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“I just wanted to clear up why I was watching your house. This lady Ms. Lundstrum has gotten hold of a crazy idea and I thought maybe you had some false notions, too,” he said.
“I know exactly why you were watching us,” she replied.
He looked away in desperation, then knelt down so he could talk to her at eye level.
“You’re making me uncomfortable,” she said.
“Listen, the evidence against Joh
“The prosecution will say he had jeans on under his greens. Why are you doing this?” she said.
“I want to let all that bad blood go. I’m sorry for what I did to Joh
“So tell it to Joh
He got up and tried to brush the grass stain off the knee of his slacks. “If I acted disrespectfully to you, I apologize. I don’t mean to be a bad guy, but sometimes-” He didn’t finish.
No, you’re just a geek, she thought, then felt oddly uncharitable as she watched him try to tuck his shirt in with his thumb and disguise his pot stomach.
THE NEXT MORNING I drove up to Joh
“Ever see a pair with that much red in them?” he said.
“Not really,” I said.
“Go
I looked at him to see if he was serious. “Sounds like a lifetime job,” I said.
He gri
“A sixteen-year-old boy from the res was killed a while back by a white man whose truck he broke into,” I said, ignoring his invitation.
Joh
“That kid was your nephew?” I said.
“What about it?” he asked.
“The court released the guy who did it. It’s reason for a family member to bear a lot of anger toward the system. It’s the kind of stuff the prosecution is going to use against us. Why didn’t you mention you were the boy’s uncle?”
“I remember when a white rancher ran over an Indian kid hitchhiking outside Missoula and got a twenty-dollar traffic fine. The kid died. The only cost to that rancher was his twenty bucks. That’s the way it is.”
He opened the gate to the lot and came outside, then looped the gate secure. He propped his arms across the top rail on the fence. The wind was up, balmy and smelling of distant rain, denting the alfalfa and timothy in the fields, puffing pine needles out of the trees on the slopes. The two sorrels were ru
“You think all this is worth fighting for?” he said.
“Damn straight it is,” I replied.
“I think one day the bison will run free again,” he said.
I kept my eyes straight ahead and didn’t reply.
“Let’s go see Amber and drink some coffee,” he said.
THE NEXT MORNING, Fay Harback said she wanted to see me in her office.
“I’m a little busy. Why don’t you come over here?” I said.
“Let me define the situation a bit more clearly. How would you like to have American Horse’s bail revoked?” she replied.
The previous night there had been a break-in at an agricultural research lab outside Stevensville. The intruders were not amateurs or vandals. They had used bolt cutters on the gate chain, cut the telephone line on which the alarm system was dependent, and called the alarm service to report the downed wire, using the owner’s password.
Once inside, they had rifled all the hard-copy document files, downloaded computers, rounded up all the floppy disks they could find, and drilled the floor safe under a canvas tarp they spread over themselves to conceal the glow of their flashlights and the noise of the drill.
A man returning from a bar in town around 3 A.M. reported that he saw four men and a woman exit the back of the building and cross a field to a grove of cottonwoods, then drive away in a van. As he rounded the bend, his headlights swept across the group and he was sure of what he saw: the woman was white but the men were dark-ski
“So you’re saying four Indians and a white woman broke into a research lab? What’s that have to do with Joh
“American Horse is involved in this. If not directly, he knows who did it.”
“You’re calling Joh
“Your friend Seth Masterson has already been here. This whole business smells of American Horse’s ongoing war with the federal government. I don’t like being the last person on the telephone tree. I don’t like being used, either.”
“I don’t know anything about the break-in, Fay. I doubt if Joh
“Where was your client last night?” She looked at me expectantly, and I realized she secretly hoped I could provide an alibi for him, perhaps for his sake, perhaps so she would not have to feel deceived.
But I didn’t answer her question. In reality, I was already wondering how the intruders had pulled it off. I was also wondering if some of Joh
“Most security services pay minimum wage to their employees. So their employees come and go and often have little loyalty to their employer. You have no idea who the woman might be?”
“No, I don’t,” I replied.
She walked in a circle, her frustration obvious. “I hate a lie. I hate it worse than anything in the world,” she said.
I fixed my gaze on the trees rustling on the courthouse lawn and a long line of bicyclers moving through the traffic.
“What’s the story on this guy Masterson?” she said.
“He’s like a lot of people who work for the G. He’s a good man who has to take orders from a bunch of political shitheads,” I replied.
She tried to look serious but couldn’t hide a smile. “You see Amber Finley?” she asked.
“Sometimes.”
“Tell her what it’s like to cell with a bull dyke up at the women’s pen.”
DARREL MCCOMB HAD never belonged to a church, but he did believe in spiritual entities. In his mind there was a Valhalla where slain heroes lived in a giant meadhouse and feasted on roasted boar and watched over the few who fought to protect the many. One of those slain heroes was Rocky Harrigan, Darrel’s mentor in a half-dozen clandestine operations, killed when his cargo plane crashed into a mountain during an airdrop to anti-Russian forces in Afghanistan.
Rocky’s handsome face gri
Why’d Rocky have to go and get himself killed? Darrel thought. And for what? Dropping ordnance and C-rats to Muslim fanatics who one day would fly planes into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. What a travesty. Who wrote the damn history books, anyway? Names like Rocky’s never got in there. Instead, the whole nation lionized fraternity pissants who had never heard a shot fired in anger in their lives.