I thought about the two bottles of water in my shooting bag, which I had left back at the truck, and turned the corner. I’d taken only a dozen steps into the high weeds when I heard the rattling sound, the one that makes westerners freeze and wonder why they didn’t wear their high-top leggings.
As Lonnie Little Bird would say, he was a big one, um hmm, yes, it is so; twelve buttons at least and only about ten feet away. Again contrary to popular belief, you can’t judge a rattler by his buttons since they shed and accumulate a new pod three or four times a year. It didn’t matter, he was big, and neither of us was in a mood for counting.
He was curling in an "S” and backing away from me, the majority of his body as big as my forearm. He had backed himself up against one of the rises on the stone steps, and there was nowhere else to go. He coiled himself tighter and flicked a dark tongue at me as the vibrating tail shook beside his rectangular-shaped head.
“Howdy.” I figured now was as good a time as any to test Henry’s theory. He didn’t respond and stayed compacted, the dark eyes shining like black beads. “You haven’t seen anybody come by here lately, have you?” His head dropped a little as I began raising my hand very, very slowly. “That’s what I thought.”
I could go for my sidearm, but the thought of what the .45 round might do after hitting the stone step gave me more than a little pause, so I continued raising my hand till I got it to the brim of my hat.
The buzzworm’s head dropped a little again, and I froze.
It was my fault really, disturbing him as he’d peacefully sunned himself after indulging in a brunch of field mouse or sagebrush lizard. I could have introduced myself as the sheriff and told him about the important case I was working on, but he didn’t seem interested and I was more than beginning to doubt Henry’s theories on interspecies communication.
I chucked my hat in a tight curveball, low and outside; he hit it in the sweet spot, then disappeared into the rocks that stuck out in shelves to my right.
I took the two steps and picked up my hat as a few rocks kicked loose and joined the scree at the bottom. He probably wasn’t alone. “Hey, there’s an Indian asleep in front of the dry-goods store, why don’t you go bite him?”
I looked at the crown of my hat—there was a scuff and stain where the rattler had hit it. I was about due a new hat, anyway. I tugged the battered palm leaf back on my head and continued up the steps with a more wary eye.
* * *
The union hall was a masterful piece of early-twentieth-century architecture, with castellated cornices and a unique second story and balcony. The structure had weathered the century better than the ones below as few people were willing to make the rest of the hike up the hill—that, and the rattlesnakes. There was still glass in the windows and, although the transom above the doorway was cracked, it still shone with the high gloss of old lead. There was a chain padlocked through the door handles, but one end had pulled loose and hung below its match. The damage was old, and there were no marks in the dust that covered everything.
The paneled door rested heavily on the sill, but I lifted it and pushed in and it swung wide with a grating noise from the old hinges. There was an entryway leading to the offices in the back and a stairwell to the right, nothing looking as if it had been disturbed in as far back as the dust remembered. I walked through the empty offices and listened to the soft squeals of the wide-plank floor.
There was a counter to one side, and a bundle of broken chairs huddled in the corner, but there wasn’t much else. The stairs to the second floor were about a quarter of the way down and ascended to the middle of a dance hall. When I got up there, I noticed that there was a doorway to the balcony overlooking the cliffs and the town on one side; on the other was a stage and a doorway that led to the wings.
I walked around the railing and stood in the blinding glow of the four windows where the balcony’s half-paned door captured the floating motes that hung in the still air. It was stifling on the second floor, and I could feel the sweat streaking down between my shoulder blades. I took off my hat, hung it on the butt of my Colt, and ran my fingers through my hair as I took the three steps to the stage.
There was an old upright piano, which was pushed against the back wall with the bench tucked underneath. I flipped the dust-laden keyboard cover up and touched a chipped F. It was flat but resonated through the silence, raising the thought of ghostly dance steps where there had been no dancers for almost a century.
