “Hey.”

  I paused and looked back up. She was standing in the apartment doorway with her hands on her hips.

  “My tits aren’t that little,” she snapped. “They look that way when I’m dressed, ’cause I have a very slender rib cage. My doctor says it’s ‘exquisite.’”

  She disappeared behind the door and slammed it, returning the stairwell to shadows.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  When the south end of Last Chance Gulch had been turned into a mall, some of the grand old commercial buildings had been torn down and others had been revamped for purposes like legislative and law offices. But a few still stood pretty much untouched.

  Reuben Pettyjohn owned one of those.

  I was thinking more and more that Kirk had been handling drugs in some big-time way. At a stretch, I could see Balcomb involved financially. It was even conceivable that on Kirk’s supposed gold-panning runs, he really picked up a pair of dope-loaded horses each time and brought them back to the ranch. But he hadn’t left town for the past few weeks, unless Josie was lying, and I was sure she didn’t know or care enough about this to go to the trouble. I couldn’t believe, either, that horses had been getting slaughtered routinely on the ranch without somebody catching on.

  I wanted to see Reuben even less than I’d wanted to see Josie or Doug. Although he and I were on cordial terms, there was plenty of strain between us because of Celia and there’d be more now. And of all the deceiving I’d done, lying face-on to the father of the man I’d killed would be the worst.

  Then there was the fact that it was really tough to put anything past Reuben. If he was willing to talk to me, I’d probably give away more than I got. But he knew more about that ranch than everybody else put together, and he was far too shrewd not to be aware that Kirk had been living beyond his means.

  It was worth a try.

  Reuben’s building, at six stories, was the tallest among its neighbors and gave an unimpeded view in all directions, with the town spread out at its feet. He’d always kept offices there, and he had often worked late hours, what with the terms he’d served in the state legislature and his many business interests, so he’d had the top floor turned into an apartment—not a luxury penthouse, just a sensible convenience. But it also had been handy for entertaining his drinking and gambling pals, and, according to rumor, occasional lady visitors.

  After Pete’s death, Reuben had gotten out of politics and become less active in business, but when he sold the ranch, he’d moved to the apartment full time. I probably wouldn’t have known this except that Elmer had mentioned it, bemused by Reuben’s choice. City people moving out to the country might want rustic, but when those old cowboys finally came in from the cold, they tended to go for modern suburban-style houses that didn’t have many stairs to climb, were easy to maintain, and had lots of gas heat and electric lights and all the other fingertip conveniences they’d spent their lives without.

  My own guess was that Reuben wanted to live there because it was the last place left where he could gaze down and be reminded of the empire he’d once had. That was pretty much history now, except for numbers in bank accounts and some scattered properties. It must have been hard to take, and harder still that he himself was approaching past tense. A new generation of politicians and movers and shakers had come along, and while men like him might be remembered the way kids admired a baseball legend like Babe Ruth, more and more they were old and in the way.

  Downtown was dead on this drizzly Sunday evening. The neon signs in the windows of O’Toole’s and the Rialto offered the reality of liquor and the mirage of a safe haven, and there’d be a few people inside taking in both. But the rain-slick sidewalks, glistening with reflected light from the streetlamps, were empty.

  It looked like Reuben was home—there were lights on behind the top-story windows. But I hadn’t thought through the elementary problem of getting inside. The lobby that gave access to the ground-floor shops and the elevator was locked. I couldn’t very well stand on the street and throw pebbles. I started walking to the Rialto, the closest pay phone I could think of. I didn’t have his number and I wasn’t sure he’d be listed, but I didn’t see any other possibilities. At least it would warm me up for a minute.

  Then I remembered something from my early teen days, a sort of small-town urban legend—that when Reuben had built the apartment, he’d had a buzzer put in around the building’s rear so his girlfriends could come and go without being seen. As kids, we’d been fascinated by this concept we understood nothing about except that it involved the looming lure of sex. We’d checked and confirmed that the buzzer existed, although nobody I knew ever had the balls to push it. You didn’t play those kinds of tricks on Reuben Pettyjohn.

  It was still there, inside the alcove of the service entrance—one of those old intercom systems with a doorbell-type button and a little round grille to talk into. It looked like it hadn’t been used since I’d last seen it at age eleven or twelve.

  Without any faith, I pressed the button. I waited half a minute, pressed it again, waited a few seconds longer, and was just stepping out of the alcove when a raspy, static-edged growl made me jump.

  “Am I hearing things, or is somebody there?”

  Even with the crackling, it was easy to recognize the voice.

  I leaned down to talk close into the chest-high grille.

  “It’s Hugh Davoren, Reuben. I wondered if you could spare a minute.”

  There was a brief pause. I didn’t think he was ever taken by surprise, but this probably came close.

  “Well, hello, Hugh. I’ll be glad to visit with you, but goddamn, I don’t believe I’ve used this thing in twenty years. Let me try buzzing you in. If it don’t work, ring again and I’ll come down.”

