Lizardskin (6 page)

The lot below was a crowded litter of trailers and cars and catering trucks and lighting rigs. Black cables snaked everywhere from a big transformer truck near the chain link fence. As usual, the talent was hiding out in their Winnebagos, four in a row, one for each of them, the size and placement of each Winnebago the consequence of weeks of talk and six full pages of legal terminology.

Around the set, hundreds of people were in constant motion with clipboards and radios. From a hundred feet up they all looked like brightly feathered birds in a box. They were like that when you were down there with them, too—all herky-jerky motions and chatter and that same kind of birdbrain self-satisfaction you could see in a budgy or a parrot.

Well, if you don’t like the company, find another line of work. Stop whining to yourself. What was bothering him wasn’t putting up with the people or even an asshole director like Nigel Hampton. It was that hot wind from the south that was whipping up the ocean out there and tugging at his flak jacket and flaring his thick black hair. He had a hundred feet to cover, at thirty-two feet per second squared every thirty-two feet. He was carrying an M-16 that weighed ten pounds, and he had six pounds of calf liver taped to his chest, over three explosive squibs and the radio detonator. Under the liver and the black-powder squibs he had a Kevlar and asbestos vest. Under that there was only him. He drew a long breath and felt the wind at his cheek. Holding a palm up into it, he
stood awhile, lost in that sensation. Then he pushed the jump-marker a few inches to the left. It would be like throwing a Hail Mary pass the length of the field, with a bad side wind. He would have to allow for that.

Gabriel was six feet even, and the last time he’d weighed himself, he had been a reasonable one sixty-five. He was good at his work. There wasn’t much that worried him. Dying like a putz in a fucked-up gag was one thing that did.

They had rigged a transmitter under his flak vest. He keyed it on again. Mike’s voice buzzed in his left ear.

“Mr. Picketwire—you reading?”

“I’m reading you, Mike. What’s the story down there? This wind isn’t getting any better up here.”

He saw one of the crewmen around the dumpster step back and look up at him.

“We’re okay now. The compressor was fucked. Jody hadn’t changed the filter, so we were pushing crap into the nozzle. This bag’ll be up in about a minute. You still gonna do this thing?”

“Is Nigel ready?”

“Yeah.… He’s got Silverman here with him, so he’s gotta show her pages, and we been stuck on this gag for two days.”

“I told him to second-unit the gags. The rest of these people could be doing interiors in Vancouver. He could shoot around this scene.”

“Yeah. Well, you know Hampton. He’s an
auteur
, right?”

“Yeah. Well, buzz me when it’s up. I stand around here any longer, I’m gonna talk myself out of it.”

“Mr. Picketwire—Gabriel—why don’t we rig the harness instead? Drop on a line. Use the drum.”

“Don’t trust the line. Someday somebody’ll die on one.”

“Okay. One minute, then I’ll cue you.”

Gabriel stepped back away from the edge. The tiles grated under his combat boots. The wind was a steady force up here, dry and dirty as truck exhaust. Under the soldier’s gear—so familiar and so strange—he could feel sweat running into the small of his back. Far into the east he could see the low black line of the San Bernardino Mountains. Beyond that there was
desert, and then the big range. Home was back beyond that, as much as any of his people had homes anywhere now.

He let his mind go that way for a while, wondering about Eddie and Earl Black Elk and old Jubal and his emphysema and whether that blue truck had made the climb through the passes. Well, if they had trouble, they’d call him. They’d promised him that.

Something was moving against the smog and the haze. He strained to focus on it. Something flying out there. A small plane, maybe. Or a large bird. It rose up on a thermal and banked in a huge arc and dipped down again. Then it disappeared.

Be good if that were an eagle or a hawk, thought Gabriel. How good it would be to believe in that kind of sign now. If that were really a hawk, it would mean something. It would be good to be able to believe in any kind of sign.

That was the thing about working with these people out here. They knew about everything and believed in nothing. It was contagious. Now he had to turn around and walk over to the edge of the roof and step off without believing in anything but physics and gravity.

He felt the need to urinate. He ignored the radio and walked over to an elevator cage. Better to leave this here, he thought. He’d seen men with belly wounds, seen how a full bladder of urine could kill you with a wound like that. If he drifted on the way down, he’d miss that bag. Maybe miss the whole dumpster. Maybe not. That would be worse. He might live.

