THAT SAME FRIDAY morning, as I headed to work, I saw Seth Masterson’s Cherokee parked on the side of the dirt road that led from my house onto the state highway. The driver’s door was open and Seth was behind the wheel, eating breakfast out of a McDonald’s container. The sun had just tipped the mountains on the east side of the valley, and the light looked like a tiny pink flame inside the needles of the ponderosa tree he had parked under.
I pulled behind him and got out.
“You talk to American Horse and the Finley girl about giving up the computer disks they stole from Global Research?” he asked.
“No,” I replied.
He nodded, his impatience undisguised. He wiped his mouth with a crumpled paper napkin and dropped it into his plate. “Mind telling me why not?” he said.
“Because I’ve talked to Johnny about it before. He’s not going to give up his friends or tell them what to do.”
“Don’t tell me those Indians creeped that place without his permission. The girl’s dirty, too. You know it, Billy Bob.”
“You want to send her and Johnny a message, go do it yourself.”
He poured his coffee into the dust and set the empty container on the floorboards of his vehicle. He stared at the coffee soaking into the dirt. “You used to be a good cop. Maybe you ought to rethink who your friends are,” he said.
“Sorry you feel that way, Seth.”
He shut the door and drove perhaps ten yards down the road, then stopped and got out, the vituperative moment gone. He had put on a tan cap with a green big-mouth bass imprinted on it and the cap’s bill darkened the upper half of his face, but I could tell he was smiling. “My wife and I have a cabin west of Walsenburg. Come down sometime and help me deplete the rainbow population,” he said.
AROUND 9 A.M. that same day, Darrel McComb sat in an uncomfortable chair, staring across the desk at Fay Harback, trying to take shallow breaths through his nose so the alcohol deep down in his lungs did not blow into her face. He had showered at Greta’s, shaved with her leg razor, and used her toothbrush to scrub the taste of tequila out of his mouth, then had driven at high speed through traffic in order to reach the office with a semblance of punctuality. But his jaws were nicked, his eyes scorched, and his shirt and suit smelled as though they had been pulled from a dirty clothes hamper.
“You busted Dixon, then turned him loose?” Fay said.
“Not exactly.”
“Then explain what exactly you did, please.”
“I drove him to the emergency room at St. Pat’s and left him with the docs. I told him we wanted better cooperation from him, but he was free to go from the hospital. Look, Fay-”
“No, you look, Darrel. I think you need to go on the desk or get some counseling. It wouldn’t hurt if you checked out a Twelve-Step group, either.”
“I don’t drink.”
“Sorry, I forgot that the odor in here is from the rug-cleaning service.”
Only two hours earlier, he had entertained thoughts of killing himself and perhaps others as well. Now he sat hunched in a chair like a chastened schoolboy. His shoes were scuffed, one of them untied, crossed on top of the other. He straightened his spine, took out a handkerchief, and blew his nose. At that moment he would have traded ten years of his life for a Vodka Collins. “A university professor was up at the revival. He said Dixon was speaking in the language Jesus used,” Darrel said.
Fay propped her elbows on her desk blotter and rested her chin on the backs of her hands. When he looked into her eyes, he saw only pity and sadness there, and he felt a balloon of anger bloom in his chest, squeezing his heart. Weevil-like motes seemed to swim through his vision. “I’m telling you what the professor said. I don’t need any skepticism out of your office. I don’t need any Twelve-Step meetings, either. I’m a good cop,” he said.
“Go home, Darrel.”
“This all started with American Horse.”
“It started when you almost beat him to death with a blackjack. You want to get some sleep, or do you want me to call the sheriff?”
“The FBI isn’t in Missoula to help us. They’re here to shut down the investigation. That’s how it works. We’re little people and we’re in somebody’s way. Even Wyatt Dixon has that much figured out. I helped kill hundreds of innocent people. They were all Indians. I know how it works out there.”
His words sounded as though someone else were speaking them, as though he were in a windowless room full of white noise and a mechanical presence inside himself was playing a tape he allowed himself to hear only in his sleep. He looked at the blank stare on Fay Harback’s face, then opened his mouth to clear the popping in his ears.
“Darrel-” she began.
“Leave me alone,” he said, knocking the chair askew as he went out the door.
HE SIGNED OUT of the department, claiming a doctor’s appointment, went to his apartment, ate six aspirin and one hit of white speed, showered for the second time that morning, and put on fresh clothes. He tried to file and categorize his thoughts, put the previous night into perspective, and somehow get a handle on it; but he couldn’t. He had seriously blown out his doors, gotten drunk in a topless bar, and passed out with his face in a puddle of spilled booze.
