Lone Creek

by Neil Mcmahon

  “Wesley, I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a man as sick as you,” Reuben said, in a voice that could have broken stone. “You’re one red hair short of dead, with your goddamned guts all over that dashboard in front of you.”

  The gears whirred again—not as long this time.

  “Take that road,” Balcomb said, indicating the gravel track that circled the outside of the compound’s perimeter. I started the truck and turned onto it, headlights out.

  Balcomb kept talking in his smooth, persuasive way. Some unfortunate things had happened, but they were over. He congratulated us on our shrewdness, laughed ruefully at himself for getting conned by Madbird, and intimated that he was taking us into his confidence—was prepared to pay us handsomely and even cut us in on a very lucrative setup. The unsubtle message was that we were all men of the world, conducting business—the catchall word to justify a million ways of fucking people over—and that we’d be fools not to join him.

  The road continued on past the compound through the woods another quarter mile, then opened into a wide level stretch of ground. Light from the moon and stars filtered through the hazy clouds to create a sort of luminescent dome, enough to see that the terrain looked like grass, except there was something slick and unnatural about it. Off to one side lay a whitish depression about twenty yards across. I hadn’t been in this area for many years, but I realized this must be his Astroturf golf range, and the white spot was a sand trap.

  “Over there,” Balcomb said, pointing at a small shed. When we got closer, I made it out as one of those cute prefabs you saw advertised at the big building supply stores—shaped like a miniature barn, with a gambrel roof and a big white X on the door. It had probably been brought here on a flatbed boom truck and set in place entire.

  A few bags of golf clubs and other paraphernalia lined the walls inside, but most of the space was taken up by a fancy motorized cart. That seemed strange—there was no actual course here. I supposed he used it to run back and forth collecting the balls he hit on the driving range.

  I held the flashlight, keeping a close watch on Balcomb’s hands as he got into the cart and started it up. He backed it out and parked it, then crouched down inside the building and pried up a half-sheet of plywood flooring that the cart had been covering.

  So that was its real purpose—disguise.

  The nail heads had been left in so the plywood looked permanently attached, but the shanks were clipped flush on the bottom. The joist backs had been chiseled down a quarter inch or so, with Velcro strips glued onto them and matching ones on the plywood, so if someone did walk on it, it wouldn’t squeak or seem loose.

  The two-by-eight floor joists were set on flat concrete pads, giving a couple of inches of space between them and the Astroturf underneath. Balcomb pulled loose a three-foot square section of that and slid it aside, revealing a round metal hatch with a recessed handle, like a giant pot lid. He slid that aside, too. Below it was a cylindrical cavity about two feet deep, formed by a section of corrugated iron culvert like the kind used for road drains, but set vertically. A heavy-duty safe lay inside it, faceup. Its back edges had been spot-welded to the culvert’s metal bottom.

  We all stared. It was a pretty goddamned slick hiding place. I could see why’d he’d wanted it outside his house or the other main buildings. Installing a vault in those would take skilled construction, and even well concealed, it would be vulnerable to discovery by searching, checking blueprints, and questioning the men who’d done the work. But all this had taken was a shovel and some basic tools. Nobody would ever think to look here, and he could come and go without attracting attention. There was nobody and nothing anywhere near, just a rich man’s little golf playground.

  Balcomb glanced at Reuben.

  “Kirk can be very industrious when he has the proper incentive,” he said.

  There was just enough light for me to see Reuben’s jaw tighten.

  I kept the flashlight carefully on Balcomb’s hands again while he worked the dial, in case he had a gun inside. But there was only a flat box of aluminum or stainless steel, about the size of a laptop computer. He took it out, set it on the floor, and opened it. It was lined with plum-colored velvet.

  And studded with dozens of diamonds, a couple as broad as a man’s little fingernail. If Josie’s was two carats, these must have been five. Most were in the range of hers—still good-size stones. All of them shone with a luster that was almost breathtaking. I felt that if I’d turned off the flashlight, they’d have kept on glowing like stars. There had to be close to a million bucks in that box.

