by Neil Mcmahon
He handed me one of the brimming glasses and went to his chair, gesturing me to another one. But even though things might be OK with Doug, I didn't want to be trapped inside if somebody like one of the Anson brothers showed up, who knew I was trespassing and wasn't inclined to shrug it off.
"Thanks, I'd just as soon stand," I said, and pressed my hand under my heart. "If it makes you feel any better, you damn near broke a couple of my ribs. I don't think anybody ever hit me that hard." That wasn't true, but I could tell it smoothed things over a little more.
"I know you were some kind of boxer," he said. "I never done any of that, but you try riding a two-thousand-pound bull some time."
"I agree absolutely. No comparison."
We both drank. I took a sip, but he knocked back a quarter of his glassful.
"I'd apologize to Mr. Balcomb, too, if I could," I said, careful to refer to him respectfully this time. "I'd like to get my job back. Why was he so mad at me? You know as well as I do he doesn't give a rat's ass about that lumber."
"I don't know. When he called me and told me to stop you, he made it sound like you were running off with the company safe. Then after all that bullshit, I found out it was some old wood-it don't make sense."
He took another long drink. No doubt this figured into his air of puzzlement-realizing that the employer he'd been sucking up to had paid him back by making a fool of him.
"Why, then?" I said. "I never even talked to him before. My crew's been doing fine-no complaints except from those pissant consultants once in a while, and they whine about everything."
"You got that right." Doug set down the glass with a thunk and wiped his mouth with his wrist. "Them fucking accountants back east telling me how to run the ranch."
That was the best stroke yet, and I wasn't about to point out that being foreman wasn't exactly running the ranch.
"I'm wondering if Kirk poisoned the well somehow," I said. "Wanted to get rid of me, and got Balcomb-Mr. Balcomb-worked up about that lumber."
"Why would Kirk want to get rid of you?"
"Well, he doesn't like me much, but that's always been true. I don't know-I got this notion that he's up to something and he was nervous I'd stumble onto it." I waited, watching him closely.
Doug shook his head. "Nothing more than usual, least that I know of. I guess he's took off."
"Yeah, I heard."
"Nobody'd pay it any mind, except he's Reuben's kid. Same as here. Everybody else busting their ass from dawn to dark, and all he ever did was fiddle-fuck around."
He drained his glass and stomped to the kitchen. While he refilled it, I noticed Tessa glance at me. This time her gaze seemed more interested. She walked past Doug, ignoring him again, and disappeared into a bedroom. I spent a little quality time with the TV, watching steroid cops busting hookers who were wretched enough to finance their junk habits by blowing guys in cars.
When Doug came back to his chair, he brought the bottle along. It was close to half empty now.
"This ain't bad stuff," he said, and made a halfhearted gesture of offering it to me.
I declined with a wave at my own glass, still almost full.
"Thanks, I'm easing off a hangover. This is plenty."
He sat down heavily, with the contented look of a man who knew he had a pleasant few hours ahead, all the sweeter because he hadn't expected or paid for them.
"You're not the only one who thought that about Kirk," I lied. "I've heard other guys talk about how he had an inside track with Balcomb. It almost seems like they're in on some secret together."
Doug frowned in concentration. "Balcomb don't know his way around here," he said. "Kirk does. Plus he's a good whipping boy, and Balcomb needs that, too."
It was a sharper insight than I'd expected, but it still didn't do me any good. I tried to phrase another question, but Doug wasn't finished.
"I been watching how it works," he said. "I grew up stupid about that kind of shit, but I'm getting smarter." His head made a disgusted circle that took in the trailer and a whole lot more. "Look at this, and then look at what people like them got."
I couldn't fault him for thinking like that. Most people sold out in some way-I'd done it many times. The only question was price. But while he might get smarter, he was never going to develop the natural cunning of someone like Kirk or Balcomb. I was sure he hadn't been hedging his answers to me, and that he didn't have anything to do with the lumber being burned-I hadn't even seen a hint that he knew it had happened.
