“Thank you just the same, but I have an issue here with Senator Finley,” I replied.
“Whatever it is, we can work it out,” Finley’s companion replied. He stretched out his arm and handed me a business card that was inserted between two of his fingers. “My home phone is on the back. I’m impressed with your legal reputation. Your father died in a natural gas blowout down in Texas, didn’t he? I bet he’d be mighty proud of you today.”
“What did you say about my father?”
“Call me,” he said. “I’d like to help you cut through some of the problems you’re encountering.”
He was still smiling at me when Finley got in the limo and closed the door. I stared dumbly at the tinted back window of the limo as it drove away, then looked at the business card in my hand. The name on it was KARSTEN MABUS.
THAT EVENING, Temple and I fixed sliced chicken and mayonnaise sandwiches and iced tea and fruit salad for dinner and took it out on the side gallery to eat. The sky was blue above the valley, the sunlight a pale yellow on the hillsides, and hawks floated above the trees up in the saddles. But I couldn’t concentrate on either our conversation or the loveliness of the evening. I wiped my mouth with a napkin and pushed away my plate.
“Want to tell me what happened today?” Temple said.
“I had a run-in with Senator Finley. He seems to think I’m responsible for his daughter marrying Johnny American Horse.”
“Tell him to grow up.”
“I think I did, but I don’t remember. I was pretty angry.”
“So that’s what’s been on your mind all day?”
“Finley was with another man. I’d swear I know him but I don’t know from where. He gave me his business card.”
I took the card out of my shirt pocket and placed it on the pine-knot table where she could read it. Unconsciously, I wiped my fingers on my shirt.
“Mabus? He’s the CEO of a chemical company?” she said.
“He knew about my father’s death on the pipeline.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. There’s something disturbing about this guy.”
“You’re listening to Wyatt Dixon—that stuff about a pentagram. Dixon’s a nutjob, Billy Bob.”
“Maybe.” I got up from the table and leaned against the railing on the gallery. A string of white-tailed deer were working their way down a switchback trail into the pasture, their summer coats gold in the shadows. “What right does this guy Mabus have to mention my father’s death?”
“So tomorrow morning we check him out. Now sit down and eat,” she said.
I thought about Johnny and Amber’s wedding and how much Johnny, in his pinstripe suit and vest, had reminded me of L. Q. Navarro. “You believe in premonitions?” I said.
“No,” she said.
“I don’t, either,” I said.
THE NEXT MORNING, as I was leaving for work, I found a note under the windshield wiper of my Avalon. It read:
Billy Bob,
Go to Sheep Flats up on the Blackfoot at 9:00 A.M. today. I’ll be parked off the dirt track, down in the trees. Drive past my vehicle, then walk back along the riverbank and up the incline to my vehicle. Carry a fishing rod. Do not mention our meeting on either a cell phone or a land line.
I’ll wait for you fifteen minutes. If you’re not there, I’ll assume you’re tied up in court. Thanks,
Seth
I drove up into the Blackfoot drainage, crossed a long cement bridge over the river, then turned up a dusty road that climbed high above the river, so that down below, the water looked like a blue ribbon winding through boulders and sloping hills covered with larch and ponderosa and fir trees. I crossed over a rocky point that jutted into space, then coasted down the road into shade and a wooded, parklike area where the remains of a nineteenth-century logging camp had moldered into dark brown pulp.
I saw a Jeep Cherokee parked in the trees and a tall man in a shapeless felt hat leaning against the grille, smoking a pipe, watching the river course over the rocks down below. I did as Seth had asked and drove past the Jeep, then worked my way back on the riverbank through dry boulders and the willows that grew in the shallows, my fly rod over my shoulder.
“Have I got a tap on my phone?” I said.
“Hard to say. My guess is you probably do,” he replied.
“I don’t care for that, Seth.”
