Dead Silence (16 page)

Metal-eyes backed up a few steps. He said, “You
are
crazy,” sounding surprised but also suddenly interested.

“Not enough to kill a good horse, you sonuvabitch.” Will shifted the spear so that he was holding it over his shoulder, ready to throw.

Talking to himself, Metal-eyes said, “Insensitive to fear . . . rage compensation. I wonder if the child has abnormal pain tolerance.” The Cuban squinted through his glasses as if studying a bug. He said, “I’ll find out,” aiming the pistol at Will’s stomach, then at his pelvis, where nerve endings terminated in mass.

Will yelled, “You’re not the first man to point a gun at me!,” because that’s what came into his mind, the image of Old Man Guttersen holding a pearl-handled revolver the first time they’d laid eyes on each other.

Fast talking had saved Will back in Minnesota.

Not this time. The Cuban wasn’t chatty like Bull Guttersen. Will could see a deadness behind those silver eyes—an aloof, clinical interest—which Will didn’t understand, but he knew what was about to happen unless he could get the needle in the guy.

When the gun muzzle flashed, Will was focused on the man’s chest and already jumping to the side as he threw the spear, thinking,
Just like in the westerns except real bullets.

The gun was so loud, the boy thought he’d been hit, but he’d jumped at just the right time and that saved him. But his spear missed, too . . . or had it?

Metal-eyes appeared to have swatted the shaft away before the needle got to him, yet now the old bastard was hunched over, crabbing fast toward one of the stalls, as Cazzio reared. The horse reared again and tried to stomp the man.

Will was hustling to retrieve his spear, yelling, “Get ’em, get ’em!,” as the stallion’s steel shoes made a coconut-popping sound on the floor, just missing the man as he pulled his legs into a stall, then reached to slam the door closed.

Spear in his right hand, Will touched his left fingers to Cazzio’s rump, not wanting to surprise the stallion, then traced his hand along Cazzio’s body until he was close enough grab the halter. The boy was hurrying, but also cooing, “Calm down . . . it’s okay . . . we’ll stomp the candy-ass later . . . easy . . . ,” as he watched Metal-eyes peek through the stall bars. When Will drew his arm back to throw the spear, Metal-eyes ducked from sight.

“My spear’s tipped with deadly poison!” Will yelled in Tex-Mex Spanish, then had to switch to English to add, “One touch, that’s all she wrote!”

Buffalo-head wasn’t dead, but he was facedown in straw, making weird, drunken noises. Near him was a fifty-gallon drum of feed. Will used the drum to boost himself aboard the huge horse.

He got his fingers knotted in the braided mane, ready for the lunging acceleration, then signaled Cazzio with his boots, yelling, “Go!,” as he heard a gunshot so close that his ears rang. Metal-eyes fired three more times—
whapwhap-whap
—as Cazzio charged toward the blinding headlights.

Beneath the boy, the horse stumbled for an instant, then surprised Will by hurtling airborne, in a brief, arching silence, over the car’s fender, then jumped again two strides later, clearing a four-board fence, into the pasture.

Will was shaking, not only because he was scared as hell but also because he had never been aboard an animal so sure, so powerful.

“Go . . . Go! Yah!”

Cazzio galloped into the frozen darkness, the drumming of his hooves in synch with plumes of steam spouting from his nostrils. Will’s ears were attuned as his body matched the rhythm, hearing the countersynch snorting of the horse’s breathing, an occasional grunt and the slosh of belly water.

He risked a glance over his shoulder. The Chrysler was fishtailing down the driveway toward the road. Metal-eyes was trying to beat the horse to the overpass, where the pasture ended.

The boy grinned as he leaned forward, finding Cazzio’s rhythm, once again. For a glorious minute, he felt that soaring warrior feeling, aloof, alone and free . . .

It didn’t last.

Cazzio stumbled . . . then stumbled again. The sound of his breathing was changing. Instead of snorting, the horse was wheezing, the air in his lungs making a bubbling sound as if leaking through a secondary exit.

“What’s wrong? You hurt?”

Will spoke into the stallion’s ear. As he leaned over Cazzio’s neck, he saw that bubbles had joined the plumes of steam coming from the animal’s nostrils. The boy’s nose isolated a metallic taste in the air.

