Chapter 4 #2
He could not stand. His legs were not going to be part of anything ever again and he seemed to understand that inside of a second and a half.
So he went on his elbows.
He dragged himself across that road with his boots trailing behind him, leaving a dark smear on the gravel that Joe could see from four hundred yards away with a pair of eight power binoculars, and he made it eleven feet, and then fourteen,
and then he got his back against the near wheel of the second wagon.
Rounds came off the wheel rim and the wagon bed and threw splinters the size of pencils.
Stance reached across his body with his right hand.
He pulled the Uberti out of the crossdraw holster.
Joe saw the ivory grip come up, yellow as an old piano key, seven and a half inches of worn blue barrel swinging out into the light.
Stance thumbed the hammer back and fired.
The forty five went off with a deep flat boom completely unlike the rifles, a sound out of another century entirely, and a cloud of it hung in front of him.
He missed.
The bullet went somewhere into the flatbed and did nothing at all.
He cocked it again.
That was when the second AR came around the wagon.
Four rounds. Fast. All of them into him from the side at fifteen feet.
They went in under the ribs and across the belly and they opened him up in a way that the leg wounds had not, and Stance Ulebrook made a sound that carried all the way up the canyon.
He looked down at himself.
"Oh my!" he said.
It came out wet. Blood came up with it, over his chin and down into the gray of his beard, and he coughed and more came.
His left hand was in his own lap trying to hold something in and failing.
His right hand still had the revolver.
He raised it.
He raised it with his elbow braced against the wagon wheel and his head down and his vision going, and he fired twice more, cocking between, deliberate as a man working a familiar tool.
The first round hit gravel.
The second one hit a man in the thigh and put him on the ground screaming, and the screaming went on, and it did not stop, and it made the other men on that road go very quiet.
Stance Ulebrook let the pistol come down into his lap.
He sat against the wheel of his own wagon with his legs out in front of him and his hands full of blood and his hat gone, and he said something that nobody ever heard, and his lips kept moving.
Then a man walked up to him.
The man was not in a hurry.
That was the detail that would stay with Joe for the rest of his life, and he would see it again behind his eyes at two in the morning for years. The man did not run. He did not crouch. He did not check his corners.
He walked up the middle of the road with his hands empty and his shoulders square, stepped over the smear on the gravel, and stopped in front of the dying man.
He said something. Two or three words.
Then he reached down to his right side, opened a leather flap holster, and drew out a pistol.
Joe knew the outline. Full size steel frame, slide riding inside the rails, that low profile that made the thing look smaller than it was.
CZ 75.
The man put the muzzle against Stance Ulebrook's temple.
And pulled the trigger.
The sound of it came up the canyon a half second behind the sight, one single crack, small and ordinary after everything else.
Stance went over sideways.
The man stood up straight.
He holstered the pistol. He closed the flap and buttoned it. He took his hat off, which Joe had not even registered he was wearing, and he held it against his chest for a moment, and then he put it back on.
He looked down at the body for four or five seconds.
Then he turned and looked up the mountain.
Directly up. Directly at the bank where Joe Henfry was lying on his stomach in the scrub oak with a pair of binoculars.
Joe knew, with a certainty that had nothing to do with evidence, that the man could not possibly see him at that distance in that cover.
He knew it and he did not believe it.
Beside him, Pruitt said, in a voice like a door closing, "That's Arlan Crowe."
Joe did not move.
"Say it again."
"Arlan Crowe." Pruitt was flat on the ground with his own rifle and his jaw was working. "He ran the salvage and towing operation out past the gravel pit. Four yards, eleven trucks, twenty some men."
"Towing."
"Towing," Pruitt said. "You understand what that is right now? He's got the only fleet in this county that all runs. Old wreckers, all of 'em mechanical, because he bought junk on purpose and fixed it. And he's got the list."
"What list."
"Every vehicle he ever towed. Every property he ever pulled a car out of. Twenty two years of invoices in a filing cabinet with names and addresses and what was sitting in the yard when he got there."
Joe felt something cold go all the way through him.
Paper, Stance had said. Paper's the whole game right now.
Down on the road, the men were working.