  The buzzer jumped to life with a sort of snapping sound, like it was startled to be roused out of its own long sleep. The service door opened at my push.

  I walked through a back storage room and then the main hallway. The interior of this place hadn’t been fancified or restored—the woodwork was scarred; the plaster was chipped; and the marble floor, while clean and polished, was badly worn. The elevator creaked like something in a spooky old movie, and by the time it came down from his apartment, picked me up, and got back again, I could have climbed the stairs faster. Reuben certainly had the money to upgrade, and he would have drawn higher prices for the spaces he rented out. But maybe the antiquated feel was part of what he was hanging on to.

  The top-floor hallway was like a smaller version of the lobby below. Reuben hadn’t converted it—just built his digs around the perimeter. It was lined with paneled, transomed doors that once would have served individual offices. All were long disused except for one toward the east end that was open, revealing a paralle
logram of dim light from inside.

  When I got there, I could see right off that this was the room Reuben mainly lived in. A comfortable blaze of split larch was burning in a stone fireplace. An antique rifle and a pair of crossed sabers, probably dating back to his grandfather’s Civil War days, were on display above the mantel. The walls were hung with several paintings, and these were the real thing—fine old oils, a couple of them looking like they might have been genuine Charlie Russells or Frederic Remingtons. A rich antique Persian rug covered most of the hardwood floor.

  Reuben was sitting in a worn old recliner, tilted back with his feet propped up, facing the panorama of the lighted city and the dark countryside beyond. He was grizzled now, his beaky face lined and worn, but he still possessed the power that wasn’t so much dynamic as a kind of gravity. A line from Julius Caesar used to come into my head when I thought of him: “Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world like a Colossus.”

  Nobody had ever questioned Reuben’s fairness or integrity, but nobody had ever accused him of being a particularly nice guy, either. He drove a hard bargain, and he had no objection to walking over people if that was what it took. He rewarded loyal service like Elmer’s, but he demanded a lot in return. The vast majority of the time, he got what he wanted.

  He had been a tough act for his sons to follow, and he hadn’t been easy on them when they didn’t measure up. He hadn’t been easy on his wife, Beatrice, either, and there were people who thought that had hastened the onset of her Alzheimer’s disease. Eventually, she’d gotten to where she had to be watched every minute—she’d do things like run away on foot in her nightgown, in winter, and everybody would have to go out searching for her, fearful that she’d freeze to death. When Reuben sold the ranch to the Balcombs, he’d finally put her in a home.

  He raised a hand in greeting as I stepped into the room. I’d expected a combative edge, but his look seemed oddly gentle. He was wearing a maroon robe with velvet lapels, and slippers. His knotty calves were mottled with blue veins.

  “I apologize for intruding on you, Reuben,” I said.

  “If I didn’t want you here, I’d have told you. Get yourself a drink.”

  One wall of the room was taken up by a handsome old bar that must have been salvaged from a saloon and reassembled up here. The back bar was ornate hand-carved cherrywood, stocked with every kind of liquor, but a dark green bottle of Lagavulin scotch was set out in front. He was rolling an old-fashioned glass of it slowly between his hands. That appeared to be his only other company. Reuben wasn’t the kind of man to want people caring for him when he was wounded. He’d run them off and hole up alone until he got through it.

  I took another old-fashioned glass from a shelf and poured a splash of the scotch. It tasted like bottled smoke, and burned from my insides out, right through the evening’s cold and wet.

  Although he’d hardly ever known me as anything but a kid and we hadn’t run into each other for a couple of years, Reuben started right off like we were old friends continuing a personal conversation.

  “I’m confused, Hugh. I don’t like admitting that.”

  I took another, bigger, swallow of scotch.

  “When you’re young, you sketch a picture of who you figure you’re going to be,” he said. “You color it in as you go along, and of course, it don’t turn out like you thought. You look back and see a lot of things you could have done better, and some you wish like hell you hadn’t done at all. But I always had the notion that a man was entitled to that, if he put himself out hard enough in other ways.”

  I caught only a glimmer of his meaning. Clearly, he’d given it a lot of thought.

  “I’m afraid that’s beyond my grasp,” I said.

  “Mine, too, I guess. Maybe that’s what I’m supposed to learn—I never ought to let myself think like that in the first place.”

  I groped for another response that wouldn’t sound entirely stupid, but came up empty. Reuben kept rolling his scotch glass between his hands. He didn’t seem to be drinking so much as using it as a crystal ball.

  “All right, you didn’t come here to listen to an old man drool in his whiskey,” he said. “I assume it’s about Kirk.”

  “This is touchy, Reuben.”

  “I’ve got a pretty good layer of callus, son.”

  “I stopped by to see Josie,” I said. “She said Kirk’s been making all his money by panning gold.”

  Reuben’s face swung toward me. His expression was probably just about the same as mine had been when I’d heard that from her.

  “And she believes it?” he said.

