Dancing Bear

by James Crumley

  “Why not?”

  “We met in D.C. some years ago,” she said, “then ran across each other out here a few months ago.”

  “What’s she do for a living?”

  “Clips coupons. Also works as a free-lance news photographer and magazine journalist, covers the occasional war.”

  “War?” I said. “She looks like a model or something.”

  “Don’t let it fool you. She’s been to at least two Middle Eastern wars and one Central American revolution.”

  At this point Simmons came back with a tray of drinks—two martinis for Carolyn, two Dos X’s for himself, two shots of goddamned schnapps for me—but after he went back to his room Carolyn didn’t want to talk anymore, so we smoked and drank until the ringing of the telephone broke the silence.

  “Yes,” she said into the receiver, then listened for several moments. “Unarmed, alone, and damn sure you aren’t tailed,” she repeated, glancing at me. “Can you handle that, lover boy?”

  “Right,” I said, which she echoed into the phone before she hung up.

  “I’ll meet you in the bar at ten o’clock,” she said as she stood up. “And wear something warm.”

  “Want to finish your drinks?”

  “You need them worse than I do,” she said, heading for the door.

  “Can you give me some small idea about what’s happening?”

  “Yeah,” she said, her hand on the doorknob, “I’m sick and tired of this goddamned cowboy-and-Indian crap.” Then she left, slamming the door behind her with a sudden and furious finality.

  “Cowboy-and-Indian crap,” I said to myself as Simmons came in the room.

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe we should eat and try to come down a little bit.”

  “Eat?” he said. “Shit, man, I can just barely chew this Mexican beer.”

  “I know what you mean,” I said. I put one finger in Carolyn’s full martini, stirred the ice, sucked the gin off my knuckle. “Let’s take a walk up to my place. Maybe we’ll have an appetite when we get back.”

  “Walk?” he said. “Goddammit, Milo, there’s a blizzard out there!”

  “And an unsightly snowstorm in my head,” I said. “Let’s do it.”

  We laced ourselves into the Soral pacs and tucked ourselves into down parkas and shearling mittens, headed into the storm. All that talk about killing had made me want to disassemble my little joke of a booby trap.

  But we were too late. Even though the snow had drifted into the tracks, we could see where they had already gone into the house, front and back doors again. At the kitchen steps the crossbow bolt stuck out of a snowbank, the handball intact on the point, and beside it, a deep wallow where someone had fallen, and gouged trenches where someone else had dragged him away through the snow. A two-foot drift like the beginning of a great sand dune had billowed against the kitchen cabinets through the open door. I shut the door quietly, and we left, trekking back through Milodragovitch Park toward the warm motel room, pausing just long enough at the apartment complex on the south end of the park to look for a light in the windows of the apartment where I had seen the two thugs go in, but the panes were as black as the wintery night.

  Chapter 9

  Carolyn was on time, dressed as warmly as I was, and she didn’t want one for the road. Out in the parking lot I asked which car we should take, and she said to take mine. Once inside the Blazer, she checked every nook and cranny in the rig, then she searched me very carefully. True to my word, I had moved the rifles, the shotgun, and the Ingrams to the trunk of the AMC Eagle. True to my word as best I could be as scared as I was—my grandfather’s .41-caliber derringer nestled inside my right mitten, tossed carelessly on the dashboard. She missed it, as I knew she would, and I felt slightly guilty that it was so easy, but I preferred guilt to death.

  “Okay,” she said, “now tell me how you’re going to be sure that we’re not followed.”

  “Just trust me, and watch. If there’s a tail, I’ll drop it. But there isn’t any.”

  “Do it anyway, whatever it is you do,” she said, “but what about those electronic things they put on cars to track them?”

  “Beepers?”

  “If you say so.”

  I drove across town to the Haliburton offices, bullied the dispatcher into giving me the key to the electronic locker, then went over the Blazer carefully. “See that dial,” I explained to Carolyn. “If there’s a transmitter aboard, it’ll go crazy.” But it didn’t move. “Now the visual tail,” I said when I came back from returning the equipment.

