At Ease with the Dead Read online

  I held up the fish to show him, and maybe he saw it, maybe he didn’t. Once again, it could’ve been my imagination—hard to tell at that distance—but I thought he nodded.

  I heard the gunshots at seven o’clock.

  I had cleaned and cooked the fish, scarfed them down with the fry bread, washed up everything, and returned to the lakeside to watch the sun set. Now that I wasn’t worried about contaminating the bait, I splattered repellent all over me like a sophomore laying on cologne before the prom. The deerflies had retired for the night, but the mosquitoes were ravenous.

  The light was fading as it slanted through the pine trees. The lake was as flat as a mirror. Here and there along the surface small clouds of midges whirled and twirled. The swallows came at them from the sky, skimmed along the water, snapped them up, soared away. The occasional trout came at them from the lake, leaping up in a muscular metallic roll, snatching at them, splashing back to leave slow concentric silver ripples. It’s not easy, being a midge.

  Then I heard the shots. Abrupt and peremptory, from off to my left, beyond the bend on the lake shore. Even before the sound of the blasts began to roll out across the lake, the swallows had vanished: a flutter of wings, a sudden upward swoop, and they were gone.

  It might have been only someone plinking at tin cans—although it’d sounded like at least a .38, and that meant fairly expensive plinking.

  In any event, it was none of my business.

  But the shots had come from the same direction that the old man had gone.

  And I was used to sticking my nose into things that were none of my business. That is, after all, exactly what my business is.

  My own gun was back in Santa Fe, in a shoebox on the floor of my closet. Which made a frontal approach a fairly dumb idea. I scrambled up the bank into the ponderosas and, keeping low, scooted along between the tree trunks.

  About fifty yards in, the trees began to thin and I was peering through the lacing of branches down a gentle slope at a wide grassy knoll by lakeside. To the right, an old pale blue Ford pickup with a battered camper shell was parked a few feet from the water. The old man stood about ten feet away, leaning on his cane, his face impassive. He might have been alone, calmly studying the movement of light and shade.

  But he wasn’t. To the left, closer to me and just off the dirt road that led to the lake, stood a run-down Winnebago, its white sides grimy with grease and dust. Two men leaned against it. One was short, thin, balding, and wore a white T-shirt above his faded jeans. The other was big, as tall as I was, and thick. He was wearing a cut-off Dallas Cowboys sweatshirt, and his pale meaty arms were folded above a loose roll of belly. Both men held cans of beer and both seemed enormously entertained.

  The third man, his back to me, was the one doing the entertaining. He was the one with the gun.

  Tall and lanky, his blue denim shirt draped outside his jeans, he laughed once now, a whoop, hard and nasal, as he aimed the pistol at the old man. “C’mon, Chief. Do us a rain dance.”

  There’s something about a forest that can bring out the worst in people. Maybe it’s the unlimited freedom, the absolute lack of restraints. No litter bags, no stop signs, no cops. Or maybe it’s merely the indifference of wild country, its disregard for their puny little lives. They resent it—they feel compelled to mark it with the stamp of their own individual stupidity.

  Whatever the reason, people who might seem perfectly normal, perfectly respectable, back home in Rockford or Toledo or Scarsdale become slobs and oafs and occasionally worse.

  And when you’ve got two or three morons who’ve learned their social graces from Johnny Mack Brown movies, idiots who live and often die by some sorry set of cowboy clichés, then the forest can become a truly dangerous place.

  The man with the pistol pulled the trigger and the gun boomed. The barrel kicked back and a spout of black dirt shot up a yard to the left of the old man’s foot.

  The pistol was a revolver, a big one, gun-metal blue. Probably a .357, probably a Ruger. He had fired three shots now. If he were cautious enough to keep an empty chamber beneath the hammer, he had two shots left. If he weren’t, he had three shots.

  Figure three shots.

  I wheeled around to the right and went padding down the slope, keeping the trees between me and them. The ground was soft, blanketed with pine needles, and I was able to move without making too much noise. We mountain men can do that.

