Killing Custer

by Margaret Coel

  The woman curled around herself, face shadowed and eyes pinpricks of black lights. Father John moved in closer, between her and Vicky. “Burrows staged his own disappearance,” he said.

  “You have no proof.”

  “It’s only a matter of time before Detective Madden shows up here.” He wished that were true. He wished they had let someone know where he and Vicky were going.

  The woman was still gripping the handle, hanging on hard, as if the shovel might evaporate and she would topple over. “So Skip got into a little financial trouble. He needed time to straighten things out. He’s very smart. He makes good investments for his clients, but they’ve been slow paying off. The economy is cyclical. It falls. It rises.” She lifted the shovel slowly, as if it weighed a couple hundred pounds and dropped it into the loose dirt, still gripping the handle.

  Little clouds of dust rose over the pines on the mountainside. The quiet rumble of an engine mingled with the whoosh of the wind. The rumble grew louder, and a pickup the color of dirt sped out of the trees, disappeared behind the barn then came bouncing along the two-track toward them. A black Stetson bobbed over the steering wheel. Father John grabbed Vicky’s arm and pulled her sideways just as the pickup swung off the road toward the barbed wire fence, tires churning the dirt and crunching sagebrush. The pickup stopped.

  The driver got out. Face dark and indistinct beneath the low-tipped brim of the black Stetson. He turned toward the frame that held a rifle against the rear windshield, rammed a key into a lock, and removed the gun. Then he came around the back of the pickup. Chin thrust high, a band of sunshine across the center of his face. Father John could have identified Skip Burrows from the swagger in his walk, the confident, take-charge attitude in the way he gripped the rifle pointed at them.

  34

  SLIP BURROWS LOOKED different, Vicky thought. Shorter, leaner, altogether a smaller man than the lawyer she had occasionally run into on Main Street, in a coffee shop, at a meeting of the local bar association. Skip Burrows had always seemed taller than his five feet ten inches, bigger than the narrow shoulders hunched around the rifle. Everything about him louder, consuming space. One hand gripping yours, the other gripping your arm or shoulder. A smile as wide and open as the plains. How are your kids, your practice, your life? How are you and Adam Long Eagle getting along? Any plans to form a firm together again? He knew about you, and he cared. Who wouldn’t want to be Skip Burrows’s best friend, a member of his private club?

  “You shouldn’t have come here,” he said.

  “We came to talk to you.” Vicky marveled at the calmness in John O’Malley’s voice, the way he seemed to look past the barrel of the rifle, the black bore that went on forever. “No need for a weapon.”

  “I’ll decide that.”

  “I’ve told them the truth,” Deborah said.

  “The truth?” Skip seemed to acknowledged the woman with the strands of red hair wafting in the wind, yet he gazed straight ahead. Staring at them. “You should keep your mouth shut.”

  “I told them it’s a mistake. You need time to straighten things out, that’s all. They understand. You do understand, don’t you?” Deborah Boynton threw a pleading look at Vicky, then John O’Malley.

  “I’m surprised you’re still here,” Vicky said. “I thought you would be in Mexico by now.”

  “I’ll be there tonight. Unfortunately you’re both here now. It’s a problem I have to deal with.”

  “You didn’t tell me we were leaving today.” A whine had come into Deborah’s voice.

  “We aren’t leaving.”

  “But you said you would take me with you. I’ve made plans. I’ve canceled meetings with clients, told them to find another Realtor.” For a moment, Vicky thought the woman might burst into tears. “I’m going with you. You know you need me.”

  Deborah shifted toward Vicky. The top of the shovel handle rested against her chest. She looked scared, shriveled like a stalk of dried tumbleweed. “You’re a lawyer. You know this will blow over. As soon as Skip recoups the money and starts getting the interest he expects, he’ll pay off the investors. They know Skip. They know he’ll do the right thing.”

  “Your boyfriend had Edward Garrett killed,” Vicky said.

  “That’s a lie!” Deborah swung a half step toward Skip. “Tell them that’s a lie. Everyone knows the Indians killed Garrett. What fool comes to a place where Indians live and brags about killing Indians? What did he think would happen? That Arapaho who thinks he’s Crazy Horse is as big a fool as Garrett. Tell them! You didn’t have anything to do with Garrett getting shot.”

