Down the slope hard through ruts and sagebrushes, she lumbered her way up the berm, spinning dust out behind her. The motorcycle sped toward the barns; the highway patrol cars blocked his escape. The patrol officers raced, hunched with shotguns in defensive positions behind their cars, until she lost site of them behind a massive livestock barn. The motorcycle sped toward her then into the open barn door. As she came over the berm, she caught air and banged down into a shallow ditch, slamming forward against the steering wheel, winding herself. The Jeep stalled out, high centered on the ditch below the berm. Yellow gunfire flickered in the gaping barn door. Her windshield crystalized. Bullets slammed into her cab, hammered on the truck’s steel hood, and fragments of glass landed around her thighs.
She rolled out her door and scrambled around to the back of the Jeep crawling on her stomach the last few feet beneath the rear axle. Gunfire echoed through the sunlit fair grounds. She crawled into the back of the truck; her AR-15 bushmaster rifle had piled against the seats with other equipment. Grabbing it, she slid between front bucket seats and rolled out onto the dusty ground of the ditch, pulling her radio down with her.
“Come in Sheriff” she breathed. “Sheriff, please respond.”
“Clear the radio” he said. “Agent Brouwer where are you?”
“I’m at the exhibition grounds, I need back up, and we’re receiving fire.”
“Wait for me Lane. I’m on my way. Please stay where you are until I get there.”
“I have men grounded by fire being approached. I have to move,” she said.
“No, Lane. Please don’t approach the gunfire, wait in cover until my assault team can get there.” He was yelling at her.
“He is escaping, he could get away with this, and my patrolmen are down, under fire.”
“You need us Lane; we’re on our way. Please wait for me. Let him go. You won Lane, you were right all along.”
“He’s getting away.”
“He’ll go back into the woods. We’ll hunt him down like an animal, we can do it together,” Sheriff Hargrove was pleading with her.
“Get here,” she called. “I’m confronting him.”
“Please don’t go Lane. Please wait for me.”
On her elbows between sagebrushes, her rifle fixed on the barn door. No one appeared. Sirens wailed, loudness of rifle fire pierced the midday, patrol officers returned fire with shotguns and side arms, but the barn blocked her vision. Swain must be inside the massive building, firing out at patrolmen on the other side.
The radio on her dash cracked in constant voices booming police codes and signals; calls cutting one another into a jumble of chaotic noise, all the voices frantic. Highway patrol dispatched that an officer was down at the rodeo grounds. There was a fire at the trailer park, three or four trailers going up in flames. Someone was screaming into the radio. They needed back up and needed ambulances. Her heart pounded, not wanting it to be real.
She leapt to her feet, weaving a path toward the barn through the silver green sage; her muzzle up toward the large overhead door, her heeled roping boots slow in the soft soil. The side door of the barn was unopened, and it seemed to move away from her as she ran toward it. Then the side door opened, and he appeared. She dropped to a knee, steadied her muzzle to the door, and he was gone. She ran. She came to the side door and followed the muzzle of her rifle into the darkness. Heart and lungs burning, she breathed dry straw dust while mites hung in the light of the large doors and pigeons circled above the stalls. Animal noises filled the dark.
There was no longer any gunfire. The barn was an immense and dark maze with walkways broad enough for animals and men to walk together. The sirens were farther away now. Her backup might be going to the trailer park fire instead of the exhibition grounds.
She ran along a hallway and peered out into a broad corridor. Shell casings lay on the dirt floor. Sunlight through the barn doors silhouetted her, and she dropped with her back against a stall door. Horses whinnied wildly and climbed at stall doors by pawing front hooves onto steel.
She ran across a corridor and pressed the wall with her back against concrete. He had retreated into the labyrinthine darkness of the building to face off with the patrol officers blocking the exit to the highway. Along the corridor of stalls, the large head of a stallion swung over a stall door. She tried to calm her breathing, her chest heaved against her ribs. Her cotton shirt soaked against her, she wiped sweat from her eyes. She needed to move along the corridors and find her way behind him to open fire on him from the rear; otherwise, the patrol officers at their cars outside remained dead to rights under carbine fire. She hoped they had retreated up the avenue, but she could not hear the cars—there was silence instead of sirens. The barn was quiet but for terrified animals. She needed to act. She needed to leave the natural light of the open bay door to let her eyes adjust to the dark.
She made her way toward the far side of the exhibition barn along the dark stalls and crouched down when she came to into the light of the massive bay door. Animals paced and spun. Pigeons flapped around trying to get away from the people below, swirling around in the rafters. She needed to move again.
She rose up into the air, hanged by her throat, her air passage clenched shut, and her assault rifle fell to the ground and billowed into the fine dust, ground by decades of hooves. The strength of the grip that seized her throat shocked her more than the surprise that he had been beside her.
She reached to claw his face, but he was too far away.
He was walking with her, and she could not breathe. Lights along the roof of the barn drifted above her slowly. Unable to scream, she was laid on her back on a stack of hay bales. His clench tightened. She was immobile.
