Lone Creek

21

When I started coming to, I seemed to be hanging in space outside my head, and for a few seconds I couldn't get back in. Then I connected, and the harsh ache in my skull brought me awake fast.

I was propped up behind the wheel of my pickup truck. The engine was running and the truck was moving jerkily down the sloping headland toward the lake-which ended in a sheer fifteen-foot drop into the water.

Kirk Pettyjohn was trotting along outside my open window, steering with one gloved hand on the wheel. We had about ten yards to go.

It took me another couple of seconds to start my legs moving. I got my right foot onto the brake and stomped it as hard as I could. The truck lurched to a stop, setting off a clatter of empty beer cans on the floor.

Kirk's hand tore loose of the wheel and he went windmilling onward. The truck bucked a couple of times, still in gear, and then the engine died. As I wrenched the door open, Kirk turned around, but instead of coming toward me he ran past me back uphill.

I knew damned well he'd have a gun in that Jeep.

I stumbled out and went after him, but he had a head start and he was moving faster. The only weapon I had was an old Schrade folding knife that I carried in my back pocket. I managed to claw it out as I ran, but I didn't have time to open it before Kirk reached into the Jeep.

He came out with the cold moonlit glint of metal in his hand-the blued barrel of a pistol. But he hadn't taken off his thick work gloves, and he fumbled, trying to force his finger through the trigger guard. I skidded on my knees, scooped up a handful of loose sandy soil, and flung it at his face.

He spun away, spitting and dragging his sleeve across his eyes, and took off again-but this time he was tugging at his gloves with his teeth. I managed to get my knife open as I chased him.

He stopped suddenly and gave his head a shake like a terrier killing a rat. A glove went flying. He started bringing up the pistol, with his right hand now bare.

I was only a step away by then, the knife clenched in my fist like a chisel, with the edge forward. I drove it at his hands as if I was throwing a right cross, with the last-ditch frantic hope that I could knock the gun aside or land a slash that would shock him into dropping it. But its upswinging barrel caught my wrist and sent the punch glancing off his chin.

I felt the blade drag just slightly, like I'd sliced its tip through an overripe pumpkin.

My momentum carried me a few more steps. I got myself turned around, ready to swing at him again if the boom and slam of a gunshot didn't knock me down first.

But he was stumbling away almost in slow motion, like a toy figure with its battery giving out. His dragging feet seemed to be trying to catch up and get underneath the rest of him. They didn't. His upper body sagged forward farther and farther, and he hit the ground like he was falling onto a soft bed.

I staggered over to him, gasping for breath, and knelt. His eyes were open but empty and his throat was pumping blood.

I fell over on the earth beside him and lay there, staring up into the cold night sky.

I'd only meant to disarm him. But that tiny drag I'd felt from the punch gone wild was the blade's tip catching him just under the jawbone.

My fingers were still clenched around the knife, slick and wet. Twenty-five years of bad blood was on my hands.

I was aware, in a distant way, that I should be panicked with horror at what I'd done. But except for my burning lungs and aching head, I felt like this was happening to somebody else. I got to my feet and limped down to my truck for a flashlight.

The key in the ignition was still in the on position. I switched it off, and noticed that Kirk had put the truck in third gear-the reason it had been moving so jerkily. There were a dozen of the beer cans I'd heard rattling on the floor, along with a nearly empty fifth of Jim Beam. None of them was mine.

And the disposable camera I'd bought, with the film I'd shot of the shed, was gone.

He'd been out to kill me, after all-and while I'd thought I was working him, it was just the other way around. He'd had a much slicker plan than lying in wait and blasting me. He'd probably watched enough true-crime TV to know that that was bound to leave an evidence trail.

So he'd spun his story to get me off guard and, idiot that I was, I'd gone for it. He'd set me up to look at the camcorder, knowing I'd be stunned by the sight of Laurie Balcomb. Then he'd clobbered me and planted the booze containers. I'd have been found in the lake, an angry drunk fired from his job and thrown in jail, who'd been driving wildly or had passed out. My friends might have been suspicious, but I had no family to push for an investigation and no status to warrant that kind of trouble and expense. It never would have gone any further.

