Chump Change (14 page)

“Not surprising.”

“I had to tell his mother he was dead,” I said.

“Hard, huh?”

“Yeah . . . and you know what?” I asked finally.

“What?”

“She never once asked what happened to all that money.”

“For some people, it’s not about money.”

“But thirteen million bucks?”

“Some people just don’t give a damn,” she said.

I tried to process the notion, but just couldn’t tamp it down.

“You come up with any ideas of your own on the subject?” she asked.

I mulled it.

“Yeah . . . I believe I may have,” I said finally. “I’m not sure exactly who’s involved or exactly how they did it, but I think somebody desperate for a big influx of cash saw that big ol lummox with all that money and decided he was such a rube they could take it from him. All they needed was the right bait.”

“Missy Allen.”

“She never even broke a sweat.”

“Men are easy that way.”

I was about to agree when my keychain began to buzz in my pocket. First vibration I thought maybe was just the user-friendly excitement of talking to Rachel. Second one made things clear. Somebody was messing with the Blazer.

“Gotta go,” I said quickly, and broke the connection.

I snapped off the TV and the lights, grabbed the room key and the .38, and slipped outside. I bent below the level of the parked cars and hustled up to the corner of the L-shaped wing, so I could approach the car at an unexpected angle.

I duckwalked past one row of parked cars, and peeped around the side of a white Subaru wagon. There were two of them. Neither of them built like Dexter. One had his head stuck in the door and was rummaging around in the glove box. The other was all the way inside the car, kneeling on the rear seat, leaning over, going through the luggage compartment.

In the movies, this is where the hero pulls his gun and gets the drop on the bad guys. In real life, however, brandishing a weapon you’re not prepared to use can get you killed in a heartbeat. Since I figured shooting car prowlers was probably frowned upon in Idaho, I left the .38 in the waistband of my jeans and rose to my full height.

“You boys looking for something?”

Freeze tag. Neither of them so much as twitched. These weren’t amateurs.

I had most of the Subaru between us. They couldn’t see my hands, which made them real slow and cautious as they crawled back outside the car. Both wearing dark jackets and wool watch caps. The nearest one took two steps in my direction.

I put my hand on the .38. He stopped moving.

“You don’t want to come this way,” I assured him.

He took another step.

“Man’s got a right to defend himself,” I cautioned.

The other one said something I couldn’t make out, and then they both began to back away from me, keeping their hands in sight and their eyes glued on me.

I waited until I heard car doors closing and the chirp of tires before I stepped out from behind the Subaru.

They hadn’t broken anything getting in, which told me for a second time they were probably pros. It took five minutes for me to put the Blazer back in order. This time, when I locked up, I set the alarm for maximum commotion. Not waking my neighbors suddenly didn’t seem nearly as important as it had earlier in the evening.

When Keith stumbled in at quarter to four, I was still up and still armed.

No crack of dawn for us. It was the better part of eleven in the morning before Keith and I rolled out of bed, found our way to the shower, and then stumbled out the door. I was having trouble waking up. He was having trouble keeping a silly-ass smile from spreading all over his face.

I was consoling myself with a cup of McDonald’s coffee as we pulled to a stop at the big billboard.
FUTURE HOME OF THE WORLD FAMOUS EAGLE TALON CASINO AND LODGE. WHERE DREAMS BEGIN
. I tried to wrap my head around the question of how something that wasn’t built yet could already be famous, but quickly wearied of the task.

Out in front of the Blazer, a brand-new blacktop road rolled over and around the hills, for as far as the eye could see. Someone had pulled back the galvanized gate and propped it open with a good-sized rock.

I once again demonstrated my keen perception of the obvious.

“Gate’s open,” I said.

“So . . .” Keith looked around. “So . . . other than the three
NO TRESPASSING
signs, the
POSTED KEEP OUT
sign, and the one over there that promises to prosecute violators to the fullest extent of the law . . . you figure this’ll be okay.”

I dropped the car into gear. “No problem,” I assured him, as we rolled over the cattle guard and started down the road.

Funny how long that ten miles seemed. I figured it must have been the new unmarked road and the fact that there was absolutely nothing in the distance for the eye to fix on. Seemed like we’d been driving for an hour before we finally crested a ridge and found ourselves looking down at the future home of the world-famous Eagle Talon Casino and Lodge, however the hell that worked.

Coupla-hundred-acre bluff overlooking the Snake River. A thousand wooden stakes pounded into the ground all over the place. Red stakes, white stakes, yellow stakes, stakes with pink ribbons nailed to the top. All marking where this or that was someday going to be located.

Uphill to the south was The Flying H. Part of a barn roof was visible from where we sat. You could sure see how having your own airport right there would be a big-time game changer. No four-lane blacktop. No buses. No nothing. Just fly em in, fleece em, and fly em out. No muss, no fuss, no bother.

The world is divided into two kinds of people: those who believe in the two-kinds-of-people theory and those who don’t. In this case, the humans had divided themselves into three groups. Out in the middle of the site, four logoed SUVs stood next to a dozen men wearing matching yellow hard hats. Hadda be the EPA, I figured, diligently protecting our environment from despoilers. My sleep-deprived brain immediately began to wonder what the hard hats were for—other than, say, random space debris—but that line of inquiry made my head hurt, so I stopped.

Over on the far side of the bluff, closest to the river, was the Indian contingent. Musta been ten of them. Everybody with long hair and a lawn chair. They’d started a fire and were sitting around warming themselves. I recognized Herbert Lean Elk’s hat and jacket among the indigenous crowd. The old man was leaning back in the chair with his feet up on a rock, using his hands to help him hold forth on some subject or other.

