“What’s the accuracy on these things?”
“Actually, pretty good.”
I placed the narrow butt plate against the deep bruise on my shoulder. It fit my wound perfectly. I raised the barrel toward Main Street and envisioned Italian buffalo sitting at a street-side cafe, drinking Chianti. “Five hundred yards?”
“Oh, God no.”
I let the buffalo go. “Won’t get there?”
“It’ll get there but not with much accuracy. Not with these repros.”
I handed the rifle back to him. “Sell many of ’em?”
“A few; here and there.”
“Mind telling me who bought them?”
He slowly exhaled, blowing out his lips. “I could go off the top of my head, but I can get it out of the computer and you’d have an exact list.”
“Great.” He locked the guns back, and I followed him to the counter and the computer. “You ever sell any of the real ones?”
“No.”
“How much is one worth, a really good. 45–70?”
The exhale again. “As much as a vacation in Tuscany.”
“How about ammunition… do you sell much for these?”
“Who knows?”
“Can you get that for me?”
“It’ll take longer.”
I was asking a lot, and I knew it. “It would be a great help.”
“Can I get it to you tomorrow?” He reached over and turned on the printer.
“That’d be fine.” He watched the paper roll through the printer for a moment, and then tore loose the list and handed it to me without looking at it. “You don’t want to see?” I asked him.
“None of my business.”
I folded the sheet in half and stuck out my hand. “Thank you, Dave.”
Ruby had said there was a cold front on the way and, by tomorrow morning, there was supposed to be more than four inches of the white stuff. I tossed my jacket onto the passenger seat. If the warm weather wasn’t going to last long, I was going to enjoy it while it was here. I fired her up, rolling down the window and resting my arm on the door. It felt good to have the extra elbow room.
You couldn’t blame the computer; it probably did the list of three names in alphabetical order. The first name on the list was Brian Connally-Turk.
6
In 1939, Lucian Connally had been told by his mother to sweep the front porch of their dry and dusty ranch house. He had refused and, when asked what it was that he intended to do, he had replied, “Go to China.” Which he did.
Lucian didn’t like family.
After finishing Army Air Corps flight school in California, he immediately joined the American Volunteer Group, a collection of a hundred U.S. military pilots released from enlistment so that they might serve as mercenaries in the lend-lease born, fledgling Chinese Nationalist Air Force. Lucian’s political zeal was reinforced by the $750 a month salary and by the $500 a head bonus promised by the Chinese for every Japanese plane shot down. Lucian found he had a knack for such activities and, by the time he left China on August 6, 1941, he had accumulated quite a little nest egg. A little over a year later he returned to the Pacific on the aircraft carrier Hornet and, in a cumbersome B-25, bombed Tokyo, crashed into the Yellow Sea, and was captured by the Japanese and sentenced to life imprisonment.
Lucian didn’t like Japs.
There was a sun-yellowed, decomposing circular in an intricate gold frame on the wall of private suite number 32 at the Durant Home of Assisted Living. Below the grainy photograph of five men in flight jackets and the exotic print was the translation, “The cruel, inhuman, and beastlike American pilots who, in a bold intrusion of the holy territory of the Empire on April 18, 1942, dropped incendiaries and bombs on nonmilitary hospitals, schools, and private houses, and even dive-strafed playing school children, were captured, courtmartialed, and severely punished according to military law.” Two of the men had been ushered outside immediately following the mock trial and summarily executed; the remaining three survived forty months of torture and starvation. Lucian was the short one in the middle with the cocky look on his face, who was smiling like hell.
After the war, Lucian had drifted back to Wyoming and then back to Absaroka County. He then drifted into being sheriff on the strength of his being the toughest piece of gristle in four states. This had been tested when Lucian had had his right leg almost blown off by Basque bootleggers back in the midfifties.
Lucian didn’t like Basquos.
He had tied the strap from an 03 Springfield he carried in the backseat of his Nash Ambassador around the exploded leg and drove himself back to Durant from Jim Creek Hill, thirty-two miles. They took the leg.
Lucian didn’t like sawbones.
They say the subzero temperatures that night saved his life, but I knew better. His more than a quarter century of sheriffing had been nothing short of epic, and his reputation in the Equality State was ferocious. Simply stated, he was the most highly decorated, retired law enforcement official in the country. “How’s them big titties on that Eye-talian deputy of yours?”
He was also a colossal pervert.
I kept my finger on the bishop and looked up at him. “Lucian.. ”
“Just askin’.” It was one of his favorite tactics, shocking me out of any sense of concentration. This might be why I had not won a chess game since the spring of 1998. I slid the bishop against the border as he looked at me through his bushy eyebrows. “What’s goin’ on?”
I settled back in the horsehide wing chair and took in the site of the losing battle. Lucian had been allowed to bring his own furnishings to the “old folks home” as he called it, and the jarring effect of the genuine western antiques in the sterile environment was unsettling. I had been coming here and playing chess with Lucian since he had moved in eight years ago. I never missed a Tuesday for fear that Lucian might lose some of his faculties and, in the eight years, he had not lost one iota. I, on the other hand, was sinking fast. “Nothing, why do you ask?”
He moved. “You ain’t said shit since you got here.”
I looked at the board. “I’m trying to concentrate.”
“Ain’t gonna do you no good, I’m jus’ gonna spank yer ass again, anyway.” He dug a finger in his ear, examined the wax on his pinkie, and wiped it on the faded blue-jean flap at the end of his stump. “I can’t believe you didn’t bring any beer.”
I couldn’t believe it either. For almost a decade I had been sneaking beer and Bryer’s blackberry brandy in to Lucian on Tuesday nights. “I need to talk to you about some stuff.”
“I figured as much, I’m just waitin’ for you to start.” He moved. “Important stuff?”
“Sheriff stuff.”
“Oh, that shit.” He watched me move a knight out to the slaughter and slowly shook his head. “Well, let’s talk it out and get it over with so I can get at least one decent game tonight.”
“It’s about your great-nephew.”
He looked up. “What’d he do now?”
“Beat on Jules Belden.”
His hands stayed still. “How bad?”
“Bad enough.”
He leaned back in his own chair, readjusting his weight and looking at his reflection in the dark surface of the sliding glass door behind me. He was a handsome old booger, movie starish like the judge, but in a more rugged
