He motioned with the stubble on his chin toward the hills to our right. “My trailer, back at the loading chutes. Saw the reflection of the fire in the window and heard the horses a screamin’ and come runnin’, but it was too late.”
I nodded. “Was there lightning that night?”
He begrudged the answer. “Yep.”
“The fire from the barn caught the house?”
“Yep.”
“Where is the barn?”
“Opposite side from where you parked your car.”
“You go in?”
He looked at me incredulously. “There wasn’t no goin’ in there.”
“Where was she?”
I glanced back at the blackened and cavernous rubble.
This time he motioned with the beer can and the cigarette. “Out there in the grass, with that varmint rifle across her lap.” He took the last puff off the cigarette, stubbed it out on the ground beside the patio, and then stuffed the butt into his shirt pocket. Evidently, Hershel Vanskike was a respectful man, of what I wasn’t quite sure, but I had suspicions. “Her head was down, and it was almost like she was asleep. I touched her shoulder and she looked up at me and said that the horses were dead and that she’d killed him.”
“Did she show any remorse?”
“Nope, just said it like she was talkin’ about the weather.” He studied me for a moment longer. “You sure do ask a lot of questions about people, for a guy that’s concerned with the insurance. You tryin’ not to pay?”
“No.”
“He’s dead, and she’s goin’ to prison; who gets the money?”
“You tell me.”
“He’s got a brother back in Youngstown.”
“Son-of-a-bitch?”
He nodded his head. “Most likely.”
We both laughed. “I’m just curious.” I took a sip and changed the subject. “She was good on horseback?”
He warmed to that line of conversation and smiled. “You ain’t never seen anything like it. She was Junior Cutting Title in Las Vegas, National Cutting Horse Association Super Stakes Champion. Brother, she was the best I ever seen-and I seen some.” He took the last swallow of his beer and crushed the can in his hand. “She could separate a horsefly from a cow’s ass.”
I took a breath of my own and was sorry to take us back to the sadness. “Why burn all the horses?”
The older man resumed petting Dog, then stopped and shook his head with his eyes closed. “I’ll be damned…”
“What?”
His eyes opened, and he looked up at me. “You insured the horses, too, didn’t you?”
I hadn’t insured anything, but Eric Boss had. “Well…”
“And her?”
I strained to understand. “Mary?”
“No, her.” I continued looking at him blankly as the fireplace crackled and popped with small explosions. “Them horses… Barsad didn’t burn ’em all.”
3
October 27, 10:30 P.M.
Her name was Black Diamond Wahoo Sue, and she was not your usual championship cutting horse; first off, she was a she and, secondly, she was dark as a starless night. A gorgeous and rare solid black in coat, mane, tail, and legs, the big gal had won every event in which she had competed and was the best in the cutting, reining, and reined cow-horse circles. The mark of a great mare is her ability to produce horses that are possibly even better than herself; Black Diamond Wahoo Sue had done so to the tune of more than twenty-five million dollars, which went a long way in explaining why she was underinsured at close to a cool five million.
Mary raised her, and she was the horse Mary had ridden at the National Cutting Horse Association championships, her pride and joy, and the thing that Wade Barsad had focused his considerable hatred upon before that fateful night when he’d burned alive not eight horses, but seven.
We walked our party around to the opposite side of the house and down a flat path that shone with mica in the moonlight. The beer supply had run dry; four for him and two for me, after which Hershel Vanskike produced a fire-damaged bottle of single malt Laphroaig, vintage 1968, from behind the fireplace. So far I’d declined, 1968 having not been the best of years for me.
The iron gate was soot-covered but still clung to the archway that framed the desolation of the burnt barn. It must’ve been something before the fire, but there wasn’t much left. The photos in the insurance binder showed a log barn handcrafted with natural timbers and small, mission-style lights inset with amber glass that had given the place a friendly bronze glow. I’m not sure if it was the photography or the story, but the barn was more inviting than the house, or used to be.
The heat must have been terrific, and it was easy to see how the flames had jumped from the barn to the cedar shingles of the house. I stared at the charred timbers and piles of rubble.
