Lizardskin Read Online Free Page B

minute ago.
    “Hey, over there! No shooting, eh?”
    Jesus. Listen to yourself, McAllister. Like it was half-time or something.
    The way the sun was lying, it was hard to see into the enclosure. He stood there in the open for a second, waiting for another one of those lunatic arrows to come flying across the parking lot. Bell was trying to crawl toward the shotgun. McAllister could hear him swearing to himself.
    Ronny Thornton came out from the front of the tractor cab and put his Smith over the propane area.
    “Ronny, don’t shoot into that tank.”
    Ronny’s hair was in a tangle, and a clump of grass was stuck to his shoulder. “I’m not gonna shoot, Sarge. Anyway, I think they’re gone.”
    “Then why the hell’re you pointing your piece over there? Get back on the air, tell everybody in Charlie Sector—tell everybody in District Four, get Radio to notify the Counties and get a BOLO out for three male Indians and a juvenilefemale. They’re armed and dangerous. Last seen this ten-twenty. Tell ’em what’s happened here. Now. Go do it!”
    Thornton nodded once and went back to the cruiser at a jog.
    McAllister walked over to the shotgun, picked it up, and jacked it empty. Joe Bell rolled over onto his side and said something. Beau couldn’t make out anything but “McAllister.” He figured it had something to do with lawyers.
    “Ronny, get on the radio and find out where the hell Fire and Rain is. We’re gonna need them.”
    He walked over to the Indian boy on the ground, got down on one knee, and put two fingers of his right hand under the boy’s shirt, just where the ribs met the breastbone.
    Not a sound. And nothing at the neck. The kid had a look on his lean unmarked face that McAllister had seen before. Although we all live surrounded by death and dying, every one of us believes he will live forever. The truth is always a surprise. The boy had long blue-black hair; it would have run down past his shoulders if it hadn’t been matted with drying blood. He had a Plains Indian look about him. Clean lines and that heavy-bodied, skinny-legged shape.
    McAllister touched one of the boy’s eyes. No reflex. No pupil change. Down at his left side, a loop of intestine and a pink bulb of kidney projected through the bloody ruin of his shirt.
    Bled to death while I was jerking around with Bell. Poor little bastard. One more sorry-ass useless killing. Kid had good taste in boots, too.
    McAllister patted the boy down. He found an eelskin wallet in his back pocket and a large bowie knife in a beaded doeskin scabbard at his right side.
    He tugged the knife out. A buck knife with a solid bone handle. A foot long, and sharp as an ex-wife.
    So what? He could pat down half the citizens of Montana and find some kind of knife.
    He headed across the lot toward the propane tank, holding the Browning out to one side, trying to look like a reasonable guy, the kind of guy you wouldn’t want to shoot an arrow into.
    Still, it was a long walk in the afternoon sunlight.
    The little fenced-off yard was empty. Behind the tank he found a sliver of blue feather lying in the dirt.
    Now that would be your basic clue, right?
    Or was it a sign?
    A sign of
what
? Times like these, Beau was glad he was just a patrol sergeant. Let the boys from the Criminal Investigation Bureau figure out this Indian voodoo.
    The dirt was scuffed up. Bootprints and some kind of patterned grid, maybe a running shoe. The sign ran to the back of the fence and continued on the far side. Wherever they had got to, they had done it on foot. Behind Bell’s Oasis there was a low coulee that ran a couple of hundred yards up into the hills. And beyond the hills, half of Montana, the Bull Mountains, Canada. He could see a faint trail running up into the brown prairie grass.
    McAllister had no inclination to go tear-assing up the slope and into the hills after anybody with arrows as mean-looking as the ones stuck into the rear of that van. He was too old and too smart.