“Half things?”
“Yes, because I am only half with them. Someday, all of me will be with them, and they will tell me everything.”
I smiled. “I hope you don’t get the whole story too soon, Lonnie.” I looked down at the rifle in his lap. “Lonnie, did you take the gun out and shoot it a bunch of times?”
He looked genuinely ashamed. “I was angry, so I shot one of the fence posts out back.”
I thought of the things I might shoot if somebody had done to my daughter what had been done to his. The image of Lonnie out on his back porch late one night shooting at a singular fence post hung there just out of range. I’m pretty sure I jumped a little when the radio crackled in the truck. I could hear Ruby’s voice through the glass and the transceived miles. “Come in, Unit One.”
It was probably word from the Sportshop or on the Espers but, when I looked up at the clock on the dash, it was only two-thirty; maybe it was Jim Keller. I opened the door and keyed the mic. “Base, this is Unit One. Go ahead?”
Static. “Walt, George Esper is gone again.”
I slumped against the doorjamb of the truck and rested my head on the mic in my hand. “You’ve got to be kidding.”
Static. “He stole Ferg’s truck. Vic’s in pursuit.”
“Where?”
Static. “Out 16, probably on the highway. He already ran into somebody near the co-op. Turk’s out there now.”
“Did anybody notify the HPs?”
Static. “Yes.”
I waited a moment; chances are Vic was still in range. Static, then a fainter signal broke through. “I’m at Mile Marker 113, and if the little fucker was up here, I would have caught him by now.”
“Vic, leave the highway to the HPs, I got a sneaking suspicion that he’s headed out this way.”
Static, and I listened as she slowed the five-year-old unit down to under a hundred, negotiating the divider with one hand. “I’m on my way back, but if that’s the case he’s got a hell of a lead on me.”
“We’ll get him from the other direction. Unit One, out.” I hung the mic back up and leaned out to look at Henry. “You coming?”
He nodded and started pulling Lonnie back up to the house. Lonnie grabbed the wheel rails of his chair and slid himself to a stop. “You go ahead, I can get back in the house myself. Yes, it is so.” Then he reached down and handed the rifle up to me. “Take this.” I took the rifle as he handed the black plastic box to Henry.
Henry looked at him, nodded, and came around to the passenger door. As I crossed in front of the truck, I stopped. “Lonnie, you know that cartridge box?”
He continued to smile. “Yes?”
“It has writing on it, next to the bullet hole?” He nodded and smiled. “Whose handwriting is that?”
“You should know that handwriting.”
“Lonnie, I don’t have a lot of time…”
“Nedon Nes Stigo, He Who Sheds His Leg.”
Lucian.
“He used to shoot with us out at the Buffalo Wallows, back in the day. One time, my father challenged him to try to hit a target as small as the cartridge box at four hundred yards, and he did it. Yes, it is so.”
It took me a minute to get myself going. “Thanks, Lonnie.”
I climbed in the truck and, reaching for my seat belt, motioned Henry to do the same. He placed the small, black plastic case at his feet and held the rifle as easily in his hands as he had held the one in Omar’s helicopter. By the time we got to the end of the state route that joined with the main drag, we were doing about a hundred with the sirens and lights at full tilt. It was still going to take us more than twenty minutes to get back to the other side of the reservation, and my knuckles tightened around the wheel. I concentrated on the road as we passed the cutoff down to the Powder River. “I think he’s headed toward us.”
“Because of what he said at the hospital, about living on the Rez.”
“It’s as good a guess as any.”
He braced a hand against the dash as the gravitational pull of a sweeping turn almost slid us into the barrow ditch. “What did Lonnie say about the writing on the box?”
“He said it was Lucian’s… You never heard that?”
“I never asked.”
“I guess it was done a long time ago, when Lucian was shooting with Lonnie’s father.” At the next straightaway he opened what looked like a cleaning kit and pulled out two long stems and began threading them together. “What’re you doing?”
“I am cleaning this rifle.”
“That’s evidence.”
“No, it is a weapon.”
It took awhile, even at our speed, but we finally made it to the northern end of the Powder when another vehicle popped over the horizon that was traveling at a pretty good speed of its own. From the distance, it was hard to tell who it was but, after a moment, I could see the lights. I grabbed the mic. “Vic, is that you?”
Static. “Fuck yes, it’s me. Where in the hell did that little shit go?” I slowed and stopped. By the time I had, she was pulling up alongside us and was rolling down her window; she had to crank. I cut the siren, and she leaned an elbow on the sill. “What now?”
I thought. “Well, if he didn’t take 14 back toward Sheridan, the only other main road is Powder River back here.”
“North or south?”
“We’ll take south, you take north.” She was gone in a billowing cloud of blue burned oil and tire smoke before I could finish my sentence. Maybe, if I bought her a new unit… I turned the Bullet around and laid a little strip of my own, accelerating back to the Powder. When we got to the cutoff, the only thing headed north was a drifting cloud of dirt that hazed the gravel road into the distance. We made the turn and headed south as the back end of the Bullet attempted to get ahead of us. I countersteered and hit the gas again as we slid around the first turn just about sideways and clipped a few mailboxes. I noticed Henry struggling to hold onto the Sharps and find his seat belt with one hand. “What’s the matter?”
“Just buckling up. It is the law.” This was the first time I had taken the big beast up to speed for any length of time; there hadn’t been any reason before. It was heavy, but I was surprised by the agility it had. “All right, you can crash now.” He had gotten his seat belt on and was studying the road farther ahead as I dealt with the ground at hand. “I see dust.”
If it was George, he had just jumped off the highway. A thought snagged in my mind. “Do you think he’s got the radio on in that thing?”
Henry turned to look at me as I negotiated another turn and another quickly afterward. “That would explain why he got off the state routes.”
“There’s something else.”
“What?”
“The old Esper place is out here somewhere, the one that Reggie’s great-great-grandfather settled. I remember Vonnie telling me about it. She bought a bunch of property on a speculation that they were going to put that power plant out there someday.”
“How does romance bloom?”
“Don’t ask.” I could feel his disapproving glance as we crossed a cattle guard and momentarily became airborne. We made for the washboard curve that lay ahead, and he braced himself. “Hey, I thought you guys always thought it was a good day to die.”
“Attributed to Crazy Horse who was often misquoted.”
The road straightened after the washboard, and I was able to bring all ten cylinders on line. The speedometer was creeping back up on eighty, and we were starting to get that light, floating feeling on the ball bearings of loosely packed dirt. My testicles felt as if they were somewhere in my chest cavity, and it wasn’t a pleasant feeling. If we missed one of the curves at this speed, we were most assuredly dead. All Henry said was “Ooh, shit.”
We hit the next turn at just about a hundred, and the sickening feeling in my stomach magnified as the laws of geometry exerted themselves on the velocity of all that Dearborn steel. At any reasonable speed it wasn’t much of a turn, certainly nothing worthy of a Jan and Dean ballad, but it was enough to slam the side of the truck into the red clay embankment. When we bounced off the wall, I overcorrected, and the Bullet shot for the river. I turned ever so slightly, trying to urge our velocity forward, and only the left rear wheel slipped off the road. The truck tipped slightly back to center where we gained purchase and shot into the next straightaway. He looked over at me, the passenger-side mirror beating against his door. “You want to wreck? Do your side, okay?”