Lone Creek

53

A little before ten o'clock that night, I did something I never thought I'd do again-pressed the old doorbell around the back of Reuben Pettyjohn's building in downtown Helena.

Twenty seconds later, his voice rasped through the grille.

"There's only one person I know of who remembers this thing. Playing hooky from the sheriffs, aren't you, Hugh?"

"Say the word, Reuben, I'll keep right on moving. But I've got something important I'd like to tell you."

"Well, that's intriguing, and I don't figure I owe Gary Varna nothing. Come on up."

The buzzer crackled and the door opened at my push. I walked through the ghostly quiet of the hallway and waited for the creaky elevator to crawl down from the top floor. I had Kirk's Consumer Guide and the paper with the numbers, plus some information I'd picked up during another hour on Hannah's computer.

The diamond industry had more than its share of unsavory aspects, especially the legacy of slavery in the mines. But the grimmest reality nowadays seemed to be blood diamonds-so called because they financed terrorist groups, including Al Qaeda and several factions of African rebels, like the Janjaweed, who made their own lands into living hells for millions of people.

Blood diamonds were impossible to distinguish from any others-there were no reliable methods to identify the stones' origins without damaging them-and often of high or even superior quality. They got smuggled out of the Congo, Angola, Sierra Leone, and other African nations, following complex routes to major world markets, blending with the flow of legitimate trade. They represented an estimated twenty to forty percent of the overall-conservatively, billions of dollars per year. Along the way, they'd usually get cut in clandestine factories-China, Pakistan, and Armenia all had burgeoning industries-and also inscribed with phony laser marks to imitate known brands. These marks were microscopic-only experts using highly sophisticated equipment could tell the fakes from genuine ones; and if the marks were well done, even that was difficult.

They sold initially for next to nothing, as little as a dollar per carat. By the time they got to retail, even those of modest size and quality could go for several thousand times that. There were five carats in a gram. If you figured an average of only one thousand dollars per carat, that came to five million bucks per kilogram, a little over two pounds.

There was no way to guess the quantities Kirk had been muling, but he could have carried a lot more than that at a time, and he'd been making a run every couple of months.

Heroin, my aching ass. That was chump change. No wonder Balcomb was willing to kill.

Of course the profit wouldn't all be his. Everybody handling the jewels along the way would take a cut, and especially as contraband, they wouldn't hit full value until they went to retail. But the markup was still astronomical and tax-free, probably pumped clandestinely into his numbered offshore bank accounts and then laundered through his other financial shell games. And while handling dope didn't seem his style, pimping diamonds fit him to a tee.

I'd spent a few more minutes running another search, on the mystery investor who'd started pumping money into Balcomb's nonexistent horse business. I'd half expected that he was another of Laurie's fictions. But the name Guy-Luc Marie DeBruyne popped up right away in dozens of listings. Most were brief mentions in foreign-language newspapers and business journals; some were in tabloids. The several that I checked added up to a cohesive picture without much in the way of specifics-he was fiftyish, Belgian in origin but an international player, and a sort of eminence grise, with considerable wealth and power but staying behind the scenes. No clear alliance was mentioned with any particular religious or political cause. On the contrary, the sense was that he was a wily mercenary who did business with any faction that could pay the price. He was fond of women and gambling and enjoyed plenty of both, keeping a villa at Cap d'Antibes for convenient access to Monte Carlo. It was taking jaunts like those, usually with a beauty on his arm, that landed him in the focus of the paparazzi.

Finally, I seemed to be uncovering some solid information. The question was what to do with it. I wasn't sure what had made me think of Reuben-maybe that this turned Josie's ring into a tangible, personal connection with Kirk, like an evil talisman that Balcomb had used to lure him in. It was also hard evidence of Balcomb's crimes that had set this ugly chain of events in motion.

I still wasn't sure what I was going to do, either. That was going to hinge on what happened here. I'd decided to give Reuben an edited version of the story, telling him pretty much everything but leaving out all mention of Madbird and Laurie.

At the least, I'd feel the relief of confessing to him personally about Kirk. Reuben might pick up a phone and call the sheriffs, but I doubted that. More likely, he'd just order me to leave. But I admitted having a hope that he'd offer his support, and that with a man so powerful on my side, we could turn this around on Balcomb.

When I'd run the idea by Madbird, he'd spent some time thinking about it.