It looked like a mass grave.
“Did they leave them in there?”
He socked himself another from the bottle and swung it toward me, a little of the precious, tawny liquor sloshing from the opening at the neck. I held out a hand in abstinence. “No, thanks.”
“Don’t blame you, stuff’s horrible; needs a little Dr. Pepper.” The old cowboy nodded with a liquor-soaked solemn that he’d probably never shown for any human being. “Smelled like cooked horse for days; I can still smell it.” He weaved there for a moment. “I had my rifle ’cause I wasn’t sure what was going on, but you couldn’t even see to shoot the poor things.”
Dog sniffed at the burnt grass, looked at the wreckage, then at the drunken cowhand, and backed up and sat on my boot. “And Wahoo Sue?”
He licked the paper on another cigarette and twisted it together a little unsteadily as I held the bottle for him. “Damn, she was a runner.” He pulled another Blue Tip match from his hatband and lit the cigarette, cupping it in his hand again. “She won that forty-mile Durant-to-Absalom overland race, just run off and left the rest of ’em-first time a woman ever won it.”
He took a puff, and I could hear the soft pop of his inhale. He brought his head up and took the bottle back, his voice taking on an animation that it hadn’t contained before.
“She was a cutter, but that horse would race anything. I seen her race other horses, pronghorn antelope, even pickup trucks on the county road. She wasn’t the biggest, she wasn’t even the fastest, but she had something in her that wouldn’t let her get beat. You can see that in an animal.” He continued to look at me through the faint glow of the ember by his chin and the complex sugars racing through his veins. “And some people.”
“What happened?”
“ ’Bout a week before…” He looked back at what was left of the barn and swigged down a mouthful of single-malt with a squint. “Before this, Wade loaded that horse up into a trailer, laid a. 30–30 in the seat of his truck, and then drove off. He went out onto BLM land, south and east toward Twentymile Butte, toward the Battlement. He come back, but the horse didn’t.”
October 19: eight days earlier, night.
Mary Barsad’s eyes had been open, but I wasn’t sure that anyone was home.
I stepped around the partition wall and could see her perfectly framed in the illumination of the streetlight outside the window-she was standing at the bars, her slender fingers wrapped around the steel.
Her face had turned a little, but she spoke to the diffused light. “Somebody closed the gates.”
I glanced down at Dog and noticed he was looking up at me. “Mary?”
“Did you feed Sue like I told you?” Her voice had a detached, otherworldly quality to it.
“Mrs. Barsad?”
“We’ll have to wrap that tendon on her-it looks like she’s favoring it.” Dog woofed at her, and I gave him a nudge with my leg. She smiled but continued to gaze out of the cell and just to my left.
“Mary, are you all right?”
I watched as her lip trembled and a sob broke loose from her throat. “The horses… there’s something wrong with the horses.”
/>
I didn’t know that much about sleepwalking but had heard that it wasn’t wise to awaken someone in that condition, so I decided to play along. “The horses are fine, I just checked on them.” Dog looked up at me again, and I shrugged.
She turned and was looking me in the face now. “They’re hurt.”
I placed a hand on the bars. “No, I just checked and they-”
She came closer to me and trailed her hands across the surface of the bars as though she were playing a silent harp. “There’s a fire.”
“No, there’s no fire.”
“I smell it… Can’t you smell it?”
Her hand shot out and gripped my sleeve, and Dog mumbled a bark again. “Mrs. Barsad, there’s no fire.” She took a deep breath, and the air caught about halfway. “I just checked, and the horses are all right.” She continued to pick at my sleeve, her eyes imploring. “I think Sue might have aggravated that tendon again, so I wrapped it like you said.”
Her eyes stayed steady with mine and, with three consecutive blinks, the muscles around her mouth relaxed. She finally smiled and let out a cautious laugh. “She’s okay then?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She let go of my sleeve and stood there. “That’s good. She’s tough.”
“Yes, ma’am.” She didn’t move, and I looked into the shine of her eyes. “Maybe you should get some sleep?”
