The Dark Horse

10

October 29, 11:55 P.M.

In 1948, at the Jimtown Bar, two hundred yards north of the Cheyenne Reservation, Hershel Vanskike killed a man. He was involved in a side-room billiards game when two traveling gentlemen from Chicago noticed the sport and asked to buy in. It was inquired as to whether they had the where-withal to join the game, and they assured the local cowboys that they did.

The cowhands, not assured, asked them to exhibit the funds. The gentlemen from Chicago displayed over two thousand dollars in small bills.

Thus assured, the locals agreed to let them participate, but after a few hours of losing and drinking too many whiskeys, the Chicagoans grew irritable, and one of them, whose name was John Boertlein, began abusing an Indian rancher who was seated at the bar. He poked the Indian with a pool cue and asked the “chief ” what the locals did for fun around these parts.

The middle-aged Cheyenne ignored him and continued drinking, slowly bringing the pungent liquid to his lips with his elbows seemingly attached to the bar.

The man from Chicago told the “chief ” that he had plenty of wampum and jabbed the Indian with the pool cue again, leaving a small, blue chalk dot on the Cheyenne’s white shirtsleeve.

The bartender took a step away, bracing his hands on the bar.

Boertlein prodded the Indian again and asked if he knew where he and his friend, whose name was Bud Ardary, could find a few squaws for the night. He left another blue mark.

The Cheyenne remained silent and took the final sip from his shot glass.

Bud Ardary, the other gentleman from Chicago, broke from the pool table to join in on the fun. Boertlein poked the Indian on his other arm but still didn’t get any response. Instead, the Cheyenne put his empty glass back on the bar surface, tipped his hat to the bartender with his right hand, and rose. Boertlein, sensing that he was about to be totally ignored, grabbed the Indian by the shoulder as the Cheyenne turned toward him, but the Indian stepped by him and headed for the door.

John Boertlein had a puzzled look on his face as he stood there.

Ardary pulled his friend toward him in time to see a thin line of red blooming across his buddy’s dress shirt where the blade of a knife with an edge like a scalpel had sliced the Chicagoan’s abdomen.

Ardary pulled a pistol as the Indian opened the door, and Hershel Vanskike, realizing that the last man to draw his gun in these situations was likely the first to end up dead, snatched a natty little. 32 from his own waistband. Ardary fired at the Cheyenne as he stepped through the door. He missed. Sensing some movement to his right, he then extended his. 38 toward the pool players, and Vanskike pulled the trigger on the. 32.

I looked up at the big Indian seated next to me. “Damned Indians, they always get you into trouble.”

He nodded. “I think that was my Uncle Art, the one who moved up to Rocky Boy.”

I looked back at the report. “I can see why he moved.”

It was viewed as a clear-cut case of self-defense, and the autopsy revealed three more bullets from previous altercations, but Vanskike still received nine months in the county jail. There were also the usual amount of D amp;Ds on his record and public intoxications with a smattering of aggravated assaults, but most of Hershel’s criminal activities had tailed off a good thirty years ago when the old outlaw had grown accustomed to painting the town beige. Other than the incident at the Jimtown Bar, the only really troubling item was the one involving a rented house in Clearmont.

As for our involvement in the present altercation, no one questioned why Henry and I were arrested by the Absaroka County deputy and not the Campbell County one.

Just north of town across the condemned bridge, Victoria Moretti pulled the Bullet off to the other end of the dirt lot that WYDOT and Range Telephone were using, along a fenced pasture and to the side of what appeared to be an abandoned, yet familiar, green pickup.

The Cheyenne Nation and I sat on the tailgate of his truck as Vic doctored his and then my broken face from the first-aid kit from my truck. My undersheriff squinted at my swollen eye and pulled at my cheekbone, her investigation inflicting a considerable amount of pain. “Does it hurt?”

I leaned back a little, trying to get away from her probing fingers. “It didn’t till you started fussing with it.”

She stood her ground with her arms folded and looked at me. She wore a light fleece jacket, and she had the collar turned up against a repeated tide of cool air floating down from across the Bighorns. You could almost see the slight trails of breath leaving her mouth-almost. “He needs to get that hand X-rayed, and you need stitches.”

“Just pack it full of that antibiotic stuff and bandage me up.”

“You need stitches.” I didn’t say anything else, just continued to look at her through one and a half eyes. “Walt, you’re being an asshole.”