"I don't know Reuben much," he finally said. "I used to go drink at the VFW once in a while, and I'd run into him. He was always friendly. But you and him got that other thing going, right? That girl getting killed, way back when?"

"Yeah."

"I can't call this one, Hugh. But if anybody got the juice, it's him. And let's face it, you ain't got much to lose."

Reuben's apartment door was open, but this time when I stepped inside, he wasn't there. A minute later he walked in from a back room, wearing boots and jeans and buttoning up a faded old plaid flannel shirt. He probably hadn't wanted me to catch him in his robe and slippers again. He waved his hand toward the bottle of fine scotch on the bar. It looked like the same one as last time, but I suspected it wasn't. I poured myself a short drink. Why the hell not?

"Let's not run around the bush, Hugh," he said. "What's on your mind?"

I handed him the book and paper.

He settled into his chair, this time staying sitting up instead of tipping it back, and examined them, turning them in his thick hands and flipping through the pages. Then he looked at me inquiringly.

"I took them from Kirk's shack," I said.

"You went there, huh?"

"Last night. We were right, the gold panning was bullshit." I pointed at the numbers on the paper. "I think he was trying to figure out the value of those diamonds in Josie's ring."

Reuben frowned. "Come again?"

"The weights are probably rounded off, but the big one's about two carats and the others are a half carat each," I said. "These columns are prices he got from the book, with markups for better quality. He didn't know how to judge that-he was just ballparking high and low end."

"If he bought them for her, how could he not know what they cost?" Reuben's gaze sharpened. "You telling me he stole them?"

"No. I think he got them from Balcomb."

The grooves in Reuben's forehead deepened.

"I knew Kirk was coming up with money some way I couldn't explain," he said. "But why the hell would Balcomb give him diamonds?"

"Payment, Reuben. Kirk was muling them across the border. That's why he wanted that place."

Reuben settled back then, dropping the book on the floor and reaching for his glass.

"Say Balcomb gave him the jewels and told him they were worth twenty grand or whatever," I said. "Kirk wanted to make sure he wasn't getting screwed, but he couldn't get them appraised right away. He'd bought this book for his gold panning act, and he gave it a shot himself."

He gazed past me out the windows, his lower teeth gnawing at his mustache. I knew I'd just made things a lot more complicated for him. If Kirk was still alive, he was facing serious prison time, and even if he was dead, it was a stain on the family. Bringing Reuben down like that didn't make me feel any better, but I had no choice.

"Any way to prove this?" he said.

"I've got a place to start. If I'm right, the diamonds will have phony laser stamps. We'd have to get the ring from Josie and take it to a lab. Maybe they could do it at Montana Tech."

He nodded, looking bemused now.

"You know where he is, Hugh?" he said.

His tone was so casual, the question so out of the blue, that the dread I'd awaited this moment with took a second to hit me.

Everything, everything, hung on what would happen if I told this man not only that his son was dead, but by my hand. I gave one last thought to hedging. But there was an insistence in my head that I owed him the truth.

"I do, Reuben." I swallowed, trying to ease the dryness in my mouth. "Balcomb sent him to kill me, late Saturday night. He damned near did. Knocked me silly and started to dump me in the lake."

I waited. Reuben only took a slow sip of scotch, gazing straight ahead.

"I know how this sounds, but honest to Christ, I was just trying to protect myself," I said. "He had a.357. His glove jammed in the trigger guard. I slashed at his hands with my pocketknife to try to get him to drop it. He jerked away and the knife caught his throat. If it helps any, it happened so fast, he barely knew it."

Reuben's head moved slightly. It might have been a nod of acknowledgment or a tremor.

"Then I got scared," I said. "I'd had that run-in with Balcomb earlier. Kirk was in on it-he'd held a gun on me, a lot of people saw that, and we weren't exactly pals anyway. All I could think was, it was going to look like I'd lured him out there to get even, and I was going to be up against Balcomb and you and your lawyers. So I hid him."

I shut up then and stood there with the sound of my pulse throbbing in my ears. Reuben deliberated for another long minute.

"When you say 'hid him,'" he said. "You think he's-comfortable-where he is?"

"Well-I guess I would be," I said.

"He's not, you know, just shoved under something?"

"No, no, it's real decent. Dignified, even. I'll show you, if you want."

"Maybe someday." He finished the scotch in his glass and handed it to me to refill. His sharp eyes looked softened, almost glazed.

"I've been carrying a weight of my own a long time, a right heavy one," Reuben said. "Never unloaded it because it might have got used against me. But if there's anybody who ought to know, it's you."