I thought about the story Lucian had told me that Red Angus, the sheriff before Lucian, had told him and that the sheriff before that had told him. The double murder had occurred on December 31, 1900—New Year’s Eve, just a few seconds after midnight, to be exact. There had been a big dance to celebrate the incoming year, and I guess Maxfield Holinshed hadn’t liked the unidentified woman who was kissing his father to welcome in 1901, so he pulled a gun right there on the dance floor and shot and killed them both. He was hung in the street below just over two weeks later. Lucian said he still had young Max’s journal that recorded the two weeks that had intervened and that someday he’d let me see it, just to raise my hair.
I pulled the bench out, placed my hat on top of the piano, and sat in front of the yellowed-white and grayed-black keys. I tinkered out a one-fingered version of the old cavalry favorite, “The Girl I Left Behind Me.”
It was horrible, and any ghosts that might’ve been in the place I had certainly driven out. Most of the soundboard was dead, what was left was remarkably out of tune, and I had a feeling that there was more than one mouse nest inside the ignored instrument.
I could always go get my friend the rattlesnake and put him to work.
I plinked away, trying to find the live portion of the board, and thought about Ho Thi Paquet, and how abandoned her body looked alongside the highway tunnel; about Tran Van Tuyen, and the look on his face when I had questioned him at the cemetery; and, finally, about Mai Kim. I thought about the photo in the lining of the purse, about who I had been in Vietnam, and the way Virgil White Buffalo watched the children on the playground across the street from the jail.
Even in the heat of the midday, I could feel the ghosts crowding in around me, their hands on my shoulders, their feet tapping to the nonexistent beat. I felt a cold wave pass over my back, which made me shiver in the hundred degrees, and I stopped playing. The palpable feeling of company was as oppressive as the heat, and I knew someone was watching me.
I placed a hand on the piano bench and turned.
Nothing.
The windows were hazed with the dust of full daylight, the diffused glow stretching across the whitewashed floor like identities. I sat still and listened.
Nothing.
I watched and waited for the motes to swirl in time with the long-dead ghosts of Maxfield Holinshed, his father Horace, and the mysterious woman who had set their lives in desperate motion, but they didn’t. The dust hung there, almost motionless. Out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw movement, but every time I looked, there was nothing. I laughed at myself and wondered if maybe the rattlesnake had made me jumpy, or if I was just getting scary in my middle age. I stood up and closed the piano, scooted the bench back underneath it, and thought about Cady in the ballroom of the VA, where there was no music, but there was.
I walked to the edge of the stage, considered what my two-hundred-and-now-forty-pound frame might do to the hundred-year-old floor up here and then to the one downstairs when I crashed through this one, and crossed to the doorway and took the steps down.
On the way back into town, Henry told me that the Dunnigans’ turquoise and white Ford had pulled in at the top of the cut-off leading to Bailey but then had backed out and continued up the road. “Probably looking to get lucky.”
I peered at him from above the shooting guard of my sunglasses while I radioed Saizarbitoria to check in on Tuyen. He sounded only mildly disgruntled that he had been watching the green Land Rover outside the Hole in the Wall Motel for the last hour and a half.
Static. “He’s probably taking a nap; I wish I was.”
I keyed the mic. “We’re on our way into town, and he’s supposed to have lunch with us.”
Static. “You want me to get him?”
“No, just meet us at the bar.”
Static. “Roger that; out.”
I looked at Henry again as we drove the winding road back toward Powder Junction. “I don’t think my staff is completely happy with me.” He shrugged as I keyed the mic again. “Base, this is unit one.” I didn’t wait for a response; instead I sang, “I gotta gal and Ruby is her name. Ruby, Ruby, Ruby baby / She don’t love me but I love her just the same. . . .”
Static. “I told you to stop that.”
“But I haven’t gone through my entire litany of Ruby songs yet.”
Static. “Oh, yes, you have.”
I keyed the mic. “Any word from the young Philadelphians?”
Static. “They just finished lunch.”
“Am I in trouble?”
Static. “Not if you get back up here for dinner.”
“How’s the sleeping giant?”
Static. “Not sleeping. Double Tough made it in to relieve Frymire, but Lucian is back there again playing chess, so he left.” There was a pause. “Please don’t sing again; I don’t know if my ears can take it.”