Cazzio had been shot, Will realized. The bullet had gone into the horse’s lungs, judging from the bloody bubbles, but Cazzio’s heart was so big that he’d continued running.

“Stop, it’s okay. I’ll call a vet!”

Will pulled back on the braided mane but Cazzio wouldn’t stop even though he was slowing. Because Will had once possessed an uncommon horse—Blue Jacket—he understood what was happening, and the knowledge created a vacuum pain beneath his heart.

Cazzio would continue running, no matter what. He would run and run, and keep running, until the last of his life had seeped away.

The fence marking the edge of the pasture was ahead. Cazzio had ten lengths on the car but was now struggling between a gallop and a canter. Will leaned low, like a jockey, and didn’t realize he was crying until his voice broke when he called, “Go! . . . Go! . . . Go!”

At the fence, Cazzio rallied, marshaling speed. His body swooped low before attempting takeoff, ascending, but with difficulty, fighting gravity’s terrible weight, and his front hooves clipped the top railing of the fence.

The horse was still ahead of the Chrysler when he landed and gained another length before his rear legs buckled.

Will anticipated the fall. He threw himself clear as the horse crashed head-first into the weeds, then made a high-pitched whinny of frustration.

As Will got to his feet, he stared at Cazzio for a moment but had to turn away. The horse was on his side, blood pouring from a wound in his chest. His legs were moving, clawing at weeds and empty air, still trying to run.

Above, on the overpass, the Chrysler had stopped, headlights bright. Seconds later, another car pulled in. Will guessed it was the man the Cubans had mentioned, the one they’d been waiting for.

Will was ducking beneath the lights and starting for the trees when he heard Cazzio whinny again. The cry was different this time. It communicated fear.

Will looked and saw that the horse’s eyes were wide and wild, terrified. He could also see two men working their way down the rock ledge, Metal-eyes, with his gun, in the lead.

It didn’t matter. Will ran to Cazzio and knelt beside him, his hands kneading the loose skin on the stallion’s neck.

The boy was whispering, “I’ll take you away from this. It’ll all be okay,” when Metal-eyes got close enough to say to Will, “Move—or I’ll shoot you, too.”

E
ven from a distance, I could see a horse’s bloated body lying in a clearing on the far side of a fence.

White fence, gray horse. Conspicuous on a landscape of hills and winter oaks. At dusk, in January, rural Long Island was as colorless as a woodcut on parchment.

The horse had been shot, maybe while jumping the fence, maybe as he touched down. It was possible that Will Chaser had been aboard.

The animal lay in waist-high sedge, his body mass creating an indentation in the grass. Tail and mane were darker than the Appaloosa spots on his rump. He had been dead for at least eight hours, but vapor continued condensing on his coat as heat dissipated from his body.

We had crossed a hundred yards of pasture. Behind us was one of Long Island’s elite equestrian estates, Shelter Point: dressage ring, boarding barn, breeding lab, staff quarters, forty acres of white fencing, a castle-sized mansion in the distance, an orange wind sock that told me the horsey set used private jets.

The practice arena was patched with snow. Jump stations were fabricated with a theatrical precision that reminded me of a miniature golf course.

A quarter mile down the road was a farmhouse where Shelter Point’s manager lived. Beside it was a semitrailer converted to haul horses in style. The trailer was hooked to a new Range Rover, which was typical of the area, opulence that was elaborately, unmistakably, aggressively understated. Welcome to the Hamptons, a cluster of villages, beach estates and ranches that, for most property owners, constituted the most expensive hobbies in the Western Hemisphere.

Ahead of us, the fence’s top rail had snapped midcenter. It looked as if someone might have hit it with a sledgehammer, but the horse had busted it as he jumped the fence—or attempted to jump the fence.

The fence was five feet high. Heavy two-by-sixes bolted to posts. Solid and unforgiving—obviously.

The horse had ended up twenty yards beyond the fence, to the right of the break. Looked as if he caught the top rail with a hoof, then struggled a few strides trying to recover before he fell.