He remembered a stripper and bouncer putting his coat on for him and helping him into his car, then leaving him alone in the empty parking lot, barely able to start the engine. Greta had taken him in, gotten his gun away from him, then had led him to her bed like a sexual beggar. Knowing full well she was involved with a criminal enterprise and that ultimately she planned to use him, he let her climb on top of him and haul his ashes, even though it was obvious that she could barely abide his breath and the stink of nicotine that rose from his hair and skin.
He took another hit of speed and felt it kick into his system, temporarily giving a brightly lit rectitude to his thoughts and the jittering energies that were beating in his wrists. Before he headed back to the department, he fitted five shells into a cut-down twelve-gauge pump shotgun, wrapped it in a blanket, and placed the shotgun and the box of remaining shells in the trunk of his Honda. If he had been asked to explain why he was carrying his own shotgun in his vehicle, he would not have been able to give a reason, except for the fact that the mountainous horizon circumscribing the valley seemed to tremble with a peculiar malevolence, and on this particular day that bothersome fact needed to be corrected.
He sat in his cubicle at the department and drank coffee, did paperwork, and answered the telephone in routine fashion, his scalp and forehead shiny under the fluorescent lighting. By noon he was sweating, his throat thick, his hands starting to shake. Maybe he should just go to a bar and get drunk again, he thought-but that was too easy. A dramatic event had to happen, something that would change the daily grief that constituted his life, that would make everyone out there understand where this country had gone wrong.
The phone on his desk rang.
The caller was a parolee, a Deer Lodge Pen dimwit and professional snitch by the name of Wilbur Pickett, who lived up the road in Ronan. “There’re two guys here who went to a veterinarian to get patched up. The vet is a junkie and was in Atascadero with these guys. Somebody beat the living shit out of them. Maybe one guy’s face is fried, like on a stove. You looking for anybody like that, Darrel?” Wilbur said.
Ten minutes later Darrel signed out of the office and was on the way to Ronan, up in the Mission Mountains, up in Indian country.
WHILE THESE EVENTS were occurring, I was at my office, convinced I would probably not see or talk with my friend Seth Masterson again, at least not until he had retired to a cabin and trout stream in southern Colorado. But at 11:14 A.M. I heard his mellifluous voice when I answered the phone. “I left American Horse a message on his machine. His wife just called me on my cell and told me to come out,” he said.
“Amber told you to come to their house?”
“That’s right. Why?”
“She doesn’t tend to get along with authority figures.”
“Who’s an authority figure? I quit the Bureau after I talked with you this morning. My leave time will take up the slack in my thirty-day notice. You know the greatest thing about quitting a job?”
“No.”
“You walk out the glass doors and it’s like you never worked there. Then you wonder why you ever did in the first place.”
“Why’d you call?”
“To tell you I quit.”
An hour later I saw Amber walk past my office window, a full shopping bag hanging from her hand. I went outside and caught her before she got to her car.
“You invited Seth Masterson up to see Johnny?” I said.
“That FBI moke? What are you talking about?” she said.
DARREL FLOORED his Honda up Evaro Hill. His day was improving by the second. He was back on the edge of the envelope again, the green countryside speeding by him, just like when he and Rocky went in low over a Nicaraguan jungle, their kickers scooting crates of C-rats, AK-47s, frags, and ammo out the bay, the parachutes blooming like the tops of white mushrooms above the foliage down below.
As he topped the hill and entered the Indian reservation, he saw a black Jeep Cherokee parked at a filling station island and that FBI drink-of-water Masterson pumping fuel into the tank. Time to check it out, Darrel thought, and swerved in behind him.
Masterson wore shades and a fishing cap. He glanced up at Darrel. “Fine day,” he said.
“You bet. Get anywhere on that Global Research break-in?” Darrel said.
“Call the Bureau. I’m off my tether now.”
“Seen American Horse recently?”
“Not really. You know how it goes. Some investigations just don’t pan out.”
“His place is up on the Jocko. Thought you might be headed there.”
“All my official duties are over, Detective.” Masterson seemed to gaze wistfully at the row of mountains that lined the valley. He tapped the nozzle of the gas hose on his tank and hung it up on the pump. “Have a good one. Think I might flip a dry fly in the riffle this afternoon.”
Darrel watched Seth Masterson drive away, the waxed black surfaces of the Cherokee shimmering with heat. Flip a dry fly, my ass, he thought.
