have booze on his breath or seem to be sick?”
“No, I saw him early in the morning, just before he left. I’m sure he wasn’t drinking. I felt bad about the room I gave him and offered not to charge him for it, but he said it was no problem.”
“Would you explain that in a little more detail.”
“A bunch of loudmouth hunters were in the rooms on each side of him. They came in drunk about eleven o’clock, yelling outside the rooms, throwing ice chests around in their trucks, rattling the Coke machine, stuff like that. He must have asked them to be quiet, ’cause I think they beat on his wall or his door. No, that’s not exactly right. I know they gave him a bad time. These guys were real assholes. They got up at four in the morning and did it again before they left, I mean slamming doors and hollering at each other, racing their truck engines, like nobody else is on the planet, so I don’t think that poor fellow got any sleep at all.”
“You got names and addresses for these guys?” Darrel asked.
Over the next few days Darrel called up seven men who had stayed in the rooms close by the bookseller’s. Each denied any responsibility for the dead man’s sleep deprivation. Three of them hung up on him. If any of them felt any guilt over the bookseller’s death, it was not apparent to Darrel. In fact, none of them seemed to even remember the anonymous, faceless man who’d had the bad luck to be sandwiched between their rooms.
In Darrel’s opinion, the hunters might not have been the direct cause of the bookseller’s death, but they had certainly contributed to it. And that’s the way it would end, Darrel thought. The hunters would go back to their jobs, their families, their venison dinners, and their swinging-dick bravado; they’d get laid, knock back shots in loud saloons, slam poker dice down on hardwood bars, see the sunrise with the warmth of a wife and mother next to them, attend churches that were little more than extensions of civic clubs, watch their children grow up, and one day many years from now, just before all the cares of the world became as dross before their eyes, wonder why a vague memory of a Saturday night outside Glendive, Montana, should hover like a chimerical presence next to their beds.
Darrel drove over to Spokane and took the dead man’s widow and children to an amusement park in Coeur d’Alene, then at dinner that night told the woman her husband might have swerved his car to avoid hitting a deer, that evidently he was a kind man and instinctively had chosen to cut his wheels toward the shoulder rather than simply slam on the brakes and broadside an animal that had probably frozen in the headlights.
Darrel could not bear to tell her that a collection of dog-pack bullies had robbed her husband of his sleep, forcing him to make the long drive across the state while he was bone-tired in order to be at work on time Monday morning. Also he could not bear to tell her that a prosecutable case against the dog pack was a legal impossibility.
The next weekend Darrel drove to the hometown of the hunters, a windblown, godforsaken place close to the Canadian line, and in an hour had the name of the man who was considered to be their leader. At 2 A.M. he used a pay phone to call the man’s house. The wife answered, but at Darrel’s insistence she woke her husband and got him on the phone.
“Who the hell is this?” the man said.
“Bang!” Darrel said, and hung up.
Darrel fired a single. 44 Magnum round through the front window of the man’s auto parts store, listened to the bullet ricochet and break things inside, then drove back to Missoula.
At Christmas, the leader of the hunters received a greeting card inscribed with a single line: “I’m still out here.”
“Why so lost in thought tonight?” Greta asked.
“Thinking about you, Greta. Want to dance?” he said.
“The food’s almost ready.”
“It’ll wait. Come on,” he said.
He put one arm around her waist and lifted her right hand in the air. Bunny Berrigan’s “I Can’t Get Started” was playing on the stereo. Darrel pulled Greta against him, pushing her arms around his neck, as though he were going to hug her. But he let his fingers slide up her side, until he felt a knot about five inches below her armpit. The balls of his fingers traced its outline against her shirt. The knot had not grown in size, but it was harder, the configuration more defined.
“Don’t,” she said.
“It hurts?”
“I told you, it’s an insect bite. It got infected.”
“Let’s take a look at it.”
“It’s time to eat.”
“Take off your shirt.”
“Come into the bedroom and I might do that,” she said, half smiling.
“The romantic jerk-around is over, Greta. You did me. Know the expression ‘First time shame on you, second time shame on me’? You sicced the lowlifes on me at Dixon’s place. I almost got my kite burned, Greta. Problem is, I was onto you and it didn’t work. You’re in deep shit, girl.”
Her face was only inches from his, the dance music still playing. She started to speak, her eyes wide with both fear and shock.
“No, no,” he said, touching her lips with one finger. “You don’t lie anymore, Greta. While you thought I was asleep, I heard you talking to your trained cretins. So I told you the Global Research goods were at Dixon’s place and I was going to take him down. Sure enough, your pals showed up that night, ready to pop both me and the peckerwood. You’re a Judas, Greta. For cops, that’s a category below drug dealers and pimps. Ever hear of the Contras?”
“Who?” she said, all of it going too fast for her now, her mouth twitching, an ugly smell from the kitchen wrapping itself around her face. “The food’s burning. I left the burner on high.”
“That’s good, because we’re not going to be eating it. I was with the Contras in northern Nicaragua, Greta, saw some mean shit go down that I don’t like to remember. I was an adviser to Somoza’s Rattlesnake Brigade, badass dudes who wired people up to field generators, got fed by the peasants, or burned the ville. But we had a problem-a turncoat was pipelining intel into the Sandinistas. One day out on the trail the lieutenant stops the column and says to him, ‘You got to dig a hole, then take a rest, man. We’re going give you a good meal, some rum, you want to get laid, there’s time for that, too, man. But then you got to rest.’
“The turncoat knows what’s about to happen. First he lies, then he lies and he lies and he lies some more, and when that doesn’t work, he begs on his knees. My job was to stay out of it, but I didn’t want to see the guy get whacked. I kept hoping he’d do the right thing, act dignified, not insult people with his lies. But he was a dumb guy and thought he could lie his way out of it, then he thought he could beg and make people feel sorry for him. Know what that did? It made it easy for everybody else. Someone finally shut him up with an AK, splattered his salad all over a ditch, and nobody could have cared less.
“If the guy had been stand-up and told the truth, if maybe he’d given up the name of his contact, chances are the others would have let him go back to his family. You hearing me on this? Don’t lie. Don’t degrade yourself. I’m the only person who can save your ass. No, don’t look away, don’t start crying, either. That stuff belongs on soap operas, not in big-people land, Greta. Why’d you kill Charlie Ruggles? Poor ole Charlie, sawed-off little jarhead gets snuffed by a broad, probably humiliating as hell for him.”
He thought she was going to faint. She sank heavily into a chair, her face splotched with color, her green eyes as round as Life Savers. “I had to. I lost control of my life years ago. My second husband was a martial arts instructor who did security work for Karsten Mabus. I went to work for him, too.”
“That means you had to smother a guy in a hospital bed?”
Her hands were fists, her arms folded across her breasts, her throat as taut as a chunk of sewer pipe. Then the fingers of her left hand seemed to spread protectively over the lump on her side. “Mabus owns people. You can’t guess at what it’s like,” she said.
Her face was uplifted, her eyes fixed on his now. The direction of the conversation was not one Darrel liked. The motivation in most crimes was money. Not sex, not power. It was money. Money could buy you all the sex and power you wanted. A premeditated homicide, in this case holding a pillow down on the face of a potential government witness, was done for money. But Darrel’s own questions about the mark or lump or whatever it was on Greta’s side would not let go of him.
“Dixon says the crew working for Mabus have the mark of the beast on them. I don’t like to even repeat
