Cheatgrass

by Bart Paul

  “Oh, god, Rusty,” she said. With her dad missing, losing his old ropehorse just made everything that much worse.

  She was crying when she took her rope off her horse and snugged the loop over my saddle horn. Then she stepped aboard, dallied, and dragged the horse off me a few feet so I could get up. It took me a minute. My whole side was numb, and my right leg buckled before she steadied me. She wrapped her arms around me so I wouldn’t fall.

  “I thought you were going to ride that circle and get the hell out of here.”

  “Didn’t want to leave you,” she said. Her arms were clamped around me tight, her eyes wet. “Idiot.” She kissed me quick.

  “Well, I’m glad you didn’t.”

  She stepped back and I started to wobble.

  “Do you think Kip’s waiting down by the cabin?” she said.

  “If he was, he would’ve come running to see that boob finish me off. But maybe he saw the law coming up-canyon and took off. Who knows?”

  She walked over to the roan and knelt by his head. “He was such a good horse.” She had trouble getting the words out. “But he had a good life. A good life.” She ran her hand over his neck and got a funny look. “Where was he hit? I don’t see an entry.”

  “I don’t know. He dropped like a rock before I even heard the shot. It was fired from a distance, I know that.”

  “Just one shot?”

  “Just one.”

  She was slipping back into her suspicious cop thinking. She bent close, feeling with both hands. “Here,” she said. “The entry wound is tiny. Just behind the eye.” She stood up then. “You think it was Kip who shot him?”

  “This drunk would’ve fired more than once. Made hamburger out of us. So yeah, unless Kip got reinforcements.” I bent down and found the entry. I’d seen similar.

  “This was either a hell of an accident or he’s a great shot,” she said.

  “Or something.”

  “Let’s just load these two in the trailer and get the hell out of here,” she said, “before you kill them all and don’t leave any for me. Then we can check in with Jack about …” She almost didn’t finish. “About the mineshaft.”

  We pulled my saddle and rifle from the dead horse, then I waited with the sorrel. I saddled him while Sarah rode back to fetch the gooseneck. I looked around for my hat but was too wracked to travel far. I sat on a rock watching the road and stood back up when my butt got too numb. It would take a bit to unstiffen from the fall. We had the horses loaded and were just climbing into the cab when my phone buzzed.

  “Hey, Sarge.” It was Kip. I was surprised as hell I had service, and kind of creeped out to hear him so loud and clear. I put it on speaker. “I thought you’d wiped out back there,” he said. “You be the man after all.”

  “Where are you, asshole?”

  “Oh, I’m far away,” he said. “Far, far away. I just called to say thanks.”

  Sarah started breathing hard.

  “I’m listening.”

  “Yeah, you did me a huge favor wasting those two clowns.” I could hear him laughing over the phone. “See, I was into Delroy for some major coin when goddamn Hoyt found our little pot plantation. Lawdy-lawdy, de ole plantation.”

  “We knew it was you who killed him,” Sarah said. “But what did you mean about Dad?” She tried to sound tough but her voice shook. “Tell me what you mean.”

  “If he’s dead, I sure didn’t kill him, doll,” he said. “Him and me was pards, remember? Yup. Pards to the end.”

  I scribbled Keep him talking on a sandwich bag and gave it to Sarah, but I guess I didn’t have to.

  “Hey, Sarge, you know I’d be pretty pissed if I’d actually had to pay a dime for that Cessna burning back there,” he said. “We stole it from Van Nuys Airport two months ago, but I guess you’d say we got our money’s worth. Did you shoot it down? Pretty good wing-shootin’, if you did. Pa-chow! We need to go duck hunting together when this is over.” He said it like he actually believed we’d do it.

  There was a muffled sound on the phone for a second. “Hold on, I got something to show you.”

  A picture popped up on my phone. It was Sarah kissing me just thirty minutes earlier.

  “You like that?” Kip said. “Damn, folks would think she was your wife, not mine.”

  Sarah looked like she’d be the next one to rip a wheel off a steering column. “I won’t be your anything,” she said. “Except your damn widow. Tell me about the damned mineshaft.”