  We drove up the dark corridor of Slayton Canyon to the end of the pavement, then I switched the Blazer into four-wheel drive, and headed down the dirt road to Long Mile Creek, bulling through the drifts while Carolyn tried to chew the knuckle out of her wool gloves, down the mountain road until I found the right sort of tree, an eighteen-inch-thick pine that leaned over the road toward the sidehill. I stopped just past it, got out my chain saw, checked the gas and the oil levels, and prayed it would start.

  “What are you doing?” she asked, leaning out of her window.

  “Roadblock,” I said, tugging on the reluctant starter rope.

  “This is national forest,” she said. “You can’t do that.”

  “Just shut up, will you,” I said, pulling on the rope again.

  The engine coughed and died in a burst of smoke, but the next time I choked it, the Poulan fired again, sputtered, then broke into smooth running. I let it warm up, then cut it off, and stepped off the side of the road into the hip-deep snow, cleared the brush around the trunk, then started it up again. It wasn’t a beautiful cut, or quick, and for a second I thought I was going to drop the sucker on the Blazer, but it fell just where I wanted it blocking the road, and when the pine tree bounced, it didn’t take my head off.

  After I had loaded the chain saw into the back of the Blazer, I got back behind the wheel, huffing like a gut-shot bear, and turned the heater all the way up.

  “Sometimes, you know,” Carolyn said, then hit her cigarette, “sometimes you people out here don’t seem to know what you’ve got in this beautiful country, because you treat it like shit.”

  “When I want some goddamned East Coast tourist to tell me how to live in the place where I was born and raised,” I said, “I’ll let you know. All right? But for now, just shut the fuck up. When you see places like Butte and the coal strip mines in eastern Montana and the goddamned clear-cuts, try to remember that we may be whores, but it’s those pimps playing squash in the Yale Club in New York fucking City who are living fat on their cuts. So shut the fuck up.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, almost as if she meant it.

  I didn’t have anything left to say, nothing to do but drive, covered in frozen sweat, trembling as the last of the alcohol and cocaine washed like acid rain out of my system, feeling all the old frost-bitten parts—the tip of my nose, both cheeks, both ear lobes, my left little finger, the outside of my left foot—begin to sting and burn as if somebody held cigarettes to the spots. And I was so tired, I almost didn’t care if I ever saw Cassandra Bogardus.

  When we finally got down Long Mile Road to the interstate, Carolyn directed me back to town, where we changed to her Mustang, which had been parked on a side street on the south side of town. She made me climb into the back seat and cover myself with a blanket.

  When she let me out, we were parked beside the end door of the new wing of the Riverfront. I was not happy.

  “Too goddamned cute,” I said as she unlocked the side door with a room key and led me upstairs. “Just too goddamned cute for words.”

  “I am sorry. Truly,” she said. “But Cassie’s afraid, and if she’s afraid, I am scared to death.”

  She paused in front of a room door and gave it two taps, three taps, one, and I curled my fingers around the derringer.

  “Coded knocks no less,” I grumbled.

  “Wait until I’m gone,” she said stiffl
y, “then knock twice.” She touched my cheek with her fingers. “I’ll be in touch.”

  “You ain’t going noplace, lover lady,” I whispered into her ear, tucking the derringer against her throat. “It was a great night, but only one night, and I don’t trust you worth a shit anymore.”

  Her eyelids fluttered as the breath rushed out of her in a warm stream against my burning face. I thought she was going to faint, but she took a deep breath, sighed, then knocked on the door twice. When it opened, I held the small pistol to my lips to shush Cassandra Bogardus’ greeting, then shoved Carolyn inside, slammed the door with my back, and motioned the two women to the floor. Then I checked out the room.

  Nobody hiding anywhere, not under the bed, not even on the balcony that overlooked the black rush of the river. Wherever Cassandra Bogardus had been staying, it wasn’t in this room. The dresser drawers were empty, the bathroom pristine, and a pair of stylish, dripping snow boots and a ski parka were the only objects in the closet, her large, expensive leather purse the only blot on the smooth, unruffled bedspread.

