Lizardskin

by Carsten Stroud

  That was the thing about working with these people out here. They knew about everything and believed in nothing. It was contagious. Now he had to turn around and walk over to the edge of the roof and step off without believing in anything but physics and gravity.

  He felt the need to urinate. He ignored the radio and walked over to an elevator cage. Better to leave this here, he thought. He’d seen men with belly wounds, seen how a full bladder of urine could kill you with a wound like that. If he drifted on the way down, he’d miss that bag. Maybe miss the whole dumpster. Maybe not. That would be worse. He might live.

  “Gabriel. Hey, you there?”

  He finished and walked back to the jump-marker, waved down at the crew. A hundred white faces looked up at him. Birds in a box.

  “You ready?”

  “I’m ready.”

  “Just a minute—Gabriel, Nigel wants me to say how much he appreciates this take. He knows you’ll give it all you’ve got.”

  “Tell Nigel he’s gonna see everything I’ve got if I miss that bag.”

  “Squibs armed. Okay … they’re rolling … when you’re ready, Mr. Picketwire. When you’re ready.”

  He was at the edge of the roof now. He looked out to sea again, saw the curve of the world and the tiny white sails in the bronze light and the color of everything. He smelled salt and blood and sensed the things moving under the surface out there. Life was everywhere around him, and the wind was sliding over his left cheek. A hundred feet below him the black rectangle of the dumpster looked like a small door to somewhere far away.

  He raised the rifle and drew back the bolt and let it snap home, feeling the first round grate up out of the magazine and slide into the chamber. It all felt very familiar, and he remembered a time when believing in nothing at all was the only way to come out alive.

  “It is a good day to die,” he said, not believing in the words. He moved forward.

  Bullshit—it’s never a good day to die.

  He felt the explosions tearing at his chest. The wind was all around him. The flak jacket spread open, and he dropped through the light. The M-16 was working against his ribs. He held it in close. White flame seared his cheek. The black door rose up at him, a flat denial of metaphysics. Maybe he had seen a hawk.

  Maybe it was a hawk.

  Maybe it was a

  3

  1900 Hours–June 14–Billings, Montana

  McAllister followed Lieutenant Meagher’s navy-blue Town Car all the way back to the station house in Billings, trying to enjoy the sundown on the ancient slopes and the way the light was always changing along the valleys, trying not to think about how it would go once they got there.

  He hadn’t exactly covered himself in glory back there at Pompeys Pillar, although he was damned if he could think of any other way he could have handled the situation.

  One thing for sure, Eustace had no intention of letting McAllister root through Bell’s office with no particular idea of what he was rooting for. Meagher had made sure that Beau put the office back together—the compact disk still in the case, the tape mound intact—and then he walked him out of the office and back to the crime scene.

  By then, the Criminal Investigation Bureau guys from the state were there, a couple of plainclothes guys named Finch Hyam and Rowdy Klein. Klein was a long bony bundle with large pale hands and floppy feet whose real name was Rudy but who refused to answer to anything but Rowdy after seeing a bunch of Rawhide reruns on cable TV. He kept it up so long that the rest of the men and women on the force had been plain worn down. Even Eustace called him Rowdy now.

  Beau always made it a point to call him Howdy every chance he got. By way of getting even, Rowdy always called Beau by his full name, pronouncing it Bo-ree-gard.

  Finch was just Finch, a silly bird-name on a man his size, but Finch was a solid investigator and a reasonable man with a very sweet wife who made it a point to try to match up Beau with any spare woman she could find. Like all good wives, she hated to see a man running loose. It offended her sense of order.

  Rowdy and Finch looked up as they walked over. Rowdy had the kid’s shirt pulled up, and they were looking hard at something on his chest.

  “Hey, LT,” said Finch, smiling at Beau but talking to Lieutenant Meagher. “Whaddya make of that?”

  They had the boy’s bloody plaid shirt pulled up to his neck. There were four ugly scars on his chest, just above the nipples. Fresh. One of them was still weeping. They were odd, paired scars, each cut about four inches long, running parallel, one set about three inches above his right nipple, the other set over his left.

  “Jesus!” said Eustace, who always got a little sick around blood and wounds. “What the hell did that?”

