“Where were you standing then?”
“Over there. By the door. I could see pretty good.”
“Could you see both of them?”
“Yeah … well, not really. I could see Joe’s back and see some of the kid. Joe’s a big guy, and the kid isn’t very big.”
“Could you hear what was being said?”
“Just Joe. Joe was being pretty loud. The kid was talking fast, but I couldn’t hear him over Joe’s voice.”
“What was Joe saying?”
“Threats, mostly.”
“Where were the rest of them?”
“The other ones? There was four of them, three big guys and a girl. The girl was in the cab. One of the guys was standing at the front of the truck there, checking his oil or his coolant or something.”
“Odd thing to do during an armed robbery. What did they do when they saw Bell coming out?”
“They kind of froze solid. The girl tries to get out of the truck, and the biggest Indian, he goes for the back but keeps the truck between him and Joe, and then Joe starts firing.”
McAllister thought it over for a bit.
“Okay, Marla. You tell it like you saw it, I don’t think Joe Bell will hold it against you.” McAllister thought she was the least of Bell’s troubles.
“We’ll haveta see, won’t we?”
“Yeah. You have a ride back to Hardin?”
“Yeah. I got an old Riviera out back.”
“Okay, Marla. We’ll have to talk again. You don’t worry about it, right? There’ll be a shooting board sometime in the next couple of days. We’ll need you to appear, tell the board what you saw.”
“What’s a shooting board?”
“Every time an officer in Montana fires his weapon, there has to be a formal inquiry. The DA and a couple of experienced detectives talk to everyone who witnessed the event, and then they decide whether or not the officer was justified in using his weapon.”
“So it’s about you, and shooting Joe Bell?”
“That’s right.”
“Why did you shoot Joe, anyway?”
Beau inclined his head toward the propane tank.
“That tank. Bell was shooting right at it. If he’d punctured it, we’d all be dead.”
Her eyes widened, and she sighed.
“Hell of a day. Burned my dress, broke three nails, then we get robbed. You ever have a day like that, Sergeant?”
“You’re looking at one right now, Marla. You take care of yourself.”
Marla shrugged and walked back toward the kitchen. McAllister went into Joe Bell’s office. The first thing he saw was the phone on Bell’s desk. Bell had a business phone, a multiline with a board full of push-buttons and lights. The machine was howling. Beau recognized the electronic warning for a phone off the hook. He searched around the thing for a bit until he found a button that said SPK. It was lit up red. He punched it, and the light went out, and the noise stopped. He picked up the receiver and got a normal dial tone.
McAllister sat down at Bell’s desk and flipped the dead man’s wallet out onto the top. The kid had died with … close to seven hundred dollars! And what was this? Gold American Express card in the name of Edward Gall. A whole packet of gas receipts. A cash card for one of those electronic machines. BankAmericard. A California driver’s license, picture ID of a young man who looked like the boy out in the yard. Showing an address of 1623 Vallejo Canyon Drive, Los Angeles. Also a plastic hospital card showing that an Edward Gall had been admitted to something called the Sonesta Clinic in March of this year.
And a couple of photographs of a strong-featured young Indian woman in what looked like a school uniform, a pink tunic and a white blouse. It made McAllister think of reservation schools like the one his first wife had attended, a long time ago.
Interesting … looked like young Mr. Gall here wasn’t exactly hard up for cash when he apparently set himself to rob Joe Bell at knifepoint in the middle of the day in the middle of a crowd of people. And they brought along a young girl to watch them do it.
There was an old joke about only an Indian being dumb enough to bring a knife to a gunfight, but this was pushing it. It ran contrary to everything in Beau’s experience of armed robbers, which was considerable. He moved his leg and felt something along the side of the desk.
Bell had a rifle sling bolted to the inside well of his desk. Big enough for the Winchester. The top was a litter of bills, receipts, yellow pads, assorted junk. McAllister pulled open some drawers. The first one had checks and some loose cash. The second drawer was locked. The third one was full of magazines and videos.
