South California Purples

by Baron R. Birtcher

  His eyes shifted to the corner of Skadden’s office, where the sheriff’s son, Myron, was still seated in a guest chair, his hands clenched in a death grip on its leather-upholstered arms. One eye was sprung open in surprise; a wet and blackened hole stared out from where the other should have been. His mouth was gaping like a hatchling.

  I returned my attention to the Rabbit, who simply looked at me and shrugged.

  “I don’t care to repeat myself,” he said. “There’s no negotiation on that point.”

  “I didn’t ask for an explanation.”

  “I know. I’m just making conversation while we wait.”

  He leaned toward Lloyd Skadden.

  “Speed it up, fat ass,” he said out of the side of his mouth.

  “Has he always been like this?” he said to me. “I can see it on your face. You’re wondering why I don’t just shoot you where you stand.”

  I had no interest in provoking a man whose brain was roiling with spiders and had the means to end both Skadden and me within a half second of each other, so I said nothing.

  “I’m told that in the old days, Comanche raiders would often let one person live, just to tell the story of the horrors and as a warning to others.”

  Skadden had finished loading the bags and stood to hand it to the biker.

  “Shut and lock the door on that safe and sit down in your chair, fat man,” Rabbit said and hooked the bags onto the arm that held the pistol. “Lay that strap across my shoulder before you do.”

  The sheriff did as he was told and Rabbit stood up from his perch. The bandage on the foot I’d shot was crusted brown with dried bloodstains.

  “Sorry you made this personal, Dawson,” Rabbit said. “Under different circumstances and all that . . .”

  “I doubt it.”

  “You’re right. Probably not. Anyway, I gotta split.”

  He turned and fired twice, one went low into Skadden’s belly and the other grazed his throat. He never took the shotgun’s aim off of me.

  Rabbit scrunched his face into a grimace as the smell of cordite filled the room.

  “Oooh,” he said. “That can’t feel good.”

  My eyes were locked on Rabbit’s while Skadden slumped down in his chair, hands groping at the new hole in his abdomen. Blood seeped through his fingers and his eyes rolled back into his head.

  “Step into the office, Dawson. I’m sure you’ll want to help your buddy while I leave.”

  He saw the calculation I was making in my head.

  “You could probably try to get those shells back into your gun and shoot me,” he said. He picked up my Colt off the table with his thumb and index finger and tossed it down the hall into the darkness of the living room. “But you’ll have to find it first.”

  Rabbit hobbled backward down the hall and kept me covered with the sawed-off. When he disappeared around the corner, I made my choice and went to see if there was anything I could do for Skadden.

  One shot had torn his clavicle to splinters, and had to hurt like hell. But the gut shot was a bad one, and aside from attempting to stanch the bleeding there was little I could do.

  I picked up the phone on Skadden’s desk, and considered calling the state police, but had no idea who I could trust there anymore; the emergency medical teams were likely still out at my ranch. I decided to call Melissa Vernon of the BLM instead and asked for assistance from anyone she might know with the ODOJ.

  Her office would be closed at this hour, so I dialed 411 and got her residential number. Skadden’s complexion was going gray and his breathing grew shallower with every second that I waited on the line.

  She agreed to have a special investigations unit of the Oregon State Department of Justice sent down to sort this out. I had no way of knowing if I could trust those people either, but it would circumvent the state police and leave the feds out of it too.

  “You’ve used up all your chips with me, Mr. Dawson.”

  “I’m sorry that you feel that way. I’d appreciate it if you’d send a team down here anyway. It’s a mess. I’ll wait.”

  Skadden looked into my face, his expression revealing nothing but confusion and contempt, a man whose certain world had imploded right before his eyes, but could not comprehend how it went so badly wrong.

  I tried to speak to him, at the very least to learn the name of the man who was his killer, but he would only stare at me with hatred burning in his eyes.

  Lloyd Skadden died ten minutes later, his white and purple viscera bulging out between his knuckles, having never said another word.

  LUCIFER WINKED in the predawn sky, bright and sharp beside the waning gibbous moon. In the hours while I awaited the arrival of my backup, I examined the crime scene for myself, made coffee in the kitchen, and phoned Jesse at the ranch.

  “Everybody’s fine,” she said. “When are you coming home?” Her voice betrayed the exhaustion and the shock that followed on from the experience of unbridled terror.

  “As soon as I can,” I said. “I promise. Some agents from ODOJ will be arriving there, probably before I do. Don’t speak to anyone until I get home.”

  “What am I supposed to do?”

  “Give ’em coffee on the gallery and tell them to wait until I come back.”

  She told me that Sam Griffin had been taken with the others up to County Hospital, and was probably in surgery as we spoke.

  “I’m worried about Cricket, Ty.”

  I felt my heart jump in my chest.

  “Sam told me Cricket was okay.”

  “She is,” Jesse said. “That’s the problem. She acts like nothing happened here at all.”

  I took a mug of coffee out to the front of Skadden’s house. I sat down on the basin of the Spanish fountain, scanned the surreality of the scene that lay before me in the driveway and lit a cigarette. Somewhere in the bushes a landscape timer clicked and the pump inside the fountain cycled on. The stone bowls overflowed and the incongruous soothing sound of falling water filled the atmosphere and rebounded off the walls. The air was cold and smelled like rain, but the storm I’d seen in last night’s sky remained immobile over the mountain peaks.

