He stopped eating. “Dave and I did a lot of stuff at NOPD that we don’t like to remember. We called it operating under a black flag. That’s when the Contras and the Colombians were filling our cities with cocaine. But we never did anything beyond what we had to. That’s the only rule there is. You do what you have to, and you never hurt people unnecessarily.” He started eating again.
She got up from the table and went into the bathroom and washed her face and dried it. When she came back out, he was looking at the FedEx mailer she had left on the coffee table. “What’s that?” he said.
“Some Sierra Club guys got ahold of a core sample from an exploratory well drilled on the Canadian side of the frontier. I sent it to a geological lab in Austin. This stuff has the same kind of sulfurous content that’s coming out of the shale-oil operation up in Alberta. Supposedly, it heats up the planet a lot faster than ordinary crude.”
“Pepper left a note. Evidently, some guys scared the hell out of him. They thought maybe you were his girlfriend and you had some information that was harmful to their interests.”
“Why didn’t you tell me that?”
“I thought the sheriff had his ass on upside down. You think this has something to do with the documentary you’re making?”
“I just got out of film school. Why should anyone be afraid of me?”
“I can’t imagine,” he replied.
THAT AFTERNOON SHE took her nine-millimeter Beretta and her Airweight .38 up to the gun range behind Albert’s house. The sun had already gone behind the ridge, and the trees were full of shadows and clattering with robins. Up the arroyo by the abandoned log road, she saw a flock of wild turkeys that had been down to the creek to drink before going to bed. She set up a row of coffee cans on a wood plank suspended between two rocks and clamped on her ear protectors and, from twenty yards away, aimed the Beretta with both arms extended and let off all fourteen rounds in the magazine, blowing the cans into the air and hitting them again as they rolled down the hillside, birds rising from the trees all around her.
She saw the man on horseback out of the corner of her eye but showed no recognition of his presence. She set down the Beretta on Albert’s shooting table and removed the ear protectors and shook out her hair. She picked up the five-shot Airweight and flipped out the cylinder from the frame and picked the rounds one at a time from the ammunition box and plopped them into the chambers, then closed the cylinder, never glancing at the man on horseback. “What do you think you’re doing here?” she said, as though speaking to herself.
“I rent pasture on the other side of the ridge. You shot the doo-doo out of them cans.”
She began picking up the cans and replacing them on the plank. “What can I do for you?”
“Nothing. You already done it,” he said. He stood up in the stirrups and grabbed the limb of a ponderosa and lifted himself free of the horse, his biceps swelling to the size of softballs. He was wearing a maniacal grin when he dropped to the ground, his shoulders hunched like an ape’s. He caught the reins of the Appaloosa and flipped them around the lower branch of a fir tree. “You’ve got a fourteen-round pre-assault-weapons-ban magazine in that Beretta. That’s right impressive.”
“I think you’re probably a pretty good guy, cowboy. But you’re off your turf,” she said.
“You got a mouth on you. Ain’t many that speaks their mind like that.”
“Does Mr. Hollister mind you riding up here?”
“He never mentioned it.”
“You know who he is?”
He seemed to think about the question. “A famous writer.”
“Have you tried any of his books?”
He looked into space. “I don’t recall. My brain ain’t always in the best of shape,” he said. He was wearing a candy-striped shirt with a rolled white collar. His shirt was pressed and his needle-nosed boots spit-shined, as bright as mirrors even in the shade. “You like rodeos?”
“Sometimes.”
“I furnish rough stock to a mess of them. You like bluegrass music?”
“ ‘Sex, drugs, Flatt and Scruggs.’ ”
“There’s a concert tonight at Three Mile.”
“Maybe another time.”
He sat on a boulder and removed his straw hat. There was a pale band of skin at the top of his forehead. When he looked at her, all she could see were his pupils. The rest of his eyes seemed made of glass. “I ain’t here to bother you. You stood up for me, missy. I owe you,” he said.
“You don’t owe me anything. Let’s be clear on that.”
“If you hadn’t been there, Bill Pepper would have put out my light with that Taser. I thought he was gonna dump in his britches when you called him ‘bacon.’ ”