Tomlinson stood, folded his chair and stacked the pie pans. “New York—perfect,” he said, unaware I had a plane waiting. “Screw the Intracoastal, we’ll sail offshore. It’ll be spring before we raise the Statue of Liberty, but that’s okay. I don’t own any winter clothes.”
12
Lying on the horse waiting for Buffalo-head to pull the stall door wider, Will heard the man clearly as he turned to Metal-eyes and said, “But the Devil Child is insane. A monster!”
Will was thinking, Not a monster, candy-ass, a warrior, his voice loud inside his own head, as he threw back the blanket and used his boots to signal the stallion, but Cazzio was already moving toward the stall door, the horse’s collective musculature vibrating through the boy’s body like shock waves from an explosion.
Even Blue Jacket couldn’t jump a six-foot fence, but this horse could, judging by his trophies, so Will was prepared for the rocket acceleration, leaning forward, staying low, as he heard Buffalo-head scream, “Mother of God!,” as he dove for safety when Cazzio lunged.
The next moment, though, Will was on the floor. His shoulder had clipped something—the doorframe?—but he wasn’t hurt. Or was he?
Yeah . . . his shoulder was throbbing, that’s all. But his legs were still solid. Will was getting up . . . getting up faster than Buffalo-head, who was also on the floor, as the stallion whined and reared, his eyes wild in the blinding headlights of the automobile parked outside, almost blocking the open barn doors.
“Here he is! I have captured the Devil Child!,” Buffalo-head was yelling to Metal-eyes, still nervous but excited, keeping his eyes fixed on Will. “Bring the gun, quick!”
Then the big Cuban’s expression changed. There was something he noticed about Will, that he was gimped over, that it hurt when he moved. As the older Cuban came into the barn, Buffalo-head said to him, “Wait, I don’t need a gun,” sounding relieved. “The Devil Child has been injured. He will be easy to catch now.”
Will was backing away, watching the big man but also stealing looks at his shoulder. Blood? No, there was no blood, but it hurt. What the hell had happened to his shoulder? Or maybe Buffalo-head had noticed Will favoring one side because of the broken rib. His ribs hurt.
Then Will became more confused because the older Cuban stepped into the light close enough that Will could see the man’s metallic eyes and also the revolver he was holding, dust particles illuminated by its red laser beam. The man said calmly to Buffalo-head, “Step away. I won’t miss again.”
Again? Will took another look at his shoulder. If he’d been shot, why wasn’t there blood? More likely, he’d banged the doorframe, but he didn’t dwell on the pain because Metal-eyes was now walking toward the stallion, who had calmed a little. The man was pointing the gun at the horse’s head.
“Watch the boy. I want a clear shot.”
Will was thinking, He doesn’t mean it, he’s bluffing. No man in his right mind would shoot a good horse.
But the Cuban wasn’t like most men. He had his finger on the trigger, ready to fire.
Will yelled, “No! Don’t do it!,” as he stepped toward Metal-eyes, then screamed, “You sonuvabitch, you’re after me, not the horse. The horse didn’t do nothing!,” but could barely hear his own words because of a fresh roaring in his ears.
Metal-eyes ignored him, waiting for the horse to stop moving, the gun only a few yards from Cazzio’s head.
“You old bastard—I’m talking to you !” As Will said it, he knelt to grab the pole with the hypodermic needle taped to the tip.
That got the old Cuban’s attention. He called to Buffalo-head, “Take that damn thing away from him!,” then extended the gun, squinting at the horse.
Will sensed Buffalo-head’s bulk coming at him from the side. He turned in time to jab at him with the spear but the needle missed. The Cuban was still quick.
The boy took a step back—an intentional decoy—then lunged forward as Buffalo-head moved toward him. This time, the needle glanced off a rib or something, then sunk deep into the man’s belly flesh, before he jumped back, yelling, “Pendejo! Damn you, that hurt!”
Metal-eyes called, “What did the brat do now?,” as he watched his partner touch his stomach, then study his fingers. “You oaf, you’re bleeding again. Had I known you were helpless against a child, I would have left you to shovel shit in Havana!”