They cut the horses loose. They took the coach gun. One of them went through the wagons and shouted something about there being nothing in them, and Arlan Crowe answered him, and the answer was short.
Then two of them picked up Stance Ulebrook by the arms and the legs and carried him to the flatbed and put him in the back.
That was the thing Joe could not process.
They took him.
They did not leave him in the road. They loaded him onto the truck and one of them got a tarp from somewhere and put it over him and tucked it under, actually tucked it, and then they helped their own wounded man up into the Bronco and somebody tied a belt around his thigh.
Arlan Crowe stood in the middle of the road and directed all of it.
When they were done he walked the length of the smear on the gravel, slowly, from the wagon wheel back to where it started.
He was reading it.
He was reading how far a man had crawled.
Then he got into the passenger side of the flatbed and they turned both vehicles around and went back down the county road, and in ninety seconds the canyon was empty and silent except for two loose horses standing in the ditch with their heads up and the harness still on them.
Joe lay on the bank for a long time without moving.
Finally Pruitt said, "Mister Henfry."
"Yeah."
"We got to go down there."
"They'll have somebody watching the road."
"I know it."
"They will absolutely have somebody watching the road, Pruitt, because he is not stupid, and the thing he most wants right now is for somebody to come down off this mountain to look at what he did."
Pruitt was quiet.
"That's the point of it," Joe said, and his voice was strange in his own ears. "He didn't do that for Stance. He did that for whoever was watching."
"Then we're just gonna leave him."
"They took him. There's nothing down there to leave."
"His hat's down there," Pruitt said.
Joe put his face against the dirt for a second.
"Yeah," he said. "Okay. We go at dark and we go on foot and we come back up the creek."
They went down at eight thirty.
They got the two horses, which had not gone anywhere, because horses in harness do not know how to leave. They got the hat. They got the wagons, eventually, after cutting the traces on one and rolling the other out of the ditch by hand with Colby swearing steadily the entire time.
They did not find the revolver.
Joe looked for it for twenty minutes with a red light and his hands in the gravel, and it was not there, and that told him the last thing he needed to know about Arlan Crowe.
He had taken the ivory gripped Uberti off a dead man's lap and carried it away.
The house did not eat that night.
Imogen sat with Colby, who was twenty and had known Stance since he was fourteen and could not stop shaking, and she put a blanket on him and made him drink something warm and did not tell him it was going to be all right.
Bill Tandy sat in the chair with the hat in his lap and turned it over and over.
Delores cried without making any noise.
Hazel came and stood next to her father and put her arm around his waist, and Joe put his hand on the back of her head and neither of them said a single word.
At eleven o'clock Joe got the handheld out of the box.
He did not turn it on right away.
He sat there with it in his hands and he thought about a tall man folding himself down off a horse. A man who had ridden nine miles in the dark for people he did not know, because there was a nurse in the house.
I don't key the mic, Joe thought.
You made me say it back.
He turned the radio on.
Four forty six was empty. He worked down through the bands with numb fingers, and at eleven fifty one, low, in the same place as before, a carrier came up strong.
Not weak this time.
Strong. Close.
"Evening," the calm voice said.
Joe stopped breathing.
"This is for the bench at the top of eleven," Arlan Crowe said. "I know you're listening, because I know exactly what kind of man buys copper screen at a hardware store and tells the clerk it's a chicken coop."
A pause.
"I want to say first that I'm sorry about this afternoon. That was not what I went out there for. I made an offer and he answered it with a shotgun and after that there was only one way for it to go, and I'd like you to understand that I gave him the choice and he made it."
The hiss swelled.
"I don't want your food," Crowe said. "I've got food. I don't want your guns and I don't want your land and I have no interest whatsoever in your livestock."
Joe realized his hand was shaking.
"There's a woman up there," Arlan Crowe said. "Pediatric nurse. Fourteen years. My daughter is nine years old and she is diabetic, and I have got eleven vials of insulin left in a cooler in the ground and no idea in this world what to do when they're gone."
A long pause. The mic stayed keyed.
"So here's what's going to happen," Crowe said, and his voice did not change at all. "In the morning I'm going to drive up that road with two vehicles and eleven men, and I am going to ask her to come with me."
"And she's going to say yes."
"Because I have your son."