The Distant Echo of a Bright Sunny Day

by Patrick O'Brien

  Rick, sitting on a stool at his workbench, had a carburetor in one hand and a screwdriver in the other. A portable radio at his elbow played rockabilly music, and a lunch plate had a half-eaten sandwich on it. As Leroy came into the garage, he looked up.

  “Amigo! Que pasa! What brings you to my humble abode?”

  He set the carburetor and the screwdriver aside and got off the stool. He stuck his hand out, and the two men did a we’re-tight-buddies handclasp.

  “Came by to visit, man!”

  “Great! Come on inside…I’ll fix ya up with a Mr. Budweiser. What’s goin’ on, anyway?”

  “That dude, Whit-the-Twit—Chuck Kovalsky said the guy’s dead, an’ the cops were over at the house asking about it. I thought you might like to know because he’s a link to those people you went to Cleveland with.”

  “Thanks for the concern. But I hope you didn’t come over here just for that. ’Cause I already heard about that. Apparently, the people he ran with fucked up. He fell off a bulldozer and cracked his head open.”

  “No shit?”

  “Yeah…just like that. Died right then and there.”

  Rick handed Leroy a can of beer and opened one for himself.

  “So, what exactly did the cops wanna know?”

  “They turned his room into a crime scene. Didn’t say why, though. Just keep the fuck out. They got it taped now.”

  “What do you think they found?”

  “I don’t know. But, according to Chuck, the dude wasn’t a housekeeper.”

  “Yeah, he was too busy writing poetry for the everyday stuff.”

  Both men laughed at the recollection of a shared impression.

  “Ja ever read any of his shit?”

  “I got high with him once on some killer weed, and he read some of it to me. Didn’t make any sense, that I could see, but he was sure into it.”

  “I think you gotta get your brain good and scrambled first, before you can even write that kinda shit,” Leroy said, shaking his head.

  “Drop a little acid…smoke a little weed…trip out. So, the cops didn’t say much, huh?”

  Sipping his beer, Leroy tried to recall.

  “Chuck says the dude mentioned homicide, but nothin’ else.”

  “Homicide, huh?”

  “Yeah, that’s what Chuck said.”

  “That could be some serious shit for someone…”

  “Tell me about it—those people might get fucked if the cops ever catch up with them.”

  “For sure.”

  “That’s what I been tryin’ to tell you, though, all along, my brother. You might wanna cool it. Ditch the feds and go to Mexico. Meet some señoritas…”

  “You may be right. And, to tell you the truth, I been thinking on it.”

  “That reminds me…Walt Craftsman just got back from there. I ran into him the other night. He tells me he got fucked every which way but loose.”

  “Oh, yeah? Where’d he go…Tijuana?”

  “Some little Mexican shithole south of Yuma, right across the border. Tells me he got fitted for a new set of choppers during the day and got fucked at night.”

  “So he’s got teeth now?”

  “Brand-new set.”

  “I need some dental work…”

  “Talk to Walt…he’ll get ya squared away.”

  An hour later, after Leroy left, Rick made a phone call. “Bill Hammerstein, please. Tell him it’s Rick Strange.”

  “Make it good, Rick,” Agent Hammerstein came onto the line. “Don’t waste my time.”

  Rick told him about Leroy’s visit and the likelihood of an expanded police inquiry.

  “Okay. But what’s your point?”

  “They might get too close to your party. If that happens, it could fuck up your plans.”

  After a long pause, the agent said, “I’m impressed, Rick. You’re thinking like a team player. You’re ready to become part of the organization. Maybe we’ll even put you on a permanent payroll.”

  “Sweeten the kitty—I could live with that. But I’m thinking mainly of myself here. If your little scheme goes into the toilet, where does that leave me? My leverage doesn’t amount to shit…I’m left hanging.”

  “True enough, Rick. You need us, buddy. But what do you want me to do? Call the police department and tell them to hold off? No. I don’t think so. Just tell those people to get crackin’ so we can get this thing underway. Too much time has passed already, and I’m starting to get real impatient.