  “She seems to. I don’t think she’s, you know, overly critical.”

  His lips twisted sardonically and his head sank back against the chair.

  “She didn’t know where he was going to do the panning, or at least she wouldn’t tell me,” I said. “I wondered if you had any idea.”

  Reuben stayed quiet for a good long minute—eyes open and seemingly gazing out the window, but he was obviously weighing this further. He was too realistic not to have accepted by now that Kirk had met with either an accident or violence. My coming here and asking about this was a red flag on top of the suspicion already hanging over me. And he no doubt saw already that I hoped to divert that suspicion by coming up with other reasons why Kirk might have gotten in trouble—by linking him to something illegal, which would harm him if he was still alive and reflect badly on the Pettyjohn family in any event.

  “Well, maybe that explains something,” Reuben finally said.

  He spoke on at some length—measuring his sentences carefully but without any gamesmanship, and answering my occasional questions without reluctance. I’d been pleasantly surprised that he hadn’t dismissed me outright, and I was almost startled at his being so forthcoming.

  But what really threw me was that right up to the last, I was braced for him to demand whether I knew anything about Kirk, or at least why I was asking what I asked.

  All he said as I was leaving was, “Stop by again, Hugh.”

  THIRTY-SIX

  When I got down to the empty wet street, my crosstop high was fading and I was starting to drag. I entertained a brief notion of going to Sarah Lynn’s, giving her the rest of her money, and apologizing for not calling her. It was strange—of all the things I felt bad about, that was the one that kept coming up in my mind. And in there, too, of course, was the thought that maybe this time she’d take me in. But pushing it would be a mistake. I decided I’d do it tomorrow, instead—go see her at work, with a dozen roses and a dinner invitation.

  I started the bike and headed homeward into thin night rain that stung my face, thinking over what Reuben had told me.

  Back during the days when oil was first being recognized as black gold, a fair amount of drilling had started in the northern part of the state. Reuben’s father had taken a stab at getting in on the action and had acquired a few bits of land. Nothing much had come of it—most of the operations had decayed to rusting skeletal derricks out in desolate fields, now worth only the scrub grass they might grow to graze a few head of cattle. Reuben leased out the rights for a pittance and otherwise paid no attention to them.

  But soon after he’d sold the ranch to Balcomb, Kirk had approached him respectfully and asked for ownership of a particular one, in an area called the Sweet Grass Hills. It was a pretty spot beside a creek, with a shack on it. He claimed that he’d gotten interested in prospecting and wanted to fix the place up and nose around.

  “I didn’t much buy it,” Reuben had said. “There used to be some gold mining up around there but it got picked clean years ago, and he knew it. He never gave a hoot in hell about anything like that, anyway. I figured more likely he was hoping to convince me he was finally amounting to something, so I’d start cutting him some cash.”

  Still, Reuben had signed the place over to him, and arranged to cover building materials and other expenses. He hadn’t tried to explain why to me, but I understood. With all the
anger, guilt, and grief that had pervaded that family, with Pete’s suicide and Kirk’s worthlessness, it was Reuben’s last-ditch attempt to salvage Kirk as his son and himself as Kirk’s father.

  We hadn’t talked about the obvious implications, either. The place was only a few miles south of the Canadian border, deep in a region that was barely populated and virtually roadless. The official crossing points were at least fifty miles apart, with no settlements in between. Border agents didn’t have nearly enough manpower to patrol it all effectively, and the only barrier across the vast empty fields was a standard barbed-wire fence. It was so vulnerable there had even been a public-service TV commercial urging ranchers to keep a watch for terrorists, who, as a friend of mine had put it, could skip across in their jockstraps.

  You couldn’t ask for a better setup to run contraband.

  The Victor didn’t have a rearview mirror, but I was careful to keep tabs on what was behind me with quick, frequent glances over my shoulder. Traffic was light tonight, and nobody tried to pass me until I got a few miles east of town, out beyond the reservoir. Then I realized that a vehicle was gaining on me fast.

  My first thought was that I’d been spotted by a cop. But it didn’t turn on flashers, and as it got closer, I was able to see that the headlights were high and far apart, like on the oversize pickups called duallies. With somebody driving that kind of rig in a hurry and me without even a taillight, I was asking for it. As soon as I spotted a place to turn out, I hit my brakes and skidded into it.

  The other vehicle roared past a few seconds later—a tow truck, probably driven by a guy who’d had to handle a wet Sunday evening emergency, was grumpy about it, and wanted to get back to his nice warm house.

  The road was mostly straight for the next couple of miles, and while the tow truck gained a comfortable lead on me, its taillights stayed in sight. I didn’t pay much more attention to it at first—just assumed that it would turn off. But it kept on going toward Canyon Ferry. I started to get puzzled. I hadn’t gotten a good look at its logo, but I was pretty sure there was nobody living out this way who ran a tow operation. Maybe there’d been a freak wreck. Maybe the driver had a girlfriend out here.