Tan Son Nhut, Vietnam: 1968
He had gotten the staples out of his earlobes, but the duty sergeant wasn’t particularly happy to see us again. He was a lot more helpful this time, however, and much more understanding of the severity of a homicide investigation. He said that Hollywood Hoang had gone into Saigon on a three-day.
Mendoza asked if he could be a little more specific about Hoang’s exact location, and I picked up the stapler.
He said that Hoang was known to frequent a place in the red-light district on Tu-Do Street. I put the stapler back down.
The three of us stood there in the close humidity of the Southeast Asian night. I stared at the two of them as Baranski tried to make up his mind. “This is a bad idea. We don’t have any jurisdiction there, and we’re under maximum alert since 0945 this morning and a security condition red since 1730, and we’ve got just as good a chance of being shot by the good guys as the bad.”
Mendoza nodded. “Yeah, but...”
Baranski shoved his hands in his pants pockets and trapped his mustache with his lower lip. “It’s going to be like looking for a needle-dick in a Vietnamese haystack.”
After a moment, the Texan spoke again. “Yeah, but...”
Baranski pulled out a cigarette without offering one to anybody else and lit up. “Why is this suddenly so fucking important to you?”
Mendoza gestured toward me. “Well, Mother Green here is going to be leavin’ on a jet plane tomorrow morning . . .”
Baranski interrupted him, switching his cigarette to the other hand and sticking out a finger, tapping him in the chest. “No, I said you. Why is this shit so suddenly important to you?”
The shorter man looked up at him, his dark eyes steady. “I don’t know, man.”
“You don’t know?”
I watched the Texican’s jaw moving. “Hey, maybe this is it, man. Maybe this is the one thing we’ll be able to look back on in this great big shitty mess and be proud of.” He turned and studied me. “The cowboy here is short and headed back to the real world—after the shit he’s pulled in the last few hours, he ain’t gonna be making a career out of the Corps.” His eyes stayed on Baranski as he reached under the front seat of the jeep and handed me my sidearm and holster. He finally looked at me. “If we don’t take you, you’re going to walk into the city, aren’t you?”
I nodded. “Yep.”
He sighed and glanced back at Baranski. “I thought the zipper-heads were on a truce?”
The redheaded man nodded, continuing to smoke his cigarette. “They are, but there have been some bullshit attacks up north.”
Mendoza stood there for a minute and then climbed into the jeep, the decision made. “I’m having trouble keeping up with all these damn holidays. What’s this one?”
Baranski threw the rest of his smoke onto the ground and himself into the driver’s seat as I climbed in the back again. “Lunar New Year.”
The Texican looked at the main gate with its guard shack, which would have been more at home at a public pool in Southern California, and down the busy four-and-a-half-mile road that led to Saigon. “Yeah, but what do the Slopes call it?”
Baranski started the jeep. “Tet.”
* * *
Phillip Maynard was MIA.
We were sitting in the café section of the Wild Bunch Bar, waiting on Tuyen, sipping iced tea, and studying the menus. “He didn’t show up for work?”
“No, and this is only his sixth day, so he may end up getting his ass fired.” Thinner than the rattler I’d encountered earlier and just about as tolerant, Roberta Porter had bought the bar back in ’98 and had had trouble keeping staff ever since. “No call or nothing. I was by his place and didn’t see his motorcycle but could hear the TV. I beat on the door, but he didn’t answer.”
I looked at Henry as he perused the menu, his voice smoothly modulating from behind the single sheet. “Did he work last night?”
“If you’d call it that.”
She pulled a pencil from somewhere in the suspiciously blonde tangle of her sixty-two-year-old hair and yanked a pad from the back pocket of her jeans as I ventured an opinion. “Maybe he’s hungover?”
“He has been sampling an awful lot of the product the last couple of days.”
“We’ll roll by and check in on him.” I handed her my menu and followed the Cheyenne Nation’s lead, ordering a Butch Cassidy Burger Deluxe with cheese, bacon, grilled onions, and fries.
She scribbled on the pad, glancing at Henry and then back to me. “I heard you picked up that big Indian.”