Текст книги "Dry Bones"

Автор книги: Craig Johnson

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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 16 страниц)

He kicked a small rock from the edge where it bounced down and slid to a stop just before reaching us, and yelled back, “It’ll burn out before they show up.”

“Call them!” I turned back to Henry. “Just in case she’s in there, I want to save as much evidence as I can.”

He nodded, and we stepped back and began the climb up to the rim, finally reaching the edge and standing there, watching the vehicle enveloped in the undulating flames. As I’d figured it would, the tank let go and there was a great whoosh as its contents flushed underneath and mushroomed in an orange ball that blew from beneath the van, momentarily lifting it and then allowing it to resettle in the rocks and debris.

I sighed, regretting the loss of the evidence that was cooking in the inferno below, and stepped back still holding Dog’s collar. He seemed to show no untoward urge to go down to the fire, so I released him.

Lucian was smoking his pipe, seated in my truck with the door propped open. I suppose he figured the rules didn’t apply when the door was ajar or that there was enough smoke in the immediate vicinity that it really didn’t matter. “They’re on their way.”

“Good.”

“Should be here by Thursday.”

 • • •

Henry had wandered to the right and was kneeling, looking at the tracks that led to the edge. Figuring it was the only way I was going to find out what was what, I followed, Dog tagging along.

“Something?”

“She did not hit her brakes.”

He looked up at me and then back at the tracks. “Fortunately, you drove parallel to these tread marks without disturbing them.” He planed his face to one side, reading the impressions in the grass and sagebrush in the fading light. “There is a spot a little bit further back where the van stopped; it sat there for an extended period and then restarted before driving into the canyon.”

I looked at the distance between the canyon lip and us. “So, she did it on purpose?”

He stood and walked past me, stopping again about two-thirds of the way toward the precipice, and then stooped again. “She swerved here.”

Lucian joined us from the other direction and watched Henry. “She have second thoughts?”

He ignored the old sheriff and stood, taking a few more steps forward and then, looking at the ground to the left, walked in that direction and then once again kneeled. Dog, taking it as an invitation, approached the Bear, who reached out and scratched the space between the beast’s ears. “I do not know if Jennifer or her dog are in there.” He glanced over the canyon edge where the flames had grown so high they licked the cooling air, almost as if the crust of the earth had opened up and swallowed the Chevrolet as a tidbit. The fire’s orange swirls tasted the air, and it looked like the flame was inside Henry’s eyes, lighting his face. “But the driver jumped out here.”

11

I don’t eat donuts.

The massive tow truck, designed to haul eighteen-wheelers, easily plucked the vehicle from the canyon and, dragging it from the edge, pulled it back a safe distance. We sipped coffee that the firefighters had brought, and Henry had a glazed with sprinkles as I excused myself from the group and carried my cup over to the van to look at the burned-out interior. It had achieved temperatures high enough to melt the metal.

Human skin burns at 248 degrees, but bones don’t burn so easily. Crematoriums use ovens approaching 2,000, but bone, containing approximately 60 percent inorganic, noncombustible matter, is capable of surviving even those temperatures. It is so tough that in modern-day crematoriums, after burning the body, the remains are ground in a process that reduces what’s left to granules similar to the dried bits in fertilizer.

According to Chaucer, murder will out—and in modern forensics it usually outs with bones.

One of the firefighters brought us fresh coffee and then raised a fist. “Save Jen!”

I raised a weary one back and then waited for him to retreat before asking Henry, “She wasn’t in there?”

The Bear, having retrieved the blanket from my truck to use as a cape, was looking particularly period, aside from the Styrofoam cup and the donut. “No.”

“Neither was the dog.”

“No.” He waited a moment and then took a bite, chewed, swallowed, and pronounced, “They landed about forty minutes ago.”

I turned and looked at him. “What?”

“Your family, they have arrived in Philadelphia, along with their bodyguard, who, to the best of my knowledge, has not killed anyone yet.” He looked thoughtful. “Evidently the undersheriff incurred a brief altercation with a captain of industry over the allotment of overhead storage space, but cooler heads prevailed and the stewardess awarded them first-class seats.”

I pulled out my pocket watch and looked at the delicate gold numerals that my grandfather had studied in his time. “Only ten minutes old and already a good day.” Pleased with the news, I repocketed my watch and stared at the van’s blackened shell, not really seeing it.