  “For the last time, Deborah, shut up!”

  “You need me, Skip. I can help you. I can make them understand.”

  “Garrett threatened to go to the police,” Vicky said. “He wanted his money back But you didn’t have his money. You had spent it, right? Houses? Expensive car? Accounts in the Cayman Islands? You were setting yourself up for life. Garrett had to be stopped.”

  The thick mountain quiet spread around them, the quiet of the sky interrupted by the sporadic hum of the wind through the brush. “It was not Colin Morningside you hired to kill Garrett.” Father John’s tone was low and as steady and certain as steel. Vicky caught his eye for an instant and understood what he was about to say, could feel it in her bones. “Indians weren’t the only ones who hated Custer,” he went on. “Benteen and Reno for starters. Custer refused to rescue Joel Elliott and his men at Washita. They all died. Elliott was their friend.”

  Skip Burrows gave a shout of laughter. “You think anybody but the Indians cares about what happened a hundred and forty years ago? Benteen and Reno are dead.”

  “What happened in Desert Storm?” Father John said. “Why would Osborne and Veraggi hate your commander so much that they were willing to kill him?”

  Skip Burrows looked stunned, a little unsteady, the rifle weaving back and forth as if he and the rifle were caught in a windstorm. “You are going to die.” His teeth were clamped together, jaw rigid.

  “No, Skip! They’re taking a wild guess. Tell them it’s not true. You couldn’t have hired anyone to kill Garrett. The Indians did it, like you told me.”

  “Garrett deserved to die.” Skip’s voice sounded distant and disengaged, Vicky thought, as if Garrett had nothing to do with him. “Bastard led the men through sand dunes into an ambush. He didn’t know anything about deserts, and he wouldn’t listen to guys who had been out there. The arrogant sonofabitch did things his way, and damn the men under him. You know what it’s like to live with the same guys twenty-four-seven? Listen to them cry out in their sleep with nightmares you were having? Watch the shadow of stubble grow on their chins? Smell their boots? We were the same. We were a single body. You know what it’s like to watch yourself die? Feel the pain of the bullet that blew off the head of your buddy crouched beside you? Wipe the sand and sweat out of your eyes and look at your buddy’s brains exploded all over you? Eight men died! Good men! But they weren’t the only fatalities. We all died there. Only some of us stumbled back after the army helicopters arrived and started strafing the Iraqis. The helicopters got us out of that hellhole. The walking dead.”

  “You hated Garrett,” John said. “Why keep up the old army-buddy routine? Why would Osborne and Veraggi be reenactors in the Seventh Cavalry with Garrett the commander, like Custer?”

  “Revenge takes time.” Burrows made a loud sucking noise. The rifle was still moving back and forth, and Father John could see the tremor in the man’s hand. “Taking that bastard’s money was the most pleasure I’ve had in a long time. Invested it in a ten-thousand-square-foot house in Mexico. You’re right about the Cayman Islands. Stashed some down there. Osborne and Veraggi? They wanted a different kind of revenge. They wanted him dead. Bided their time, waiting for the right moment for an accident to occur. That’s what kept them going. Custer must die! I handed them the oppor
tunity. Sooner or later they would have found it on their own.”

  “My God, Skip. What are you saying?” Deborah was shouting, as if Skip were on the other side of the road, halfway up the mountain. “You hired them to kill Garrett ? Why? Why would you do such a thing? You lied to me! You told me you needed more time, and everything would turn around. Interest money would start flowing. My God! I believed you!”

  “I’m sick of you, Deborah.” Skip spoke out of the side of his mouth, keeping his eyes from her, as if she weren’t beside him, hunched over the shovel handle as if she might throw up. “Sick of your whining and nagging and your superior, know-it-all attitude. Sick of you understanding me. You don’t understand anything. Garrett set a deadline. Either he got his money on Monday morning, or he went to the cops. The colonel giving the order, just like before. The arrogant sonofabitch. Forward! Over the sand dunes to destruction. Well, he was no longer in charge. He was no longer leading anybody. He had destroyed enough.”

