center of that lovely dimple which I would never taste again, then essentially blown her right buttock off. Even if I'd been conscious, I probably couldn't have saved her. Enos Walker was beyond saving, too. One of the.22 rounds from the derringer she had stolen out of my war bag and secreted in her purse had glanced off his teeth and harmlessly out of his cheek. The other, though, had gone up his left nostril, and, I suspected, kicked around his brain pan like a marble in a urinal. He probably was dead when he pulled the trigger. No one will ever know. Once I was vaguely mobile, I crawled to Molly but there was nothing beyond her eyes, just that other country where the dead go, and when I held my face to hers, I just stained her beauty with my bloody snot. Then I crawled to the door and into the blizzard, burying myself into a small snowbank beside the shed, just long enough to stop the burning on my neck and back, then staggered to the pickup, and gobbled a handful of codeine. When I stumbled back inside, I struggled into my insulated Carhart's and pacs, listening to the tiny rat's teeth of bone grinding every time I moved my left elbow. Next came the first of many hard parts. To make my nose resemble one. It took three tries, even packed with wads of Walker's cocaine. The result wasn't anything that my friends would recognize, but it stopped flopping around my face. It didn't work as well as it once did, either, but I had enough coke left to pack the nostrils, plus some left over to pack into the bloody slots where teeth used to hang out. Then the necessary shit. Somehow I had to get out of there.
By the time I had taken care of everything, the snowstorm had blown itself out, and the sun sat low in the southwestern sky, hanging just over the snow-packed peaks of the Bridgers, the bare golden ridges of short grass banked by blue clots of snow glittering like frozen rivers. The wind had turned. Icy torrents roared off the Crazies behind me, blasted the afternoon, blowing the tears off my cheeks before they could freeze. South, the Absarokas gleamed with frozen snow and even harder rock, shining distant and dangerous like polar mirages against the clotted sky.
FOURTEEN
Although it was not yet April, it could have passed for a summer dusk in the real world, except for a small, aimless wind and the lingering chill of the last in a series of wet northers that had plagued the Hill Country winter. The pungent, musky cedar fragrance mingled lightly with the damp but dry limestone wafting on the cool air. The cloudless horizon burned like a distant grass fire. CJ, as Carol Jean Warren said we should call her, stepped out of the front door of Tom Ben's house as former deputy sheriff Bob Culbertson drove up. She patted my shoulder and tucked my windbreaker closer around my shoulders as if I was some ancient grandfather, and the movement set the rocking chair in motion for a long second. I waited for the black discs and the waves of nausea, echoes of the concussion, that sometimes still came with the rocking, but they didn't come, so I continued whittling at the scrap of cedar in my hands. I wished her good luck. CJ told me good night, kissed the top of my head, then headed down the walk to Bob's pickup, her pool cue case cocky over her shoulder. Bob climbed out of his pickup to meet her at the bottom of the walk. They chatted a few minutes standing beside the pickup. With skinny butts tightly packed into jeans, cowboy shirts topped by down vests, they could have been siblings. Or lovers. Which I suspected they had become in the weeks they had been working for me. But they showed no sign as they parted. She climbed into his pickup and drove away. Bob ambled up to the veranda, scattering the small goats, then stopped in front of me, smiling.
'You ready to beat the shit out of somebody, old man?' Out of uniform, Bob had the face of a boy scout.
I stood up and stretched. The dead man's ligament in my right knee felt a little stiff in spite of, or because of, the long workout I had endured that morning; I would have sworn that the pins in my elbow ached in the unseasonable evening chill. The skin grafts on my neck and shoulder felt like sun-dried leather. But when I stiff- armed Bob's shoulder with my right palm, he stepped back, grinning.
'Who are you calling an old man, kid?' I said. 'Besides, we're just looking for some polite conversation.'
