Lone Creek

by Neil Mcmahon

  I’d sure been a sweetheart to her through all this.

  The small road I was on dead-ended in a tee intersection with Highway 89. I put on my right turn signal, stopped at the stop sign, and carefully looked both ways. The vista was empty—no vehicles, no people, nothing moving but some cattle in a distant meadow.

  But when I let out the clutch, my hands didn’t turn the steering wheel. I just drove straight across the highway, through the dead end and into the grassy field beyond, until the truck’s front wheels dropped into the roadside ditch and it lurched to a stop.

  I had to put it into four-wheel drive to get out of there, but I managed to do it before anybody came along and saw me. I backtracked a mile or so along the Musselshell and found a dirt spur road that led down to an old railroad trestle.

  Then I pulled the truck behind its shelter and crashed in a sleep of exhaustion and defeat.

  FIFTY-FOUR

  I waited until dusk to go to Madbird’s place, figuring that if the sheriffs came around to talk to him, they’d most likely do it during the day. As it turned out, they hadn’t yet, and that made me nervous. He was due.

  “Keep a eye open for Bill LaTray, too,” Madbird said. “He called today, asking if I seen you. I didn’t tell him nothing. Most Indians I could talk to and get things straight, but he ain’t one of them.”

  Hannah looked tough and foxy and gave me a big warm hug. I returned her bag, with deepened shame at how Laurie had treated it and how I’d been too besotted to heed that warning. I couldn’t bring myself to mention it.

  “This was great,” I said. “Like one of those fairy tales where every time you reach in, you pull out just the right thing.”

  “I figured that with her, you were going to need all the help you could get,” Hannah said.

  That took me aback. I’d thought Laurie had passed muster fine.

  “What made you think that?” I said.

  “I just didn’t have a good feeling.”

  Madbird cut in. “She put it a little different, soon’s you two drove away. How’d that go again, baby?”

  “You shut up,” Hannah said fiercely.

  “‘She already got his pecker on a string, he better watch out she don’t hang him by it’—something like that,” he stage-whispered to me.

  I couldn’t help smiling, although pathetically. I went outside to stash Balcomb’s truck in the woods.

  I’d slept only a couple of hours when I’d bombed out earlier today, but I’d slept hard, and it had helped a lot to clear my mind. I’d spent most of the time between then and now parked up a secluded Forest Service road in Deep Creek Canyon, pacing around through the trees and trying to put things together.

  Laurie had recognized a special connection between her and me, all right—that I was fuckhead enough to rid her of the husband she hated and feared, and put her in control of her money again. The way she’d set it up was worthy of Balcomb himself. Clearly, she’d learned a lot from him.

  She also clearly knew quite a bit about Celia, and not from any ethereal wavelength. I remembered something Kirk had said when we were out by the lake, which hadn’t meant anything to me at the time—Beatrice, his mother, had mistaken Laurie for a grown-up Celia the first time they met.

  My guess was that Laurie had been curious about that, asked around, and learned the story. Someone must have mentioned that I figured into it and I was now back working at the ranch. The information had germinated in her mind and sprouted into an idea. She’d cultivated that into a plan.

  It had run into trouble as soon as she made her move, with me getting fired and thrown off the ranch, ending her pretexts for “accidentally” running into me and furthering our acquaintance. But she’d seen a way to turn that around—to keep the drama going, send my rage at Balcomb into orbit, and insinuate herself as my ally, all in one brilliant stroke. She knew that I was going to jail and that she’d have time to find my place.

  And to set that lumber on fire.

  But she hadn’t known about what was going on behind the scenes—how desperate Balcomb was and how dangerous things would get. Once that came home to her, she’d realized, correctly, that Madbird was a much better bet for protection than me, and she’d made a grab for him. Probably she’d figured that she could convince him of the need to kill Balcomb, and he’d be a lot more skillful at that, too. But she’d ended up stuck with me, and Madbird had added insult to injury by turning down her advances—the underlying reason for the fury that led her to pitch Hannah’s bag out the window.