“What?”

I turned and looked at my friend. “Hmm?”

“What are you looking at?”

“In case it escaped your attention, the burned hulk in front of us.”

“No, that is where your eyes are directed, but what are you looking at?”

I smiled. I had been looking at the moon rising over the Powder River country and the clouds that piled up around it in the blackness with tinged edges dulled like an old coin. I smiled at his catching me. “I was thinking about what I was thinking. You know, asking myself about what I need to do? Where do I want to be right now?”

“Wonder.”

I sipped my coffee. “Excuse me?”

“Wonder. There is wonder in you, along with a little impatience. You are standing outside of yourself, looking at yourself, conscious of a rhythm within yourself, several rhythms, and the sound of drums from far away.”

I turned and stared at him. “How the hell do you know that?”

He took the last bite of his donut. “You think you are the only one who hears them?”

I took a deep breath and sighed. “Think we’re headed for something big?”

He laughed a smile. “That, or something big is headed for us.”

“Think we can take it?”

“We have taken it all up until now.” He shrugged. “But you need to be careful.”

“Of what?”

“Preparing for a battle yet to be fought while in the midst of another.”

“Play ’em one at a time, huh?” I smiled and shook my head, staring at the destroyed vehicle and finally seeing it. “Why would she want us to think that she was dead?”

The Bear gestured toward my truck, where the old sheriff was dead asleep. “Perhaps it is as Lucian says—she is attempting to avoid being drawn into the trial—or maybe it is something else.”

“Yep, but that’s not helping Dino-Dave, as near as I can tell.” I took a deep breath and then released it as an elongated and tortured sigh. “What something else?”

“I’d rather not say unless it is confirmed.” He licked his fingers and grinned. “So, I am thinking we should be heading over to the Lone Elk place to snoop around.”

“Without a warrant?”

“Everything has to be so proper with you.” He shook his head and sipped his coffee. “Beatus homo qui invenit sapientiam.”

I made a face. “Blessed is the man who invents wisdom?”

“Blessed is the man who finds wisdom.” He shook his head, dismissing me. “You always act as if you are the only one who cui from a classical education.”

 • • •

It wasn’t dark at the Lone Elk place; in fact, every light that could be on, was. The lights were glowing not only from both floors of the house but also from the barn and outbuildings. “I don’t think we’re going to be able to sneak in.”

He leaned forward. “No.”

Lucian rose up from the back and thrust his head between the seats, moving Dog to the side. “What the hell’s going on?”

“Go back to sleep.”

His head disappeared. “You’ll wake me if we get to shoot somebody?”

“I promise.”

“I don’t want to miss an opportunity.”

“You bet.” I pulled the truck into the drive and got half turned before the pack of border collie mixes surrounded the Bullet. I turned to Dog, figuring it was time to release the hound. “Don’t eat any of them, all right?”

He responded with a single wag, which was not completely convincing.

I opened my door and watched as the assembled canine mafia swarmed forward and barked. I opened the back door and watched as Dog bounded from the truck and looked at them. The half-dozen dogs froze at the sight of him. The one farthest away ducked its head and started off, but the others held fast just a bit longer as the beast turned his large-muzzled head and started toward them as if in a Jack London novel. This was too much for the pack, and they all widened the area around him. One barked, but Dog turned toward it and it joined the one on the far end in making a move for the porch. All the others, feeling their numerical advantage diminish, started backing away, quietly retreating.

Dog looked up at me.

“One police dog, one riot.”

Henry joined me from the front, and after I put Dog back in the truck, we started toward the house. I could hear a lot of shouting inside, and I was beginning to think that we’d stumbled into a domestic situation.

Before we got onto the porch, the front screen door flew open, and Randy limped out, pulling up to keep from running into us. “You found him?”

The Bear and I glanced at each other and then back at him. “Who?”

“Taylor!”

I glanced at Henry again, as he answered, “We saw him at the IGA this morning. He did not come home?”

Randy was massaging his knee, and his butt held the screen door open. “Yeah, but he’s gone again.” He gestured a thumb over his shoulder. “Eva went in to check on him, and he had disappeared.”

I interrupted. “I thought he ran off every twenty minutes. Why is this such a big deal?”

