“I think it was that twenty-year-old scotch that stepped on your head.” I looked at the powdered paint that was flaking off of the four-stall horse trailer. “What’s it worth?”
The old cowboy shrugged, and I think it hurt. He pulled the trademark Blue Tip match from his hat and lit the hand-rolled cigarette. I counted six matches in his hatband and figured Hershel was pacing his cigarettes these days. “ ’Bout a thousand, maybe.”
Two shotgun stalls with butt-bars and a rotten wooden floor, questionable tires, and broken plastic windows-I figured the auctioneers would be lucky if they got seven-fifty. Benjamin scuffed a boot in the sand of the arena. “I heard you were thinking of taking this little outlaw up to the Battlement?”
Hershel looked at the boy and then back to the faded cobalt paint of the vintage trailer. “Might as well be a million.” He smiled bitterly at Benjamin with his missing teeth. “I’m so stony broke that if they was sellin’ steamboats on the Powder River for a dime apiece, all I could do is run up and down the bank yellin’ ain’t that cheap.”
I glanced at Juana and she rolled her eyes, and the two of us watched the auctioneer attempt to get another twenty dollars out of a manure spreader before moving on to the object of our two cowboys’ affection. “Why do you suppose Nolan is selling his place?”
She leaned against the trailer and pushed her hair back behind her ears. “He was going to get rid of it because he didn’t want to deal with any more of Wade’s crap.”
I joined her and leaned against the trailer. Bill looked pretty satisfied; evidently the sale was going well. “Has anybody told him that’s not much of a problem anymore?”
“Yeah, but I think he got used to the idea of selling the place, so he’s just going ahead with it.”
The familiar auctioneer’s voice echoed in the confines of the building. “Now we have a prime example of a nineteen-and-sixty-eight, dubya-dubya brand, straight-load, bumper pull trailer. What do I hear, what do I hear! Gimme a thousand to start, a thousand to start! Here we go!”
We weren’t particularly going, because no one was bidding.
Larry Brannian was the auctioneer. He was from my county, and from where I stood I could read BRANNIAN AUC-TIONEERING SERVICES, DURANT, WYOMING, on the PA system. He was a comfortable old cowboy and the best auctioneer in the state, with a turquoise and coral bolo tie that bobbed up and down on the freshly starched opening of his white dress shirt when he spoke. He was a little embarrassed at having opened the bid too high. “Eight-fifty, do I hear eight-fifty, eight-fifty, eight-fifty, eight-fifty-”
The crowd remained unmoved.
“Seven-hunerd, seven-hunerd dollars for this fine piece of equipment with tires that…” He peered to get a better look at the bald and dry-rotted tires to our left. “Tires that hold aieeer!” There was a smattering of laughter from the crowd as his eyes caught mine, and he laughed. “Well, we must have some trouble around here somewheres.” I ducked my head and pulled my hat down just a little; I looked behind me as if Larry must’ve been talking about somebody else. The auctioneer was nothing if not quick on the uptake and rapidly changed the subject back to matters at hand. “Seven-hunerd?”
Another disaster averted, I watched the abject misery that passed between Benjamin and Hershel as the old cowpuncher started to raise his hand but then thought better of it. A spotter raised his arm and pointed toward an area we couldn’t see, which was blocked by the trailer itself. “Hup!”
“I got seven-hunerd, seven-hunerd, gimme seven-fifty?”
Mike Niall, who was leaning against the far wall, raised his head and nodded. Another spotter caught the gesture. “Hup!”
“Seven-fifty. Do I hear eight-hunerd?”
He looked back at the party we couldn’t see to the right, and the spotter rang out again. “Hup!”
“Eight-hunerd. Eight-hunerd. Do I hear eight-fifty?”
Mike Niall raised the brim of his sweat-stained straw Resistol and spat on the sand-covered floor.
“Hup!”
“I got eight-fifty.” Brannian looked toward the mystery bidder, and his spotter cried out again. “Hup!”
