Lizardskin (38 page)

Beau read the words again in silence.

“You still there, Beau?”

“Yeah. Christ, Eustace. You remember what Charlie Tallbull said about the Shirt Wearers? This James guy was a member. And they were war heroes.”

Meagher was quiet for a moment. Beau looked to his left and saw the teenagers staring at him. He guessed all they saw was a big old white man in a rented Lincoln. He didn’t make the mistake of smiling at them.

“Well, it looks that way, Beau. The old guy was at Iwo. Lot of Indians in the services. They make real good combat troopers when there’s a war on, but they’re lousy at peacetime soldiering. Ran into some trouble, looks like. Just don’t look like professional thieves. What the hell was going on, Beau?”

“Damned if I can tell you. What’s all this stuff here? RECONDO. MACSOG. Phoenix. Sounds like spook shit.”

“The Phoenix stuff is, for sure. I ran into a few of those guys when I was in-country. Usually, they were free-lancers pulled from their regular units and sent off on some kinda wet-work operation. Duffy dug out the spook listing. That kinda stuff is never on open-loop networks. It wasn’t listed on the NCIC record, but Duffy has a buddy at Quantico and he confirmed it. RECONDO is Recon Commando. MACSOG means Military Assistance Command Special Operations Group, more Vietnam spook stuff. MACSOG replaced Phoenix after the Phoenix operations attracted too much press. Both these guys were hard core, Beau.”

“Yeah. How the hell I took one out is beyond me.”

“Yeah. If I’d known the guy coming up the hill at me was a Recon vet, I’d have shot myself. We lucked out. But I guess we can shitcan the robbery angle, right?”

“We can shitcan robbery. But I wouldn’t shitcan the SPEAR thing. This change your attitude about the Shirt Wearers?”

Meagher grunted. “Yeah. I don’t like it.”

“They
are
chiefs, all of them. Even this Gall kid, his father was Austin Gall. The Gall name goes back a long way in Lakota. There was a Gall, a real hard bastard, face like a fist, eyes like black stones, he was at Little Bighorn, helped carve up the Seventh Cavalry. You got Indian aristocracy here.”

“So why start a fight at a gas station? I don’t know. It sure doesn’t fit the sheets. I mean, we
do
have some felony assaults here. But no previous on armed robbery—man, what do we call these guys? I can’t say Chief Comes In Sight every time I wanna mention him. Take me a year just to do the reports.”

“Call them Earl and James,” said Beau.

“Okay. James here has some hits for assault, and he did time at Deer Lodge. Earl did eighteen months at San Pedro. But Jubal is clean—except for that drunk and disorderly beef, which you explained. And this Gall kid, hell, he had a regular job.”

“And seven hundred bucks in his pocket when he died. Did American Express tell you anything?”

“Yeah,” Eustace said. “The cardholder is actually the Offshore Film Group. The bills go to their address on Balboa. Card’s current. The Gall kid was a subsidiary holder. An employee. And he’s clean, as far as a sheet goes. We checked with Rocky Mountain Information Network, checked Mid-Atlantic-Great-Lakes network, checked with Western States Info—nothing.”

“What about the stuff in Two Moon’s blue pickup?” Beau asked.

“The stuff in the back was weird. Some of the usual—beans and canned beef. Flour and dried beef. Beer. A crate of Meals Ready to Eat, army issue. But get this! They also had gear for melting lead and a casting mold for .50-caliber shot. Two reproduction Hawken muzzle-loaders, and a whole lotta black powder. Percussion caps, several cans of those. Machine-milling gear. And another one of those combat bows. All of it bought in Pierre.”

“Like for an expedition?”

“Or a campaign. Why the nineteenth-century armaments?”

“My guess, you’re gonna work against the law, don’t use
weapons the law can control. Black powder, you can make that out of carbon, saltpeter, and sulphur. Anybody can get lead for shot. Bows are quiet, and arrows are reusable.”

“How much damage can you do with some old muzzle-loader?”

“Ask the Narraganset or the Pequot,” Beau replied.

“There aren’t any.”

“There you go. All this full-auto shit, that’s just a substitute for marksmanship. Any asshole can spray a couple hundred rounds into a target, be sure to kill something. Why you think that shit appeals to crack dealers and gang kids? Takes no control. Even a dropout can fire one. Takes a cool hand to do it with one round. I got that McMillan at home?”

“The heavy-barreled thing, over the window?”

“Yeah. That’s a single-shot machine. I can punch the eye out of the Jack of Hearts at six hundred yards with that.”

“Then how come you can’t hit your foot with the nine-mill?”

“Good question. I never thought of that.”

“Anyway, that rifle you have, that fires a .300 Magnum round, I remember correctly?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re not gonna be clipping the eye out of any Jack with that round. That round’ll come in like a runaway freight. Hit you so hard your
relatives
would die.”

“My point is, all this sounds like something planned. Like it was a … project. Got an ID on the girl yet?”

“No. Danny Burt says they were calling her Donna. It came out at the shooting board. We took her prints, but a blind search like that, we’d be lucky if the feds got back to us in a year. No reason to think she’d ever been printed. We have copies of those photos of her that you found in Gall’s stuff. You have one?”

“Yeah. Got it with me. You could try showing them around in Rosebud and Lame Deer. Anything else come around on her?”

“Not a thing. Garner said you asked for Greer and Harper,
for help with this. Why not leave it to Finch Hyam? He’s a good cop, he’ll get under this.”

“I like to have somebody on our side. Did Garner say we could have them?”