I took a deep breath, sighed, and I think I might’ve even smiled. “I do it rarely, but you’ve gotta admit that when I make an effort, I’m pretty good at it.”

She shook her head as she delved through the kit for the requisite supplies. “What in the hell came over you?”

“I was feeling manly.” I listened as the breezes played the dry, burnished grass like a mandolin and thought that maybe it was the oncoming winter, or maybe it was what Henry was reading in the file, or the fact that my left eye was almost completely swollen, but even though I felt tired, I was still willing to rise to the occasion. I sighed deeply and looked up at the Cheyenne Nation. “He supposedly burned a house down in 1992?”

“He was charged, but then it was dropped.”

Henry read further in the glow of Vic’s Maglite, which he held in his good hand as she continued to assess my injury. “He was supposedly out of town, but according to the Sheridan County sheriff there was reason to believe that he was the arsonist.”

Vic knocked my knees apart to get better access, and I listened to the creaking of her gun belt as she pushed against my legs.

The Bear read aloud. “ ‘Large, high-relief alligatoring of charred wood, crazing patterns of irregular glass, and depth of charring indicate the use of an accelerant… Line of demarcation and spalling of the masonry indicates suspicious point of origin.’ ”

Vic looked up. “What? They had Sparky the fuckin’ arson expert working over in Sheridan?”

He snorted. “It gets better. Guess who the investigating officer was?”

He held up the manila envelope with the arson report on top. Vic snatched it off his lap and read the scribbled signature at the bottom of the faxed sheet. “It says Frymire. Fuck me.”

I looked back up at her and remembered that Chuck had been employed by Sheridan County before us. “Our Frymire?”

Henry nodded. “In the personal notes, he says that it was such a clear case of deliberate fire that he tried to run it down, but as soon as the owner got a check from the insurance company, he dropped the charges.”

The Cheyenne Nation sat forward to hold the flashlight for Vic as she squeezed a worm of topical antibiotic onto her index finger.

Vic leaned my head back and removed the gauze pad she’d been using to sop up the blood, careful to keep the medication on her finger from getting smeared off. I spoke to the sky. “Who’s watching the store?”

“Ruby, and she says to tell you that the next time you’re working undercover, would you please leave a note or something?”

“I’ll leave a sock on my office doorknob.”

“You don’t have a doorknob.”

I looked at Henry’s hand as he held the flashlight, and Vic smeared the goop under my eye and into the cut. “Oww.”

She smirked. “Good. I hope it fucking hurts.” She peeled the wrapper from a large gauze-backed Band-Aid. “I’ll ask again: what in the hell possessed you?”

I continued to look at the Bear’s hand. “The Indian started it.”

She dismissed him with a glancing blow from the Mediterranean eyes and pasted the bandage onto my cheek. “From him I expect it.”

“Why?”

She smiled, the canine tooth sparking in the beam of the flashlight. “He’s a savage.”

Henry’s voice rumbled in his chest. “Look who is talking.”

After Vic finished, I stood and walked away from the bridge toward five horses. They stood just over the crest of a hill alongside the river and watched us, probably wondering if there was any chance of getting fed. I made a kissing sound and watched as the lead bay raised his head. He came toward us, and the others followed. They expected something to eat but settled for nosing my hands.

I scratched the big bay behind his ears and then ran my fingers under his chin where the bugs usually bit along the soft flesh beneath the jaw. The short hair was pebbled with small swellings, and he rocked his head back and forth, using my hand as a scratching post like some thousand-pound house cat.

I glanced back at Vic and Henry. “He’s got pictures of her all over his sheep wagon.”

“Who?”

I pulled my hand back, and the bay nibbled at my knuckles. “Mary Barsad. When I dropped Vanskike off at his trailer last night, I saw that he had pictures of her all over his walls.”

They looked at each other before resuming their communal looking at me, Henry the first to speak. “That is significant.”

I brushed the horse’s nose and stretched my other hand out to pet a roan. “Maybe. He also believes in the divine accordance of Kmart.” They both were still looking at me. “He buys these astrology scrolls at the checkout line at Kmart, and I think he really believes in them.”

Vic pushed off Rezdawg and walked over. She kept her distance; she didn’t much like horses. “He was on Sandy’s short list; we know he killed a guy, and he might’ve set a house on fire.”

“So?”

