by Neil Mcmahon
“You grab hold here,” Madbird said. He closed his fist and jerked the head back by the hair.
Then he pressed the knife blade just under the far left edge of the hairline.
“And slice toward you, nice and careful.”
John Doe squealed, an impressively loud sound considering the duct tape.
My stopped-up breath exploded out of my mouth.
“Jesus, Madbird! Wait!”
He glanced over his shoulder at me, annoyed.
“You ain’t got to yell, I’m standing right here.”
I floundered to explain. “Shouldn’t we at least kill him first?”
“What’s the point of that?”
“Well—it just seems like, you know, common courtesy.”
He lowered the knife and stepped away, shaking his head.
“Fucking white people. You already tell us how we’re supposed to do everything else, and now this?”
John Doe was trying to hop around the tree, or maybe climb it. A thread-thin red streak a couple of inches long had appeared on his forehead where the blade touched and blossomed into a dribbling stream of blood. Madbird thunked the knife into the bark beside his face, raising another squeal.
“Your call,” he said to me. “But if you don’t mind a little advice, you’re gonna have a problem. His hair got some kind of greasy shit on it.” He sniffed his left palm and wiped it disgustedly on John Doe’s back. “You got to reef on it pretty good to tear it loose, ’cause of all them roots going down. So I brung some dikes. It’s kind of cheating, but I ain’t gonna tell.” He felt around in his pockets and pulled out an old pair of lineman’s pliers, their scarred plastic grips wrapped with electrician’s tape, and slapped them into my hand.
I walked to the bull pine and wrenched the knife free. By now John Doe was slamming his head against the tree, blowing snot like a mule and maybe trying to howl. I slammed my hip against his back like I’d seen Madbird do, clamped a hank of his greasy hair with the pliers, and twisted up hard. He bucked and gurgled, cheeks bulging. I raised the knife with my other hand and pressed its edge against his hairline.
Then I let go of him, and stepped around to the other side of the tree, and cut the tape on his wrists.
FORTY-FIVE
We sat John Doe on the ground, pulled off his stiff new hiking boots, sliced them to pieces, and threw those into the brush. Then Madbird crouched beside him with the knife point to his cheek and spoke close to his ear.
“Now, you go telling anybody what really happened here, it sure ain’t gonna make you look good. If I was you, I’d disappear and let Balcomb worry. And you ever come near any of us again, you best believe I’ll find you. I used to make my own living killing people. ’Cept it was hunting other soldiers in the jungle—not gunning down unarmed civilians.”
John Doe had been clasping his wounded arm with his other hand, but now he raised it shakily to start tugging at the tape across his eyes. Madbird pressed the knife to his cheek again, a little harder this time, just enough to draw blood.
“I didn’t say nothing about that,” Madbird said. “Leave it on.”
He jerked John Doe to his feet and gave him a shove toward the ravine. We watched him start picking his way down into it, mincing and stumbling in his socks.
“I wouldn’t go yelling,” Madbird called after him. “Lot of griz around. They hear you, they’ll come check it out, and soon as they smell blood—like hot sauce on a taco.”
“Rattlesnakes are what I’d worry about,” I said. “They’re going to be sunning on the rocks, and it’s breeding season. They get real aggressive.”
“You ain’t lying. One of them motherfuckers bit me on the thumb one time. Arm swole up twice its size, doctors thought they were gonna have to cut it off.”
In fact, the odds were next to nil of a bear taking enough interest in him to attack, and there were few, if any, snakes at this elevation. But it would give him something to keep his mind off his other problems.
Much more quietly, Madbird said, “I never scalped nobody, are you kidding? Never tortured, never raped. Never killed unless I had to.” He paused and reconsidered. “Well—maybe if they really needed killing.”
I’d picked up fast that the scalping was bogus—a harsh scare to pay back John Doe for his own cruelty. I’d realized, too, that Madbird was leaving his fate up to me.