“Join the club.” He knocked his pipe clean on a rock, then pressed the ashes deep into the soil. “Let me lay it out for you. I gave the Bureau thirty days’ notice. This time next month, my wife and I will be on a passenger ship headed up to the Alaskan coast. This fall we’ll be hiking in Silver City, New Mexico. I’ll officially be an old fart. In the meantime I have to play out this American Horse situation here. You with me so far?”
“I’ll try to grab a noun here and there and work with it,” I replied. Then I looked at the cast in his eyes and regretted my flippant attitude.
He unzipped a thin vinyl satchel on the Jeep’s hood and removed a folder that contained a stack of enlarged mug shots. “You know any of these guys?” he said.
I shuffled through the photos one by one. “No, I’ve never seen them,” I said.
“All of them are either professional intelligence operatives or assassins. I didn’t say mobbed-up button men. I said assassins.”
“They work for the government?”
“No, guys like me work for the government. These characters work for people in the government. At least that’s the distinction I’ve always tried to make. I want you to talk with Amber Finley and Johnny American Horse.”
“About what?”
“I believe Amber was with Lester Antelope and the other Indians who creeped that research lab down at Stevensville. The computer files in their possession are going to get each of them killed, in the same way Lester Antelope was killed, in a way nobody even wants to think about. Tell American Horse and the Finley woman to dump whatever they have. Now, not later. They can put it in a paper bag marked ‘FBI’ and drop it in a mailbox or tie a rock on it and throw it through a window glass in the Federal Building.”
“Who’s behind this, Seth?”
“That’s like asking how original sin got started. I did two tours in Vietnam. I believed in what we were doing there. Then I spent the next thirty-five years picking snakes out of my head. My dad had a great expression. He’d say, ‘Son, if everybody agrees on it, it’s wrong.’ ”
Seth’s eyes crinkled when he grinned.
I walked back downstream to my car. When I drove back out of the main dirt road, Seth’s Jeep was gone. For a moment I thought I saw a flash of light on metal or a pair of binoculars across the river. I stopped my car and stared at the trees on the opposite bank until my eyes burned, then told myself the sunlight was simply dancing on the early morning wetness of the trees and that my eyes and mind were playing tricks on me.
TEMPLE CALLED ME at the office later in the day. “Karsten Mabus is the CEO of the parent company that owns Global Research,” she said. “He’s been in the biotech business for around twenty years. Owns homes in Arlington, Palm Beach, East Hampton, Santa Barbara, and a place he just built out on Highway Twelve. Has a degree in American Studies from Princeton and an MBA from Harvard. He never married, although he appears to be a ladies’ man. His estimated worth is over five hundred million.”
“How about a military record?”
“None.”
“Did he ever live in Texas?”
I heard her leafing through some papers. “He owns a company in Houston and one in Dallas,” she said.
“When he mentioned my father’s death, he said my father would be mighty proud of me.”
“Like he was home folks?” she said.
“That’s right.”
“According to a feature on him in The Washington Post, he was born in Minneapolis and grew up there and in Milwaukee. The article says his father was a hardware store owner and his mother a school-teacher. Except I couldn’t f
ind any records on the family in either city.”
“What’s his connection to Finley?”
“A friend and campaign contributor, as far as I can see.”
“Do you have any idea what Global Research does?”
“They have lots of government contracts. Some of them have to do with genetically altered foods. Some of their other dealings are anybody’s guess. They’re a high-security outfit. It’s amazing their facility was successfully burglarized…Did you just hear something on your line?”
“Yeah, I think we’re tapped,” I said.
“Tapped?” she said.
“Tapped,” I said.
THAT SAME DAY Johnny American Horse and two of his workers were putting in a rail fence on a new dude ranch out on Highway 12, not far from the Idaho line, when a panel truck stopped in a rooster tail of dust and the driver, an unshaved man wearing aviator’s shades, slacks, and a dirty white shirt, got out and approached Johnny with a grin at the corner of his mouth. “Got some sportsman’s hardware to sell before I move out to California,” he said.
“Like what?” Johnny said.