WHEN SETH DROVE across the iron cattle guard onto Johnny’s property, he saw horses in the shade by the barn, a half-dozen goats eating knapweed and dandelions in a pasture, a water sprinkler whirling in Johnny’s side yard, boxes of petunias and impatiens blooming in the windows of his clapboard house.
He parked his Cherokee and turned off the engine. In the quiet he could hear the humming sound of the Jocko River, the wind in the trees up the slope, classical music from a radio that was propped in an open window. Wash flapped on a clothesline and a calico cat with kittens lay in a cool, scooped-out place in the dirt under the front porch. Seth walked toward the house.
Then he paused. The curtains in the house puffed whitely in the wind and he heard a door slam in the barn. What was it that bothered him? The absence of any movement in the house, although the front door was open and a pickup truck was parked in back? Or was it the hot reflection of the sun on the tin roof, the flicker of a bright object up in the trees, or the sudden flight of birds from the canopy? In the corner of his vision he saw a red pony sprinting through a field of tall grass toward its mother.
In his youth, during a war few cared about anymore, a glimmer of moonlight on a trip wire, a smell of recently eaten fish, a glimpse of a conical-shaped hat in the elephant grass, had made the difference between seeing the sunrise and walking into an ambush that on one occasion was so intense and certain in outcome that Seth had called in a napalm strike on his own position.
Had he survived the war and twenty-seven years as a federal agent only to develop a case of short-timer’s nerves while trying to do a good deed? He fixed his collar, as though it were chafing his neck, then continued toward the front porch. When no one responded to his knock at the open door, he walked up the dirt drive, stooped under the wash on the clothesline, and mounted the back steps. Behind him he thought he heard a dry, metallic klatch, not unlike a sound he had heard on night trails in that forgotten war. He turned and stared at the wooded hillside behind the house, momentarily unsure of where he was in time and place, his hand reaching inside his windbreaker.
DARREL HAD FOLLOWED the FBI agent up the state highway through the res, until the agent turned on a dirt road that led to Johnny’s ranch. At that point it was impossible to continue the tail without being seen. Darrel continued up the state highway another half mile, then caught the service road and doubled back. By the time he approached Johnny’s property, Masterson had already arrived.
Darrel turned into a neighbor’s pasture, following the edge of a creek that wound from the river back to a split in the hills. A knoll traversed the pasture, effectively concealing his vehicle from Masterson’s view. Darrel’s hands were damp on the steering wheel, his heart starting to race. He slowed the car so the dust from his wheels would not drift above the knoll. What did he hope to prove by being there? He didn’t know.
Like most county or city law officers, he didn’t like federal agents. He thought of them as lazy, arrogant, and disdainful of semieducated locals like himself. But that wasn’t why he was bird-dogging Masterson. What if Masterson was working with American Horse, using him as a confidential informant? Or what if Masterson was turning dials on American Horse to get at Amber?
Maybe Masterson had a sexual itinerary, Darrel thought. Why not? It wasn’t a coincidence that federal sharpshooters had the muscular physiques of actors in porn films.
But in truth Darrel knew his motivations were not that complex. He simply wanted to step inside a white flame and burn his life clean of all the impurities that plagued his soul.
He parked in a grove of aspens and walked up the knoll with his binoculars. American Horse’s house was no more than seventy yards away. Through the lenses Darrel watched Masterson knock on the open front door, wait a moment, then disappear around the far side of the house. A moment later Masterson appeared in the backyard, ducking under the washline, removing his shades, dropping them into his shirt pocket. Evidently no one was home and Masterson hadn’t figured that out yet. What an idiot, Darrel thought.
Masterson started up the steps, then paused and looked behind him up the wooded slope, as though he had heard a sound that didn’t belong among the trees. Through the binoculars Darrel saw a flock of wild turkeys burst from the hillside and fly into Johnny American Horse’s backyard.
The wind was blowing from behind Darrel, so that sight and sound did not coordinate. He saw Masterson’s hand go toward his belt, then his head lurch back and both hands rise to his throat, as though he had swallowed a large chicken bone. Red flowers seemed to bloom on his tan windbreaker, and it was then that Darrel heard pop, pop, pop and saw the puffs of smoke inside the trees on the hillside.
He couldn’t believe what he was watching. The shooter was using a semiautomatic of some kind, but the firing was sustained and rapid, the magazine obviously one of large capacity. Blood fountained from Masterson’s mouth. He crumpled against the steps and the railing, still fighting to get his weapon free from its holster, his legs peppered with wounds.
Darrel realized the attrition from last night’s drunk was not over. He had left his handheld radio at the department and the battery in his cell phone was dead.