I hadn’t been sure until the last second whether or not I was going to cut his throat.
I wasn’t sure why I’d backed off, either. It wasn’t from fear of consequences or any other solid reason, like there’d been with Kirk. This terrain was so far from any beaten track, so rough and thickly wooded, that I was near to being lost myself. If we’d thrown him down into the ravine there’d soon have been nothing left but scattered bones, and even if somebody ever did chance across those, identifying him and linking him to me was a possibility as remote as this spot itself. Most likely my reluctance had stemmed from a deeply embedded knee-jerk concept of who I was. Killing Kirk in a frenzy of violence had been bad enough. Cold-blooded execution was unimaginable.
But now I started thinking it was really cowardice—that I’d shirked a grim but necessary duty, and excused myself by calling it mercy.
If ever I’d run into someone who needed killing, it was John Doe.
He was still practically crawling, easily within range of the long-barreled .41 Magnum. It was a very powerful pistol and, especially if you lay prone or braced yourself against a tree, quite accurate. All he’d feel would be an instant of impact to the back of his head, over with too quickly even to cause pain. Christ only knew how much more pain he was going to cause to how many people, maybe including us.
“You think I should do it?” I said to Madbird.
He rubbed the back of his hand against his jaw.
“Whichever way you go, you’ll spend the rest of your life being glad of it and wishing you’d gone the other, both. Hard to tell which’ll weigh heaviest.”
“What about gunning down an unarmed civilian?”
“That ain’t a unarmed civilian. That’s something dressed up human.”
I ran it through my mind again, this time with more focus, and finally got a glimmer of what was really holding me back.
“It’s like I’m being offered some kind of free chance in a game,” I said. “If I use it to take him out, that’s one worry out of the way. But then I’ve spent it, and I might need it a whole lot more somewhere down the line.”
Madbird nodded. “The way things been going, I’d say that’s a real good bet.”
We stayed and watched John Doe crash around in the brush until he finally disappeared. His odds of making it were pretty good. The Scapegoat was big and wild, but lost people usually survived in these kinds of woods, even for several days under far worse weather conditions. Especially in this climate, his wound wasn’t life-threatening. Eventually he’d run into a marked trail, or he could follow a stream downhill if he had enough sense.
Although if he was both stupid and unlucky and kept going north into the Bob Marshall, he was in for a long walk.
FORTY-SIX
Laurie and I split off from Madbird, with him and me agreeing that I’d contact him in a day or two. He drove his van home with the Victor in the rear. We took the vehicle that John Doe had used. He’d switched from his rental car to one of the Pettyjohn Ranch pickup trucks, a four-wheel-drive king cab Ford that Balcomb must have given him to navigate the Scapegoat’s rough terrain. It was good cover—those kinds of rigs were as common as rocks around here, and I was sure that Balcomb wouldn’t get the cops looking for it for fear that might somehow connect him with John Doe.
The drive to the Hi-Line took several hours, and dusk was settling in as we got there. We kept on going toward the Canadian border, following the directions that Reuben had given me to Kirk’s patch of land. The highway was narrow and deserted, and the last of the pavement gave out not long after we left the town of Sunburst, which consisted largely of a
café and a feed store with a few gas pumps. From there, the roads were all dirt for more than a hundred square miles.
Laurie had been silent for a long time. This country would do that to you. We’d already been in the middle of nowhere, but this was a different kind of nowhere—prairie that stretched almost unbroken for a hundred miles south and west, several hundred miles east, and north to the Arctic Circle. A friend of mine who’d been stationed at Air Force missile silos around here claimed that if you stared long enough into the vista, you could literally see the curvature of the earth.
