Judas Horse_ An FBI Special Agent Ana Grey Mystery - April Smith [75]
The motor ticked to a stop. Slammer had extracted a quarter cup of amber-colored juice.
Megan put her head in her hand. I laid my arm around her shoulders.
“Megan’s upset. She saw the whole thing at the corral.”
“Never should have happened,” declared Stone.
“The lady was too old to go on something like that,” Sara added.
“It wasn’t her being old.” Megan raised her burning eyes. “It’s us who were arrogant. We were breaking the law when—”
“What’s the law anyway?” asked Stone. “Whatever the government decides. Arbitrary bullshit.”
“I’ll be back late Sunday,” Megan said tiredly.
“You’re not going. It’s a trap. The feds will be there.”
Megan stood. “That’s crazy!” She had gone shrill. “I am so sick of your paranoid fantasies. The world is fucked and we can’t save it. We’ve been living in fantasyland all these years, without one normal day. Without peace of any kind. Without family.”
“We could have had a family.”
“All I ever wanted was a baby.”
“You could have had a baby.”
“No! I couldn’t! We were always on the run.”
“Hush up now!” Stone said menacingly.
“I won’t! This is my house.”
“You want me to leave? Because I’ll leave,” said Stone.
“Thank you,” Megan said. “After you have ruined my life.” And she walked out of the room.
We waited in silence until Sara and I got up to collect the dishes.
Stone told us to sit down.
We sank back into our seats.
“This is a tragic situation that did not have to happen,” Stone repeated in a hurt voice. “Nobody would have had to get messed up with wild horses if it hadn’t been for Herbert Laumann. He is the oppressor. He is the United States government. Megan has a right to be angry. A lady is dead who didn’t have to be.”
He was good. Low-key and light on the rhetoric. You could feel him gathering up the fractured energy left in the room, wrapping it ever so piteously around himself.
Hours later, Megan was gone and Stone roused the household—Sara, Slammer, and me.
“We’re gonna have some fun,” he promised. “Gonzo political action.”
Now, miles away from the lost farm, we are squeezed into the white truck, and Dick Stone is singing Otis Redding: “They call me Mr. Pitiful. That’s how I got my fame—”
He keeps switching songs, genres, decades. Inside his head must be some crazy mix of rhythm and blues and screaming black-leather motorcycle metal. In a fraction of a second that goes on for eternity, he can hear Blue Oyster Cult expanding like the day of reckoning since 1975.
“Music is consciousness; it never dies,” Stone proclaims. “Music exists forever, somewhere in the universe.”
“If it never dies,” Slammer apes, “where was it born?”
“In a thirty-twoer laced with windowpane.” Dick Stone grins.
Rewind.
We are forty minutes outside Portland. Real time. It is way past the midnight hour, and this, in the grand saga of injustice and revenge, is what Dick Stone has been given: two kids passing a joint as if they are on a lark, the boy running his mouth about his wicked life, the poor little rich girl without a clue; and the pretender, the eager stranger with wild dark hair and shifty eyes, slouching in the seat beside him.
But he is pleased with the discipline of his rock ’n’ roll commando unit. Under his leadership, they have put together a goody bag of plastic squeeze bottles you would use for catsup, now filled with hydrofluoric acid; cans of red, white, and blue spray paint; a video camera; and Molotov cocktails made with the bandit’s signature Corona beer bottles.
Still the original, still the best.
For no discernible reason, he jerks the joint from Slammer’s mouth and flicks it out the window.
“What the fuck?” The boy laughs uneasily.
The bandit punishes him with silence.
Sara is all of a sudden in a fit of giggles, rolling on her back in the rear seat, long, thin arms and legs kicking out at funny angles.
“You’re a little butterfly.” Dick Stone looks in the rearview mirror. “Just like Megan, back in the day.”
It was Megan, he tells us, who shared that thirty-twoer of psychedelic malt liquor in the Civic Auditorium down in