“Nine-hunerd, nine-hunerd! Now we’re talkin’! Rubber mats, padded walls, hay manger, and a tuck-under saddle rack!” The spotter swung back toward Niall, but you could see the rancher’s will was rightly weakening.
I watched Hershel and Benjamin, cowpokes separated by a good sixty years but joined in a brotherhood of horseback and by a thing we all shared, the want of a journey to a mystical place.
“Nine-hunerd once!”
There was a lesson my mother had instilled in me at an early age, which had been reinforced by my experience in Vietnam and by my twenty-four years as sheriff of Absaroka County. She said that I should protect and cherish the young, the old, and the infirm, because at some point I would be all of these things before my own journey ended.
“Nine-hunerd twice!”
So far, I was two for three.
I raised my hand above the crowd.
“Hup!”
I left it there as a tall, handsome Cheyenne man peeked around to see who he was bidding against now. The young woman and the two cowboys looked up at me in surprise. Henry Standing Bear glanced at our little group and shrugged. Hired on faith, one is obliged to be more than expected.
7
October 28, 3:17 P.M.
It looked like UPS with all the boxes in the kitchen of the old Nolan ranch house, and it was all I could do to find a place to sit down. I chose a foldout stool, which was leaning against the wall, and sipped my can of iced tea. I turned down a slug from the bottle of rye whiskey that Bill had offered before he spilled himself a double shot into a tumbler-it was his second since I’d arrived. I wondered what it was that caused old cowboys from around here to resort so readily to drink. He alternately sipped and wrapped plates, stacking them in cardboard boxes.
“I tell you, if you ever want to talk yourself out of buying anything ever again, just be forced to pack up everything you’ve already got.” He held up a dish for my inspection. “You need any dishes, Mr. Boss?”
I shook my head no and thought about all the boxes still in my own life that were lined up against the walls of my cabin. “Where you headed?”
“Believe it or not I bought a condo in Denver, down in LoDo.” He stopped packing for a moment and toasted the Queen City. “Thought I’d try urban life; see if it agreed with me. Eat in restaurants, drink five-dollar cups of coffee, and see if the Rockies can ever win the big one.” He smiled.
I felt a little guilty about raising the next subject. “Being neighbors with Wade Barsad turn you against ranching?”
He thought about it. “Oh, there wasn’t much of the ranch left after I sold the majority to him. All I had was this old place, two hundred and sixty acres, and the new house.” He glanced around. “I got it all listed in Gillette and Sheridan, and it’ll probably be sold by next week.”
I sipped my tea. “You ever think about buying the other part back instead?”
The look on his face hardened, but it was having a difficult time combating the liquor. “Not really. My family had this and an old gas station up on the east side of the Powder River forever, but it always seemed like they were working three jobs just to make ends meet.” There was a resignation in his voice I recognized. “I guess I’m just tired of it.”
“No family?”
“Nope, I’m the last one stupid enough to stay. I had a wife.” He looked around as if she might be in one of the boxes. “But I must’a misplaced her somewhere.” His eyes finally rested on the tumbler of rye, with more than a little meaning.
“Kids?”
“Yeah, but it appears they went the way of their mother.”
I studied him. “Footloose and fancy-free.”
“That’s the way of it.” He continued to gaze at the amber liquid intermixed with the ice cubes for a while longer, then rattled the tumbler, sat it down, and began wrapping more dishes. “You
don’t have to dance around it; you can ask me about Wade, I don’t mind. I got nothing to hide.”
“General consensus was that he needed killing.”
He breathed a short laugh. “I’ve heard that from more than one source.”
“You don’t seem overly bitter toward the man.”
He folded the flaps on the box, pulled up another one from the floor, and glanced at the large and mismatched stack of dishes on the counter. “Hey, you sure you don’t need any dishes?”
“Yep, I’m sure.” I continued to look at him.
He picked up the bottle from the counter, refilled his glass, and took another swig for emphasis. “I got my money out of him.”
“Meaning?”
