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?