C. J. Box
Pronghorns of the Third Reich
As he did every morning, Paul Parker’s deaf and blind old Labrador, Champ, signaled his need by burrowing his nose into Parker’s neck and snuffling. If Parker didn’t immediately throw back the covers and get up, Champ would woof until he did. So he got up. The dog used to bound downstairs in a manic rush and skid across the hardwood floor of the landing to the back door, but now he felt his way down slowly, with his belly touching each step, grunting, his big nose serving as a kind of wall bumper. Champ steered himself, Parker thought, via echo navigation. Like a bat. It was sad. Parker followed and yawned and cinched his robe tight and wondered how many more mornings there were left in his dog.
Parker glanced at his reflection in a mirror in the stairwell. Six-foot-two, steel-gray hair, cold blue eyes, and a jaw line that was starting to sag into a dewlap. Parker hated the sight of the dewlap, and unconsciously raised his chin to flatten it. Something else: he looked tired. Worn and tired. He looked like someone’s old man. Appearing in court used him up these days. Win or lose, the trials just took his energy out of him and it took longer and longer to recharge. As Champ struggled ahead of him, he wondered if his dog remembered his youth.
He passed through the kitchen. On the counter was the bourbon bottle he had forgotten to cap the night before, and the coffee maker he hadn’t filled or set. He looked out the window over the sink. Still dark, overcast, spitting snow, a sharp wind quivering the bare branches of the trees. The cloud cover was pulled down like a window blind in front of the distant mountains.
Parker waited for Champ to get his bearings and find the back door. He took a deep breath and reached for the door handle, preparing himself for a blast of icy wind in his face.
Lyle and Juan stood flattened and hunched on either side of the back door of the lawyer’s house on the edge of town. They wore balaclavas and coats and gloves. Lyle had his stained gray Stetson clamped on his head over the balaclava, even though Juan had told him he looked ridiculous.
They’d been there for an hour in the dark and cold and wind. They were used to conditions like this, even though Juan kept losing his focus, Lyle thought. In the half-light of dawn, Lyle could see Juan staring off into the backyard toward the mountains, squinting against the pinpricks of snow, as if pining for something, which was probably the warm weather of Chihuahua. Or a warm bed. More than once, Lyle had to lean across the back porch and cuff Juan on the back of his skull and tell him to get his head in the game.
“What game?” Juan said. His accent was heaviest when he was cold, for some reason, and sounded like, “Wha’ gaaaame? ”
Lyle started to reach over and shut Juan up when a light clicked on inside the house. Lyle hissed, “Here he comes. Get ready. Focus. Remember what we talked about.”
To prove that he heard Lyle, Juan scrunched his eyes together and nodded.
Lyle reached behind him and grasped the Colt .45 1911 ACP with his gloved right hand. He’d already racked in a round so there was no need to work the slide. He cocked it and held it alongside his thigh.
Across the porch, Juan drew a .357 Magnum revolver from the belly pocket of the Carat hoodie he wore.
The back door opened and the large blocky head of a dog poked out looking straight ahead. The dog grunted as it stepped down onto the porch and waddled straight away, although Juan had his pistol trained on the back of its head. It was Juan’s job to watch the dog and shoot it dead if necessary.
Lyle reached up and grasped the outside door handle and jerked it back hard.
Paul Parker tumbled outside in a heap, robe flying, blue-white bare legs exposed. He scrambled over on his hands and knees in the snow-covered grass and said, “Jesus Christ!”
“No,” Lyle said, aiming the pistol at a spot on Parker’s forehead. “Just us.”
“What do you want?”
“What’s coming to me,” Lyle said. “What I deserve and you took away.”
A mix of recognition and horror passed over Parker’s face. Lyle could see the fear in the lawyer’s eyes. It was a good look as far as Lyle was concerned. Parker said, “Lyle? Is that you?”
What could Lyle want, Parker thought. There was little of significant value in the house. Not like Angler’s place out in the country, that book collection of Western Americana. But Lyle? He was a warped version of Western Americana …
“Get up and shut the hell up,” Lyle said, motioning with the Colt. “Let’s go in the house where it’s warm.”
Next to Parker, Champ squatted and his urine steamed in the grass.
“He don’ even know we’re here,” Juan said. “Some watch dog. I ought to put it out of its misery.” Meeserie.
“Please don’t,” Parker said, standing up. “He’s my bird dog and he’s been a great dog over the years. He doesn’t even know you’re here.” Lyle noticed Parker had dried grass stuck to his bare knees.
“You don’t look like such a hotshot now without your lawyer suit,” Lyle said.
“I hope you got some hot coffee, mister,” Juan said to Parker.
“I’ll make some.”
“Is your wife inside?” Lyle asked.
“No.”
Lyle grinned beneath his mask, “She left you, huh?”
“Nothing like that,” Parker lied. “She’s visiting her sister in Sheridan.”
“Anybody inside?”
“No.”
“Don’t be lying to me.”
“I’m not. Look, whatever it is …”
“Shut up,” Lyle said, gesturing with his Colt, “Go inside slowly and try not to do something stupid.”
Parker cautiously climbed the step and reached out for the door Lyle held. Lyle followed. The warmth of the house enveloped him, even through his coat and balaclava.
Behind them, Juan said, “What about the dog?”
“Shoot it,” Lyle said.
“Jesus God,” Parker said, his voice tripping.
A few seconds later there was a heavy boom and simultaneous yelp from the back yard, and Juan came in.
Paul Parker sat in the passenger seat of the pickup and Lyle sat just behind him in the crew cab with the muzzle of his Colt kissing the nape of his neck. Juan drove. They left the highway and took a two-track across the sagebrush foothills eighteen miles from town. They were shadowed by a herd of thirty to forty pronghorn antelope. It was late October, almost November, the grass was brown and snow from the night before pooled in the squat shadows of the sagebrush. The landscape was harsh and bleak and the antelope had been designed perfectly for it: their brown and white coloring melded with the terrain and at times it was as if they were absorbed within it. And if the herd didn’t feel comfortable about something — like the intrusion of a 1995 beat-up Ford pickup pulling a rattletrap empty stock trailer behind it — they simply flowed away over the hills like molten lava.
“Here they come again,” Juan said to Lyle. It was his truck and they’d borrowed the stock trailer from an outfitter who got a new one. “They got so many antelopes out here.”
“Focus,” Lyle said. He’d long since taken off the mask — no need for it now — and stuffed it in his coat pocket.
Parker stared straight ahead. They’d let him put on pajamas and slippers and a heavy lined winter topcoat and that was all. Lyle had ordered him to bring his keys but leave his wallet and everything else. He felt humiliated and scared. That Lyle Peebles and Juan Martinez had taken off their masks meant that they no longer cared if he could identify them, and that was a very bad thing. He was sick about Champ.
Lyle was close enough to Parker in the cab that he could smell the lawyer’s fear and his morning breath. Up close, Lyle noticed, the lawyer had bad skin. He’d never noticed in the courtroom.