  “Beats me,” said Rowdy, shaking his head. “Got into a fight, maybe? Somebody with a knife?”

  “Real regular, aren’t they?” said Finch. “He’d haveta stay pretty still to get himself cut up like that. You figure he’d be jumping around a bit, somebody cutting him like that.”

  “What’s Bo-ree-gard got to say?” asked Rowdy, looking at Beau like a mortician sizing up a client.

  “Beats me, Howdy. Maybe an animal did this. Some kinda cat or something?”

  “Nice deduction, Beau,” said Finch. “Don’t quit yer day job. Sure as hell isn’t any cat I ever saw.”

  Eustace had his control back now. He dusted his palms together, although he had never touched the body. “The doc been here?”

  “Yeah.” Finch inclined his head toward a Jeep Cherokee parked a few yards away. Inside a young man in a gray suit was talking into a cellular phone. “Vlasic’s calling Bob Gentile’s people now. They’ll get a wagon out here and take him in to the hospital. You want an autopsy, LT?”

  “It’s a homicide, isn’t it?”

  “Looks like self-defense to us, LT.”

  “Yeah … but we do the thing right.”

  Beau felt a kind of sadness for the boy.

  “What’re we gonna do about Bell?”

  “You’re not gonna do anything about Bell, McAllister!” said Eustace. “You and me, we’re gonna go back to the station and sort out some divergent views on operational procedure.”

  “Hey, LT,” said Rowdy. “You shouldn’t talk about Bo-ree-gard that way. He’s doing the best he can with what he got.”

  “Thanks, Howdy. And here I was just thinking that you probably couldn’t talk at all unless somebody had his arm shoved up your ass. Say hi to Clarabelle for me, willya?”

  “Fuck yourself, McAllister.”

  Beau was going to say something else, but he caught the look Eustace was giving him and he shut up.

  He had rolled these thoughts around in his mind all the way back to Billings. They parked side by side in front of the low yellow breeze-block building next to the Highway Department’s truckyard on Foote Street, in the middle of a sprawl of warehouses, truck depots, gas stations, and roadhouses.

  PUBLIC SAFETY BUILDING

  MONTANA HIGHWAY PATROL

  Behind the new bulletproof glass wall, Sergeant Myron Sugar was typing away at an old Remington machine, his fine Mediterranean features taut with concentration. He raised a languid hand without looking up.

  The rest of the desks were empty at this time on a Friday. Most of the patrol guys were out on the six-six night shift. And it was still too early on a Friday night for the usual crowd of drunken ranchers and maudlin cowhands and grifters off the interstate to build up in the waiting rooms and the cells downstairs. Finch Hyam and Rowdy Klein were the only Criminal Investigation Bureau men stationed at this branch, and they were still back at Bell’s Oasis, tagging arrows and telling each other war stories.

  “Hey, LT—Beau—I hear you shot Joe Bell. Good for you. He gonna live?”

  “He’ll live,” said Eustace.

  “Too bad,” said Myron, who had once locked horns with Bell during a pool game over at Fogarty’s New York Bar in Pompey. Bell had called him a kike. Myron had expressed his dislike of that
term with a cue ball.

  In Meagher’s office, a large room with a massive metal desk and a long row of filing cabinets with a coffee machine on top, Eustace poured them coffee. Eustace got his favorite, a big china mug with the FBI seal on it. Beau got one shaped like a pig in a blue uniform. Beau hated it because to get any coffee out of it you had to look like you were kissing the pig on the snout. It was one of Meagher’s little jokes.

  Beau looked around at the pictures and certificates on the wall while Meagher riffled through his While You Were Out slips and made a few apparently urgent calls. Letting McAllister sweat a bit. Beau went back to looking at the pictures all over the office walls.

  Meagher had a poster on the wall behind his desk. It read:

  WHAT PART OF “NO!” DON’T YOU UNDERSTAND?

