Lizardskin by Carsten Stroud Read Free Book Online Page B

did that?”
    “Beats me,” said Rowdy, shaking his head. “Got into a fight, maybe? Somebody with a knife?”
    “Real regular, aren’t they?” said Finch. “He’d haveta stay pretty still to get himself cut up like that. You figure he’d be jumping around a bit, somebody cutting him like that.”
    “What’s Bo-ree-gard got to say?” asked Rowdy, looking at Beau like a mortician sizing up a client.
    “Beats me, Howdy. Maybe an animal did this. Some kinda cat or something?”
    “Nice deduction, Beau,” said Finch. “Don’t quit yer day job. Sure as hell isn’t any cat I ever saw.”
    Eustace had his control back now. He dusted his palms together, although he had never touched the body. “The doc been here?”
    “Yeah.” Finch inclined his head toward a Jeep Cherokee parked a few yards away. Inside a young man in a gray suit was talking into a cellular phone. “Vlasic’s calling Bob Gentile’s people now. They’ll get a wagon out here and take him in to the hospital. You want an autopsy, LT?”
    “It’s a homicide, isn’t it?”
    “Looks like self-defense to us, LT.”
    “Yeah … but we do the thing right.”
    Beau felt a kind of sadness for the boy.
    “What’re we gonna do about Bell?”
    “
You’re
not gonna do anything about Bell, McAllister!” said Eustace. “You and me, we’re gonna go back to the station and sort out some divergent views on operational procedure.”
    “Hey, LT,” said Rowdy. “You shouldn’t talk about Bo-ree-gard that way. He’s doing the best he can with what he got.”
    “Thanks, Howdy. And here I was just thinking that you probably couldn’t talk at all unless somebody had his arm shoved up your ass. Say hi to Clarabelle for me, willya?”
    “Fuck yourself, McAllister.”
    Beau was going to say something else, but he caught the look Eustace was giving him and he shut up.
    He had rolled these thoughts around in his mind all the way back to Billings. They parked side by side in front of the low yellow breeze-block building next to the Highway Department’s truckyard on Foote Street, in the middle of a sprawl of warehouses, truck depots, gas stations, and roadhouses.
    PUBLIC SAFETY BUILDING
MONTANA HIGHWAY PATROL
    Behind the new bulletproof glass wall, Sergeant Myron Sugar was typing away at an old Remington machine, his fine Mediterranean features taut with concentration. He raised a languid hand without looking up.
    The rest of the desks were empty at this time on a Friday. Most of the patrol guys were out on the six-six night shift. And it was still too early on a Friday night for the usual crowd of drunken ranchers and maudlin cowhands and grifters off the interstate to build up in the waiting rooms and the cells downstairs. Finch Hyam and Rowdy Klein were the only Criminal Investigation Bureau men stationed at this branch, and they were still back at Bell’s Oasis, tagging arrows and telling each other war stories.
    “Hey, LT—Beau—I hear you shot Joe Bell. Good for you. He gonna live?”
    “He’ll live,” said Eustace.
    “Too bad,” said Myron, who had once locked horns with Bell during a pool game over at Fogarty’s New York Bar in Pompey. Bell had called him a kike. Myron had expressed his dislike of that term with a cue ball.
    In Meagher’s office, a large room with a massive metal desk and a long row of filing cabinets with a coffee machine on top, Eustace poured them coffee. Eustace got his favorite, a big china mug with the FBI seal on it. Beau got one shaped like a pig in a blue uniform. Beau hated it because to get any coffee out of it you had to look like you were kissing the pig on the snout. It was one of Meagher’s little jokes.
    Beau looked around at the pictures and certificates on the wall while Meagher riffled through his While You Were Out slips and made a few apparently urgent calls. Letting McAllister sweat a bit. Beau went back to looking at the pictures all over the office walls.
    Meagher had a poster on the wall