The Dark Horse wl-5

by Craig Johnson

  “Do you recognize it?”

  “Yes. I mean, it’s familiar.”

  “Who is it?”

  She took a deep breath of her own, and you could see the frustration tensing her body. Her eyes searched the sheets, and her brow furrowed, the lines deep between her eyes. I was afraid that she would lose the story, and she almost panicked at losing the story herself. “I went into the house, and I remember that he’d killed my horses-Wahoo Sue, my horse.” There had been a catch in her breath, and she plucked at the blanket before she spoke again. “The bedroom, I remember going into the bedroom, and it was strange because the lights were off.”

  I spoke gently. “Was he asleep?”

  “Yes.”

  Even more gently. “But if he was-”

  “No. He always slept with the lights on, because he said he could. It had something to do with the time he’d spent in prison, like those little lists of paper he kept.”

  “The kites?”

  “Yes, there was a particular one that he accused me of taking, and I think I did… Once, just to see what it was.”

  October 30, 10:35 P.M.

  There’s nothing romantic about a dead body, and the romantic poets notwithstanding, there’s nothing romantic about death.

  About thirty minutes down the road, the bay skittered to the left and tried to rear. I was getting tired of his nervousness and was prepared. I wrapped the reins again and stayed put, allowing the big horse to back away but not turn and run. Something was out there a little ahead, something the horse didn’t like. I didn’t want to chance riding him closer, but I didn’t relish the idea of walking around out here, trying to find him in the dark, either. The closest thing I could find to tie him off to was a sprig of dead blue sage-it was brittle but looked strong enough to hold the bay unless he was really determined.

  I stepped off, comforting him with my voice and wishing I knew his name. “Easy, easy boy-”

  I thought of reaching into my saddlebag for the Maglite, decided against it, and then changed my mind, figuring that if there were someone out there, they probably already knew I was here. I got the flashlight and then unclipped and slipped the. 45 from the pancake holster at my back. I clicked off the safety and spoke to the horse again, looking into the white of his eye. “Easy, easy now.”

  I ran my eyes over the surrounding area, left the horse, and continued down the dirt road. Twenty yards further, I could see that there was a spot where the big Dodge had slid to a stop and then continued. I clicked on the tactical flashlight and could plainly see that there were running shoe prints again. It was the driver who was wearing them, and I could see where he’d yanked the truck to a lurching stop, jumped out of the cab, and run around the back.

  I followed his tracks into the scrub weed and Johnson grass. There were boot tracks now as well, and it appeared as if the booted man had jumped from the passenger side and then been chased by the man in running shoes.

  There wouldn’t be anybody coming to my rescue tonight.

  I found his hat first, lodged against one of the skeletal hands of dead sage. The battered beaver fur was brim up and the hat struggled against the dry branches, unable to escape their grip. I could see the stained, white sateen of the liner beckoning like the whites of the horse’s eyes I’d just left.

  I picked up the hat, rescuing it from the cruel, punishing wind of oblivion.

  He was another twenty yards from the road. He must have been trying to angle toward the trailer. He’d been shot in the back and then again in the back of the head at close range, both, from the look of the wounds, 9 mm. His hands were duct-taped together.

  I squatted by the old cowboy and nudged my own hat up, running my gloved hand across my face and placing the other on his shoulder to steady myself and maybe to provide some solace to his soul. I suddenly felt very tired. “Well, hell.”

  Evidently, Hershel had jumped from the truck and tried to run for it, but whoever he was attempting to escape from had chased after him and placed one of the 9 mm slugs between the old cowboy’s shoulder blades and slightly to the right. As the puncher had tried to crawl away, the shooter had calmly walked over, lowered his weapon, and finished the job.

  “I’m so sorry, Hershel.”

  I crouched there for a while, because it was the only thing I had the energy for. I watched one of the stark flashes of lightning strike no more than a mile away, the quick succession of explosive noise and reverberation through my boots telling me to move. I sighed and took one last look at the old cowboy, wondering how much blame I carried for his demise. It wasn’t how the old fellow should’ve passed, on the mesa, executed. I made a promise to myself.

