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Chapter One
Roadkill
(cont) |
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The velocity of a bullet varies greatly,
depending on the weight of the bullet and the load of the propellant, but in this case it
was less than a 1000 feet per second. As Joe was standing little more than six feet from
the muzzle of the gun he had about 200ths of a second before impact. This is a very small
period of time, but it is measurable and time, as everybody knows now, is relative.
Subjectively, it seemed a near eternity. Joe squeezed the trigger of his own pistol once.
He did not see if his bullet had hit his assailant, for his head was suddenly smashed as
if he'd taken a direct blow in the face from a sledgehammer. And that was it for Joe
Service.
He fell
backward, sprawling on his back on the paved road, his pistol still clutched in his right
hand, his mouth open, his western hat rolling away under the pickup. The bullet wound in
Joe's forehead was small, almost unnoticeable, except that blood was welling out of it.
His assailant raced around the front of the pickup and kicked the door shut, his pistol at
the ready. He stared at Joe in disbelief, then stepped closer. He looked around wildly.
The semi was gone down the highway, tires singing now as it picked up speed. No other
vehicles had passed or were approaching. The blood was now trickling down the side of
Joe's head, soaking into his thick, black hair.
Hurriedly,
the man jammed the .32 into his waist band and knelt to pry the .38 from Joe's hand. He
tossed that into the front seat of the truck, through the open driver's window, then
stooped to grasp the limp body under the arms. He dragged it to the other side of the
pickup truck, off the road, and then rolled it down the embankment into the ditch. The
body lay there, face down. The gunman looked around. Still no traffic, but the chrome of a
car glinted to the west, approaching rapidly. The man drew out the .32 and emptied the
magazine at the body. He stuffed the gun in his waist band again, then slammed the door on
the passenger side. He got into the driver's seat and was reaching for the key in the
ignition when he realized he was sitting on Joe's pistol. He extracted it and stuck it
into the glove box as the car whistled by him,. Then he paused. He reached under the dash
and pulled the hood release. He got out and lifted the hood, then looked around. A
westbound car crested the hill and whisked by, some hundred yards or so away. A couple
more cars could be seen back to the west, miles away, but approaching.
Quickly, the
gunman scuttled down to Joe's body and turned it. There was an awful lot of blood. He
riffled through the pockets, taking everything that was on the body. He could hear the
cars approaching. He stood and, with his back to the road, shoulders hunched, held his
right hand to his crotch, as if he were urinating. The cars sped by and one of them
honked. He laughed. He looked down at the body and was tempted to piss on the body for
real, but the urge wasn't there. He found a piece of paper in his shirt pocket and
searched for a pencil. He knelt to the body again and quickly stood up.
By the side
of the pickup he glanced around. There was a splatter of blood on the pavement. He saw the
brim of Joe's hat jutting out from under the pickup. He bent and drew out the hat, then
sailed it down into the ditch. It landed nowhere near Joe. The body lay at the bottom of
the ditch, hardly visible to a passing car, or even a truck driver. A magpie sailed down
the side of the hill and landed on a post of the interstate fence, it's long tail swaying
in the breeze. The magpie waited for the man to go.
"Joe
Service, himself," the man said. "Who'da thought?" He shook his head with
disbelief, then grinned broadly and got into the pickup.
It was two
hours before the body was discovered. A passenger on the eastbound Rimrock Stage bus
happened to glance up from the novel she was reading and her eye was attracted by a party
of magpies and a couple ravens in the ditch alongside the interstate highway. The bus was
already past the scene when she realized that the object of their attentions was not a
roadkill deer, but a man. She cried out and stood up. The driver glanced into the overhead
mirror and caught her eye. She signalled at him, waving her hand, then quickly made her
way to the front and told him what she'd seen.
The driver
instantly slowed and then braked to a halt. He tried not to swear in her presence -- she
was a nice-looking young woman, on her way to college in Bozeman -- but a bus driver never
likes an unscheduled stop. But out here you didn't not stop, even if you were confident
that the passenger must have just seen a dead deer. He pulled over as quickly as possible
and radioed ahead to the Butte-Silver Bow sheriff's department, informing them that a
passenger thought she had seen a man down, in a ditch. He was going back to check, he
said. He gave them a rough estimate of his location, about two or three miles west of the
junction of I-15. He hadn't noticed the last mile marker. The dispatcher said a vehicle
would respond.
The driver
started to inform the passengers over the p.a. system, but then he stood up and assured
the folks in the coach that nothing was amiss, just that he had to check out the report of
a passenger -- he'd be right back. He jogged back down the road in the cool midday sun. He
didn't see anything and by the time he had walked over the crest of the hill, out of sight
of the bus, he slowed down and lit up a cigarette. It was very pleasant out here, he
decided. He saw the ravens first. And then he spotted the body. As the jacket was brown,
he thought at first that it might be a deer, but he hadn't approached much closer before
he saw the blue jeans.
