“Would they typically stay for beers after with other staff?”
“Yeah for sure, on a Saturday night definitely, they are like a comedy duo. Both are fun. Were fun, everyone loved Crystal.”
The smile remains on Crystal’s face well after her friend has left.
A heavyset man in a Denver Broncos jersey gets up from the second poker table and walks to the bar. He has lost out, bleeding several hundreds of dollars’ worth of chips. Drunk, he stands at the bar watching Augustine’s body as she turns to get several bottles from the shelf behind her. She turns and he stares at her chest. She pours from both bottles at once into a shooter glass. He takes the shot and walks out.
“Who is that man?”
“I have his name from the dealer on shift. He’s an oil worker for a tribal company. I’ll get you all his details but he’s not who I want you to look at. The person I want you to see comes on camera shortly.”
Brouwer searched Oldman’s face. He lifted his chin toward the screen. Augustine moves back and forth restless behind the bar. California comes back into the room and moves around in subtle dancing with the music of the room, sound not captured by the camera. The two women lightly dance to the music together.
“Do California and Crystal ever come to work together, ever carpool?”
“No, Cali lives with her kid at Fort Washakie. You should talk to Cali, but she's not who I want you to see either.”
At 1:00 a.m., a tall, thin but sturdy man entered the poker room, with his back to the lens. Standing behind the other players, he watches the game. Both tables have thinned by now. The dealer suddenly stood, a new dealer sat to take her place, and motioned to join the tables into one single game. The players shuffle about and organize themselves to sit and play a final table. The second dealer leaves signaling a peace sign to Crystal Augustine who stands behind the bar top, she signs a peace sign back.
The tall thin figure sat and placed his chips on the green felt. Cards drifted on the table from the dealer’s deft hand and stopped before the players. Augustine came out from behind the bar, speaking to each player. As she stopped at the new man, his head turns to regard her. He is wearing a heavy denim jacket lined with shearling sheepskin, and his hair flows over its collar. As Augustine walked back to the bar, the figure followed her movements; her black hair gleamed on her shoulder blades as she turned. The new man wound his hair into a ponytail. He leaves the table despite it being his turn to call the blind; the dealer sweeps his cards assuming he folded.
The man walked to Crystal Augustine, entering the frame of the camera behind the bar. When he speaks, she turned to stand before Donald Swain.
“Do you recognize that man, Detective?”
“I do. It’s Donald Swain, the Jackal prospect. But you know all about the Jackals don’t you? When I went by their garage, you were with the Jackal bookkeeper they call Swindle Vetch. You want to talk about the Jackals?”
“This has nothing to do with Motorcycle Clubs or this Casino. This has only to do with the man on that camera. I’ll tell you again, anything you need from us to stop him cold you got it. Crystal was our girl. She’s a sister.”
Oldman had prepared for her to raise a connection to the Jackals, a connection they were worried about her exploring.
“I appreciate your help Barney, we will bring Swain in right now,” she took a copy of the video disk.
“You bring him in for his own good. Its midday and everyone out here already knows who he is and that he killed a sister.”
She unfolded a glossy photograph of Barney Oldman and Avina Zadeh walking in the tall grass in front of the dilapidated shack in Jackson. The sheriff had texted it to her, likely in secret.
“Mr. Oldman, what is your relationship to Avina Zadeh?”
Oldman was surprised. He studied the image as if it was sentimental to him. A slight smile formed at the edge of his mouth. He held the photo for a long time.
“I definitely remember the girl. She wanted a job at the casino.”
“You give job interviews at a crack shack?”
He grinned more openly, “I appreciate your candor detective. I wanted to see if she was cut out for reservation life, casino life. To see if she could hold her own down here or if she was just a prissy Jackson girl.”
Brouwer took back the photo.
“How’d she do?”
He smiled again, “She’s a smart kid. She is perceptive, not much gets by her. She will have a bright future, but she’s too quiet. She needs to speak. She needs to find her own voice. It’s as if her voice has been stolen.”
