Lone Creek Page 4

  I took a step toward him, my left hand rising to yank him off the horse.

  “Hugh!” Elmer said sharply.

  Balcomb swiveled, his face turning alarmed. But Elmer was right—busting his head would make a bad situation a hell of a lot worse. I clenched my teeth hard and stopped.

  Only then did Kirk, late to the party, throw his rifle to his shoulder and yell at me, “Freeze!”

  Elmer walked over to him and pushed the barrel aside, shaking his head in disgust.

  “You’d better be very careful, Davoren,” Balcomb said, in that same grandstanding voice.

  Many times, I’d read the phrase hands itching to get hold of someone, but I’d never felt the sensation literally before. It was actually more of a throb.

  He watched me, maybe expecting me to humbly agree with him. When I didn’t, he waved his hand impatiently at the other men, like he was brushing off a pesky bug.

  “We need a word in private,” he said. They moved away, Steve Anson stuffing his jaw with another wad of chew, Elmer shaking loose his thirtieth smoke of the day, and Kirk backing up reluctantly with his weapon at port arms.

  “Doug Wills told you to stay where you were and wait,” Balcomb said to me harshly.

  “Doug doesn’t tell me to do anything.”

  We both knew that I was really talking about Balcomb.

  Flies were zeroing in on the mare, and she snorted suddenly and flicked her tail. Her ass end swung around toward me again. I gave it another shove.

  “You seem to feel free to take matters into your own hands,” he said. “Even though you’re on my property.”

  “I’m on your property by invitation. Doing the job I was hired to.”

  I could see a muscle jump in his jaw. “I’m getting very impatient with you.”

  I waited.

  He glanced around, then leaned forward and lowered his voice.

  “I was going to give you a chance to make this go away, before anyone else knew about it,” he said. “I could still be persuaded to call it a misunderstanding.”

  “Persuaded how?”

  “I want to know if anything—unusual—happened to you this afternoon.”

  “How would something ‘unusual’ turn this into a misunderstanding?” I said.

  “You let me worry about that.”

  Any hint of polish was gone from his face now. I could feel the intensity of his gaze burning right through those sunglasses. Out of my side vision, I sensed that Kirk was staring at me just as hard.

  That feeling of wrongness hit me again. Maybe I was only imagining it. But I was abruptly very glad I hadn’t said anything about what I’d found in the dump.

  “No, it was pretty much like every other day,” I said. “One man starts a fight with me for no reason I can tell, another holds a gun on me, and I get called a thief and a liar over some scrap wood.”

  Balcomb looked unfazed. If anything, he seemed pleased.

  “That’s all?” he said.

  “It’s plenty for me. You want more unusual than that, give me a hint. A guy like me will say anything to weasel out.”

  He straightened up again, relaxed now, and clucked his tongue like he was chiding a little kid.

  “Well, since you haven’t done me any good, I don’t see why I should do you any. If you’d stayed with Wills, I might feel more charitable. I had to ride another mile and a half to get here.”

  “Try bag balm,” I said. “Best thing for saddle sores.”

  That venomous look crossed his face again.

  “You don’t have any idea how far out of your league you are, do you?” he said.

  It sounded like a line from a bad movie, but he spoke it with real conviction.

  He walked the mare away, pausing to talk to the waiting men. Elmer glanced at me and shook his head again, this time sympathetically. Kirk pulled out his cell phone and punched numbers, looking smugly important.

  Wesley Balcomb rode off into the sunset, tall in the saddle after cleaning up Dodge.

  Then, from a little copse of aspens down the road, Laurie Balcomb came riding out. There was no telling how long she’d been there—she might just have arrived, or she might have been hidden in the trees and seen the whole show. She glanced coolly toward me with no sign of recognition, then cantered away to catch up with her husband. The two of them continued on side by side, apparently talking. Balcomb pointed back in my direction with his thumb, but didn’t turn around.

  Oddly, it struck me that she was on a gelding and he was on a mare.

  I walked to my pickup. The Anson brothers were waiting there, same as when I’d first driven up.