Swedish Nights. Ballbusters. Seka’s Greatest Hits. The usual full-color hardcore entertainments, based largely on having low gag-reflexes and being double-jointed. This stuff always reminded Beau of autopsies, all that red flesh and slippery skin. Sexy as a federal audit. There was a television set on top of a filing cabinet, and a VCR beneath the TV. Bell’s wastepaper basket was stuffed full of old wadded-up tissues. Best thing to do with that was to take it out back and set it on fire.
Porn videos and skin mags.
This garbage was illegal in Montana, but McAllister had better things to do than police other people’s entertainments. A lot of unmarried men had worse than this under their bunks. At least it kept them away from the schoolyards—
Oh, Christ!
He grabbed up the handset and punched in seven numbers, looking at his wristwatch as the line started to ring.
“Hello.”
“Maureen, it’s Beau!”
“You’ve done it again, haven’t you, Beau.”
There was that tone—all sweet reason and razor blades.
“Maureen, we’ve got a real thing going on down here at Joe Bell’s.”
“Don’t you always? How do you think Roberta Lee’s feeling right now? Or do you care?”
“Of course I care, Maureen. You know that.”
“I do? She’s six years old today, Beau. In case you forgot that, too. She’s been out on the front step for an hour. She won’t come in because she knows you’re coming soon. She’s got her blue dress on, and she won’t come in. Do you care about that?”
“I know, Maureen, I do care. I’ve got a whole party set up. Everybody’s gonna be there, and we have it all—”
“You know the rules, Beau.”
McAllister tried very hard not to pull out his Browning and send a round down the phone line. He imagined it hitting Maureen in the ear and going right through her head and out the other ear.
“Maureen—”
“You signed the agreement. Dwight says I’ve been more than fair about access.”
“Let’s leave Dwight out of this, can we? Just for now? I can be there in half an hour!”
Less, if I take the cruiser and don’t change. Use the siren. He sniffed at his shirt. God, he smelled like a dead bat dipped in gasoline.
“The agreement says if you’re late one more time—”
“Maureen, it’s her birthday. She’s just six. Don’t make her part of this. She’s too young to understand. All she’ll think is I don’t—”
“She’d be right.”
“You know that’s not true, Maureen. I’ve had to fight you and that son of a bitch Hogeland for every minute with her. Would I do that if I didn’t care about her?”
“Dwight’s twice the father you are to her. She—”
“Dwight’s your goddamned lawyer, Maureen! He’s not her father. I’m her father, and I have a right to—”
“Take her to Fogarty’s so she can hang out with a bunch of lesbians and bums and cops? Dwight’s been telling me about that crowd. No, Beau—”
“Maureen, don’t do this again!”
“You’ve got to learn a lesson. You have to take your responsibilities seriously, Beau.”
Jesus, that voice. It was in his ear like a wasp. He fought to keep the tremor out of his voice.
“I have the right, Beau. The agreement says—”
“Hey, Maureen. Fuck the agreement! And fuck Dwight!”
“Thanks, Beau. Maybe I will.”
And she was gone.
McAllister stood there for a long time, breathing in and out rapidly and looking at his reflection in the black screen of the television on top of the filing cabinet.
He saw a forty-five-year-old cop in a rumpled tan uniform with two days of beard on a face like old leather and more gray than black in his hair. He saw a man with a large ragged salt-and-pepper moustache and tired blue eyes who had done a lot of damage for one Friday shift; he’d shot a man in the ass when he was aiming for his foot, he’d let a bunch of Indians shoot arrows at him and then walk away smiling, and he had just now totally torched his chances of getting to see his daughter on her sixth birthday.
What he saw did not impress him.
He put both his hands on the inside lip of Joe Bell’s desk and heaved it hard upward. It flipped over away from him, papers and drawers flying, pens and pencils clattering and spinning, a tremendous crash and clang as the gray metal desk hit the floor ten feet away. The drawers spilled out all over the greasy tiles, a ragged fan of porn magazines, slips of paper, loose bills.
