Death Without Company

by Craig Johnson

  There were others, but the one that next caught my attention was one toward the back; I guess I noticed it because its face was turned toward the wall. It twisted gently as I watched, revealing a very young Leo with the man who must be his father. He had on a hat, a broad-brim, flattop like the Powder River cowboys wore, and his head was tilted down to the young Leo, the hat hiding the eyes. The jawline was discernible, along with the lips. The connection to Ellen was there, but the black-and-white photo did nothing to tell me whether his skin was white or red; he didn’t look particularly Indian nor did he look particularly like Charlie. It was like doing a lineup with jigsaw puzzles. I turned the ornament over, but all it said was LEO & FATHER. He was her son, and she hadn’t even written down his name, but she had cared enough to keep track.

  I had the sandwiches that Dorothy had made and the coffee, so I had something to eat and drink. I went over and retrieved one of the jugs of water as well, the one that was only half frozen. I might need it and, if I didn’t keep it with me, chances are it wasn’t going to stay thawed. I gathered the blankets that were left and the buffalo robe, dragging them to a chair so as to sit as far away from the creamed corn as the furniture would allow. I pulled the Mag Lite from my belt for future use, placed the ornament on one knee, and pulled the little automatic out and rested it on my other knee. I placed the shotgun between my legs and pulled the .45 from my holster and checked it again. I felt like Zapata.

  I studied the ornament and stared at the partial face, knowing that I had seen this man, knowing that he was out there, knowing that he and Leo were in cahoots, cahoots being a legal term in Wyoming, see cahooting in the first degree, intent to cahoot, and so on.

  I sat there and thought about what a long wait this might turn into and about the course of things and looked around again. I noticed a strap sticking out from under the couch Ellen had been sitting on that was made from the kind of tubular webbing that is used for backpacks. I sat the gun on the floor along with the ornament, flipped back the buffalo robe, and moved across the small room to kneel by the sofa. The strap was followed by a grimy daypack. The zipper to the main compartment was broken, but it had been fastened together with large safety pins. I unhooked the pins and had a look inside: dozens of small glass bottles and a small bundle wrapped in the Durant Courant containing close to what looked like about $40,000 in mixed currency.

  Leo, you bad boy. Whether he would slog his way through a blizzard to the middle fork of Crazy Woman to a trailer and his loopy grandmother was suddenly academic. Leo might leave his grandmother to starve to death, but he would come back for the drugs and the money.

  I put the bundle back in the knapsack and stuffed the bag under the sofa when I noticed a battered cooler in the kitchen. I wondered what Leo might have put in there. The kitchen reminded me of my grumbling stomach, but my curiosity was stronger than my appetite. If I had been hungry, I wasn’t anymore. I pulled the aged skull of an adult male from the cooler. I leaned against the counter and held it in my hand. “Alas, poor Charlie.” The prominent gold tooth was there, central incisor, right. I guess Double Tough hadn’t looked at the head; I didn’t blame him. “You got off easy, you son of a bitch.”

  I carefully placed the skull back in the cooler and walked over to the window where I raised the blind just far enough to see a fog bank beginning to form along the shadowed canyon wall. The creek water must have been warmer than the air and, if the low cloud cover held, this was going to be a very foggy, as well as dark, place in about thirty minutes. Now all I had to do was relax and watch what little light there was at the bottom of the windows die.

  Static. “Unit One, this is BR75115, come in?”

  The blankets slipped and the ornament fell to the floor, but at least I didn’t shoot the door. I had forgotten to turn off the radio. I struggled through the folds in the blanket and pulled it out, the small glow of the channel display providing a comforting light. “Hey Jess. You got through. Over?”

  Static. “Sheriff, I’m at the base radio at equipment storage. I’ve got your dog here, and he’s been shot.”

  I stared at the radio as a million and one things ran through my mind, all of them bad. “Are you sure?”

  Static. “Yeah, I’m sure. It looks like a small caliber. I’m doing all I can for him.”

  “How did he get there?”

