CHAPTER TWENTY

Part of the barns roof had caved in on itself and collapsed in a shower of orange embers. A vast cloud of steam and smoke rose into the sky behind me as I made my way back to the truck, and I knew Taj had begun hosing down the fires. A freight train sounded its pneumatic horn somewhere far up the valley and the sound echoed from between the walls of stone canyons and creek beds, propelled by the wind inside the storm. I could almost hear the grind of the steel wheels along the hot flanges of track as the train prepared for the steep climb up the grade.

My headlights glanced off the rough surface of the corduroy road and I rolled down my window as the beams lighted the scene where the runaway biker had met up with my wrangler, Paul Tucker.

Both of the entry roads into the ranch had been strung with loops of razor wire that had been placed in the low spots between rises, where runoff had carved natural gullies, knowing anyone unfamiliar with the place would not see the hazard until there was nothing they could do to avoid it. The original intent had been to keep the bastards out, but the call I had made to Caleb from the phone booth had obviously come too late for that. Even so, I knew it would be useful as a deterrent to an escape.

“That’s gotta hurt,” I said.

Tucker grinned and laid the barrel of his rifle across his right shoulder. His eyes shone inside the lean angles of his face, reflecting the glare of my headlamps.

“He come barreling down that road like a bat out of hell,” Tucker told me. “Never saw it comin’ until it was too late. Sumbitch’s brakes wouldn’t grab on the loose dirt and he laid down that hog and slid straight into the coils.”

“Looks like he’s tangled up good.”

“I told him to stop fightin’, it just makes it worse.”

“Doesn’t look like he took your advice.”

Tucker turned and spit a stream of tobacco juice into the weeds, wiped his lips with the sleeve of his jacket.

“Naw,” he said. “He’s a foul-mouthed sumbitch—stubborn too. What do you want me to do with him?”

“Leave him be. If he gets loose somehow, shoot him in the leg,” I told him. “If that doesn’t stop him, shoot him in the other leg.”

The corners of his eyes twitched, not with surprise but anticipation.

“You joshin’ me, Mr. Dawson?”

“I’m dead serious. There’s ambulances coming. But if this piece of shit gives you one lick of trouble, you put him down on the ground.”

“Yes, sir,” Tucker said and spat again.

“You think I can get this truck around the edge over there? I need to get out to the two-lane.”

“I’ll guide you through. Follow me, just go slow. It’s slippery down there in the low spot.”

Seven.

I don’t know why it angered me so much to know that Wallace had lied to me. I counted again in my head. There had been seven of the bastards on my ranch. I was glad all over again that I’d left him strung up in the barn, and put it out of my head that some moral switch might have been permanently shut down inside me.

I did not hold to an image of a vengeful or vindictive God, nor to the notion that His will held much sway with the improbable and grotesque mischief of venal and prehensile men. I wanted to deny, also, that their acts had been choreographed and were operating with the sanction of an organized society. But I had been made complicit in some scheme of which I had no prior knowledge nor had been given the opportunity to consent. If some arbitrary wheel was being turned, I would not allow me or my family to be strapped to it while it was being set to the torch.

To the extent that I held to a code that I lived by, it had not included violence as a component tool, at least not since I’d come home from Korea. That code had now been revised in the extreme, and I felt no guilt or remorse for my actions, or the ones I may yet have the need to commit.

These were the thoughts that accompanied me as I sped down the road to Lloyd Skadden’s ranch.

Fat drops of rain exploded on the windscreen of my truck, one drop at a time, desultory and hesitant, and lightning forked high in the clouds.

I parked my truck at an angle, intentionally blocking the exit for a marked patrol car and a dark-colored Harley shovelhead outfitted with ape hangers and a sissy bar. I placed my palm on the cruiser’s hood and it felt warm to the touch, as did the carburetor on the hog.

Two uniformed officers and one biker had been shot dead on the stone steps at Lloyd Skadden’s front door, the apparent victims of a brief and close range firefight. Lights that had been constructed to resemble gas lamps flickered and cast jittering shadows across the bodies and the troweled swirls of an ornately plastered wall.

