Lone Creek

59

Sitting behind the wheel of my good old pickup again was a pure joy. I started home. But I hadn't gone more than a few goddamned blocks when I heard a pop outside the window, then felt the drag in the right rear that meant a blown tire.

"Son of a bitch," I said. I had a good spare and jack-I just couldn't believe I was going to have to fuck around with something like that right now.

I was on Ewing, a narrow street with cars parked almost solid, and of course there was somebody right on my ass. I turned down the next side street, found a place to ease over to the curb, and got out to take a look at the damage.

The vehicle behind me also turned-a big four-door Chevy pickup truck of a generic white color, so new it didn't yet have license plates, just a temporary tag. As it pulled up beside me, I got a glimpse of a logo that read Grenfell Chevrolet, Great Falls, Montana. The windows were smoked so I couldn't see in, until the rear one closest to me rolled down. There were two men, one driving and the other in back. I assumed they were going to offer me a ride to a gas station, and I started to say thanks, but I had it covered.

Then I realized that the man in back was resting a pistol barrel on the windowsill. It ended in a vented cylinder the size of a roll of quarters-a sound suppressor.

"Get in, please," he said. The words were clear but had a crisp accent. He pushed open the door and slid back across the seat, with the gun still pointed at my chest.

Balcomb had been quick about hiring new killers, all right. He must have set this up before we'd gotten to him last night.

There wasn't another human being anywhere in view. My body felt completely drained of power, like a bag of hair. With the sick hopeless certainty that this was it, I got in.

The interior's pleasant new-vehicle smell was almost overcome by cologne that reminded me of a bad air freshener, with a heavy admixture of garlic. The man in the back with me had a wiry athletic build and a handsome, sharp-featured face. Together with his accent, his looks suggested northern Europe. The driver was older, heavier-set and darker-complexioned, with black hair and a thick mustache-maybe Latino or Mediterranean. By and large, they were almost as ordinary-looking as John Doe.

Except that both were decked out in full cowboy regalia, from Stetsons and shirts with mother-of-pearl snaps down to pointy-toed boots, all as new as the truck. It would have been laughable, except that there was nothing funny about these two. John Doe had only been scary. They were at ease.

"Wesley Balcomb's gone," I said, in the feeble hope of canceling their mission. "He disappeared last night. Maybe hiding out. Maybe dead."

The man in back with me nodded calmly.

"Yes, we know," he said.

They must have been paid in advance.

I couldn't imagine how the hell they'd found out about Balcomb so fast, or how they'd located me-a police scanner, maybe, or something far more sophisticated. I wasn't about to ask. In a way, the worst thing about it was knowing that the last laugh was going to be Balcomb's after all.

But then-late, as usual-the obvious occurred to me. If he had known they were after me, he would have used that as a bargaining chip last night.

That didn't make me feel any better, just more confused.

The man in the backseat watched me comfortably. His gaze never left me, and the gun barrel never wavered. They obviously had familiarized themselves with the area-the driver tooled along like he'd lived here all his life, taking us smoothly and unhesitatingly up Davis Gulch, a narrow dirt road that climbed into the forested mountains south of town. When I was a kid it had been deserted-we used to ride our dirt bikes and sight in rifles up there. Now there was a little development, but it was still pretty much no-man's-land, with all kinds of places where a body could simply be tossed out of a truck and not noticed for a good long while.

After a couple of miles we came to a clear-cut plateau that they must have found out had good cell phone reception. The man in the back with me took out his phone and spoke into it tersely. The language seemed familiar but I couldn't identify it. It resembled German, but I was sure it wasn't, nor Scandinavian-it didn't have those inflections. Dutch was the closest I could guess. He listened, spoke again, then handed me the phone.

"Hello, Mr. Davoren," a male voice said. It had just a trace of the same accent, but overlaid by the kind of precise British pronunciation that foreigners learned at Oxford.

"I'm sorry, I don't know who I'm talking to," I said.

"I'm afraid that's precisely the problem. You do. The charming Laurie Balcomb informed you that I was in business with her husband."

For a few seconds, my confusion deepened. The only one of Balcomb's associates that I could remember Laurie talking about was John Doe, and for certain, this wasn't him.

Then the answer came to the surface, along with the realization that the language the men were speaking must have been Flemish.

All I could think of to say was, "Oh."

I'd worry later about how Laurie had managed to hook up with Guy-Luc Marie DeBruyne.

"I gather that you set out to dispose of her husband," he said.