  Static. “He must’a drug himself. I went out and followed the blood trail as far as I could, but you can’t see a damn thing with all this fog.”

  I thought about Henry. If Dog was shot . . . “I’m going to need you to call my office, tell them that I think we’ve got a man down and that we need all the help we can get. Then get the HPs out here.”

  Static. “Roger that, out.”

  Here I sat with every weapon that we had, and my closest friend and blood brother was probably dead out there in the snow somewhere. It was a solid three miles back to the methane wells and that was if I could find him. That’s if Leo left him, and what were the chances that Leo would have left him alive?

  I’m lousy at ignoring first instincts and mine told me to gather the weapons and head out. I stuffed the little automatic back in my belt, holstered the .45 cocked and locked along with the Mag Lite, pulled the buffalo robe around me, and flipped the shotgun up on my shoulder. I stuffed the ornament into my duty jacket and started for the door, opened it, and sidestepped. I pulled my hat down tight and raised my head slowly to look into the vaporous white. Barely visible in the fog were blue and red lights that blinked across the blurred canyon walls.

  My truck.

  The headlights were shining at an odd angle and the blue and red ones were simply revolving in place, so I was pretty sure Leo had misjudged the width of the trail and had planted the three-quarter ton over the edge. He was lucky he had done it near the bottom, or the truck would have flipped and killed him. The headlights cast to the left, away from the homestead and the trailer. I stepped down and pulled the door closed quietly behind me.

  It was only about 150 yards, but the fog made it seem like miles. I started the slow trudge, staying to the right and keeping my one eye on the slightly illuminated portion of the white distance. If he was coming to the trailer, he was going to have to cross that bit of diffused light and, when he did, I would be there.

  I lowered the Remington from my shoulder and allowed it to swing forward; with all my training, here I was shooting with one eye. There was a movement to my left, just out of the headlight beams. I unfocused as always, allowing my eye to become a motion detector, and waited until whatever it was out there moved again. It did, and it was large. Not only tall but wide. I stood there, watching as it lumbered into view, in no way the outline of a man. It was at least four feet across and as tall as I am. I was thinking that it was a cow, confused and trying to find some relief from the storm or a horse trying to do the same. It was a blur in the fog. It swayed there for a moment, and it seemed as though a wing extended outward and then folded back.

  After a few seconds, the wing extended again and caught a small movement of the air, then flipped sideways only to fall. It shifted its weight and then both wings caught the breeze, and I was sure the thing would take flight. My mouth fell open, and my mind was jarred to the image of Henry at the Busy Bee when he had spread the wings on his duster, his battle cry shaking the windows of the café.

  The fog froze the inside of my mouth. “Bear?”

  The blast was instantaneous. Leo had been waiting, hoping that I would say something in recognition, and I had.

  It was as if someone had tied a rope around my leg and tied it to a galloping stallion. I couldn’t move. Leg, left, and I thought of bone and the artery as the immediate shock sparked and then subsided. The reason his shadow had been so deformed was that he was carrying Ellen, which meant my shot had to be low. He wasn’t expecting a return volley and was probably as surprised as I had been when he pitched backward with the flame of the Remington still in my hands.

  I fell with the re
coil, and the barrel of the shotgun buried itself in the snow and frozen ground below, useless. I rolled to the left, trying to keep him in view, but all I could see was the freezing fog that reflected in the dimness of the truck’s lights. The pain in my leg clinched my guts and pulled my knees forward even as I tried to negotiate my left arm up for leverage. He was down too, but I couldn’t be sure which of us would be able to get up first; the smart money would be on the man hyped on crystal meth.

  My hat rolled from my head and rested there in the snow as I looked up. He seemed to be growing from the crusted surface. Henry’s coat tried to hold him against the ground for me and, along with the burden of Ellen Runs Horse, did pin him just long enough for me to get the .32 up and out, the .45 still buried at my side.

  I attempted to time the squeeze on the .32, waiting until a lull in the pain allowed my aim to stay steady long enough to fire off my only round, the chrome pistol extended into the fog. I felt like one of those near frozen buffalo in imminent danger of being torn apart by a pack of wolves, just waiting for one of those wolves to get close enough. I pulled the trigger, and the little semiautomatic roared and bucked in my hand.

