Lizardskin (26 page)

“The fund-raisers?”

“Yeah!”

“You got the old man here?”

“Yeah, he’s in a cooler. Wanna see him?”

“What killed him?”

“It was a race.”

“A race?”

“He had emphysema and diabetes and renal dysfunction. Any one of them coulda taken him out.”

“What did?”

“Cut his own throat. Neatly, too. One downstroke on the external jugular. Still had the knife in his hand when they
brought him in here. Klein photographed it
in situ
, then bagged it for evidence.”

“So out of the five people who showed up in Yellowstone County last Friday morning, we got one Edward Gall dead of shotgun wounds inflicted by Joe Bell, the old guy is probably Jubal Two Moon, that fits. What about the others? Did Klein have the IDs?”

“Not yet. He lifted prints from all of them except Gall, and we already know who he is. Sent the prints to the feds. He’s onto Frank Duffy to get his guys in Quantico working on it. Head shots and prints to the army. But right now, we got them as John Does One and Two. They didn’t find anything on the others. Not even labels. We do have Peter Hinsdale ID’d.”

“Is he here?”

“Not now. Klein had him done first so Danny Burt could take him, along with the Wozcylesko kid. Had to get him cleaned up for his mother.”

“What killed him?”

“He was disemboweled. Somebody opened him up from his belly to his sternum. One upward stroke with a big combat knife. When it went in, the hilts bruised his skin. We got a nice imprint of the hilt. Klein has a shot of it. Boy came in here with most of his intestines down around his knees. Had about a pint of blood left in him. Nasty.”

“Klein have the knife?”

“The knife?”

“Yeah. The one Klein says killed Hinsdale.”

Vlasic considered that. “Okay … now that you remind me, I’d say no. He didn’t have it. Guess it’d be in the river somewhere?”

“Yeah. Guess it would be.”

Beau was silent, thinking that Peter Hinsdale was another one of
his
victims. If he’d left Hinsdale in the coffin, maybe the kid would still be alive. What a miserable performance. Maybe Dwight Hogeland was right about him—maybe he
was
a toxic cop.

“Hey, Beau … thinking like that will kill you. You didn’t
kill Hinsdale. You killed the guy who killed him. You’re a good guy. These are the bad guys. You know that.”

“Most of the time.… So, out of the five people who drove a blue Ford pickup into Bell’s Oasis last Friday, we have one dead of shotgun wounds, one dead of nine-mill, one Meagherized, one suicide, and a girl I gunbutted—that about right?”

“More or less. So what? Like I said, shit’s tidal.”

“Not very efficient, are they?”

“Well …”

“Can’t raise a lot of cash when you’re dead, can you?”

“No? Ask the Catholics. Their leader’s been dead for two thousand years. You ever see the Vatican? Hell of a corporate headquarters. And their logo’s a dead guy stapled to a tree.”

“So your theory—the bows, the arrows, the traditional wounds—all that means another native uprising? Maybe connected to SPEAR? And this … unit is part of that, and their job is to rob gas stations and banks and earn money for the uprising?”

“It fits everything, doesn’t it, Beau?”

“It’s a damned complicated explanation for it. And I don’t like it.”

Marco was watching Beau’s face. “Beau, you gonna faint?”

“Not immediately … I just feel tired. Think I’ll go back home, see the cats. Get some sleep.”

“Can I drive you?”

“What about these guys?”

Marco swiveled on his heel, surveyed the room. “They’ll still be dead tonight. Frank’ll put them in the coolers. Come on, let me take you home.”

Beau got slowly to his feet.

“One more thing. You seen Danny Burt yet?”

“Yeah. When he took away Hinsdale and Wozcylesko yesterday.”

“How was he?”

“Hell. You know Danny. He’s like an old boot full of piss and hot peppers. Wrists a little marked-up from where he was tied. Madder than hell about the Indians making a fool of him.
Pretty upset about the Hinsdale kid. Not that he liked him, but the kid was his responsibility.”

“Where’s he now?”

“Working. He’s coming back later for another load.”

“Another load? What’s he taking?”

“Beau, look around. You think we should stack ’em up in the corner? Hang ’em by their heels in the window?”

“You’re a sick person, Marco. I’ve always admired you for that. Can I have this copy of the paper?”

