Then I stopped. A fresh tingle of adrenaline was starting through me, this time for a very different reason.
It was coming to me how this was going to look.
There were no witnesses to the fact that I'd acted in self-defense. On the contrary, the obvious take would be that I'd lured Kirk here to get even.
Investigators would quickly establish that he'd torched my lumber. Plenty of people knew about the long-standing friction that was there between us anyway, and several today had watched his snitching cost me my job and send me to jail, with him holding a rifle on me in the process.
Including, especially, Wesley Balcomb.
By killing Kirk, I'd destroyed my only backup for my story about the horses. I had no idea where they were buried, and the photos I'd seen on that camcorder sure weren't of them.
I had nothing on Balcomb now. But he had plenty of reason-and plenty of means-to railroad me for homicide.
My gaze was pulled to the pistol, lying where Kirk had dropped it, about eighteen inches from his hand-a Smith and Wesson.357 Magnum, with a slug powerful enough to penetrate a car engine. The slightest graze would have sent me reeling, giving him plenty of room to finish the job.
But I had a different worry about it now. Both make and caliber were so common around here that they were generic-you could buy one for a couple hundred bucks in any pawnshop, and cheaper in a parking lot behind a bar. This one was fairly old and a little beat-up. It probably wasn't registered to him-which meant that I could have been the one who'd brought it here-and if it was his, I could have held a gun of my own on him and forced him to give it to me. All the staging he'd done-even using my gloves-could be seen as clumsy attempts on my part to bolster my claim of self-defense.
And without question, the knife that had killed him and the hand that had held it-both were mine.
I'd gotten a real good look at the criminal justice system when I'd worked the crime beat in Sacramento, and as if the vision that Madbird had joked about finally came, I found myself staring into into a tumbling kaleidoscope of probabilities that froze just long enough for me to see to the end with chilling clarity.
I'd be slammed back in jail as soon as the sheriffs arrived, and this time the bail would be astronomical. I'd sit in a cell for months or years while some overworked court-appointed attorney tried to wrangle with the smooth power of Balcomb's wealth and behind-the-scenes influence, and the outrage of Kirk's prominent family. If I was lucky, I might get off with manslaughter, but if suspicion was strong that I'd set this up in advance, then premeditation entered in. I'd trade the county lockup for Deer Lodge, with only the question of how old a man I'd be when-if-I got out.
The invisible grip that had held me all day tightened like a junkyard's car-crushing vise.
Then, through the chaos in my mind, came a thought so clear it almost seemed spoken by a voice.
Nobody knows about this yet.
A weaker voice protested that no, I couldn't, I just wasn't like that. But my body started moving, and gathered speed under the power of a whole new kind of fear.
I spent the next four hours working harder than I'd ever worked in my life.
22
A distant sound jolted me awake, too dazed to grasp where I was.
Then I remembered.
When I'd gotten home, not long before dawn, I'd come in quietly and made sure nobody was around, then gone into the woods to a spot that was well hidden and gave a clear view of my cabin and the road. I'd wrapped myself in a sleeping bag and sat back upright against a little berm, with my old man's pistol in my lap. I wouldn't have believed I could have closed my eyes, let alone slept, but my adrenaline had evaporated and exhaustion slammed down like the lid of a coffin. Now the hazy light of an autumn morning was filtering down through the pine branches around me.
The noise I'd heard was from a vehicle coming up my drive-a sheriff's cruiser.
It pulled up beside my truck. As the driver unfolded his lanky frame out of the car, I saw that it was Gary Varna.
He'd abandoned his usual button-down shirt and jeans and was in full uniform-counting his Smokey Bear hat, six and a half feet of khaki and leather. Ordinarily, you never saw him with a gun-he probably carried a small one concealed, like most off-duty cops-but on formal occasions he strapped on a more traditional Montana sheriff's weapon, a.44 Magnum that looked the size of a jackhammer. He was wearing it now.
I got up fast, shoved my gear into the brush, and hurried to meet him, keeping the cabin between us so it wouldn't look like I'd been so far away. My head, ribs, and wrist all reminded me of details from yesterday.
When I got to Gary, he had my truck's hood up and seemed to be admiring the engine.
"Morning, Hugh," he said. "I haven't seen this much of you in years."
"Sheriff."
"Out for a stroll?"
"Just to take a leak."
"Nice old rig," he said, patting the fender. "What you got in here, a 327?"
I nodded. "My dad had it bored and revalved for the changeover to unleaded, so it's a little bigger now."
"Nice," he said again. He closed the hood with a clang that made me wince.
"Come on in," I said.
His blue-gray eyes took in the cabin's interior without seeming to, in that practiced cop way. There wasn't much to see-the nook I euphemistically called my kitchen, just big enough for an old Monarch wood cookstove and a sink; a bed made of three-quarter-inch plywood with a worn-out mattress on top; a table and some other pieces of furniture; and some bookshelves and prints and such that I'd mounted on the rough log walls.
The clock read 7:39 AM. I hadn't expected this visit so early, or that Gary himself would come. But I'd known that somebody would, and I'd done a little staging of my own, rumpling the bedding and leaving a bottle of Old Taylor and some empty beer cans around.
"Sorry to interrupt you," he said, hooking his thumbs in his gun belt. "You look like you could use some more sleep."
"I got pretty fucked up last night." I didn't have to pretend much about that. I was bleary-eyed, rumpled, and still wearing dirty work clothes-although not the same ones as yesterday.
"The kind of day you had, I can't blame you," he said.
"Thanks. I'll make some coffee."
"Don't worry about it on my account. I already drunk a gallon." So. He'd been up and on this for a while.
I started filling the kettle, mostly to give my hands something to do. "You're looking very official," I said.
"Not by choice-just in case something comes up. I got a call about five this morning from Reuben Pettyjohn. He'd just got a call from Kirk's girlfriend. I guess she didn't want to talk to our office directly-she's got a couple little drug issues pending. Anyway, seems Kirk never came home last night."
I kept my hands moving and did my best to put on a wry face.
"I don't find that too hard to believe," I said. Kirk had a well-known penchant for sliding around on his live-in squeeze, Josie. Even Helena had its meth whores, and he was popular with them.
"That's what me and Reuben would of figured, and so did Josie, at first," Gary said. "She drove around town a while, checking the bars and other gals' apartments and all that. She kept calling his cell phone and he wouldn't answer, which ain't hard to believe, either.
"But then an hour or two after midnight, her calls started going straight to the phone's answering machine. Now, it's possible he turned it off or it ran out of juice, but she says he was crazy about that phone and he made damn sure to keep it working twenty-four seven, no matter what."
Son of a bitch, his cell phone. He must have had it stashed in the Jeep. I'd rummaged through there quickly, looking for my camera, but I hadn't found that and I'd never even thought about the phone.