  At the bottom of the hill, I found what I’d been looking for. A big stick, an old branch, approximately five feet long and a couple of inches thick. The wood seemed solid, neither rotten nor riddled with insects. If I’d had time, I could’ve shaved it clean and whittled myself a nifty staff, just like Jim Bridger’s. I didn’t have time.

  The closest I could get to the man with the gun, without being seen, was about fifteen feet. Beyond that, I’d be out in the open.

  He was still standing there with the pistol aimed at the old man. “Hey, Chief. You ain’t cooperatin’ at all.”

  Fifteen feet. A rush, a swing, smash away the gun, smash away the shooter, get to the gun before the other two bozos got to me.

  Piece of cake.

  Right.

  “C’mon, now,” grinned the man with the gun. “Just a teensy-weensy dance. You don’t really got to make it rain. Jest make it cloud over a little, huh?”

  Over by the Winnebago, the big man laughed.

  The old man merely stood there, leaning on his cane.

  The man with the gun pulled the trigger.

  The gun exploded and the old man’s body jerked slightly to the right. Expressionless, he looked down at his leg. The slug had ripped a hole in his jeans, just above his knee. He looked up at the shooter and gave him the same small hint of a smile he had given me earlier. “Great White Hunter,” he said, and shook his head. “Can’t even miss right.”

  The other man scowled and raised the gun.

  Inhale. Exhale. Now.

  I went at him with the club raised back over my right shoulder, a roar bellowing up from down deep in my stomach. Make a lot of noise and sometimes you confuse them.

  It confused him. He turned to me, his mouth open in a big round O of surprise. For a moment he was too startled to move, and then he was bringing the gun down, the barrel lining up with my chest, but by that time it was too late because I was already swinging. The stick smashed into his wrist and something snapped and it wasn’t the wood.

  The gun went tumbling off to the left as I followed through on the swing, and then I braced my feet and came back with the club—no time for subtlety—and slammed it into his kidneys. He gasped and started to go down, and I saw that the big man was on his way, slow but determined, like a freight train. I dropped the club and spun to the left and scooped up the gun and came around in a crouch and thumbed back the hammer. I could’ve slipped a nice neat hyphen between the l’s in DALLAS. I almost did. I was high on fear and fury.

  The big man put on the brakes and stopped a few feet short of his friend, blinking rapidly.

  The other man, the short, skinny one, hadn’t moved at all. He just stood there by the Winnebago, frowning, puzzled, as though he’d wandered into the wrong movie. Probably he’d need the other two to explain it to him later. Slowly.

  “Pick him up,” I told the big man, and jerked the gun barrel toward the man on the ground.

  Except for blinking his eyes, the big man did nothing.

  I took a step toward him. Through my teeth, just the way Clint does it, I said, “Pick him up, asshole.” The only way to deal with stalwarts like these is to convince them, from the start, that you’re a lot meaner and a whole lot crazier than they are. Just at that moment, I probably was.

  He looked away, convinced, and then stepped forward to help his friend up. The other man groaned and clutched at his wrist.

  I said, “Now get the hell out of here. And listen.” With my left hand I reached into my back pocket, slipped out my wallet, and held it out so he could see the badge.
Hector Ramirez, a friend in the Santa Fe Police Department, had arranged it for me. It was an honorary Santa Fe County deputy sheriff’s badge and it was almost as official as something you fish out of a box of Fruit Loops. But these three dipsticks didn’t know that. “Nothing would make me happier, nothing, than blowing your guts all over the grass. You remember that when you start thinking about coming back here.”

  The big man put up a hand and said, “Okay, okay. We’re leaving.” Once again, his glance didn’t meet mine.

  The short, skinny man, still looking puzzled—Golly, is the fun all over?—helped him load his friend into the back of the Winnebago, then got in there himself. The big man, without glancing at me at all, went around the RV, opened the front door, and climbed up, pulling the door shut behind him. The Winnebago’s engine turned over, caught. The big boxy vehicle backed away from the dirt road, lurched once, and then moved forward, turning onto the wide rutted path.