Vlasic handed it to him and took Beau’s left arm in a surprisingly strong grip. Beau felt muscle and wire in the small man’s shoulders and across his back as Vlasic helped him toward the door. Beau looked back toward the young woman under the sheet. A terrible suspicion rose up out of his belly and drove the blood from his face. He stopped Vlasic with a pressure on his shoulder.

“Marco—who’s that under the sheet there?”

Vlasic looked back at the corpse. He realized the connection Beau had made.

“No, Beau, that’s not her. Read it in the paper here. That girl, she’s in Sweetwater General. In the ICU. This isn’t her. Hell, Beau, somebody would have told you!”

“Nobody’s been telling me anything, Vlasic. I haven’t heard from Eustace, I haven’t heard from any of the guys. Didn’t even get a call from the Benevolent Association.”

Vlasic shrugged. “This is somebody else here. Young Cheyenne girl, died in childbirth. Sad story.”

“Anything I should know?”

Vlasic moved under Beau’s arm. He was quiet for a moment.

“Not really. It’s reservation stuff. She was a hooker, you know. Hospital does
pro bono
work through the clinic in Hardin. Guess you knew that?”

Beau did. Maureen worked at the Julia Dwight Clinic in Hardin. She had always told Beau horror stories about lives being wasted on the reservations. He nodded, and Vlasic started to walk them both toward the exit.

“So she’s hooking around the county, and she must have forgotten her pills, or whatever. She gets knocked up.”

“That’s odd. A hooker has her kid? Most of them go to the Dwight Clinic or somewhere and get an abortion.”

“Yeah. Well, somebody tried one on her. You can see the marks on the cervix. But it was pretty amateur. Anyway, she carried for another two months, then went into premature labor. Died from internal bleeding. She was admitted last Friday night. She’d already lost most of her blood. They did what they could.”

“What about the kid?”

Vlasic looked away. “We got him here. You don’t wanna see him. Take my word.”

“Why?”

“Anencephalic. Premature. Deformed as well. By any definition, a gork. Lived a few minutes, but you don’t try real hard for something like that. They put it on a tray in a storage closet and let it die. Christ, Beau! What’s the matter?”

Beau was staring at the young girl. “Is Mary Littlebasket here?”

“Who’s she?”

“She’s the Crow girl who was killed in that accident last week, down in Hardin.”

Vlasic was shaking his head. “No. They took her back to the clinic in Hardin. She was DOA. I think her family came to get her. That’d be the routine. We’d only get her if there was some kind of question about cause of death.”

“I want to see this woman’s baby.”

“No, you don’t. Anyway, I’m not sure we still have him. If the family doesn’t want the baby—this girl’s family doesn’t even want
her
body—then we usually give it to the students.”

“
Students?
”

“The interns. For research.”

“Where?”

“Where d’you think? Sweetwater General’s the catch-basin hospital for most of eastern Montana. It’s a teaching hospital as well. So they’d want anything like that, an anomalous baby.”

“Is a baby with that condition …”

“Anencephaly?”

“Anencephaly. Is a baby with anencephaly a rare thing?” Vlasic shook his head. “Not these days. Happens a lot.”

“What causes it?”

“Christ. What causes anything? Something goes wrong in the fertilization. Genetic material is damaged. There are millions of cells in a single developing fetus. It’s amazing that any of them come out right. I’d say, poor nutrition has a lot to do with it. And drugs. The reserves are full of addicts, gas sniffers, glue sniffers, the gene pool’s a mess because of inbreeding. Families in decay. It’s a hell of a thing. Don’t get me started on it.”

“So the chances of there being two anencephalic babies in a couple of weeks, born to reservation women, that’s not out of the ordinary?”

“Who’s the other?”

“Mary Littlebasket. Her kid was anencephalic, too.”

“Yeah. Well, I don’t know. Sure, it might be pushing the odds. But I doubt it. Statistical regression, Beau.”

“What does that mean?”

“Things even out. If it gets real good for a long time, it’ll probably get real bad for a while. If you roll a chain of sevens at the crap table, you think it’s luck. But it’s just math. If you paid attention, you’d see the same dice roll out a string of random junk. It would all boil down to statistical averages. The only reason people believe in luck is because they don’t keep accurate records. They see what they want to see. If the reserve had several months of healthy babies, then a month of preemies and deformed kids, the tribe would say, look, this is evil, there’s something evil at work. They’d do something, have a sing, cast out someone they didn’t trust. Around the same time, statistical regression would see to it that the births leveled out again. The tribe would say, look, the magic worked. But a scientist would know it was going to stop and turn around anyway. That’s why there’s so much superstition in the world, why people believe in curses and astrology and runs of good luck.”