  Balcomb rocked back on his heels and looked up at us, with a hint of a Cheshire cat smile.

  “I’ve saved some of the finest ones as they passed through,” he said. “Go ahead, each of you take a couple. We’ll call it a goodwill gesture—a down payment on what’s to come.”

  That was another wrong thing to say to Reuben—reminding him that Balcomb had offered the same lure to Kirk.

  “That’s a good start, Wesley,” Reuben said. “Now tell us about those horses.”

  A hint of nervousness started creeping into Balcomb’s voice, and there was a clear sense that he was shading the story to justify himself. The horses had been used for the most recent run of diamonds, he said, because the human mule on the Canadian side of the border had gotten arrested. The charge wasn’t related to the smuggling—like most of his colleagues, the mule had an extensive criminal career—but it raised the fear that he’d roll, and the police would stake out the area where he and Kirk had been crossing. There was no time to scout a new route and no way to delay the shipment.

  “Believe me, gentlemen, the people at the top of that operation do not accept excuses,” Balcomb said. “If the diamonds don’t arrive on schedule, they collect body parts instead.”

  So the Canadian operatives had enlisted a veterinarian to implant the cargo into the horses—roughly half a kilogram in each, pumped in a slurry into their stomachs through a tube. They’d been taken quickly across the border, along with a shipment of others, by a professional stock transporting company that made routine crossings and got rubber-stamp inspections. The truck driver, unaware of the implants, had then delivered them to the ranch.

  Balcomb claimed that the first thing he’d known about it was a phone call telling him the horses were on their way. He’d protested but had no choice, and once they arrived, he’d had only a few hours before a courier was due to pick up the diamonds. There was another wrinkle besides. Not surprisingly, the vet who’d done the tubing was at the low end of the scale in terms of competence—Balcomb had gleaned that he was a drug addict—and had admitted that he might have mistakenly passed some of the stones into their lungs instead, which apparently wasn’t uncommon when administering medicine by that method. With no veterinary skills of his own, Balcomb hadn’t been able to tranquilize them—he hadn’t even trusted his ability to handle them. Desperate, he’d resorted to slaughter, and had to thoroughly eviscerate them in order to make sure he recovered all the stones. He was very convincing about how gruesome the experience had been, although it leaked through that his outrage was more for himself than for them.

  “Kirk did all your other shit work,” I said. “Why not that?”

  His eyes shifted evasively. “I couldn’t get hold of him until late that night. He was off on a tear and wouldn’t answer his phone.”

  I was sure that Reuben and Madbird picked up the same thing I did—the truth was that Balcomb had been enraged at the position he’d been put in, and had taken it out on the horses.

  Reuben lowered his shotgun barrel and gave the lid of the diamond box a tap, knocking it shut.

  “Being as how this is the U. S. of A., you’re entitled to a trial by jury,” he said. “Let’s go, they’re waiting.”

  SIXTY

  I drove with headlights out again to the shed where Balcomb had shot and butchered the horses. His cool started to evaporate as he realized where we were going. As it cam
e into sight, a dense dark rectangle against the night sky, he swiveled around in his seat toward Reuben.

  “Look, this has gone far enough. You’ve made your point. You want all the diamonds? Take them. What else?”

  I stopped and cut the truck’s engine. We hadn’t rehearsed or even talked about what came next. It just happened.

  “Kirk wasn’t a particularly good kid,” Reuben said. “But he wasn’t a bad one, either. Kind of weak, kind of dumb, but he was muddling through all right. Then some snake like you comes along.”

  “Now, Reuben, all I did was offer him—”

  Madbird leaned forward and gripped Balcomb’s larynx between his thumb and forefinger.

  “Lot of things we never could figure out about white people,” he said. “Why you want to shit in the lodge, or carry your snot around in little rags. It don’t bother us any—it’s just weird.”

  He tightened his hand grip. Balcomb made a choking sound and clutched at Madbird’s wrist.