  The air left his body as the impact of the slug carried his teetering momentum back. Center shot, or close enough. He fell with an angry, gargling sound, and the report of his pistol smacked like a bullwhip. His shot went off harmlessly into the frosted air.

  I slumped down against my side and breathed again, the cold flood of oxygen inflating my chest as well as causing the searing pain in my thigh to start up again. I took a few more breaths and rolled my head back to look at him. He had collapsed backward on his shattered legs, doubled back as though he had been playing some perverse game of limbo. I stayed steady, looking at him, and tried to reassemble my mind so that I could begin making assessments on how badly I was hurt, how soon I could reach Ellen Runs Horse, and how long it would take me to get us both to cover.

  Then he moved.

  It was a feeble gesture at first, almost an involuntary one, but it was a movement nonetheless. I felt my single eye widen as his hand, still holding a very large stainless revolver, scrambled up from the snow like an antiaircraft battery. A shoulder surged forward as the other arm fought to push him up; like his grandfather, Leo would not stay in the grave.

  His head lolled to one side as the trunk of his body approached upright, and the arm with the gun dragged across the snow. Our breaths billowed out to join the fog like two locomotives on a collision course.

  I yanked on the .45 and freed it from the robe, feeling it swing forward, but he was already there, the endless, stainless barrel of a Colt .357 pointed at my face. I felt the surge of cold air in my teeth as I tried to bring the .45 around, but it was too late.

  There was silence. He had paused for a moment, and all I could think was that this was the last thing I would see. Time froze then, and it was as if the air had died and the snowflakes just hung there like some ethereal mobile as I looked into the darkness of his face.

  I waited as he wavered in the silence. The Colt toppled from his hand, and he stood there looking at me before falling forward, a Special Forces Vietnam issue tomahawk driven deep into the base of his skull.

  The voice in the distance was garbled but still discernible. “Nesh-sha-nun Na-woo-hes-sten Nah-kohe Ve-ne-hoo-way-hoost Ne-hut-may-au-tow.” Tell your ancestors Standing Bear has sent you.

  16

  I was pretty sure that the two of us looked like a human junkyard. We were sitting at the veterinarian’s office. Henry struggled out the next sentence with the good side of his mouth, “How is your leg?”

  “It hurts, but only when I walk. It’s not so bad when I talk.” He nodded, and we both looked at the carpet. “DCI is going to want to talk to you.” He didn’t move, so I continued. “How about I go through the story, and you can make corrections and additions as we go?”

  “Hmm.”

  “What?” He turned to look at me, and I could see the bulge of the bandage at his jawline. “Just kidding. So, you found the highway patrol cruiser buried in the snow up on the flat?”

  “Hmm.”

  “And you stopped the truck and got out to take a look, and the driver didn’t move. So, you opened the door.” I nodded my head for a moment. “What kind of rookie move was that?” He didn’t respond, but I could see his jaw flex. “So he raised the glorified .22 and shoots you in the face right off the bat?”

  “Hmm.”

  I nodded some more. “You’re lucky it was a .32, the .357 would’ve deviated your septum. You don’t have to answer that.” He didn’t. “All right, you fell backward, and then Leo rolls you over, takes you for dead, and strips your coat off of you?”

  “Hmm.”

  “Because of this, Dog tries to eat Leo alive, and he shoots Dog twice and drives off with my truck?”

  “Hmm.”

  I shook my head and looked at the operating room door. “Then you got up, sprinted after the truck, and followed Leo back to the canyon with half your face tied on with a bandana? You ran a half a mile with a subcutaneous bullet trail running from the cleft of your chin to the back of your neck?”

  He held the bloody fragment of lead that Isaac had pulled out and handed it to me. “Hmm.”