“Never at night; he never runs off at night.”

“What, he’s afraid of the dark?”

“Yes.”

I looked at him. “You’re serious?”

“Yes.” Randy yelled inside. “Eva, the cops are here.”

After a moment, she arrived at her brother’s side. “Did you find him?”

“Um, no.”

Randy talked out of the side of his mouth to his sister. “He says they saw him at the IGA, but we saw him after that . . .”

“When?”

Her voice was urgent. “He gets home at seven; I guess it was around then.”

“Where does he usually go? I mean, before it gets dark.”

She threw her hands in the air. “Everywhere, anywhere!”

I gestured toward my truck. “I’ll go call it in and get the Highway Patrol and the Bobs to start watching for him. In the meantime there are really only two directions he can go on the main road out here, north and south, and we just came from the south, so I’ll try north—sound good?”

“I’ll go with you.” Randy ducked back in the house, probably to grab his jacket and hat.

“We don’t really have room.”

He looked at the truck. “I’ll ride in the bed. I stove up my leg earlier fighting with a cow, and it feels better standing up anyway.” He smiled. “Unless that’s against the law.”

“I am the law.”

We loaded up, leaving Eva on the porch, her hands knotted in her dress, humming the old spiritual again. I wheeled the three-quarter-ton back up the road as Lucian’s voice echoed from the back, “I don’t mean to alarm, but there’s an Indian standing in the back of your truck.”

“We’re aware of that. Go back to sleep.”

Henry glanced at Randy’s legs in the rear window of the cab and then directed the beam of my Maglite on the hills across the road, as I turned the spotlight on and focused it on my side. “A missing woman and a missing young man . . .”

“What are the chances?”

I glanced at the Bear. “That the two of them are together?”

“Yes.”

I nodded and trained the spotlight over the hills. “What was the other thought you had?”

“She went missing before he did.”

“And he did not seem overly surprised that she was gone.”

“Didn’t show much emotion either way.”

The voice rose from the back again. “Inscrutable, those damned Indians.”

I talked over my shoulder. “Old man, if you’re going to join in the conversation, sit up.”

“Hush. Me and your dog are tryin’ to catch a few winks.”

The Cheyenne Nation nodded. “We will have to ask Randy.”

It was about that time that the aforementioned individual began pounding on the roof of my truck. “Stop, stop!”

I braked, the truck slid on the gravel, Dog yelped, and Lucian slammed into the back of our seat and hit the floor mats. “Damn it to hell!”

I watched as Randy carefully eased himself from the bed and took off at a hitched pace into the hills to our right. I redirected my spotlight in that direction and could see an Appaloosa gelding, saddled, bridled, and munching grass on the other side of the fence—the same horse we’d seen in the corral the other day. He jumped and lifted his head, his reins trailing on the ground, his eyes reflecting gold in the light, and pivoted to the left as Randy approached. The rancher, realizing he’d spooked him, stopped and spoke softly in Cheyenne, whereupon the animal ambled over to him like an old friend.

By the time we got to the fence, he’d led the horse over. “Yours?”

“Yeah, Bambino.” He glanced around. “Not Taylor’s regular horse, but this one was in the corral and saddled, so he was convenient.” He brushed his hand across the velvety nose. “He’s got the yips, though; every once in a while he thinks there’s a grizzly bear under a Snickers bar wrapper.”

“You think Bambino did the two-step, and Taylor got grounded out here?”

“It’s more than possible.”

“If you were headed out, where would you go?”

He pointed in an easterly direction toward a crutch in the hills. “There’s a gully that leads back south and circles around the ranch proper toward the ponds and that dry wash and ridge where we found the T. rex.”

“Where we found the van.”

“What van?”

“Jennifer Watt’s, crashed in the canyon, burned.”

His face froze. “Holy shit, was she in it?”

Henry interrupted. “No.”

He sighed in exasperation. “What the hell was she doing out here, anyway?”

“We were hoping that you might have an answer to that question.”

He glanced at Henry. “And why is that?”

My turn. “There just seems to be a lot going on out here at the ranch, and no one seems to know what, who, or why.” I waited a moment and then asked, “Where’s Enic?”

He stared at me. “What?”

“Your uncle, where is he? With all the hubbub going on, I would’ve supposed that he was awake.”