  October 30, 10:52 P.M.

  I piled some rocks on top of Hershel’s hat and sat there on the side of the road. Who would’ve wanted to do such a thing? I felt another wave of sadness and that peculiar weariness that only overtakes you with the weight of a world gone bad. I took a deep breath and pushed off from the ground. I felt like the stack of rocks.

  I looked back in the distance and thought about how easy it was to lose a body in this country, how quickly the scavengers and the weather could dispose of it, and scatter you. I also thought of something Bill Nolan had said in his truck about personal history-if nobody remembered you, were you ever really here?

  I made a silent promise to not forget Hershel and then slowly approached the bay that had grown more skittish with the proximity of the lightning. “Easy, easy now-”

  Despite recent developments or maybe because of them, I again felt a wave of exhaustion as I hooked a hand on the horn of the saddle and draped the. 45 Colt over the seat. I pushed my hat back again and placed my damaged cheek against the cool leather of the saddle and just stood there. I could smell the rich, earthy scent of the leather, the horse, and the strong ozone of low-slung clouds.

  Something was troubling me, something that tied all these events together dot to dot like one of those games that kids get on restaurant menus.

  I turned my face and saw something move to the south. Probably the owl again. Maybe he had been delivering a message after all.

  There was another lightning strike-it was close-and the bay lurched just a few inches but enough to strike the saddle against my injured cheek. I stood there for a moment more with my eyes closed, breathing through the pain, and thought about the ferocious burst of the big owl’s wings on the trail and at the trailer-but it wasn’t the owl, it was something else, something similar.

  I guess my mind wasn’t working.

  I stowed the Colt in the holster at my back, fixed my hat and pulled the dead man’s canteen from the saddle horn, unscrewed the top, and took another draught. It still tasted bad but with more of a bitter, metallic taste than mud puddle-it was probably from the liner. I replaced the canteen, looking at the beads on its face with the twin bird insignia. I thought that what was bothering me was about a bird but not about an owl, and I thought about the meadowlark I’d seen sitting on Kyle Straub’s sign outside the hospital when I had been questioning Mary last week.

  It was something about the meadowlark, something about it not sounding right.

  One strike of lightning followed another in succession, and I felt the tingling of intimidation in being the tallest point on the big mesa; then I slipped a boot into the stirrup and made myself taller.

  The bay behaved and only took a few steps to the left to avoid the smell of the dead man. I swayed in the saddle for a moment and felt a mild nausea. It must have been a drop in blood pressure from the exertion and the exhaustion. I’d seen enough dead bodies, but maybe Hershel had deeply ingrained himself in my psyche in the short time I’d known him. One thing I knew was that the world was a little bit poorer from his loss and that it was my job tonight to right the scales.

  I yawned, cursed, and thought about the meadowlark again. Why was it my mind had suddenly decided to mimic the horse I rode and jump left?

  I thumbed my eyes. Was it Hershel’s dead body the horse
s had sensed at the trailer or was it something else?

  Maybe it was the meadowlark… Why the hell was I continuing to think about the damn meadowlarks? I started with a jerk at the thought, so that the bay stopped and looked back at me.

  I pulled the reins through my fingers, kneed him just slightly to get him going again, and looked at the canvas cover of the canteen, at the stenciled letters faded from the years.

  I was tired.

  It was two meadowlarks.

  I looked down, and my head began nodding with the rhythm of the horse as he continued on. The next volley of lightning struck even farther south, down near the tip of the mesa, so the horse didn’t pay too much attention.

  Two meadowlarks.

  One’s voice was right, the other was not. There are two types, eastern and western, and they do not sing the same song-similar, but not exactly the same. Where had I heard an eastern meadowlark lately? Evidently I was thinking of Cady and my trip to Pennsylvania and, more importantly, the conversation we’d had on the phone at the bar. I kept riding south but was having trouble remembering why. It wasn’t about birds. It was something about a boy, a dead man, and a horse.

