them, and have no cares other than the traffic I would have to negotiate before I was home, enjoying a fine supper.
But the images of two bullet-wounded men would not go out of my head.
I went back to the bar twice more for doubles, with a beer back. When I was on my fourth round, a huge shape stepped between my table and the glare of light through the front door.
“Didn’t know you were a drinking man,” Darrel McComb said.
“I’m just about to leave,” I replied.
He sat down at the table anyway, with a longneck and an empty glass. His jaws were gritty with stubble, his clothes rumpled. “Tell American Horse he gave me the key,” he said.
“The key?” I said.
“It’ll make sense down the road.” He poured beer into his glass and salted it. “One day I’m going to write the history of what happened down in Central America. Hitler said the victors write the history books. But sometimes the victors leave big blanks in the story, know what I mean?”
“Yeah, I think so,” I said, realizing he was either drunk or entering a new and perhaps terminal stage in his career. “Say that again about Johnny American Horse?”
“You bet, kemosabe,” he said. He drank from his glass, then smelled himself and smiled bleary-eyed into my face. But he forgot whatever it was he intended to say.
I patted him on the shoulder as I left the bar, perhaps glad to have the problems I did and not someone else’s.
I bought a hot dog and a Styrofoam cup of black coffee on the corner and ate the hot dog on a bench before I tried to drive home. After I pulled into the driveway I went straight into the bathroom, brushed my teeth, rinsed my mouth with Listerine, and showered the smell of booze and cigarette smoke off my skin and out of my hair. But I didn’t fool Temple. Not about anything.
“Make a stop on the way home?” she said.
“I ran into Darrel McComb. He said something about Johnny American Horse providing a key for him. I couldn’t figure out what he was talking about.”
But Temple was not interested in the problems of Darrel McComb. “The thirty-thirty is gone from the rack,” she said.
“Yeah, I took it to Sportsmen’s Surplus. I think the sight is bent,” I replied.
I was sitting at the kitchen table. Through the side window I could see our horses drinking at the tank and shadows spreading across the valley floor. I felt her fingers stroking the back of my neck. “You’re the best man I’ve ever known, Billy Bob,” she said. “You’re incapable of evil or meanness. If you’ve broken any laws, it was on behalf of the people you love.”
I had to swallow at her words. I started to speak, but she didn’t let me. She put her arms around me and hugged my head against her, her mouth pressed into my hair.
Chapter 24
Darrel left the bar and drove to his apartment on the river. He took a hit of white speed and washed it down with beer, then walked out on the balcony and looked out over the town. The rain had killed the fires and restored the glories of summer to western Montana. What a grand evening it was. He looked at the water coursing under the pilings on the Higgins Street Bridge, the glow of lights on the old Wilma Theater building, the red brilliance of the sunset among hills at the bottom of an azure sky, and he wondered how his life could have gone so wrong.
The answer was easy: He genuinely loved the place where he lived, but the place where he lived did not love him. And that’s the way it had always been. He had loved causes that didn’t love him. On all levels he had served people who had found him either odious or expendable, and the notion of being loved had long ago disappeared from his life.
Well, that was why hookers were invented, he thought bitterly, then felt both embarrassed and demeaned at the content of his own thoughts.
Get out of this funk, he told himself. He had never sought either pity or understanding for the life he had led. Years back, whenever he was asked why he kept re-upping in the Army, he had always replied, “It’s three hots and a cot, Jack.” You didn’t share your feelings with people who don’t pay dues. Let the fruits and tree huggers frolic in Golden Gate Park, he had always told himself. The men and women who protected them and would one day live in Valhalla required no recompense other than their own self-respect.
But for just a moment Darrel wondered what it would have been like if he’d had a wife or even a girlfriend like Amber Finley.
He went back inside, closed the glass door on his balcony, and forced himself to empty his mind of thoughts about Amber Finley. He opened another beer, bit down on another hit of white speed, and blew out his breath when he felt the rush take him. That was more like it.
He opened his computer file and began recording all the recent events concerning Karsten Mabus, Greta Lundstrum, Elton T. Sneed, and Johnny American Horse.
For a college guy, Holland didn’t seem too smart, Darrel thought to himself. The key to taking down Karsten Mabus was getting inside his compound. But even though Darrel had made Greta his personal snitch, he had not figured a way to put her inside Mabus’s place with a wire. Then American Horse had escaped from federal custody, which made him a likely candidate for the sniper shootings at Mabus’s ranch.
The only other viable candidate was Wyatt Dixon. But Darrel didn’t believe Dixon had the brains to get inside the property, shoot two men, and safely escape. It had to be American Horse. Or at least that was the case Darrel was going to make.
The shooting couldn’t have happened at a more perfect time. Now Darrel had the leverage he had lacked earlier. It was just a matter of convincing Karsten Mabus that Greta and her boyfriend, one Darrel McComb, a disgraced police officer with no moral bottom, had information that could prevent another assassination attempt on Mabus’s life.
He glanced at his breakfast table, where the tools of his trade rested like an ugly testimony to everything that he was: his Beretta, the sap he had beaten American Horse with, his cuffs, a switchblade knife, two miniaturized recorders with tiny microphones, a. 25 hideaway and holster with a Velcro ankle strap, and a throw-down that had the serial numbers burned off.
Darrel finished recording the events of the last few days that were connected in any way to the homicides committed on the property of Johnny American Horse. He used the spell-check mechanism to correct any misspellings in the file, reviewed his prose for its accuracy and specificity, then decided to add another paragraph.
It read: “Please consider the following statement as my summation of my time on earth- Hey, I never had to sell shoes at Thom McAn.”
He exchanged the fourteen rounds out of the old magazine on his Beretta, inserting them into a new magazine with a taut spring, examined the surveillance equipment he had bought off an alcoholic P.I., and finished his beer out on the balcony. The sunset that had flamed at the bottom of the sky was almost gone, and a cool wind was blowing off the river. The evening shade had spread across the valley, the gold light on the eastern hills dying before his eyes, and he thought he smelled the autumnal odor of gas and dead leaves inside the wind. But surely fall had not already come, had it? Wasn’t there another summer concert and dance on the river tomorrow night?
AT 1:00 A.M.Thursday, someone reported a fire burning inside Brendan Merwood’s downtown law office. Two fire trucks were dispatched, but when firemen and the security service searched the building, they found nothing out of the ordinary. By the time Brendan Merwood arrived at the scene, wearing his pajamas and bathrobe, the firemen were packing up to leave. Across the street, at the entrance to an alley, several homeless men had evidently started a fire in a trash barrel, and the firemen told Merwood the flames from the barrel had probably been reflected in the windows of the law office.
I’ve heard recovering drunks and addicts say they treat their own minds like dangerous neighborhoods they don’t enter by themselves. All night I kept seeing the face of Elton T. Sneed and imagining the level of pain and fear