  Dual shafts of yellow headlights slashed through the dark along the entry lined with cypress, and I stood up as three matching black Dodge Coronets pulled inside the gates and parked. Two agents emerged from each of the cars, and looked so oddly similar that they could have dropped off of the edge of some eastern seaboard factory conveyor, been given haircuts and gray suits, and handed leather satchels, cameras, and clipboards.

  One man stepped out from the driver’s side of the lead car and headed straight for me. He introduced himself as Averill Conrad, lead investigator for the Oregon DOJ. The other five donned rubber gloves and immediately set about snapping photos of the scene and making diagrams and notes.

  Averill Conrad removed his Madison hat and ran a hand across a head that had gone prematurely bald. He was short and wiry in stature, so I had a good view of a pate flecked with patches of dry skin and a horseshoe fringe of hair that was the color of a rusted nail. His eyes possessed the peculiar greenish cast of the sky when it presages a monsoon.

  “Tyler Dawson,” I said, and offered my hand for him to shake. He seemed to consider the alternatives before he took it.

  “I don’t like dealing with amateurs,” he said.

  “Are you this agitated every morning when you get up, or is this one something special.”

  “I don’t know you, Dawson.”

  “Were you ever in the livestock trade? If not, there’s not much reason that you would.”

  “I was told you are the undersheriff in this county.”

  “Undersheriff is a position I was shanghaied into. Let’s get this over with, I need to get back home.”

  Conrad’s naturally ruddy complexion reddened further and he kept his eyes locked onto mine while he screwed his hat back into place. His blunt and squared-off features put me in mind of a poorly tempered Dexter bull, and I could not
take my eyes off of a patch just off the center of his chin that he had missed with his razor that morning.

  I walked him through the scene and gave him my statement. I identified Skadden’s two dead deputies by name as we passed by them on our way into the house. We ended up in Skadden’s office and stood on opposite sides of the desk.

  “So, this rabbit-faced biker shot Sheriff Skadden for no reason?”

  “I suspect his reason was to keep me occupied while he made his escape,” I said.

  “And he left you alive.”

  “He said something about Comanches leaving one live witness as a warning.”

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “I guess you’ll have to ask him when you find him.”

  My focus drifted to the safe that was bolted to Skadden’s floor. The door was closed and locked, and I still was not convinced that I trusted Averill Conrad, so I kept any mention of money to myself.

  Special Investigator Conrad and I went through the entire scene two more times, and I repeated my recitation of events nearly verbatim. I had grown tired of this guy’s condescending attitude, and it was long past time for me to get back to my ranch. I lit a cigarette and moved toward the door.

  “I would prefer it if you wouldn’t smoke,” Conrad said.

  “So would my wife, but you can see how that worked out.”

  He cut his eyes out through the door, squinted at the sky that had faded pale blue with the rising sun.

  “We’re not finished here,” he said.

  “I am.”

  “The entire cadre of Meriwether County law enforcement is lying dead on this property, and you tell me you’re leaving?”

  “You need to adjust your thinking, Conrad. The surviving members of this county’s law enforcement cadre are either lying in a hospital bed or waiting for me at the crime scene that I used to refer to as my house.”

  “This is the reason I don’t like dealing with amateur law enforcement.”

  “Tell you the truth, Conrad, I’m not overly impressed with the qualities I’ve seen among the so-called professionals in these parts either. Let’s call it a draw.”

  I could feel his eyes peeling the skin off the back of my neck as I walked over to my truck and opened the door.

  “We’re colleagues, Mr. Conrad,” I said. “Whether you like that or not. I’ve answered all your questions and now I’m heading home. When you have something else for me, you know where to find me.”

  “I’ll be in touch,” he called out to me.

  “You’d better be,” I said. “This thing’s a long damn way from over.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  JESSE AND CRICKET met me on the porch when I got home. Four men identical to those I had left behind at Lloyd Skadden’s house were now going through similar machinations inside of mine. Flash bulbs ignited from the other side of the window and left their floating shadows imprinted on my eyes.

  “They just barged in and started up with that,” Jesse said. “I offered coffee like you said, but they refused.”

  I hugged my wife and daughter close, and breathed them in. I could feel Jesse begin to falter.

  “I was only halfway kidding when I said that on the phone,” I told her. “You didn’t speak to them yet, did you?”

  “No,” Cricket said, the expression on her face unreadable to me. “We told them we weren’t willing to speak to them until you got here.”

  “I told Caleb and the others what you said,” Jesse said as she moved out of my arms. “No one’s given any statements.”

  I moved down the stairs and looked in the direction of the barn. It had burned to the foundations, its previous existence marked by a mound of blackened beams, charred timber, and smoldering ash. From where I stood, I could see Taj Caldwell spraying water from the hose and pump that snaked out from the cistern onto the glowing coals that steamed inside the wreckage. Caleb drove the tractor, scooping piles of wet ash and debris into the dump truck that we used for hauling rubbish to the transfer station. Tucker sat behind the wheel and tossed a wave in my direction.

