After getting the woman to her feet, I handcuffed her to the refrigerator and went outside to take a quick look at the blue Dodge. I busied myself for a moment and then went to the right in the direction of the as-big-as-a- very-large-house giant pile of beer cans but couldn’t see where Lolo and Burns might’ve gone.
I stopped by a Dumpster, which was made out of a couple of fifty-five-gallon drums sitting on a crumbling concrete pad next to the huge pile, and listened; it sounded like the cans were being stepped on and were sliding down the hill.
I approached the gigantic assembly and worked my way around the periphery-Lolo Long with her sidearm drawn was thirty feet above me and was panning the. 44 around the area. She must’ve half-seen me and swung the big Smith toward my chest.
“Whoa, Chief!”
She raised the barrel of the revolver skyward. “Where is he?”
“You don’t know?”
She slipped on the mountain of crushed aluminum and almost fell. “No, he disappeared.”
I circled the base of the thing, held in check by the remnants of an old foundation, and figured that must’ve been how “the largest pile of beer cans in the world” had started; somebody had run a wheelbarrow out the back and dumped them into the place where a building must’ve been in the twenties, and the tradition had continued on into the twenty-first century. The smell of stale beer, even in the moderate heat of the morning, was sinus clearing.
“Where did you lose him?”
She screamed in frustration, finally forming words. “I followed him up over this trash heap, and when I got to this side, he was gone!” She took a step and then slid down and fell in a tumbling avalanche. “Damn it!”
I stood there watching the slipping cascade of cans. “Well, I guess there’s only one thing to do.” She stood back up and watched as I drew my Colt and raised my voice. “Throw a few shots into this pile and see what happens. If he’s in there, I’ll probably get him.”
There was a wheelbarrow load that hadn’t made it to the mountain proper, smaller and more scattered than would’ve hidden a man. I raised my. 45, snapped off the safety, and pulled the trigger-a few cans flew into the air.
So did Kelly Joe Burns.
As I’d suspected, he’d slipped and fallen but had been smart enough to realize that the mountain of cans could provide a fine hiding place, at least before I threatened to shoot it.
If we’d thought Kelly Joe was fast before, we hadn’t seen anything. The man practically levitated from the cans downgrade from where Chief Long sat and about a third of the way around the base from where I stood before remembering to throw the bag he held over the top of the pile.
We both yelled at him to stop, but we might as well have been talking to the wind in both solidity and velocity. As I circled the base, I pointed toward the spot where he’d been buried. “Get the bag!”
She stumbled and slid as I ran after the world’s fastest non-Indian.
Back at USC, as an offensive tackle, I had been able to outrun any other two-hundred-and-fifty-pound man in Southern California for forty yards; we were now more than a couple of decades past that, I was coming up on my forty yard limit, and Kelly Joe Burns didn’t weigh close to two hundred and fifty pounds.
He had run toward the road but had circled back to the front of the bar, and I could hear the sound of the Dodge’s starter, grinding away.
I stopped at the edge of the asphalt and attempted to catch my breath by bending over and placing a hand on one of my knees for support as I pulled the coil wire from my shirt pocket and dangled it like a dead rat for him to see.
He looked at me, threw open the door, and ran across Route 39 just as an eighteen-wheeler bellowed down the road from Colstrip. The white cattle truck locked its brakes and blew its horn, and I watched as Kelly Joe slid underneath and came up on the other side.
“You’ve got to be kidding…”
I skimmed around the rear end of the Freightliner full of unhappy cows when another horn sounded and caused my heart to skip like a warped record album. I was pretty sure I’d checked for oncoming traffic, but was surprised to find both of my hands, one still holding the. 45, on the hood of a Baltic blue 1959 Thunderbird convertible.
The car had stopped, and my daughter and soon-to-be in-law stared at me with stunned looks on their faces. I coughed and held up one finger as I lurched off the stationary Ford into the barrow ditch after Kelly Joe.
Holstering the sidearm felt like the right thing to do in front of Cady and Lena, and besides, I figured I wasn’t going to really have to shoot Burns. There was a well-worn trail at the base of the ditch beside a barbed-wire fence. I looked north, then started off south-my daughter kept pace with the Thunderbird in low gear and Lena, having folded her arms on the door sill, sat up on her knees to look down at me as if she were in a parade.
“What are you doing?”
I coughed again and struggled to get enough air to reply. “Chasing a drug dealer.”
“I thought you were chasing a murderer.”
I glanced around and jogged on. “This is kind of a side bet.”
They accelerated and kept up, Cady driving, Lena talking. “Two felonies with one stone?”
“Something like that.”
She turned and was talking to Cady. “The driver says to remind you that you have a luncheon in thirty minutes.”
“I’ll be there.”
There was another brief conversation. “The driver says to tell you that we’re taking it on faith that since you’ve holstered your weapon, your life is not imperiled?”
I was getting a little of my air back and responded, “He may run me to death, but he’s not armed, if that’s what you mean.”
“You’re sure you don’t want our help? We do our best work from concours vintage automobiles.”
I waved them on. “I bet.”
They sped off, and I watched as the driver didn’t spare the horses.
Good girl.
It was pretty much a straight shot along Rosebud Creek, so other than a few high stands of grass, I could see about a hundred yards heading south and left toward Lame Deer. I glanced out at the swathed fields to my right and could see all the way across that flat area as well. No one.
I stopped as I remembered something Henry had once told me-something about a culvert nicknamed the “time tunnel,” which was somewhere in the area. It was reputedly filled with mattresses so that those who had imbibed and didn’t want to run the risk of becoming the forgotten dead up on Route 39 could sleep it off. Dire stuff, but better than being roadkill.
I turned and looked north. I had automatically followed the flow of the traffic on my side of the road and started south, but what if the time tunnel was north? It was a crap shoot.
Standing there for a moment more, I made a decision, turned, and began trotting back up the path. After about three hundred yards, I came to a culvert and stopped. The grass was high and only a little water spilled from the corrugated pipe, which was almost as tall as a man.
I thought about the last time I’d climbed in one of these things and had almost been killed by a big Crow by the name of Virgil White Buffalo. I reached around to my back and felt for my venerable Maglite, but then remembered I wasn’t wearing my duty belt.
Standing there, I could see that there was an uneven light at the end of the tunnel where it opened out on the other side. The smell of the place was less than inviting, but in I went, crouching down and once again pulling the Colt from the small of my back. “Kelly Joe, if you’re there I want you to know I’m coming in!”
Nothing.
I kept a wide stance and trudged over the first mattress that smelled more disgusting when I stepped on it. I cleared my throat and tried to breathe shallowly, in hopes that the odor wouldn’t overtake me before I got out.
Stepping to one side, I watched as some sort of snake slithered from under the mattress and continued on in the direction from where I’d come. I started talking to the animals again. “You’re not the variety I’m looking for.”
