Leaning Land (32 page)
Authors: Rex Burns
“You got him,” Ray said again. “I saw him drop.”
“How’s Luther?”
The short, quick crunch of boots running through sand behind Wager. “Lung shot. I don’t know how long he’ll live.” A muffled grunt and a soft sound of dragging as Ray pulled the wounded man into the shade beside Wager. “Cover me,” and the tribal policeman was sprinting across the wash, dodging erratically as he ran crouched toward the shelter of broken rock tumbled down from around the white spur. Wager, the rifle aimed at the target, watched the sweat-stained back of Ray’s denim shirt pause against a boulder, then dart out of sight, flicker above the large rock, disappear again. A minute or two later, Ray stood against the skyline and waved an arm. His voice carried across the emptiness of the wash. “He’s down!”
T
HEY USED
L
ITVAK’S
pickup truck to carry the wounded men. Wager drove. Luther, gray with death but maybe still breathing, lay jammed and still in the cab’s small jump seat. Litvak, his ankles cuffed together and his searched, empty pockets dangling inside out, sat in the passenger seat with his eyes closed, sweating with pain and grunting as the truck lurched and jolted slowly across rock and ledge. His scratched face was streaked with dried blood, and his tongue, when it wiped across his chapped lips, was coated sticky white with thirst. A strip of horse blanket wrapped his shoulder and arm and held in place the soggy compress Ray had found in his emergency kit. In front of the truck on horseback, the tribal policeman guided Wager across the country and led two horses behind him as they wound down and out of the broken country that was the face of the plateau they had left. Ahead lay an expanse of brown, brush-filled desert that formed the next wide plateau below. Beyond that wide shelf Wager could glimpse part of yet another, lower plateau. The grinding whine of the four-wheel drive sounded like a giant insect.
At the foot of the thrusting buttresses of gray-and-yellow earth, where gullies spewed their sand in alluvial fans onto the next level, Ray reined in his horses and pulled the transmitter out of a saddlebag. “Might be able to reach somebody from here.” Wager rested wearily against the hot steering wheel and watched the man speak into the battery-powered radio. Beside him, Litvak grunted and twisted against a spasm of pain from his wounded shoulder and splintered collarbone. He glared at Wager out of eyes that were bloodshot with pain and which made the pale hairs of his eyebrows seem even blonder. Wager looked back at him.
“Feel good?”
The voice croaked, “You son of a bitch.”
“Makes me feel good. After what you and Nichols and Gregory did.”
“We should’ve buried you.” He panted. “Give me some more water.”
Wager handed the man the canteen. Water had been the price of Litvak’s earlier confession about beating Wager senseless—Wager sloshing the water loudly as the truck lurched, splashing some over his face and chest in the broiling heat of the slowly moving cab, spitting a mouthful out of the window. All while Litvak slowly seeped more blood and his tongue swelled and ran more and more often across his crisping lips.
He smiled at the man who grunted and winced to lift the canteen to his dry mouth. “Want to tell me about Larry Kershaw, too?”
Litvak stopped swallowing, face taut beneath the dust and dried blood. “What about him?”
“I figure you killed him. Was it with or without the help of Nichols and Gregory?”
“You don’t know crap.” He choked back a cough and grunted at the spasm. “You’re full of crap!”
“It was to throw us off the reason for the other murders, wasn’t it? The FBI, Sheriff Spurlock, the people on the reservation who might raise hell if they found out what you and Ramey were planning. Kill a BLM man, set off a few bombs, make people think it was the Posse … .”
Litvak closed his eyes.
“We’ve got you for attempted murder.” Wager glanced back at the silent figure cramped behind his seat. “Looks like first-degree murder, now. That’s the death sentence, Litvak. But maybe your lawyer can work a deal with the DA if you clear up the Kershaw killing, too. Maybe you get life instead of execution—you know, guilty plea and full confession as a sign to the court of your sincere and heartfelt remorse.”
“Go to hell!” But the heat had gone out of Litvak’s words and he was thinking over what Wager had said.
Ray had finally reached someone and he nodded to a voice on the radio. Then he leaned toward the truck window from his saddle, glancing once at the backseat and then keeping his eyes on Wager. “Helicopter should be here in half an hour, forty-five minutes.”
