off one. That left me with about seven hundred in my checking account. I had some folding money stashed at home, that I'd been rat-holing whenever I had a twenty or two that wasn't immediately spoken for. It didn't amount to much over fifteen hundred, if that. My next, and final, paycheck wouldn't come until next Friday.
Then I remembered that Bill LaTray had a sideline as a pawnbroker-his shop was conveniently located close to the jail. I had a couple of guns that I could hock to him to make up the extra few hundred. He probably picked up a lot of business that way.
'I can do it, but I need to get to my place,' I said. 'If you guys will drive me-'
Gary shook his head. 'Sorry, we can't let you out until the bail's posted. I don't make the rules, Hugh. That's just the way it is.'
I ran my hand over my hair, trying to see a way through this. My forehead was still caked with dried sweat and grime.
I could have called Madbird to get my guns and the bank money from an ATM, but the cash at my place was hidden, and it would have been damned near impossible to explain where. The only other choice I could see was to borrow it. I hated the thought, but I started going through a list of names in my head.
My parents were passed on, my sisters had long since moved away, and no other family was left around here except a couple of shirttail relatives I hardly knew. Elmer would have helped me and so would some other older family friends and men I'd worked with, but I couldn't bear the thought of asking them. Most of my own friends weren't any better off than me. There were only two people I could think of who probably had that kind of cash available.
Tom Dierdorff was one. But while I didn't mind asking him to talk to Balcomb-that was the kind of favor where it was understood that I'd insist on paying Tom, he'd tell me he'd send me a bill but never do it, and somewhere down the line he'd get me to come to his place and make some minor repair and he'd slip a check into my coat pocket that I'd tear up when I found it-tapping him for a twenty-five-hundred-dollar loan to boot would be pushing the envelope. I might have done it anyway, except he spent most weekends helping out on his family's ranch up near Augusta, about eighty miles away, and I sure wasn't going to ask him to make that drive.
That left one more.
'I guess I'll need a phone call,' I said.
'We'll have to make it for you. Those damn rules, you know.' Gary waited inquiringly while I ran it through my head once more.
'Sarah Lynn Olsen,' I said.
His eyebrows rose just a twitch. Sarah Lynn and I had a lot of history together, and he knew it.
He pushed off the wall and unhooked his keys from his belt.
'I've got to lock you in again,' he said. 'Sorry, but-'
'Let me guess. Just the rules.'
He smiled slightly. 'I'll try to get hold of her.'
Then he paused and fixed me with that pale steady gaze.
'You sure there's nothing more to this, Hugh?'
It was a perfect opening to blow the whistle about those horses and try to turn this around on Balcomb. I thought highly of Gary and I trusted him a long way. But my unease had kept on deepening. I wouldn't have believed that old Judge Roy Harris would set a twenty-five-thousand-dollar bail even for an ax murderer just because he was annoyed about his poker game being interrupted. It smelled of Balcomb's influence, and there was no telling how far that went.
I decided to wait until I saw the judge on Monday. If it cost me a couple of hundred bucks to get this bullshit over with, I'd take it lying down. If he stood pat, I was going to have to think real hard about whether I was twenty-five hundred dollars worth of scared.
'If there is, Gary, I can't think what,' I said.
He nodded and closed the door.
It wasn't the first time I hadn't told Gary Varna everything I knew.
10
By the end of the summer that Celia was living here, she'd succeeded in getting Pete Pettyjohn's attention in a big way. Gary Varna had been a young deputy then, and Celia was the reason that he and I first got acquainted. Seeing him always jogged my memory back to those times.
But oddly, the association that tended to hit me first was of an incident from before I'd met him. Some superstitious part of me had come to believe that I'd seen an eerie hint of what was coming-that it was the moment when the wheels had started turning in that direction.
It happened on one of my last afternoons working at the ranch that summer. The older hands were sitting around the shop drinking beer like they always did on Fridays. I'd become sort of a mascot, the tall skinny kid who both exasperated and amused them. But I'd gotten to where I could handle eighty-pound hay bales all day and be reasonably useful doing other chores, and to those men, that kind of help was worth a lot. They pretended not to notice when I sneaked a beer out of their cooler.
I walked off by myself to one of the other buildings, a small house where family members stayed when they came to visit, and sat on the steps. I hung out there quite a bit when the place wasn't being used. The view was long and clear, good for watching what was going on around the ranch, or staring at the mountains beyond.
The only person moving around just then was Reuben Pettyjohn, the ranch's owner, and father of Pete and Kirk. He was doing something I'd seen him do a lot-taking a slow walk that seemed aimless, but really he was checking things out. He'd stroll through the used equipment yard and stop to tap an old engine block with his boot toe, then he'd hook his thumbs in his belt and move on, pausing again to scan some cattle waiting to be shipped off. He was always looking for ways to use or improve things, and probably he was thinking about much more than that.
Reuben was in his mid-forties, bull-shouldered and physically formidable. His beak nose and clipped mustache added to the effect. When I started taking college literature classes years later and saw a photo of William Faulkner, Reuben's face came immediately to my mind. His presence was striking, too, a dense aura that you could feel. He was genial, but tough and shrewd-the epitome of a cowboy businessman, and a state legislator for several terms. You'd see him downtown or at the capitol, carrying a briefcase and wearing a big white Stetson and a western-cut suit with that rolled piping that looked like it was made of Naugahyde. But he was just as likely to be on the ranch, working cattle with the hands.
I sat there on the steps for a few minutes, slipping into daydreams. The afternoon was hot and I was thirsty. I went through my beer pretty fast and started working up my nerve to go score another one.
Then Celia and Pete appeared, walking from the stables toward his pickup truck, probably on their way to town to party. She was striding along playfully, almost skipping, bumping her hip against him. Everybody knew they were an item by now, but they seemed to be having one of those boy-girl wars about public affection. She wanted to advertise it, and she was always trying to hold his hand or drape herself over him. He still tried to act like there wasn't really anything going on, but you'd have had to be blind not to see them up against a fence or shed, groping and dry-humping. I suspected that they'd also been going swimming at the waterfall, and that Pete had gotten treated to repeat performances of the show she'd put on for me. I'd been staying away from there, and from him in general.
Celia looked electric, wearing a halter top and cutoffs, with her auburn hair gleaming and tossing as she danced along. They passed within plain sight of Reuben, but they were too wrapped up in each other to notice him. He watched them go by, with that same thoughtful attention he paid to the other things that caught his eye.
Then behind me, I heard the door of the guesthouse open. I jumped up, trying to hide the beer behind my back.
Reuben's wife, Beatrice, was standing there with her arms folded and her eyes narrowed. Beatrice was another person I tried to avoid, even when I wasn't caught red-handed drinking pilfered beer. It hadn't occurred to me that she'd be inside the house. She must have been cleaning up or getting ready for some visitors, although with her, you never knew. Years later, she would be diagnosed with Alzheimer's, and she was already starting to act in