Eager to prove him wrong, Buffalo-head held his hand out, relieved. “It’s nothing. He pricked me with a pin. Only a speck of blood.” He grinned. “The little Indian thinks his toy spear can hurt a Habañaro ! A spanking, that is what this little Indian puta deserves.”
Metal-eyes’s eyes warned Be careful but Buffalo-head waved him away, his swagger saying Stop worrying! as he marched toward Will, who was now taunting him, “My pecker’s bigger than your horn! I won’t look so small when you’re on the floor!”
It happened.
Buffalo-head completed three steps before he slowed to a halt, breathing heavily as he turned toward Metal-eyes, who was saying, “What is wrong? You look sick!”
Now Buffalo-head had an odd, confused expression on his face, and he was sweating. He attempted another step but almost fell. He looked from Metal-eyes to Will, as he took a big, dizzy breath and gasped, “This child is not normal. He is bad luck. We must . . . must—”
The man couldn’t finish. His eyes rolled back and his knees buckled. With a flesh-and-bones whump, his body hit the floor.
Suddenly, Metal-eyes didn’t care about the horse. He swung the gun’s red laser beam to Will’s chest, saying, “You’re insane.”
Will turned toward the old man, still holding the spear, and began walking toward him. “Why? ’Cause I’m gonna scalp you?”
Metal-eyes backed up a few steps. He said, “You are crazy,” sounding surprised but also suddenly interested.
“Not enough to kill a good horse, you sonuvabitch.” Will shifted the spear so that he was holding it over his shoulder, ready to throw.
Talking to himself, Metal-eyes said, “Insensitive to fear . . . rage compensation. I wonder if the child has abnormal pain tolerance.” The Cuban squinted through his glasses as if studying a bug. He said, “I’ll find out,” aiming the pistol at Will’s stomach, then at his pelvis, where nerve endings terminated in mass.
Will yelled, “You’re not the first man to point a gun at me!,” because that’s what came into his mind, the image of Old Man Guttersen holding a pearl-handled revolver the first time they’d laid eyes on each other.
Fast talking had saved Will back in Minnesota.
Not this time. The Cuban wasn’t chatty like Bull Guttersen. Will could see a deadness behind those silver eyes—an aloof, clinical interest—which Will didn’t understand, but he knew what was about to happen unless he could get the needle in the guy.
When the gun muzzle flashed, Will was focused on the man’s chest and already jumping to the side as he threw the spear, thinking, Just like in the westerns except real bullets.
The gun was so loud, the boy thought he’d been hit, but he’d jumped at just the right time and that saved him. But his spear missed, too . . . or had it?
Metal-eyes appeared to have swatted the shaft away before the needle got to him, yet now the old bastard was hunched over, crabbing fast toward one of the stalls, as Cazzio reared. The horse reared again and tried to stomp the man.
Will was hustling to retrieve his spear, yelling, “Get ’em, get ’em!,” as the stallion’s steel shoes made a coconut-popping sound on the floor, just missing the man as he pulled his legs into a stall, then reached to slam the door closed.
Spear in his right hand, Will touched his left fingers to Cazzio’s rump, not wanting to surprise the stallion, then traced his hand along Cazzio’s body until he was close enough grab the halter. The boy was hurrying, but also cooing, “Calm down . . . it’s okay . . . we’ll stomp the candy-ass later . . . easy . . . ,” as he watched Metal-eyes peek through the stall bars. When Will drew his arm back to throw
the spear, Metal-eyes ducked from sight.
“My spear’s tipped with deadly poison!” Will yelled in Tex-Mex Spanish, then had to switch to English to add, “One touch, that’s all she wrote!”
Buffalo-head wasn’t dead, but he was facedown in straw, making weird, drunken noises. Near him was a fifty-gallon drum of feed. Will used the drum to boost himself aboard the huge horse.
He got his fingers knotted in the braided mane, ready for the lunging acceleration, then signaled Cazzio with his boots, yelling, “Go!,” as he heard a gunshot so close that his ears rang. Metal-eyes fired three more times—whapwhap-whap —as Cazzio charged toward the blinding headlights.