Spurlock was waiting for Wager when, on its second trip, the orange rescue helicopter settled in a cloud of dust blown up from a dirt runway just outside La Sal.
“Luther Del Ponte’s dead.” The heavyset man held his Stetson against the rotor wash of the clattering machine that began to lift away.
Wager, face turned against the flying dust, nodded. “Looked that way in the truck.” The man’s death might be a shame and it had upset Ray, but Wager didn’t feel much of anything about it. He really thought Luther got what he wanted, and it also saved the taxpayers the cost of a trial and of housing one more lifer. “I’m filing charges against Louis Gregory and Bradley Nichols—assault on an officer.”
“They the ones beat you up?”
“That’s what Litvak said. They helped him.”
Spurlock watched the helicopter move swiftly away, toward the south and the hospital in Montezuma County, an orange dot whose straining engine popped as it struggled for the altitude to clear the distant mountains. “Stan told me he and Bradley Nichols set off those bombs. Said he killed Larry Kershaw, too. Did it so people wouldn’t start thinking the other deaths were related to the Flying W project.” The sheriff spat and watched the white bubble land on the earth. “Scraped up every penny he had for that investment. Borrowed against his ranch, everything.”
“Did he tell you that Nichols and Gregory helped with Kershaw’s murder, too?”
“No. Said it was just him. Used the same rifle he used on Luther. I reckon ballistics will verify it. Said he did it alone—was very clear about that, in fact.”
Wager heard what Spurlock was really saying. “I intend to file charges, Sheriff.”
“Any citizen’s got a right to do that. And I guess I couldn’t really blame you if you did.” His wide chest rose and fell with a deep sigh. “But you know Nichols is already in custody. Durkin and his lawyer worked out a deal: lesser charges for a guilty plea on two of the bombings.”
“So what’s he get, six months?”
“No less than two years. Plus a pretty hefty fine.”
“When he finishes that, he can move into state prison for assault on an officer.”
“I wish you wouldn’t, Wager. Nichols had a lot of money in that Flying W deal, too, and now it’s all gone. There’s a good chance he’ll lose that ranch of his if he spends more time in prison. And Louis Gregory was just dumb, that’s all: he just went along with Litvak and Nichols because he was drunk. All this,” he shook his head, “all these killings, a lot of people in the county are hurting now. Litvak has relatives who didn’t have anything to do with this—that new wife. And a daughter by his first wife. They’re going to suffer this for the rest of their lives. Rubin had a family, too. And so did the other Indians. Now Durkin’s gone and thank God he’s not stirring up any more folks, but there’s a lot of healing needed around here.” Another sigh. “So I wish we could just say it’s all over now.”
Wager gazed across the expanse of piñon and brush-dotted earth that lay as level as a pond out to the western horizon. Here and there beyond the rim of earth peeked the snowcap of a mountain range. With the fading noise of the helicopter, the silence returned, deepened by the rustle of stiff grass in the wind. “Nichols and Gregory, they’re friends of yours?”
“No. And I don’t know if they voted for me, either. Don’t much care, Wager, tell you the truth. But Nichols’s got a wife and children. They all got wives and children, and those people are my neighbors. A lot of people who don’t have anything to do with any of this are caught up in it even if they don’t want to be. And they live here, Wager. In this county. My county.”
As it was, both Ramey Many Coats and Ronald Pyne would get off. There was no evidence to connect either of them to the murders, nothing a lawyer couldn’t suppress, anyway. The only penalty they would pay for making so much bad medicine would be the crash of their plans for their little Las Vegas. Ray had told Wager this would also be the end of the Many Coats’s ownership of the tribal council. When the people on the reservation learned what Ramey had tried to do, the man and his influence would be finished.
Wager studied the pale blue of the horizon and the meandering lip of a nearby gully. The bright green of new leaves covered the once wintry branches of cottonwoods. What Spurlock was talking about was community—the sense of what one person ought to owe another just because they shared the same land and breathed the same air. It was a fragile thing, Wager knew, that sense of community. “Yeah. Well. What the hell, forget it then.” It was a thing that needed all the help it could get.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1997 by Rex Burns
cover design by Michel Vrana
978-1-4532-4798-3
This edition published in 2012 by Open Road Integrated Media
180 Varick Street
New York, NY 10014
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