There was a large mass of duct tape attached to the underside of the bottom drawer. If Bell had put that packet there, whatever was inside it was kind of important to him.
But Joe Bell wasn’t the target of an investigation right now. McAllister had no legal right even to be inside Bell’s office, let alone throwing his furniture around like a drunken cowhand in a bar fight.
And if Joe Bell did become the target of an investigation, then anything McAllister found inside Bell’s office before getting a legal search warrant would be inadmissible in a court of law. Fruit of a Poisoned Tree. Fourth Amendment. Weeks. Mallory. All that voodoo.
Beau knew damned well what a good cop would do now. He’d leave it alone. Yes sir—that was what a good cop would do.
McAllister got down on his knees and used a corner of a stapler to pry up a section of the silver mound of duct tape. It came away from the gray metal easily. There was a flat plastic box in the center of the mound. And inside the plastic box, something flat and rainbow colored glimmered like a jewel.
Hell, it was a computer disk!
Why the hell would Joe Bell be hiding a computer disk under his desk? He started to rip the tape away when he heard somebody clearing his throat in a theatrical way.
A short black man in a starched and razor-pressed Montana Highway Patrol uniform was leaning on the doorjamb. He had his hat pushed back away from his shiny bald blue-black head, and his exceedingly muscular arms were crossed over his weightlifter’s chest. His badge glittered in the downlight. His shoulder bars gleamed. His clean-shaven face was fine-boned and hard-looking. He was grinning the kind of grin you give your kid when you catch him with his head stuffed inside a bottle of your favorite bourbon.
Beau McAllister got slowly to his feet. They both looked around the room awhile. McAllister tried a smile.
“Afternoon, Eustace,” he said, shuffling a boot through a pile of papers. “I suppose you’re wondering what the hell’s going on in here.”
“No,” said Eustace, “I wasn’t. I can see what’s going on in here. What’s going on in here is either a class C felony or a violation of several elements of the Fourth Amendment.”
“Look … aah …”
Meagher held up one elegant pink-palmed hand. More gold glittered from his FBI Academy ring.
“Beau, you only call me lieutenant when you’re gonna tell me something I don’t wanna hear. Like when you’ve shot the wrong guy or something. Is this gonna be one of those times?”
“Well … Lieutenant …”
2
1500 Hours–June 14–Los Angeles, California
Braced against the wind, Gabriel Picketwire walked back to the edge of the roof and looked out at the Pacific. One hundred feet gave you a lot to look at. The sun was still high in a sky the color of sulphur. On the windward shore of Catalina Island a heavy sea boiled along the rocky shores. Gulls screamed and dipped at the rockline, snatching at crabs and dead fish. The sun broke up on the whitecaps like yellow glass. In the San Pedro channel, butting like rams through the surge, bluewater trawlers heading in to Long Beach harbor dumped their old bait into the churning current. Yellow lances of sunlight shimmered in the hazy water.
Gabriel knew that twenty feet down, drawn by the chum and the smell of blood washing off the trawler decks, bulls and makos and whitetips circled and darted, jaws working, gills extended, dead eyes swiveling in powder-blue flesh. He had seen them. Once, on a shoot at Catalina, he had killed a bull shark with a compressor-gun. Broken at the spine, it had slashed and twisted at the wound. It had been eaten by the others before it could die. He remembered its one black eye and his image in it as a whitetip struck from beneath and tore out its stomach.
A hot wind thick with dust and the iron smell of the open sea drove a flutter of white sails over the hammered bronze surface of the water. Close to the shoreline at Sunset Beach, a few surfers in acid greens and hot pink rubber cut lacy arcs into the green shoulders of ocean rollers, and the hot wind drove the salt spray back north along the edge of the waves. Along the beaches a few sunbathers dug in behind dunes and jerry-built windbreaks, working through Styrofoam boxes of warm beer, chasing the old dream of sunset days and California nights. Across the coast, highway oil derricks rusted into ruin in a clutter of warehouses, dead cars, and empty lots.