Well, I was old, true enough. A man can't turn sixty in a hospital bed without feeling old. I was old even before I made it to the hospital in Billings. It took hours and almost all the rest of Enos Walker's cocaine to organize the scene at the Punky Creek Mine building. At least Carver D said it was nine o'clock his time when I called him on the scrambled cell phone as soon as I reached the back door of the Owl, called to ask him to call my ex-partner to ask him to drive over from Meriwether to help me. Then I pulled up my jacket hood, and hobbled into the bar, almost invisible among the other late night drinkers. The bartender handed me the worthless manila envelope full of worthless truths. I tore it into small pieces and fed it into the toilet. Then I settled into a long wait of nips of cocaine and slow sips of Absolut.
I'd wanted to carry Molly's torn body away with me but I couldn't think what to do with it. Wear it around my neck like the fatal, final albatross of my life, a sign of all my mistakes and foolishness. I didn't think I was going to need a visible sign of all that. But I did take the Shark of the Moon and hang it around my neck.
I had used up most of my energy to pile up the meth lab and drag the bodies into the stacks. My attitude toward Enos Walker was oddly benign. Whatever mistakes he had made in his life, I had to admit that my half- assed quest was at least as much for my own benefit as his. I didn't even complain too much that the son of a bitch weighed nearly three hundred pounds. Getting him under the meth lab was like dragging a live bull calf to a denutting. And when I got him under the end table, I hooked his thumb around the trigger of the Desert Eagle pistol and blew most of his fucking head off. The pathologist, should one ever turn up, would have a hell of a time tracing the path of the.22 round that had bounded around inside his skull like a crazed mouse and scrambled his brains like an omelet.
I was afraid to drag Molly into the pile, afraid her destroyed leg would rip off her body. I didn't think I could stand that. So I picked her up, even with my broken arm, then carried her to the table and placed her among the meth chemicals. As the winter dusk settled like an ashen cloud, I closed her eyes and stroked her face until I knew I had to go.
First, I turned off the gas to the heaters until the flames died, then turned it back on again, and set the crude cigarette and matchbox fuse, and finally staggered out to drive shakily away. I was halfway to Wilsall when the gas-filled building went off. It lit up the sky like a bomb, like the end of the world, and with any luck the natural gas and the ether would burn hot enough and long enough to destroy any fingerprints I might have missed inside the building. Whatever tire prints I might have left on the frozen road would be wiped out by the first rural fire truck up the track.
During the endless, wandering drive to Livingston, I discovered a long sharp pain in my right knee that somehow I hadn't noticed yet, plus the disturbing fact that the little finger on my right hand was half its normal size. But it didn't hurt. I stopped in Wilsall, did another bump of cocaine, and pulled my little finger out of my hand. That got me to the Owl.
Where I huddled on a stool near the front door, sick with the waste of Enos Walker's life. I could have saved him – saved all of us – if he'd just given me a chance. Molly's death had left me as empty as a whiskey bottle in a Hangtown gutter. Whatever she might have been in her earlier life, in my part of it she had been a beauty, a tough, stand-up, fearless partner, and I knew that I would never be able to replace her. Those light blue eyes fading to gray, then into impenetrable, dark distance – that would never go away. No matter how many times I lifted the water glass of vodka, no matter how much shit I stuffed into my broken nose, the black stone was going to hang cold over my heart until the end.
By driving like a madman, my ex-partner managed to show up from Meriwether just before closing time. He didn't ask any questions he didn't want to know the answers to, and dealt with the shit. On the way to Billings, he dumped the weapons, the cocaine, the codeine, and the fake identification into the depths of a deserted construction site in Columbus, followed by a sack of traction sand, a hole where once spring arrived and the cement was poured and the asphalt laid, except for memories, that part of my life would disappear. Then he took most of my extra cash and promised to mail it to Petey, then dropped me down the street from the emergency room entrance of Deaconess in Billings before he drove up to the airport to leave the Cherokee in the rental car lot. He would take the bus to Livingston the next morning, and we would leave no tracks. I wandered over to sit on the curb, stoned and drunk, waiting to die.
'Tell me about it some time, old man,' was the last thing he said before he drove away.