Beneath the boy, the horse stumbled for an instant, then surprised Will by hurtling airborne, in a brief, arching silence, over the car’s fender, then jumped again two strides later, clearing a four-board fence, into the pasture.
Will was shaking, not only because he was scared as hell but also because he had never been aboard an animal so sure, so powerful.
“Go . . . Go! Yah!”
Cazzio galloped into the frozen darkness, the drumming of his hooves in synch with plumes of steam spouting from his nostrils. Will’s ears were attuned as his body matched the rhythm, hearing the countersynch snorting of the horse’s breathing, an occasional grunt and the slosh of belly water.
He risked a glance over his shoulder. The Chrysler was fishtailing down the driveway toward the road. Metal-eyes was trying to beat the horse to the overpass, where the pasture ended.
Fat chance!
The boy grinned as he leaned forward, finding Cazzio’s rhythm, once again. For a glorious minute, he felt that soaring warrior feeling, aloof, alone and free . . .
It didn’t last.
Cazzio stumbled . . . then stumbled again. The sound of his breathing was changing. Instead of snorting, the horse was wheezing, the air in his lungs making a bubbling sound as if leaking through a secondary exit.
“What’s wrong? You hurt?”
Will spoke into the stallion’s ear. As he leaned over Cazzio’s neck, he saw that bubbles had joined the plumes of steam coming from the animal’s nostrils. The boy’s nose isolated a metallic taste in the air.
Blood!
Cazzio had been shot, Will realized. The bullet had gone into the horse’s lungs, judging from the bloody bubbles, but Cazzio’s heart was so big that he’d continued running.
“Stop, it’s okay. I’ll call a vet!”
Will pulled back on the braided mane but Cazzio wouldn’t stop even though he was slowing. Because Will had once possessed an uncommon horse—Blue Jacket—he understood what was happening, and the knowledge created a vacuum pain beneath his heart.
Cazzio would continue running, no matter what. He would run and run, and keep running, until the last of his life had seeped away.
The fence marking the edge of the pasture was ahead. Cazzio had ten lengths on the car but was now struggling between a gallop and a canter. Will leaned low, like a jockey, and didn’t realize he was crying until his voice broke when he called, “Go! . . . Go! . . . Go!”
At the fence, Cazzio rallied, marshaling speed. His body swooped low before attempting takeoff, ascending, but with difficulty, fighting gravity’s terrible weight, and his front hooves clipped the top railing of the fence.
The horse was still ahead of the Chrysler when he landed and gained another length before his rear legs buckled.
Will anticipated the fall. He threw himself clear as the horse crashed head-first into the weeds, then made a high-pitched whinny of frustration.
As Will got to his feet, he stared at Cazzio for a moment but had to turn away. The horse was on his side, blood pouring from a wound in his chest. His legs were moving, clawing at weeds and empty air, still trying to run.
Above, on the overpass, the Chrysler had stopped, headlights bright. Seconds later, another car pulled in. Will guessed it was the man the Cubans had mentioned, the one they’d been waiting for.
Will was ducking beneath the lights and starting for the trees when he heard Cazzio whinny again. The cry was different this time. It communicated fear.
Will looked and saw that the horse’s eyes were wide and wild, terrified. He could also see two men working their way down the rock ledge, Metal-eyes, with his gun, in the lead.
It didn’t matter. Will ran to Cazzio and knelt beside him, his hands kneading the loose skin on the stallion’s neck.
The boy was whispering, “I’ll take you away from this. It’ll all be okay,” when Metal-eyes got close enough to say to Will, “Move—or I’ll shoot you, too.”
13
Even from a distance, I could see a horse’s bloated body lying in a clearing on the far side of a fence.
White fence, gray horse. Conspicuous on a landscape of hills and winter oaks. At dusk, in January, rural Long Island was as colorless as a woodcut on parchment.
The horse had been shot, maybe while jumping the fence, maybe as he touched down. It was possible that Will Chaser had been aboard.
The animal lay in waist-high sedge, his body mass creating an indentation in the grass. Tail and mane were darker than the Appaloosa spots on his rump. He had been dead for at least eight hours, but vapor continued condensing on his coat as heat dissipated from his body.