  “How about that. Remember, doll, they say the old ways are the best.” He laughed, and the phone went silent.

  I picked up the dead guy’s AR-15 and stowed it in the bed of her truck. Sarah turned the rig around and drove back up the road, stopping where we’d camped the night before. She backed fast and turned again, jamming the brakes hard. She parked heading out in case we had to leave quick. We got out and picked up the rest of our gear and the bedroll, moving fast. We stopped to catch our breath and stare at the plane crumpled against the hillside. It had burned the earth where it crashed, and the snow had melted in a big oval around it. The ground was still warm in places, and the metal of the fuselage and wings had curled. What was left of Delroy’s body looked small and twisted and reminded me of old black-and-white photographs of napalmed Jap soldiers from Guadalcanal or the caves on Iwo Jima in my dad’s Life magazine box-set history of World War II. Sarah gave a wince, but she didn’t look away. It was a man she had known and not liked. He was dead and she was glad he was dead, but I knew Delroy’s black corpse was hard for her to take.

  We got back into the truck and she drove to the cowcamp as fast as she dared with trailered horses. I rode shotgun with my .270 resting out the open window, gulping cold air like a border collie. We both watched for sign of Kip or any new folks he may have brought up to replace Delroy and the big Indian, and watched for any trace of Mitch or the FBI. I was halfway expecting them by now. The day was windy and cold and the snow hadn’t melted much, but it had blown off the boughs of the piñon along the road. So much for spring.

  “What do you think he meant,” she said, “‘the old ways are the best?’ Did he mean dying in a mineshaft?”

  “I guess he’ll let us know.” I remembered Jedediah saying the same thing.

  At the cowcamp we did a quick reconnoiter before we went inside the cabin. Most of the cattle had drifted out to the meadows, and only a few stayed back. The flatbed Ford I’d set off by itself had been driven back to the pens. There was snow on the seat from the shot-out back window.

  “Where’s everybody gone?” Sarah said. “I figured it would be like the OK Corral when we got here.”

  “You have service?”

  She dug out her phone. “Looks like,” she said.

  “Call Roger at Douglas County Sheriff’s and get an ETA.”

  She got on her phone and left Roger Parrott a message when he didn’t pick up. She mentioned they’d need a coroner up here, too. She tried to get Mitch but got no service calling south.

  The cabin was an empty mess. Just overnight, Kip’s guys had eaten our food, drunk our beer, and thrown trash everywhere. We took what we needed and got back into Sarah’s truck and headed on down the road toward the drift fence. After a few minutes I checked my phone. Sarah watched me, gripping the wheel like death. We were in the treeless mess above the cattle guard.

  “I don’t know how much of this I can take,” Sarah said.

  “Pull over. I got a message from Becky.”

  She stopped the truck.

  “She says they found a body but it’s not Dave.”

  “Bodies everywhere—what the hell?”

  We were close enough to the mouth of the canyon so cell service was semi-good. I got Becky on speaker. She and Dan were still at the mine with the Forest Service District Ranger.

  “The Forest Service guys found a real old corpse—half skeleton, half mummy,” Becky said. “It was in a side shaft you wouldn’t find if you didn’t know where to look. She must�
�ve got trapped in the open shaft and couldn’t get out.”

  “She?” Sarah said. “The medical examiner said it was a female?”

  “They haven’t got here yet. But you can see bits of blond hair on the scalp. And guys?”

  “Yeah?”

  “The corpse had been wearing a bathing suit. A bikini. Dan called it the creepiest thing he’s ever seen—Tales from the Crypt creepy.”

  They talked a bit more, then she thanked Becky and hung up.

  “Mitch needs to call Santa Barbara County about the surfer girl who vanished,” Sarah said. “The one who burned Kip in a drug deal.” She edged closer and took my hand. “He’s done this before. If Dad is in some other cave or shaft at some other mine, where do we even start to look?”

  “Jesus, who knows? I wonder why we haven’t seen Mitch yet.”