  She’d rebounded fast again and gotten the train back on track, sending me chugging along to what looked like a sure thing after all. Then she’d left me to twist in the wind. I’d discovered today that she’d peeled several hundred dollars off my roll of bills while I was in the shower or asleep, like a hooker rolling a drunk. She could have gone to another motel or another city. There was no knowing what kind of story she planned to tell the authorities; but for sure, Madbird was right—I’d have been on the wrong side of those lawyers once more, this time with cold, and highly visible, blood on my hands.

  The Celia angle was another brilliant stroke, and she’d played it beautifully, starting slow, gauging my reactions, and jacking it up a little at a time. She’d picked up specifics somehow, like the bits of information and mannerisms she’d dropped. I guessed that her being on horseback when she’d first come on to me was no accident. She’d obviously known that Celia had done a lot of riding on the ranch, and probably intended for me to subconsciously make that association. I even suspected that she’d gotten a photo or detailed description of Celia, and had dyed her hair to heighten the resemblance—I remembered thinking that on the previous glimpses I’d gotten of Laurie, the color had seemed a subdued brown, but when I’d first seen her coming across the meadow, it had struck me as that same flaming auburn as Celia’s.

  I didn’t think that without that aspect, I’d have let her lead me so far. But Lord, the way I’d bought it made me want to weep.

  Most of my anger was for myself. I’d not only let myself get drawn into the fantasy—absurd, adolescent, and self-serving—I’d largely created it.

  As for Laurie, with everything she’d done for me and to me, everything that had happened and everything that still might, she had, without question, blessed me with a precious gift.

  An education that took her kind of woman to teach and my kind of fool to learn.

  FIFTY-FIVE

  When I got back to Madbird’s house, he made it clear that I was welcome to stay as long as I liked, and showed me how to slip into a closed-off part of the attic in case the sheriffs came—a sort of priest hole, like Catholics had used to hide their clergy during the English Reformation. I tried to take some comfort in the thought that the worst I was looking at was nothing compared with back then. Getting caught usually had meant the rack—the Jesuit Edmund Campion had been stretched four inches—followed by castration, disembowelment, and other niceties in the name of God.

  But staying here still would be an extra risk to them, and it wasn’t going to solve anything for me.

  Madbird broke out some of his homemade venison sausage and started making spaghetti sauce. I sat at the kitchen table and gave him and Hannah a quick rundown of what had happened. Usually he really got into cooking, but as he listened, he seemed to be just pushing the sausage around the pan. He didn’t comment, and his silence told me he had things figured pretty much the same grim way I did and didn’t want to say so.

  Hannah was in the next room unpacking her bag. In the silence after I shut up, she spoke in her lilting accent.

  “Is this a present for me?”

  She held up the book I’d lifted from Kirk’s cabin, Consumer Guide to Precious Metals and Gems. I’d brought it into the motel room last night, thinking I might get a chance to look through it. But I didn’t, and when I’d gone back this morning and realized that Laurie had disappeared, I’d crammed it into Hannah’s bag along with our other stuff. Then I’
d forgotten about it.

  “It’s Kirk’s,” I said. “I took it because there’s some writing inside, but I’m sure it’s nothing.”

  She brought it to the table and we all spent a couple of minutes trying to make sense of the scrawled entries on the folded sheet of paper.

  The writing started out relatively neat but he’d gotten sloppier as he went down the page, finally scrawling FUCK in frustration. School hadn’t been his strong suit. He’d probably had a calculator for the simple math—at a glance, that looked correct, and there were no signs of figuring. At the very bottom, it looked like he might have tried a more complex calculation, but that was scribbled over with the pen point dug into the page.

  “Heroin?” I said. “Trying to figure the value? Say the first number’s the weight, the next ones are money, and the difference is whether it gets sold as a chunk or dealt in packets.”

  “If them weights are ounces, it ain’t much dope, and if they’re pounds or kilos, it ain’t much money,” Madbird said.

  “Maybe it’s just his cut. Say that’s how he was getting paid.”