“Gabriel. Hey, you there?”

He finished and walked back to the jump-marker, waved down at the crew. A hundred white faces looked up at him. Birds in a box.

“You ready?”

“I’m ready.”

“Just a minute—Gabriel, Nigel wants me to say how much he appreciates this take. He knows you’ll give it all you’ve got.”

“Tell Nigel he’s gonna see everything I’ve got if I miss that bag.”

“Squibs armed. Okay … they’re rolling … when you’re ready, Mr. Picketwire. When you’re ready.”

He was at the edge of the roof now. He looked out to sea again, saw the curve of the world and the tiny white sails in the bronze light and the color of everything. He smelled salt and blood and sensed the things moving under the surface out there. Life was everywhere around him, and the wind was sliding over his left cheek. A hundred feet below him the black rectangle of the dumpster looked like a small door to somewhere far away.

He raised the rifle and drew back the bolt and let it snap home, feeling the first round grate up out of the magazine and slide into the chamber. It all felt very familiar, and he remembered a time when believing in nothing at all was the only way to come out alive.

“It is a good day to die,” he said, not believing in the words. He moved forward.

Bullshit—it’s never a good day to die.

He felt the explosions tearing at his chest. The wind was all around him. The flak jacket spread open, and he dropped through the light. The M-16 was working against his ribs. He held it in close. White flame seared his cheek. The black door rose up at him, a flat denial of metaphysics. Maybe he had seen a hawk.

Maybe it was a hawk.

Maybe it was a

McAllister followed Lieutenant Meagher’s navy-blue Town Car all the way back to the station house in Billings, trying to enjoy the sundown on the ancient slopes and the way the light was always changing along the valleys, trying not to think about how it would go once they got there.

He hadn’t exactly covered himself in glory back there at Pompeys Pillar, although he was damned if he could think of any other way he could have handled the situation.

One thing for sure, Eustace had no intention of letting McAllister root through Bell’s office with no particular idea of what he was rooting for. Meagher had made sure that Beau put the office back together—the compact disk still in the case, the tape mound intact—and then he walked him out of the office and back to the crime scene.

By then, the Criminal Investigation Bureau guys from the state were there, a couple of plainclothes guys named Finch Hyam and Rowdy Klein. Klein was a long bony bundle with large pale hands and floppy feet whose real name was Rudy but who refused to answer to anything but Rowdy after seeing a bunch of
Rawhide
reruns on cable TV. He kept it up so long that the rest of the men and women on the force had been plain worn down. Even Eustace called him Rowdy now.

Beau always made it a point to call him Howdy every chance he got. By way of getting even, Rowdy always called Beau by his full name, pronouncing it
Bo-ree-gard
.

Finch was just Finch, a silly bird-name on a man his size, but Finch was a solid investigator and a reasonable man with
a very sweet wife who made it a point to try to match up Beau with any spare woman she could find. Like all good wives, she hated to see a man running loose. It offended her sense of order.

Rowdy and Finch looked up as they walked over. Rowdy had the kid’s shirt pulled up, and they were looking hard at something on his chest.

“Hey, LT,” said Finch, smiling at Beau but talking to Lieutenant Meagher. “Whaddya make of that?”

They had the boy’s bloody plaid shirt pulled up to his neck. There were four ugly scars on his chest, just above the nipples. Fresh. One of them was still weeping. They were odd, paired scars, each cut about four inches long, running parallel, one set about three inches above his right nipple, the other set over his left.

“Jesus!” said Eustace, who always got a little sick around blood and wounds. “What the hell did that?”

“Beats me,” said Rowdy, shaking his head. “Got into a fight, maybe? Somebody with a knife?”

“Real regular, aren’t they?” said Finch. “He’d haveta stay pretty still to get himself cut up like that. You figure he’d be jumping around a bit, somebody cutting him like that.”

“What’s Bo-ree-gard got to say?” asked Rowdy, looking at Beau like a mortician sizing up a client.

“Beats me, Howdy. Maybe an animal did this. Some kinda cat or something?”

“Nice deduction, Beau,” said Finch. “Don’t quit yer day job. Sure as hell isn’t any cat I ever saw.”