Randy shrugged. “He never sleeps; at least only an hour or two at a time.” He reached out and petted the horse. “Jeez-O-Pete.”

“Randy, what’s going on?”

Jamming a thumb and forefinger in his eyes, he scrubbed at them. “I don’t know, and that’s what’s got me worried. I mean . . . you don’t think I know how this looks with people running around and disappearing?”

The Bear rumbled again, “How does it look?”

“Guilty.” He shifted his attention to Bambino and rubbed his withers.

“I mean, ever since Dad’s death everything’s been kind of weird, and every time I think I’ve got a handle on things, something else strange happens.”

I nodded. “Welcome to my world.”

“Maybe it all started with that damn dinosaur . . .” He cast his eyes on me. “Look, there’s something I should tell you. Dad was drinking again, and Taylor was hiding the stuff for him. Like I said, he wouldn’t tell me where and that’s when I hit him. He’s pretty much convinced that he’s responsible for Dad’s death because he kept letting him have the liquor—that may be why it is that he ran off.” He held the reins out to me. “Here you go.”

I stared at him. “What?”

“There aren’t any roads in that direction, so somebody’s going to have to do it old-school, and I’m hurt.”

I glanced at the Bear, who shook his head. “As much as it pains me to say, you are the better horseman.”

I shook my head. “It’s an Appaloosa. Isn’t that the horse the Cheyenne traditionally rode into battle?”

“It was, because by the time you ride an Appaloosa some distance, you are ready to kill anything.”

I sighed, took the leather strips between my fingers, and studied the white in Bambino’s eye. “The yips, huh?”

 • • •

We all decided that Henry would drive Randy back to get his truck and continue north; then he and Lucian would head south and meet me back at the site where Jen the Elder had been found. As a precaution, I took a handheld radio from my truck, just in case I found myself alone standing in a field in the dark with a sore rump.

There was a ruffling in the grass as the wind picked up, and Bambino sidestepped to the right and shook his head, rolling his eyes back to me. I countered: “You know, my grandfather had a horse with a nervous disposition, and whenever he acted up he’d reach out and slap the living daylights out of the back of his head.”

We rode along, and I looked down, longing for Dog’s companionship, but having realized that the presence of a strange animal might give Bambino more of a motivation to misbehave, I had left him in the truck—besides, Lucian was using him as a pillow. “Good thing we live in more enlightened times, huh?”

Bambino made no comment.

At the ridge I looked west toward the Bighorns and even in the darkness could make out the tracings of the mountains that suddenly halted at about twelve thousand feet. There was a ceiling over the high plains as far as the nighttime eye could see, a thick confection of black that hid the moon and promised a deluge.

I just hoped that our work was done by the time that someone turned on the faucet and started thinking it had been pretty smart of me to roll up the yellow slicker that now rode on the cantle behind me.

Pulling up, I turned us toward the wind and watched as a strike of lightning hit the flats between Powder Junction and here, the bolt holding like a heavenly finger poking the earth for emphasis. “Wait for it, Bambino . . .”

The thunder rolled up the wide valley between the mountains and the endless ocean of the plains, a soft rumble that built and then subsided like a tidal voice.

The Appaloosa backed up a half step and sashayed to the left as I wrapped the reins in a fist, determined to avoid the horseman’s greatest fear, to be left afoot. “Easy.”

He tensed, and I caught wind of one of his tricks: getting the rider’s weight traveling backward, he would likely launch and leave you tumbling off his rear as he raced for the barn alone.

“You can try that one, little Bambino, but I’ve seen it before and you’ll be dragging two hundred and fifty pounds of very unhappy sheriff.” I reached down and petted his neck. “Just so we’re clear on this—I will never let go.”

Never let go. Those three words echoed in my mind as I turned south, riding the ridge and letting the Appaloosa watch the lightning strikes and get used to the accompanying thunder instead of it overtaking him from the rear.

We joined up with a cattle path and spooked a group of mule deer that had bedded down for the night. Bambino shifted but stayed steady as we continued on, the first sprinkles of the storm reaching us like a dusting from the clouds as they shook themselves off. It felt good, and I thought back at how much time I’d spent in a saddle in my youth, herding cattle with my father and grandfather, the real rancher of the family.

