He shrugged uncomfortably and spat a stream of tobacco juice off to the side.
This wasn't helping my temper any.
'I'll talk to Balcomb Monday, Steve, just like I told Doug. Now you guys kindly get out of the way.'
Instead, he turned toward a little rise that lay between here and the highway. On top of it was a man sitting astride an ATV. At Steve's signal, he jumped off, unslung a rifle, trotted forward to a good vantage point, and dropped to a prone position. He was clearly aiming at me.
My adrenaline kicked in again, not just because somebody was holding a gun on me, but because of who the somebody was. His name was Kirk Pettyjohn, and in my mind, he was a stick of dynamite with a lit match almost touching the fuse.
Kirk was Pete Pettyjohn's younger brother and the only other child of Reuben and his wife, Beatrice. He was in his early thirties, with the kind of slim build and generic good looks you saw on models in magazines. Wesley Balcomb had kept him on here as an employee, supposedly to help run things. But it was common knowledge that he'd never been worth a damn as a hand, and an open secret that he was pretty heavily into meth. What he seemed to spend most of his time doing was riding that ATV around and snooping. I'd almost gotten used to looking up and seeing him off in the distance, watching my crew through binoculars or a camera.
It struck me that his ATV might have been what I'd heard when I was leaving the dump.
Kirk favored camo fatigues, and he always wore those bug-eyed sunglasses with a neck cord, even indoors. He'd gotten himself an earring shaped like a grinning little skull. His hair was cut in a boot camp bristle, although he'd taken to dyeing it bright punkish blond, presumably to add a touch of glamour.
And he loved guns, especially the one he had trained on me. It was a Ruger Mini-14, a semiautomatic that fired the same high-speed.223 round as an M16, as fast as you could pull the trigger-an excellent rifle for around a ranch, where coyotes and stray dogs might get into the cattle. But Kirk had turned it into a paramilitary weapon, replacing the standard five-round clip with thirty-round clips, and I was almost certain that he'd modified it illegally to full automatic capacity. Every so often while we were working, we'd hear it sound off like a string of firecrackers. I didn't know if he ever shot any stock predators, but he sure made some men nervous.
It all added up to me that Kirk had become the star of a commando movie inside his own head. Maybe that was because he didn't really have much going for him, in spite of the bounty he'd grown up with. My sense was that above all he wanted people to take him seriously, but nobody did, and that was what worried me. Killing somebody would get him the kind of attention he craved, and while I didn't think he'd do it on purpose, there was a lot of room for accidents.
Then there was the long-standing tension between our families-once again, involving Celia.
The office door opened and Hjalmar Stenlund, who everybody called Elmer, came walking out. Elmer was the ranch's stock manager and the model of a sweet old cowboy, gaunt and leathery, close to eighty but with hair still streaked yellow. Like a lot of those men, he'd done his tour in the military-it had been the Pacific for Elmer-and spent the rest of his life on ranches. He'd worked on this place since before I was born, and he moved with a stooped, bowlegged shuffle from a spine and legs rearranged by years in the saddle.
I got out of my truck and went to meet him. He looked puzzled and concerned.
'I'm sorry as hell about this, Hugh,' he said. 'I wouldn't of stood for it if I could help it.'
'I appreciate that, Elmer.' I gripped his shoulder and gave it a squeeze. It was bony and still hard with muscle. 'I guess I put a hair across Balcomb's ass, but I don't know how.'
'Me, neither. Doug got a phone call a little bit ago and blew out of here. I didn't have time to ask him nothing. Then he called a few minutes later and said you was on your way here and we better stop you. I told him I'd talk to you, but what you did was up to you.' He glanced sourly at Kirk. 'Guess I was wrong.'
'You know what a hothead Doug is. Maybe he just popped off and I happened to be in range.'
'Maybe,' Elmer said. His gaze checked me over. 'He sounded kind of rattled. You look it, too. You get into it with him?'
'Nothing serious.'
'Huh. Well, Balcomb's supposed to be on his way here.'