  He flicked a fingertip at the line that read 13416 maybe more.

  “So if this is what two of them’s worth, whatever the fuck they are,” he said, and moved down the page to 2887 x 4 = 11548, “and this is four times a half, how come it’s less? Dope don’t get cheaper when they sell it in smaller amounts. The other way around.”

  I shook my head. It was a feeble premise anyway. The thought of gold crossed my mind, but the entries didn’t make sense that way, either. Besides, I was still sure that Kirk hadn’t found any gold or even looked. I flipped through the book. There was no other writing and nothing that struck me as related to the numbers. I closed it again.

  I wanted to do one more thing before I left.

  FIFTY-SIX

  I hadn’t used my journalism training to speak of in almost a decade, and Hannah had to spend a couple of minutes showing me around her computer. But things came back fast, and the task wasn’t complicated.

  A quick search for Laurie Balcomb gave me her maiden name, Lennox, and the location of her family’s estate in Virginia. There were plenty of news archives available—it looked like genealogies were a big thing in that part of the country. I went to the nearest newspaper, the Charlottesville Daily Progress. It mentioned her a few times as a debutante and equestrienne.

  And then as an arsonist.

  The few brief items on the stable fire she’d told me about matched her account pretty well—except that by all indications, she had, in fact, set it. There was no suggestion of a delayed attempt at blackmail. She’d been caught red-handed, with the eyewitness reporting her to firefighters as soon as they arrived on the scene.

  The story disappeared from the news, as such stories usually did. I doubted that she’d gone to jail or even to trial. An influential family in a place like that would most likely be able to settle the matter quietly. Or maybe Wesley Balcomb really had played a role somewhat like she’d claimed—scared the eyewitness into backing off, or even silenced her for good. I couldn’t find any more mention of her in the Daily Progress. If she had, in fact, been killed, it was possible that her body had been discovered in a different area, and the two events were never connected.

  The one thing I was sure of was that the scars on Laurie’s breasts were real. She might have lied about how they’d been caused, although I was quite sure that her terror of John Doe was real, too.

  As to what would happen to her now—whether her husband really would have her murdered—that was out of my hands.

  It was time for me to finally decide what was going to happen with me.

  I sat in Hannah’s office a few minutes longer, weighing the factors once more. As near as I could tell, I had three options. The first, keeping on running, didn’t look any better than it did to start with. The second, turning myself in, looked more disastrous than ever. Things had gotten so much more complicated that I’d trip all over myself if I tried to spin a tailored story. My only course would be to stonewall completely, but that was practically an admission of guilt, and would leave me helpless to defend myself against a case built against me.

  Both choices carried the added problem that Laurie might decide that the best way to save herself would be to cooperate with authorities. If they leaned on her hard enough, she might let it slip that I’d set out to kill Balcomb, adding another major felony to my list. She might also drag Madbird in, and now we weren’t talking just about abetting a fugitive. Conning Balcomb out of that money and working outside the law would have both those parties furious. No doubt Madbird would be charged with felonies there, too. Especially with him being an Indian, he’d land in Deer Lodge along with me for sure.

  My third option was a final hike in the woods with my old man’s pistol—with a stop at Balcomb’s first to carry out last night’s aborted mission. I could leave a written confession—admitting that I’d killed him and Kirk and giving the location of Kirk’s body—but leaving out everything else. The cops would run a routine investigation, but there’d be no point in pushing it, and nobody involved had anything to gain by talking, including Laurie—with her husband dead, she’d have gotten what she wanted. I’d have the satisfaction of protecting my friend, avenging myself, and ridding the world of a scumbag.

  My rational mind still rejected the idea, but some deeper part was starting to think about choosing a place to draw my last breath.

  When I went back out to the kitchen, Hannah was sitting at the table with Kirk’s book open in front of her again.

  “I’m just thinking,” she said, ignoring the dogs trying to wrestle their way into her lap. “Whenever I see Josie in the bars, she’s always flashing that ring around?” She twisted her right fingertips around her left third finger to indicate where a woman wore an engagement ring.