  I nudged the bottoms of their feet, and the two women rose, Carolyn frightened and angry, her shallow breath coming like blasts from a blacksmith’s bellows across a white-hot bed of coke, but the Bogardus woman only arched one perfect eyebrow in amusement, the corner of her perfect mouth slightly curled.

  “Outside,” I mouthed silently as I handed her the coat and boots and her purse. Once the three of us were in the hallway, I steered them down toward my room. Halfway there, Carolyn stopped and turned on me. “You son of a bitch,” she hissed, “whose side are you on?”

  “I don’t even know what we’re playing,” I whispered.

  “I’ll scream my head off,” she said, “then what are you going to do? Shoot me?”

  “Knock you out and hope I don’t break your jaw, hope your tongue isn’t between your teeth, because you’ll bite it off, maybe scream myself…”

  “Tough guy,” she sneered.

  “Take it easy, Carolyn,” the Bogardus woman said softly, her hand reaching for Carolyn’s. “Can’t you tell that he’s as frightened as we are. Let’s just do what he says. It’ll be all right.”

  Carolyn took a long moment to decide, and I took the time to look at Cassandra Bogardus. If she had looked beautiful in the spotting scope that morning, up close and in person, she was stunning, the loveliest woman I had ever seen in real life: flawless skin made up so carefully that I couldn’t see it even in the bright hallway, but make-up she could have worn under the harshest camera lights, the whitest and straightest teeth I had ever seen, jade-green eyes with flashing flicks of amber, and glowing blond hair that fell full and soft across her shoulders to curl in ardent dismay at her heavy breasts. She wore an open-weave sweater, which nearly matched her eyes, over a dull-gold turtleneck, designer jeans so tight they made me uncomfortable, and golden high-heeled sandals, which made her taller than me, with straps as delicate as spider webs.

  “If you’re through, lover boy,” Carolyn said, “let’s get on with it.”

  “Huh? Right, right,” I said. “When we get to my room, ladies, not a sound—”

  “He’s afraid of electronic surveillance, darling,” Cassandra said to Carolyn, “and I don’t blame him a bit.”

  “Huh? That’s right. Let’s go.”

  Inside my room, while the two women sat at the table, I went through their purses looking for bugs and information. As far as I could tell, they were who they said they were, and not bugged, but I went through their coats and snow boots, anyway. The Bogardus woman stood up and slipped the open-weave sweater over her head, draped it over the back of the chair, then her earrings and rings clattered to the table. She slid neatly out of her shoes, tugged the turtleneck out of her jeans, and started to take it off, but she stopped just below her breasts.

  I guess my mouth was open because she said, “Don’t you want me to strip? And go into the bathroom with you where we can turn on the water and talk?” Before I could say it wasn’t necessary, she was naked, strolling toward the bathroom, saying over her shoulder to Carolyn, whose jaw had dropped even farther open than mine, “Wait for me, darling. We’ll be a bit.” Then she paused by the bed, picked up a large manila envelope, went into the bathroom, and turned on the water. I took off the parka and the vest, stuffed the derringer into my hip pocket, and followed. Behind me, I heard Carolyn sigh long and hard.

  For a motel, it was a large bathroom, but when I walked in, it seemed terribly crowded. She stretched her leg, arched her lovely foot, and shut the door, then she reached for my hand, ran my index finger around the inside of her mouth. “See, nothing there,” she whispered, then drew it into her crotch, “and nothing there,” then farther back, “or there.” I swallowed something in my throat that lodged like a stake in my chest. “See, darling, I’m clean. We can talk here, safe from directional mikes, spike mikes, or those funny lasers that pick up sound vibrations off window-panes.” She reached over to turn on the hot-water faucet, too, bouncing her breast solidly off my arm. “Quite safe,” she said.

  “You seem to know a lot about electronic surveillance,” I said lamely, seemingly unable to point out that any wireman worth his fee could filter out the sound of rushing water his first pass on the tape. “Maybe too much.”

  “Only what I read in books,” she said. She reached for my hand again, squeezing my limp fingers until I answered her touch, saying, “I’m so glad to finally meet you, Mr. Milodragovitch, and so sorry to have played that awful trick on you at the airport the other day. But I thought you were one of them.”

