“What’s in the road?” Juan asked, tapping on the brake to slow them down even further.
Parker looked ahead. Six or seven oblong shadows emerged from the whiteout. They appeared suspended in the air. They looked like small coffins on stilts.
The pickup inched forward. The forms sharpened in detail. Pronghorn antelope — part of the same herd or from another herd. A buck and his does. They stood braced into the storm, oblivious to the truck. Juan drove so close to them Parker could see snow packed into the bristles of their hide and their goatlike faces and black eyes. The buck had long eyelashes and flakes of snow caught in them. His horns were tall and splayed, the hooked-back tips ivory colored.
“Fucking antelope,” Lyle said. “Push ‘em out of the way or run right over them.”
Instead, Juan tapped the horn on the steering wheel. The sound was distant and tinny against the wind, but the pronghorns reacted; haunches bunching, heads ducking, and they shot away from the road as if they’d never been there.
Parker wished he could run like that.
“Few miles,” Lyle said. “We’ll pass under an archway. I helped build that arch, you know.”
“I didn’t know that,” Juan said.
“Me and Juan,” Lyle said to Parker, “We’ve worked together for the past what, twelve years?”
Juan said, “Twelve, yes. Twelve.”
“Some of the shittiest places you could imagine,” Lyle said. “All over the states of Wyoming and Montana. A couple in Idaho. One in South Dakota. Most of those places had absentee owners with pricks for ranch foremen. They’re the worst, those pricks. They don’t actually own the places so for them it’s all about power. You give pricks like that a little authority and they treat the workingman like shit. Ain’t that right, Juan?”
“Eees right.”
Parker thought: It’s like we’re the only humans on earth. The world that had been out there just that morning — the world of vistas and mountains and people and cars and offices and meetings — had been reduced for him to just this. Three men in the cab of a pickup driving achingly slow through a whiteout where the entire world had closed in around them. Inside the cab there were smells and weapons and fear. Outside the glass was furious white rage.
There was a kind of forced intimacy that was not welcome, Parker thought. He’d been reduced to the same level as these two no-account ranch hands who between them didn’t have a nickel to rub together. They had guns and the advantage, Parker thought, but they were smart in the way coyotes or other predators were smart in that they knew innately how to survive but didn’t have a clue how to rise up beyond that. He knew that from listening to Lyle testify in court in halting sentences filled with poorly chosen words. And when Lyle’s broken down ninety-eight-year-old grandfather took the stand it was all over. Parker had flayed the old man with whips made of words until there was no flesh left on his ancient bones.
Lyle likely couldn’t be reasoned with — he knew that already. No more than a coyote or a raven could be reasoned with. Coyotes would never become dogs. Likewise, ravens couldn’t be songbirds. Lyle Peebles would never be a reasonable man. He was a man whose very existence was based on grievance.
“This is getting bad,” Juan said, leaning forward in his seat as if getting six inches closer to the windshield would improve his vision. Thees.
Parker gripped the dashboard. The tires had become sluggish beneath the pickup as the snow accumulated. Juan was driving more by feel than by vision, and a few times Parker felt the tires leave the two-track and Juan had to jerk the wheel to find the ruts of the road again.
“We picked a bad day for this,” Juan said. Thees.
“Keep going,” Lyle said. “We been in worse than this before. Remember that time in the Pryor Mountains?”
“Si. That was as bad as this.”
“That was worse,” Lyle said definitively.
There was a metallic clang and Parker heard something scrape shrilly beneath the undercarriage of the truck.
“What the hell was that?” Lyle asked Juan.
“A T-post, I think.”
“Least that means we’re still on the road,” Lyle said.
“Ay-yi-yi,” Juan whistled.
“We could turn around,” Parker said.
“We could,” Juan agreed. “At least I could follow our tracks back out. As it is, I can’t see where we’re going.”
“We’re fine, Godammit,” Lyle said. “I know where we are. Keep going. We’ll be seeing that old house any time now.”
Parker looked out his passenger window. Snow was sticking to it and covering the glass. Through a fist-sized opening in the snow, he could see absolutely nothing.
He realized Lyle was talking to him. “What did you say?”
“I said I bet you didn’t expect you’d be doing this today, did you?”
“No.”
“You’re the type of guy who thinks once a judge says something it’s true, ain’t you?”
Parker shrugged.
“You thought after you made a fool of my grandpa you were done with this, didn’t you?”
“Look,” Parker said, “we all have jobs to do. I did mine. It wasn’t personal.”
Parker waited for an argument. Instead, he felt a sharp blow to his left ear and he saw spangles where a moment ago there had been only snow. The voice that cried out had been his.
He turned in the seat cupping his ear in his hand.
Lyle grinned back. Parker noticed the small flap of skin on the front sight of the Colt. And his fingers were hot and sticky with his blood.
“You say it ain’t personal, lawyer,” Lyle said. “But look at me. Look at me. What do you see?”
Parker squinted against the pain and shook his head slowly as if he didn’t know how to answer.
“What you see, lawyer, is a third-generation loser. That’s what you see, and don’t try to claim otherwise or I’ll beat you bloody. I’ll ask you again: what do you see?”
Parker found that his voice was tremulous. He said, “I see a working man, Lyle. A good-hearted working man who gets paid for a hard day’s work. I don’t see what’s so wrong with that.”
“Nice try,” Lyle said, feinting with the muzzle toward Parker’s face like the flick of a tongue from a snake. Parker recoiled, and Lyle grinned again.
“That man fucked over my grandpa and set this all in motion,” Lyle said. “He cheated him and walked away and hid behind his money and his lawyers for the rest of his life. Can you imagine what my grandpa’s life would have been like if he hadn’t been fucked over? Can you imagine what my life would have been like? Not like this, I can tell you. Why should that man get away with a crime like that? Don’t you see a crime like that isn’t a one-shot deal? That it sets things in motion for generations?”
“I’m just a lawyer,” Parker said.
“ And I’m just a no-account working man,” Lyle said. “And the reason is because of people like you.”
“Look,” Parker said, taking his hand away from his ear and feeling a long tongue of blood course down his neck into his collar, “maybe we can go back to the judge with new information. But we need new information. It can’t just be your grandfather’s word and his theories about Nazis and …”
“They weren’t just theories!” Lyle said, getting agitated. “It was the truth.”
“It was so long ago,” Parker said.
“That doesn’t make it less true!” Lyle shouted.
“There was no proof. Give me some proof and I’ll represent you instead of the estate.”
Parker shot a glance at the rearview mirror to find Lyle deep in thought for a moment. Lyle said, “That’s interesting. I’ve seen plenty of whores, but not many in a suit.”