Lizardskin (46 page)

Harper stared down at the pile. “Oh, God. There can’t be that many Cadillacs in Montana!”

Beth patted him on the shoulder. “They can’t index them by year. They’re not set up for that.”

“Goddamn! Computers can tell you every credit card purchase made in Missoula by a left-handed Nicaraguan nanny named Filomena between three and three-fifteen on a Thursday, but they can’t run off a year-by-year breakdown of Cadillacs!”

He hefted the pile and let it drop back on the desk. Then he looked up at Beth, and a slow sly smile spread across his tanned face. “Oh, no,” said Beth, backing away. “Not on your life!”

“Dinner? Your choice?”

“No way!”

“And dancing? How about a weekend?”

Beth stopped and smiled at him. “Who’s bribing who here, Moses?”

“Whom,” said Harper. “Who’s bribing
whom
.”

Headband was doing lengths in the backyard pool. Bobby Lee was somewhere back in the kitchen, busy with her goldfish. Dell Greer was sitting in a lawn chair with his collar undone, trying not to let Maureen’s body distract him. Half
the sky was taken up with a huge storm front now. The sun was about a half-hour away from being eaten up by it.

Greer shifted his position in the chair and turned it away from the pool so he could see the yard and the door of the house. Maureen was swimming on her back now, the water sliding over her breasts and her belly.

Damn, thought Greer. I’m married.

And I don’t even like her.

Why me? Why not Moses? Moses was no good at paperwork anyway. He’d just try to get someone else to do it for him.

He shifted again, trying to ease the strain in his pants.

Come
on
, he said to himself. Settle down there!

Show some taste.

Never have sex outside your own species.

Words to live by.

George Cut Arms set his beer down on the hood of the pickup and grunted at Meagher. “That’s just
this
year! And just from one clinic.”

“How many of the women?”

“On the Rosebud? Maybe fifteen.”

Meagher walked away and looked out at the flattened countryside. If God had really made this land, he’d done most of the work with a twenty-pound sledge.

“How can you be sure?”

“I asked them.”

“And you believe them?”

“Why not?”

“Well … they’re hookers, aren’t they?”

George Cut Arms pushed himself off the truck and slid to the ground. His heavy body thumped the earth, and his boots scraped on the ground. “Look, buffalo soldier, you’re a black man. Yes?”

“Last time I looked.”

“And a cop?”

“Yes.”

“So which part of you is the real part? The buffalo soldier or the cop or the black man?”

“All of it is.”

“Yeah. Same with me. Same with the women.”

“Don’t they … take precautions?”

“Take precautions? Yeah—they don’t work.”

“Bullshit. They
have
to work. The girls are lying to you.”

“
All
of them, soldier? All of these girls are lying? And what about the girls on Pine Ridge and up at Standing Rock? It’s even happening to the Crow and the Shoshoni—”

One of the old men spat on the ground. Some things never ended, thought Meagher. A hundred years, and the old men still hate.

“—even to them. Charlie Tallbull will tell you. They killed his niece. His boys know—Willy and Philip Joe told us about it. They call them the Sleeping Ones. Mary Littlebasket had one, and they tried to take it. She left the medicine sign.”

Christ. “What medicine sign?”

Cut Arms walked over and drew a few quick strokes in the dusty hood of the Lincoln.

“What does it mean?”

“It’s a sign for protection from bad things. A warning sign. Whatever the arrows point at, we watch for. It is from that thing that the evil comes.”

“And the cross? Is it a church? A priest?”

“That is our sign for your medicine. How many things is it going to take, how many people talking to you, before you believe us and do something? I will tell you, there are many of us who are not waiting for you to help us. The Crow boys have told us that a man has come into their country, into the Bighorn country, and they do not know who he is, but they say he is a great fighter who has a bad face.”

“A bad face?”