He shrugged. “Most of the people around here who hated his guts, hated him because he cheated ’em in one way or another. I got my money up front, when he bought the ranch. Maybe I just caught him at the head of the curve, while he was still flush.”
“Lost it quick?”
He sat the bottle back on the counter and gazed at the unwanted dishes, but his enthusiasm for packing seemed to be waning-mine would have. As he ruminated, he reached up, unplugged, and plucked from the wall one of the ugliest metal sunburst clocks from the fifties that I’d ever seen. “Oh, yeah.”
“He didn’t know a lot about ranching?”
He looked at the clock, greasy from years of ticking above the range, its cord dangling to the floor, and it was like time had died. “You need a clock?”
“Nope.”
He looked disappointed. “You don’t start taking some stuff, I’m going to stop talking to you.”
I held out a hand for the clock-it was even uglier on closer examination.
He smiled, satisfied that there was at least something in the kitchen he wasn’t going to have to pack. “He didn’t know heifer from steer as near as I could tell, but he came rolling up in that big, black Cadillac of his at a time when it didn’t seem like anybody else was doing anything but leaving.”
I rested the clock on a box and hoped he wouldn’t notice if I left it. “He wanted your place?”
“Hey, he was a godsend to me. The bank was getting ready to foreclose; damn right I was glad to see him.”
“Where did the money come from?”
“Out of state, both times.”
“Both times?”
“He bought half of my ranch about four years ago, and the other half about a year or so back.” He sipped his refreshed whiskey, set it on the counter with the bottle, and began packing dishes again. “But you know all this stuff.” He glanced up at me. ”I mean, you insured him, right?”
I didn’t answer the question. “Did he ever say where the money came from?”
He reached for the packing tape. “There was a lot of talk about that. Some folks puzzled over the fact of how such a lousy rancher could keep coming up with money.”
“What’d they say?”
“Oh, the usual stuff. Some said drugs, some said the mob, and others figured he was in the witness relocation program.”
“Really?”
“Wouldn’t be the first one who showed up out here.” He finished taping the last box and put it with the others on the linoleum floor. “He got sued about a half-dozen times, once by the hospital in Gillette, once by the propane delivery people, once by Mike Niall, once by Pat down at the bar, and twice by me.”
“What was the hospital one about?”
He picked up the bottle of rye and refilled the tumbler, which was four times, by my count. “That was tied in with Niall, who ’bout kicked his ass over some cattle Wade sold him. There was a fight, and Wade went and got a rifle out of his truck and Mike broke his hand takin’ it away from him.”
“That would be the rifle that his wife Mary used to allegedly kill him?”
His eyes avoided mine as he picked up the glass. “I’d rather not comment about that.”
“What about Pat at the bar?”
He leaned against the counter and propped an elbow on a folded arm, glass by his head. He was still staring at the floor. “Pat owed Wade a small fortune and rather than pay him money, he just gave him half the bar.”
“You?”
He opened the closest drawer and gazed at the mismatched utensils. “You need any silverware?” I didn’t say anything, and he closed it with the extra care that an almost drunk man would. “We had a little right-of-way problem, but I want to go back to something you mentioned about Mary.”
I waited, but he didn’t say anything. “I’m listening.” He didn’t move for a long time, and I was almost sad the greasy, old clock was unplugged; at least it would have given us something to listen to.
He finally spoke again. “You wanna take a little ride with me?”
“Excuse me?” I waited, but he didn’t say anything else. “I don’t think I’m following you.”
He put the tumbler down but picked up the almost half-full bottle. “I need to run up the road a minute, and I was hoping that you’d come along.”
“Now?”
“Yep, if you don’t mind drivin’, ’cause I’m about three sheets to the wind.” He pushed off the counter, the rye in his left hand, and stood there staring at the concrete pad of the porch with the propped-open screen door in his hand. “One thing I’m gonna miss.”
“What’s that?”