The driver threw open the back door of the truck, exposing at least a dozen shotguns and rifles that were laid out on a blanket. “I’ll sell them individual or the whole bunch. Dirt cheap, brother. I’ll take pretty near any offer,” he said.
Johnny shook his head and went back to setting a post in a hole and packing crushed rock around it.
“How about you fellows?” the man asked the two white boys working with Johnny.
“Johnny doesn’t pay us that kind of money,” one of them replied.
The boys laughed. The driver of the panel truck picked up an AR-15 that was wrapped in an oilcloth, released the magazine, and pulled back the bolt to show the gun was empty. Instead, a shell ejected from the chamber. “Damn, my nephew left a round in there,” he said.
Johnny picked the shell out of the dirt and threw it inside the truck. The man held out the rifle for Johnny to examine it. “Three hundred dollars,” he said.
“It’s worth six, easy,” Johnny said.
“You know your guns.” The man tossed the rifle to Johnny.
Johnny caught it in one hand, then walked to the back of the panel truck and set the rifle down on the blanket. “I’ve said no to you once. Hate to say it again,” he said.
“No offense meant. A guy’s got to try,” the man said.
Johnny and his two employees watched the man drive away, the dust from the truck blowing across a field of timothy. The man stopped at a crossroads where several land surveyors were eating their lunch under a tree and began making the same presentation to them. Johnny lost interest in the gun seller and went back to work.
TWO DAYS LATER, a Thursday, Darrel McComb was in a bad mood. Wyatt Dixon had just checked himself out of the hospital, against medical advice, and the hospital had not informed Darrel, as it had been instructed. Also, Wyatt had continued to stonewall the investigation into the identity of his assailants, speaking in disjointed hillbilly song lyrics, treating the detectives to his idiot’s grin and feigning incredulity at the detectives’ wisdom.
The nurses and pink ladies puffed his pillows and brought him soft drinks and outdoor magazines from the gift shop and extra desserts from the dining room. In turn, he signed autographs for them as well as the plaster casts of other patients. Darrel tried to explain to the head nurse that Wyatt Dixon was a recidivist whose brain belonged in a jar of alcohol. She replied, “I don’t believe that at all. If he’s done anything bad, he’s already paid his debt to society. Why don’t you people leave him alone?”
Later that afternoon Darrel drove up to Dixon’s place on the Blackfoot, but no one was at home and Dixon’s truck was gone. The neighbor on the opposite side of the river said he believed Wyatt was at a revival up at the Indian reservation.
“Dixon at a revival?” Darrel said.
“That’s right.”
“This man is a criminal.”
“He’s a polite man who always tips his hat to my wife. Why don’t you flatfeet stop picking on him?” the neighbor said, and slammed the door in Darrel’s face.
Darrel drove up to the Indian reservation in the Jocko Valley. It wasn’t hard to find the revival. Between a grove of cottonwood trees and a small rodeo arena and pavilion where the annual summer powwows were held, a huge, open-air striped canopy flapped gently in the warm breeze, the mountains blue and jagged in the distance. Darrel parked his unmarked car in the shade of the cottonwoods and watched the people who were arriving for the revival. They were both Indian and white, poor, uneducated, with the distorted physiques of people who ate the wrong food and had the wrong habits. He wondered how people who had already been so badly treated by life could allow what little they had to be taken from them by charlatans.
He could not shake the vague sense of anger that seemed to foul his blood. Why did Wyatt Dixon bother him so much? Because he had beat the system and was back on the street, lauded by people who had no idea of the man’s violent history? Yes, that was part of it. But in his heart Darrel knew Wyatt Dixon bothered him for other reasons as well, ones that went to a central dilemma in Darrel’s life. Darrel himself, lawman and soldier, had recruited men like Dixon for military and political operations that were shameful and dishonorable in nature. The qualifications for the job had always been simple: the recruits needed only to be disposable and totally devoid of humanity. Darrel had been their mentor, feeding them patriotic Valium when in reality the men Darrel reported to would not spit on them if they were burning to death.