I'd underestimated Kirk, all right.

There were more signs that for all his lack of talent at anything else, he'd staged this scene with real cunning. Whatever he'd hit me with was nowhere in sight. He'd probably hidden it or thrown it into the lake. It must have been flexible, a sap or old-fashioned sandbag-my head hurt, but there was no bleeding or damage. He hadn't fastened my seat belt, so if the lumps had been noticed, they'd have been accounted for by the crash. He'd even used a pair of my own goddamn gloves that he'd gotten from my truck, probably so he wouldn't risk losing or leaving traces from his own.

There was no sign of my camera, either. It might have been in the Jeep or one of his pockets, but I was guessing it was also in the lake.

In itself, the film wasn't important, especially now. But the fact that he'd taken it suggested strongly that Balcomb was behind this-that he'd called Kirk after talking to me and sent him to get rid of both me and the photos I'd claimed to have-and Kirk had turned my own lie right around on me, by claiming to have them, too.

The decision I'd put off was made for me now. I didn't have any choice but to take Balcomb to the law.

I didn't want to disturb any evidence, including my truck, so I started walking toward Canyon Ferry village to find a phone.

Then I stopped. A fresh tingle of adrenaline was starting through me, this time for a very different reason.

It was coming to me how this was going to look.

There were no witnesses to the fact that I'd acted in self-defense. On the contrary, the obvious take would be that I'd lured Kirk here to get even.

Investigators would quickly establish that he'd torched my lumber. Plenty of people knew about the long-standing friction that was there between us anyway, and several today had watched his snitching cost me my job and send me to jail, with him holding a rifle on me in the process.

Including, especially, Wesley Balcomb.

By killing Kirk, I'd destroyed my only backup for my story about the horses. I had no idea where they were buried, and the photos I'd seen on that camcorder sure weren't of them.

I had nothing on Balcomb now. But he had plenty of reason-and plenty of means-to railroad me for homicide.

My gaze was pulled to the pistol, lying where Kirk had dropped it, about eighteen inches from his hand-a Smith and Wesson.357 Magnum, with a slug powerful enough to penetrate a car engine. The slightest graze would have sent me reeling, giving him plenty of room to finish the job.

But I had a different worry about it now. Both make and caliber were so common around here that they were generic-you could buy one for a couple hundred bucks in any pawnshop, and cheaper in a parking lot behind a bar. This one was fairly old and a little beat-up. It probably wasn't registered to him-which meant that I could have been the one who'd brought it here-and if it was his, I could have held a gun of my own on him and forced him to give it to me. All the staging he'd done-even using my gloves-could be seen as clumsy attempts on my part to bolster my claim of self-defense.

And without question, the knife that had killed him and the hand that had held it-both were mine.

I'd gotten a real good look at the criminal justice system when I'd worked the crime beat in Sacramento, and as if the vision that Madbird had joked about finally came, I found myself staring into into a tumbling kaleidoscope of probabilities that froze just long enough for me to see to the end with chilling clarity.

I'd be slammed back in jail as soon as the sheriffs arrived, and this time the bail would be astronomical. I'd sit in a cell for months or years while some overworked court-appointed attorney tried to wrangle with the smooth power of Balcomb's wealth and behind-the-scenes influence, and the outrage of Kirk's prominent family. If I was lucky, I might get off with manslaughter, but if suspicion was strong that I'd set this up in advance, then premeditation entered in. I'd trade the county lockup for Deer Lodge, with only the question of how old a man I'd be when-if-I got out.

The invisible grip that had held me all day tightened like a junkyard's car-crushing vise.

Then, through the chaos in my mind, came a thought so clear it almost seemed spoken by a voice.

Nobody knows about this yet.

A weaker voice protested that no, I couldn't, I just wasn't like that. But my body started moving, and gathered speed under the power of a whole new kind of fear.

I spent the next four hours working harder than I'd ever worked in my life.