Lizardskin Read Free

the dry wash, McAllister’s patrol car butted through a windbreak of gorse and dry sage. He hit the brakes. He was right at the crest of Bull Peak, and fifty square miles of Yellowstone County stretched away south and west, a watercolor wash of greens and blue-gray, ochre and amber and copper fading out along the distant horizon where the last of the spring snow on the roof of the Beartooth range glimmered pink and silver in the waning sunlight. It would have been a sight to raise a man’s heart if it weren’t for the little corpses scattered all around.
    To the right of the cruiser, like a deep cut in old green hide, a massive crater scarred the slope. New earth and cracked rock covered the prairie grass. Prairie dog corpses were scattered around like pillows in a cathouse. Some of the bodies were about to pop. It looked like a tailgate party for crows and coyotes.
    He powered down the window. The midafternoon heat moved across his face and down into the cool of the car.
    Even McAllister could read this kind of trail sign in the roadway. The little tiptoed skitter of the coyotes. Those crisscrossing hatchwork trails under the coyote sign would be the crows. Shiny blue-black, as big as dogs. Waddling back and forth between the bodies like lawyers at a nine-car pileup.
    And this track here … he leaned out the window to follow it. A kind of shallow trench with hills of yellow dust looking a little like waves. Fresh, since the wind up here in the hills was always pretty good. And big … a full-bore male.
    So he’d be … close. Good to know how close. Not that McAllister was getting out of the patrol car. But it was an interesting problem. It was always good to know who was where. He shut down the engine and opened all the windows. The car needed an airing anyway. He tugged his garrison belt off and dumped it in a pile on the passenger seat, the Browning on top.
    It would have been Walker’s crew. They were working up this slope, trying to cut a roadway through the crest over to Musselshell. God knew what for. The best thing about Musselshell was there were two ways to get out of it.
    Walker must have hit bedrock here. No county bulldozer could have done this. McAllister had never been on a battlefield, not a fresh one anyway, but this was what he thought it would look like. Bodies all over the place. New earth ripped up in heaps and piles. New white stones that hadn’t seen the sun for a half a million years. Wind in the grasses—he looked up at the skyline, and as usual it hit him that this was possibly the finest work God had ever done, this fifty square miles of Yellowstone County, sea green and rolling from the massed blue line of the Big Horn Mountains in the south all the way west to the Beartooth range. Most of it as full of little murders as this ridge.
    When Walker’s charge went off, it had blown away a section of this hillside up here to his right. It had opened up a prairie dog town and spread it down the grassy slope. Most of them had died right then. The rest, those who could, had split for a better neighborhood. But since it was June in Montana, everything that had lived through the winter was breeding furiously. There were some mothers with litters around, trying to get whatever was left of their broods into a safe place.
    What had looked to McAllister like a pile of pebbles in the roadway was now sitting up and looking around. One large gray-brown prairie dog. The mama. And one—kit? pup?—at her forelegs.
    And another about a yard away.
    So where was the rattlesnake?
    There he was—where the waving track went into a low screen of sagebrush. He must have been making his run when McAllister came up the hill and scared everybody. A
big
old son of a bitch from the look of him, a dirty-brown loop of thick rope with a pattern along his spine. A diamondback maybe, although the purple shadow made it hard to tell. He might go six feet, judging by how thick he was, coiled up there. Under the sage,