Balcomb wouldn't have come up here himself. He'd have sent somebody who was familiar with this area, who wouldn't balk at arson-who'd known I was in jail.
The first face that appeared in my mind was Kirk Pettyjohn's.
He knew where this place was, knew its isolation and that he could easily get in and out unnoticed. He was capable of something like this, on every level. And taking a gouge out of me would thrill him.
I wasn't happy about his waving that rifle at me this afternoon, but I'd intended to let it go.
Not this.
But first came the problem that the pile of ashes in front of me literally meant thirty-five hundred bucks up in smoke-on top of the bail money and whatever the hell else might be lurking down the road.
At least I didn't have to worry about finding a truck and driver any more.
With this new wrinkle, my hope that Tom Dierdorff might be able to smooth things over was out the window. Balcomb was twisting the knife as payback for riling him up and smarting off to him.
But there was a much more disturbing message. He had the power to stomp me like a bug. He could easily have had my whole place burned, except he didn't take me that seriously. This was a love tap, a joke. Without doubt, he could arrange to damage me far more in some sneaky way that the cops couldn't protect me from or even punish.
It gave my fears a concrete base. But my anger was still rising, too, and got another charge from the thought that he was probably laughing at me right now.
I dug out my money stash from the loose foundation rock where I kept it, inside an old metal drill bit box. I was better off than I'd thought, with a little over seventeen hundred. Together with what I had in the bank, that would almost cash out Sarah Lynn.
It would also buy me a disposable camera. The couple of good ones I'd had back in my newspaper days were long gone.
I made a point of locking up the pistol inside the cabin again before I started for town, and promised myself I wasn't going to do anything stupid. But I was getting more in the mood.
13
Main Street in Helena was also known as Last Chance Gulch, the place where some on-the-ropes miners in the 1860s had discovered the gold that put this place on the map. It was the city's prime downtown business strip, but when I was growing up, it had had several bars where you could get your ass kicked just for walking in. I'd seen that happen more than once, along with men getting thrown out through doors or lying unconscious on the sidewalk in front. Sometimes in the mornings there'd be bloodstains in the snow. Those were people who'd come up in hard times, tough and proud and with a lot of pent-up emotion, including anger. The bar life was one of the few outlets.
Most of those places were gone now. The roughest ones, the Indian bars at the south end, had been torn down to make way for a pedestrian mall. About the closest thing left was O'Toole's-small, dark as a cellar even on bright afternoons, and thick with cigarette smoke that had started building up generations ago. Tonight it was crowded and noisy. When I walked in, I could hear the jukebox playing, but it was impossible to tell what.
I'd hoped that Madbird would be here and he was, standing at the far end of the bar. In a place like O'Toole's, there was always the chance of a fist or bottle coming at you, and it paid to stay on your feet. I made my way over to him, saying hello to a couple of people I knew, trying to act like everything was the same as ever. By the time I got there, he had frosty cans of Pabst and shots of Makers Mark bourbon waiting.
His nostrils widened in a snort as he looked me over.
"You smell like you been rolling around in a ashtray," he said, in a gravelly voice that was like no other I'd ever heard.
I drank down my shot and signaled Denise, the bartender, for refills.
"Deep shit is more like it," I said. "I've got trouble, Madbird."
He lifted his chin in acknowledgment. Deep shit and trouble came as no surprise to him.
He had the kind of harsh powerful face and thick black hair I'd seen in photos of old-time chiefs and braves, and an agile, compactly muscled build like a natural halfback. His grandmother had been born in an Indian camp in Heart Butte, northern Montana, in 1910. His family name was actually Mag-dah-kee, which meant "Bird of Prey." Nobody ever used his first name, Robert. One time when we'd been drinking seriously, he'd let it out that he'd had a favorite stepbrother Robert who had died young, and that the name had died with him.
Madbird had grown up near his grandmother's birthplace on what was now the Blackfeet Reservation, legendary for its toughness. I remembered often that when I was eighteen I'd gone away to college in California, but at that same age, he'd been a Marine forward observer in Vietnam.
The two of us had first worked together more than twenty years ago, and steadily for the past nine. He was an ace electrician and carpenter, handling the job in the same cool quick way as everything else. While other guys were standing around talking about what to do, Madbird was getting it done. I'd come to depend on him heavily in a lot of ways. I'd never been quite sure why he liked me, but I had the feeling it was largely because I didn't make any sense to him.
"I was about to go get some pussy, but there ain't any rush," he said. "What's the deal?"
He gazed straight ahead while I gave him a low-voiced, two-minute version of what had happened. When I finished, he shook his head, once.
"I never heard of nothing like with them horses," he said.
"I'm still having a hard time believing it, but I know what I saw."
He didn't move again or change expression for another minute or so, just kept staring at the mirror behind the bar. You couldn't see much of it because of stacked-up liquor bottles, and what you could see was mostly a murky kaleidoscope of talking heads and gesturing hands behind us. But Madbird's face was in the foreground, looking like a chunk of Mount Rushmore.
"You gonna take on Balcomb?" he finally said.
"I'm hoping I can make him back off. I want to go out there and get some photos of those carcasses. But if I get caught on the property, I'm more fucked than ever."
He nodded slowly. "So you could use a ride. Say, in a electrician's van, so you could hide in back if somebody come along."
"I guess that occurred to me."
He raised his beer and drained it. "Funny thing-I just remembered I left my Hole Hawg at the job, and I'm gonna need it tomorrow."
I exhaled with relief. The ranch was probably dead as a tomb right now, but if we did run into somebody, he had an excuse for being there.
Then there was the deeper truth-I wanted him with me, and he knew it.
"You sure?" I said.
"Hell, yeah. My old lady's probably still out with her girlfriends anyway. But you got to buy the beer."
"Denise, how about a sixer to go," I called to her, dropping a ten on the bar.
Madbird scooped up his change and tossed out another ten.
"Make it two," he said. "Why fuck around?"
When we walked to where Madbird was parked, the evening chill was more noticeable, maybe because of the body heat inside the bar. His van was of about the same vintage as my pickup, one of the four-wheel-drive models Ford had made in the early 1970s. It was packed with emergency equipment and supplies, and saturated with the smell that men in this line of work came to savor: oily tools and musty clothes and the building materials that kept this world running. There was even a foam pad-and a couple of sleeping bags on the floor that I could burrow into if I had to take a dive. I wouldn't be proud of it, but I'd rather live with that than add a trespassing bust to the mix.
We drove out of town past Fort Harrison, angling northwest toward the Rockies' foothills. The moon was on the wax, hanging over the high peaks of the divide. This was another drive that I usually really enjoyed.