Craig Johnson: The Dark Horse

I told Dog to stay on the rock patio as I carefully picked my way through the debris.

The nearest fire department was the volunteer one in Clearmont, and obviously they hadn’t hurried in getting here; possibly they knew the man. The roof and supporting timbers were gone, but the majority of the heavy walls still stood with their windows blown out and shards of blackened glass scattered across the stone floors. I walked past the open front doorway, the side panels burnt and hanging loose on the hinges, the moonlight pulling the sheen from the flagstone walkway that led to where I’d parked the rental car.

Through an antique glass door that was curiously still intact, I crossed a greenhouse atrium that separated the public part of the house from the bedroom where the deed had been done. Burnt houses bring out the melancholy in me, but it was possible that burnt greenhouses were even worse. The withered, dead plants hung from the beds as if they had tried to limbo under the smoke to escape the flames. They hadn’t made it. As I looked back from the door of the bedroom, I noticed the collective tracks of the Campbell County Sheriff’s Department, those from the Division of Criminal Investigation, and those from the firefighters in the fine, black dust that covered everything.

The master bedroom suite was built over what must’ve been a root cellar, and most of the hardwood floor was gone, leaving only a vast hole that dropped to the charcoaled pit below. There was nothing left of the king-sized bed other than the inner frame and coils of the box spring. T. J. Sherwin and her DCI investigators must have had a time securing and processing the scene.

I stood there for a long while, looking into the abyss and wondering what the abyss was making of me. I tucked the folder under my arm a little tighter and turned, making my way back to the courtyard.

By the time I got there, I discovered that Dog’s idea of “stay” was disinterestedly springing a few western cottontails from the brush. He wandered back in my direction when I called him, marking each stand of sage as he came, and finally rested his muscled behind on my foot. I ruffled his ears, my hand stretching a full octave across his massive head. I peeled some fur back to look at the bullet furrow across his thick skull. “Is that your idea of stay?” He smiled up at me, revealing rows of teeth that shone in the evening moonlight.

It appeared that with the prevailing wind from the river basin, the fire that was started at the barn had destroyed the main house, perversely leaving the courtyard. It was as if the elements had decided to ravage the enclosed areas but leave the open heart untouched.

It was not lost on me that the most obliterated area of Wade and Mary Barsad’s house had been the bedroom.

There was an outdoor fireplace with firewood stacked nearby and a willow chair that yawned with an open seat, but I refused its invitation, walked to the edge of the patio, and carefully leaned on the hand-adzed timbers that supported the cedar shingles and copper gutters and downspouts. Part of this roof was still there and blocked the view of the thick stripe of the Milky Way that was just beginning to trace its girth across the twilight sky.

The courtyard wouldn’t be a bad place to live; well, at least until a month from now when it would be filled with snow and the wind would attempt to blow the whiskers off your face.

It was getting chilly, so I looked at the fireplace again. It looked serviceable and almost as if it’d been used recently. Even if it hadn’t, it wasn’t like I was going to have to worry about burning the place down.

I glanced around, looking for a bit of fresh kindling, and found a big bunch of tiny astrological scrolls that you see for sale in grocery-store checkout lanes. I noticed they were all Sagittarius-which was as far as my knowledge of astrology went-then wadded them up and tossed them into the makings of a fire. There were a few long-stem matches by the mantel in a tin container, and soon I had a blaze where no more than a month ago there had been far too much of the stuff to contain.

Dog, knowing a good thing when he saw one, curled up at the hearth and watched as I pulled the chair closer and unfolded the insurance binder to the middle where I had carefully concealed some faxed sheets from DCI. I was lucky that T.J., the wicked witch of the west, as she was known in some of Wyoming’s law enforcement circles, had done the general on the deceased. She had included some disturbing and detailed photographs on how the rancher had gone not so gently into that dark night.

Six tangential shots from a Savage. 22 automatic rifle had done the trick but, for all practical purposes, the first one had been enough.

Probably not a suicide.

Close range, but not that close-four feet to be exact-and there may have even been a little powder dispersal, but we would never know. The body of Wade Barsad had burned along with his home, his barn, and her horses. Dental records had hung the name on Wade’s toe in lieu of upcoming DNA testing. I was just getting to the meat of the report when Dog growled with a sound as deep and resonant as a powwow drum.

I closed the report and listened to the soft pop of the fire and the chirp of the crickets. “Hello?” I placed a hand on Dog’s back to keep him from disappearing into the darkness and into whatever it was out there. “I said hello.”

The outline of a battered cowboy hat shifted from the partial shadow of the burnt juniper tree at the edge of the house, and I could see the octagonal barrel of a heavy rifle move in emphasis. “Make yourself at home, why don’t’cha.”

Dog growled again, but the repeater was cradled in the man’s arms as he lit a hand-rolled cigarette, so I figured the threat from it wasn’t too great. The glow showed orange on the large, flat face, stubbled with whiskers as prodigious as my own, and on a set of ears that pushed forward from an oversized, flat-brimmed, Powder River-style hat.

I rested the folder on my knee with the label facing out as he came closer. Dog continued to growl. I squeezed his neck and he stopped, even going so far as to sniff at the stained jeans of the stranger’s leg as he stood there in the intermittent light of the fireplace. I tipped my own hat back and looked up at the fence-post-thin man, his clothes and entire body tapering down from the buttoned collar at his bobbing Adam’s apple. “You burn my fortunes?”

“Excuse me?”

“My damn fortunes I had sittin’ on that hearth, did you burn ’em?”

I remembered the tiny scrolls I’d used for kindling. “I’m afraid I did.”

“Well, that’s another trip to the Kmart.” He said Kmart like it was Mecca and studied me for a while. “They told me you was askin’ questions down at the bar, earlier tonight, and that you might be by.”

“They?”

He didn’t answer but leaned against a support timber with the old Yellow Boy wedged in his folded arms-I figured the Henry was probably a reproduction. “Lot of insurance money, I guess.”

“Around three million for the house alone.”

He glanced at the folder on my knee again. “Some racket, I’ll tell ya.” I waited. “That stuff, jus’ a protection racket near as I can tell.” He took a puff on his cigarette, cupped in his hand European style. It was a gesture he’d probably learned from the local Basque sheepherders-with a name like Vanskike, the chance that he was Basque himself was slim. “I guess it’s all jus’ a big protection racket, the government, the insurance companies.” He looked straight at me. “So, how come you’re up here sneakin’ around in the dark?”

“There was more light when I got here, and I guess I didn’t feel like sitting in a motel room.”

He pulled the wrinkled cigarette from his lips, flicking some ashes into the dried grass. “I can understand that.” He nodded and looked off toward the river. “It’s a nice spot. I been coming up here since the fireworks when the weather’s good-sit in that very same chair and drink beer.”