I withdrew the Colt strapped to my belt and stepped between the pools of blood that had already begun to congeal onto the stones and mortar. The front door was cracked open, so I cocked the hammer and pushed it slowly open with my shoulder and slid inside. The interior was dim, the only light a golden glow that emanated from an open doorway at the terminus of a short hall at the far side of the sitting room. I had my finger looped around the trigger, ready to let fly, but saw no movement anywhere.

I angled past a mirror at the entry and toward the source of the light, and heard the murmur of male voices coming from inside. Pressing my back against the wall, I crabbed sideways toward the sound, my footsteps muffled by the carpeting. When I peered around the casing, I found myself staring into the twin barrels of a cut-down Remington that I had seen before.

The biker I called Rabbit had his right hand wrapped around the shortened stock. In his left he held a semiautomatic pistol, which was aimed at the side of Lloyd Skadden’s head.

“Lower the hammer on your weapon, Mr. Dawson,” Rabbit said. “Do it slowly, then remove the cartridges and drop them on the floor. When you’re finished, put the gun on the table by the door.”

He was perched at the edge of Skadden’s desk, his weight resting on his good foot, while the bandaged one swung loosely in the air. His eyes were dry, the pupils spun down to pinpoints with painkillers and speed. He moistened his uneven teeth inside a crooked smile and waited while I thumbed the cylinder release and dropped the unspent shells onto the carpet.

“You come out here alone?” he asked. “Or did you bring your nigger with you?”

“Use that word again and I’ll find a way to slit your throat and pull your tongue out through the hole.”

“You still mad about that girl at the motel?” he asked. “I thought a worldly man like you would understand a little milking through the fence. You need to learn to lighten up, man. In fact, why don’t you take a load off your feet?”

“I’m good where I am.”

“Then stand there in the doorway where I can keep an eye on you.”

Beneath his Charlatans club vest, he had the sleeves of a flannel shirt rolled up above his forearms. The right one was disfigured by a sheet of purple scar tissue that looked like snake skin or wax paper that had been melted on his flesh.

“Willy Peter,” he said when he saw the focus of my gaze. “A keepsake from the war that is not a war.”

He tilted his head sideways and took on an expression of amusement.

“I assume you know all about these things,” he said. “You’ve had some experience with armored tanks, if I’m not mistaken.”

“How would you know that?”

“Everyone in this town has a big mouth. But that tidbit I learned from this one.” He jogged the pistol in his left hand in the direction of Lloyd Skadden.

The back of Skadden’s khaki uniform shirt had been soaked through by a line of sweat that traced the humps along his spine. His hands quaked with a combination of fear and helplessness and anger as he knelt and stacked banded bricks of currency into a pair of saddlebags that rested beside the open door of a Hamilton safe that was bolted to the floor.

“We had a spirited disagreement regarding compensation,” Rabbit said. “And the sheriff doubted the sincerity of my first request to open up his safe.”

His eyes shifted to the corner of Skadden’s office, where the sheriff’s son, Myron, was still seated in a guest chair, his hands clenched in a death grip on its leather-upholstered arms. One eye was sprung open in surprise; a wet and blackened hole stared out from where the other should have been. His mouth was gaping like a hatchling.

I returned my attention to the Rabbit, who simply looked at me and shrugged.

“I don’t care to repeat myself,” he said. “There’s no negotiation on that point.”

“I didn’t ask for an explanation.”

“I know. I’m just making conversation while we wait.”

He leaned toward Lloyd Skadden.

“Speed it up, fat ass,” he said out of the side of his mouth.

“Has he always been like this?” he said to me. “I can see it on your face. You’re wondering why I don’t just shoot you where you stand.”

I had no interest in provoking a man whose brain was roiling with spiders and had the means to end both Skadden and me within a half second of each other, so I said nothing.

“I’m told that in the old days, Comanche raiders would often let one person live, just to tell the story of the horrors and as a warning to others.”