Darrel got the cut-down twelve gauge from his car trunk and went over the top of the knoll at a run. He could see Masterson on his side, a semiautomatic in his hand, firing blindly into the trees even while he was being hit. That is one macho G-man, he thought. Darrel jumped across a flattened barbed wire fence, his shotgun at port arms, his face breaking with sweat, his lungs aching from the barroom smoke he had inhaled the previous night.
For a moment he thought of cutting into the woods and advancing on the shooter from his flank, but the time loss of working through the tree trunks would probably cost Masterson any chance he had of survival. So he poured it on, his big shoes pounding like elephant’s feet across the sod, his sports coat split at the shoulders. He felt more naked than he had ever been in his life as he waited for the redirected fire that could rip through his viscera or explode his brain pan.
But the firing in the trees stopped, either because Masterson had let off at least a dozen rounds from a nine millimeter or because the sniper was reloading.
Darrel charged into the yard, fired two shells loaded with double-ought bucks into the trees, and heard the pattern spread and knock ineffectively over a large area. He tried to hold the shotgun with one hand and lift Masterson to his feet with the other, but Masterson was hurt too badly to stand. Darrel laid the shotgun on the steps, caught Masterson around the stomach, and worked him up on his shoulder as he would a side of beef.
He could hear Masterson’s breath wheezing from a sucking chest wound and feel his blood draining on Darrel’s arms and back. He started toward the lee of the house, then the shooter fired again, blowing white splinters out of the steps, breaking a window, ricocheting a round off a metal surface inside. Darrel got inside the screened porch, with Masterson draped over him, and pushed a water-stained couch against the plywood that framed the bottom of the enclosure. He huddled behind the couch, his body shielding Masterson’s.
He kicked his foot against the door to the mud room, then kicked it again. But the door was bolted and set solidly in the jamb. He and the agent were trapped, and the shooter could now reposition himself and incrementally cut them apart.
Masterson’s face was spiderwebbed with blood, his eyes dull with shock, a red froth spraying from his chest wound. Darrel found a piece of cellophane in a garbage sack, tore open Masterson’s shirt, and pressed the cellophane against the hole in the agent’s chest. He heard air catch wetly in Masterson’s throat and go into his lungs. “I’m going to get you home, pal. You hang tough,” he said.
But he could not tell if his words registered with Masterson or not.
Darrel’s twelve gauge was still angled butt-down on the steps. The agent’s nine millimeter lay in the dirt, with probably no more than two or three rounds in it. Darrel slipped his own nine millimeter from his clip-on holster and clicked off the butterfly safety. But his handgun brought him little sense of reassurance. He and Masterson were boxed in, with no access to electronic communications. At some point the shooter would flank them, take out Darrel with a head shot, and finish the job on Masterson. What kind of cop had Darrel proved to be? What would Rocky do in these circumstances?
Never accept the hand your enemy deals you, Rocky used to say. Bring it to the bad guys and make them reconsider their point of view. Everybody takes the same dirt nap, Rocky used to say. What’s the big deal? It’s only rock ’n’ roll.
A round from the hillside blew stuffing out of the couch and another shattered the glass knob on the door. Darrel breathed hard through his mouth, oxygenating his blood, then crashed through the screen door, gathering the shotgun up from the steps. He saw a man moving up the slope through the trees and realized he’d caught him changing his position. He fired once and saw leaves and small branches topple through a shaft of sunlight. Then Darrel plunged into the treeline, pumping the spent shell out of the chamber, snugging himself against a ponderosa trunk.
He could hear feet running and peeked quickly around the tree, but he saw nothing except the needle-covered floor of the forest, outcroppings of gray rock, and motes of dust spinning in the columns of sunlight that pierced the canopy.
The ground was spongy with lichen, the air smelling of fern, stone that never saw sunlight, mushrooms, and burned gunpowder. He followed a deer trail that wound laterally along the hillside, through shade and parklike terrain, but he saw no more sign of the shooter. When he retraced his steps, he saw an AR-15 rifle propped against a boulder, the breech locked open on an empty twenty-round magazine. In the distance he could hear a siren pealing down the dirt road.
He walked back down the slope and entered the screened porch. Seth Masterson lay as Darrel had left him, one hand resting on the cellophane patch Darrel had placed on his chest wound. Darrel sat down on the floor, pulling his knees up, the adrenaline gone, his energies drained. Masterson’s face seemed to swim in and out of focus. “You were a brave guy, buddy. It was an honor to meet you,” he said.
He cupped his hand on Seth’s sightless eyes, closing them as he would a doll’s, then hung his head like a man who had not slept in years.