The wind was ceaseless, rippling across the fields and whipping the yellow thistles that lined the road. Flocks of little swallows skimmed along in front of the truck, and everywhere, we heard the liquid warble of meadowlarks closing down the day. Oil derricks in the fields bobbed patiently up and down like giant insects from a sci-fi movie drinking the earth’s blood. We saw some cattle, a couple of pronghorns, and one hawk. But there were no people or vehicles and hardly any signs of human presence except for an occasional ranch mailbox or a distant building. The deepening twilight underscored it all, bringing the uneasy sense of choking off the last connection to the world we’d always known.
That left just her and me alone together, with everything that had happened and everything that might. It filled the cab like the engine’s drone.
“I tried to find out more about you,” she said suddenly. “But I didn’t want anybody to know I was interested, so I didn’t get far.”
Her voice came as a pleasant little shock. Staying quiet had suited me—I had plenty to think about. But having her back was nice.
“Find out more what?” I said.
“The usual things women want to know. Like how many ex-wives.”
I glanced over at her. She looked alert and inquisitive, out of her withdrawal. The West Butte of the Sweet Grass Hills was coming into sight, a craggy upthrust of almost seven thousand feet that relieved the somber bleakness. And maybe it had occurred to her that the farther we went, the farther we left behind John Doe and Balcomb and all the rest of that. Still, it was another measure of her sand that she could start up a conversation like we were on a first date.
“Just one,” I said.
“Kids?”
“Nope.”
“Previous work experience?”
I smiled. “I spent some time as a journalist.”
“Really? Was that the ‘other guy’ you talked about? Or should I say, didn’t talk about?”
“That was what he did for a living.”
“What else did he do?”
“Failed, mostly,” I said. “I’d just as soon keep not talking about him.”
“Painful to remember?”
Both more and less than that, I thought.
“It’s kind of like what you told me about another ghost,” I said. “I want you all to myself.”
Her eyes changed slightly, enough to show that she was pleased.
I’d been driving slowly, partly because of the rough road and partly waiting for full night. Most likely we’d go unnoticed. But particularly when we got to Kirk’s, I wanted to be extra careful. His place was surrounded by private ranch land that I was going to have to cross. I was sure the rancher had been contacted about his disappearance by now, and would probably be keeping an eye out in case he showed up.
“How we doing for time?” I asked Laurie.
I rarely wore a watch. Hers, a slender gold Bulgari that was probably worth more than the truck we were driving, had caused a minor panic earlier today—as we’d been leaving the campsite, she thought she’d lost it. We’d hunted around a couple of minutes with no luck and left without it, but then she’d realized it had probably slipped off while she and I were thrashing around last night. We were still on the dirt road in the Scapegoat with Madbird right behind us in the van, so she’d jumped out of the pickup and gotten in with him to look for it. When we stopped at the highway a few minutes later and she came hurrying back to the truck, I’d seen with relief that she was wearing it.
She told me it was a quarter to seven. We were within a few miles of Kirk’s now and darkness was settling fast. I started refocusing on why we’d come here.
“Now let me ask you some things,” I said. “What made you and your husband decide to buy the Pettyjohn Ranch?”
“Wesley wanted it.”
“You didn’t?”
“I thought it was insane from the first. But I went along, like always.”
“So tell me why a city businessman who doesn’t know anything about horses or even like them decides to move to Montana and start raising them? I mean, I can buy it up to a point that he’s trying to compensate for his feelings of inadequacy or whatever. But that’s a hell of a lot of compensation.”
“There was also a much more practical reason. He needed money. Like always.”
“I don’t get that, either. From what I’ve heard, he’s not making any or really even trying to.”
“That’s not what I mean. It was a way of getting his hands on more of mine.”
I shook my head, confused still further. My sense of finances didn’t extend much beyond going to work and bringing home a paycheck, and the more macro the economics got, the more micro my grasp was. The concept of trickle-down threw me completely.
“My inheritance is controlled by trustees,” she explained patiently. “They let Wesley invest out of it at first, but he went through several million and ended up with nothing but debt. My family got furious and had us cut off. We got an allowance, but no capital.”
