"That little prick Kirk come on to me in the bar the other night, trying to pal up," Madbird said. "I flicked my finger crost his ear." He snapped his forefinger off his thumb against the metal dash hard enough to make it ring. "That was the end of that shit."
"You better watch it. You can bet he'll be looking for an excuse to take you out, too."
Madbird gave me a fierce grin that I'd come to know well, and that I could never help associating with scalping.
"He don't have to look far. You ain't the only one been helping himself to something that don't exactly belong to him."
I wasn't entirely surprised. "Yeah? What?"
"You know that Tessa?"
"Sure, sort of." Tessa was Doug Wills's wife-a rangy, unhappy-looking bleached blond stuck living in a trailer out in the middle of nowhere, with a couple of young kids. I'd been pulled off our job one time to go there and fix a jammed bathroom door. The floor had seemed carpeted with dirty diapers and National Enquirers.
"Every so often she gets somebody to sit them kids, and I take her for a drive," Madbird said. "She got some rose-colored panties she hangs out in the wash. That's the signal."
I was surprised now. That explained why those sleeping bags were spread out into a bed.
"Christ on a bike," I said. "I've been passing by her trailer every day myself. I've even seen those panties hanging on the line. I didn't know that was any kind of signal."
"That's 'cause you ain't a Indian. You don't know how to read the trail."
"I guess I could use some lessons."
"You just got one."
"If you're so fucking smart, how come you're letting yourself get dragged into this?"
"Hey, at least I ain't dumb enough to drag in a drunk Indian."
I took the bait, and said the sort of thing you'd better not say unless you'd spent a few thousand hours sweating together.
"I didn't know there was any other kind."
He rumbled with deep gut laughter and answered me with his hands in sign language, fingers flexing and weaving like snakes. I caught the wheel of the veering van and steered it back onto the road.
"What's that mean?" I said.
"Your squaw give lousy head."
We cracked fresh beers, and I realized I was feeling a little better.
14
Madbird switched off the flashlight beam and we stood there in the dark, up to our ankles in the sea of garbage that was the dump at Pettyjohn Ranch. We'd spent a good ten minutes kicking and pawing through it. We'd found some of the plywood that had come from our job. But there wasn't any doubt. The D-8 Cat had been moved again, and the horses were gone-dug out, with junk then spread around to cover the hole. The only sign that they'd been there was a trace of that rotten smell.
That slick bastard Balcomb had long-cocked me again. Maybe he'd come out here to check and seen that hoof sticking up. Maybe he was just playing it safe.
Maybe I hadn't done such a hot job of convincing him I hadn't seen them.
We walked around for several more minutes trying to figure out where the Cat had taken them. But the ground around the dump was scarred with years of its tracks, and the dirt road was hard as concrete. To the northeast lay a big chunk of grazing land, several thousand acres of scrub timber and prairie where nobody ever set foot. I was willing to bet that those carcasses were out there now, dropped into a ravine or shoved up against a hillside and covered over-this time, thoroughly enough so nothing could get to them.
Madbird stopped, like he was listening. I stopped, too, thinking he was hearing a vehicle. But the night was still quiet. That part, at least, was going well.
"I'm wondering if we ain't looking in the wrong direction," he said. "Forget where they went to-what about where they come from? It don't seem likely they got killed right here. They'd of had to be penned up or tethered. If we find that, it might tell us something."
I rubbed my hair in exasperation. With all the brain racking I'd done, that obvious point had slipped right by me.
"I'd guess he took them out in the woods and tied them to trees," I said.
"Then why didn't he just bury them there? It don't make sense he'd haul them back here." He swung his hand southwestward, toward the ranch proper. "I'd say more likely he was in the hay fields. Then he'd of had to move them someplace he could cover them up, and this is the closest."
We started walking in the direction he'd pointed, making an arc through the meadow that surrounded the pit's rim. Within a minute, his flashlight picked out the Cat's tracks, wide ridged lines crushed into the stubble of second-cut hay.
"Well, will you fucking look at that," he said softly. "You know this place pretty good. What's out there?"
The tracks angled away from the road, straight across the field toward the northernmost border of the ranch. I had to think for a few seconds, but then I remembered.
"An old calving shed," I said. "It's another half mile, give or take."
15
Madbird crouched on his heels, his right hand reading the ground-testing its feel, picking up chunks of dirt, crumbling and smelling them. Every half minute or so he'd edge a couple of feet sideways and do it again. I walked along with him, holding the flashlight so he could see.
The shed was the kind of old structure that every good-size ranch had a few of, made of weathered rough-sawn timber and a corrugated metal roof. This one was a sort of frontier post, used for calving in late winter and early spring. Cows going into labor would sometimes seek out the remotest possible places, and the shed was a sanctuary both for them and for the hands out rounding them up, often in blizzards and subzero temperatures. Four walls and a propane heater could make all the difference. But nobody came here this time of year, and the nearest habitations were the hired hands' trailers, a mile and a half away.
It was a perfect place for dirty work.
The walls were a good ten feet high and the barn doors were wide enough to bring in a midsize truck for equipment and feed. Or a D-8 Cat. It would have been tight, but the dirt floor looked freshly turned, as if the blade had scraped and dragged it over-probably to cover the traces of butchering the horses. What was left was a sour-smelling mash of old hay, manure, and hair, along with some dampness and soil-crusted bits that might have been blood and flesh. But blood and flesh were what this place was all about. Calf birthings left a lot of organic residue. The lucky ones made it with relative ease, but many came harder, and sometimes there was no other choice than to pull the infant out with a come-along. If one calf lost its mother and another cow her calf, it was common practice to skin the dead calf and drape the hide over the live one, in the hope that the bereft cow would adopt and nurse the orphan that smelled like her own. This earth was soaked with decades of that necessary carnage. Trying to separate out the new from the old would have called for a sophisticated technical analysis, and all it stood to prove was that some horses had somehow gotten into the mix.
Madbird crunched a last fistful of dirt, then tossed it away and stood. I followed him outside and we checked the perimeter, until he stopped at several hay bales lying on the ground.
"What are you doing here?" he said to the bales. It did seem odd. Hay was brought in to feed, but not in this season, and there was no reason to drag it around the building's rear.
He took the flashlight from me and moved the beam slowly across the ground, then crisscrossing up the shed's wall. The siding was pine of random widths, mostly ten or twelve inches, run vertically. The wood had dried and shrunk away from the rusting nails over the years, but the workmanship, although rough, was neat-the product of some long-gone cowboy carpenters who hadn't cared about pretty, just decent.