“Yeah, I guess that’s good to know. But I got no idea what you’re talking about,” the man said.
“Maybe I got you confused with somebody else.”
“Yeah, maybe you do,” the man said.
Johnny watched the man with roses and parrots tattooed on his arms go out the door and cross the street, then walk down an alley, where a car was parked. The man walked gracefully, light-footed, like a prizefighter, his back a triangle of sinew and muscle. Just before he reached the car, a Firebird, he turned and looked back at the bar.
When Johnny got back home, he strung tin cans on wires around his house and removed a box from under his bed containing a bowie knife that had been forged from a car spring, and a trade hatchet, with an oak handle and a half-moon hook on the head, given to him by his grandfather. He went into his toolshed and ground the hatchet on an emery wheel, then sharpened both it and the bowie knife on a whetstone and returned to the house.
The day was growing warmer, and through the window he could see flies hatching out of the reeds on the riverbanks, drifting onto the riffle, where rainbow trout popped them as soon as they touched the surface. He fell asleep in a chair on the porch and thought he heard dry thunder on the far side of the mountains that ringed his land.
EVERY DEFENSE ATTORNEY has clients who enter his life on a seemingly temporary basis, then become the human equivalent of chewing gum on the bottom of a shoe. Celebrity defense attorneys who appear regularly on CNN talk shows may lead glamorous lives, but the average practitioner of criminal law has a clientele with whom he does not want to be seen in public. These include grifters of every stripe, jackrollers, pimps, paperhangers, drug dealers, Murphy artists, cross-dressing prostitutes, court-assigned women who kill their children, and lifetime recidivists who are convinced they are criminal geniuses and try to outwit the system by lying to their attorneys.
Private investigators deal daily with the same bunch, although occasionally there’s one who doesn’t fit into the box. Temple called me that afternoon. “It’s Amber Finley again,” she said. “She’s in on a drunk and disorderly. She also hit a cop. Actually, she threw her underwear in his face.”
“Why is she calling you?”
“She’s burned herself with every attorney in town. At least with the good ones,” she replied.
“She wants me to represent her?”
“She’s not a bad gal, Billy Bob.”
“Answer is no.”
“You pretty busy now?”
“She can call her father. I don’t want to get involved.”
“She says she knows why Johnny American Horse was carrying a pistol.”
“How does she know anything about Johnny?”
“They’ve been seeing each other. At least that’s what she says.”
“Her old man must love that.”
“You want me to tell her to get lost?”
A few minutes later I walked over to the sheriff’s department and a deputy escorted me to a holding cell, where Amber Finley sat on a metal bench, her legs crossed, looking at the wall. She was around twenty-five and wore beat-up cowboy boots, jeans hitched tightly around her hips, a Harley T-shirt, and long earrings with blue stones in them. Her hair was blond and cut short, her eyes an intense blue. Even though she was hung over, her face still possessed the lovely features and complexion that Hollywood had idealized and turned into a national icon in the Technicolor films of the forties and fifties. But Amber Finley’s mind-set was far removed from that earlier, more innocent time.
She was a biker girl one night, a cowgirl the next. She drank in busthead bars and was probably the wet dream of the men and college boys who hung in them. But the clothes she wore and the life she led were a self-abasing deception. She spoke French and German, had an IQ of 160, a degree in English literature from the University of Virginia, and was the daughter of United States Senator Romulus Finley.
“How do you commit battery with undergarments?” I said.
“It’s easy when a cop kicks open your motel room while you’re dressing,” she replied.
“What were you doing in a dump like that, anyway?”
“To tell you the truth, I don’t remember.”
I paused a moment. “Your old man won’t spring you?” I said.
She seemed to think about it. “If I asked him, yeah, he probably would. Yeah, he might,” she said. She looked at me, as though confused by her own words and the sad implication in them. She got up and walked to the bars. I could smell the cigarette smoke in her hair and the mixed drinks that had gone sour on her stomach. “Get me out of here, Billy Bob. I’m really hung over this time.”