The sky was yellow in the west, filled with dust and rain, the air smelling of mown hay and the watermelons someone was splitting apart on a wood table. The tent was filling now, a preacher mounting a stage above the rows and rows of folding chairs. Then Darrel saw Wyatt Dixon working his way on crutches down the aisle toward a chair an usher was unfolding especially for him. Dixon wore a shirt emblazoned with blue and white stars and steel-colored eagles with thunderbolts in their talons, one dark blue pants leg split up to the hip to expose the plaster cast on his thigh. He was gripping his hat between his fingers and the handle of his crutch, his mouth like a slit in his face.
Darrel got out of the car and took a seat at the back of the tent. Next to him a tall man, wearing sandals and eyeglasses that hung on a velvet cord around his neck, was setting up a tape recorder.
“What’s going on?” Darrel asked him.
“I’m a professor at the university. I have permission to be here, if that’s what you mean,” the tall man replied.
No, that’s not what he had meant, but he didn’t pursue it. The preacher introduced himself as Elton T. Sneed, then immediately went into a histrionic sermon that Darrel could only associate with an epileptic seizure. But the preacher’s performance, the Appalachian accent and heated gasping for breath at the end of each sentence, was nothing compared to what Darrel saw and heard next.
One by one people rose from their seats at the front of the tent and began to rant and shake, their faces lifted skyward, their eyes closed as though they were experiencing orgasm. But the sounds or words coming out of their throats were like none Darrel had ever heard. Wyatt Dixon rose, too, wobbling into the aisle on his crutches, his chin jacked in the air, a staccato stream of unintelligible language rising from his throat louder than anyone else’s.
“What is that?” Darrel said to the professor from the university.
“You’re listening to Aramaic, my friend. Something you can tell your grandchildren about,” the professor replied.
“It’s an Indian dialect?”
“It goes back nine centuries before the birth of Christ. It’s the language Jesus spoke,” the professor said.
“Right,” Darrel said. “Glad my tax money is going for a good cause out at the university.”
Darrel left the tent and went to a concrete building that contained showers and restrooms that were used by campers during tribal powwows. As he relieved him
self in a trough, he could hear the tent session breaking up for dinner. If he was going to make a move on Dixon, now was the time. He used his cell phone to call directly into Fay Harback’s office, hoping she would be working late, which for her was customary.
“Fay?”
“Yes?” she said.
“I want to bring Dixon in as a material witness.”
“Witness to what?”
“The attack on his own person.”
“You want to lock up an assault and battery victim?”
“Got any better solutions for dealing with this guy?”
“Wyatt isn’t a guy you squeeze, Darrel.”
“Wyatt?” he said.
“He’s neither a snitch nor a rat, so forget it,” she said.
“Whose side are you on?”
“You should try to relax,” she replied.
He disconnected the transmission. Had everyone in the courthouse lost their minds? He left the stalls in the cement building and went back outside into the twilight. Wyatt Dixon was laboring across the rough ground, a soft cowboy hat the color of chewing tobacco low on his forehead, a festive group of men and women on each side of him. They were the homeliest people Darrel had ever seen, their faces creased and work-worn, their teeth decayed, their eyesight diminished by injuries and diseases that were never treated. What did they have to be happy about?
But the faces here at the revival were not new ones to him. He had seen them in El Salvador, Guatemala, and northern Nicaragua. He had seen them staring at him out of windows in government jails, shantytowns, and miserable huts on the fringes of large pepper plantations. He had also seen them at the bottom of excavations just before a bulldozer shoved a mountain of dirt down on them.
His depression was coming back. Get rid of morbid thoughts. He remembered George Patton’s famous admonition: You don’t win wars by giving your life for your country; you win by making the other sonofabitch give his. For Darrel, that meant taking it to them with red-hot tongs. He waited until Wyatt Dixon was inside the entrance of the men’s room, then braced him.
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