'I guess that means sometime before midnight.'
Elmer smiled. 'No, Steve said he's really coming. But he's out riding, so he ain't moving too fast.'
In terms of horsemanship, Balcomb was at the opposite end of the spectrum from his wife. But he must have figured he'd have more credibility in the horse raising business if he acquired at least basic riding skills, so he'd brought his own thoroughbred from Virginia, a young bay mare, and spent an hour on her most days.
'Is he getting any better?' I said.
Elmer shrugged. 'He's getting more experience. But he won't listen to nobody, and he's ruining that horse.'
'Ruining how?'
His face creased in a grimace of groping to explain.
'He wants things his way, so he tries to force her, same as he does everything else. It ain't that he's mean to her-he just can't get it in his head he's got to teach her, steady and patient. He'll get riled up and swat her for no reason, then maybe he'll catch a phone call that makes him feel better and he'll feed her a treat. Poor little thing don't know how she's supposed to behave. She's nervous as a whore in church.'
I knew Elmer had been working with Balcomb and the mare, and he'd gone riding with them every day until recently. But that had stopped, and while Elmer wasn't the kind to come out and say so, I had a feeling this explained why-Balcomb couldn't tolerate his disapproval, and so had dismissed him.
Elmer had a deep love and respect for horses, and he was bone honest. I thought hard about confiding in him. Kirk was a long way off and the Anson brothers were out of earshot, too, milling around with occasional nervous glances in my direction. But I decided again to hold off. There was no point in getting him outraged and asking him to keep it secret, and since I was locked into meeting with Balcomb, I might as well find out what he wanted before I stirred things up.
Elmer fished a pack of Camels out of his shirt pocket and offered me one. I didn't usually smoke, but I took it. He hobbled on back to the office. I found a shed wall to lean against and settled in to wait.
Wesley Balcomb's makeover of this place had started when he bought it, about two years ago. The fences had been reinforced everywhere and electrified for roughly a mile around the headquarters. There were several dirt roads running across the property that used to be open for anybody to drive through-you just were expected to close the cattle gates, the old kind that you bear-hugged and slipped a barbed-wire loop over. Now all those roads were sealed off. He'd turned the property's east end into an adjoining compound and built a six-thousand-square- foot house and an ultramodern stable complex there. I'd heard the stables were an equine Ritz, with an enclosed heated arena, forty stalls, and every other kind of luxury. But I'd never been inside the compound-it was off-limits even to the hands, and had a high-security alarm system, ten-foot fences, and a gate with a camera.
While all that progressed, Balcomb had hired and fired a slew of managers, consultants, architects, and other experts. Most of them took themselves very seriously and seemed determined to make that clear. They'd set up a maze of rules and procedures that turned even simple decisions into major productions, and yet they were always screaming demands for better efficiency. They interfered in everything, trying to impose corporate thinking that simply wouldn't fit here. Elmer, who'd forgotten more about livestock than most people would ever know and had run this operation smoothly and profitably for decades, was now overseen by a firm of east coast accountants.
That sort of thing took its toll on the people who were trying to get the hands-on work done. I'd noticed it even during the few months I'd been here. Little irritations kept building up, the kind you didn't pay much attention to, but that started eating at you. It was all amped up by Kirk riding around with his binoculars and rifle. Some of the hands, like Doug, were eager to chop themselves a niche in the hierarchy. Others, like Elmer, looked on with pained weariness.
This ranch had its own persona, an old-fashioned quality that was hard to define. The word humanity wasn't quite right, but I couldn't think of a better one. The weather, the land, and the people on it could all be harsh; but fundamentally, they treated each other like human beings. That was true of most such places, and of Montana in general. Beneath the surface beauty lay a less visible and more powerful kind-a quiet understanding that the really important things were to pull your own weight and not fuck other people over. By and large, if you held to those, you could do whatever you wanted.
But now it was changing, not just here, but all around. You could tell from what you heard, saw, read- felt.
