“Not anymore—now he’s mulch. You want to see the one you popped?”
“Christ, Marco. You’re such a sensitive guy.”
“Vita brevis, Beau. Especially when you’re on the case. Come over here, take a look at this.”
Vlasic pulled the cover back over the body. Beau watched it come up with a feeling composed of two parts sadness at the waste of life and one part joy that he was standing up looking down. Better you than me, friend.
“Now this is shooting, Beau. Classic head shot. Picture perfect. Such a good shot, you must have been aiming at something else.”
He was staring across the ruined flesh at Beau, a twist in his right cheek. The blue downlight gave him a sardonic shadowing. Beau took a long breath and came around.
The body lay on its back, naked, arms splayed out and slightly curled. One eye was closed, and one side of the dark and heavy-featured face seemed serene, at rest.
The other side of the face was gone. There was a ragged green and purple hole under the right eye. The orb itself was milky and protruded from the socket. Teeth and white bone showed in the crater that had been his cheek.
“And his wounds were all before him. Certainly wasn’t running away when you fired. What the hell did you use on him, Beau? A LAWS rocket?”
Vlasic raised the head and turned it on the limp neck. A massive exit wound, star-shaped, gaped in the blue light.
“See that. Like the nine-fourteen from Doomsville. Took him in the cheekbone there, powered right through, no deviation, no deflection. Hell of a round. You using that big nine-mill?”
“Yeah, the nine-mill. Jesus, Marco, put him down, willya? This isn’t a contest.”
Vlasic’s smile flickered off and then back on. He shook his head. “Yes, it was, Beau. That’s exactly what it was. This guy’s a killer. You can see it in him. You can smell it in him. Here’s a guy, been handing out death for a long time. You remember that when Vanessa and the gang start snapping and snarling at you tomorrow. I see a lot of death, Beau. Most of the people I see didn’t deserve it. But now and then, you see one like this, looks like it dropped in from the Jurassic period. A killer. The world’s a better place without things like this walking around upright.”
Beau stared down at the man for a long time.
There was a hell of a lot of dying going on around him, and none of it was making very much sense. This man had done his very best to kill Beau and had probably killed Peter Hinsdale as well. Maybe he deserved to die. But a lot of people who deserved to live were dead, and not everyone who died had died well or timely. He put out his hand and touched the shattered face. It felt damp and cool. A rough beard scraped against his fingertips.
There were two new scars above the man’s nipples. Lateral scars, paired like a mathematical symbol. Parallels.
“What do you make of these marks?”
Vlasic studied them for a bit.
“I’ve been wondering about them. We have what’s left of that Gall kid, the one these guys tried to steal? You don’t wanna see him. He’s pretty well toast. Shrunk down. Classic pugilist effect, you know, from the muscles contracting. Skin all baked off. But you could see there’d been—not incisions. They were into the pectoral muscles, just like here.”
Beau remembered those marks, and Finch and Klein had been talking about them at Bell’s Oasis.
“I saw them on the kid Bell shot. They were brand new, too. What do you figure made those marks? Animals? Some kind of machinery?”
“Hooks, maybe. Signs of tearing and pulling. Let me show you.”
Vlasic selected a scalpel from a standing tray and leaned over the broad chest, placing his fingers in a fan over the scar. He drew a thin arc. The skin opened behind the knife, showing blue flesh underneath. Vlasic peeled the tissue back, exposing the pink complex of muscles and ribs.
“See here—that’s tearing. Where the muscle has actually ripped. Somebody put a hook into this guy and pulled on it until the muscle ripped out. Ring a bell with you?”
“Not immediately.”
“No? Think Dances With Wolves. Little Big Man.” Then it came to Beau. He saw it complete, felt himself at the edge of illumination.
“Sun Dance? The ritual thing. Warriors used to do it—it was some kind of purification thing. Crazy Horse refused it. Sitting Bull went through it, just before the Custer battle. They have somebody pierce their chests with claws or something. The claws are attached to cords that go to the roof of the lodge, and they dance around the lodgepole, leaning back on the cords, putting their weight on it, until—”
Vlasic was nodding vigorously, bright with approval and enthusiasm.