  She drove down toward the drift fence. I asked her to stop at the edge of the piñon, well back from the cattle guard, so I could look for tracks.

  “Are you okay to do that?” she said. “You look horrible.”

  “I’m fine.”

  I took the Remington and started hobbling up to the fence. Sarah got out of the cab and drifted toward the trees to cover me with the 12 gauge. I walked along, memorizing the tire tracks and footprints in the road still half-covered with snow and in the red clay that showed through the bare spots, some of it frozen hard, some puddled with slush. The mounds of dead piñon from the wildlife mitigation spread off on either side of the road, boughs poking through snowmelt. I could see that the newest tire tracks came up through the piñon forest from the east, then crossed over those tracks heading back over the cattle guard. I figured those were Kip’s. I looked back. Sarah was watching me with an are-you-okay sort of look.

  I was thirsty and my head ached. The IED wound in my right femur from a few months before ached like it sometimes did when the weather got cold. I stopped to catch my breath and felt along the leg where the horse landed on it, wondering if maybe I’d cracked something. My right hip hadn’t hurt this bad since I bruised it playing football on Astroturf against Virginia City in the eleventh grade. I turned back to Sarah again, but by now she was out of sight in the trees. I walked along the fence line. I could see footprints on top of the tire tracks and bent down to look. I walked slow, following them, my eyes on the ground trying to separate what looked like a second set of tracks and feeling that something was wrong. Holding my head that low made it spin like a bad hangover. When I raised up, the ground all around me swirled and I thought I was going to puke, and one of the swirling piñon piles seemed like it was rising up too. I thought I heard somebody yell my name, then the snap and thpppt of a rifleshot. I felt a bullet burn in the same spot on my back thigh that had been ripped by scrap-metal from the IED that winter, then the whole sky spun like I was hallucinating. As I fell, the piñon pile rose up in a manshape like some crazy petroglyph. I heard a shotgun blast and the hallucination vanished in a puff of snow and twigs, and then I was down on thin snow over hard ground hanging on to Dad’s rifle but not seeing anything to shoot.

  I looked up and saw Sarah walking toward me pumping the 12 gauge, her eyes on the pile of brush about a hundred feet away. She kept the shotgun pointed in that direction as she knelt down and put her hand on my leg.

  “The hell?”

  “Somebody shot you,” she said. “Is it bad?”

  “I don’t think so. If it’d hit bone or artery I’d know it. Help me up.” I let the Remington slip out of my hands like it was too heavy to hold.

  She didn’t argue, but she had to set the shotgun down and grab me under the armpits to get me on my feet.

  “Was it Kip?”

  She shook her head and pointed out to the mounds of dead piñon. I leaned on her and we limped the hundred feet over to the pile of brush. When I was still fifty feet away I could see that the brush hid a sniper nest, and what I’d seen moving was a shooter in a ghillie suit rising up out of the hole to take a kill shot. We walked closer. Sarah looked down at the red nail polish on the hand cupped around the pistol grip of an Army M110 sniper rifle.

  “Did you know her?” she said.

  “Not as well as I thought I did.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Sarah rolled the body over with her boot to make sure Captain Cruz was dead. She still held the shotgun with both hands, ready to rip into Ofelia a second time. She looked over at me like I’d be next.

  “This was the company commander?” she said. “The one who sent the sexy picture to your phone?”

  Nodding was about all I dared.

  “What the hell is she doing here, Tommy? What have you done?”

  “I have no damn idea.” I poked around the body. “I never made no secret where I was going. She must have found a way to track me.” I touched the rifle with my boot toe. “And to get this thing off the base.”

  Under the camouflage suit Ofelia Cruz wasn’t in uniform, just hunting shirt and pants, and good boots. Well turned out, right to the end. She always kept her phone on her belt unless she was wearing a dress. I peeled back the ghillie suit and found it.

  Sarah pushed past me, saw where I was looking, and jerked the phone out of its belt holder.

