“AH,” SAID DEPUTY LAWYER Foote, “I just finished chewing their asses off—my, how I talk in the sagebrush—and now I suspect Benetsee will do the same.”
“Hee,” said Benetsee.
“The old man gets done with them I’ll let ’em go,” said Bart. “I was appalled to find out that you cannot arrest people on suspicion of being stupid assholes. Lucky for Congress, ain’t it?”
Booger Tom was sitting in Bart’s chair, drinking coffee. The smell of whiskey got stronger the closer you got to Booger Tom’s cup.
Du Pré and Benetsee followed Bart back to the cells. They were old and primitive and cold. The five people in the holding cell were all shivering in orange jail jumpsuits. Two men, three women.
Benetsee dragged a chair over to the cell and he sat down. He held his hand up for a smoke. Du Pré rolled him one, lit it, and stuck it in Benetsee’s old brown fingers.
Benetsee smoked and he stared unblinking at the people in the cell. They began to stir and shift like a bunch of horses when the wrangler comes to cut one out.
Benetsee stared.
They could not look him in the eye.
“Why you come here?” said Benetsee, suddenly.
No answer.
“You maybe ask Bart for a red bag?” said Benetsee, turning to Du Pré. “Not a big one, maybe some flat, about this big.” He gestured with his hands.
Du Pré shrugged and went on out.
Bart listened and he dug around in the locker and found the red bag, about the size of a long briefcase, very thin, made of nylon cloth. Du Pré carried it back to Benetsee.
Benetsee held it on his lap. He unzipped it. The people in the cell stirred uncomfortably. Benetsee pulled out an eagle’s wing, bald eagle. He held it up, looking at the feathers.
“I keep this,” said Benetsee, “it only cause you trouble. You think you can make magic? Hah. You, you maybe make coffee, boiled eggs.”
Du Pré laughed.
“You come here with bad hearts,” said Benetsee, “and you get a lot of people killed, one way, another. Very foolish. You don’t kill them with your hands, you kill them with your foolish talk.”
The people in the cell looked at each other.
“You go home maybe,” said Benetsee. “You don’t come back here. Not ever. This place eat you if you do.”
The old man stood. He looked levelly at the people cowering in the cell. Benetsee tucked the eagle wing under his arm and he walked back out into the room.
“Fools,” he said to Bart. Bart nodded.
“I go, Toussaint now.” Du Pré put his coat on.
They drove out of Cooper, down the white road. There were still some cars shoved off to the side, their engines frozen. Du Pré parked in front of the Toussaint Bar and they went in.
Susan Klein was serving several couples lunch, rushing about. Du Pré and Benetsee sat and waited on stools at the bar.
“You need lunch?” said Susan, when she got back behind the bar. “I’m serving mooseburgers. All we had left. Illegal as hell, but hungry is hungry.”
“Sure,” said Du Pré.
Susan poured Du Pré some whiskey, pale yellow, a local product.
She gave Benetsee a big glass of wine.
“You can drink all the damn wine you want,” said Susan to Benetsee. “But you’re going to have to eat. All free.”
Benetsee grinned, his few old worn brown teeth like chips of walnut.
Bill Stemple got up from his table and came over to Du Pré. He was picking his teeth. He fished in his pocket and took out a cigarette and lit it.
“Ain’t this some shit,” he said. “We lost some more cows, they had their damn mouths freeze shut while me and my hands were going up and down the road to find the little fuckers. Found six. Had to keep ’em in my house and feed ’em.”
“Yah,” said Du Pré, “well, it was plenty quiet here, long time, now we got all this fuss. But maybe it teach somebody something, I don’t know.”
Stemple shrugged.
“That damn FBI woman, Banning,” he said, “hell, she’s all over everybody, asking the same damn questions over and over. I understand that she’s got to, but, Jesus, no one’s gonna walk forward and say ‘I did it’ and nobody else knows anything. We wasn’t even here.”
Du Pré shrugged. “Soon, we going to have another bunch of newspeople,” he said. “They are coming, see the disaster. Probably say, did someone take those people, kill them, bury them under the snow?”
“I got work to do,” said Stemple.
“We all got work to do,” said Du Pré. “You keep your gates closed and don’t shoot any of them. I do not like to arrest you.”
Corey Banning slid in the door and shoved it to. She had a dark red muffler wrapped around her head. A sheepskin coat. She unwrapped the muffler. She wore a pissed-off expression.
“Christ,” she said, “it ain’t one thing it’s another.”
She stalked up to the bar and Susan poured her a double brandy.
“They’re sending me some more agents,” she said, “in the middle of the fucking winter. They’ll freeze and get lost and die and such.”
“Um,” said Du Pré. “Do you care, them?”
“As much mother instinct as I got,” she said, “I hate to see it. You know, frostbite. Crippled for life. They’ll all be from Florida, I just know it. Christ.”
She sipped her brandy.
“We got a big bunch, press coming,” said Du Pré.
“Hah,” she said. “That guy Foote is a plenty smart guy, there. He’s got this one-page press release which says not one fucking thing in the most elegant English. Me, I just got no comment. We’ll starve ’em out.”
“Yah,” said Du Pré. “Well, one more bad storm like this, it will not melt till June, you know. Maybe people be out there, frozen, till then.”
“The bottom canyons in the Wolfs’ll be eighty feet deep in snow,” she said. “It may not melt down before the summer after.”
Banning shrugged out of her coat. She was wearing simple ranch clothes and a stainless-steel nine-millimeter and cop holsters on her belt, handcuffs, pepper spray. She walked over to Benetsee and she put her arms around him and hugged him. She put her head down on his back.
“You know,” she said softly. “You don’t want to tell me and you won’t and I can’t make you. But you know it all, don’t you. And there’s not really anything that you want, so you can’t be bought, and you’re too old to care about anything much except praying.”
Benetsee reached back and he patted her hair. He patted the stool beside him.
“You come sit here, my daughter,” he said. “I will tell you what I know to tell you.”
She got up on the stool and put one elbow on the bar top and she leaned her ear close to his old lips.
Benetsee whispered.
She nodded.
She listened and listened.
The other people in the bar paid and left. Du Pré went to the poker machine and lost money in it. Dumb machine, electronic.
He had a pocketful of quarters and it took him some time.
When he turned around Benetsee was gone, and Corey Banning had turned round and was looking off into the distance.
Du Pré walked over to the bar. He got another whiskey and he sat beside the FBI agent.
“Old Benetsee he just see the riddles most times,” said Du Pré. “I would not get mad with him.”
“Even the fucking riddles would help,” said Banning.
“Sometime,” said Du Pré, “you get one of them things, you know, it seems like you can untie it but you can’t. You know, my father Catfoot he kill Bart’s brother and we take a long time to figure it out, many years later. We never could have, but for a coyote Benetsee sent me.”
Banning nodded.
“Fourteen people dead is a lot of people dead, and whoever killed ’em is very smart,” said Banning, “and there’s more’n one of ’em.”
Du Pré nodded.
“I know,” he said, “that is a bad thing, they should not have done that.”
“Lot of pressure on us,” said Banning. “I may get shoved out, you know.”
Du Pré nodded.
“Yah,” he said, “then they send someone in who make evidence up, convict anybody, guilty, not, they don’t care.”
“Yeah, well, shit happens,” said Corey Banning.
She sipped her brandy.
“I don’t give a shit about the eight suicides under the avalanche,” said Corey Banning. “I got my plateful.”