“Until the cord breaks or the muscle tears. Try that the next time you’re depressed. You’re good, Beau. Didn’t think you paid any attention to history.”
“Marco, you can’t cross a coulee or ford a bend of any river in this state, anywhere west of the Missouri, without thinking about the people who used to live here. The country’s haunted.”
“So what do you make of this?”
Beau and Vlasic studied the body in silence.
“Well,” said Beau, finally, stepping back and drawing a long breath, “nobody’s gonna do that for fun. Why not just get a tattoo? No, this guy, he meant business. He was getting ready for something big. Something that meant a lot to him.”
Vlasic pushed the flesh into place and stepped back, reaching for an antiseptic tissue. He wiped his hands in an absent way, thinking about the puzzle.
“So the original beef was robbery, right?”
“That’s the story,” said Beau.
“But you don’t buy it?”
Beau was quiet for a while.
“It’s like this, Marco. Usually, when you’re trying to figure out why something happened, something criminal, it’s best to take the most obvious reason. Like, a wife gets killed, you take a hard look at the husband or the boyfriend. A bank gets taken for a major score, you look at the staff. There’s a hit in a crack house, you look at the tenants or the dopers next block over. Life’s pretty simple. But that Gall kid? He had close to seven hundred dollars in his pocket when he died. That doesn’t fit a robbery.”
“It would fit if it was part of an organized operation. Remember the Panthers, back in the sixties?”
“Organized for what, Marco?”
“Look at these wounds here. Can you imagine the pain involved, Beau? I cut myself shaving, it’s all I can do to get up the nerve to put on aftershave. Call it my manhood test. Scream when I do it, too. Drives my wife crazy. How you figure this guy here got the nerve to go through something like a Sun Dance?”
Beau shifted on his leg. The pain seemed electric. He saw it in his mind, a jagged bolt of blue lightning racing up his arteries, slamming into his brain.
Beau breathed out slowly and put a hand out on the edge of the table. Marco stepped toward him, then stepped back.
“How do people firewalk, Marco? Even Yuppies, New Age loonies in Oregon, they walk across red-hot coals. How do they do that?”
“Pain’s a mindless thing, Beau. Cut up these bodies, you can see the wiring. But it all runs to the brain, and the brain does what the mind tells it.”
“That’s a little simplistic, Marco.”
“Sure it is. I’m talking to you, right?”
“Right. So you’re saying, this guy was in a trance or something when this happened, when he went through this ritual?”
“Exactly. And what does that say about him?”
Suddenly, Beau felt very tired. His hand trembled on the stainless cart. “It says … belief. Fanatical belief.”
“Yeah. You know SPEAR’s into this thing, don’t you? You read about it in the Gazette?”
“Not yet. What’s the story?”
“Wait here. No, better yet, go over there and sit down. I’ll be right back.”
Marco led him over to a wooden chair at the end of a row of tables. Beau settled into it and put his head back against the wall. Vlasic
looked at him for a second, then walked into his office.
Beau found himself staring at the top of a dead woman’s head. Her hair was black and shiny, worn in two braids. Her skin was pale brown, and her young breasts rose up under the plastic.
Beau looked away, closed his eyes, and tried to will the pain away. It wouldn’t go. He figured that was the price of being a lapsed Catholic. If he still believed, maybe he could rise above the pain on a cloud of religious ecstasy. Like Cochise over there, riding a steel tray all the way to Valhalla.
Vlasic came back, folding a newspaper flat against his green hospital overalls.
“Here we go. ‘An attempted armed robbery ended in death’ … wait a minute, it was farther on here. Yeah, here we are. ‘Spokespersons for the Society for the Protection of Ethno—American Rights have protested the shootings and the publicity surrounding them. The American Civil Liberties Union—’ ”
“Oh, fuck,” said Beau, closing his eyes even tighter.
“Oh yeah. This shit’s their bread and butter. They’ve applied for intervenor status—”
“They’ll never get that.”