“When Satanka-Witko was on the Red Cloud Agency, he was in love with Black Buffalo Woman. But she was the
woman of No Water, and No Water came to the Powder River Country and took Bad Heart Bull’s gun, and he shot Crazy Horse in the face. Crazy Horse tried to move away, but Little Big Man held his hands, thinking to stop a killing, and No Water’s bullet hit Crazy Horse in the left cheek. “This man who is in the Crow country is a Lakota man, a great fighter who has been asleep but is now awake again, and this man has a bullet in his left cheek.”

“But Crazy Horse is dead. He’s buried on the Wounded Knee creek.”

“I told your man, McAllister, back at Sweetwater Hospital, I told him Satanka-Witko had come into the world again. If I’m wrong, then who is this Lakota man? He was in the ground, and now he has come out of it. I have been told this even by the Crow boys, who have heard it from their old men.”

“And how have the old Crow men heard it?”

“It has been in the wind, and in the long grass.”

Meagher stared at the man, full of disbelief. “Oh, good. That’s great. It was in the grass. That’s all right, then. George, what the hell am I supposed to make of
that
? I mean, you’re here, you
look
real. How can you buy this kind of thing?”

“Look around you. What else do we have? I go your way, I have nothing at all, I’m just a red nigger. You and me, we had other ways to look at things, but now the whites, they run things, and they don’t believe in anything. I say, for me, for my clan, the old men know something, and if they tell me they heard it in the wind or in the tallgrass, then that’s good enough for me. If you belonged someplace, had your own land back, you’d think like me, you’d let go of what the whites have been giving you. It’s too much to carry. They give it to you to keep your hands busy, so you don’t make trouble and start to listen to yourself. Me, I went that way, but now maybe I start to listen to these old men here. Maybe now, you should, too.”

Meagher looked down at his hands. They were tightened into fists. He walked back to the Lincoln, conscious of all the Sioux on the streets of Parmelee now, in little groups and
singly, in the shade and in the hard sunlight, looking at him as he talked with George Cut Arms.

He was thinking about the skull-faced man, the “black man” that Beau had seen in the wedding picture. Was he an ex-soldier, like the two men killed at Arrow Creek? But Beau had said nothing about a scar on his face.

But if he was a Sioux and a fighter, who was to say what was true and not true about it? Meagher had not been born here, but sometimes at night even he heard something in the wind and felt a living thing close at his shoulder and turned to see nothing but a bending in the light or a darker shadow in the hills. The Academy had had nothing to say to him about any of this.

“What are you gonna
do
about it, soldier?”

Meagher stared at the man, angry at him for no reason. George Cut Arms stared back, his thick dark face a blunt instrument, his heavy arms folded across his barrel chest. The wind whipped up a dust devil along the street, and the sky seemed to press down on them all. A man could go crazy out here. There’d be no horizon to keep his mind in his head. It would just spread out until the wind took it, and it would blow away into the blue horizon like smoke. There’d be nothing left of him but ashes.

He reached into the Lincoln and pulled out his car phone. The handset blinked at him.

Damn.

“Is there a phone around? Or do we send up a smoke signal?”

George Cut Arms raised his right hand, pointed at the shaded porch where the old men were sitting.

“In there.”

Miss Haydon walked Beau out to the reception area after their interview. The receptionist swiveled in his chair and
called to her. Beau stepped away to give them some privacy and studied the framed awards on the wall over the gray leather couch. The Lizard-Boys were gone, although there were several wadded-up, bloodied Kleenexes in the wastepaper basket next to the couch.

A door opened up to his left, and a large fat man came out into the reception area. He was wearing a baggy suit and a white shirt with no tie. His ears stood out from the side of his head, which he carried forward on his neck as if it were too heavy to lift. He looked at Beau, his face slack with age and weariness. He made Beau think of an old buffalo. He was drying his hands, and Beau realized that the door led to a washroom.

Miss Haydon came up to Beau and shook his hand. “Sergeant, I want to thank you for telling us this in person. It’s a terrible tragedy, and we’ll do anything we can to help your department. I had Dylan run this off for you.”

