were moving in. There was also a substantial element of small-time criminals, conveniently residing close to the jail. It couldn't have been much more different from the pristine country where Kirk had grown up, but it was where his girlfriend Josie lived, and he'd moved in with her when the ranch was sold.
I hardly knew her, mainly just to nod and say hi when I'd seen her out with Kirk. She hadn't grown up around here-I had it in my head that she was from the coast, Seattle or Portland. She was about twenty-five, with shoulder-length brown hair and a small slim build, quite pretty in an anorexic way-the kind of girl you'd see sitting at a bar on a summer afternoon, wearing cutoff jeans and a tank top with a little bow, and she'd seem fresh and appealing and amusingly smart-mouthed. But in time you'd notice the dark circles under her eyes as her makeup wore thin, and how she started seeming a lot older than her years, and that the tantalizing patter was never going to go anywhere except toward what was in this for her. When I was younger, I'd been quite good at not catching on to that sort of thing. It had taken me on some rides, but I couldn't recall one that hadn't turned out sour or outright troublesome.
The only time I'd exchanged more than a casual hello with Josie had been on a night several months back, when she'd come up to me in O'Toole's and asked if I'd seen Kirk. He must have been off on one of his runners. When I told her no, she said he was supposed to pick her up hours ago, and she was tired and wanted to crash, and would I drive her home? As soon as we'd gotten into my truck, she'd started asking me to make other stops-first at a convenience store for cigarettes, then at somebody's house where she probably scored some dope, and then she'd wanted to go to another bar. Instead, I'd driven straight to her and Kirk's place and stayed behind the wheel while she pouted her way inside. Back at O'Toole's, it wasn't long before I saw her come in again. But that time, she looked right through me as she walked past. I hadn't run into her since.
There was no reason to expect that she'd be happy to see me. I was starting to realize that a lot of people weren't. But she was bound to know some things about Kirk's drug dealings, and I'd been thinking more and more about Madbird's guess that that might have been how the horses were used. If the shred of nylon I'd found at the shed had come from the tarp wadded up with their carcasses, it suggested that the Cat had picked it up and carried it to the dump along with them. I was wondering if Balcomb had put the tarp down to keep from losing any cargo in the swamp that their blood and entrails would have made on the shed's dirt floor.
Josie's apartment was on the second story of a run-down frame house on Ewing Street. I pulled the Victor up to the curb, shut it down, and sat for a minute, absorbing the neighborhood's own peculiar kind of desolation. It was closed in by steep hills, with the buildings packed tightly together, giving it the secretive feel of an older time and place. The lights of the tree-lined streets were dim and the windows heavily curtained, with no signs of activity and no sounds but the faint patter of rain and the rumble of a car with a shot muffler passing a few blocks away. I knew there were plenty of people and plenty going on around me, but everything was hidden inside the walls, working by its own rules, apart from the rest of the world and wanting to keep it like that. The sense was similar in a way to what I'd felt approaching the ranch-that I was an intruder being watched, but not by anybody. The difference was that out in that wild country, it had been exhilarating. This was a lot less pleasant.
The building's outside entrance was unlocked. It gave into a little hallway with a mailbox and a shadowy staircase leading up to the door of the apartment. I hadn't been able to tell if Josie was home-her windows, like most of the others around, were covered and barely lit. But she must have either been watching outside or heard me on the stairs, because the door opened against its chain before I raised my fist to knock.
Her face appeared in the gap. She looked wary, like she didn't remember me, which was entirely possible. Then again, maybe it was because she did-or because she'd learned that I was under suspicion in Kirk's disappearance.
I said, 'Hi, Josie.'
'Kirk's gone.'
'I know. That's why I came by.'
'Did you hear something?' she said sharply.
'Nothing besides that. I need to talk to you. It won't take long.'
Her eyes narrowed. 'What about?'
'I had a run-in with Wesley Balcomb. I need help figuring some things out.'