Her snort startled the little remuda. “Somebody once taught me that if you’re looking for a murderer, you start with the people who’ve killed people.” She took a step closer, and I could just see her in my bad eye, past the gaggle of horse noses. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but it’s not like we’ve got a suspect behind every fucking tree.” She glanced around with purpose at the plains stretching to the horizon. “Not that there are a lot of those around here either.”

Henry stuffed the folder under his arm. “What are you thinking?”

I took a breath and watched the roiling of the over-grazed sweetgrass in the pasture; it was as if someone was stroking it just as I’d petted the horses. “I’m not getting a feeling for any of it, and that worries me.” The bay extended his muzzle and breathed in my breath as I laughed. “Hershel’s horses.”

Henry joined us, handing Vic back her flashlight. “What?”

I palmed the bay’s head slightly out of the way. “These horses must be some more of Hershel’s; they always want to identify you by sniffing your breath.”

“OIT.”

I glanced at him-Old Indian Trick. “Really?”

He nodded and extended his good hand to a dun mare. “I have heard of it done when gathering horses on the open range.”

I nodded. “Maybe Hershel has more Indian connections than we know about.”

Vic stuffed her hands in the pockets of her fleece. “So, how does that help us?”

“Damned if I know, but I don’t think it’s Hershel.”

“I thought it’s only women who have intuition.” She sighed in exasperation. “Then what about this Bill Nolan character?”

I thought about it. “He’s up to something, but then he’s been up to something ever since I’ve known him. I don’t think he’s a killer, even in the more abstract sense of setting the house or the barn on fire.”

Vic risked getting closer to the horses so that she could get into my line of sight. “So, now we’re thinking that Wade Barsad might’ve not set the barn fire?”

I ran my hand down the bay’s muscled throat. “I don’t know.”

“Then why did she kill him?” I turned and looked at her. “Walt, she’s the only one left.”

I shook my head. “Nope.”

“Then who? That’s everybody who was there the night of the murder.”

I reached out to pet the bay between his ears, but I guess he figured we didn’t have anything in the way of treats and decided to move on; the others followed. Henry started digging in his shirt pocket. He extended his unswollen hand with one of the high-grain sorghum treats-the kind that horses will walk through hell in a napalm saddle to get. The bay turned on a heel and took the horse cookie from the flat of the Bear’s palm. The others crowded near as he distributed a few into my shirt pocket where I’d hidden my star.

“Then it was someone who was not there.”

October 24: five days earlier, late morning.

Frymire had sounded irritated.

“I walked in here, and the prisoner was gone.”

I leaned on the counter at the nurse’s station and held the phone a little away from my ear. “We’re at the hospital. Mary’s getting a mandatory checkup; Vic and I brought her.”

“I thought that was supposed to be at two o’clock?”

“Isaac called and said he could fit her in sooner, so I figured we’d get it over with.”

“What’s the verdict?”

I glanced at the closed door that led to the examination room. “I don’t know, but Isaac, Vic, and Mary are still inside.”

“Well, I’m here serving and protecting. There was a drive-off at the gas station south of town, but the guy came back and paid while I was there.”

“Must’ve known that the International Man of Mystery was on his trail.”

Frymire hung up. My deputies did that to me a lot.

I was bored, and Ruby’s niece was working on the computer at the next desk, so I ambled over and looked down at the sandy-haired young woman. “How you doin’, Janine?” I was particularly proud of myself for remembering her name; it seemed as though I was forever forgetting it.

She didn’t look up. “I’m busy, Uncle Walter, so stop bothering me.”

I decided to take a walk down to the bank of machines by the door and get a bottle of water, seeing as how they didn’t have an apparatus that dispensed Rainier. I dropped in a few quarters, pushed the button, and retrieved the plastic bottle below. It was a nice day, so when the automatic doors that opened to the outside automatically swung wide, I took it as an invitation.

I stepped onto the sidewalk outside the emergency room. There was a grassy hillside that the hospital board had recently landscaped and dedicated to Mari Baroja. There was a conveniently placed bench that had her name inscribed on a small brass plaque, so I sat, sipped my water, and thought about Mari and her granddaughter.

Lana had stopped by the office a week ago to say hello, but I’d been out. Word was that the young baker was buying up a remarkable amount of property on Main Street with the millions her grandmother had left her, along with a large tract of land leading up to the mountains. The buzz was that she was attempting to gather enough land for a ski resort, but I was hoping for a Basque restaurant.

The locals had been predicting, with resigned and doom-filled voices, that Durant was the next Jackson before Jackson had been Jackson. I didn’t see it.