  The door to the operating room was opening and, from the corner of my good eye, I could see Mike Pilch coming out to give us the prognosis on Dog. Mike was a vet who was something of an oddity in Absaroka County in that he actually tried to save domestic animals as opposed to giving up and putting them down. He stopped short. “Wow, you guys look like eight kinds of hell.”

  I held a finger to my lips to silence him. “We escaped from the hospital.” I glanced over at Henry to see him wave a feeble hand at the veterinarian and readjust the leather duster over his knee. “The Indian’s not talking today.” He nodded and studied the Bear’s face a little more closely. “How’s Dog?”

  He pulled his eyes away from the spectacle of Henry to look at me; I don’t guess the view improved. “It’s pretty bad, but he’s tough whatever he is.” He moved over and sat in the chair beside me. “The first bullet just grazed his skull. It was the second bullet that did the most damage, entering the abdomen and lodging in the muscle near the spine. I did an exploratory and found a section of the intestinal tract was perforated and had to remove eleven inches. I flushed the stomach with sterile saline and placed several drains. With the bullet so close to the spine, we’d probably do more harm than good if I tried to take it out, but the body will wall it off and it shouldn’t cause any future problems. He’s still dopey from surgery but seems to be doing well. I’ll need to keep a close watch on him for the next few days.”

  As we left Mike’s office, I finished questioning the Bear. He was buttoning his leather duster. “Did you put the axe in the base of Leo’s skull just to save your coat?”

  He gathered it up as he wearily climbed in the truck. “Hmm.”

  “Wow . . .” I glanced back at the Bear. “You could’ve missed. What kind of rookie move was that?”

  It had been a long night. We had staunched our bleedings and had huddled in the cab of my truck with Ellen Runs Horse until Double Tough showed up in a D9 Caterpillar and pulled my three-quarter ton out of the creek bed like it was a Flexible Flyer. He had rendezvoused with the HPs so that Dog could be brought to Durant for more professional care and had drunk about a half a bottle of Wild Turkey in the meantime, but he seemed as impervious to liquor as he had been to bullets. He pulled us up and out of the canyon, angling the blade so that a slow-motion wall of snow cascaded away from the dozer and cleared a way for us as we were pulled along. By the time we had gotten to the flat above, revolving blue and red lights joined with our own, telling me that the rest of the cavalry had arrived.

  Vic’s unit was the only one that could make it this far. Before we had come to a stop she was there, yanking the door open and applying a more professional pressure bandage to my leg; Saizarbitoria helped Henry on the other si
de of the cab. We left the Bear in my truck, thinking it might help maintain the quiet Ellen Runs Horse had surrendered to. Saizarbitoria would drive it to the hospital with them, while I would ride along with Vic. As I leaned against her, she tipped her head around to give me a look. “You get him?”

  My smile couldn’t help but fade. “The Bear did.” I glanced into the truck bed. So did Vic. The half-frozen body of Leo Gaskell was buried into the cradle of snow that had accumulated there. The black alloy tomahawk still stuck up from the back of his head like a pump lever.

  She blew a brief breath from pursed lips. “Fuck.”

  There were four HPs parked at the underpass.

  Wes was dead, only one week away from guarding those golf course ponds. They found him where he must have pulled Leo over. He was a veteran cop with more than thirty-five years on the job, and he had known that Leo was armed and highly dangerous, but something had gone terribly wrong.

  There was a buzz of activity at the hospital emergency room, one that I had grown used to as of late. Out of the three of us, triage speaking, I was third. I waited on a gurney as they stabilized Henry. Bill McDermott had cut off my jeans above the wound, irrigated the hole in my leg, and was now bandaging me up; Ferg leaned against the wall and watched the process. I glanced at him, trying to ignore the pain in my leg. “Cady and Lana?”

  He smiled. “Christmas shopping over in Sheridan.” He shrugged. “They weren’t going to stay in that room any longer, and they don’t know about all of this.” He waited a few moments before asking. “Leo Gaskell dead?” I nodded, as we both stared at my leg. “You do it?”

  “Henry.”

  After a while he spoke again. “Good.”

  It was a strange remark for the Ferg to make. “Why good?”