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."
8
Driving into Helena from the north was usually something I enjoyed. The old part of the city was a pretty sight, built in a pocket at the base of steep forested slopes that rose like waves into the mountains beyond. Downtown was studded with grand old stone buildings. There were quite a few real mansions, and even the modest houses lining the streets conveyed a comfortable old-time feel. The huge dome of the state capitol and the twin spires of St. Helena Cathedral gave a sense of grandeur.
But on this particular trip, two khaki-uniformed sheriff's deputies in a cruiser were right behind me, escorting me to the Lewis and Clark County jail.
By now I'd had long enough to start grasping how slick Balcomb was, how far ahead of me he'd been at every step. All the time I'd worked there, I'd considered Kirk's commando act to be a silly show of "security." Now I realized that he'd really been gathering information, and that had provided Balcomb a ready-made excuse for bracing me. I'd been stupid enough to make it easy, but I was willing to bet that Balcomb had some pretext for getting rid of just about anybody on the place. He'd also had the foresight to impress on the other men that I wasn't to be trusted or believed, before I'd had a glimmer of what was happening.
I stood amazed at the kind of mind that could think like that. I suspected that he'd had a lot of practice.
The jail was in the original county courthouse, in the hills toward the south end of town. Probably its most famous resident had been the Unabomber, when they'd first nailed him a few years ago. I'd spent a night there once myself, the result of a youthful indiscretion involving too much tequila and a barroom brawl that ended with a friend of mine running a bouncer's head through a wall. The bouncer came out of it OK and the only damage was a minor drywall repair, but everybody agreed how lucky it was that he hadn't hit a stud.
When we got there, the deputies put handcuffs on me. The older one was burly and grizzled, with the seen-it-all look of a veteran. He was decent enough to be apologetic about the cuffs, and told me it was a formality for booking prisoners. The other wasn't much more than a teenager, and had a withered arm. Helena was a big enough place so you didn't know everybody, and I didn't know these men, which was just as well-it kept things impersonal. Cops tended to give me a two-edged feeling. On the one hand, they were usually just doing a thankless job. On the other, it was easy to imagine that they liked pushing people around, and the kid with the bad arm sure seemed to.
Inside, they turned me over to the jailers. The place didn't look any more modern than on my last visit, but the drill was different. Back then, they'd just made sure my friend and I didn't have any weapons and thrown us in a tank. Now they took away my clothes and issued me a bright orange jumpsuit, so small that the seam cut into my crotch. They made me take the laces out of my boots, then shuffle in them down a hallway with a few individual holding cells not much bigger than closets. The door to mine, a solid metal slab with a mesh-fortified window about a foot square, locked behind me with a no-bullshit clang.
Late on a Saturday afternoon, it was going to take a while to reach a judge and set my bail. I figured I'd be released on my own recognizance-I was a local, and an upstanding citizen. At least, I had been until an hour ago.
The jail would probably be busy later tonight, but now the other cells were empty, with nothing stirring in the hallway, no windows to the outside world, no diversions except graffiti, scrawled by well-equipped guys eager to meet others like themselves. The bunk was a thinly padded bench too short for me to stretch out on. I sat back with my knees up and my hands behind my head, and tried to make use of my first chance to concentrate.
Maybe Balcomb didn't know anything about those dead horses-would have been appalled to find out, investigated the matter, seen to it that anybody who had it coming got punished. Maybe there'd just been some kind of bizarre accident. Maybe I was overblowing the situation and blaming him out of shock and anger.
But I was more certain now of what I'd suspected right off-that Doug Wills's stopping me didn't really have anything to do with the lumber, and neither did any of what had followed.