"No, I backed off, I can prove it. I started thinking about-"

"Your reasons don't concern me, Mr. Davoren. Neither does losing the enterprise, really. It was lucrative, but I have many others. To be truthful, I wouldn't have entered into it except that Wesley Balcomb introduced me to Laurie, and arranged for the two of us to spend some delightful time together. She was very persuasive on his behalf."

Did you ever meet him?

No.

"Anyway, what good is it to wail when the horse is out of the barn?" he said.

I winced.

"Look-sir," I said. "I didn't mean to interfere with you. I was just trying to save my skin."

"Oh, I don't bear you any ill will. My worry is strictly professional-that you may have talked about my connection to her husband. Especially since you've just had an interview with the police. It would draw undesirable attention, and that, I can't allow."

Business.

"No way I'd do that," I said.

"Oddly enough, I was sure that was what you would tell me."

"It's true, I swear," I lied, working to keep desperation out of my voice. "I'm suspected of murder, and I'm sweating blood trying to get the cops off my back. If I breathed a word about you, they'd be all over me. I didn't even tell them I ever saw Laurie. I never heard your name. We're not having this talk."

We rounded a curve and I caught a glimpse of the city spread out like a carpet of buildings below, a long ways away and getting farther every second.

"What did happen to Balcomb, do you think?" he said.

"My best guess is it was the mule, Kirk. He disappeared, too. He's the one I'm being blamed for. Probably he had some kind of grudge and came back to settle it."

"Do you know where we could find him?"

"I don't know anything about any of this. A few days ago I went to throw away a load of trash and next thing I knew, I was up to my neck in shit. Wait, sorry, I didn't mean to be offensive."

"Bouf. I spend a great deal of time in France, and there is no word more common than merde. Let me talk to Patrice again."

I handed the phone to the gunman. He spoke, listened, and said something to the driver. The truck pulled off the road. Outside my door, the ground sloped steeply down into a brushy ravine.

My mind pointed out, with idiotic pedantry, another little irony. I had managed to barely evade disaster all along, mostly through luck. But I'd ignored one of the basic rules-to be careful what I wished for. I had conjured up imaginary heavies to mislead Gary Varna, and now they'd sprung to life and turned on me.

The gunman, Patrice, handed me back the phone.

"Well, Mr. Davoren, it's been a pleasure talking with you," DeBruyne said. "I'll be saying good-bye now. But hold just a moment, you might want to thank Laurie. She assured me-again, very persuasively-that you can be trusted."

The driver eased the truck through a cautious three-point turn and headed back toward town. Patrice lowered the pistol into his lap.

"I hope she's correct," DeBruyne said. "From what she tells me, you sound quite entertaining. I'd like to have a drink with you one day. Rather than to your memory."

The phone felt like it had the weight of an anvil.

"Are you there?" Laurie said.

The sound of her voice burned right through me.

"Yeah," I said.

"I'm sorry I ran. I lost my nerve, alone in that motel. I called Guy-Luc. He sent a plane for me. I didn't know those men would be on it."

"It's OK," I said. I'd decided already that we were even, and maybe that I even owed her, for the persuading she'd done. "If you get questioned, you and I never saw each other. Your husband was acting scary, you took off, and that's all you know."

I listened to her breathing for a few more seconds.

"I really do care for you, Hugh," she said. "I meant what I said about our kinship."

The connection ended.

Goddamn me, I almost could have believed her.

The truck pulled up beside mine, right where they'd picked me up. I started to open the door, but the driver turned to look straight at me for the first time and, with one hand gesturing eloquently, growled a sentence. I could tell this was French, but it was too fast for me to catch. Along with his words came a blast of garlic I could almost taste. I stared back helplessly, wondering what final trap they were springing.

"He ask your pardon that we break your tire and not help to repair it," Patrice translated. "Mais faut qu'on parte-we must go. You understand?"

I started nodding and kept on. "Yeah, sure. Don't worry, I've done it a million times. Thanks, though."

He tipped his hat, Old West style. The window rolled up. They drove away.

The bullet hole that had caused the flat was neatly centered in the treads-not surprisingly, a very professional job. I got the spare on in record time, in spite of my hands shaking and my head swiveling like a Ping-Pong ball in play. I just knew that the next thing coming down the pike would be Bill LaTray, leaping out of his rig and piling into me like a freight train.

When I finally drove through the gate to my cabin, the first thing that hit me was the lingering smell of the lumber that Laurie had burned.