'It's rather late to be calling.'
'This is important.'
She paused again, as if she was trying to imagine what, in my life, it possibly could be.
But she said, 'I'm remembering you more clearly now. Somebody told me something about you.'
'Huh. They must have been pretty hard up for gossip.'
'You weren't quite honest with me this afternoon. Stanford, is that right?'
I blinked in surprise. I hadn't known what to expect, but it wasn't this.
'I don't recall lying about it,' I said.
'Oh, I think the 'aw, shucks, ma'am' routine was a kind of lie.'
'I've learned I get along better if I don't answer questions until they're asked.'
'All right, I'll ask one,' she said. 'Why are you making your living out here hauling trash?'
Out of nowhere, I remembered her riding toward me across the meadow, looking for all the world like Celia, by some miracle grown up into her full womanly beauty.
'The guy hauling trash is me, Mrs. Balcomb. The other guy was a suit I tried on that never fit. He's long gone and we're both glad of it. Is your husband around?'
For a few more seconds, again, nothing happened. I was getting the feeling that her hesitations had a meaning beyond anything I could grasp.
It seemed strange that she'd have heard that about me, and stranger still that she'd bring it up.
'I'll get him,' she said.
Balcomb took his time coming to the phone-back in his dick-swinging mode of making people wait.
'Mr. Davoren,' he said, in his cool, smooth tone. 'How interesting to hear from you. This number's supposed to be unlisted. I can see I'll have to change it.'
'This is getting out of control, Balcomb. Let's stop it right now.'
His sarcasm edged up a notch. 'Out of control?'
'Somebody came onto my land and burned that lumber.'
'Oh, for God's sake,' he said, now with weary patience.
'You don't believe me, come up and take a look.'
'I don't believe you about anything, Davoren, and I'm most certainly not going to waste any more time on you. Even if what you claim is true, my first suspicion would be that you burned it yourself.'
'Me? Why the hell would I do that?'
'Because you thought it might make me feel sorry for you. I advise you to forget about any more such naive little ploys. You committed crimes and you took my property. You're going to pay for that.'
'Then it's going to cost you, too,' I said.
Balcomb actually sounded amused. 'Yes, I thought that would be coming next. When lying and whining don't work, your kind shift to threats.'
I was starting to think real hard about driving right through his fucking high-security fence and dragging him out of his house.
'Remember when you asked me if I saw anything unusual?' I said. 'I probably should have mentioned-the most unusual thing I didn't see was two shotgunned and gutted horses in the ranch dump.'
There came a pause, like with Laurie, but the feel was a whole different order of business. Everything seemed to stop dead.
'I haven't told anybody yet,' I said. 'But I'm ready to head straight to the Independent Record and give them the story. They'll have it all over the wires by morning.'
He wasn't shaken for long. He knew the carcasses were safely hidden now. His tone changed to the steely one of a man who had tried to be tolerant but had run out of patience.
'Really, Davoren. This has gone from distasteful to sick. I won't dignify that with a response. But if it was anything but another outrageous lie, you'd have said something earlier.'
'I kept my mouth shut so I could find out more without tipping anybody off,' I said. 'I went back a little while ago and followed the Cat's tracks to the shed where those horses were killed. Oh, sorry-weren't killed. Never even existed, right?'
This time he was silent as stone.
'There's a kicker, Balcomb,' I said. 'Sure, I'm a liar trying to get off the hook, but I'm a liar who happened to be a journalist for seven years. The Sacramento Guardian-you can check it out if you want to waste the time. I always keep a camera with my other gear, out of old habit. So I've got a bunch of photos I didn't take. The whole shittarree-the carcasses, the tipped-over hay bales, the loose piece of siding.'
I watched a middle-aged couple come out of the store and make their way toward a dusty sedan, pushing a cart filled with plastic sacks-out grocery shopping late on a Saturday night. There was something odd and yet sweetly sensible about it.
'I'm starting to realize that I was wrong about you,' Balcomb finally said, with the weariness in his voice again. 'Your real problem is not that you're a petty criminal. You're completely unhinged. But I have far too much on my plate to be mired down in something like this. What is it you want?'
See which way he jumps.
'You drop all charges first thing Monday and pay my bail,' I said. 'We'll call the lumber a wash. Maybe it wasn't mine, but you'd have just thrown it away.'
'What guarantee do I have that you won't stir up more trouble?'
'I never stirred up any trouble to start with. And I don't ever want any fucking thing to do with you again. You can believe that.'
Another blast of that frozen stillness came across the phone, as clear as if it had turned my ear blue.
'Consider it done,' he said.
The connection ended.
18
I got into my truck, shaking like I had after mixing it up with Doug Wills. As I drove, I tried to balance off the plays in this nasty little game. I'd shown my hole card, but so had Balcomb. The fact that he'd given in was as good as an admission. I didn't have the photos I'd claimed, but he hadn't asked to see them-another sign that his denial was a bullshit show. It was going to cost him a couple of thousand dollars, but that was nothing to him. I'd lost the lumber, but it wasn't coming out of my pocket.
I wasn't naive enough to trust Balcomb, like I would have when I was younger. I'd grown up with the dinosaur ethic of somebody's word being everything. It was the way you lived, how you were judged by other people-who you were. Eventually, I'd wised up enough to realize how differently a lot of the world saw it. Promises were empty, lures with sucker punches behind them, to be chuckled about later in a boardroom or four-star restaurant. He was powerful, rich, cunning in a way I could never touch. I hadn't forgotten his threat about my being out of my league. And whatever the reasons might have been for that butchery, the chill factor was off the charts.
I just hoped that Madbird's bluff would prove out, and the risk of exposure would spook Balcomb enough, in turn, to get off my case.
I didn't know if Sarah Lynn would still be awake, but I was carrying the wad of cash I'd brought from my place and I wanted to pay her back. She lived not far away, in the hills east of the capital, so I figured I'd drive by and see. I could have waited for Monday-Bill LaTray would refund her twenty-five hundred after Balcomb paid him. But my sense of honor had taken a serious pounding, and I was going to feel a little better if I made a point of settling the debt right away.
I stopped at an ATM to clean out the seven hundred bucks in my bank account, and learned something I'd never known-I had a daily limit of two hundred, and that was all the son of a bitch would give me. I decided it was the thought that counted, and drove on to Sarah Lynn's.
Her house was modern and expensive, two-level, with a rock facade on the lower one. I knew that she and her ex had owned it together until they'd split the sheets. She'd married the kind of guy she wanted-the son of the
