It was time for me to finally decide what was going to happen with me.
I sat in Hannah's office a few minutes longer, weighing the factors once more. As near as I could tell, I had three options. The first, keeping on running, didn't look any better than it did to start with. The second, turning myself in, looked more disastrous than ever. Things had gotten so much more complicated that I'd trip all over myself if I tried to spin a tailored story. My only course would be to stonewall completely, but that was practically an admission of guilt, and would leave me helpless to defend myself against a case built against me.
Both choices carried the added problem that Laurie might decide that the best way to save herself would be to cooperate with authorities. If they leaned on her hard enough, she might let it slip that I'd set out to kill Balcomb, adding another major felony to my list. She might also drag Madbird in, and now we weren't talking just about abetting a fugitive. Conning Balcomb out of that money and working outside the law would have both those parties furious. No doubt Madbird would be charged with felonies there, too. Especially with him being an Indian, he'd land in Deer Lodge along with me for sure.
My third option was a final hike in the woods with my old man's pistol-with a stop at Balcomb's first to carry out last night's aborted mission. I could leave a written confession-admitting that I'd killed him and Kirk and giving the location of Kirk's body-but leaving out everything else. The cops would run a routine investigation, but there'd be no point in pushing it, and nobody involved had anything to gain by talking, including Laurie-with her husband dead, she'd have gotten what she wanted. I'd have the satisfaction of protecting my friend, avenging myself, and ridding the world of a scumbag.
My rational mind still rejected the idea, but some deeper part was starting to think about choosing a place to draw my last breath.
When I went back out to the kitchen, Hannah was sitting at the table with Kirk's book open in front of her again.
'I'm just thinking,' she said, ignoring the dogs trying to wrestle their way into her lap. 'Whenever I see Josie in the bars, she's always flashing that ring around?' She twisted her right fingertips around her left third finger to indicate where a woman wore an engagement ring.
I couldn't see how Kirk's girlfriend might figure into this, but I said, 'What about it?'
'My friend Carol, she makes jewelry? She says the big diamond's, like, two carats, and it might cost ten thousand dollars or even more. The smaller ones, maybe they're like a half carat each.'
'She's lucky somebody ain't cut off her finger for it,' Madbird muttered.
'Jewels aren't like drugs,' Hannah said patiently. 'The bigger they are, the more they're worth, on a sliding scale.'
Madbird's hand stopped. He strode to the table and crouched over to stare at the page with the scrawled numbers. I stepped beside him.
Hannah's forefinger pointed at the top entry.
Her finger moved down to the next entry.
'Now look at this,' she said, and pointed to the page the book was opened to. It was a chart of diamond values, correlating several factors like shape, weight, color, and clarity. One of the low-end values listed for a two- carat stone was $6,612. The figure 10,716 appeared toward the higher end. All the variable factors made the figuring very complex, but it seemed that enhanced qualities like better clarity or cut could raise the value by several hundred dollars or more.
Madbird slowly straightened up and raised his face toward heaven.
'Fuck, oh dear,' he said. He swung around toward me. 'You got any idea how much we're gonna owe her for this?'
Hannah smiled shyly.
I stood there bewildered. He took hold of my shirt like he had last night, but this time the grip was a good one.
'I'm sorry I called you white boy,' he said. 'You sure ain't as white as you used to be. I watched you when we first started working. Heard you were going to college and knew all kinds of smart shit, kept expecting you to deal down to the rest of us. But you never did.'
He let me go and opened the refrigerator door, came out with three cans of Pabst, shoved one at me, and took another over to Hannah.
'Then I started seeing you got something fucked up in you. But the same kind of fucked up as her and me-' his hand moved to caress her hair, rough and gentle at the same time-'and the other fucked-up people we hang with, 'cause they're our fucked-up people.'
I still couldn't grasp what was happening. Madbird exhaled in exasperation.
'Look, I respect you for all that schooling, but you got a way of not seeing what's right in front of you. Hannah just told you it ain't dope them horses were carrying. It was diamonds.'
53
A little before ten o'clock that night, I did something I never thought I'd do again-pressed the old doorbell around the back of Reuben Pettyjohn's building in downtown Helena.
Twenty seconds later, his voice rasped through the grille.
'There's only one person I know of who remembers this thing. Playing hooky from the sheriffs, aren't you, Hugh?'
'Say the word, Reuben, I'll keep right on moving. But I've got something important I'd like to tell you.'
'Well, that's intriguing, and I don't figure I owe Gary Varna nothing. Come on up.'
The buzzer crackled and the door opened at my push. I walked through the ghostly quiet of the hallway and waited for the creaky elevator to crawl down from the top floor. I had Kirk's Consumer Guide and the paper with the numbers, plus some information I'd picked up during another hour on Hannah's computer.
The diamond industry had more than its share of unsavory aspects, especially the legacy of slavery in the mines. But the grimmest reality nowadays seemed to be blood diamonds-so called because they financed terrorist groups, including Al Qaeda and several factions of African rebels, like the Janjaweed, who made their own lands into living hells for millions of people.
Blood diamonds were impossible to distinguish from any others-there were no reliable methods to identify the stones' origins without damaging them-and often of high or even superior quality. They got smuggled out of the Congo, Angola, Sierra Leone, and other African nations, following complex routes to major world markets, blending with the flow of legitimate trade. They represented an estimated twenty to forty percent of the overall- conservatively, billions of dollars per year. Along the way, they'd usually get cut in clandestine factories-China, Pakistan, and Armenia all had burgeoning industries-and also inscribed with phony laser marks to imitate known brands. These marks were microscopic-only experts using highly sophisticated equipment could tell the fakes from genuine ones; and if the marks were well done, even that was difficult.
They sold initially for next to nothing, as little as a dollar per carat. By the time they got to retail, even those of modest size and quality could go for several thousand times that. There were five carats in a gram. If you figured an average of only one thousand dollars per carat, that came to five million bucks per kilogram, a little over two pounds.
There was no way to guess the quantities Kirk had been muling, but he could have carried a lot more than that at a time, and he'd been making a run every couple of months.
Heroin, my aching ass. That was chump change. No wonder Balcomb was willing to kill.
Of course the profit wouldn't all be his. Everybody handling the jewels along the way would take a cut, and especially as contraband, they wouldn't hit full value until they went to retail. But the markup was still astronomical and tax-free, probably pumped clandestinely into his numbered offshore bank accounts and then laundered through his other financial shell games. And while handling dope didn't seem his style, pimping diamonds fit him to a tee.
I'd spent a few more minutes running another search, on the mystery investor who'd started pumping money into Balcomb's nonexistent horse business. I'd half expected that he was another of Laurie's fictions. But the name Guy-Luc Marie DeBruyne popped up right away in dozens of listings. Most were brief mentions in foreign-language