He gestured with the bottle. “Somebody’s been leavin’ me a fifth of whiskey every couple of days.” He smiled. “I guess I’ve got a secret admirer.” He called back to me as he continued out the door, and I got up from the stool. “Hey, don’t forget your clock.”
October 22: six days earlier, afternoon.
I had looked at her eyes, washed out like an old pair of Wranglers, and it seemed to me that the color there had gone through the wringer.
“I have these dreams.”
I already knew what the dreams were about, but there were other things I wanted to tackle, and I thought a little backstory might help with the context, so I asked her. “About?”
“Horses.”
I nibbled on a triangular portion of the grilled cheese sandwich that we were sharing. I’d already eaten lunch, but a deal was a deal. This was the first real response I’d gotten from her, and I knew I had to go slowly. “What horses?”
She brought her part of the sandwich up to her mouth but just held it there without eating. “Everything is orange, and there are these flares of circular light that keep expanding toward me-it’s hot, but I can see them in the distance, looking back at me.” She took a deep breath, and it was like she was still in a trance. “They’re all dead.”
I didn’t say anything.
“That night… I’d been at a friend’s house; he’d been sick. When I got home, he wasn’t there.”
“Your friend?”
“No, Wade.”
I paused. “This was the night of the fire?”
“No, before.” I waited. I was confused but didn’t want to disturb the flow. “When I got home, he wasn’t there. Neither was my horse.”
“Wahoo Sue?”
She stared at the floor and still held the sandwich at her lips. “He said he killed her, but he didn’t. I know him better than that; know how he liked to torture things.” Her eyes came up again, and she smiled. There was no happiness in it. “Look at me.”
“Who was the friend you went to visit?”
She stopped smiling. “I don’t think I want to tell you that.”
I waited as she took a bite of her sandwich-the first-and chewed without enthusiasm. “Why?”
She handed the rest of her portion of the grilled cheese to Dog through the bars. “Don’t you think enough people are in trouble with all this?” I watched as Dog carefully extended his muzzle and took the bite from her tapered fingers.
“No, I don’t.” I looked out Virgil White Buffalo’s window. He had been our lodger for a week or so in the summer and while here was intent on watching the children at day care play in the school yar
d. “See, here’s the thing.” I looked back at Mary. “I don’t think you did it, and that means somebody else did. And in a roundabout way, it’s become my responsibility to find out who that is.” I took a deep breath and figured if I laid all my cards on the table, maybe she would see them, too. “I’ve got a killer out there, somewhere, and I have no intention of letting them get away with it. Now, who’s your friend?”
October 28, 3:30 P.M.
Small-man-big-truck syndrome was what Lucian called it.
There, sitting in the now-empty arena, sat a sparkling red Dodge duellie. I stopped as Dog moved ahead of us and sniffed the tires and then turned around and looked at Bill and me. I glanced at the ex-rancher, and he smiled as he took another slug from the whiskey bottle. “Ain’t she a beauty?”
I only nodded and said nothing, wondering what he hoped to gain from introducing me to a vehicle I’d already met twice, once at the Barton Road Corrals and again early this morning, when I’d attempted to shoot out the radiator with an empty shotgun. It had plates now, but it assuredly looked like the same truck.
“A lifetime of ranching and this is the first brand-new pickup I ever bought.”
I gauged the size of the thing. “It’s going to be kind of hard to parallel park this at Larimer Square.”
He shrugged, and it honestly appeared that he didn’t have an underlying motive in showing me the truck. “You can take the boy out of the big-sky country, but you can’t take the big-sky country out of the boy.”
I noticed he walked to the driver’s side, before remembering that he had asked me to drive. “Sorry, the last thing I want to do is pilot this thing after too much ‘who-hit-john.’ ”
I circled around and peered in the tinted windows-the same Winchester was still leaning against the passenger seat.
Same vehicle. Had to be.
Bill was watching me when I looked up. “New truck-are you sure you want my dog in there?”
He studied me for a second more and then shrugged as he pulled the passenger-side door open. “It’s a truck.”
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