Gabriel looked down at the second-unit film crew working at the dumpster a hundred feet below him. They were trying to get the air bag pumped up, and it looked as if they were having trouble with the compressor again. He could hear them yelling at each other, a strange high sound like the cry of the gulls out there on the ocean.
The lot below was a crowded litter of trailers and cars and catering trucks and lighting rigs. Black cables snaked everywhere from a big transformer truck near the chain link fence. As usual, the talent was hiding out in their Winnebagos, four in a row, one for each of them, the size and placement of each Winnebago the consequence of weeks of talk and six full pages of legal terminology.
Around the set, hundreds of people were in constant motion with clipboards and radios. From a hundred feet up they all looked like brightly feathered birds in a box. They were like that when you were down there with them, too—all herky-jerky motions and chatter and that same kind of birdbrain self-satisfaction you could see in a budgy or a parrot.
Well, if you don’t like the company, find another line of work. Stop whining to yourself. What was bothering him wasn’t putting up with the people or even an asshole director like Nigel Hampton. It was that hot wind from the south that was whipping up the ocean out there and tugging at his flak jacket and flaring his thick black hair. He had a hundred feet to cover, at thirty-two feet per second squared every thirty-two feet. He was carrying an M-16 that weighed ten pounds, and he had six pounds of calf liver taped to his chest, over three explosive squibs and the radio detonator. Under the liver and the black-powder squibs he had a Kevlar and asbestos vest. Under that there was only him. He drew a long breath and felt the wind at his cheek. Holding a palm up into it, he stood awhile, lost in that sensation. Then he pushed the jump-marker a few inches to the left. It would be like throwing a Hail Mary pass the length of the field, with a bad side wind. He would have to allow for that.
Gabriel was six feet even, and the last time he’d weighed himself, he had been a reasonable one sixty-five. He was good at his work. There wasn’t much that worried him. Dying like a putz in a fucked-up gag was one thing that did.
They had rigged a transmitter under his flak vest. He keyed it on again. Mike’s voice buzzed in his left ear.
“Mr. Picketwire—you reading?”
“I’m reading you, Mike. What’s the story down there? This wind isn’t getting any better up here.”
He saw one of the crewmen around the dumpster step back and look up at him.
“We’re okay now. The compressor was fucked. Jody hadn’t changed the filter, so we were pushing crap into the nozzle. This bag’ll be up in about a minute. You still gonna do this thing?”
“Is Nigel ready?”
“Yeah.… He’s got Silverman here with him, so he’s gotta show her pages, and we been stuck on this gag for two days.”
“I told him to second-unit the gags. The rest of these people could be doing interiors in Vancouver. He could shoot around this scene.”
“Yeah. Well, you know Hampton. He’s an auteur, right?”
“Yeah. Well, buzz me when it’s up. I stand around here any longer, I’m gonna talk myself out of it.”
“Mr. Picketwire—Gabriel—why don’t we rig the harness instead? Drop on a line. Use the drum.”
“Don’t trust the line. Someday somebody’ll die on one.”
“Okay. One minute, then I’ll cue you.”
Gabriel stepped back away from the edge. The tiles grated under his combat boots. The wind was a steady force up here, dry and dirty as truck exhaust. Under the soldier’s gear—so familiar and so strange—he could feel sweat running into the small of his back. Far into the east he could see the low black line of the San Bernardino Mountains. Beyond that there was desert, and then the big range. Home was back beyond that, as much as any of his people had homes anywhere now.
He let his mind go that way for a while, wondering about Eddie and Earl Black Elk and old Jubal and his emphysema and whether that blue truck had made the climb through the passes. Well, if they had trouble, they’d call him. They’d promised him that.
Something was moving against the smog and the haze. He strained to focus on it. Something flying out there. A small plane, maybe. Or a large bird. It rose up on a thermal and banked in a huge arc and dipped down again. Then it disappeared.
Be good if that were an eagle or a hawk, thought Gabriel. How good it would be to believe in that kind of sign now. If that were really a hawk, it would mean something. It would be good to be able to believe in any kind of sign.
Lizardskin Page 4