“Can you wire a money order? The car battery is dead. Even if I get a jump start I hate to take Ellie and the baby over the pass like that,” the man said.
There was silence while the man listened, his free hand clenching and unclenching at his side.
“We just need to get to Spokane. I’ll get paid in two weeks and everything will be fine,” the man said. “I wouldn’t ask you if it wasn’t a dire situation…No, operator, I don’t have more change. Did you hear me? No, please don’t cut me off.”
Then the man was staring wanly at the receiver, which had gone dead in his hand. He replaced it in the cradle and pinched his temples between his thumb and forefinger. Lester glanced out the back door of the saloon. A battered car with a Washington State plate was parked down by the river, a blond woman in the passenger seat, an infant wrapped in a blanket on her shoulder. “You want to borrow a buck or two?” Lester said.
“Oh, no, thanks. But I could sure use a battery jump. I got cables in my trunk,” the dark-haired man said.
Ten minutes later the battered car with the Washington tag was seen roaring up the entrance ramp to the interstate highway. A tramp living in a hobo jungle on the mountainside close by the ramp walked hurriedly to a filling station and made a 911 call. He swore he had seen a baby thrown from the car’s passenger window.
The bartender at Stockman’s brought a fried pork chop sandwich, a plate of hash browns, an
d a cup of coffee to the table where Lester ate his meals. But Lester never returned from the parking lot, and the food grew cold and finally the bartender took it away and tipped it into the garbage can.
AT 8:14 A.M. WEDNESDAY, Darrel McComb called my office from a cell phone. “Ever know an Indian named Lester Antelope?” he said.
“Yeah, he does fence work for Johnny American Horse sometimes,” I replied.
“Describe him.”
“What for?”
“I need somebody to do an ID. I’m looking at a guy I think is Antelope but I can’t be sure.”
“I’m not understanding you.”
“He’s dead. You know Sleeman Creek Road?”
“Lester’s dead? Up Sleeman Creek? That’s close to my house.”
“Good. You know the way,” he said.
I drove ten miles south of Missoula through Lolo, then west on Highway 12 toward Idaho. I turned up the dirt road that led past my home, then entered a long, deserted valley where the hills were round on the tops and steep-sided, with ponderosa growing hard by the rock outcroppings. A collection of police cruisers and emergency vehicles were parked on a slope at the bottom of an arroyo. The coroner had just arrived.
Midway up the arroyo, in deep shadow, was a tin shed built on a cement pad, the door hanging half open. Darrel McComb walked down to meet me. He wore a rumpled suit with a blue shirt and dark tie. His face had no expression.
“Last night a bum called in a 911 on an infant thrown from an automobile. The ‘infant’ turned out to be a plastic doll,” he said. “We have a feeling Antelope got lured out of Stockman’s Bar by some people posing as a hard-up family trying to get to Spokane.”
“Why would anyone want to kidnap Lester?”
“He used to work for Blue Mountain Security. I have a feeling he was one of the Indians who broke into the Global Research lab. This morning a hiker got caught in a shower and took shelter in the shed. Take a look inside, then talk to me.”
“Why me?” I said.
He wrote in a small spiral notebook and didn’t answer.
“I asked you a question,” I said.
“You got a vested interest in this case, Holland. Maybe we’re on the same side,” he replied.
I walked up the slope and looked inside the shed, which was bolted down on a concrete pad and had probably once been a storage place for logging equipment. The coroner was squatted down by the body of a large Indian man who lay on his side, his face pointed toward me. A uniformed deputy had placed a lit flashlight on the floor. One of the Indian’s pigtails had been cut from his head. I looked at the walls, floor, and ceiling, then backed out of the shed and blew out my breath.
“Is it Lester Antelope?” Darrel said.
Before I could speak I had to clear my mouth and spit. “Yeah, it’s Lester Antelope. He didn’t have any identification on him?” I said.
“Picked clean. Ever see anybody take a beating that bad when you were a cop?”