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“And they’re all gonna be saved. Any more beers?”

I give him the Heineken and pull out a Coors.

“I could use a set-down,” he suggests. “How about yourself?”

At the other end of the table, in the half dark, an enormous white man is holding forth to a slight man of color—the first black face I’ve seen in Oregon. As we sit, I recognize the voice: like a sixteen-wheeler groaning uphill in second. That’s when I realize the fuzzy shape in the diffuse light is Mr. Terminate.

“John! It’s Darcy! From Omar’s bar.”

The other couple take a good look at John and decide to get out of there, leaving us with the dour biker, massive thighs dwarfing a folding chair, clutching a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. He has left the black top hat at home, revealing long, thin tresses trailing off a half-bald dome.

“What are you doing here?” I ask.

“Crashin’ the party.”

“Who’s your friend?”

“Toby Himes,” says the black man, extending his hand.

In the rural crowd, Toby Himes is a standout, neatly dressed in pressed slacks and a windbreaker. He keeps his hands inside his pockets while surveying the scene. He sports a tweed snap-brim cap and a white goatee, and takes his time, not intimidated. At first, I make him for another cop.

Because it takes a minute to dial it in. The biker and the black man, having a drink in the dark? This isn’t random. They know each other. And Mr. Terminate is not eating ashtrays, or washing his hands in someone’s pitcher of suds.

He is calm, like Vesuvius on a good day.

This is so inconsistent with John’s attitude toward the darker nation that the hair goes up on the back of my neck and I hook a leg over the bench, curious to find out why.

I introduce McCord as the wrangler who saved me from the wild horses, tell them the story of the arrests at the BLM corrals and try to draw them in.

“Should we all go out and save the wild horses?”

“I’ll tell you about horses,” wheezes Mr. Terminate, and begins a tale that has nothing to do with horses. “Up in Colorado, some of the fellas came into a load of computer stuff.”

“Just dropped from the sky, did it?” Toby Himes laughs and takes a sip of beer. “I know how that is.”

“You know bull crap. Excuse my French, but this is top secret shit, vital pieces of our national defense system.”

“A vital piece of our defense network is missing?” McCord says. “John, you know, that really helps me sleep at night.”

“How’d they steal it?” I ask.

Mr. Terminate shakes his head and pours a little Jack into a plastic cup.

“That I cannot say. But I do know this.”

He points a pinkie with an inch-long curved fingernail, a built-in spoon for snorting coke.

“Those computers were sold to the Indians for a shitload of silver and turquoise.”

We are openmouthed. Toby Himes giggles.

“And then,” whispers Mr. Terminate dramatically, “they buried it.”

Pause.

“Who buried it?”

“That I cannot say.”

But he furrows his eyebrows menacingly, as if telling a ghost story, which he probably is.

Toby Himes: “Get the story straight. The bikers buried it, or the Indians buried it?”

Mr. Terminate looks confused. “The way I heard it from Julius is the Indians buried it. After they stole it back.”

“The Indians stole it back?”

“The Indians damn right stole it back. Now, the fellas I know—”

“You mean Hell’s Angels?”

“That’s a dated concept, darlin’. We are businessmen.” Another sip of Jack. “The fellas I know, that knew where the turquoise was buried, when it was buried on the reservation, happened to be in prison at the time. But before they got murdered, they got word to the outside.”

Another dramatic pause.

“So,” ventures McCord after this baffling recitation, “did your boys ever find the turquoise?”

Mr. Terminate chuckles. “Rest assured it is buried in a very safe place. You think I’m fibbing? You ask Julius. He’s the one got custody of it now.”

“We’re asking you.”

“They say it’s buried beside a pipe.”

“A peace pipe!” echoes McCord with a straight face.

“All’s I know, there’s a marker, and it’s yellow. And a cage of wild beasts guarding it. But don’t go running out there.