She handed him a sheet of computer paper. “This is a staff list. We are actually three separate corporations, but there’s a parent company and we do the employee accounting through this office here. This man, Gabriel Picketwire, is the one in your photograph. He’s a stunt man. He works for a lot of film companies around town. He’s an independent, but he belongs to SAG and also the stunt-men’s organization. He lives on a boat in Newport Beach. It’s a Cheoy Lee ketch called
Blue Coat
. But he’s not there now. At least, he’s not answering his phone and his service doesn’t know where he is. Actually, no one seems to know. He has no family—”

Something in her face caught Beau’s attention.

There had been something between Picketwire and this woman. It was gone now, but the traces of it lingered in the woman’s eyes.

“He walked off a set last week after he was hurt in a fall. As a matter of fact, it was Dr. Sifton who—”

The old man came forward, and she turned to him. “Doctor, how’s Gash?”

The old man shook his heavy head in a kind of apology. “He’ll be fine, Paula. May I meet this man?”

“Of course! Excuse me! This is Sergeant Beauregard McAllister, of the Montana Highway Patrol. Sergeant McAllister, this is Dr. Sifton, our medical supervisor.”

Beau shook his hand. It was damp and chilly. The man looked very sick. His eyes were wet and sunken, his lips pale as sand. “Sergeant McAllister, I’ve just been attending to the young boy with the nosebleed.”

“Really? Is he all right?” Beau tried for a sincere tone.

“A little older. A little wiser. It seemed to be more of a psychosomatic affliction brought on by a personality disorder. Michael is a gifted talent, but a little uncontrolled.”

He looked at Beau for a moment.

Beau held the look steadily, his face blank.

The doctor shrugged it off.

“Anyway, I’m sorry to meet you in these circumstances. What seems to be the trouble?”

“The sergeant is looking into—” She touched Dr. Sifton’s arm.

“Apparently Eddie Gall has been killed.”

“Killed? In an accident, Sergeant?”

“No, sir. I’m afraid not.”

“He was shot, Lucas.”

The doctor studied Beau for a while, his heavy face unreadable. “I heard you mention Gabriel Picketwire, Julia. Is he involved?”

Beau cut her off. “Just a routine followup, sir. Nothing to worry about.”

“I see.… Well, I’ll leave you to it, then. I’m very sorry to hear about young Eddie. He was a fine boy. We all loved him.”

“Yes,” said Miss Haydon, her eyes filling up. “We all did.”

Beau left them in the hall and walked back out into the glare of the midday sun. He was halfway to the car lot when he heard his name being called. He turned to see the old doctor making his way down the landscaped walkway. He stopped by the Lincoln and waited for him.

“Thank you, Sergeant. I wanted a word with you.”

“Yes, sir. Is it about Edward Gall?”

“Well, in a sense. I wonder, do you have plans for the … well, of course you will.”

“I have to go downtown. But I have time.”

“Perhaps we could sit in your car, then. I’m rather an old fart, and the heat affects me.”

Beau looked at the old man. He looked back unblinkingly, an old bull buffalo with a bad heart. “What’s this about, sir?”

The man indicated Beau’s file folder. It was open, and Beau’s hard blue script was visible.

“You’re asking about the Sonesta Clinic?”

“Yes. I’m going there now.”

“I can short-cut some of this for you. I sent Edward Gall to the Sonesta Clinic. And about Picketwire—I had something to do with this.”

Beau looked at the man for a while. “Let’s get in the car. It’s cooler.”

Gabriel forced himself to look again.

It was as if Gabriel Picketwire had been erased. The eyes were perhaps the same, but the face—it was a ruin. It shook him to the core. His throat was thick and tight. He thought about the shotgun he had found in Bell’s tool shed. He could hardly look worse, and at least he wouldn’t be alive to spend the rest of his life behind a face like this.

But then, maybe he wasn’t alive. Maybe he was a walking corpse, and if that were true—and in this narcotic land many things seemed possible—then it wasn’t his life anyway.