  “But killing a animal the way you did them horses, scaring them half crazy and tearing them all up,” Madbird said. “That pisses us off.”

  He released his grip contemptuously. Balcomb glared, massaging his throat, but didn’t speak this time.

  It was my turn. I understood real well my personal anger at him. But the feeling cut much deeper, and all through the past days, an undercurrent had been running through my mind as to why. There were millions of facets, but they came down to one.

  “The reason people like you get ahead, Balcomb, is because you don’t carry the same loads the rest of us do—no fairness, no generosity, no sense of obligation. Maybe you’ve got superior genes for survival. I don’t care. It makes me sick knowing you’re on this planet.”

  We all got out. I opened up the doors of the shed. Reuben gave Balcomb a shove with the shotgun barrel toward the interior. He must have believed that we were just out to scare him—we were two-bit rednecks who wouldn’t dare to really harm him, and his revenge would start as soon as he was safe again. He stalked forward, shaking his head in scorn.

  But when he got to the doors, he hesitated. He took a step in, but immediately backed up. He stayed there maybe fifteen seconds, staring into the darkness inside.

  “This has gone far enough,” he said again, but this time he muttered it.

  He turned around, looking distracted and furtive. Then he made an abrupt lunge, trying to scurry past Reuben.

  Reuben brought the shotgun barrel up sharply and clipped him across the head.

  Balcomb reeled away into the shed, spinning and clutching at air. Reuben followed and belted him again, this time with a full home run swing. I’d never heard anything quite like the sound it made.

  In the stark silence that followed, Reuben said, “Got into some hand-to-hand on the Yalu. Too thick for a bayonet to do much good. Best deal was to take your rifle like that and swing it.”

  Balcomb was sprawled on the ground, where he’d come to rest after crashing against a stall. Reuben dragged him by the shirt to a scattering of dung that the Cat’s blade had pushed against a wall. He turned Balcomb facedown into it, then put a boot on the back of his head and gave it his weight.

  I’d once read a rumor about Cardinal Mazarin, Richelieu’s successor, whose arrogance and harsh treatment of the common people had greatly stoked the fire that would become the French Revolution. In his last years, he’d suffered increasingly from an unknown disease, possibly syphilis. The hapless pseudo physicians of the day tried every remedy in their repertoire, to no avail. As he lay dying in agony, an old peasant woman appeared at his palace with a wondrous poultice, which she claimed would save him if it was applied inside his throat. Never mind that this smacked of witchcraft, and Mazarin had enthusiastically condoned the torture and burning alive of women accused of it—in desperation, he agreed. The old crone faded quietly away and was never seen again.

  The poultice turned out to be manure mashed up with cheap white wine. Thus, with his mouth packed full of horseshit, the world’s most powerful man went to meet the God he had professed to serve.

  Wesley Balcomb, the poor boy who had craved to be among the elite, had achieved a bond with one of the biggest names in history.

  SIXTY-ONE

  Reuben and I caused quite a stir when we showed up at the courthouse a little after eight o’clock the next morning. Handcuffs practically flew onto my wrists. Besides the trouble I was in, the deputies didn’t like what they saw. We both looked like shit anyway, and we’d gargled scotch and knuckled our eyes red to fake hangovers. Reuben added to the effect by lumbering around like a wounded bison, glaring and just itching for somebody to get in his way. Nobody did.

  Gary Varna came out of his office right away and took us back in with him. He sat us down, unlocked my cuffs, then eyed us.

  “If you think we were out having fun, think again,” Reuben said belligerently.

  “‘Fun’ ain’t a word that comes to mind, Reuben. I’m just trying to get used to this. It’s—unexpected, to say the least.”

  The room had a cell-like feel, with just one small window, and it was neat to the point of severity. Photos of Gary’s family were the only personal touch—his pretty wife who was a nurse, his son who’d played football for Montana State, a daughter in pharmacy school, and another with two cute kids of her own. It gave me a twinge, a little stab that in his life, he’d done right all the things that I’d done wrong.