  I couldn’t see how Kirk’s girlfriend might figure into this, but I said, “What about it?”

  “My friend Carol, she makes jewelry? She says the big diamond’s, like, two carats, and it might cost ten thousand dollars or even more. The smaller ones, maybe they’re like a half carat each.”

  “She’s lucky somebody ain’t cut off her finger for it,” Madbird muttered.

  “Jewels aren’t like drugs,” Hannah said patiently. “The bigger they are, the more they’re worth, on a sliding scale.”

  Madbird’s hand stopped. He strode to the table and crouched over to stare at the page with the scrawled numbers. I stepped beside him.

  Hannah’s forefinger pointed at the top entry.

  Her finger moved down to the next entry.

  “Now look at this,” she said, and pointed to the page the book was opened to. It was a chart of diamond values, correlating several factors like shape, weight, color, and clarity. One of the low-end values listed for a two-carat stone was $6,612. The figure 10,716 appeared toward the higher end. All the variable factors made the figuring very complex, but it seemed that enhanced qualities like better clarity or cut could raise the value by several hundred dollars or more.

  Madbird slowly straightened up and raised his face toward heaven.

  “Fuck, oh dear,” he said. He swung around toward me. “You got any idea how much we’re gonna owe her for this?”

  Hannah smiled shyly.

  I stood there bewildered. He took hold of my shirt like he had last night, but this time the grip was a good one.

  “I’m sorry I called you white boy,” he said. “You sure ain’t as white as you used to be. I watched you when we first started working. Heard you were going to college and knew all kinds of smart shit, kept expecting you to deal down to the rest of us. But you never did.”

  He let me go and opened the refrigerator door, came out with three cans of Pabst, shoved one at me, and took another over to Hannah.

  “Then I started seeing you got something fucked up in you. But the same kind of fucked up as her and me—” his hand moved to caress her hair, rough and gentle at the same time
—“and the other fucked-up people we hang with, ’cause they’re our fucked-up people.”

  I still couldn’t grasp what was happening. Madbird exhaled in exasperation.

  “Look, I respect you for all that schooling, but you got a way of not seeing what’s right in front of you. Hannah just told you it ain’t dope them horses were carrying. It was diamonds.”

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  A little before ten o’clock that night, I did something I never thought I’d do again—pressed the old doorbell around the back of Reuben Pettyjohn’s building in downtown Helena.

  Twenty seconds later, his voice rasped through the grille.

  “There’s only one person I know of who remembers this thing. Playing hooky from the sheriffs, aren’t you, Hugh?”

  “Say the word, Reuben, I’ll keep right on moving. But I’ve got something important I’d like to tell you.”

  “Well, that’s intriguing, and I don’t figure I owe Gary Varna nothing. Come on up.”

  The buzzer crackled and the door opened at my push. I walked through the ghostly quiet of the hallway and waited for the creaky elevator to crawl down from the top floor. I had Kirk’s Consumer Guide and the paper with the numbers, plus some information I’d picked up during another hour on Hannah’s computer.

  The diamond industry had more than its share of unsavory aspects, especially the legacy of slavery in the mines. But the grimmest reality nowadays seemed to be blood diamonds—so called because they financed terrorist groups, including Al Qaeda and several factions of African rebels, like the Janjaweed, who made their own lands into living hells for millions of people.

  Blood diamonds were impossible to distinguish from any others—there were no reliable methods to identify the stones’ origins without damaging them—and often of high or even superior quality. They got smuggled out of the Congo, Angola, Sierra Leone, and other African nations, following complex routes to major world markets, blending with the flow of legitimate trade. They represented an estimated twenty to forty percent of the overall—conservatively, billions of dollars per year. Along the way, they’d usually get cut in clandestine factories—China, Pakistan, and Armenia all had burgeoning industries—and also inscribed with phony laser marks to imitate known brands. These marks were microscopic—only experts using highly sophisticated equipment could tell the fakes from genuine ones; and if the marks were well done, even that was difficult.