  It felt like I’d been traveling a long way. My head kept nodding until my chin poked into my breastbone. I yanked my head up and opened my eyes, and I was unsure if it was real or a dream.

  The road was gone, and a thin layer of snow, less than an eighth of an inch, covered the ground and vegetation for as far as I could see into the gloom, except for a perfect circle of dark ground where there was no snow and where nothing grew. The bay stopped and looked at the scene with me. There were no struggling tufts of grass, no sage, nothing. It was as if some flying saucer had landed on top of the mesa, burned all the undergrowth and the thin skim of snow, and then had gone.

  I exhaled and my head dropped again, but when I forced my face back up I could see something in the middle of the circle, like the center of a clock with both hands pointing toward midnight.

  I knew it was a hell of a lot later than that.

  I thought about the teepee circles that were part of the landscape in our portion of the country, but I couldn’t see any of the rocks that the Indians would have used to mark the periphery. And the circle was too big. Even the Crow and Cheyenne family-sized teepees wouldn’t be this large in circumference.

  Crop circles maybe, but there were no crops.

  The bay pulled up a little way from the edge, then pranced toward it and whinnied. I was just beginning to wonder if it was really a hole and that my tired eyes were playing tricks on me when another lightning strike hit no more that a hundred yards to our right. My horse had had enough, and he bolted to the left. I tried to hang on, but this time he pivoted, slipped, and fell.

  I hit on my side like a load of firewood and felt the air push from my lungs with the impact and a sharp pain in my foot as the bay landed on my boot with an audible crunch. I lay there for a second to get my bearings, assess the damage, and generally feel embarrassed about falling off my horse. For a westerner, coming unmounted is as shameful as wearing your pants inside your boots, asking somebody how big their spread is, or pissing on the floor of the Alamo.

  The only good thing about the fall and the excruciating pain in my foot was that it cleared my head enough to think about what I was going to do now that the bay was hightailing it north across the hardpan range and disappearing into the darkness. I watched the stirrups bouncing off the horse’s sides in a comical interpretation of a TV western and allowed my head to fall back on the crusted snow. “Damn.”

  The hammer of the. 45 was digging into my back, and I started to roll over, when another streak of pain ran up from my right foot. My eyes watered with the hurt, and I wiped at them.

  It was then that I saw something at the far edge of the circle. It was something dark and big, and it was rapidly moving my way. I thought it was the owl again, even though it was the wrong color and didn’t seem to be flying, and figured maybe he thought he’d found a culinary bonanza.

  I tried to raise my head, but the pain in my cheekbone made it hard, so I just watched as the big creature stamped the ground and rushed forward to snake out its long neck and snap at my head with huge clacking teeth.

  Pain be damned, I yanked back and looked up at a thousand pounds of unrivaled fury. It was a horse, but only in the sense that the headless horseman’s horse was a horse. I could hear the clanking of chains where the thing had come unfettered from hell, and I expected fire to blow from its nostrils at any moment.

  Unable to move any farther, I lay there on my back and watched as the black beast reared on its hind legs and crashed its hooves to the ground only inches from my foot; it stamped at me over and over again.

  I had found Wahoo Sue.

  I discovered a reserve I didn’t know I had and dragged myself back on my elbows as the horse screamed at me and whinnied and snapped the air in an attempt to get free from the nylon halter around her head. She was close enough that I could see where it had rubbed her raw and where the dried blood had stained her dark face. The harness was connected to a heavy, rusted logging chain that was in turn connected to a rock in the middle of the circle, and the length of links had torn and chafed the chest, barrel, and rump of the tortured animal.

  October 26: four days earlier, afternoon.

  Mary Barsad’s hands had come up again, and she had tried to aim an imaginary rifle despite the restraints at her wrists.

  “His voice kept telling me to do it, and when I looked at his body lying there on the bed it was as if I already had shot him. It was as if the blood was already there, that I’d already shot him, but the voice was telling me to do it again.”

  I moved to my right, placed my hands on the foot rail of the hospital bed, and looked into her face. “You fired the rifle?”