  “I’ll get the lumber back here tomorrow,” I told Steve.

  He spat a stream of tobacco juice. “Doubt it.”

  I did, too, seeing as how tomorrow was Sunday, and I needed to round up a good-size truck and driver.

  “Monday, then.” I took hold of the steering wheel, pulled myself in, and reached for the keys. They were gone from the ignition.

  I swung back to glare at Steve. “What’s this bullshit?”

  “You’re going to jail, Hugh,” he said. He spat again nervously, and added, “Nothing personal.”

  EIGHT

  Driving into Helena from the north was usually something I enjoyed. The old part of the city was a pretty sight, built in a pocket at the base of steep forested slopes that rose like waves into the mountains beyond. Downtown was studded with grand old stone buildings. There were quite a few real mansions, and even the modest houses lining the streets conveyed a comfortable old-time feel. The huge dome of the state capitol and the twin spires of St. Helena Cathedral gave a sense of grandeur.

  But on this particular trip, two khaki-uniformed sheriff’s deputies in a cruiser were right behind me, escorting me to the Lewis and Clark County jail.

  By now I’d had long enough to start grasping how slick Balcomb was, how far ahead of me he’d been at every step. All the time I’d worked there, I’d considered Kirk’s commando act to be a silly show of “security.” Now I realized that he’d really been gathering information, and that had provided Balcomb a ready-made excuse for bracing me. I’d been stupid enough to make it easy, but I was willing to bet that Balcomb had some pretext for getting rid of just about anybody on the place. He’d also had the foresight to impress on the other men that I wasn’t to be trusted or believed, before I’d had a glimmer of what was happening.

  I stood amazed at the kind of mind that could think like that. I suspected that he’d had a lot of practice.

  The jail was in the original county courthouse, in the hills toward the south end of town. Probably its most famous resident had been the Unabomber, when they’d first nailed him a few years ago. I’d spent a night there once myself, the result of a youthful indiscretion involving too much tequila and a barroom brawl that ended with a friend of mine running a bouncer’s head through a wall. The bouncer came out of it OK and the only damage was a minor drywall repair, but everybody agreed how lucky it was that he hadn’t hit a stud.

  When we got there, the deputies put handcuffs on me. The older one was burly and grizzled, with the seen-it-all look of a veteran. He was decent enough to be apologetic about the cuffs, and told me it was a formality for booking prisoners. The other wasn’t much more than a teenager, and had a withered arm. Helena was a big enough place so you didn’t know everybody, and I didn’t know these men, which was just as well—it kept things impersonal. Cops tended to give me a two-edged feeling. On the one hand, they were usually just doing a thankless job. On the other, it was easy to imagine that they liked pushing people around, and the kid with the bad arm sure seemed to.

  Inside, they turned me over to the jailers. The place didn’t look any more modern than on my last visit, but the drill was different. Back then, they’d just made sure my friend and I didn’t have any weapons and thrown us in a tank. Now they took away my clothes and issued me a bright orange jumpsuit, so small that the seam cut into my crotch. They m
ade me take the laces out of my boots, then shuffle in them down a hallway with a few individual holding cells not much bigger than closets. The door to mine, a solid metal slab with a mesh-fortified window about a foot square, locked behind me with a no-bullshit clang.

  Late on a Saturday afternoon, it was going to take a while to reach a judge and set my bail. I figured I’d be released on my own recognizance—I was a local, and an upstanding citizen. At least, I had been until an hour ago.

  The jail would probably be busy later tonight, but now the other cells were empty, with nothing stirring in the hallway, no windows to the outside world, no diversions except graffiti, scrawled by well-equipped guys eager to meet others like themselves. The bunk was a thinly padded bench too short for me to stretch out on. I sat back with my knees up and my hands behind my head, and tried to make use of my first chance to concentrate.

  Maybe Balcomb didn’t know anything about those dead horses—would have been appalled to find out, investigated the matter, seen to it that anybody who had it coming got punished. Maybe there’d just been some kind of bizarre accident. Maybe I was overblowing the situation and blaming him out of shock and anger.