Eustace had his control back now. He dusted his palms together, although he had never touched the body. “The doc been here?”

“Yeah.” Finch inclined his head toward a Jeep Cherokee parked a few yards away. Inside a young man in a gray suit was talking into a cellular phone. “Vlasic’s calling Bob Gentile’s people now. They’ll get a wagon out here and take him in to the hospital. You want an autopsy, LT?”

“It’s a homicide, isn’t it?”

“Looks like self-defense to us, LT.”

“Yeah … but we do the thing right.”

Beau felt a kind of sadness for the boy.

“What’re we gonna do about Bell?”

“
You’re
not gonna do anything about Bell, McAllister!” said Eustace. “You and me, we’re gonna go back to the station and sort out some divergent views on operational procedure.”

“Hey, LT,” said Rowdy. “You shouldn’t talk about Bo-ree-gard that way. He’s doing the best he can with what he got.”

“Thanks, Howdy. And here I was just thinking that you probably couldn’t talk at all unless somebody had his arm shoved up your ass. Say hi to Clarabelle for me, willya?”

“Fuck yourself, McAllister.”

Beau was going to say something else, but he caught the look Eustace was giving him and he shut up.

He had rolled these thoughts around in his mind all the way back to Billings. They parked side by side in front of the low yellow breeze-block building next to the Highway Department’s truckyard on Foote Street, in the middle of a sprawl of warehouses, truck depots, gas stations, and roadhouses.

Behind the new bulletproof glass wall, Sergeant Myron Sugar was typing away at an old Remington machine, his fine Mediterranean features taut with concentration. He raised a languid hand without looking up.

The rest of the desks were empty at this time on a Friday. Most of the patrol guys were out on the six-six night shift. And it was still too early on a Friday night for the usual crowd of drunken ranchers and maudlin cowhands and grifters off the interstate to build up in the waiting rooms and the cells downstairs. Finch Hyam and Rowdy Klein were the only Criminal Investigation Bureau men stationed at this branch, and they were still back at Bell’s Oasis, tagging arrows and telling each other war stories.

“Hey, LT—Beau—I hear you shot Joe Bell. Good for you. He gonna live?”

“He’ll live,” said Eustace.

“Too bad,” said Myron, who had once locked horns with Bell during a pool game over at Fogarty’s New York Bar in Pompey. Bell had called him a kike. Myron had expressed his dislike of that term with a cue ball.

In Meagher’s office, a large room with a massive metal desk and a long row of filing cabinets with a coffee machine on top, Eustace poured them coffee. Eustace got his favorite, a big china mug with the FBI seal on it. Beau got one shaped like a pig in a blue uniform. Beau hated it because to get any coffee out of it you had to look like you were kissing the pig on the snout. It was one of Meagher’s little jokes.

Beau looked around at the pictures and certificates on the wall while Meagher riffled through his While You Were Out slips and made a few apparently urgent calls. Letting McAllister sweat a bit. Beau went back to looking at the pictures all over the office walls.

Meagher had a poster on the wall behind his desk. It read:

And the pictures—there was Eustace in his graduation class at Quantico, in a lineup of sixty guys as tightly wrapped as he was, everybody grinning like they had a secret you’d
never
guess. And Eustace with Robert Ressler, head of the FBI’s Behavioral Sciences lab, and Eustace with Dan Quayle and the governor. Eustace with Doc Darryl Hogeland—Dwight Hogeland’s famous father and a great argument against evolution, since the father was a fine man and the son was a legalistic weasel: Eustace was standing beside the doctor’s navy-blue Learjet. Eustace with Doc Hogeland again, at the opening of the Hogeland Oncology Wing at Sweetwater General here in Billings; Eustace holding one end of a blown-up check, money raised from District Four of the Montana Highway Patrol last year.

Beau had to smile at that one. The lieutenant’s fund-raising
method was sort of like the IRS—he had it taken off their paychecks. When he looked back at Eustace, the lieutenant was looking at him and tugging on his lip. Beau tried a big disarming smile.

He got a thin grin back.

“This part of a campaign you’re on, Beau? Discourage the citizens from cluttering up the 911 line? Every time one of ’em calls in, we send you out there and you shoot ’em?”