“So a couple of deformed babies, that’s nothing out of the ordinary.”

“Not if you take the long view, no. Poor bastards. They’re having a hell of a time down there. Hookers and dead babies. Makes you think a bit about SPEAR, maybe. If these guys are part of some kind of new Indian movement, they might believe they have a case to make.”

“Custer died for our sins, Marco.”

Vlasic twisted his mouth. “There was a hell of a lot of dying going on around here before Custer showed up. You know that, Beau. Better than most.”

Beau was looking at the young woman.

“Would there be records about the incidence of deformed births on the reserves?”

“Sure. Why not ask Doc Hogeland about it? He’s a friend of yours.”

“I will. What’ll happen to her?”

Vlasic raised his hands, a gesture of helplessness. “Nobody claims her, she goes to the hospital.”

“To the students?”

“That’s right.”

“How much to bury her?”

“Five, six hundred. Depends on the coffin. Are
you
going to spring for that?”

Beau hesitated a long time.

“No, no, I’m not. Goddamn it, I can’t afford it.”

Vlasic stared at Beau for a long time.

Finally he said, “Beau, let’s get you home.”

Every road leads homeward, angel. If you’re lucky.

Vlasic insisted on buying Beau a meal. They ate at the Muzzleloader and talked in careful generalities, settling on the Bobcats and their pennant chances while Beau toyed with a bowl of barley soup and a mug of Lone Star. By the time they reached the Lizardskin road, the sunset was casting yellow fire across the polished hood of Vlasic’s Cherokee. Ahead of them the hardtop gave way to stones and the stones gave way to dirt, to the red dust and yellow earth of the Whitman Coulee.

In the Far West, shreds of cirrus and altostratus spread across a teal-blue sky. The hills crowded close, dark as buffalo bulls on either side of the road. The air smelled of rain and lightning and pine trees. The headlights swept around the hills, picking out a sweep of sage or a stand of cottonwoods. Overhead a few pale stars glittered through the gathering dark.

Beau drifted in and out of sleep on the way back home, his head coming forward, then jerking back as he woke. Vlasic said little once they turned off the interstate at Hardin and climbed north up the Lizardskin road toward the Pine Ridge range.

Vlasic was humming a nameless tune, and the car’s motion rocked Beau gently. His face was still and set in hard lines in the light of the dying sun. He was trying to see his way through this thing.

Apart from a few years spent working with the Interagency Strike Force—something he had done to distract himself from
the apparently bottomless pain of losing Alice—Beau’s career had been a slow and, as far as he was concerned, seemly progression through the ranks. If he’d gone to war, he would have been a middle soldier, not on point and not on drag, just a trooper with the rest of the boys. Life was too short to get all fired up over promotions and corner offices. He did the job and cut no slack. Hooked them and booked them and never looked back. It was a steady and soothing rhythm, something he could depend on to give shape and structure to the formless reality of life. Nor would he engage in the thousand petty intrigues that make up the typical cop society anywhere in the world.

He longed for no one’s job, he coveted no man’s influence. Meagher could have the whole damned state. Run for governor, like old Doc Darryl had a few years back. He had even resisted a promotion to sergeant, but Meagher wouldn’t leave it alone. It was Eustace who had signed him up for the sergeant’s examination, and Meagher who had drilled him on the questions.

Nor was Beau inclined to run against the pack, especially if the pack was hunting for someone to blame. If the ACLU was getting involved, then you could kiss good-bye to any chance there might have been to find out what had really happened with Joe Bell anyway. All the ACLU ever wanted to accomplish was the crucifixion of as many police officers as possible in the time available. Meagher would fight that very hard, by any means, the best of which would be silence.

Anyway, did it really matter now? The dead were dead, and the dead had gone looking for death. Montana had simply obliged them, something Montana had been doing for a million years. Montana was soaked to the grass roots with blood and bitter outcomes. It was a wonder the well water didn’t run red.