  “As for your stake in all this, you got yourself into this mess…you gotta take a chance that it’ll work out. Just in case it doesn’t, and if I were you, I’d be doing some yoga exercises to better accommodate all those nice fellas you’re gonna get to meet. Comprende?”

  “I gotcha, boss.”

  “Good. So ya got anything in the works yet? Those people getting ready to move on a decision or not?”

  “I can try to light a fire, man, but I don’t want it to sound urgent. They might wonder what exactly I’m up to.”

  “Good point. So tell ’em this…that you got a limited window of opportunity. You tell ’em you got an ex-Navy buddy who’s got a cabin outside Livingston, near where the rancher lives. Tell ’em this buddy of yours is part of a local animal rights group, and he’ll be there to show them the layout. But you also tell them he’s only gonna be around for a couple of weeks, so if they wanna do anything, they gotta do it soon. Got it?”

  “I got it.”

  “Good. Hang onto it.”

  30

  Bill Hammerstein and his partner turned off a state highway east of Livingston, Montana, and started up the ten-mile-long dirt road to Art Jimson’s ranch. For a good mile, they passed sections of fenced-off grazing land stretching off to the north, where open but hillier grazing country merged with the mountainous and heavily timbered Gallatin National Forest. Continuing on for several miles, they passed through rough pastureland that looked like it had gone through a series of upheavals before finally settling into corrugated terrain consisting of flattened ridge tops, narrow ravines, and open meadows. The high afternoon sun shone bright and clear, and the air had the crisp feel of early fall. As they purred over the bumpy, washboard road, wispy clouds of brown dust trailed up behind their black Buick and drifted off into the air like a slowly dissipating vapor.

  Art Jimson’s ranch house sat at the top of a small rise. It had a broad front porch, two dormer windows set into a royal blue metal roof, and a rock chimney at one end. Painted a pastel blue with white trim around the windows, it overlooked a small parking area demarcated by a necklace of whitewashed rocks with a flagpole in the middle. A gravel pathway led up to the porch steps.

  The two agents parked the Buick and, as they got out of the car, Art came out onto the porch to meet them. “You guys get to travel a lot, dontcha?”

  “The job does have its perks,” Tom replied.

  The three men shook hands, and Art led them into the house. He offered them chairs in the living room. “I’ll have Lila fix us some coffee,” he said. “If you’re here a little later, she’ll fix us some lunch. But, tell me, what’s the latest?”

  They had been out to Jimson’s ranch not too long before to discuss their plan. Art had told them he had no objection to being part of what they termed an intensive government effort to unmask and convict a group (and, possibly, groups) of domestic terrorists. For a long while now, he had felt unduly put upon by the unfair categorization of what he deemed his God-given right to protect his livelihood against a predator whose existence threatened to upset a delicate balance. Frankly, he had no use for wolves or for misguided, sentimental dogooders, some of whom followed him around town wearing wolf-masks and confronting him with protest signs. So, without much reservation, he had in fact looked upon the agents’ proposal as a way to strike a blow for himself. Ordinarily, he was not a vindictive man, had the easy tolerance of a lot of Montanans, but he also had his limits. His only concern had to do with the cattle. With the way the
y wanted to implement their plan, he could see the possibility of a turkey shoot, or a lot of dead cattle strewn about the property. On the other hand, so long as the government made good the loss, he supposed he could live with it.

  “We got the word,” Bill said, “and now we wanna set it up.”

  For the next hour and a half the three men sat in the comfort of Art’s Western-style living room—stone fireplace, mounted elk head, Navajo-blanket couch and chairs, and a bearskin rug—and discussed the details of the plan the agents had formulated. The only thing left out was a timetable and the coordination of the activity itself.

  For the latter, they needed a battle plan.

  “I got lots of time,” Art said. “So I’m good there. But what’s this about a battle plan?”