AN HOUR LATER we walked out of the jail. “Why was Johnny American Horse carrying a gun around?” I asked.
“It’s those oil companies he’s trying to stop from drilling on sacred lands. He thinks they put a hit on him.”
“A hit? From an oil company? Maybe some of their CEOs are moral imbeciles, but oil companies don’t have people killed,” I said.
“Right, that’s why we’re taking over Third World countries—we don’t care about their oil. See you later, B.B. I’m going to sleep for three days.”
B.B.?
AS THE SUN dropped behind the ridge of mountains on the west side of the Jocko Valley, Johnny American Horse walked the perimeter of his four-acre lot, examined the wire and tin cans he had strung earlier in the day, then continued on up the slope into the trees bordering the back of his property. The sun became a hot red spark between two mountains, and a purple shade fell across the valley floor just as the moon rose over the hills in the south. He sat for a long time among the trees, his arms folded across his knees, studying his land, the dirt road that traversed it, the dark green shine on the river winding out of the cottonwoods.
The men who had driven across the plains to find him were urban people, he thought. They would come for him at night because they were cowards and they killed for hire. They would drive their Firebird as close to his house as possible because they did not like to walk, nor did they feel confident when they were separated from the machines that gave them both power and anonymity.
But their greatest mistake would be their assumption that their prey thought as they did.
He returned to the house and turned off all the lights except the one in the bathroom, leaving the door ajar so that it shone on his bed. He stuffed a rolled sleeping bag under the blanket on the bed and pulled the blanket up onto the pillows. In the kitchen he filled a thermos with black coffee, threaded the sheath of his serrated bowie knife on his belt, and put on his sheep-lined coat and a shapeless cowboy hat.
Make entry as hard as possible for them, he told himself.
He locked all the windows and both the front and back doors, then walked back up the slope with his thermos in his coat pocket and his grandfather’s trade hatchet swinging from his right hand.
He sat on the ground inside the cover of the trees, his back against a boulder. He could smell elk and deer droppings in the pine needles and the tannic odor of horses in the gloaming of the day. The surrounding hills were black now, but the sky was still full of light from the sun’s afterglow. He unscrewed the top from his thermos and drank, then screwed the cap back on. He heard the sound of an automobile coming down the dirt road, rocks pinging inside the fenders.
The car was low-slung, the body weather-scoured almost paintless, the engine far more powerful than the age of the car would indicate. It passed his house in a rooster tail of dust and disappeared around a bend, beyond a grove of cottonwoods. Less than two minutes later it came back up the road, gradually slowing, pulling into the cottonwoods. The driver cut the headlights and in the darkness Johnny heard at least one car door squeak open on an ungreased hinge.
He stood up in the pines and strained his eyes at the road. The air was cold now, smelling of the river and damp stone and timothy grass that was sodden with dew in the fields. When the wind gusted across the valley floor the leaves swirled like wate
r in the cottonwoods, and suddenly Johnny could see two men, standing as stationary as statues, amidst thousands of fluttering green leaves.
The men crossed the road and headed toward his house, stooped in simian fashion, as though somehow their abbreviated posture would make them less visible. One of them stopped and raised his hand in a clenched fist, as a foot soldier would in order to signal a halt. Then the two of them stepped carefully over the trip wire that Johnny had strung with tin cans, each containing a handful of gravel.
The two figures moved around the side of the house, peering in each window. One of them went to the shed and put his hand on the hood of Johnny’s pickup truck, as though to determine if the metal was still warm. He rejoined his companion, and the two of them stepped gingerly onto the back porch and went to work on the door lock.
Johnny followed a deer trail that wound laterally through the pines in the opposite direction from his house, then walked down the slope on the far side of his barn, so he could remain out of view and beyond the angle of vision of the two men picking the lock on his door.
