April Smith - Judas Horse

“What is it?”

“Flood control.”

We stand there like two idiots, staring in silence at the work of some engineering drone twenty years ago.

“Nice,” I say.

“Thought you’d like it.”

“Give me dried hoofprints and the smell of old manure any day.” McCord laughs. At least he has a sense of humor about himself. I can feel the giggles rise like bubbles…. Maybe that’s how it will begin.

“One thing about wranglers,” he says. “We take you to the best places.” “Really? I thought you were interested in Sara.”

“Sara’s hot but way too young.”

“That’s what she said about you. The opposite. In reverse.” I snicker self-consciously. Awkward, too, he kicks at the wire cage covering the pump. It moves. It is not secured by the rusted lock, only looks that way.

Wordlessly, we catch our fingers in the wire mesh and pull. It comes off easily and we set it aside.

“Someone’s been messing with this, for sure.”

We squat closer. The flashlight reveals a hole in the iron plate that is fitted around the pipe assembly. A hole for lifting.

McCord checks with me. “Are you ready?”

“Go for it.”

He hooks a finger in the hole, but it is hard to lift. No hinge — it just sits in the square opening.

“Need a crowbar. Got one in the truck.”

“I’m not staying here alone.”

“No problem.” McCord finds a heavy stick. “I’ll lift, you get the stick under there and pry.” “Ready.”

“Wait a minute!”

“What?” I whisper with alarm.

“Watch out for that Indian ghost,” he hisses. “If he comes charging out of here, I’m gone.” “Don’t make me laugh!”

“This is serious stuff. Indian lore. Buried treasure.” “Just lift.”

“You know the old Indian chant—”

“Just do it before I pee my pants!” McCord hooks his finger firmly, sets his back, and lifts. I push the stick underneath the edge and we slide the plate to one side of the hole and shine the light inside.

I scream like a madwoman. “Close it! Close it quick!” Inside the culvert, four feet down, is a nest of rattlesnakes.

“Just stand still.”

“Oh my God, Sterling—”

“Don’t move. They’re cold. They’re resting. This is not their time of day.” Resting? The slow, slithering mass is pit-of-the-stomach hell. McCord keeps his flashlight on the entwined bodies — big ones, inches thick, with long rattles and darting wedgelike heads.

“These guys are old,” McCord observes, “and full of venom. If one of these daddies bit that little horse, it’s amazing that he lived.” “They’re waking up—”

Like the Indian curse.

Their eyes glint. The rattling, faint at first, is quickly becoming deafening, like medicine men hallucinating wild dreams.

“Put the cover on,” I plead.

McCord whistles and bends closer. I grab his belt, terrified he’s going to fall in.

“Look at this!”

I cannot look any longer at the glistening knot of reptiles.

“What is it? Is it the turquoise?”

“I don’t see no turquoise,” McCord drawls, “but there’s a hell of a lot of guns.” Now I do look, and carefully. The rattlesnakes are crawling over a pile of semi-automatic weapons and boxes of grenades.

McCord ticks them off: “You got your Heckler & Koch MP5s, a Berreta Model 12, a couple of Ingrams, and your basic Makarov handguns, extremely popular in the Arab world. It’s a global terrorist barn dance down there.” And a.50-caliber McMillan M87, heavy sniping rifle, made in the USA.

Just like the rifle that killed Sergeant Mackee.

Careful. What would Darcy say?

“All this stuff is worth money.”

McCord shoots me a look too quick to read in the dark. “Seen enough?” “Wait!”

Scattered across the cache of firearms, like offerings in a tomb, are the skeletons of tiny animals.

“What are those?”

“Looks like rabbit bones,” says McCord.

“The baby rabbits,” I whisper. “Stolen from the farm. Do you think someone’s been feeding them to the snakes?” “They sure didn’t hippity-hop down there on their own,” says McCord.

We drag the lid over the seething pit.

Some very unlucky FBI agents (I hope it was the dopey duo from Portland who brought the ducks) dig through the rattlesnakes guarding the cache and replace the.50-caliber M87 sniper rifle with an identical model, sealing everything back the way it was. Forensics determines the gun found in the pit is, in fact, the same one that fired the round that killed Sergeant Mackee. Dick Stone’s fingerprints are all over it.

As a result, a horrendous argument breaks out in the conference room in Los Angeles.

“We have the cop killer,” Galloway says right away. “Case closed.” “Dick Stone is more than a killer.” Angelo has loosened the Rolex and is spinning it around his wrist. “He’s an anarchist who hates the FBI.” Donnato: “That’s why we bust him and get Ana out.”

“What are we in there for?” Angelo yells. “FAN!” “Stone is moments away from making her. If he hasn’t already.” Angelo: “We don’t want to blow the operation on a lousy murder charge.” Donnato gets up from the table to confront him. “Killing an officer gets Stone the death penalty.” Angelo shrugs. “Stone being dead is not the mission.”

“What is the mission? Remind us.”

“Stone giving up his contacts.”

“He’ll talk when he’s in prison.”

“A former FBI guy? How does that work?”

“He gets protective custody.”

“Peter Abbott wants the big picture,” Angelo says impatiently.

“Peter Abbott sits at a desk in Washington while Ana Grey is at risk. He’s exactly the guy we should be worried about.” Donnato is incredulous. “Whose side are you on?” “You’re asking me that? You are really asking me that? Think twice about walking to your car alone, buddy.” Donnato: “Is that a threat?”

“I see we are taking our testosterone pills this morning,” says Galloway by way of warning.

They back off, but only to regroup.

“Anybody remember a case in the seventies called Turquoise? Ana flagged it from a conversation with Rosalind, who subsequently provided me with confirmation and pulled the abstract. We connected the Weathermen to a string of armored car robberies taking place in Arizona. Dick Stone went in as the undercover. Ana says there’s talk of some kind of buried turquoise up in Oregon. She’s wondering if there’s a connection with Stone and the old Turquoise case.” “In reality?” Angelo says. “Or in his head?”

Galloway: “Pull up the complete files and court transcripts.” He mouths the dead cigar. “Let’s review. Angelo’s feeling is that whatever is taking place in the here and now, Dick Stone isn’t pulling this off alone. The cache of weapons indicates international connections. He’s up there on the food chain but answering to a higher power.” “The higher power is someone in the Bureau,” Donnato says, barely keeping a lid on it. “Given the Toby Himes revelation, we’d better look closely at who’s in charge and why.” They don’t tell me until later, but as a result of running his license plate at the midsummer festival, Toby Himes has become a “person of interest” to Operation Wildcat. More, the star quarterback. He lives in Stevenson, a tiny river town on the Washington side of the Columbia River Gorge, where he is employed as the town engineer. If he had come from there the night of the midsummer festival, it would have been almost a three-hour drive to see Mr. Terminate at Dick Stone’s farm. The black man and the biker didn’t meet to discuss hazelnuts.