The
magpies flew up reluctantly as the driver neared and they didn't go far, but landed
optimistically on the interstate fence, a few yards away. The two ravens had mounted well
up into the sky, croaking. The driver knelt beside the man. There was a lot of dried blood
and there was birdshit all over the back of the man's canvas "tin coat". He
turned the man and winced at the bloody face. He'd been shot at close range. The thick
black hair was stiff with blood and the face was a bloody mask. But it didn't make any
difference, for clearly the man was dead. He could detect no pulse and the gravel was
soaked with what looked like enough blood for two or three men.
He stood up
and took a deep breath, then moved away and lit another cigarette. To his relief he could
see a police car, a Butte-Silver Bow County sheriff's Blazer, approaching in the westbound
lane. He waved and the blue flickering lights on the roofbar went on. The vehicle slowed,
then cruised a few hundred feet until the cop found a more conveniently negotiable section
of the median. The Blazer swayed and bounced through the swale then turned onto the
eastbound lanes and came rapidly forward.
The sheriff's
deputy was a thickset man in his early thirties with a huge square face. He was evidently
an Indian, but not evidently a Montana Indian. This was an Olmec, or a Toltec face. The
bus driver had seen a face like this in a National Geographic magazine article about
Central American ruins of the pre-Columbian era: massive stone heads, weighing hundreds of
tons, sitting on the earth and veiled by jungle overgrowth. The brassy-looking name plate
on the deputy's tight, starched tan gabardine shirt was engraved, "Deputy Sheriff/
Jacque Lee".
Deputy Lee
nodded at the driver and stared down at the body. He put his huge hands on his narrow hips
and pursed his thick lips. Lee had a very large upper body but almost no buttocks and
relatively short slender legs. Still he was over six feet tall. Seated behind a desk, or
in a car, he would look even larger. Now he squatted down beside the body and picked up
the limp wrist. He peeled back one of the man's eyelids and peered into the iris. The eye
was glassy, but the iris shrank. Lee got to his feet with a huff and straightened his
gabardine slacks, stooping to adjust the trouser legs over his dark and deeply polished
boots.
Without a
word he strode back to the car and reached inside for the microphone.
"Three-nine-six, four-twelve. Mile marker one-thirty-six, gotta man down. Ambulance.
Tell 'em to bring blood, lot's of it."
"Ambulance?" the bus driver said, incredulously. "Better call a
hearse."
Lee didn't
respond to this. He opened the back of the Blazer and got out a blanket which he spread
over the body. Then he turned to the driver, drew a notebook and a ballpoint pen out of
his breast pocket, clicked the pen to expose the point and said, "Name?"
The driver
gave his name and the few details he could provide. "I've gotta be getting on,"
he said, "I got a bus full of folks."
"You're
stopping in Butte, right?" Lee said.
"For
fifteen minutes, less if I can get 'em to move," the driver said.
"If I'm
not there, go ahead," Lee told him, "but get the girl's name and address and a
phone number and leave it for me."
The driver
jogged off down the road and Lee returned to the body and carefully searched it for
information. There was no wallet or personal effects at all -- strong evidence of robbery,
given the victim's generally well-apparelled appearance. The boots alone were worth a few
hundred and Lee wondered that the killer/thief hadn't taken them. Thrust into the
half-closed inert left hand, however, he found a card, just a piece of heavy manila paper
which appeared to have been cut out of a larger sheet with not very neat scissor-work. The
card, about the size of a business card, was smeared with blood on both sides and someone
had scrawled with a #3 pencil two names, one above the other, in childish lettering. The
writer had not pressed down very hard and the lead was not very dark. Later, on closer
examination, Lee would see that the first name was actually "CARMINES," but that
the "S" had been obscured by blood and dirt. For now, he read it as
"CARMINE", and the name below it as "DEADMAN."
Lee held the
card by the edges and found a plastic evidence bag in the car for it. By that time the
ambulance had arrived.
"Oh
dear," said Sally Gradovich when she saw the body. "Is he dead?"
"Oughta
be," Lee said, "but he's still winkin' ... just. You better give him blood, he's
about out." He didn't exactly smile but there was a faint easing of the heaviness
about Lee's face. Sally appreciated it.
"Okay,
Jacky," she said, "we've got him." She and her colleague Tom eased the body
onto a stretcher and Lee helped Tom wheel it to the ambulance while Sally ran to radio in
for full crash preparedness on arrival.
After they
left, Lee began his methodical examination of the area. He found an expensive Stetson
cowboy hat, boot prints, blood stains on the road, and six empty .32 caliber cartridge
casings. That was about it. He went on into Butte, to the St. James Hospital. |