  As it drove away, I looked down at the gun. It was a Ruger, a. 357 Blackhawk. I flipped open the loading gate and spun the cylinder. Two cartridges left. I clicked the cylinder forward until the last empty chamber was aligned with the barrel, snapped the loading gate shut, lowered the hammer.

  Now that there was no one around to admire my Dirty Harry impersonation, my hands were beginning to shake.

  I took a deep breath, blew it out, and looked at the old man. His head bent forward, he was fingering the hole in his jeans thoughtfully.

  “You all right?” I asked him.

  He looked up at me and smiled his faint smile. “Of course,” he said. “I was okay even before you got here.”

  I smiled. “Yeah?”

  “Sure,” he said. “I had ’em surrounded.”

  2

  You’re not really a cop,” the old man said.

  “No,” I said. “Private detective.”

  He smiled the faint smile. “Like Magnum P.I.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Exactly. How’d you know I wasn’t a cop?”

  We were sitting, the two of us, on a pair of old ragged logs set at right angles along the ground. The sun was gone, the air was gray and cool, growing grayer and cooler as the sky went from violet to black. We had introduced ourselves—he was Daniel Begay, from Gallup. After he’d built a small efficient fire, he’d pulled an old blue enamel coffeepot from inside the camper shell of the pickup. Now we were both drinking coffee out of old blue enamel mugs. It was good coffee.

  He shrugged his thin shoulders. “Cops carry guns. Even when they’re off duty.”

  True. I wondered if the three bozos in the Winnebago would remember this, and decide they wanted a rematch.

  Daniel Begay smiled and took a sip of coffee. As though reading my mind, he said, “They won’t be back. You scared ’em pretty good.”

  I nodded. I hoped so.

  He sipped some more coffee. “A private detective spends a lot of time scaring people?”

  I smiled. “Not a lot of time.”

  He nodded. “You do murder cases?”

  I shook my head. “That’s police business. Cops don’t like it when you stick your nose in.”

  He tasted the answer for a moment, then said, “So what does a private detective do?” He moved his head in a small polite nod. “If it’s okay to ask.”

  “Look for missing people. Gather evidence for insurance companies. Or for lawyers. Or for husbands and wives who don’t want to be husbands and wives anymore.”

  He nodded, sipped at his coffee. “You like your work?”

  “Sometimes.”

  He smiled again. “And sometimes you don’t.”

  I returned the smile. “And sometimes I don’t.” A log shifted in the fire, crackling, and sent a thin streamer of bright orange sparks up to meet the stars. “Used to be,” I said, “I liked it all the time. Liked getting to the bottom of things.”

  “You don’t anymore?”

  I shrugged. “Too many things,” I said. “Too many bottoms.”

  “Myself,” said Daniel Begay, his eyes crinkling as he smiled behind another sip of coffee, “every now and then I like to see a nice round bottom.”

  I grinned. “How about you? What kind of work do you do?”

  He shrugged. Lightly, dismissively. “Some of this. Some of that. A few sheep. A little land.”

  “You like your work?”

  He smiled again. “Sometimes.”

  I finished my coffee. “Are you going to be here in the morning?”

  He raised his eyebrows slightly, as though surprised by the question. “Sure. I came for the fishing.”

  I stood up. “Maybe I’ll see you then. Do you have some water? I’ll rinse out the cup.”

  “No, no,” he said, and waved a hand. “Don’t bother.”

  “No bother.”

  “Please,” he said, and smiled. “Leave it.”

  I didn’t know the proper etiquette here—it was his lake, his forest, his coffee cup—so I only nodded, set the cup down on the log, and told him again that I’d probably see him in the morning.

  “What about the gun?” he asked me. He nodded toward the big Ruger lying atop the log I’d been using.

  “You keep it,” I told him. “I’m not hunting any bear this season.”

  He thought about it for a moment, then said, “Got a nephew wants a new pistol.”

  “Now he’s got one.”

  I was up before dawn, and down at the shore just as gray was seeping into the east and color was returning to the world. Off in the trees, the birds were thrilled by this development.