  “I guess we’re way past doing the right thing here,” she said. She started sliding her finger across the screen, turning away from me like she didn’t want me to see. After a minute it was like she remembered that I was shot and bleeding and used her own phone to get the Douglas County dispatcher. She gave a report of the shootings and our location for the EMTs, and asked that they confirm the location with Deputy Parrott. Then she walked me to her truck, unbuckled the .45 gun rig, set it on the floorboards, and sat me down in the passenger side of the cab. It hurt to sit but it was better than trying to stay on my feet. I had to ask her to go back and fetch Dad’s Remington from where I’d dropped it in the snow. Sarah came back quick, almost throwing the rifle at me. I slipped it behind the seat. She came around to my door looking cranky and in no mood for comfort. She started to untie her wild rag, but thought twice about it and untied mine instead. She yanked it off my neck when it was only half undone, then wrapped it hard around my thigh to apply pressure on the wound. When she was done with that she set my leg inside the cab with my foot resting on the floorboard. She never said a word except things like, “Hurt?” or “That okay?” as she worked. She never looked me in the eye and was rough as hell. When she had me secured, she turned the rig around and drove back up through the piñon to the cowcamp to wait for help.

  She cleared the trash off one of the mattresses in the cabin and got me stretched out. When I was situated, she stood by the window and went back to looking at texts on Ofelia’s phone. Then she dropped in a chair, looking hard at me.

  “I went back to the beginning,” she said. “The morning you flew home. Even before your plane landed, this woman cyber-stalked me and found Kip at his veteran’s website. He didn’t answer right away, but when he did and he realized who she was, they both just went crazy.” She finally looked at me, still mad. “There’s a huge bunch of texts here. Hundreds. This is just nuts.”

  She held the phone and read half out loud, getting more and more raggedy and beside herself while I lay there. She was still reading and muttering about thirty minutes later when we heard the county ambulance coming up the road. By then I’d already taken a few pulls from the whiskey bottle and had to listen to Sarah give me little bits of text-swapping between Ofelia Cruz and Kip Isringhausen. I won’t deny it was some crazy stuff.

  She looked out the cabin window as the ambulance rolled toward us, then read some more, looking disgusted. “Your girlfriend says she’ll cut your heart out if you don’t come back to her.” She looked at me hard. “They were taunting each other, playing this poor-me game so whatever they do to us, they think we had it coming.” She threw the phone on the bed. “What kind of people are these? My god, he even tried to poison Dad’s dog.”

  “I never should’ve come back.”
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  “You never should’ve left.”

  “I know. Look, I reenlisted so I’d be—I don’t know—worthy of you. Get a degree. Some kind of career. All the stuff that you have. I wanted you—” I slowed down. I didn’t want to screw this up. “I wanted you to be proud.”

  “I was always proud of you,” she said. “I never cared about the rest. How can you not have known how I felt? Then you left me, and you never did any of those things, did you? No college, no nothing. Except trade me for that woman and almost get yourself killed.” She was mad and crying, both at once. “You left me alone. And I am no good alone.”

  She shouted as the ambulance passed by the open window. “Over here, idiot.” She put her hand on the wild rag bandage to feel for bleeding, looking down at the blood seeping through my jeans. “You’re just lucky she’s not a better shot.”

  The captain had examined me up close where I’d been wounded by the IED, and she’d drilled me right there in the same fleshy part of the leg about four inches below my privates.

  “She hit what she aimed at.”

  The ambulance started backing up.

  “You saved my life, Sarah.”

  “Don’t flatter yourself,” she said. “I shot that woman because she killed a perfectly harmless horse. Anyway, I assume it was her.” She finished poking at the oozy wild rag. “I told you I’d kill them all.” She looked up at the ambulance backing to the cabin door.

  “They only sent one guy,” she said. “That’s retarded.” She looked at me like she didn’t know who to kill next.

  I leaned up as best I could and looked out the door. An EMT in a white uniform shirt and Wranglers was opening the rear of the ambulance and pulling out a gurney. I remember thinking most of those departments wear black pants. The guy had his back to us, but he was real recognizable.

  “Hey, surfer boy.”

  Sarah pulled her pistol just like I hoped she would as she jerked around to see who I was talking to.