But it wasn’t the fall that had killed the horse. The FBI agent who’d met us at an East Hampton jetport had already provided some details. That night, around ten p.m., a 911 call was placed from a stable near the manager’s house, but the phone went dead before the operator heard the caller’s voice. The operator made the required call back and the manager answered—the number had been forwarded to his cell, he told her. He was in town, no one was at the ranch, so maybe he’d sat on his phone wrong.

When the manager got home, though, he called 911 and said he needed police, it was an emergency.

Police discovered that the phone line had been ripped from an outside wall of a barn. Inside was evidence of a fight, and the ranch’s prize hunter-jumper stallion was missing. They’d found the horse’s body only four hours ago.

The evidence was still fresh, but it was a difficult scene to read. That’s why the agent, Jibreel Sudderram, wanted to have another look. The FBI had instructed Sudderram to let us tag along because a powerful senator had insisted.

“I heard the boy was a competent horseman,” Sudderram had said as we drove from the airstrip, his inflection asking if we knew anything else about Will Chase.

I did. During the flight, I’d slept for a while, then made phone calls. I’d spoken with one of the boy’s former teachers and also to Ruth and Otto Guttersen. Most of the information came from Otto, a crippled ex-wrestler who seemed to genuinely care about the kid. As we talked, the smart-assed teen became a person—complex, troubled, gifted, tough, tricky and, most all, different.

All three said that about the boy: “Will is
different
.”

I told the FBI agent that Chaser was more than just a decent horseman, he’d been a rising star on the Oklahoma junior-rodeo circuit.

“I suppose they take rodeo seriously in that region.”

I said, “Chaser was qualifying for senior competitions before he was thirteen. At a regular school, the equivalent would be a seventh grader playing varsity football starting at quarterback.”

William Chaser had lived on three reservations and in six different homes before he was twelve, I told the agent. “The only consistent thing in his life was working on ranches. A former teacher said the boy’s a better barrel rider and roper than most men.”

“Barrel riding . . . He was that good, huh?”

I said, “Hopefully, he still is,” and paid close attention to the agent’s shielded reaction. The man had seen or heard something that convinced him the boy was dead or soon would be.

Because the agent noticed, he amended, “That was a slip. We’re not even sure the boy was in the area. But some strange things took place last night . . . or early this morning, more likely. We’re still putting it together.”

I wasn’t convinced he wasn’t convinced. Using the past tense might have been careless but it wasn’t accidental. And there was a reason we’d seen a pair of helicopters working both shorelines as we landed and why there were police cruisers and unmarked cars on most of the roads.

Long Island’s eastern tip forks like a lobster’s claw. The South Fork is a summer retreat, not a winter destination. From the air, the estates had looked as deserted as the shoreline, miles and miles of beach where for two hundred years whalers hunted.

What surprised me was the wild landscape, acres of wooded hills, swamps, kettle ponds and corn stubble. Before today, when I heard the name Long Island, I pictured Brooklyn slums, not a hundred miles of glaciated seacoast, dunes and archaic farms.

I hoped Will Chaser was still alive and on the loose. There was space here to hide from men who had every reason to kill him. Seeing a roadful of cops might not lure a boy with his background from hiding. He had been arrested twice for dealing grass and was also suspected of growing it. And he’d almost gone to jail for stealing a quarter-million-dollar horse. I had discovered all that and more about William J. Chaser,
J
for
Joseph
.

The kid was a survivor. The more I learned, the more I wanted to meet him. Not just to save him—I am a rescuer by nature, or so I’m told—but to find out how the boy had managed to escape, if he had indeed escaped. He
was
unusual and I wanted to know how . . . and why.

“It’s because you see yourself in the kid,” Tomlinson had told me on the plane. “Or want to. Not all homeless kids are functioning, independent adults by the time they’re sixteen. You were. Maybe Will is, too. But it’s unfair to hang those kind of expectations on him, man.”

I had chided Tomlinson, accusing him of being in a foul mood because the plane didn’t serve booze. That’s what got him started. Maybe he read my refusal to debate as an admission of guilt. Or disinterest. Whatever the reason, it irritated him and he pressed the issue.

“If Will outsmarts the people who snatched him, it validates you, Doc. If he’s too tough for them to break, it validates your totally unsympathetic view of what makes a man strong. Of what constitutes ballsiness in a
real
man.”