Life’s hard lessons, I thought. The “allowance” probably would have financed a third world nation.
“Then Wes came up with the ranch scheme, and he made me go to the trustees and convince them it was for me,” she said. “I’d fallen in love with the west, it would be my lifelong dream, all that. They finally agreed to give him the down payment, but that was the end.”
“But he didn’t gain any cash, right?” I said. “Just the opposite—he took on a huge mortgage to pay off.” I had only a rough idea of what a place like that was worth, but for sure it was more than twenty million and maybe closer to twice that. “He must have known there wouldn’t be any short-term profit. How’d he figure to make money? How is he making it?”
“Is this why you wanted me all to yourself?” she said, with sudden sharpness. “To interrogate me about my husband’s business?” She swung away to gaze out her window, crossing her arms.
I exhaled. “Laurie, I’ve hardly been able to think about anything but you and last night. But I need to make sense of all this. It’s the only chance I can see for us getting out of it.” I reached over and touched her knee. “I intend to give you my full attention real soon, believe me.”
She squeezed my hand forgivingly but didn’t turn to look at me.
“Wesley found a new investor,” she said. “A man named DeBruyne. The kind you never hear about, but very rich and powerful. I think he’s Belgian originally, but he has homes all over the world.”
I blinked. That was news.
“How did Balcomb ‘find’ this guy?”
She shrugged. “Business contacts, I suppose. I really don’t know.”
“And he just started writing checks? Let’s face it, Laurie, your husband doesn’t have the kind of track record that would draw most smart investors.”
“Monsieur DeBruyne literally has more money than he knows what to do with. What matters to him is the huge cachet—a ranch in Montana and fine thoroughbred horses.”
“Has he ever been here?”
“No. Wesley wants their partnership kept secret. I’m not even supposed to mention his name.”
“I’d say all those kinds of bets are off now.”
For a couple of seconds, I thought she hadn’t heard me. Then she turned and gave me a smile, warm and steady.
“Of course they are,” she said. “It just hasn’t sunk in yet.”
FORTY-SEVEN
The ranch th
at surrounded Kirk’s place was owned by a family named Jenner. We drove past the headquarters, a distant cluster of lights inside their main gate, then another couple of miles to the back road Reuben had described. I didn’t want to risk driving on their land, but Kirk’s was only about a mile and a half in. I figured I could make it there on foot, take a quick look around, and be back within an hour. There was no good place to hide the truck—not a tree in sight, and the landscape was flat as a lake—but we still hadn’t seen anybody, and the odds were slim that we would. I found a roadside patch of tall weeds, gave Laurie the rest of the brandy, and told her if somebody did come by to spin a story about a spat and a boyfriend out taking an attitude adjustment walk.
The autumn chill had a real bite up here, borne on that wind that never stopped. It gave me extra incentive to travel fast and I made good time, with enough moonlight for fair visibility filtering down through the hazy clouds.
The site was easy to recognize from Reuben’s description. The flat terrain dropped abruptly into a shallow coulee, sheltered and pretty, with timbered slopes and a little creek running through. The road was carved to the bottom in a few long switchbacks. Near where they ended, I could just make out the small dark shape of the shack. I walked on down there, moving quietly now on the tiny chance that someone might be keeping watch for Kirk. But it seemed as deserted as any place could ever be.
I wasn’t surprised to see that his building repairs hadn’t gone any farther than hauling in some materials and dumping them haphazardly outside. The lumber was warped from long exposure to the sun and the insulation had the dead soggy look of many soakings. I turned on my flashlight and stepped inside. Even calling it a shack was saying too much. It was a box hardly bigger than a pickup truck, with a sagging tin roof, rotting floor, and gaps in the barn-wood walls. Broken glass panes in the couple of windows were stuffed with rags. The furniture consisted of a bunk like a workbench, a rickety table, and a pair of chairs. The bedding, dishes, and a few cans of food were all layered with dust.