“No. But they’ll get permission to audit. Have a lawyer at the hearings or whatever. Some BlueStones woman, she’s trying to link the accident out in Hardin with this. She’s talking about ‘institutional hostility.’ ”
“Man, the shit never stops, does it, Marco?”
“It’s tidal, Beau. It comes up and goes down. Right now, you’re in a high-water period, shit-wise. Anyway, my point is, you oughta be thinking cults. Terrorists. Remember those AIM guys? Russell Means? The guys who took over Wounded Knee?”
“Yeah, I remember. And I watched those Mohawks awhile back, at Oka. They killed a Quebec provincial cop. Took the Canadian Army to get them out of there.”
“Right! I tell you, Beau, this native rights thing, it’s building. It’s politically correct. All the university assholes are into it. These guys could be the … I don’t know.”
“The fund-raisers?”
“Yeah!”
“You got the old man here?”
“Yeah, he’s in a cooler. Wanna see him?”
“What killed him?”
“It was a race.”
“A race?”
“He had emphysema and diabetes and renal dysfunction. Any one of them coulda taken him out.”
“What did?”
“Cut his own throat. Neatly, too. One downstroke on the external jugular. Still had the knife in his hand when they brought him in here. Klein photographed it in situ, then bagged it for evidence.”
“So out of the five people who showed up in Yellowstone County last Friday morning, we got one Edward Gall dead of shotgun wounds inflicted by Joe Bell, the old guy is probably Jubal Two Moon, that fits. What about the others? Did Klein have the IDs?”
“Not yet. He lifted prints from all of them except Gall, and we already know who he is. Sent the prints to the feds. He’s onto Frank Duffy to get his guys in Quantico working on it. Head shots and prints to the army. But right now, we got them as John Does One and Two. They didn’t find anything on the others. Not even labels. We do have Peter Hinsdale ID’d.”
“Is he here?”
“Not now. Klein had him done first so Danny Burt could take him, along with the Wozcylesko kid. Had to get him cleaned up for his mother.”
“What killed him?”
“He was disemboweled. Somebody opened him up from his belly to his sternum. One upward stroke with a big combat knife. When it went in, the hilts bruised his skin. We got a nice imprint of the hilt. Klein has a shot of it. Boy came in here with most of his intestines down around his knees. Had about a pint of blood left in him. Nasty.”
“Klein have the knife?”
“The knife?”
“Yeah. The one Klein says killed Hinsdale.”
Vlasic considered that. “Okay … now that you remind me, I’d say no. He didn’t have it. Guess it’d be in the river somewhere?”
“Yeah. Guess it would be.”
Beau was silent, thinking that Peter Hinsdale was another one of his victims. If he’d left Hinsdale in the coffin, maybe the kid would still be alive. What a miserable performance. Maybe Dwight Hogeland was right about him—maybe he was a toxic cop.
“Hey, Beau … thinking like that will kill you. You didn’t kill Hinsdale. You killed the guy who killed him. You’re a good guy. These are the bad guys. You know that.”
“Most of the time.… So, out of the five people who drove a blue Ford pickup into Bell’s Oasis last Friday, we have one dead of shotgun wounds, one dead of nine-mill, one Meagherized, one suicide, and a girl I gunbutted—that about right?”
“More or less. So what? Like I said, shit’s tidal.”
“Not very efficient, are they?”
“Well …”
“Can’t raise a lot of cash when you’re dead, can you?”
“No? Ask the Catholics. Their leader’s been dead for two thousand years. You ever see the Vatican? Hell of a corporate headquarters. And their logo’s a dead guy stapled to a tree.”
“So your theory—the bows, the arrows, the traditional wounds—all that means another native uprising? Maybe connected to SPEAR? And this … unit is part of that, and their job is to rob gas stations and banks and earn money for the uprising?”
“It fits everything, doesn’t it, Beau?”
“It’s a damned complicated explanation for it. And I don’t like it.”
Marco was watching Beau’s face. “Beau, you gonna faint?”
“Not immediately … I just feel tired. Think I’ll go back home, see the cats. Get some sleep.”