  But I was more certain now of what I’d suspected right off—that Doug Wills’s stopping me didn’t really have anything to do with the lumber, and neither did any of what had followed.

  I might have saved myself this trip to jail if I’d come clean with the ranch hands or told the deputies when they arrived—cast a cloud on Balcomb and his motives for bracing me. But my credibility was zilch. Nobody wanted to cross a rich landowner, especially the men who worked for him. And given his smoothness, he probably had a way figured out to deflect any blame even if the horses had been uncovered.

  But—more important—I was spooked worse than ever. The intensity of his reaction and his warning that I was out of my league had underscored my feeling that something really ugly was at work, and whatever I gained in the short term by exposing it might leave me facing serious trouble.

  There were plenty more questions, starting with who had done the killing and why. I had to think it was Balcomb himself. There were other employees at the ranch besides Doug who I didn’t much care for, but I couldn’t imagine any of them treating an animal that way. Kirk had that twitchy violent edge, and I could easily see him going ballistic and shooting somebody—like me—but I couldn’t believe he was capable of that kind of brutality. Balcomb must have figured that the carcasses would stay safely hidden until they decomposed. He’d have been right except for some hungry coyotes and a construction worker dumping trash on a Saturday afternoon. I could only guess that Kirk had spotted me, known that Balcomb didn’t want anybody around there, and alerted him. Balcomb had immediately given orders to get me stopped, used the smokescreen of the lumber theft to question me, then fired me to justify it.

  I could think of several reasons why he might get rid of a couple of horses—not pretty reasons, but at least they made some sense. The horses might have been old, costing more to care for than they were worth, or carrying a contagious disease, which he’d certainly want to cover up. There were insurance scams, too. A couple of his thoroughbreds, reported stolen, would be worth a sizable chunk of cash. The worst possibility that came to mind was a drunken rage or sheer insane cruelty. There’d been a few of those kinds of incidents around here in the past years. A group of hunters had slaughtered a sitting-duck elk herd, leaving most of them to rot; another time, some out-of-state executive types had chased a penned-up antelope herd in a jeep and run them nearly to death.

  But I couldn’t imagine anything to explain why the horses had been sliced open. My scalp still bristled every time those images came back to me.

  I turned my mind to how I was going to handle this from here. I had an old friend named Tom Dierdorff, a respected lawyer in town and a thoroughly decent guy, who came from a big ranch family that had been here for generations, like the Pettyjohns. Balcomb needed to be accepted by people like that; and with any luck, Tom’s influence would get him to drop the criminal charges. I’d get the lumber back to the ranch somehow and be done with this—no worse off except for a couple of hours in jail and the kind of memories that woke you up at three o’clock in the morning.

  I hated to be a coward, hated to let something so vile slide. But I couldn’t get past that queasy fear, and this wasn’t my fight, anyway.

  NINE

  After maybe forty-five minutes, I heard somebody come walking down the hall and stop outside my cell. I stood up, expecting one of the jailers.

  But a glimpse through the mesh window showed me that the man unlocking the door was the sheriff of Lewis and Clark County, Gary Varna.

  Gary was imposing—at least six-four, broad-shouldered, lanky, about fifty years old, but with no trace of a paunch. His forebears had immigrated from around the Black Sea a couple of generations ago and intermarried with the local Nordic stock. That might have explained his height and his pale blue eyes. But those slanted in a way that harked back to the tribesmen of the steppes, and had a way of fixing on you without ever seeming to blink.

  He was also cordial, and as soon as the door swung open, he offered me a handshake.

  “Come on out of there and stretch your legs,” he said.

  I shuffled into the hall in my laceless boots, surprised that he’d even be at the jail on a Saturday evening. I wondered if he’d just happened to stop by for some other reason, or found out I was here and had come on that account. I hadn’t seen him for quite a while, but there’d been a time when we’d crossed paths pretty often.