Jackson’s geography was a lot like that of Manhattan in size and restriction-the City of New York because it was an island surrounded by water, and the town of Jackson because it was a valley surrounded by state and national parks. There was a limited amount of land in both places, and a lot of people who wanted to live in either or both.

A ski resort would change things, but I doubted we’d be seeing espresso stands and full-length coyote coats on the sidewalks of Durant-other than the one on Omar, that is.

I sipped my water and looked across the parking lot where another of Kyle Straub’s signs proclaimed A MAN TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE. What the hell did that mean, anyway? It wasn’t even particularly good English. The sign still made my ass hurt, but I was cheered by what was sitting on its top. A large, very yellow meadowlark periodically lifted its head and sang out with the gurgling, flutelike notes of its song.

A hardy bird that nests in the grasses of the plains, famous for that song, the meadowlark is the state bird of Wyoming, North Dakota, Montana, Kansas, Nebraska, and Oregon. As a state bird choice, original it was not. The birds always arrive in the spring, but then seem to disappear in July until they come back in fall, like sentinel bookends for summer.

The glass doors slid open to my right, and I turned my head just in time to see Janine run by and down the hallway toward the examination room. I was up and through the doors after her. We reached the room at the same time, and I blew through the door in front of her.

The treatment table had fallen over, and Mary Barsad, still attached to an ECG monitor, was lying on the floor beside a series of small, glass-doored cabinets. Vic was holding both her hands against the woman’s throat as the pulse of the blood from her carotid artery pushed with Mary’s pulse through my deputy’s fingers in a one-and-a-half-foot arc. Vic was the only one speaking. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.”

There was blood everywhere, and what appeared to be one of those disposable scalpels was lodged in Mary’s throat with the wrapper still half on. Isaac Bloomfield, who sat on the floor across the room, was tangled in an overturned utility cart with his thick glasses askew.

I grabbed a large roll of gauze from the counter and knelt to wind it around Mary’s neck; then I slid my arms under her back and legs. I used my foot to flip the table back upright and placed her on the flat surface as a fresh stream of blood streaked across my uniform shirt and badge.

Vic continued to apply pressure, but the blood loss was catastrophic. “I turned my head for a split fucking second.” She was literally shaking with anger. “Fuck!”

Mary lay with her head turned to the side, her mouth gulping air like a landed trout. It seemed as though the pulse in the veins at her temples was beginning to still. My voice was loud but sounded far away. “Isaac… I need your help.”

The small man, assisted by Janine, slid up the wall and partially settled his glasses while approaching with hands extended, hands that had saved my own life. I hoped they would save hers.

“Vertebral arteriovenous…” The doc’s face turned only slightly toward the young nurse. “I need a transvascular embolization kit. Quickly, please, Janine.” She slipped past us to the cabinets on the wall as he continued to speak, almost as if he were reminding himself of the procedure. “Neurologic deficits coincident with the fistula should resolve with the reestablishment of flow-” Janine brought back a balloon device as Isaac’s hands took over for mine, and I was stirred by Isaac’s sudden switch to his native Teutonic tongue. “Gottverdammit! ”

I held Mary’s head and looked into her eyes, the blue dulling with each pulse of blood. I knew that we were in a race as to whether the woman would die of blood loss or of suffocation from the mounting hematoma of coagulating blood that was forming in her throat. Isaac called for a number of paralytic drugs to be administered through the IV that Janine had nervously pushed into Mary’s arm.

The choice was brutal but necessary, and for the remainder of the episode, no matter how short that might be, Mary would be aware of what was happening and feel everything as we attempted to save her life.

Isaac took the endotracheal tube and began feeding it into the stricken woman’s mouth. He handed Janine the plastic that was connected to the balloon device and to a one-way valve. With hands shaking, the young nurse screwed a syringe without a needle but full of air into the valve and depressed the plunger on the syringe, effectively holding the tube in place as Isaac listened to Mary’s chest and stomach with a stethoscope.

He nodded, and Janine passed the bulb to me. Isaac looked directly into my blood-spattered face. “Einmal alle fьnf Sekunden.”

I stared back at him and smiled grimly at the concentration camp survivor. “English, Doc.”

Bloomfield swallowed. “Once every five seconds.”

One.

I was now Mary’s lungs.

Two.

Her lips quivered, and she continued to try to gulp air-pushing out silent words past the tube in her throat.

Three.