  “Figuratively speaking, of course,” Bill assured him. “You see, what we have to do is control their line of attack, which we can do because we have a man in their organization. And that’s actually the easy part. But what we don’t have is a way to spring a trap. To do that, we have to position our agents in a certain way. It’ll be a pincer movement, and that’ll depend on the lay of the land. Our boy’ll bring ’em up to a certain point, which we’ll know about ahead of time, then we’ll move in on them. Kind of like herding cattle, is how I look at it.”

  Art had to laugh. “Goddamn, you sure make it sound easy,” he said. “You sure it’ll pan out that way?”

  “It can’t miss,” Bill said.

  “We’ve practically orchestrated this whole business from beginning to end,” his partner confirmed. “And everything is beginning to fall into place.”

  “We may have to candy-wrap the outcome, of course, but you don’t have to worry.”

  “Well, if you boys say so. I just hope you’re right.” Art shifted a bit nervously in his chair. His recollection of their first meeting did not include all this talk about a battle plan. As he recalled, the original idea was to let the group fire a few shots, knock off one or two of his cattle, then move in and arrest them. But the conversation now conjured images of a furious gunfight, with bullets coming in from everywhere and a mess of casualties afterwards. He didn’t mind helping the two agents nail a band of malcontents, especially as they posed a threat to himself, but the resulting publicity could jeopardize his peace of mind. What with television crews and obnoxious reporters looking to titillate the public with lurid stories about a crazy-eyed rancher out to exterminate the wolf population, he’d probably never hear the end of it. He’d already had a taste of how uncomfortable being in the spotlight could be—he didn’t feel up to another dose of the same.

  “Like I said, we got a man on the inside,” Bill continued to reassure him. “We allow things to go so far, then he steps in and brings everything to a standstill. Trust me, we’re not gonna let this thing get outta hand. Our objective is to use this group as an example. We want to send a message to all like-minded groups that this is what will happened. And we can’t expect to do that if we initiate a bloodbath. I mean, look what happened at Waco—we’re still feeling repercussions from that, not to mention Timothy McVeigh’s reaction.”

  Art Jimson sighed. He didn’t feel entirely reassured; after all, the best laid plans of mice and men… But neither did he approve of the tactics used by these environmentalists; if he could be instrumental in bringing some of them to justice, he’d participate. He didn’t exactly consider himself and the federal government to be part of a tight brotherhood of similar interests—too damn many regulations for that!—but he was patriotic enough to overlook predispositions. And, of course, he was not unmindful of how he might benefit from a little reciprocity: somewhere down the line, a grateful government might dispense a favor or two.

  “Well, tell me more about this battle plan of yours. What exactly do you have in mind?”

  “It involves using terrain to our best advantage…”

  “Like stationing people in certain strategic positions?”

  “That’s right. But, listen, that’s one of the things we have to do, anyway, is determine how we’re gonna disperse our people. Maybe we can take care of that now? See what we’ve got to work with…”

  The entire sweep of Art Jimson’s ranch, all the way up to the edge of the Gallatin National Forest, approximated the shape of a trapezoid. It was about three or four miles across the back, a little over three miles deep, and a couple of miles along the front. Except for a swath of flat ground surrounding the house and several outbuildings, including a barn, most of the terrain within this trapezoid had the rumpled appearance of a badly laid green carpet. Leaving out an occasional lone oak or a clump of scrub bush, it was characterized by smoothly lumped hills, low-lying ridges, rounded knolls, and numerous gullies that channeled rainwater and snow runoff from the higher elevations. A coarse range grass covered most of it, providing forage for five hundred head of cattle.

  “So it just keeps going until you get to the tree-line, is that it?” Bill wondered aloud as he raised a pair of binoculars and scoured a nearby ridge for possible positions.

  “That’s right,” Art told him. “But it’s all open country. If you’re coming from the other direction, all you gotta do is stay on a southerly course, an’ you’ll run right into the highway. If you more or less follow the gullies, you’ll stay on track.”

  The three men had gone out behind the house, where several holding pens, a horse corral, and a large barn were located. While the two agents listened, Art did his best to give a visual impression of the sizable back section of his ranch. The picture he drew imparted the kind of information they would need to implement their plan.