  And the pictures—there was Eustace in his graduation class at Quantico, in a lineup of sixty guys as tightly wrapped as he was, everybody grinning like they had a secret you’d never guess. And Eustace with Robert Ressler, head of the FBI’s Behavioral Sciences lab, and Eustace with Dan Quayle and the governor. Eustace with Doc Darryl Hogeland—Dwight Hogeland’s famous father and a great argument against evolution, since the father was a fine man and the son was a legalistic weasel: Eustace was standing beside the doctor’s navy-blue Learjet. Eustace with Doc Hogeland again, at the opening of the Hogeland Oncology Wing at Sweetwater General here in Billings; Eustace holding one end of a blown-up check, money raised from District Four of the Montana Highway Patrol last year.

  Beau had to smile at that one. The lieutenant’s fund-raising method was sort of like the IRS—he had it taken off their paychecks. When he looked back at Eustace, the lieutenant was looking at him and tugging on his lip. Beau tried a big disarming smile.

  He got a thin grin back.

  “This part of a campaign you’re on, Beau? Discourage the citizens from cluttering up the 911 line? Every time one of ’em calls in, we send you out there and you shoot ’em?”

  “Not a bad idea, LT. I say, why wait till they call? I’m out there, I could just pick one at random, smoke him. Be like the lottery, only instead of going to Hawaii, you die.”

  “You give them a running start?”

  “Nah—just blast away at ’em. They’ll figure it out.”

  “That’s true. Way you shoot, never know, they might just die of old age waiting for you to get the windage. Thornton tells me you were aiming at Bell’s foot.”

  “Yeah. You can always tell what I was aiming at by what I hit. Take fifty feet of string and a piece of chalk, draw a big circle around the bullet hole. It’s probably in there somewhere.”

  “Yeah. Shoot at his foot, hit him in the ass.”

  “It was a larger target. Bell’s got an ass like a harvest moon. Bell gets any fatter, they’ll give him his own area code.”

  “And while you’re popping away trying to hit Bell’s ass, three, maybe four armed robbers are zipping off into the hills. I’m gonna love writing this one up for the brass in Helena. So just for the record, why’nt you tell me—in your own words— just how this all happened?”

  “This a Q and A?”

  “You see a tape recorder? You see Vanessa down here?”

  “Oh, Christ—Ballard catching today?”

  “None other. She’s the duty DA all weekend. Your luck.”

  “Jeez, I thought she was down at her place in Red Lodge.”

  “Nope. So we better get this right.”

  “Hell. Why can’t women just do what God made them for?”

  “Beau, I tell you, that’s what God made her to do. She’s the best DA in eastern Montana.”

  “I know that. She still makes me jumpy.”

  “When they told you these were the nineties, Beau, they didn’t mean the eighteen nineties.”

  “Damned affirmative action.”

  “That’s not how Ballard got here. You saying that’s how I got here?”

  “You know what I’m saying, Eustace. You didn’t get here because you’re black. You got here because you were a hotshot fed and a good cop. Nowadays, the only way to get into the force is to be a Native American lesbian dwarf with a wooden leg and an ACLU card. Cover a shitload of federal quotas there. Just don’t be tall enough to reach the pedals on the cruisers or help out in a bar fight. Last week, remember that go-round at Twilly’s?”

  “I remember.”

  “So do I—I’m getting the shit kicked outta me by Johnny Karpo and that huge Crow girlfriend of his, Brenda Roan Horse? Who shows up but the Munchkin.”

  “He did okay, I hear.”

  “Oh, yeah—pulled some of that oriental martial arts stuff, and Brenda comes up behind him and throws him over the bar. That was fun to watch. Only reason I lived, Karpo turns to watch and I maced him.”

  “Maced him? Why the hell? Mace is for wimps.”

  “Left my gun in the car, Eustace. Somebody’s always pulling it outta my holster in Twilly’s, and then I gotta kick ass to get it back. Lately I just leave it in the cruiser—all they ever wanna do is brawl. No harm in them.”

  “How’d Karpo take to the mace?”

  “He didn’t like it.”

  “What’d you do then—hit him with a chair?”

  “Nah, a bottle. Word of advice there, LT. Never hit a man with one of them foreign Scotch bottles. The ones with the dented sides? They don’t break.”

  “What happened to the Munch—to Patrolman Benitez?”

  “He got the cuffs on Brenda. Finally. Guy’s so dumb, he couldn’t pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were written on the heel. That’s not the point. We got a lot of stupid troopers. That’s what traffic duty is for. Point is, he’s too short. He’s only on the job because he’s Hispanic.”