As he came out of the horse lot, he let his heavy coat drop to the ground, moving quickly into the lee of his house. He worked his way toward the back corner, no more than ten feet from the men, who were still on the porch. He held his bowie knife in his left hand, the trade ax in the other, breathing slowly through his mouth, his back flat against the clapboards. Out in the darkness he heard horses nickering, their hooves thudding on packed earth.
The two men had been unsuccessful with the lock. One of them stood back and smashed the door out of the jamb with his foot, shattering glass on the floor. Both men burst into the house, crashing into the bedroom, only to discover that Johnny was not there.
“I told you he was onto us. You wouldn’t listen.” It was the voice of the man Johnny had seen shooting pool that morning, a man who wore roses and parrots on his arms to tell him who he was because someone had stolen all expression from his face.
“Turn off the light,” the other man said.
“We got to finish it, Eddy.”
“No.” One of the men clicked off the light in the bathroom. “Another day. We find his cooze, then we whack him.”
“The guy’s an Indian. He’s out there.”
“Tell me about it.”
Johnny heard them move into the front room and unlock the door. A moment later a board squeaked on the porch and the two men walked into the yard, into the moonlight, each of them turning in a 360-degree circle as they did. Johnny picked up a rock and pitched it over the peak of the house to the far side. Both men jerked around, staring into the shadows at the source of the sound.
The man named Eddy, who wore thick, horn-rimmed glasses, held a cut-down double-barrel shotgun in both hands, the shoulder stock wood-rasped into a pistol grip. The man with tattoos carried nothing in his hands but was reaching behind him now to extract the blue-black heavy shape of a semiautomatic stuck down inside the back of his belt.
Johnny closed his eyes briefly, heard the words hokay hey inside his mind, and hit the two men running, just as they were turning toward the sound of his work boots coming hard across the grass.
The man with horn-rimmed glasses seemed the more surprised of the two men, his eyes distorting like a goldfish’s behind the thickness of his lenses. But nonetheless he was able to raise his cut-down shotgun for what should have been a deafening explosion of flame and lead shot into Johnny’s chest. Instead, his angle of fire was obstructed by his friend, the man incapable of expression, whose weapon had caught in his belt.
Johnny whipped the trade hatchet into the neck of the man named Eddy and slashed his knife across the face of the man who did not know how to smile or to be sad. Later, he would not recall with any exactitude the struggle that followed, but he knew the blows he visited upon the intruders from an industrial city on the shores of a great lake were more than enough to ensure they would not present themselves to him again, at least not outside the bright edges of his sleep.
Chapter 3
THE MAN NAMED EDDY was on the surgeon’s table four hours. His full name, according to his driver’s license and a GI dog tag tucked down in his wallet, was Edward T. Bumper of New Baltimore, Michigan, a lakeside community on the shores of Lake Erie. The next day an information check through the National Crime Information Center would indicate that Eddy Bumper had no criminal record whatsoever, not even a traffic citation. In fact, other than the eleven years he had spent in the lower ranks of the United States Army, he seemed to have been hardly more than a cipher in the Detroit area, where apparently he had spent most of his life.
During the ambulance ride to the hospital, he offered no explanation for his presence at the house of Johnny American Horse, nor did he make any entreaty to his attendants, in spite of his obvious pain, or express interest in contacting friends, family, or minister. His only request of any kind was to the surgeon: If possible, he wanted a local rather than general anesthetic.
At 2:43 A.M. Edward T. Bumper opened his eyes wide on the operating table, stared up into the brilliant glare of lights overhead, and said, “I need to get to the airport.”
Then he died.
His fall partner in the home invasion was another matter. Raised in a state-run orphanage, released from juvenile court at age seventeen to the United States Marine Corps, Michael Charles Ruggles served eight years in the Third World, received a general discharge, and began to get into trouble again, as though his time in the Corps was simply a respite from his true career.