  Tears spilled from her lower lids and highlighted her high cheekbones. “Yes.”

  “How many times?”

  Her head went back as if she’d been struck and then stayed at that odd angle. “Three times.”

  I don’t think the expression on my face changed, but the facts had. “Three times.”

  “Yes.”

  Wade Barsad had been shot six times.

  She turned her head toward the light. “He said that he deserved it, said that he deserved to die.”

  “Wade.”

  “Yes.”

  This time she didn’t move. “But the voice that told me to kill him-it was Wade’s.”

  October 31, 2:30 A.M.

  “She likes you.”

  The voice came from the darkness to my left. I could see his outline as I lurched up on one elbow, but I was still having trouble focusing. “How can you tell?”

  “ ’Cause she would have killed you if she didn’t. Okey?”

  I stared into the darkness. He had come closer, and I could see his shape more clearly. I’d figured it out, but now that I heard the hard nasal voice like flat stones falling and the signature word, it was confirmed.

  “How are you, Wade?”

  He laughed. “I knew you’d find out; it was just a question of when.” The horse strained against the chain, but this time she directed her fierce aggression toward him. He walked closer but was careful to stay outside of the circle where Wahoo Sue had licked the snow and nibbled everything else in a desperate attempt to stay alive. “She doesn’t like me much, but then the feeling’s mutual.” He squatted down in the running shoes and was holding a roll of duct tape. “Just out of curiosity, when did you know it was me?”

  My head slipped to one side, and I could just make out his face. From the photographs I’d seen, it was indeed Wade Barsad. I flexed my foot and caught my breath again as the pain clamped inside my boot-broken, no doubt about it. “Meadowlarks.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  Despite the pain, the horse, and the appearance of Wade Barsad, I had to fight against a mounting exhaustion and mumbled. “Meadowlarks.”

  He smiled and made a suc
king sound with his teeth. “I’m still not following you.” He reached out and shook my shoulder. “Hang in there, Sheriff, I’ve been dying to have this conversation.”

  “Different song.”

  Wahoo Sue continued to stamp at him, but since he was the one who had staked her, he knew her range. “What?”

  I took a deep breath and let it out slowly, and I think I was drooling. I tried to wiggle my foot again in an attempt to wake up, but the pain had subsided to a throbbing, and my eyes started to close. “The eastern meadowlark has a song that’s different from the western one.”

  He stared at me. “So?”

  I tried to concentrate, but my neck muscles had dissolved somehow. “On the phone… Supposed to be your brother back in Ohio, but I heard a western meadowlark.”

  He sat back on his ankles. “You’re shitting me. On the cell phone?”

  “Yep.”

  He was laughing again and leaned back to sit beside me. “Okey, so you’re John J. Audubon.”

  I lay back, thinking that it might be my only chance to keep my sidearm, and stared into the heavily clouded sky. “It was your brother, the dentist, in the house-burned up.”

  He nodded. “I was getting pressure from my old business associates, and the FBI wanted all of the names and account numbers that I’d written down in exchange for further protection, so I decided to do away with Wade Barsad. I got my brother to fake the dental records for a cut of the insurance money, but I needed a body. Unfortunately for him, it turned out to be his.”

  “You walked Mary through it, while she was on the pills-”

  “You know, I was worried about the mob and worried about the FBI, but then you showed up and I don’t even know your name. After I saw you with Vanskike and the boy, I figured I’d better dope you up before taking you on, that’s why I didn’t just wait for you at the trailer.”

  “Hershel.”

  He nodded again. “Yeah, I’m sorry about that. I didn’t want to kill him, but he ran. And let me tell you, he was some kind of fast when he got going. I had to throw a bullet into him to stop him, and then I thought that I wouldn’t want him to suffer.” Barsad laughed and looked at the horse, whose chains clanked against her efforts to get to him. “So, I finished the job.” He reached into the pocket of his jacket and pulled out the 9 mm semiautomatic. “And now I have to shoot you and make it look like you shot him, and do something with the kid and try to find my missing kite, and I don’t have time for all this.”