'So this isn't because you're worried about Kirk, right?' she said, with chilling precision and speed.
'Hell, yes, of course I'm worried about him. If I do any good, it could-you know-' I floundered, and finished up, 'Help him, too.'
Her face relaxed into a calculated look. It was oddly more natural.
'Come on in,' she said.
She didn't look so pretty tonight. She was wearing a University of Montana Grizzlies football sweatshirt so big and baggy that she seemed lost inside it like a little kid, and skinnier than ever. The sleeves came down to her fingertips-she kept fidgeting, pushing them up to her wrists, but they'd flop loose again immediately. I suspected they were hiding track marks. Her face was tense and twitchy, and her nostrils had a raw peeled look.
The apartment was a train wreck, but not a comfortable kind of organic mess like at Doug's trailer. The pastel blue paint on the walls had peeled in patches to reveal a mosaic of previous colors, and the carpet, a green- orange shag that screamed remnant sale, was stained and cigarette-burned and trodden down to a dismal mat. The room reeked of smoke, with an undercurrent of decay from the kitchen or the plumbing or God knew what else.
But that all went with the turf. The jarring element lay in the newer things. For openers, Josie was sporting a diamond engagement ring like you'd see on rich widows in Miami, with one stone the size of a chickpea surrounded by several smaller ones. I was no judge of that kind of thing, but they gave off the kind of sparkle that I didn't think came from paste.
There was a full-blown home entertainment center with a TV even bigger than Doug's, plus a DVD and a VCR and a stereo and all the other bells and whistles, encased in a slick cabinet set. A new leather couch that they must have had a hell of a time getting up those stairs took up most of one wall. A couple of large western-theme paintings were hung above and around it, the kind of imitation Charlie Russells that were one step this side of black velvet, but that sold for ungodly prices in rustic art galleries.
And clothes. The front closet was so packed with coats and boots that the door wouldn't close. Jeans and tops trailed off the furniture onto the floor and formed a path to the bedroom. Pretty much everything, to be blunt, looked slutty. But most of it was new, too-some of the items still had tags.
The strong implication was that she'd been living low to the ground, then suddenly had come into a chunk of cash and tried to buy some class. But she didn't know how, so she'd retreated to filling up the place with the familiar security of clothes.
The psychology involved didn't particularly interest me. What did was the more tangible matter of where that money had come from-not just for all this, but for Kirk's new Jeep and guns and other pseudo-military toys. I was sure that Josie didn't have a job, and there was no way Kirk's salary went that far. Maybe it had come from his family, although he'd done plenty of barroom pissing and moaning about his father's stinginess. Maybe they'd bought it all on credit.
Maybe.
Josie turned to me with her arms folded and a no-bullshit stare. Her mouth was a tight line turned down at the corners.
'Look, I don't know where Kirk is or what's going on,' she said. 'I'll talk to you, but you got to do something for me, too. He didn't leave me any money, man. There's no food here, I'm starving.'
It looked like coyness wasn't going to figure into this, which was good. I opened my wallet, thinking I'd give her a twenty. But I'd had only a few bucks of my own to start with, and out of the hundred-dollar bill I'd put down at the Red Meadow, only some singles, a couple of fives, and a fifty were left. Elmer and I hadn't drunk much, but I'd been careful to take care of the bartender-who in return had topped our glasses to the brim and bought us a round, the way it ought to be-and a shot of good bourbon wasn't cheap these days even at a place like that.
I wanted Josie in a cooperative mood, and it was Balcomb's cash anyway, so I set the fifty on top of a clothes pile, making sure she saw the denomination. Instead of being impressed, she looked at it like a waitress in a classy restaurant would look at a two-bit tip. I shouldn't have been surprised. I'd seen it often enough, people who'd never had to earn money thinking that people who did should throw bushels of it at them.
'What do you want to know?' she said. Now she seemed impatient.
'What did Kirk-' I caught myself, and coughed into my hand to cover. 'What does Kirk have to say about