Skadden had finished loading the bags and stood to hand it to the biker.

“Shut and lock the door on that safe and sit down in your chair, fat man,” Rabbit said and hooked the bags onto the arm that held the pistol. “Lay that strap across my shoulder before you do.”

The sheriff did as he was told and Rabbit stood up from his perch. The bandage on the foot I’d shot was crusted brown with dried bloodstains.

“Sorry you made this personal, Dawson,” Rabbit said. “Under different circumstances and all that …”

“I doubt it.”

“You’re right. Probably not. Anyway, I gotta split.”

He turned and fired twice, one went low into Skadden’s belly and the other grazed his throat. He never took the shotgun’s aim off of me.

Rabbit scrunched his face into a grimace as the smell of cordite filled the room.

“Oooh,” he said. “That can’t feel good.”

My eyes were locked on Rabbit’s while Skadden slumped down in his chair, hands groping at the new hole in his abdomen. Blood seeped through his fingers and his eyes rolled back into his head.

“Step into the office, Dawson. I’m sure you’ll want to help your buddy while I leave.”

He saw the calculation I was making in my head.

“You could probably try to get those shells back into your gun and shoot me,” he said. He picked up my Colt off the table with his thumb and index finger and tossed it down the hall into the darkness of the living room. “But you’ll have to find it first.”

Rabbit hobbled backward down the hall and kept me covered with the sawed-off. When he disappeared around the corner, I made my choice and went to see if there was anything I could do for Skadden.

One shot had torn his clavicle to splinters, and had to hurt like hell. But the gut shot was a bad one, and aside from attempting to stanch the bleeding there was little I could do.

I picked up the phone on Skadden’s desk, and considered calling the state police, but had no idea who I could trust there anymore; the emergency medical teams were likely still out at my ranch. I decided to call Melissa Vernon of the BLM instead and asked for assistance from anyone she might know with the ODOJ.

Her office would be closed at this hour, so I dialed 411 and got her residential number. Skadden’s complexion was going gray and his breathing grew shallower with every second that I waited on the line.

She agreed to have a special investigations unit of the Oregon State Department of Justice sent down to sort this out. I had no way of knowing if I could trust those people either, but it would circumvent the state police and leave the feds out of it too.

“You’ve used up all your chips with me, Mr. Dawson.”

“I’m sorry that you feel that way. I’d appreciate it if you’d send a team down here anyway. It’s a mess. I’ll wait.”

Skadden looked into my face, his expression revealing nothing but confusion and contempt, a man whose certain world had imploded right before his eyes, but could not comprehend how it went so badly wrong.

I tried to speak to him, at the very least to learn the name of the man who was his killer, but he would only stare at me with hatred burning in his eyes.

Lloyd Skadden died ten minutes later, his white and purple viscera bulging out between his knuckles, having never said another word.

Lucifer winked in the predawn sky, bright and sharp beside the waning gibbous moon. In the hours while I awaited the arrival of my backup, I examined the crime scene for myself, made coffee in the kitchen, and phoned Jesse at the ranch.

“Everybody’s fine,” she said. “When are you coming home?” Her voice betrayed the exhaustion and the shock that followed on from the experience of unbridled terror.

“As soon as I can,” I said. “I promise. Some agents from ODOJ will be arriving there, probably before I do. Don’t speak to anyone until I get home.”

“What am I supposed to do?”

“Give ’em coffee on the gallery and tell them to wait until I come back.”

She told me that Sam Griffin had been taken with the others up to County Hospital, and was probably in surgery as we spoke.

“I’m worried about Cricket, Ty.”

I felt my heart jump in my chest.

“Sam told me Cricket was okay.”

“She is,” Jesse said. “That’s the problem. She acts like nothing happened here at all.”