“They’re both on AL until Indian Affairs decides if there’s a lawsuit coming. Garner says we can have them until then.”

“Look, I was worrying about Bobby Lee. If this guy can find my place, he’ll find my ex-wife.”

“Yeah. You said that last night. Am I going to hear why you think Maureen’s involved?”

“Her name keeps coming up in connection with these baby incidents.”

“Well, I got Harper and Greer. One of them will keep an eye on both of them. That okay with you?”

“That’s fine. Okay, well, I gotta go.”

“Beau, let me call somebody in the LAPD. I know a guy in the detective division, he could walk around with you. Be another gun on your side.”

“I’ll call him, I need him. What’s his name?”

“Rufus Calder.”

“Rufus?
Rufus?
He one of your people? Can he dance?”

“You say that to him, Beau. He doesn’t have my sense of humor. He’s a good cop, though. You go see him.”

“Yeah. I’ll bring him some tap shoes.”

“Very funny, Beau. Rufus’ll love you. Anything else you need?”

“Just, if you could, talk to this Cut Arms guy. Run this Shirt Wearer thing past him, see if he blinks.”

“Yeah. I’ll drive out there, see what he has to say. He recognized you in the hospital elevator?”

“Yeah. I guess he’d seen me somewhere.”

“You know him?” asked Meagher.

“Not at all. By the way, how’s Dwight? I guess he’s pretty pissed off at me?”

“Does Batman have homosexual panic? Why do you figure his dad was so interested in getting Dwight off your back?”

“Doc Darryl is a throwback. He’s an Early.”

“One of the first to come, you mean?”

“Yeah. Those guys, they have a kind of code. Frontier justice. Doc Hogeland’s roots run real deep into Montana. They had land on the Bitterroot back when you had to fight a Flathead warrior every time you went outside to take a leak.”

“Yeah,” said Meagher. “Dwight’s always bringing that up. So what now?”

“Now?” said Beau, suddenly back in the moment. He looked around at the rotting barrio, at the hard yellow light and the beaten ground.

“Now I get out of the car. Pray for me, Eustace.”

Vanessa Ballard spent the better part of a long, humid Tuesday afternoon in a meeting with, among others, Dwight Hogeland, acting now for the ACLU and looking a little the worse for his dance lesson with Beau McAllister.

Also appearing was Joel Sherman, who was on the ACLU staff in Helena, and a Native American lawyer named Maya BlueStones, a full-blood Ojibway with puffy pockmarked cheeks, tiny hard-rock eyes the color of wet mud, short black hair, and a sulphurous temper that she seemed able to switch on and off at will. She radiated self-righteous fire and disrupted the talks at several points to deliver sententious orations that Ballard later, for the benefit of Eustace Meagher, broke down into two basic categories: Native American—good; Euro-American—dogshit.

Although Eustace Meagher had dodged the meeting, mumbling something about locating an L.A. cop named Rufus Calder, the FBI agent, Frank Duffy, also attended, so that made four besides herself—three too many for Vanessa Ballard.

In self-defense, she set the meeting with them in neutral territory, the lounge at the Berkely House, a private club for Montana businessmen and corporate lawyers in an old Victorian brick mansion that stood on a crest of land overlooking the Yellowstone and the rest of Billings, as befitted the Players and Movers and Men of Affairs who built it and stocked it and who were—
all together now!
—making Montana The State of the Nation.

Ballard’s membership in this club was a bequest from her father and mother, who were remembered around the state as a collective proper noun usually rendered as
Bootsandbonnie
.

Boots’ real name was Augustus, but he preferred to be called Boots because it harmonized with the frontier image he had always been careful to project in public, although in his business relations he advanced the causes and crusades of Ballard Holdings with classic eastern coldness and aggression.

The Great Con was how Vanessa always thought of her father. Their relationship had taken a negative turn around her eleventh birthday, when her father—a big rugged redwood of a man with thick white hair and a blunt red-tinted face—had developed an interest in her bathing habits. She once looked up from her shower stall, scrubbing away at the dirt she always managed to grind into her knees when she was out playing at gunfighters with her gang, and saw—it stole her breath and snapped her innocence in a nanosecond—saw the florid drunken face of Boots Ballard through the steamy mist on the bathroom window, staring at her with something carnivorous—something vile—in his blood-thickened face.

Vanessa never told anyone this story, not even her mother. It would have distressed Bonnie greatly, not because it was a terrible invasion and a sign of something rotten at the core of the redwood, but because it would have been so
vulgar
of Vanessa to bring it up. Instead, Vanessa put up draperies at her bathroom window and talked Reynardo the groundsman into installing a deadlock on her bedroom door.

Now and then she would lie in bed in the still dark of the night and listen to the knob being turned slowly, a tinny scratching noise, like a rat in the baseboards, then silence and another long watch of the night, while she sleeplessly waited for the sky outside her window to change from black to pale rose to bright blue, and then she would go down the stairs for another breakfast of cornbread cakes and the hypersonic silent shriek of suppressed truths and a day full of bright brittle conversation with Boots and Bonnie.

Bonnie Ballard’s real name was Portia, a curse laid upon her by a mother with an obsession for the classics, but she had
allowed their “set” to nickname her Bonnie because Boots and Bonnie were almost all the way to becoming that all-important collective noun by this time, and Bonnie was alliterative and, well, just so darn
cute
.

Their “set” was the merchant aristocracy of Montana, a collection of hard-eyed women and predatory men who had found a variety of ways to twist money out of the red earth and leathery hide of the country, and who along the way had cultivated the elemental coldness, the steely blindness required if the rich wish to grow richer.