Neil McMahon - Lone Creek

But I was more certain now of what I'd suspected right off-that Doug Wills's stopping me didn't really have anything to do with the lumber, and neither did any of what had followed.

I might have saved myself this trip to jail if I'd come clean with the ranch hands or told the deputies when they arrived-cast a cloud on Balcomb and his motives for bracing me. But my credibility was zilch. Nobody wanted to cross a rich landowner, especially the men who worked for him. And given his smoothness, he probably had a way figured out to deflect any blame even if the horses had been uncovered.

But-more important-I was spooked worse than ever. The intensity of his reaction and his warning that I was out of my league had underscored my feeling that something really ugly was at work, and whatever I gained in the short term by exposing it might leave me facing serious trouble.

There were plenty more questions, starting with who had done the killing and why. I had to think it was Balcomb himself. There were other employees at the ranch besides Doug who I didn't much care for, but I couldn't imagine any of them treating an animal that way. Kirk had that twitchy violent edge, and I could easily see him going ballistic and shooting somebody-like me-but I couldn't believe he was capable of that kind of brutality. Balcomb must have figured that the carcasses would stay safely hidden until they decomposed. He'd have been right except for some hungry coyotes and a construction worker dumping trash on a Saturday afternoon. I could only guess that Kirk had spotted me, known that Balcomb didn't want anybody around there, and alerted him. Balcomb had immediately given orders to get me stopped, used the smokescreen of the lumber theft to question me, then fired me to justify it.

I could think of several reasons why he might get rid of a couple of horses-not pretty reasons, but at least they made some sense. The horses might have been old, costing more to care for than they were worth, or carrying a contagious disease, which he'd certainly want to cover up. There were insurance scams, too. A couple of his thoroughbreds, reported stolen, would be worth a sizable chunk of cash. The worst possibility that came to mind was a drunken rage or sheer insane cruelty. There'd been a few of those kinds of incidents around here in the past years. A group of hunters had slaughtered a sitting-duck elk herd, leaving most of them to rot; another time, some out-of-state executive types had chased a penned-up antelope herd in a jeep and run them nearly to death.

But I couldn't imagine anything to explain why the horses had been sliced open. My scalp still bristled every time those images came back to me.

I turned my mind to how I was going to handle this from here. I had an old friend named Tom Dierdorff, a respected lawyer in town and a thoroughly decent guy, who came from a big ranch family that had been here for generations, like the Pettyjohns. Balcomb needed to be accepted by people like that; and with any luck, Tom's influence would get him to drop the criminal charges. I'd get the lumber back to the ranch somehow and be done with this-no worse off except for a couple of hours in jail and the kind of memories that woke you up at three o'clock in the morning.

I hated to be a coward, hated to let something so vile slide. But I couldn't get past that queasy fear, and this wasn't my fight, anyway.

After maybe forty-five minutes, I heard somebody come walking down the hall and stop outside my cell. I stood up, expecting one of the jailers.

But a glimpse through the mesh window showed me that the man unlocking the door was the sheriff of Lewis and Clark County, Gary Varna.

Gary was imposing-at least six-four, broad-shouldered, lanky, about fifty years old, but with no trace of a paunch. His forebears had immigrated from around the Black Sea a couple of generations ago and intermarried with the local Nordic stock. That might have explained his height and his pale blue eyes. But those slanted in a way that harked back to the tribesmen of the steppes, and had a way of fixing on you without ever seeming to blink.

He was also cordial, and as soon as the door swung open, he offered me a handshake.

"Come on out of there and stretch your legs," he said.

I shuffled into the hall in my laceless boots, surprised that he'd even be at the jail on a Saturday evening. I wondered if he'd just happened to stop by for some other reason, or found out I was here and had come on that account. I hadn't seen him for quite a while, but there'd been a time when we'd crossed paths pretty often.

He leaned back against the wall and folded his arms. He wore his uniform only when he had to, and he was dressed now in his signature outfit of sharply creased jeans and a button-down oxford cloth shirt-a sort of spiffed-up cowboy look that helped put people at ease. It was one of the many shrewd facets that made him what he was. He'd been in the sheriff's department close to thirty years, and probably knew more than anybody else about what people in this area were up to. He also excelled at working the political side of the street. He was known for being fair, but in the same way as a hometown referee-if there was a judgment call, you didn't have to wonder which side he'd come down on.

"I hear you hit a rough spot, Hugh," he said.

"I just took home some scrap lumber, Gary. Otherwise it would have gone to waste. I never tried to hide anything-I've been doing it for weeks, broad daylight, right in front of God and everybody."

"That don't sound like much of a start on a criminal career."

"I guess I'm too old to retrain."

He nodded, maybe amused.

"I'll get it back there Monday at the latest," I said. "Honest to Christ, I never dreamed anybody'd give a damn."

Those unblinking eyes stayed on me.

"Something about an assault?" he said.

"Doug Wills, the foreman, came at me out of the blue like he'd gone psycho. Just about head-on'd me with that asshole big rig of his, started yelling orders, then grabbed my shirt like he was going to punch me." I touched the scar on my face. "You know I've got this fucked-up eye. I get hit there hard again, I might lose it."

"Ever have any trouble with him before?"

"We hardly ever even talked to each other. There was sure nothing to set him off like that."

"So this wasn't personal, him trying to settle a score? He was following his employer's orders?"

"Goddammit, Gary, I was just sitting in my truck."

"That's not the point, Hugh. It sounds like he had good reason to make a citizen's arrest. And you resisted."

My eyes widened in disbelief as what he was saying came home to me.

"You're telling me that's how the court's going to see it?"

His shoulders rose in a shrug that meant yes.

"Fuck a wild man," I said, and turned away to stare at the hallway's dead end.

"I'm afraid I don't have any better news. Judge Harris set your bail at twenty-five thousand dollars."

I spun back around. "Twenty-five thousand?" The last time I'd been in this place, my pal and I had each paid a two-hundred-dollar fine, plus fixing the drywall.

"It does seem tall, I got to agree," Gary said. "The judge likes his Saturday poker game and Wild Turkey, and he tends to get pissy about being bothered. You can see him Monday, tell him what you just told me, and I'd guess he'll reduce it. With this sort of thing, you're usually talking more like a couple grand."

But that meant staying in here until Monday.

"Everything I own put together isn't worth twenty-five thousand dollars, Gary."

"That's why God invented bail bondsmen."

"I've never done business with one."

"I'm glad to hear that. You know how it works?"

I did. You fronted them ten percent, which they kept as their fee, and they posted your bond to the court. If you skipped out, they had to find you and haul you back in or forfeit the entire amount. They got very serious about looking.