  “Well, at least you didn’t say spic.”

  “Don’t get on me about that shit, Eustace. You brought this up. I’m no racist. No sexist either. I think that Sonnette broad has the makings in her. And Myron out there, he’s one of the best we got. Today’s Friday, right? After six? That’s sabbath for Myron. You ever think of that when you’re setting up the duty rosters around here? You notice, he’s using the only manual typewriter we have so he can stay in line with the sabbath restrictions. He ever bitch to you about it?”

  “Can’t say he does.”

  “Can’t say? I know you can’t. Now Myron could pull some of that racial religious equal opportunity shit on you, say he’ll go to the union or the civil liberties people. But he doesn’t, because he’s a cop first and something else afterward. That’s all I’m saying.”

  “Christ, Beau. You get up on the wrong side of your cage?”

  Beau leaned back in the chair and let out a long slow sigh. “Not my best day, Eustace.”

  The lieutenant thought it over for a second.

  “Oh, hell. You’re not even supposed to be here, are you? You’re supposed to be taking Bobby Lee over to Lizardskin for a party! Why’nt you say something?”

  “Oh yeah—excuse me from the firefight, LT, I gotta take my kid to a party. That’d get me a citation for sure!”

  “That why you were hiding out up at the Elbow?”

  “Two hours left in the shift-well, there y’go.”

  “You wanna go now? We can do this tomorrow when things are slower. I’ll call Vanessa, tell her some story.”

  Beau tried to keep his smile in place, but inside he could feel that old blackness rising up. “No point now. Maureen pulled the plug.”

  “She did? How’d Bobby Lee take it?”

  “I don’t know. I never got the chance to ask her. I ended up saying something stupid, and Maureen hung up on me.”

  “What’d you say?”

  “She was quoting Hogeland at me. Guy’s all over me like a bad suit. I said fuck Dwight Hogeland—and she said thanks, Beau, maybe I will.”

  “Dwight’s getting real tangled up in this, isn’t he?”

  “I think so. I think he and Maureen—hell … it couldn’t be worse, Eustace.”

>   “Ethically, if he’s involved with her—you know—then he oughta get someone else in the firm to handle her file.”

  “Ethics are something Dwight doesn’t seem to have inherited from his father. Doc Hogeland—man, I can’t see how Doc can stand his own kid. Anyway, I screwed it up good with her.”

  “This before or after you whacked Joe Bell?”

  “After. That was when you came in on me, in Bell’s office. I sorta lost it and flipped his desk.”

  “That I had noticed.”

  “I still say there’s something rocky in his bedroll, LT.”

  “That more of your cowboy shit? Don’t tell me. What’d you get from the witnesses?”

  Beau ran it down for the lieutenant: the time of the call, their attendance at the scene, being fired upon by Bell, receiving hostile fire from the area by the propane tank.

  Meagher nodded through it all, considering how it would look to the district attorney.

  When Beau reached the point where he had fired to wound Joe Bell, Eustace shook his head slowly and made a couple of notes on his desk calendar.

  Beau was wrapping up his story when the intercom on the lieutenant’s desk buzzed.

  “Meagher here. What is it, Myron?”

  “Ballard’s here. You want her to wait?”

  “Tell her just a minute, Myron.… Well, Beau. This is it now. She’s gonna want to tape the whole thing. Not a formal Q and A, but it’ll be part of the official record. Also, she’s gonna be a tad pissed as well. I hear we’re getting sued. You want to go ahead now, or I can say you’re still in a reaction from the stress of the encounter, tell her to do this later tonight?”

  “Oh yeah—tell the Dragon Lady I’m stressed out? No way, Eustace. Bring her on, and damn the torpedoes.”

  “Well, I think we’re in good shape here. There’s a precedent for wounding fire if an officer perceives a danger to citizens. Just stick to your notes, and don’t let her get you rattled, okay?”

  Meagher leaned over and hit the intercom button. “Please ask Ms. Ballard to come in.”

  Beau and the lieutenant waited in taut silence for a minute. Beau tried to keep his heart from speeding up, tried to breathe slowly and steadily through his nose.