The three red Dodge pickups spoke for themselves.
Into the Future Together
was what they said. Tyler Bain and his pet Indian were part of a tight muttering knot of five or six guys standing out in front of the Keeler trucks. Bain’s face straightened out in a hurry when he caught sight of my car. He nudged Dexter with his elbow and said something under his breath, and then the whole bunch of them started our way.

“On your toes, kid,” I said to Keith as I popped the door and stepped out of the Blazer. “We may need some of those fancy Shore Patrol moves of yours.”

They’d had some practice at this sort of thing, I could tell. As they approached, they fanned out, hoping to flank us. I kept my back to the Blazer. The two guys on the left moved in a familiar unhurried manner that I’d seen before. I was betting these were last night’s car prowlers.

“The car’s unlocked,” I said to the nearest guy. “Case you two missed anything last night, when you were so rudely interrupted.”

“Don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,” the guy said. His buddy nodded several times. Apparently, he didn’t know either.

Tyler Bain walked right up into my face. “Well, looky here,” he drawled.

He scratched the side of his head.

“Try as I may . . . I just cannot recall sending you an invitation.”

“The gate was open,” I said with a smile.

Keith laughed and turned his face aside.

Bain pawed at the ground with his toe. “Now . . . as I recall, Mr. Waterman . . . you assured me last evening that you didn’t have a dog in this fight.”

“That’s right. I don’t.”

“Then what the hell are you doing here?”

“Just sightseeing,” I said. “Checking out the rugged natural beauty.”

He looked over at Keith. Gave him a salacious grin.

“You boys been holding any more of them circle jerks up in the hills?”

“Couldn’t start without you, could we?” Keith asked.

Now . . . it wasn’t the best quip I’d ever heard, but it also wasn’t the worst. Either way, though, it served its purpose. It pissed Bain off.

He pointed at the Blazer. “You get your asses back in that car, and you get the hell out of here. This here is private property.” He stopped talking and shoved his nose right up into mine. “You’re standing here a minute from now and I’m gonna have Dexter fuck you up good.”

“Is that how we’re going into the future together?” I chided.

He looked back over his shoulder. “Hurt him, Dexter,” he growled.

Dexter’s face broke into a grin as he rolled his thick shoulders and began to close the distance between us.

Parts of me began to constrict like a dying star. I’ve always had a pretty good sense of who I could handle and who I couldn’t. Everything about Dexter said he’d whip my ass without breaking a sweat, and the worst part was, we
both
knew it.

I spread my feet for balance. I figured I had what old-time fight commentators used to call a puncher’s chance. I was big enough and strong enough that if I got a good one in, I might be able to put him down for the count, and end this thing before he ever got a chance to puree my liver.

“He’s with us,” a familiar voice said.

Took everything I had to tear my eyes from the rapidly approaching Dexter.

Herbert Lean Elk and the Indian delegation had arrived en masse.

“Keep out of this,” Bain said.

Bain aimed a restraining palm at Dexter, who looked mighty disappointed that he wasn’t going to get the chance to pound me to jelly.

“Mr. Waterman here is a guest of the tribe,” Herbert said.

“This land belongs to the Keeler—”

“This land don’t belong to nobody right now,” Herbert corrected. “You guys got a handy-dandy new road and an option to buy, but that’s all you got, until those guys over there . . .”—he nodded in the direction of the EPA crew—“until those guys say whether it’s in the public interest or not for you to go on with your project.”

Bain opened his mouth, but Herbert cut him off.

“Until that happens, you got a right to be here, we got a right to be here, and the EPA guys got a right to be here. Something changes in that, I’m sure they’ll let us know.”

“Soon enough,” Bain said through clenched teeth. “Soon enough.”

Herbert took me by the arm. We walked side by side across the broken ground.

“You should keep away from the Pawnee,” he said. “He hurt one of our young men real bad, a while back. He’s one of those men who likes to hurt people, cause it helps to fill the black hole he’s got inside him.”

“I’ve known a few of those,” I said.

“No good ever comes of them. It’d put things out of balance, if it did.”

I stepped around a boulder.

“Bain seemed pretty confident this is going to roll his way,” I said as we picked our way downhill toward the fire and the circle of chairs.

“Got every reason to be,” Herbert said. “But that don’t make it a done deal.”

They found lawn chairs for Keith and me in the back of an ancient station wagon and spread the circle out enough for us to find a place at the fire. “Lot of this we already done,” Herbert said to me. “The tribe hired its own environmental experts. So did Keeler.” He spread his hands in resignation. “All said the same damn thing. Ground’s stable. Percolates pretty good. They got enough space to keep the sewage out of the river. Shouldn’t be no drainage or erosion problems. Shouldn’t do no harm to the fish runs that ain’t already been done.”

He dropped his hands to his lap. “We thought we had em with the road thing. Judge ruled that there had to be direct access for emergency vehicles if they was going to have that many people out there. Nobody’d give em an easement, so we figured that was the end of it.”

“And then, all of a sudden, they came up with the money.”

Herbert nodded his head. “Our financial people were telling us that Keeler was out of credit. They were sure of it. Said they had notes coming due that could lose em everything. Their houses and ranches . . . everything. Said there was no way they could come up with that much unsecured cash flow.”

“I thought Roland Moon was big money.”

“Moon’s land rich and cash poor. He owns a lotta stuff, but none of it’s liquid.”

“So,” I began, “. . . if you already know what the EPA is going to find out here . . . why all of this?”

“Stalling, mostly. And hopin all the diggin somehow finds something of cultural significance.”

“Like?”

“Anything that says our people once lived here. That the place had some sort of religious or cultural significance to the tribe.”