  “What about Angela?” Vicky struggled to keep her own voice steady. “What had she destroyed?”

  “Angela! That Arapaho girl you were involved with? My God! You had her killed, too!”

  “Shut up! I won’t tell you again.”

  “Angela loved you,” Vicky said. “She would have given you the flash drive. All you had to do was ask. You didn’t have to kill her.”

  “What? You did it yourself?”

  “There was no way out for me. I thought there might be. I even tried to call you.” He gave a little nod toward Vicky. “The fact is, Angela knew too much.” Skip drew his lips into a thin, tight line. The same look of disengagement, as if he were somewhere else, crossed his face like a shadow.

  “She didn’t know anything,” Vicky said. “She prepared the phony statements you told her to prepare. She thought they were legitimate reports that your clients needed. Why wouldn’t they be? She thought you were a god, a white god come to save her, take her away to Mexico and a dream life.”

  “You killed that girl? You bastard!”

  “Let me tell you what you’re going to do, Deborah,” Skip said. “You are going to walk to the pickup and get the rope on the floor in back. You’re going to bring it to me. Do it! As for you”—he pressed the butt of the rifle against his chest and looked from Father John to Vicky—“you are going to drop. Now. On your hands and knees, on your stomach, faces in the dirt. You won’t be tied up long. Only as long as it takes us to dig your graves. Get the rope,” he shouted as if he were now aware that Deborah hadn’t moved.

  “You’re going to kill them?”

  “Get it!”

  “Murderer!” The woman grabbed the shovel handle and swung it backward over her shoulder, a swift, smooth motion. Just as Skip turned sideways, the shovel crashed into his temple. He staggered forward, the rifle loose and bouncing in his hands. Stunned, glassy-eyed. Blood was running down his cheek.

  “No!” Vicky heard Father John shout as Deborah swung the shovel into the back of Skip’s head. There was the sharp sound of metal splitting bone. Skip dropped onto the dirt, collapsing like a tree uprooted in the wind, the rifle sliding against the fence post. Again Deborah lifted the shovel, but John O’Malley had grabbed hold of her shoulders and pulled her away from the man sprawled at her feet, spasms running through his body, the back of his skull bashed in.

  Vicky stooped over, picked up the rifle, and carried it to the borrow ditch alongside the dirt road. She set it down below the edge, where it couldn’t be seen, aware of John O’Malley leading the woman backward. Holding on to her with one hand, as if she might bolt toward the fallen man and slam the shovel into his head again, he pried the shovel from her. Vicky saw him toss it hard into a clump of sagebrush. Deborah had started shaking, as if she were coming apart, as if she had returned to sanity from wherever she had gone, and reality—the terrible reality—was buffeting her. He led her up the porch steps to the chair rocking in the wind and guided her into the seat. “Stay here,” he said. Then he came down the steps toward Skip.

  He had stopped shivering. Stopped breathing, Vicky realized. She caught John O’Malley’s eye as he went down on one knee beside the man.

  Vicky crouched beside him. He kept one finger pressed against the side of Skip’s neck. “I can’t get a pulse,” he said. “He’s gone. God have mercy on his soul.”

  “Do you think there is mercy?” she heard herself say. An inanity. What difference did it make? Skip Burrows was dead. As dead as Edward Garrett and Angela Running Bear.

  “There is always the hope,” John said.

  Vicky got to her feet, conscious of the weight of his hand on her arm, guiding her upright. Then he was pulling his cell out of his shirt pocket. She felt dazed, almost weightless, half expecting the shivering to start inside her, the shovel and the rifle looming presences in her mind. They were the ones who could have been dead. Tied up, shot in the head, and dumped into whatever shallow graves Skip and Deborah managed to dig in the hard ground. And Deborah. She would also have been dead.

  “Send an ambulance,” John was saying. Then came the directions: Stockton Ranch, ten miles from Dubois, the dirt road on the west, twelve miles up the mountainside. Man struck in the head. No vital signs. Woman in shock.

  “Ask them to get Madden on the line,” Vicky said.