His face, inches from hers, was tranquil and his hair was wet with perspiration curled around his large ears. Pigeons swirled around the wooden rafters above him. Faint under the pressure, darkness crowded her vision. The lights along the rafters of the barns became blinding and faded into black.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” Swain said.
“I know.” She gritted through her teeth.
He let go of her throat, and in the same instant pulled an old western pistol from his belt, firing a deafening crack into the barn. A loud blast from within the barn’s darkness fired at the same moment.
She bent off the hay, coughing, and he raced into the dark corridors along stalls in the barn.
Out the large bay door in the sun’s brightness, two Highway Patrol cruisers sat riddled with rifle fire. A striped uniform pant leg lay visible on the ground beneath a cruiser.
She grabbed her rifle by its top handle. Sheriff Hargrove lay on his back, a gaping hole in his armored vest. He was writhing on the barn dust, winded. He tried to speak, his fingers reflexively digging at a hole in his vest.
She was somehow back to where she had first entered the livestock barn. He was in these passageways with her. The great stallion’s head rocked up and down in the dark of the corridor. The stall gate lightly bumped on the beast’s chest. It was unlatched. She quietly opened the stall gate, and the enormous silken body moved alongside her in liquid motion. She ran her free hand along the stallion’s powerful body as it left the stall, the hide smooth on her fingertips. With her rifle stock firm on her shoulder, the stallion passed by her into the corridor, and she followed her rifle into the stall. The man took shape in the shadows, kneeling in a corner, waiting for her. She let her rifle rip a round into his head. Her muzzle flash lit the stable. An instant of bright yellow light as the man’s skull shattered, and the rifle bullet departing his head. As she squeezed a second round into his chest, the loud bark of the rifle echoed against the metal doors and dulled at damp concrete walls. The stallion turned hard into the daylight and ran with all its power from the barn. Gunpowder and damp wetness of stud piss and wood chips were humid around her, and she stood over Donald Swain, dead at her feet in the stall. His final act was to curl, wrapping his arms around himself.
Sheriff
Hargrove knelt in sunlight with the second patrol officer, bleeding badly but still alive. The tall patrol captain was dead under his car. Helicopter blades of the state police chopper, on its way from searching the forest, beat the thin air. He could feel the blades beating in his chest, a familiar, welcome thumping. He tossed a smoke flare where the chopper should sit down. More police arrived from the failed assault on the Jackal’s garage, some his, some not. Police cars skidded beside the long barns, lights and sirens flashing and wailing. Her shadow came behind him, so slight, even in her State Police assault vest, with her heavy rifle. Her small body and youthful face, pokerfaced always, despite destruction and ruin everywhere around her.
Sheriff Hargrove tried to grin at her. He knelt, watching the chopper, pressuring the wound on the patrol officer’s thigh, telling the young infantryman that it would all be okay, and that he was going home soon.
Helicopter blade shadows wound around them, bright brown dust swirled up from the lot. Paramedics took over, stabilizing the young officer, and Sheriff Hargrove stood in the bright sun with his bloodied hands out to the side, signaling the helicopter to back up and set down. Following his commands, the chopper touched down on its landing skid.
He held her head in his hands. The helicopter rotors sanded them and the ravaged cars. He said that he was never more proud of a fellow warrior than he was of her.
Epilogue
Dust whipped off the unpaved roads in the open prairie wind as they crossed the massive reservation. Brouwer let the girl alone with her thoughts. The younger woman sat with her face near her window, watching the wind beaten buildings as villages rushed by, barbed wire fences tacked along ditches, broad flat grasslands rocky to either side.
They came into a village. A boy with no shirt coasted his bicycle alongside the police truck to see whom it transported. He sped his bike ahead over unpaved streets. Other children joined, a parade of bicycles leading the police truck through the houses scattered sparsely along grassy rises.
They came to Kimama’s house, set off from the brown road up on a grassy side hill. Her brother, Barney Oldman, stood on the front steps, in his black t-shirt and jeans, and Victor Langlais stood beside him near the door, arms crossed. Paula came out of the house and stood in her bare feet on the grass. She was wearing a tight yellow strapless dress. Her black dreadlocks like coal spilled across her.
They stood at the front porch and waited for her to join them.
Tiffany Oldman got out of the truck and stood beside Brouwer’s open window.
“Thank you for all your help Tiffany,” Brouwer said.
She smiled a big smile, her face darkened by bruising, showing off the gap in her front teeth. She said, “There’s one other thing I need you to do. I need you to find who killed Bernice Whiteman. Bernie was murdered hitchhiking from Jackson.”
Tiffany walked up the grassy hill to Kimama’s house.
Acknowledgements
Brad McKenzie would like to thank: Margaret "Maggie" Morris. Craig Melhoff, Jill McKenzie, and Andrew Wahba. Sarah Richards of Booming Ground at UBC. The Saskatchewan Writer's Guild. Special thanks to Rufi Thorpe and Catapult. Thank you to the beautiful community of Jackson, Wyoming, USA.
This book is for Kristen McKenzie.
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