Brouwer searched his face for telling details. He was firm.
“You offer her a job?”
“No, I really couldn’t. She said she’s from Denver, and lives in Jackson Hole. She says her background is overseas; I think she said her name is Persian and that her family is new to America. I told her I was sorry, but we help our tribal sisters first.”
50.
Heavy arched wood doors opened and Agent Brouwer entered the main house of the Vahedi vacation estate with her pistol drawn, the crosshatched handle held close to her right breast. Track lighting illuminated the kitchen. Nothing moved in the vast log home, as though it was abandoned.
She had reread the texts she received moments before Zadeh fled with the sheriff in pursuit:
He killed Cat tried kill me
Proof locked in cellar code: 33, 19, 17
Gonna go
Will outrun sheriff
What had this girl done?
A wall of stone divided the kitchen and den where large windows overlooked trees and night. She came through the kitchen at two doors facing one another; one opened into stairs, the other was large and steel and had a security key pad. A voice inside muffled as if from a tomb. She pressed 33-19-17 and pulled the metal handle. At the click something inside scurried, and a light came on inside.
Decklin Siboda slid back against the wall of the wine cellar and held his knees against his chest. He stared unseeing at her, and she lowered her pistol. His hair and face were caked in vermillion red and his eyelids were swollen. Tears shined on his cheeks. His face was scalded with bear spray and he had dumped a bottle of red wine over his head to ease the scorching pain. Wine bottles were smashed around him, the stone floor streaked with glass shards and crimson. Dried wine cleaved with caked blood from his nose and bare feet.
“Don’t kill me Avina, I will tell them what they want to know.”
Trying to get up, he slid on the red wet and broken bottles. Catherine Kinderdine’s backpack sat in front of him.
“Decklin, this is Lane Brouwer, of the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation. Tell me what happened the night that Catherine died and I’ll bring you something for your eyes.”
His eyes looked unseeing at the sound of her voice.
“Jesus I've been through this with Avina,” he said, defeated. “I went to pick Catherine up. I was going to take her to her house. I walked all the way up there to meet her. I took her to a clearing to make out and then, nothing. She acted as if she had no idea what a man was.”
He made a mild attempt at standing, but slid in the wine and blood.
“She was so arrogant and superior to everyone around her. I don’t really remember it. I didn’t mean to kill her, but she just stopped moving. I want this to be over; I want a deal for manslaughter or something.”
“You grasped her throat in your hands until you broke her neck and then you left her there?”
“Yes.”
“You’d been texting her that night. From what phone did you send those messages?”
“The party phone, for hook ups, from back when I was dealing. I guess she didn’t have my contact info in her phone. She didn’t know it was me coming for her.”
He laughed.
“Tell me about Lara Mazer.”
“I don’t know her or what happened to her. She has nothing to do with me. I want to go home, to the city.”
Bro
uwer sat the lanky Decklin Siboda down on his cuffed hands in the back of her Jeep. She poured a bottle of water over his eyes and the last of it down his throat. Driving the short distance from near Wilson to the outskirts of Jackson, she didn’t speak to him. Into a makeshift holding cell at a State Department of Highways and Transportation building, she sat him down on a stool to take his statement and confession. A public health nurse stood outside the room to treat his wounds. As he sat on the stool, he said, “Don’t charge my mother with lying to you about where I was that night. It’s not her fault. She doesn’t know what is happening with me. She never has.”
51.
The hole was beside freshly buried sewer pipes, deep in raw black earth, in ground that would soon grow the manicured lawns of suburban homes. To the onlooker, the hole was part of the same construction dig as the sewer lines, not fresh dirt from a newer dig, and certainly not a grave.
Swindle chose the spot far enough away from any future basement or drainage channel. The spot would not see excavation any time in the coming decades. He worked the Caterpillar excavator’s hand controls, the boom arm of the hoe unfolded in jerks, unfolding its length, and the bucket tipped dirt onto a growing black mound. The hole was much larger than necessary for just one body.