My father had refined the ranch, but my grandfather had built it, aggressively buying property from adjacent families until he had accumulated many thousands of acres. I was on intimate terms with those acres and knew every single stand, swale, gully, and canyon where a cow and calf could hole up and brush pop in the very worst of weather.

Men get on edge doing some kinds of work, while others develop an ability to continue on where others can’t. My father was outside working—I was eating breakfast, sitting at the kitchen table in the dim light of my grandfather’s home—when the old man told me he didn’t particularly care for me and that in his estimation I probably wasn’t going to amount to much.

Calving season, and I was fourteen years old.

Staring at him through the pewter condiments holder on the round table as I sipped a glass of buttermilk, I’d mumbled an honest response: “That’s all right; as far as I’m concerned you haven’t turned out so great either.”

He hated everyone but had a special, single-cask-strength hatred held in reserve for his immediate family. He had kept his son, a natural-born engineer, from continuing with his schooling, instead chaining him to those thousands of acres and a life of agricultural servitude. To give my father his just due, he had not allowed that to poison his own life, his wife’s, or mine.

The bulwark against the poison usually held, but every once in a while the old bull and I locked horns. I’d been working seventy-two hours straight without sleep and had been stepped on, kicked, horned, butted, stomped, pinched, swatted, and crushed—and I’d had about enough of his venom.

He showed me his teeth. “I suppose you think you’re a man now?”

He was eighty-two years old with a receding hairline and little tufts of hair on the sides of his head that gave the impression that he was an owl—not a wise old owl, but rather the kind that hears small, defenseless things from a great distance. He wore steel-rimmed, round glasses, which did nothing but emphasize the imagery. His eyes were gray, a gift I’d received from him, perhaps the only one.

In the pale light of that morning I’d studied him.

“Stand up.”

I sipped my buttermilk.

He stood, and I ignored him.

Still in remarkable shape, he was broad at the beam and winnowed down to nothing but stringy muscle and gall. He came around the table to look down at me.

I tried to feel sorry for him just then, tried to understand where all the anger, recrimination, and bitterness that had eaten up his life had come from. There was talk of a woman other than my long-deceased grandmother, rumors of a dalliance that had somehow been swept away with the years. There were also whispers of a lost act of violence so unspeakable that its utterance still went unvoiced.

With the first swipe, the blue-willow-patterned cup had flown from my hand, knocking over the condiment holder and the sugar bowl and shattering like the fragile relationship between us, spraying its contents across the table and the papered wall.

I stood, the rough-cut joists of the floor creaking beneath me, my nose brushing his as I gathered myself, looking down at him from a four-inch height advantage.

He’d forgotten how big I was, how big I had become, didn’t know then how big I would be, but the surprise didn’t last and he struck me across the face with his open hand.

It stung, but I didn’t show it, only turning my eyes, his eyes, back on him, my expression as neutral as the nickel-plated color we shared.

A thick forefinger, leathery and stiff as a truncheon, bobbed against my chest like a woodpecker having found a soft spot on an otherwise impenetrable tree. “When I say stand . . .”

They say he’d killed a man, numerous men, but I had grown up in a period when the ghosts of a previous era still roamed the plains and had seen enough that those spirits didn’t affect me any longer. Say what you will about age and experience, youth and indifference can engender an annoying strength of its own.

“Don’t ever do that again.” I brushed past him and deliberately walked slowly back to the calving shed where my father still labored.

Later in the morning when we had returned to the house, my grandfather was gone, likely on one of his aberrant rides where he would disappear for hours and then reappear, barking orders as if he’d never left. When we entered the kitchen, the remains of the mug and its contents had dried on the wall and the floor, but where the sugar had dusted the red-and-white-checkered tablecloth, that thick forefinger had traced the words “Never Let Go.” Before I could get a good look at it, my father swept the words away and coaxed them back into the open container at the edge of the table like a scouring wind.

Never Let Go.

Those words had haunted me for decades, especially after my grandfather died, and it was only when my father had been approaching his final rest that he told me the significance of the words and the story, a story that had changed the trajectory of my family for generations.

Never Let Go.