But the charges filed against him were those consistent with a run-of-the-mill miscreant rather than a professional killer: solicitation of a prostitute, jackrolling an elderly person, possession of marijuana, failure to pay child support, drunk driving, solicitation and battery of a prostitute, and passing counterfeit currency at a racetrack. In each instance the charges were dismissed without explanation.
But I knew none of these things until the following day, when Johnny American Horse called my office from the jail.
“Have you been charged?” I asked.
“No. They’re just talking to me,” he replied.
“Cops don’t just talk. As of this moment you answer no questions unless I’m present.”
“Amber’s with me,” he said.
“Did you hear me?”
At the courthouse a deputy escorted me to an interview room, where two plainclothes cops were sitting with Johnny at a wood table on which there was a can of Coca-Cola and a Styrofoam cup, a video camera mounted high on the wall. Johnny could not have looked worse. He had washed his skin clean, but blood splatter had dried in his hair and horsetails of it were all over his clothes.
“This ends now, gentlemen,” I said.
One of the detectives was a towering, bull-shouldered man named Darrel McComb, whose clothes always seemed to exude a scent of testosterone. “We were talking about baseball. Think those Cubbies are cursed?” He grinned.
I sent Amber and Johnny across the street to my office and went downstairs to see the district attorney. “Put Darrel McComb back in his kennel,” I said.
“Treated unfairly, are we?” she said, looking up from some papers on her desk.
“McComb questioned Johnny without Mirandizing him. He also ignored Johnny’s request for a lawyer.”
“Your client is not under arrest. So get lost on the Miranda. Also quit pretending Johnny’s an innocent man.”
“These guys tried to kill him, in his own house. What’s the matter with you?”
“He lay in wait for them with a tomahawk and a knife. Why didn’t he dial 911, like other people?”
“The Second Amendment says something about telephones?”
“Don’t drag that right-wing crap into my office.”
“I don’t want Darrel McComb anywhere near my client.”
“What’s wrong with McComb?”
“For some reason the words ‘racist’ and ‘thug’ come to mind.”
“Get out o
f here, Billy Bob.”
Twenty minutes later, after Amber Finley had driven Johnny back to the res, I glanced out the window and saw her father cross the intersection and enter my building, his face effusive, his hand raised in greeting to street people who probably had no idea who he was. Romulus Finley’s political detractors characterized him as an ignorant peckerwood, a Missouri livestock auctioneer who fell off a hog truck and stumbled into the role of United States senator. But I believed Romulus was far more intelligent than they gave him credit for.
He sat down in front of my desk, pulling a wastebasket between his feet, and began coring out the bowl of his briar pipe with a gold penknife. The indirect lighting reflected off the pinkness of his scalp.
“My daughter has already retained you?” he said, his eyes lifting into mine.
“Yes, sir, she has.”
“I wish she’d called me. It’s hard to keep them down on the reservation sometimes.”
“Sir?” I said.
“Can’t keep them down on the farm is what I mean. Or at least I can’t keep my daughter there. Damn if that gal isn’t a pistol.”
His language and use of allusion, as always, were almost impossible to follow. “What can I do for you?” I said.
“I just want to pay her fees and take her off your hands.”
“If she wants to discharge me as her attorney, that’s up to her,” I replied.
He cleaned the blade of his penknife on a crumpled piece of paper and put the knife away. He smiled. He was a stout, sandy-haired, sanguine-faced man, with manners that struck me as genuine. He clucked his tongue. “My daughter is a source of endless worry to me, Mr. Holland. Will you let me know if there’s anything I can do?” he said.
“I will.”
“Thank you,” he said, rising to shake hands. His grip was meaty and powerful, his eyes direct. “Did she leave with that Indian boy?”
“Excuse me?”
“Take exception to my vocabulary if you want. But that fellow American Horse is trouble. Not because he’s an Indian. His kind tear things down, not build them up. You know I’m right, too.”