  Tom wanted to know about hiking time: “How long from the tree-line to here?”

  “I’ve never done it on foot. But a couple of hours, anyway, maybe more. And, at night, who knows? If you’re not familiar with the terrain or don’t have a compass to guide you, you might go in circles. But, let me ask you this: Where do you expect them to be starting from, anyway?”

  “The map shows a road from Timberland to the edge of the forest. They’ll have to drive that far, then walk the rest of the way.”

  “That could be quite a walk. You sure they’re gonna be up to it? They’ve never been here before, and they don’ know what they’re in for.”

  “With these folks, I hesitate to say. But I expect they’ll wanna be prepared.”

  “Prepared or not, it’ll be a helluva good after-supper walk.”

  Bill chuckled and handed the binoculars to his partner.

  “Take a look, Tom. There’s a small hill out there that’s got a ridgeline that’d give them the kind of vantage point they’d probably want. It’s where I’d wanna be, anyway, higher up.”

  Tom looked through the binoculars. “Yeah, it puts them a good hundred and fifty yards off. If they were on this side of it, they’d be on level ground and out in the open.”

  “It slopes down on the far side,” Art added helpfully. “And it puts them right in line with the cattle pens.”

  “That’s want they’d want.”

  “Who’s gonna tell ’em all this?” Art laughed. “You gonna send them instructions?”

  “That’s the inside man’s job, Art. He’s gonna scout the area, then report back to them with a description of the battlefield, although he’ll have been briefed beforehand.”

  “You keep using that terminology, like you’re getting ready to fight a war or something. I gotta admit, that kind of bothers me. It don’t make me feel any better about this whole business.”

  “Like I said, Art, we’ve got it under control. But pardon the terminology…nothing more, really, than a figure of speech.”

  “I’ll try to remember that.”

  The note-taking and the observations ended a short time later, and Art and the two agents walked back to the front of the house.

  “The timetable is the next thing we have to work out,” Bill said. “We’ll get that to you just as soon as we have the information in hand ourselves. But you’ll have
plenty of notice—don’t worry about that.”

  The three men shook hands, and the agents thanked Art for his cooperation.

  “It’s not every day that you get to do something like this for your country,” Bill said. “And, believe me, it won’t be forgotten.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of.” Art laughed. “But, hey, I guess it’s my patriotic duty to help root out these crazy environmentalists. If we can put a few of them outta commission, that’s fine with me. Let the legitimate ones talk all they want about birds and flowers and saving endangered frogs and fishes. Just let us handle our own affairs out here.”

  He watched the two agents drive off. He couldn’t decide if their visit left him feeling any better about letting them use his ranch as part of an object lesson or not. He wanted to do his bit to defeat terrorism, domestic or otherwise, but still had doubts about his involvement. After all, back when the West was settled, wolves had always been considered nothing but pests, just like any other varmint, and he couldn’t understand why they should be considered any less so now. Nor could he see why a bunch of citified environmentalists were up in arms about shooting a few of them. They didn’t live out here and they didn’t have to deal with the problem. Why the hell couldn’t they just leave the ranchers to their own devices? The ranchers had cattle to protect and knew what needed to be done to protect them. They didn’t need a bunch of strangers to interfere. They didn’t need do-gooders and self-righteous outsiders to teach anybody a lesson about anything. Hell, why were they coming all the way out here, anyway? Crazy—that’s why!

  Shaking his head at the thought, Art went back into the house.

  31

  Carlos had been a loan officer now going on five years. In the beginning the rewards had been spotty. Loans had taken longer to close and had often been more problematic than he anticipated. He supposed back then he had been too influenced by the easy money he had heard about from other Hispanics in the business. They all drove new BMWs, beefed-up Camaros, or Cadillacs, and they were able to send large amounts of money to their families back in Mexico. Compared to the jobs most Hispanics had, it was a lucrative profession, and he decided he wanted some of the action.