I took a mug of coffee out to the front of Skadden’s house. I sat down on the basin of the Spanish fountain, scanned the surreality of the scene that lay before me in the driveway and lit a cigarette. Somewhere in the bushes a landscape timer clicked and the pump inside the fountain cycled on. The stone bowls overflowed and the incongruous soothing sound of falling water filled the atmosphere and rebounded off the walls. The air was cold and smelled like rain, but the storm I’d seen in last night’s sky remained immobile over the mountain peaks.

Dual shafts of yellow headlights slashed through the dark along the entry lined with cypress, and I stood up as three matching black Dodge Coronets pulled inside the gates and parked. Two agents emerged from each of the cars, and looked so oddly similar that they could have dropped off of the edge of some eastern seaboard factory conveyor, been given haircuts and gray suits, and handed leather satchels, cameras, and clipboards.

One man stepped out from the driver’s side of the lead car and headed straight for me. He introduced himself as Averill Conrad, lead investigator for the Oregon DOJ. The other five donned rubber gloves and immediately set about snapping photos of the scene and making diagrams and notes.

Averill Conrad removed his Madison hat and ran a hand across a head that had gone prematurely bald. He was short and wiry in stature, so I had a good view of a pate flecked with patches of dry skin and a horseshoe fringe of hair that was the color of a rusted nail. His eyes possessed the peculiar greenish cast of the sky when it presages a monsoon.

“Tyler Dawson,” I said, and offered my hand for him to shake. He seemed to consider the alternatives before he took it.

“I don’t like dealing with amateurs,” he said.

“Are you this agitated every morning when you get up, or is this one something special.”

“I don’t know you, Dawson.”

“Were you ever in the livestock trade? If not, there’s not much reason that you would.”

“I was told you are the undersheriff in this county.”

“Undersheriff is a position I was shanghaied into. Let’s get this over with, I need to get back home.”

Conrad’s naturally ruddy complexion reddened further and he kept his eyes locked onto mine while he screwed his hat back into place. His blunt and squared-off features put me in mind of a poorly tempered Dexter bull, and I could not take my eyes off of a patch just off the center of his chin that he had missed with his razor that morning.

I walked him through the scene and gave him my statement. I identified Skadden’s two dead deputies by name as we passed by them on our way into the house. We ended up in Skadden’s office and stood on opposite sides of the desk.

“So, this rabbit-faced biker shot Sheriff Skadden for no reason?”

“I suspect his reason was to keep me occupied while he made his escape,” I said.

“And he left you alive.”

“He said something about Comanches leaving one live witness as a warning.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“I guess you’ll have to ask him when you find him.”

My focus drifted to the safe that was bolted to Skadden’s floor. The door was closed and locked, and I still was not convinced that I trusted Averill Conrad, so I kept any mention of money to myself.

Special Investigator Conrad and I went through the entire scene two more times, and I repeated my recitation of events nearly verbatim. I had grown tired of this guy’s condescending attitude, and it was long past time for me to get back to my ranch. I lit a cigarette and moved toward the door.

“I would prefer it if you wouldn’t smoke,” Conrad said.

“So would my wife, but you can see how that worked out.”

He cut his eyes out through the door, squinted at the sky that had faded pale blue with the rising sun.

“We’re not finished here,” he said.

“I am.”

“The entire cadre of Meriwether County law enforcement is lying dead on this property, and you tell me you’re leaving?”

“You need to adjust your thinking, Conrad. The surviving members of this county’s law enforcement cadre are either lying in a hospital bed or waiting for me at the crime scene that I used to refer to as my house.”

“This is the reason I don’t like dealing with amateur law enforcement.”

“Tell you the truth, Conrad, I’m not overly impressed with the qualities I’ve seen among the so-called professionals in these parts either. Let’s call it a draw.”

I could feel his eyes peeling the skin off the back of my neck as I walked over to my truck and opened the door.

“We’re colleagues, Mr. Conrad,” I said. “Whether you like that or not. I’ve answered all your questions and now I’m heading home. When you have something else for me, you know where to find me.”

“I’ll be in touch,” he called out to me.

“You’d better be,” I said. “This thing’s a long damn way from over.”