Banish’s hope fell. She was neither his wife nor his daughter. The woman entered and crossed to him with a tentative, relieved smile on her face, stopping only a few feet away.
“Agent Banish?” she said. “I’m Lucy Ames.”
Banish shook his head. He still did not know her.
“From the World Financial Center,” she said. “I was a hostage.” The woman was reaching into her handbag. “I just wanted to thank you for saving my life.”
She pulled out a gun and fired. It flashed and there was a burning deep in Banish’s stomach, a bodywide flare of pain. Then he was on the floor.
Confusion, sounds of a commotion, chairs being overturned. Dr. Reed kneeling over him, screaming for the nurse. Blood on her hands.
Banish looked up past her at the cork board ceiling. His lips were moving. He was trying to speak. He was trying to say something. He could not believe that he was going to die this way.
Monday, August 2,1993
Huddleston, Montana
It was a small municipal building, flat-roofed, cement-sided, with dry shrubs lining the entranceway and a pool of gravel that was the parking lot out in front. Beyond the foothills bowing in the distance loomed enormous green-blue mountains, thunderous in their silence, mist shrouding and wisping over their snowcapped peaks like shower steam. The sky was vast and cool blue and broken with clouds.
It was Monday morning. The Border County Sheriff’s Department’s only utility vehicle, a 1991 Ford Bronco, turned off the two-lane interstate and pulled around into the circular parking lot, rocks popping under its nubby tires. Sheriff Leonard M. Blood stepped out. He walked with an easy rancher’s gait, snakeskin cowboy boots crunching gravel to the grassy edge of the lot nearest the cement walkway. Two wooden signs were nailed to stakes there. One read CHIEF OF POLICE. The unblemished front bumper of the chief’s car rested not six inches away from it. The other sign read COUNTY SHERIFF. A police cruiser was parked there, bumper dented, grill shorn.
Sheriff Blood surveyed the situation. As with everything else, he strived to fit it in a perspective. A police cruiser parked in his space. A thing that others would see as trivial, he thought. But line up enough of these affronts, and in ascending order, and you began to realize the difference between a push and a shove.
He turned and started along the pavement toward the entrance, his pace loping, the absence of chinging spurs on his boots nearly palpable. He wore a Resistol cowboy hat — crease greased, brim firm — though he supported none of the other stereotypes of a back-country sheriff, such as chewing tobacco or spitting or being grossly overweight. He was trim and strong enough, with broad forty-year-old shoulders down to which thick crow-black hair hung straight and neat.
He was a Blackfoot Indian of the Blood tribe, his last name likely the result of a botched birth certificate some generations past. The Blackfoot Indians had tamed the land now known as Montana and warred with the Shoshoni tribe of neighboring Idaho. They were expert horsemen who prided themselves on their skill in clean-scalping their enemies. Now Leonard Blood wore a United States Sheriff’s star and enjoyed jurisdiction over the north westernmost county in the established state of Montana. The significance of this struck him every once in a while, sometimes in the shower or out mowing the lawn, or while kicking back on the sofa watching “Jeopardy!”
His distinctive gait and the clop-clopping of his boots in the narrow hallway of the building his office shared with the town police department allowed that his secretary, Marylene, would be looking up and smiling at him from behind her desk as he entered. Marylene was older than he was and sported jangly silver loops hanging off her fleshy earlobes, like those of a veteran waitress. She took some pride in mothering him.
“Morning, Marylene,” he said.
“Morning, Sheriff. Coffee’s on.”
His first official act upon his swearing-in as Sheriff of Border County two years before had been to hire Marylene away from the Mug ‘n’ Dunk down in Huddleston center. This was a bold stroke, coming on the heels of Blood’s surprise grass-roots Indian campaign run out of his bait-and-tackle shop, and locals buzzed for days over the new sheriff’s demonstrated canniness. Marylene had that elusive sixth sense, the secret of good coffee. In an age of machines and filters and bean grinds, she was an automatic-drip miracle worker. Sheriff Blood opened the door on his inner office and there sat the mug on top of his desk, proudly steaming. He shed his hat and eased back into his wooden chair. The steam swirled in the sunlight, spiraling up in a fine cyclone and disappearing. He took it hot and black. Marylene’s brew was such that it came naturally sweet with neither sugar nor cream. He fingered the warm handle of the mug and turned to the clutter atop his desk.
Front and center on his cup-stained blotter was a one-page regional court order. A legal document, large black type across the top reading NOTICE OF EVICTION. Blood’s eyes ran down the page to where it had been signed, stamped, and dated by Judge Jonas D. Leary that previous Friday.
Blood withdrew his finger from the mug handle. He stood. He looked around at his desk and the chairs in his office, the notes to himself tacked up on the walls, the cartons set in the corner. Everything seemed to be in its place. He went to his file cabinets and tugged on each locked drawer, checking the almond finish around the locks for scratches. Then he took the notice and his hat. He let the coffee stand.
His boots clopped down the short connecting hallway to the glass doors of the Huddleston Police Station. He went in past the officer at the front desk without a word and headed for the closed wooden door of the chief’s office in back.
Chief of Police Gale C. Moody was facing his window, sitting back in his wide, padded chair and looking out at the mountains and the sun coming up over them, and drinking his own cup of coffee. He swung around slowly, looking at Blood with a tipped head. Only annoyance clouded his disinterest. Moody did subscribe to most of the stereotypes of his profession. On a greasy napkin on his desk was a honey roll that a bear might have half-eaten. His gun belt, notches stretched to a pattern resembling Morse code, hung next to his hat on a rack by the door.
“Most people knock,” he said.
Blood went forward and laid the notice down in front of him. “What was this doing on my desk?”
Moody perused it from where he was, without setting down his mug. “Looks to me like an eviction notice,” he said. “As the Sheriff of Border County, one of your duties is to serve—”
“I know what my duties are,” said Blood. “I asked you what it was doing on my desk.”
Moody judged him, then nodded as though slowly remembering. “That came in late Friday. I had one of the boys here run it on down the hall so it wouldn’t get misplaced over the weekend. One of the conveniences of policing the county seat, our shared quarters—”
“I keep that door locked,” Blood said.
Moody’s soft bottom lip shrugged. “I’m sure you do.”
“I keep a key, Marylene keeps a key.”
Moody just nodded. “That sounds about right.”
“What do you know about that cruiser being in my spot out there?”
Moody looked at him. “What cruiser?”
Blood nodded and stiffened up. “What do you think I have?” he said. “You think I have something? And if I did, you think I’d keep it in my office?”
Moody’s eyes sparked a bit. He sat to. “You been sheriff here what now, two years? I’m chief of Huddleston some sixteen. You got anything more for me, you come out with it plain. Or else turn around and leave.”