Portable trailers serving as construction site offices reflected the lights of the excavator. He toiled his lonely chore with a view of Jackson’s outskirts while the machine’s overhead lights circled over the sage herding crickets in swarms toward the sleeping town. He stepped down from the cab and stood over the grave, ten feet deep. As a precaution, a cement truck sat nearby. A yard of concrete would encase the limed body in the grave, making it unrecognizable, making it appear part of the network of water and sewer lines for the eventual neighborhood. State police devices wouldn’t detect the soil disturbance. The concrete tomb would be of no interest to cadaver dogs. When someone went into this hole, encased in eternal darkness, it would be of no interest ever again.
#
Heavy Dunbar stood facing his bay window. Joanne’s Cadillac Escalade reeled into the driveway, up the slope into the garage. The oldest, Rebecca, already sixteen, was showing her younger sister how to grate parmesan without scraping her knuckles, as the youngest leaned an elbow on the island, her head on her hand, watching her sister.
Heavy stepped out the back door onto a white stone patio and slid the glass door closed behind him, hurrying his call to Swindle before Joanne came in.
“I’m coming up,” Heavy breathed. “I want to lay eyes on him, I want to see him for myself and decide . . . then I will take action.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“I want you to tell him we are going to patch him in as 1%. That he’s becoming a Jackal and that we have a ceremony planned for him. Tell him that there’s a strict club protocol to go through to become a brother, and then tell him that after that, we’ll have a party with Jackal club members. During his patching in ceremony, I will assess him. I will look into his eyes, and see what he truly is, see if he is doing this, to these girls. I’ll be able to tell. But I want you to prepare things ahead of time and have him ready when I get there. If it’s him doing this, we can take action that night, so have a place to put him.”
Heavy closed the burner phone and stooped to pick up his youngest girl’s baseball glove, left on the lawn after school.
52.
Disinfectant stung at small wounds in her scalp. Her busted nose would heal straight. Black bruising below her eyes compounded their darkness, large and blinking.
She received the treatment in silence while Brouwer roamed the kitchen of her small cabin, phone on her ear, arranging for a helicopter to search the wilderness. She was organizing a manhunt for someone called Donald Swain. Highway Patrol units stood outside in the yard beside the cabin, awaiting her orders. She was the boss of them all.
The police were planning a raid on the Jackal’s Motorcycle Club. They were bringing all known members in and tossing their operation. All so that the gang’s members would give up the whereabouts of this Swain person that she was after. Somehow, all of this explained the death of Lara Mazer.
The doctor treating Avina was a younger woman with a nice body and bangs cut straight above her eyebrows. The doctor told her about skiing, how Lane and she became friends when she arrived in Jackson. Lane shot severe glances at the Doctor who only laughed. The Doctor took Avina’s hands in hers, lightly thumbing the scratches across her knuckles, pressing at the delicate back of her hands, no pain consistent with broken bones.
“Girl, you can take a lickin’ and keep on tickin’, you’re a tough kid. You remind me of someone I know.”
She closed her heavy plastic medical container.
“You have my info, if you need anything, let me know.”
With that, she smiled, waved a faux salute to Brouwer and left. When Brouwer was finished on the phone, she came and sat in the love seat across from Zadeh, her gray eyes becoming familiar.
“You’re lucky to be alive.”
Sipping tea, they watched the western light spread over the dark brown of the small corral, transforming it to momentary gold. A tall black horse stood with its chest at the rails, looking in at them.
“You’re a brave person, but you should have come to me first. You should have come to me right away and told me everything.”
“I should’ve but I couldn’t. No one would believe me. The sheriff wanted to charge Helen and me with the death of Catherine . . .” She looked down.