She nodded, turned, and crossed back to the bunk. “You’ll let me know how she is?”
“Yes, of course.”
She sat, tucked her legs back under the county-issued blanket, and turned away from me toward the concrete-block wall. “Thank you, Hershel.”
There was a disassociated quality to the entire conversation, and I stood there thinking about what had been said. I finally nodded, patted Dog on the head, and turned to go back to my office. Vic stood in the doorway with two cups of coffee. “Who the fuck is Hershel?”
I shushed her, and we took our coffee into the reception area near Ruby’s dispatch desk. I took a sip from my chipped Denver Broncos mug and sat on the bench. “She sleepwalks.”
“No shit.”
Vic sat next to me, Dog curled up in front of us, slowly rolling over onto his back. “Do you know anything about that stuff?”
“A little. My brother used to do it.” She sipped her coffee.
“Which one?”
“Michael. When he was a kid he used to get up and walk around the house with this dopey expression on his face. He grew out of it, sorta.” She lowered her mug and looked at me. “My mother says my uncle Alphonse says my father used to do it; it’s supposedly genetic.”
I leaned back and listened to the thin, wooden stays of the bench squeal. “Is it dangerous to wake them up?” I thought about the episode I’d just witnessed.
Vic shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t think we could ever get Michael to wake up.” She watched me. “I’m still not sure we have.” I didn’t laugh at the joke, and she continued to study the concern that rested on my face. “What’d she talk about?”
“Horses.”
She petted Dog’s belly with the toe of her boot. “That would make sense. There are environmental factors that can bring sleepwalking on-insomnia, tension, post-traumatic stress disorder, or dissociative states-”
“It all goes back to those horses that got burned alive.”
“That’d be pretty traumatic.” She nodded and took another sip. “For the sake of more than conversation, I’ll ask again, who the fuck is Hershel?”
I chewed on the inside of my lip; it was a habit I would conquer someday. “Sandy mentioned that the man who worked for the Barsads was named Hershel-Hershel Vanskike, to be exact.”
October 27, 11:07 P.M.
Hershel Vanskike took two reasonably steady steps and then planted face-first into the dried grass off the pathway.
Dog turned and glanced up at me, unsure of the situation. I looked at the old puncher lying there, unmoving, and at the broken bottle on the flagstone. “Well, I think he’s had enough.”
Hershel had said he would just ride his horse home, but it was evident that he couldn’t sit a horse let alone ride one. I saw that the aged gelding was tied off to a fence post as I carried the unconscious cowboy to my car. I stood him up against the side of the Lincoln and held him there while I opened the passenger door.
He started mumbling, but I ignored him, stuffed him into the seat, wrapped the seat belt around him, and clicked it in place. I tossed the insurance folder into the back with Dog and then shut the door and looked at the horse. I took a length of yellow nylon rope that the Campbell County sheriff’s office had used to block off the drive and approached the bay. He crow-hopped, laid his ears back, and looked at me.
I stood there with the rope in my hands and tried to figure out what I was going to do when he lowered his head and stretched it out toward me. I didn’t move and watched him as the big, prehensile lips approached my face. I had a brief moment of panic, thinking that he might bite, when he took in a great breath and sniffed at me. I thought he was just smelling me, but I noticed that his breathing was matching my own and that he was breathing my breath. He took a step closer as I threaded the rope through the bridle and looked him in the eye. “You are one weird horse.”
After that, he seemed eager to leave, and I couldn’t blame him, considering the recent incidents.
Dog sat in the back and watched as I drove slowly, keeping the car under five miles an hour, as the bay kept pace behind us with the nylon rope held in my hand, dangling by the door from the open window.
It took the better part of a half-hour to get to the Barton Road corrals, and once we got there, there wasn’t much. An old sheep wagon was parked beside them, and the rounded top of the wagon gave off a silver sheen in the moonlight, bisected by the shadow of a pole where an electric cord was strung from an attached four-way plug. A soft yellow glow overhung the rear door where a few leftover miller moths battered themselves against the bulb inside the dish-shaped, porcelain fixture.