Bambino’s ears perked at my words; probably wondering why I had made the same statement twice, and I could see the white sickle in his eye. The lightning struck again, closer this time, and he sidetracked and sashayed some more, reversing into his launch position, but I turned his head toward the strike to show him that I wasn’t hiding anything. If he shot forward he would have to do it without the benefit of seeing what was ahead of him, and in my experience horses are loath to do that.

“Easy.”

The resounding thunder shook the ground, and Bambino circled to the right, slipping off the narrow trail, digging in with his rear hooves and driving up the slope. I gave him his head just a bit and then changed the lead on him in an attempt to get him going in the right direction but also to distract him from any further mischief.

The rain was steady now, and I thought of the slicker behind me on the saddle. It was tempting, but I wasn’t sure what kind of response Bambino might have to me suddenly producing a large yellow raincoat and swirling it above his head in the pervasive wind like a banshee. Actually, I knew exactly what Bambino’s response would be, and I thought it best to avoid being knocked out of the park.

There was another flash but further away, and the horse seemed to settle again as I leaned a little forward and noticed hoofprints in the dampened earth, coming from the direction where we were headed, the glistening water in the shoe prints looking like semicircles of mercury.

Mercury. I thought about what Dave Baumann had said about the dangerous vapors from Native relics that had been in the hands of museums.

The path stretched to the right in a curve like a woman’s hip, and I figured we’d covered a few miles. Before long we would circle around and reach the archeological site, the narrow portion of the canyon, and finally the turtle reservoir where we had found Danny Lone Elk.

Something was nudging at the periphery of my consciousness like a burr under a saddle blanket, a thought that kept intruding until an image appeared—the burnt remains of blackened sandstone and broken pieces of cottonwood and scrub pine.

Thumbing through the dog-eared Rolodex of my mind, I saw a card flip up, and I could again plainly see the overhang in the choked canyon near the site where Henry had pulled Vic and me to safety.

It was raining, you’re hurt, where do you go?

I turned the Appaloosa into the wind and increasingly heavy rain, and, slapping his rear, sent him down the trail beside a dry creek bed with a bit more purpose and a good amount of speed, the ground not wet enough yet to impede us.

On cue, static raised the hair of both horse and horseman as a bolt struck the ridge above us, and Bambino redoubled his efforts in getting us on down the trail. The thunder echoed off the rolling hills and the cap of dark, dangerous clouds chased the lightning as if we were in a glass specimen dome.

I crouched in even closer and pulled my hat down tight, aware that the race was indeed on. It was raining in earnest, and I knew by experience that the little canyon was going to be filled with fast-running water.

Henry was probably in the vicinity of the dig, but he hadn’t been in the cave and likely wouldn’t remember exactly where it was. I thought I would pull the handheld and call in from the next ridge where the reception would probably be better.

Bambino’s muscles bunched under me and, watching the westward sky and the chain lightning that streaked over the Bighorn Mountains like white, electric veins, we headed for the ridge that ran to my right. Reaching for the handheld, I could imagine the profile we cut against the black diamond skies.

Never Let Go.

I once found my grandfather on one of his horseback jaunts on a tall bluff north of Buffalo Creek. He had been gone longer than usual, and my father had grown worried. The old man was then almost ninety-seven years old but still insisted on traveling the place alone on horseback—the way he said it was meant to be done.

I’d come up on him from behind, had followed his tracks to a spot he must’ve come to over and over, the trail well worn from his passing back and forth. There was a stand of pines along a rock outcropping that faced due north toward the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, and he’d pulled his old horse, Starbuck, a big bay stallion, up there and they stood like a Civil War statue.

It was as if they were waiting on something, or someone.

The eyes of both man and horse were focused on the horizon.

I stayed there for ten minutes, watching them, until the sorrel I was riding that day snorted and they both turned to look. They watched us for a moment and then turned back in ultimate dismissal, their eyes returning to that much anticipated something in the distance—something that was coming, or something that never had.

Maybe it was the light or the angle from which I was viewing him, maybe it was the sun or the ever-present Wyoming wind, but I had seen tears in the old man’s eyes that day.

It was strangely silent as I unhooked the radio from my belt, the clip springing back with the tiniest of metal sounds, like the detonator on a very large bomb. It was at that moment, with my hand behind me and my weight backward and slightly to one side, that I felt the hair on my body pulse with electricity just as a bolt of lightning struck the rocks about seventy feet to my right like an earth-shattering pickax.