The next weekend Darrel drove to the hometown of the hunters, a windblown, godforsaken place close to the Canadian line, and in an hour had the name of the man who was considered to be their leader. At 2 A.M. he used a pay phone to call the man’s house. The wife answered, but at Darrel’s insistence she woke her husband and got him on the phone.
“Who the hell is this?” the man said.
“Bang!” Darrel said, and hung up.
Darrel fired a single.44 Magnum round through the front window of the man’s auto parts store, listened to the bullet ricochet and break things inside, then drove back to Missoula.
At Christmas, the leader of the hunters received a greeting card inscribed with a single line: “I’m still out here.”
“Why so lost in thought tonight?” Greta asked.
“Thinking about you, Greta. Want to dance?” he said.
“The food’s almost ready.”
“It’ll wait. Come on,” he said.
He put one arm around her waist and lifted her right hand in the air. Bunny Berrigan’s “I Can’t Get Started” was playing on the stereo. Darrel pulled Greta against him, pushing her arms around his neck, as though he were going to hug her. But he let his fingers slide up her side, until he felt a knot about five inches below her armpit. The balls of his fingers traced its outline against her shirt. The knot had not grown in size, but it was harder, the configuration more defined.
“Don’t,” she said.
“It hurts?”
“I told you, it’s an insect bite. It got infected.”
“Let’s take a look at it.”
“It’s time to eat.”
“Take off your shirt.”
“Come into the bedroom and I might do that,” she said, half smiling.
“The romantic jerk-around is over, Greta. You did me. Know the expression ‘First time shame on you, second time shame on me’? You sicced the lowlifes on me at Dixon’s place. I almost got my kite burned, Greta. Problem is, I was onto you and it didn’t work. You’re in deep shit, girl.”
Her face was only inches from his, the dance music still playing. She started to speak, her eyes wide with both fear and shock.
“No, no,” he said, touching her lips with one finger. “You don’t lie anymore, Greta. While you thought I was asleep, I heard you talking to your trained cretins. So I told you the Global Research goods were at Dixon’s place and I was going to take him down. Sure enough, your pals showed up that night, ready to pop both me and the peckerwood. You’re a Judas, Greta. For cops, that’s a category below drug dealers and pimps. Ever hear of the Contras?”
“Who?” she said, all of it going too fast for her now, her mouth twitching, an ugly smell from the kitchen wrapping itself around her face. “The food’s burning. I left the burner on high.”
“That’s good, because we’re not going to be eating it. I was with the Contras in northern Nicaragua, Greta, saw some mean shit go down that I don’t like to remember. I was an adviser to Somoza’s Rattlesnake Brigade, badass dudes who wired people up to field generators, got fed by the peasants, or burned the ville. But we had a problem-a turncoat was pipelining intel into the Sandinistas. One day out on the trail the lieutenant stops the column and says to him, ‘You got to dig a hole, then take a rest, man. We’re going give you a good meal, some rum, you want to get laid, there’s time for that, too, man. But then you got to rest.’
“The turncoat knows what’s about to happen. First he lies, then he lies and he lies and he lies some more, and when that doesn’t work, he begs on his knees. My job was to stay out of it, but I didn’t want to see the guy get whacked. I kept hoping he’d do the right thing, act dignified, not insult people with his lies. But he was a dumb guy and thought he could lie his way out of it, then he thought he could beg and make people feel sorry for him. Know what that did? It made it easy for everybody else. Someone finally shut him up with an AK, splattered his salad all over a ditch, and nobody could have cared less.
“If the guy had been stand-up and told the truth, if maybe he’d given up the name of his contact, chances are the others would have let him go back to his family. You hearing me on this? Don’t lie. Don’t degrade yourself. I’m the only person who can save your ass. No, don’t look away, don’t start crying, either. That stuff belongs on soap operas, not in big-people land, Greta. Why’d you kill Charlie Ruggles? Poor ole Charlie, sawed-off little jarhead gets snuffed by a broad, probably humiliating as hell for him.”
He thought she was going to faint. She sank heavily into a chair, her face splotched with color, her green eyes as round as Life Savers. “I had to. I lost control of my life years ago. My second husband was a martial arts instructor who did security work for Karsten Mabus. I went to work for him, too.”
“That means you had to smother a guy in a hospital bed?”
Her hands were fists, her arms folded across her breasts, her throat as taut as a chunk of sewer pipe. Then the fingers of her left hand seemed to spread protectively over the lump on her side. “Mabus owns people. You can’t guess at what it’s like,” she said.
Her face was uplifted, her eyes fixed on his now. The direction of the conversation was not one Darrel liked. The motivation in most crimes was money. Not sex, not power. It was money. Money could buy you all the sex and power you wanted. A premeditated homicide, in this case holding a pillow down on the face of a potential government witness, was done for money. But Darrel’s own questions about the mark or lump or whatever it was on Greta’s side would not let go of him.
“Dixon says the crew working for Mabus have the mark of the beast on them. I don’t like to even repeat bullshit like that, but what the fuck is he talking about?” he said.
She bent over in the chair, her hands pressed on the sides of her head. “I’m going to be sick,” she said.
“Are you in a cult?”
“Cult? You idiot! Cult? No one can be that stupid.”
Her skin had turned as gray as a cadaver’s, her upper lip beaded with moisture. Then she sniffed at the air again, remembering the food on the stove. She ran into the kitchen and shut off the flame under a pan filled with blackened onions and scorched hamburger patties.
“Turn around and look at me,” Darrel said.
Instead, she swung the pan at his head. He blocked her arm and food that smelled like it had been dug out of an incinerator splattered all over the walls. But she wasn’t finished. She struck at his face and tried to claw his eyes, and he had to pin her arms against her sides and squeeze them against her torso in a bear hug until the tension made her breath seize in her chest and her spine pop.
He saw her mouth open, and he knew what was coming next. He released her, and she ran to the toilet and threw up, then went into the dry heaves on her knees, clenching the edge of the bowl, her back shaking, her skin the color of cardboard.
Darrel sat on the rim of the tub and flushed the toilet for her, then wet a towel and put it in her hand. “Why’d you rat-fuck me, Greta?” he said.
“Because I hate you,” she replied.
“For once you’re probably telling the truth,” he said, his eyes flat, concealing the recognition that her words could still wound him.
He leaned over and raised her shirt, exposing a dry, star-shaped swelling under her arm.
“That looks like a jungle ulcer. We used to get them in Nicaragua,” he said.
“Rah-rah for you,” she said.
“It’s just a skin problem, so now we got that out of the way. You’re going to wear a recorder into Karsten Mabus’s house, Greta.”
“No, I’m not.”
“I still don’t think you understand my status. I’m effectively canned, in large part because of you. That means we’re not using rule books here. You wear a recorder, or I put out the word you’re a federal informant. I also stoke up Wyatt Dixon and let him know who sent that collection of killers to his house. Want Wyatt coming around to see you again, Greta?”