  “Them?”

  “The people who have been watching my house and trying to follow me. Mr. Rideout warned me, but I made the mistake of thinking he was just being melodramatic. Poor chap’s dead now, isn’t he?”

  “That’s right,” I said, sweating now.

  “A crispy critter, poor fellow,” she said sweetly, “as the boys in Nam used to say. A disgusting term, but all too accurate, I suppose.”

  “How did you know I knew about him?” I asked dumbly. Since I had gone to a lot of trouble to talk to her, it seemed only right to stop looking at her breasts and ask a question, any question.

  “Oh, I was watching you watching him that afternoon,” she said. “I recognized you from the airport, and when I told Rideout that I thought I had been followed, he left like a shot, running back to wherever he had been hiding. I simply assumed that you were able to follow him, even though he knew you were there. He wasn’t exactly the brightest sort of man, you understand. Almost repellent, too, but he didn’t deserve to die that way, not burned to death.” She bit her lower lip, than added, “And I hope you’ll forgive me for thinking you might have something to do with his death.”

  “Would you put something on, please?”

  “Of course,” she murmured. “Forgive me.” She twisted her hair into a bun and wrapped a towel around it. Almost as an afterthought, it seemed, she wound a towel about her body, then leaned against the counter, her arms crossed under her breasts. She, too, sweated now in the steam coming off the hot water running in the sink. I reached around her, careful not to brush her, and turned off the hot water. “Don’t be so prissy, Mr. Milodragovitch,” she said, then leaned over into the shower stall. “Oh, you’ve got one of those steamers,” she said, turning it on. “It will feel wonderful, don’t you agree, as cold as it is outside.”

  “Sure,” I said as she moved close to unbutton my chamois shirt and gently tugged the tails out of my jeans.

  “You’re quite well built for an older man,” she said, her long fingernails lightly scratching through the thick gray fur on my chest. Then she patted my belly and stepped back. “I like a bit of gut on men,” she said, “it gives them presence.” Beads of sweat began to glisten on her body, and the perfumed smell of her seemed to fill the cloudy room.

  Only a fool wouldn’t have known he was being played for a fool, but knowing it didn’t help. I swallowed something larger, more
painful, and asked finally, “What was your connection to Rideout?”

  By way of answer, she picked up the limp manila envelope and slid an eight-by-ten photograph out of it. The picture had been taken at a great distance with maximum magnification of the telephoto lens, then the negative had been cropped and enlarged, so the photograph looked ghostly gray, indistinct in the steam-clouded room, I stepped over to the counter, switched on the lights around the mirror, and tried to ignore the soft tug of her fingers on the hairs of my forearm. Blurred as it was, I could make out the faces of the two men huddled over a huge supine silver-tip boar grizzly with its throat gaping open like another, larger, more awesome mouth. A 10-gauge sawed-off shotgun, a guide’s weapon of last resort when leading someone after grizzlies, and a tranquilizer rifle leaned against a log behind them. The men were laughing, clearly, in the shot, John P. Rideout/Rausche and a large Indian with a braid hanging over his shoulder, a curved skinning knife held in his raised hand.

  “What the hell is this?” I asked, moving away from her hand.

  “Poachers,” she said calmly.

  “Poachers? All this shit is about poachers? That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Not just any poachers,” she said, “but an organized gang of poachers. Do you have any idea what that hide and head are worth back East? Ten thousand dollars is my guess. Taken legally, that’s a Boone and Crockett head. Can’t you just see some fat-cat bastard in Chicago or Cleveland or Pittsburgh showing off that grizzly mounted in his den? Can’t you? I understand that full-curl Rocky Mountain sheep ram heads go for five grand, so think what that bear must be worth.”

  “This can’t be about poachers,” I said, thinking about the goods I had lifted out of the trunk of the yellow Toyota, about the dead man’s stubs clutching my arm. “No.”

  “Think about it. This is big business,” she said, “and when you threaten their profits, they are always ready to kill.”