  Reuben came out of his corner swinging. Some of it was a smoke screen, but not all. He’d made the point that if we wanted something from Gary, we’d better give him something, too.

  “We’ve been figuring Wesley Balcomb and Kirk were in on something together,” he said. “They were both coming up with money there was no accounting for.”

  Gary’s slate blue eyes focused a click.

  “Something like what?” he said.

  “That we don’t know. But we’re thinking they crossed somebody and Kirk went on the run.” Reuben paused, his gaze wavering, as if he recognized the other possibility but refused to allow it. “I want you to take a hard look at Balcomb, Gary. I’ve got some financial information I can give you, and Hugh found out some things.”

  “Well, now, ain’t that interesting.” Gary leaned forward and clasped his hands on his desk. “We just got a call from your ranch—excuse me, ex-ranch. Seems Balcomb’s gone missing, too.”

  We did our best to look blearily shocked.

  “He didn’t show up for an appointment this morning,” Gary said. “The video camera on his security gate shows him driving out about one AM. But he left his vehicle there, and nobody knows where he went.”

  Reuben slapped his palm down emphatically on the desk.

  “You can’t tell me that’s just coincidence,” he said. “Both of them taking off for no reason, in the middle of the night. I’d say that gives our notion some pretty good clout.”

  Gary glanced at me. “I guess if it was true, you’d be off the hook.”

  I wasn’t sure how barbed that was—somewhat, without doubt. I kept my mouth shut.

  He settled back again, gazing past us, tapping one forefinger on the arm of his chair. Then he checked his watch.

  “I’ll be glad for whatever information you fellas have, and believe me, I’ll start digging,” he said. “Right now, it’s going to look bad if I don’t put in a personal appearance at the ranch for an eminent citizen like Mr. Balcomb. Hugh, I need to know where you’ve been. We can talk quick and informal, same as last time. You can wait for a lawyer if you’d rather.”

  I could wait for a lawyer, sure—in a little cell down at the end of that long jailhouse hallway.

  My much better bet was that one of the most influential men in the state was sitting beside me, in my support, which in itself made clear his belief that I didn’t have anything to do with his son’s disappearance. He was also vouching for my whereabouts when Balcomb went missing. I’d spent the last hours preparing my story according to his advice—incl
uding not to say one more word than necessary, and to let him handle the rest.

  “I stopped by Reuben’s yesterday evening,” I told Gary. “I wanted to tell him in person I didn’t know anything about Kirk, but I’d found out some stuff that might interest him. He had a bottle of good scotch going and invited me into it. We started talking and putting things together. Then it was dawn.”

  Reuben nodded gruffly in affirmation. Barring disaster, that much was solid. It would take a hell of a lot to start anybody doubting Reuben Pettyjohn.

  “All right,” Gary said. He picked up a sheaf of notes off his desk and paged through them. “The last we know of you before that was, let’s see, just about forty-eight hours earlier. We got a call from Josie Young, saying you’d been to her place.”

  So it was that little bitch who’d ratted me out.

  “After you came to see me, I knew I was under the gun, so I tried to play detective,” I said sheepishly.

  “You ever do it for a living, that’ll cure you.” He kept watching me expectantly.

  This part of the story was going to be a lot tougher to float than the last one. “Try to make it just unlikely enough so he might believe it,” Reuben had said. Oddly enough, I’d remembered something Laurie had told me that seemed to fit—that when her fear of her husband had erupted and she’d tried to flee, she’d gone to a place where she’d felt safe as a child.

  “I kind of went on a retreat, Gary,” I said. “You know, like in grade school?”

  His head tilted skeptically to the side. But then he gave me a cautious nod. Gary was a steady Catholic, and I was doing my shameless best to play on that.

  “I seem to remember you were maybe going to be a priest,” he said.

  “I was maybe going to be a lot of things, and I fucked them up.” I spoke too sharply, and I saw that both men were taken aback. I hunched over and rubbed my eyes with the heels of my hands.