  He leaned back against the wall and folded his arms. He wore his uniform only when he had to, and he was dressed now in his signature outfit of sharply creased jeans and a button-down oxford cloth shirt—a sort of spiffed-up cowboy look that helped put people at ease. It was one of the many shrewd facets that made him what he was. He’d been in the sheriff’s department close to thirty years, and probably knew more than anybody else about what people in this area were up to. He also excelled at working the political side of the street. He was known for being fair, but in the same way as a hometown referee—if there was a judgment call, you didn’t have to wonder which side he’d come down on.

  “I hear you hit a rough spot, Hugh,” he said.

  “I just took home some scrap lumber, Gary. Otherwise it would have gone to waste. I never tried to hide anything—I’ve been doing it for weeks, broad daylight, right in front of God and everybody.”

  “That don’t sound like much of a start on a criminal career.”

  “I guess I’m too old to retrain.”

  He nodded, maybe amused.

  “I’ll get it back there Monday at the latest,” I said. “Honest to Christ, I never dreamed anybody’d give a damn.”

  Those unblinking eyes stayed on me.

  “Something about an assault?” he said.

  “Doug Wills, the foreman, came at me out of the blue like he’d gone psycho. Just about head-on’d me with that asshole big rig of his, started yelling orders, then grabbed my shirt like he was going to punch me.” I touched the scar on my face. “You know I’ve got this fucked-up eye. I get hit there hard again, I might lose it.”

  “Ever have any trouble with him before?”

  “We hardly ever even talked to each other. There was sure nothing to set him off like that.”

  “So this wasn’t personal, him trying to settle a score? He was following his employer’s orders?”

  “Goddammit, Gary, I was just sitting in my truck.”

  “That’s not the point, Hugh. It sounds like he had good reason to make a citizen’s arrest. And you resisted.”

  My eyes widened in disbelief as what he was saying came home to me.

  “You’re telling me that’s how the court’s going to see it?”

  His shoulders rose in a shrug that meant yes.

  “Fuck a wild man,” I said, and turned away to stare at the hallway’s dead end.

  “I’m af
raid I don’t have any better news. Judge Harris set your bail at twenty-five thousand dollars.”

  I spun back around. “Twenty-five thousand?” The last time I’d been in this place, my pal and I had each paid a two-hundred-dollar fine, plus fixing the drywall.

  “It does seem tall, I got to agree,” Gary said. “The judge likes his Saturday poker game and Wild Turkey, and he tends to get pissy about being bothered. You can see him Monday, tell him what you just told me, and I’d guess he’ll reduce it. With this sort of thing, you’re usually talking more like a couple grand.”

  But that meant staying in here until Monday.

  “Everything I own put together isn’t worth twenty-five thousand dollars, Gary.”

  “That’s why God invented bail bondsmen.”

  “I’ve never done business with one.”

  “I’m glad to hear that. You know how it works?”

  I did. You fronted them ten percent, which they kept as their fee, and they posted your bond to the court. If you skipped out, they had to find you and haul you back in or forfeit the entire amount. They got very serious about looking.

  “Yeah,” I said sourly. “It costs me twenty-five hundred bucks right off the top.”

  “Ordinarily. But you might be able to knock that down to a couple hundred.”

  I perked up. “How so?”

  “Well, I’m not supposed to go recommending anybody in particular, but just between you and me, Bill LaTray’s been known to cut a deal in a situation like this. You get him the twenty-five hundred, and if the judge does reduce your bail on Monday, Bill will cut his rate to ten percent of the lowered amount and refund you the rest.”

  Bill LaTray, proprietor of Bill’s Bail Bonds, was an extremely tough, heavily pockmarked, mixed-blood Indian who could quiet a rowdy bar with a look. He was built like a bull pine stump, and he favored a fringed, belted, three-quarter-length coat of smooth caramel-colored leather, a cross between native buckskin and something a Jersey mobster might wear. Besides his rep as a bar fighter, it was rumored that he’d done some time for armed robbery and assault when he was younger—sort of an apprenticeship for his later career.