Just then the biggest of the kids, a grinning gap-toothed four-year-old berserker, lunged across the room and threw himself gleefully against his father's legs. He'd been playing a game that seemed to involve tackling whatever caught his fancy-he'd already taken out his wailing little brother and a laundry basket full of clothes and made impressive assaults on the furniture, all without parental rebuke. Now I braced myself for some yelling and maybe a slap.
But Doug only reached a hand down to catch and steady him as he careened away, paying no more attention than if it had been a newborn calf stumbling around. The gesture was so carelessly gentle and sheltering that it almost stunned me-swept away everything else I'd ever thought about him and left me confused. It was a kind of love, a generosity of spirit even if only toward his own flesh and blood, that was foreign to me.
The mellowing shift of gears didn't last long.
I heard a door open and glanced over toward the sound. Tessa stepped out of the bedroom, wrapped in nothing but a towel. Her legs were very long. I turned away hastily.
"Lord, woman, what the hell you doing, walking around like that?" Doug said, startled harshly out of his comfortable bubble.
"Taking a shower, what's it look like?"
"A shower? At dinnertime?"
Her voice took on an edge that pressed me back against my chair.
"I spend half my life trying to keep this place clean. But it's goddamn impossible and I always feel grubby, especially with all the shit you track in."
She walked on to the bathroom. Doug, glowering, knocked back another big drink of whiskey. Things probably would have been OK if they'd stayed there.
But Tessa said, archly, "In case you don't know, that's the man who fixed this door, so we could have some privacy."
I swear I wouldn't have looked at her again, but I realized that she was talking about me, and the response was automatic. She smiled over her shoulder, then tugged at the door to close it, but somehow her towel got caught in it and fell to the floor, and she had to kick it free before the panel slid home behind her. Her ass was a little on the generous side, but firm and quite attractive.
Doug saw me see it, and his eyes lit on fire.
"So you could have some privacy?" he barked at me.
"No, Doug, so you could-your family."
But he was heaving himself up from his chair. I backed ungracefully out onto the trailer's steps. On top of his busted nose and hammered ego and Christ knew how many other hard-ons, plus a bellyful of whiskey to amp them all up, he probably suspected Tessa'd been jumping somebody, and she'd just made me the odds-on candidate.
"Goddammit, it's not what you think," I said, but he kept stomping toward me the way he'd done yesterday, seeming to inflate like an old-time cartoon villain, while I felt myself shrinking like one of those mice. I hopped down the stairs and took off. I was in trouble enough for what I had done, and I wasn't about to get my ass kicked for what I hadn't.
As I trotted away, I caught a glimpse of the clothesline. There was just enough light around for me to recognize that rose-colored thong flying in the breeze like the defiant flag of a small republic, declaring its independence.
I was going to have to tell Madbird that while he might be done with the construction project, his services were still in demand out here.
32
As I rode to Helena I started getting into a drizzle that turned the pavement slick and the visibility poor. With just the flashlight duct-taped to the handlebars, I stay
ed on back roads and streets, making my way toward the area around the county courthouse. It seemed I'd been spending a lot of time there lately. The neighborhood was old and largely working class, although some younger professionals involved in the Montana version of gentrification were moving in. There was also a substantial element of small-time criminals, conveniently residing close to the jail. It couldn't have been much more different from the pristine country where Kirk had grown up, but it was where his girlfriend Josie lived, and he'd moved in with her when the ranch was sold.
I hardly knew her, mainly just to nod and say hi when I'd seen her out with Kirk. She hadn't grown up around here-I had it in my head that she was from the coast, Seattle or Portland. She was about twenty-five, with shoulder-length brown hair and a small slim build, quite pretty in an anorexic way-the kind of girl you'd see sitting at a bar on a summer afternoon, wearing cutoff jeans and a tank top with a little bow, and she'd seem fresh and appealing and amusingly smart-mouthed. But in time you'd notice the dark circles under her eyes as her makeup wore thin, and how she started seeming a lot older than her years, and that the tantalizing patter was never going to go anywhere except toward what was in this for her. When I was younger, I'd been quite good at not catching on to that sort of thing. It had taken me on some rides, but I couldn't recall one that hadn't turned out sour or outright troublesome.