  He repeated the request. “Vicky Holden wants to speak to Detective Madden. This concerns two murders he has been investigating.” He handed her the cell.

  Silence on the other end, and for a moment Vicky wondered if the connection had been lost. “Vicky? What’s going on?” Madden sounded loud and impatient.

  “We found Skip Burrows. We found the murderer.”

  Behind her, she heard the coughing noise of a motor turning over, the ratcheting of gears. She swung around as the pickup charged like a bull down the dirt road, rocking back and forth, Deborah Boynton hunched over the steering wheel. And John O’Malley running toward the pickup, waving both hands, shouting. “Stop! Stop!”

  She heard the thud and watched him flying, flying, lifting into the air with the wind, and the terrible, scudding noise as his body dropped onto the ground and slid forward. Barely aware of the pickup speeding past her, the whooshing sound as the rush of air grabbed at her skirt. The pickup raced down the dirt road, the smell of exhaust filling her nostrils.

  She dropped the phone and ran to John O’Malley.

  35

  SOME THINGS HE couldn’t remember.

  He couldn’t remember what he had been doing in the moment before the darkness.

  He couldn’t remember the medics, sheriff’s deputies, and state patrol officers swarming the ranch, although he learned later that had been the case.

  He couldn’t remember the ambulance trip to Riverton Memorial.

  He decided they weren’t important. He remembered Vicky’s face, blurred and wavy, swimming toward him out of the darkness, finally solidifying, becoming real. “How do you feel?” she had asked, and he had tried to assure her he was okay. What he knew was that he was alive.

  That was three days ago. He had spent the night in the hospital. For observation, the doctors told him. He’d taken quite a blow from the bumper of the speeding pickup. Slight concussion. Chipped rib and a bruise that ran from his shoulder to his hip and had already started to fade at the edges from black to shades of purple and yellow. His muscles felt as hard and stiff as rocks. The next morning Vicky had appeared at the hospital and driven him to the mission. She told him Skip Burrows was dead. The state patrol had picked up Deborah Boynton before she reached the outskirts of Riverton, and she had spent a night in jail. No charges would be brought against her. She had acted in the defense of others. She had saved their lives.

  Vicky had brought the bishop, who rescued the old Toyota pickup from the hospital parking lot and drove it home. A cavalcade, he had thought, as they rolled through town and out onto the highway.
Everything had looked vivid and alive in the hot June morning. The wild grasses in the open fields, bending in the sun, the cottonwood leaves swaying against the glass-clear blue sky.

  They had driven in silence except for a few perfunctory remarks. Was he sure he was okay? He was fine. He should take it easy. So the doctor said. But he wouldn’t, would he? No, he probably wouldn’t. He could have been killed. She had thought he was dead. And she told him she didn’t know what she would have done if that had been the case, how she would be.

  He had turned away from the anguish in her voice and stared at the scrub brush passing outside, grateful they were both alive.

  In the residence, he had managed to get up the stairs to his bedroom, the bishop trailing behind as if he might catch him should Father John tumble backwards, and that would have been a sight—the frail, white-haired man trying to hold him up with nothing but an indomitable spirit and determination. Bishop Harry had insisted upon saying the early Mass the last two mornings, visiting parishioners, counseling people who wandered into the administration building. Father John should rest. An old man recovering from heart surgery was taking charge. It was as if the bishop and he had exchanged places.

  He had gotten to the office early this morning. There was only so much resting he could stand, and there were always things that needed attention. He had spent a couple hours working on the budget for the summer. Cosi fan tutte played on the CD. Tourists meant the Sunday collections might be larger than usual, but he could never count on that. Better to try to adjust the expenditures to the average amount of money that came in. As if the budget at St. Francis Mission could ever be balanced. He tried to stop the laugh that rumbled through him and knocked about the sore places. Then he pushed himself to his feet and walked down the corridor.

  Bishop Harry was curled over a book opened flat on the desk. The ceiling light glowed in the pink bald spot on top of his head. He glanced up, and Father John told him he was going out for a while. He gave what he thought was a friendly wave and headed back down the corridor before the bishop could voice the objections that flashed in his blue eyes.