I parked the car and left Hershel sound asleep in the passenger seat.
I gathered the rope into a loop as I walked back to the bay and led him into the corral. After the same ritual of breathing my breath, I untied him. He stood there, waiting to be unsaddled, made a passing sniff, and then allowed me to pull the leather strap on the front cinch and the rear. I hooked the opposite stirrup on the horn and lifted the saddle onto the nearest pole. I took off the blanket and bridle and watched as the bay walked to the center of the fifty-foot ring and kneeled down to roll over, wiggling on his back with all four legs in the air. Half a roll, as the old cowboys say, and you’ve got a thousand-dollar horse; all the way over and you’ve got a fifteen-hundred-dollar one. Hershel’s went over one way and then all the way back-a two-thousand-dollar horse.
It looked like it felt good.
I walked back over to the saddle and pulled the antique repeater from the scabbard. It was indeed the real McCoy. I examined the rough-worn weapon, the brass receiver glowing dully in the starlight as did a small plaque, screwed into the stock, which read CORPORAL ISAIAH MAYS, 10TH CAVALRY, CONGRESSIONAL MEDAL OF HONOR, JUNE 18, 1892. In smaller print were the words GALLANTRY IN THE FIGHT BETWEEN PAYMASTER ROBERT EDWARDS’S ESCORTS AND ROBBERS.
I studied the scratches, chips, and dents-it hadn’t been treated like a museum piece, but it was one. I carried the historic rifle with me to the sheep wagon.
I’m smart about hauling people because I’ve done enough of it. I opened the door of the wagon so that I could carry Hershel to his bed unimpeded, propped the Yellow Boy in the corner, and started to go back outside to the vehicle to get the old cowboy. I stopped when I saw the far wall.
In the haloed light from the bulb behind my head, I could see pictures taped, pictures of Mary Barsad, hundreds of them. I leaned in and took a closer look. They were all from magazines, some dating as far back as the seventies: photographs of the woman when she’d ridden a white stallion dur
ing football games, some of her on cutting horses, and a few from when she must have been a print model. I studied the glossy surfaces and the stunning young woman. She had a broad smile and high cheekbones that were emphasized by her thinness, high-sky blue eyes, and long blond hair. She was a beauty, but I had to admit I preferred the edition who was in my jail. She was older and stiffer, but age had seasoned her and her grief had humanized her.
Mary had even starred in a Rainier beer ad. She was seated on a horse and trailed a six-pack tied off with a latigo strap. She had turned and looked at the camera and was all hair, teeth, and sex. Personal tastes notwithstanding, it was enough to stop your heart.
The wall was bordered with more of the little astrology scrolls that I’d used to start the fire at what was left of the Barsad ranch. I glanced around and clicked on a ceramic space heater. It was a desperate and lonely looking place, slightly smaller than the holding cells back at my jail, and the photos only made it worse.
He was still out cold. I carried him in, accidentally knocking his flat-brimmed hat off in the doorway, and laid him on the bunk. I pulled off his boots, shoved his stocking feet under a wool blanket, and pulled the scratchy fabric up to his chin. He sighed deeply as I retrieved his sweat-stained hat and carefully placed it over the pale forehead above the sun-tanned face and closed eyes.
I turned the heater on to medium and switched off the light, closed the door, and walked back to the car. Dog was driving. I had rolled all the windows down on the long trip over, and his head rested on the lip of the windowsill. I petted him and listened to his tail thwack the leather seat. “I’m tired; you tired?”
The tail thumped harder, and I looked at the sky and the condensation from my breath. It was going to get cold, and I was glad I’d turned the heater on for the old cowpuncher.
I was still watching the horizon when the bay in the corral snorted, and I followed his eye back, away from the river. We were both looking south and east, toward Twentymile Butte. It was big country in the thunder basin, a place where a person could get away with a lot and had. Like a giant, high-altitude frying pan in summer, it heated up during the day to well over a hundred degrees, but then, in accord with the extremes of its nature, plummeted past freezing at night. If you were going to kill, it seemed like the place for it.
The Dark Horse wl-5 Page 4