We had crossed a hundred yards of pasture. Behind us was one of Long Island’s elite equestrian estates, Shelter Point: dressage ring, boarding barn, breeding lab, staff quarters, forty acres of white fencing, a castle-sized mansion in the distance, an orange wind sock that told me the horsey set used private jets.
The practice arena was patched with snow. Jump stations were fabricated with a theatrical precision that reminded me of a miniature golf course.
A quarter mile down the road was a farmhouse where Shelter Point’s manager lived. Beside it was a semitrailer converted to haul horses in style. The trailer was hooked to a new Range Rover, which was typical of the area, opulence that was elaborately, unmistakably, aggressively understated. Welcome to the Hamptons, a cluster of villages, beach estates and ranches that, for most property owners, constituted the most expensive hobbies in the Western Hemisphere.
Ahead of us, the fence’s top rail had snapped midcenter. It looked as if someone might have hit it with a sledgehammer, but the horse had busted it as he jumped the fence—or attempted to jump the fence.
The fence was five feet high. Heavy two-by-sixes bolted to posts. Solid and unforgiving—obviously.
The horse had ended up twenty yards beyond the fence, to the right of the break. Looked as if he caught the top rail with a hoof, then struggled a few strides trying to recover before he fell.
But it wasn’t the fall that had killed the horse. The FBI agent who’d met us at an East Hampton jetport had already provided some details. That night, around ten p.m., a 911 call was placed from a stable near the manager’s house, but the phone went dead before the operator heard the caller’s voice. The operator made the required call back and the manager answered—the number had been forwarded to his cell, he told her. He was in town, no one was at the ranch, so maybe he’d sat on his phone wrong.
When the manager got home, though, he called 911 and said he needed police, it was an emergency.
Police discovered that the phone line had been ripped from an outside wall of a barn. Inside was evidence of a fight, and the ranch’s prize hunter-jumper stallion was missing. They’d found the horse’s body only four hours ago.
The evidence was still fresh, but it was a difficult scene to read. That’s why the agent, Jibreel Sudderram, wanted to have another look. The FBI had instructed Sudderram to let us tag along because a powerful senator had insisted.
“I heard the boy was a competent horseman,” Sudderram had said as we drove from the airstrip, his inflection asking if we knew anything else about Will Chase.
I did. During the flight, I’d slept for a while, then made phone calls. I’d spoken with one of the boy’s former teachers and also to Ruth and Otto Gutt
ersen. Most of the information came from Otto, a crippled ex-wrestler who seemed to genuinely care about the kid. As we talked, the smart-assed teen became a person—complex, troubled, gifted, tough, tricky and, most all, different.
All three said that about the boy: “Will is different.”
I told the FBI agent that Chaser was more than just a decent horseman, he’d been a rising star on the Oklahoma junior-rodeo circuit.
“I suppose they take rodeo seriously in that region.”
I said, “Chaser was qualifying for senior competitions before he was thirteen. At a regular school, the equivalent would be a seventh grader playing varsity football starting at quarterback.”
William Chaser had lived on three reservations and in six different homes before he was twelve, I told the agent. “The only consistent thing in his life was working on ranches. A former teacher said the boy’s a better barrel rider and roper than most men.”
“Barrel riding . . . He was that good, huh?”
I said, “Hopefully, he still is,” and paid close attention to the agent’s shielded reaction. The man had seen or heard something that convinced him the boy was dead or soon would be.
Because the agent noticed, he amended, “That was a slip. We’re not even sure the boy was in the area. But some strange things took place last night . . . or early this morning, more likely. We’re still putting it together.”
I wasn’t convinced he wasn’t convinced. Using the past tense might have been careless but it wasn’t accidental. And there was a reason we’d seen a pair of helicopters working both shorelines as we landed and why there were police cruisers and unmarked cars on most of the roads.
Long Island’s eastern tip forks like a lobster’s claw. The South Fork is a summer retreat, not a winter destination. From the air, the estates had looked as deserted as the shoreline, miles and miles of beach where for two hundred years whalers hunted.
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