Lone Creek

7

Wesley Balcomb came into sight in a few more minutes, riding his pretty mare at a fair clip and bouncing in the saddle in a way that looked very uncomfortable.

He was maybe forty-five, tanned and handsome, with the fit look of someone who played a lot of golf-he'd had an Astroturf driving range and putting green installed behind the compound so he could keep in practice. But he had the stiffness of being uncomfortable doing things that might involve getting dirty. His clothes looked like they'd been picked out by a film fashion consultant-Wrangler jeans, western cut shirt, and off-white Stetson. The rumor was that his outfits were tailored and his boots were handmade Luccheses that went for upwards of fifteen hundred bucks.

Kirk Pettyjohn came down the rise to meet him, carrying himself with importance, apparently thinking the two of them were going to have a confab. Balcomb ignored him completely and rode right on by, straight toward me. Kirk tagged along sheepishly behind. The Anson boys fell in with him, and Elmer came back out of the office. I'd half expected Doug to show up, but there was no sign of him. Maybe he didn't want anybody to see his nose.

Elmer was right about the mare's being skittish, and Balcomb wasn't in good control of her. He didn't rein her up until she was almost close enough to step on my feet, and she stamped and swung her rump around at me, the way horses do when they're ready to kick. I put a hand on her haunch and shoved her away.

Balcomb stared down at me as if it was his wife's ass I'd grabbed. Like Kirk, he hid his eyes with sunglasses-his were aviator-style, giving him the authoritative look of a military officer-and his face was smooth and bland. But I got a quick weird hit that behind his shield, he was nervous.

"You're an enterprising fellow, Mr. Davoren," he said. He spoke louder than he needed to, like he wanted to make sure the other men heard. I was surprised that he knew my name. He even pronounced it right, to almost rhyme with "tavern."

"That's the first time anybody ever told me that," I said.

"Unfortunately, the enterprise isn't an admirable one. It seems you've been helping yourself to ranch property. Lumber, to be precise."

Son of a bitch.

That had crossed my mind a couple of times, but I just couldn't believe it would cause this ruckus.

What had happened was that the plans for the old mansion's remodeling called for tearing out a couple of downstairs walls to open up space. We'd had to redo the second-story floor structure with glu-lam beams to allow longer spans. That had left us with a few dozen of the old joists, full two-inch by twelve-inch clear coast fir, a lot of them twenty feet long and straight as a wedding dick.

Goddamned right I'd been taking them home-a load on my pickup's lumber rack every Saturday for the past three weeks. I'd intended to haul off another one today. Otherwise they'd have been thrown away like all the other scrap. But it was true that I hadn't exactly asked permission. I knew that if I got tangled up in Balcomb's bureaucratic grid, I could kiss the whole thing good-bye. As it was, nobody had cared or even much noticed.

Except for whoever had ratted me off. I glanced over at Kirk. His bug-eyed shades were fixed on me in a biker-style hard stare. But his mouth jerked suddenly in a twitch.

I turned back to Balcomb. It came as a nasty shock, realizing that he had me up against a hard place. I started circling.

"You mean those scabby old floor joists?" I said.

"They're obviously worth stealing, to you."

"That's not stealing, that's recycling."

"It's common theft, in the eyes of the law. Grand larceny."

"For Christ's sake, they'd have ended up in the dump."

"What belongs to this ranch stays on this ranch."

"You're saying you'd rather throw them away than let somebody else use them?"

"I'm saying you owe me for them." Balcomb unsnapped a tooled leather holster on his tooled leather belt and got out one of those Palm Pilots.

"I'll just double-check my figures," he said, punching buttons with a stylus. "You've taken about eight hundred and fifty linear feet, at four dollars and ten cents per. That comes to three thousand four hundred eighty-five dollars-"

"Four dollars a foot? That lumber's worthless. It's old and rough cut and full of nails."

"I'm talking about replacement value. Clear fir's very pricey these days."

"All right, I'll bring it back. You want me to take it straight to the dump?"

The bland mask left his face for a second. It wasn't a pleasant look.

"I don't want you on this property again," he said. "You can hire someone to return it. That will take care of restitution. There's still the matter of criminal charges. Oh, yes, and assaulting one of my employees."

I stared at him in disbelief. He turned to the other men, coaxing the mare into sidestepping showily, like he was Roy Rogers or Ronald Reagan. He even put on that same kind of rugged, comradely half smile.