“Can I drive you?”
“What about these guys?”
Marco swiveled on his heel, surveyed the room. “They’ll still be dead tonight. Frank’ll put them in the coolers. Come on, let me take you home.”
Beau got slowly to his feet.
“One more thing. You seen Danny Burt yet?”
“Yeah. When he took away Hinsdale and Wozcylesko yesterday.”
“How was he?”
“Hell. You know Danny. He’s like an old boot full of piss and hot peppers. Wrists a little marked-up from where he was tied. Madder than hell about the Indians making a fool of him. Pretty upset about the Hinsdale kid. Not that he liked him, but the kid was his responsibility.”
“Where’s he now?”
“Working. He’s coming back later for another load.”
“Another load? What’s he taking?”
“Beau, look around. You think we should stack ’em up in the corner? Hang ’em by their heels in the window?”
“You’re a sick person, Marco. I’ve always admired you for that. Can I have this copy of the paper?”
Vlasic handed it to him and took Beau’s left arm in a surprisingly strong grip. Beau felt muscle and wire in the small man’s shoulders and across his back as Vlasic helped him toward the door. Beau looked back toward the young woman under the sheet. A terrible suspicion rose up out of his belly and drove the blood from his face. He stopped Vlasic with a pressure on his shoulder.
“Marco—who’s that under the sheet there?”
Vlasic looked back at the corpse. He realized the connection Beau had made.
“No, Beau, that’s not her. Read it in the paper here. That girl, she’s in Sweetwater General. In the ICU. This isn’t her. Hell, Beau, somebody would have told you!”
“Nobody’s been telling me anything, Vlasic. I haven’t heard from Eustace, I haven’t heard from any of the guys. Didn’t even get a call from the Benevolent Association.”
Vlasic shrugged. “This is somebody else here. Young Cheyenne girl, died in childbirth. Sad story.”
“Anything I should know?”
Vlasic moved under Beau’s arm. He was quiet for a moment.
“Not really. It’s reservation stuff. She was a hooker, you know. Hospital does pro bono work through the clinic in Hardin. Guess you knew that?”
Beau did. Maureen worked at the Julia Dwight Clinic in Hardin. She had always told Beau horror stories about lives being wasted on the reservations. He nodded, and Vlasic started to walk them both toward the exit.
“So she’s hooking around the county, and she must have forgotten her pills, or whatever. She gets knocked up.”
“That’s odd. A hooker has her kid? Most of them go to the Dwight Clinic or somewhere and get an abortion.”
“Yeah. Well, somebody tried one on her. You can see the marks on the cervix. But it was pretty amateur. Anyway, she carried for another two months, then went into premature labor. Died from internal bleeding. She was admitted last Friday night. She’d already lost most of her blood. They did what they could.”
“What about the kid?”
Vlasic looked away. “We got him here. You don’t wanna see him. Take my word.”
“Why?”
“Anencephalic. Premature. Deformed as well. By any definition, a gork. Lived a few minutes, but you don’t try real hard for something like that. They put it on a tray in a storage closet and let it die. Christ, Beau! What’s the matter?”
Beau was staring at the young girl. “Is Mary Littlebasket here?”
“Who’s she?”
“She’s the Crow girl who was killed in that accident last week, down in Hardin.”
Vlasic was shaking his head. “No. They took her back to the clinic in Hardin. She was DOA. I think her family came to get her. That’d be the routine. We’d only get her if there was some kind of question about cause of death.”
“I want to see this woman’s baby.”
“No, you don’t. Anyway, I’m not sure we still have him. If the family doesn’t want the baby—this girl’s family doesn’t even want her body—then we usually give it to the students.”
“Students?”
“The interns. For research.”
“Where?”
“Where d’you think? Sweetwater General’s the catch-basin hospital for most of eastern Montana. It’s a teaching hospital as well. So they’d want anything like that, an anomalous baby.”
“Is a baby with that condition …”
“Anencephaly?”
“Anencephaly. Is a baby with anencephaly a rare thing?” Vlasic shook his head. “Not these days. Happens a lot.”
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