“Running from the sheriff meant that you could have died on the highway. You were doing ninety-five miles an hour through a mountain pass. They could have put out spike strips. That car would have exploded. They could’ve opened fire on you. I’m just glad you’re in one piece. Where were you going?”
“California.”
Brouwer smiled and her cheeks dimpled. She should smile more. She was beautiful. She said,
“You risked a lot to help Catherine, to find her justice, now you have to start helping yourself.”
Avina stared blankly. Brouwer’s gray eyes were steady.
“Avina, you have to tell me who you really are.”
Zadeh looked away. The stallion pawed at corral dust, and blackbirds danced at the raked ground.
“I don’t know where to start.” Avina studied the black horse.
“It’s okay,” Brouwer said. “It’s all over. You’re safe now, with me. You can begin at the beginning. Just tell me your story.”
53.
Deep into the trees, into a marshy bog of forest, Swindle walked along the higher slope. He was sure to keep track of his truck on the trail above him - the last thing you needed was to get lost out here.
On the long highway to Great Falls, Donald Swain had talked about the wilderness being the last refuge of the free man. Back to the woods talk, wilderness survival rap. Only in the forest could a man be truly free. Then Swain had said something that Swindle didn’t understand, that the Polar Star, above the mountain forest, was an entrance to paradise. He thought of the ADX, where they strapped Swain to a table with only the stars to keep him company. Swindle Vetch did not respond and Swain went quiet, and the two sat silent all the way to Montana and back. He was glad when Swain had started living outdoors, but it had unsettled him, that he could not find Swain, but Swain could find him. Then he recalled that Swain had slipped up. He had mentioned this spot.
Swindle followed clearings between old trees toward marshland in the rocky basin. Then he saw the beast. The animal stood motionless, as though dead on its feet, its coat marbled with blood sucking tics. Drool colored pink hung in a shining rope from its muzzle to the ground. Blood tinged the hide of the animal, rubbed raw against the pines, only to expose itself to more tics, black flies, and mosquitoes. Ravens, black and merciless, chatted with one another in trees above. They were watching and waiting. A powerful beast stilled by bloodsuckers.
Swindle Vetch walked up to the motionless creature. The bi
g Bull Moose had broken off an antler running through the trees and now stood lopsided, a massive concave of bone hanging off one side of its head. It had tried to run into the marshland, to wade with only its nose above the water line drowning the tics off, but it didn’t make it to the marsh. It was waiting for death to come.
There was no campsite among the thick trees. No gun to put the tic-shrouded moose out of its misery meant there was no gun to face Donald Swain with either. That mistake rang in his ears. Something was watching him. Then Donald Swain called down from a rocky slope.
“Y’ all looking for me?”
The voice started Swindle; he had been near to him for some time. Swain stood touching the moose’s wet nose. Swindle Vetch took a few steps back and watched as Swain petted the wild beast as though it were his pet.
“If we have a piece on us we ought to put this poor thing down, it’s suffered enough,” Swindle Vetch said.
“Wolves will come for it and take it. Bearing witness to a Wolf pack kill is a sacred thing,” Swain said.
Water ran from the moose’s bulbous eyes over the small black beads burrowed in its long face.
Swindle Vetch started up the rocky slope toward his truck.
“We need you back in town. We’re patching you in as a full member of the club.”
Down in the wet meadow, the man was standing with a hand holding the Bull Moose’s upright antler.
“Well now, that’s a surprise,” he said.
54.
Tiffany Oldman was born Tiffany Not Afraid on the Wind River Indian Reservation but she soon left Wyoming to live among the Crow Nation of Montana, the birthplace of her father, a vicious white man with a stolen Crow name.
Her father was a sheer ghost of a man conjured unwillingly, who took the Crow name Not Afraid despite nerve shattering anxiety. The man was not a physical presence. He was a hazy image, a shadow skirting her formless childhood, the black double of unpredictability, of anger without limits, of rage without attendant cause. She had not conjured him in years, yet the shadow remained.
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