The only time I'd exchanged more than a casual hello with Josie had been on a night several months back, when she'd come up to me in O'Toole's and asked if I'd seen Kirk. He must have been off on one of his runners. When I told her no, she said he was supposed to pick her up hours ago, and she was tired and wanted to crash, and would I drive her home? As soon as we'd gotten into my truck, she'd started asking me to make other stops-first at a convenience store for cigarettes, then at somebody's house where she probably scored some dope, and then she'd wanted to go to another bar. Instead, I'd driven straight to her and Kirk's place and stayed behind the wheel while she pouted her way inside. Back at O'Toole's, it wasn't long before I saw her come in again. But that time, she looked right through me as she walked past. I hadn't run into her since.
There was no reason to expect that she'd be happy to see me. I was starting to realize that a lot of people weren't. But she was bound to know some things about Kirk's drug dealings, and I'd been thinking more and more about Madbird's guess that that might have been how the horses were used. If the shred of nylon I'd found at the shed had come from the tarp wadded up with their carcasses, it suggested that the Cat had picked it up and carried it to the dump along with them. I was wondering if Balcomb had put the tarp down to keep from losing any cargo in the swamp that their blood and entrails would have made on the shed's dirt floor.
Josie's apartment was on the second story of a run-down frame house on Ewing Street. I pulled the Victor up to the curb, shut it down, and sat for a minute, absorbing the neighborhood's own peculiar kind of desolation. It was closed in by steep hills, with the buildings packed tightly together, giving it the secretive feel of an older time and place. The lights of the tree-lined streets were dim and the windows heavily curtained, with no signs of activity and no sounds but the faint patter of rain and the rumble of a car with a shot muffler passing a few blocks away. I knew there were plenty of people and plenty going on around me, but everything was hidden inside the walls, working by its own rules, apart from the rest of the world and wanting to keep it like that. The sense was similar in a way to what I'd felt approaching the ranch-that I was an intruder being watched, but not by anybody. The difference was that out in that wild country, it had been exhilarating. This was a lot less pleasant.
The building's outside entrance was unlocked. It gave into a little hallway with a mailbox and a shadowy staircase leading up to the door of the apartment. I hadn't been able to tell if Josie was home-her windows, like most of the others around, were covered and barely lit. But she must have either been watching outside or heard me on the stairs, because the door opened against its chain before I raised my fist to knock.
Her face appeared in the gap. She looked wary, like she didn't remember me, which was entirely possible. Then again, maybe it was because she did-or because she'd learned that I was under suspicion in Kirk's disappearance.
I said, "Hi, Josie."
"Kirk's gone."
"I know. That's why I came by."
"Did you hear something?" she said sharply.
"Nothing besides that. I need to talk to you. It won't take long."
Her eyes narrowed. "What about?"
"I had a run-in with Wesley Balcomb. I need help figuring some things out."
"So this isn't because you're worried about Kirk, right?" she said, with chilling precision and speed.
"Hell, yes, of course I'm worried about him. If I do any good, it could-you know-" I floundered, and finished up, "Help him, too."
Her face relaxed into a calculated look. It was oddly more natural.
"Come on in," she said.
She didn't look so pretty tonight. She was wearing a University of Montana Grizzlies football sweatshirt so big and baggy that she seemed lost inside it like a little kid, and skinnier than ever. The sleeves came down to her fingertips-she kept fidgeting, pushing them up to her wrists, but they'd flop loose again immediately. I suspected they were hiding track marks. Her face was tense and twitchy, and her nostrils had a raw peeled look.