"You see why I warned you against trusting Mr. Davoren," he said to them. "Considering the position he's in, I don't think he's going to get any more honest. Men like him will say anything, trying to weasel out."

I took a step toward him, my left hand rising to yank him off the horse.

"Hugh!" Elmer said sharply.

Balcomb swiveled, his face turning alarmed. But Elmer was right-busting his head would make a bad situation a hell of a lot worse. I clenched my teeth hard and stopped.

Only then did Kirk, late to the party, throw his rifle to his shoulder and yell at me, "Freeze!"

Elmer walked over to him and pushed the barrel aside, shaking his head in disgust.

"You'd better be very careful, Davoren," Balcomb said, in that same grandstanding voice.

Many times, I'd read the phrase hands itching to get hold of someone, but I'd never felt the sensation literally before. It was actually more of a throb.

He watched me, maybe expecting me to humbly agree with him. When I didn't, he waved his hand impatiently at the other men, like he was brushing off a pesky bug.

"We need a word in private," he said. They moved away, Steve Anson stuffing his jaw with another wad of chew, Elmer shaking loose his thirtieth smoke of the day, and Kirk backing up reluctantly with his weapon at port arms.

"Doug Wills told you to stay where you were and wait," Balcomb said to me harshly.

"Doug doesn't tell me to do anything."

We both knew that I was really talking about Balcomb.

Flies were zeroing in on the mare, and she snorted suddenly and flicked her tail. Her ass end swung around toward me again. I gave it another shove.

"You seem to feel free to take matters into your own hands," he said. "Even though you're on my property."

"I'm on your property by invitation. Doing the job I was hired to."

I could see a muscle jump in his jaw. "I'm getting very impatient with you."

I waited.

He glanced around, then leaned forward and lowered his voice.

"I was going to give you a chance to make this go away, before anyone else knew about it," he said. "I could still be persuaded to call it a misunderstanding."

"Persuaded how?"

"I want to know if anything-unusual-happened to you this afternoon."

"How would something 'unusual' turn this into a misunderstanding?" I said.

"You let me worry about that."

Any hint of polish was gone from his face now. I could feel the intensity of his gaze burning right through those sunglasses. Out of my side vision, I sensed that Kirk was staring at me just as hard.

That feeling of wrongness hit me again. Maybe I was only imagining it. But I was abruptly very glad I hadn't said anything about what I'd found in the dump.

"No, it was pretty much like every other day," I said. "One man starts a fight with me for no reason I can tell, another holds a gun on me, and I get called a thief and a liar over some scrap wood."

Balcomb looked unfazed. If anything, he seemed pleased.

"That's all?" he said.

"It's plenty for me. You want more unusual than that, give me a hint. A guy like me will say anything to weasel out."

He straightened up again, relaxed now, and clucked his tongue like he was chiding a little kid.

"Well, since you haven't done me any good, I don't see why I should do you any. If you'd stayed with Wills, I might feel more charitable. I had to ride another mile and a half to get here."

"Try bag balm," I said. "Best thing for saddle sores."

That venomous look crossed his face again.

"You don't have any idea how far out of your league you are, do you?" he said.

It sounded like a line from a bad movie, but he spoke it with real conviction.

He walked the mare away, pausing to talk to the waiting men. Elmer glanced at me and shook his head again, this time sympathetically. Kirk pulled out his cell phone and punched numbers, looking smugly important.

Wesley Balcomb rode off into the sunset, tall in the saddle after cleaning up Dodge.

Then, from a little copse of aspens down the road, Laurie Balcomb came riding out. There was no telling how long she'd been there-she might just have arrived, or she might have been hidden in the trees and seen the whole show. She glanced coolly toward me with no sign of recognition, then cantered away to catch up with her husband. The two of them continued on side by side, apparently talking. Balcomb pointed back in my direction with his thumb, but didn't turn around.

Oddly, it struck me that she was on a gelding and he was on a mare.

I walked to my pickup. The Anson brothers were waiting there, same as when I'd first driven up.

"I'll get the lumber back here tomorrow," I told Steve.

He spat a stream of tobacco juice. "Doubt it."

I did, too, seeing as how tomorrow was Sunday, and I needed to round up a good-size truck and driver.

"Monday, then." I took hold of the steering wheel, pulled myself in, and reached for the keys. They were gone from the ignition.

I swung back to glare at Steve. "What's this bullshit?"

"You're going to jail, Hugh," he said. He spat again nervously, and added, "Nothing personal."