My hands, opening the scotch bottle, stopped.

"I've got a feeling I already do know," I said.

"I figured you'd think that. Go on, tell me."

This was almost harder than confessing about Kirk. I poured a fresh couple of inches into Reuben's glass and gave it back to him.

"Pete got Celia pregnant," I said. "Beatrice wouldn't let him marry her. He got in a rage, maybe from Celia taunting him, and got too rough with her. You covered it up."

Reuben nodded heavily. "That's pretty close to the money, except for one thing. It wasn't just her picking at him that set him off. She told him who that baby's real father was."

An image clicked like a slide in my mind, giving me a glimpse back to that day when I'd seen Pete and Celia walk past Reuben without even noticing him, but he had stopped what he was doing and watched them attentively. Then Beatrice's sudden harsh words: Don't you sit there oogling that little slut, too.

I sat down hard on a bar stool. Then I groped for the scotch to pour myself another drink, not because I wanted it, but because I couldn't think of anything else to do.

"I decided to show her who was boss, was how it started," Reuben said. "Saw how she had Pete so poleaxed. Arrogant bastard I was, I didn't think there was any woman I couldn't handle, let alone a girl. But pretty quick, she had me damn near as bad as him. She'd laugh in my face, then whisper in my ear, and next thing you knew, we'd be-" He exhaled. "I knew there was bound to be trouble, and I should have got her out of there. But I couldn't get enough of her."

It hit me with painful keenness-a powerful man in his prime with a cold wife, suddenly beset by beautiful, sultry, sassy Celia. And I had no doubt that she'd done more than her share to kindle the flame.

"I can see how she'd have been hard to resist," I said.

"There's a couple things I want you to understand. Pete never meant to hurt her, any more than you did Kirk. He blew up like you said. They were out in the shop. He gave her a shove, she tripped and fell against a workbench and hit her head on a vise-that knob where the handle attaches. It cracked her temple like somebody swung a hammer."

Reuben wiped his eyes with his thumb and forefinger.

"He came and got me," he said. "Lord, the look on his face. Going in and finding her laying there. Then two months later, finding him dead. And it was all my doing. That's the other thing I want you to know, Hugh. Nobody to blame but me."

Emotions, memories, connections that suddenly snapped into place were rushing through me.

Reuben had been carrying a weight, all right.

I stepped to him and put my hand on his shoulder.

"I wouldn't call it that way, Reuben. If I'd been in your place, I'd have done the same. Probably most men would have."

His eyes changed, to a look that was surprised and maybe grateful.

"I loved Celia and I admired Pete," I said. "But she knew damn well what she was doing, and a lot of it wasn't good. Pete always took it for granted he'd get everything his way-he never bothered much about anybody else. And there was some pure bad luck."

Reuben patted my hand brusquely. I sat at the bar again. We both knocked back an inch of scotch.

"'Course, there were other people who suspected," he said. "Your father. Gary. They had their reasons for keeping it to themselves. But how come you never said anything?"

In that moment, I realized that in spite of what had happened with Laurie and how idiotic I felt about it, I still couldn't let go of the special intimacy with Celia that my imagination had constructed. I gave an answer that was as true as it needed to be.

"I don't know, exactly," I said. "I was fourteen-it wasn't like I thought it through. I guess I figured we'd all lost enough already."

His eyes widened a little.

"That's a damn fair way to put it, Hugh. All right, I've said my piece. Now tell me the rest of what you know about my son."

It wasn't easy concentrating after the way I'd just been slammed. I kept it terse, and he seemed satisfied-at least he didn't ask any questions, just kept gazing out the window and rolling his glass between his hands.

"Suppose I was to suggest we ought to pay a call on Wesley Balcomb," he finally said. "You got any ideas how we might arrange it?"

In one way, that was the last thing in the world I'd ever have expected. In another, I wasn't even surprised.

"I do, Reuben," I said. "I've been thinking a lot about paying him a call myself. Assuming we're talking about the same kind."

He heaved himself to his feet and stalked into the back rooms of the apartment. When he came out, he was carrying a twelve-gauge Remington Model 870 shotgun. He didn't look like an old man now.

"We're talking about this kind," he said.

I stepped to a phone, punched Madbird's number, and waited for his gravelly "Hello."

"That project we've been talking about," I said. "I've got an idea I'd like to run by you. Now would be a real good time."