The apartment was a train wreck, but not a comfortable kind of organic mess like at Doug's trailer. The pastel blue paint on the walls had peeled in patches to reveal a mosaic of previous colors, and the carpet, a green-orange shag that screamed remnant sale, was stained and cigarette-burned and trodden down to a dismal mat. The room reeked of smoke, with an undercurrent of decay from the kitchen or the plumbing or God knew what else.
But that all went with the turf. The jarring element lay in the newer things. For openers, Josie was sporting a diamond engagement ring like you'd see on rich widows in Miami, with one stone the size of a chickpea surrounded by several smaller ones. I was no judge of that kind of thing, but they gave off the kind of sparkle that I didn't think came from paste.
There was a full-blown home entertainment center with a TV even bigger than Doug's, plus a DVD and a VCR and a stereo and all the other bells and whistles, encased in a slick cabinet set. A new leather couch that they must have had a hell of a time getting up those stairs took up most of one wall. A couple of large western-theme paintings were hung above and around it, the kind of imitation Charlie Russells that were one step this side of black velvet, but that sold for ungodly prices in rustic art galleries.
And clothes. The front closet was so packed with coats and boots that the door wouldn't close. Jeans and tops trailed off the furniture onto the floor and formed a path to the bedroom. Pretty much everything, to be blunt, looked slutty. But most of it was new, too-some of the items still had tags.
The strong implication was that she'd been living low to the ground, then suddenly had come into a chunk of cash and tried to buy some class. But she didn't know how, so she'd retreated to filling up the place with the familiar security of clothes.
The psychology involved didn't particularly interest me. What did was the more tangible matter of where that money had come from-not just for all this, but for Kirk's new Jeep and guns and other pseudo-military toys. I was sure that Josie didn't have a job, and there was no way Kirk's salary went that far. Maybe it had come from his family, although he'd done plenty of barroom pissing and moaning about his father's stinginess. Maybe they'd bought it all on credit.
Maybe.
Josie turned to me with her arms folded and a no-bullshit stare. Her mouth was a tight line turned down at the corners.
"Look, I don't know where Kirk is or what's going on," she said. "I'll talk to you, but you got to do something for me, too. He didn't leave me any money, man. There's no food here, I'm starving."
It looked like coyness wasn't going to figure into this, which was good. I opened
my wallet, thinking I'd give her a twenty. But I'd had only a few bucks of my own to start with, and out of the hundred-dollar bill I'd put down at the Red Meadow, only some singles, a couple of fives, and a fifty were left. Elmer and I hadn't drunk much, but I'd been careful to take care of the bartender-who in return had topped our glasses to the brim and bought us a round, the way it ought to be-and a shot of good bourbon wasn't cheap these days even at a place like that.
I wanted Josie in a cooperative mood, and it was Balcomb's cash anyway, so I set the fifty on top of a clothes pile, making sure she saw the denomination. Instead of being impressed, she looked at it like a waitress in a classy restaurant would look at a two-bit tip. I shouldn't have been surprised. I'd seen it often enough, people who'd never had to earn money thinking that people who did should throw bushels of it at them.
"What do you want to know?" she said. Now she seemed impatient.
"What did Kirk-" I caught myself, and coughed into my hand to cover. "What does Kirk have to say about Wesley Balcomb?" I breathed a silent thanks that I'd screwed up with her and not someone who might have noticed. I was going to have to watch it.
"Not much," Josie said. "Back when he first started that job, I asked him about it a couple of times, and he told me to shut up. So I stopped."
"Why won't he talk about his job? Most guys do."
"Maybe he just doesn't want to, OK? Maybe Mr. Balcomb told him not to."
"Did Kirk tell you that?"
"I said maybe." Her impatience was getting clearer.
"Did you ever get the feeling that Kirk and Balcomb were into something together?" I said.
"Like what?"
"Like dope, big-time?"
Her eyes widened in disbelief. Then she snorted with what seemed to be genuine amusement.
"You gotta be kidding." But it wasn't so much a denial as, You think I'd tell you?