I allowed Isaac’s hands more access to the wound, and I brushed her bloody hair back from the high cheekbones, driving my eyes into hers. I spoke from only inches away.

Four. “Not today you don’t.”

Isaac continued to dig into the wound with a hemostat in an attempt to find the artery responsible for delivering the bright red blood to her brain, as Vic conceded him her portion of the wound.

Five. I compressed the bulb again.

“Got it.” The old man’s voice was tired but steady. “Clamp, please, Janine.” Mary Barsad would no longer die from blood loss or strangulation. He looked up and through the still-crooked glasses, and maybe because the circumstance had been so dire, it was funny. “She kicked me.”

I smiled, but it didn’t hold for long. “I bet she did.” I looked down. Mary’s eyes were wide with the pupils contracted to tiny tunnels. She was trying to get to a place to which I wasn’t going to let her go.

I’d lost too many, and I wasn’t losing another.

October 30, 1:00 A.M.

I was tired when Vic dropped me off at the motel room in Absalom, but she sat there, lounging against the seat, and watched me. I leaned in the window and met her eyes with my one good one. “You’re driving my truck.”

“Yeah.” She ran the palm of her hand over the leather steering wheel. “Thought I’d see what it felt like.”

“Well, don’t get used to it too soon.”

She paused for a moment, and I had to admit that the big, three-quarter-ton truck suited her. “You want to give me a straight answer this time?”

I turned so that she would see the undamaged side of my face. “What?”

“Have you lost your fucking mind? A tough-man contest?”

I cleared my throat, which made my eye hurt-not a good sign. “I wasn’t an official entry.”

“And that makes it better?”

I fessed up. “I think Henry wanted me to get in a fight.”

“Why?”

“I’m just guessing, but I think it was his way of getting me all unballed-up from Cady, the election, the investigation-”

“And me?”

I nodded, and that hurt, too. “And you.”

“Wily devil, isn’t he?” She snorted and covered her face with her hand. “Unballed-up. Is that a technical term?”

She shimmied over and raised her hand, putting the cool of the back of her fingers against the skin next to the wound on my left cheekbone. It felt really good, and I was carried back to that night in Philadelphia when we’d become intimate in a way with which I was still unsure I was comfortable. As a symptom of that discomfort, I changed the subject to her brother and my daughter. “I assume you’ve gotten the word on the latest from our respective households, both alike in dignity?”

Her eyebrow cocked like a revolver. “I think Romeo’s being a tard, but who am I to stand in the way of true love?”

“So, if they get married, does that mean that we’re-”

“I don’t want to think about it.” She summarily pulled her hand away and rested it on my shoulder. “You know, I’d come in if I wasn’t afraid of blowing your cover.”

“Uh huh.” I folded my forearms on the passenger doorsill. “I’m not so sure I’ve got much of a cover to blow.”

She inclined her head and looked up at me through the open window and her dark lashes. “I could always come in and blow something else.”

I didn’t move for a minute, and I don’t think I’d been at a loss like that since junior high school.

I was saved by a loud crash. Juana had carried out a garbage bag of empty bottles and deposited them onto the boardwalk. She looked over at the two of us with a hand on her hip. “I let your dog out, twice.”

“Thanks.” I leaned against my truck and introduced the two women. “Juana Balcarcel, this is Undersheriff Victoria Moretti-Vic, Juana.”

She started over but then stalled out when she saw me. “ЎAy, mierda!” She took the step down to glance at Vic, but her eyes kept returning to the side of my face. “Are you all right?”

“Yep, I’m okay. How’s my adversary?”

She shook her young head, the dark hair swinging. “He was still unconscious when the EMTs loaded him out with a neck brace, but when he woke up, they gave him the cash, since you weren’t an official entry. I think that made him feel much better.” She reached in and extended a hand to Vic.

“Hi.”

Vic shook her hand and smiled. “How you doin’?”

I felt compelled to continue. “Juana’s almost got an associate’s degree in criminal justice from over in Sheridan.”

They both ignored me.

La bandita flicked her eyes at my caved-in face and then looked back at Vic. “Is he really the sheriff?”

The Italian beauty’s head dropped in silent laughter, then raised and considered me. “Yeah, and believe it or not, most of the time he acts like one.”

Juana looked at me again and then back at Vic. I felt like sonar readings were being made, but I wasn’t on the same frequency, even though I could see the pings bouncing back and forth between the two.

“If you’re going to stay, I’m going to have to charge you the double rate for the room.”