  “Are you Tyler Dawson?” one of the gray suits called down from the porch behind me.

  “I’m Dawson.”

  “I need to speak with you now, sir.”

  “In a minute,” I said and headed down to talk with Caleb Wheeler first.

  He kept the tractor running while he climbed down from the seat, the engine noise providing cover for our conversation.

  “Any news on Griffin?” was the first thing that he asked me.

  “He was in surgery the last I heard.”

  He nodded and sighed deeply then moved his eyes over the rubble of the barn. “I cut him down before they got here, Ty. Before the roof fell in.”

  “Alive?”

  “He was when the medics carted him away.”

  “Better than he deserved.”

  He pulled a red bandana from the back pocket of his jeans, wiped the perspiration from his forehead, and spread a greasy trail of ash across the mark it had imprinted on his brow. He jerked his chin in the direction of my house.

  “They gonna want to talk to us?”

  “Yes,” I said. “After they finish speaking with the girls.”

  “What do you want us to say?”

  I smiled and clapped him on the shoulder, and felt more tired than I had in a long, long time.

  “Just tell them what happened, Caleb.”

  He seemed to consider that for a minute, stuffed the bandana into his pocket, and climbed back up into the tractor’s seat.

  “I don’t suppose I need to mention the thing with the breed bull,” he said.

  “You can probably skip past some of the details if you want to.”

  IT WAS nearly noon by the time they finished taking statements from Jesse and my daughter. I sat beside them the entire time, hearing for the first time the personal accounts of their ordeal. Jesse’s voice was leavened with emotion and my heart broke just a little while she recounted the whole story, twisting her wedding ring on her finger, her eyes glued to the floor. It broke a little more when I listened to my little girl. Cricket’s jaw was set like stone, her posture as erect as if she had been balancing a bowl of boiling water on her head. She never even glanced at her mother or at me the entire time she spoke, her fingers interlaced into a ball, and I wondered if the images that lived inside her head would ever leave her. I recognized the self-indulgence of that thought the very instant that it crossed my mind and I felt a sense of shame wash over me that ached just like a bone bruise.

  The investigator thanked them as they packed their gear and left. None of us stood up or said a word. Wyatt shuffled in as the front door closed behind them, his midsection shaved and taped and bandaged where he’d absorbed the vicious strikes from his family’s attackers. He curled up at my feet and closed his eyes.

  I don’t know how long we sat there, but when I came back to myself, I found that Cricket had been staring at my face.

  “Let’s take a drive,” I said to her. “Let’s go do something good.”

  Her eyes softened just a little, and she smiled.

  THE SKY was ribbed with diaphanous clouds that looked like spilled cream, or the silt and salt marks left behind on sand from a receding tide. I tuned the truck’s radio to the only station I could find that played music, and turned it down low to fill in the silence. Cricket’s gaze was transfixed by something far in the distance, and she was idly twisting a lock of her hair on her finger as she frequently had done as a child. I thought she said something, but I didn’t quite catch it, so I reached over and switched off the radio.

  “Did you say something?”

  She turned in her seat and shifted her focus on me.

  “I don’t feel anything,” she said. “It seems like I should, but I don’t.”

  I knew exactly what she meant, but some thoughts need to be aired out in daylight, or they’ll start to fester and rot inside your head.

  “I killed
somebody. But I don’t have any feelings about it.”

  I could have elected to be charitable and tell her that some people were simply different from out of the womb, but that’s not the belief that I held to; my experience taught me that most men embraced whatever evils they practiced out of choice.

  “You didn’t kill anybody,” I said. “Those men were born dead.”

  She chewed at a rough edge on her thumbnail and her eyes slid sideways, out through the windshield.

  “Shouldn’t there be something?”

  “You think there should be because you are good, Cricket. But what you did last night was a public service. They would have hurt you and your mother; don’t hold on to any reservations about that.”

  She crossed her legs, Indian style, on the bench seat and pressed her back against the door.

  “You don’t need to convince me, I was there.”

  “If I had been there, I would have done the same thing and never thought twice,” I said. “You need to make me a promise. If you ever do start to feel anything remotely like guilt or remorse, you call me so I can remind you that you’re wrong.”

  Her lips turned up at the corners and she wiped at a dew-drop of moisture that had pooled up at the edge of her eye.

  “You’d like that, wouldn’t you,” she said. “To remind me I’m wrong.”

  I reached across the width of the seat and squeezed her hand.

  “Only about that.”

  A FEW minutes later I turned off the road and drove the narrow dirt track that opened onto the place that belonged to Teresa Pineu. Cricket sat up straight in her seat, cranked down the window, and leaned her head out.

  “Where’d everybody go?” she said.

  The fields where the protestors had once camped were abandoned and resembled a wasteland left behind after a battle. Loose garbage rolled over the broken soil like tumbleweeds, a patchwork of mud-soiled blankets and the remnants of small fires that had been ringed by circles of small stones. The donated outhouses had been carted off, but the dirt underneath where they once stood was marked by puddles of filth and blue dye from the chemical toilets.