  A stillness lay over everything else. It was one of those brand-new mornings that make you think you’re somehow sharing in the creation of the universe. The grass, the earth, the lake, they were all frozen in time, waiting for the ring of the starter bell. The air seemed thicker, denser, and so did the water. It looked so solid that I felt I could walk straight across its flat silver surface.

  I decided to use the path instead. Realism, as usual, beating out romance.

  When I came to Daniel Begay’s campsite, I saw that he was already up, and had been for a while. He had lit another fire and it had burned down to coals. Warming by the side sat a cast-iron pan holding a few biscuits. The old man was sitting on the same log he had occupied last night, the brim of his hat tipped forward as he fiddled with the reel of a fly rod. I didn’t know much about fly rods, but I knew that this one was expensive. Eight or nine feet long, made of slender bamboo that had aged to the color of old ivory, it looked as delicate and as functional as a spider’s leg.

  He looked up as I approached, and smiled. “You hungry?”

  “Always. But are you sure I’m not imposing?”

  “Not if you’re hungry.”

  “Okay, then. Thanks.”

  Nodding, he set aside the rod and rested it carefully against the log. Moving slowly, deliberately, he picked up his cane and walked down to the shore, then bent forward at the waist and used his right hand to grasp a length of rope that led into the water. He stood straight, pulling in the rope. Twitching at the end, the rope hooked through its gill, was a thick rainbow trout, at least two flashing pounds of fish. A bigger trout than I’d ever caught in my life.

  “Nice fish,” I told him, feeling a bit like the straight man in a vaudeville act. Custer and the Indian.

  He nodded, dropped his cane, and reached his right hand into his pocket, pulled something out. A knife, it looked like.

  “You want any help?” I asked him.

  He turned to me and smiled. “Oh, I think I’ll be okay.” A knife blade suddenly sprang, snick, from the front of his fist. Switchblade. He nodded toward the fire. “Have a biscuit.”

  As he squatted down to clean the fish, I strolled over to the fire. I pried a biscuit from the pan and sat down on the log. Took a bite of biscuit. Crunched at it. Crunched some more. It was a lot like eating fiberboard. But I’d be willing to bet that fiberboard has more subtle nuances of flavor.

  I sat there for a wh
ile, teeth sawing away at the thing, trying to produce enough saliva to soften it. Finally Daniel Begay limped up from the shore, the fish in his left hand, the knife and the cane in his right. He looked down at me. “Biscuit okay?”

  “Good,” I said around a mouthful of gravel. “Great.”

  He nodded, his face expressionless. “Biscuits aren’t my best thing.”

  “It’s terrific,” I mumbled. “You’ve got to give me the recipe.”

  He smiled then. “Not allowed to. Old family secret.”

  I laughed and some biscuit dust shot from my mouth.

  In the camper he had everything he needed to fix breakfast: oil, flour, salt and pepper, blue enamel plates. He put the remaining biscuits on a plate, poured oil into the pan, set it on the coals. Before he dredged the fish with flour, he cut off the tail and tossed it into the fire. This could have been a religious observance, or it could have been a convenient way to get rid of a fish tail. After he fried the fish, the two of us ate it, drinking more of his good coffee out of the blue metal cups. The fish, flaky and sweet, was even better than the coffee.

  We didn’t talk much while we ate. I’m not at my best in the morning—I’m no longer sure when I am at my best, or even what my best is, exactly. I suspect that Daniel Begay was quiet because that was simply the sort of man he was. But his silence was as companionable as most conversations.

  At one point, I nodded to the fly rod. “That’s a nice piece of equipment. Had it long?”

  “Few years. A gift.”

  “You’ve taken good care of it.”

  He nodded. “Gifts should get good care. Like this one.” Smiling, he pointed his fork at the fish on his plate. Then he waved the fork lightly around, taking in the lake, the forest, the far-off mountains. “And this.”

  No argument there, not from me.

  He wouldn’t let me help him with the dishes. He rinsed them down at the lake, dried them with an old strip of terry-cloth towel, and then packed everything, including the gun and the fly rod, into the camper. Finished, he turned to me and said, “Well. Got to go now.”