Lizardskin by Carsten Stroud

behind his desk. It read:
    WHAT PART OF “NO!” DON’T YOU UNDERSTAND?
    And the pictures—there was Eustace in his graduation class at Quantico, in a lineup of sixty guys as tightly wrapped as he was, everybody grinning like they had a secret you’d
never
guess. And Eustace with Robert Ressler, head of the FBI’s Behavioral Sciences lab, and Eustace with Dan Quayle and the governor. Eustace with Doc Darryl Hogeland—Dwight Hogeland’s famous father and a great argument against evolution, since the father was a fine man and the son was a legalistic weasel: Eustace was standing beside the doctor’s navy-blue Learjet. Eustace with Doc Hogeland again, at the opening of the Hogeland Oncology Wing at Sweetwater General here in Billings; Eustace holding one end of a blown-up check, money raised from District Four of the Montana Highway Patrol last year.
    Beau had to smile at that one. The lieutenant’s fund-raisingmethod was sort of like the IRS—he had it taken off their paychecks. When he looked back at Eustace, the lieutenant was looking at him and tugging on his lip. Beau tried a big disarming smile.
    He got a thin grin back.
    “This part of a campaign you’re on, Beau? Discourage the citizens from cluttering up the 911 line? Every time one of ’em calls in, we send you out there and you shoot ’em?”
    “Not a bad idea, LT. I say, why wait till they call? I’m out there, I could just pick one at random, smoke him. Be like the lottery, only instead of going to Hawaii, you die.”
    “You give them a running start?”
    “Nah—just blast away at ’em. They’ll figure it out.”
    “That’s true. Way you shoot, never know, they might just die of old age waiting for you to get the windage. Thornton tells me you were aiming at Bell’s foot.”
    “Yeah. You can always tell what I was aiming at by what I hit. Take fifty feet of string and a piece of chalk, draw a big circle around the bullet hole. It’s probably in there somewhere.”
    “Yeah. Shoot at his foot, hit him in the ass.”
    “It was a larger target. Bell’s got an ass like a harvest moon. Bell gets any fatter, they’ll give him his own area code.”
    “And while you’re popping away trying to hit Bell’s ass, three, maybe four armed robbers are zipping off into the hills. I’m gonna
love
writing this one up for the brass in Helena. So just for the record, why’nt you tell me—in your own words— just how this all happened?”
    “This a Q and A?”
    “You see a tape recorder? You see Vanessa down here?”
    “Oh, Christ—Ballard catching today?”
    “None other. She’s the duty DA all weekend. Your luck.”
    “Jeez, I thought she was down at her place in Red Lodge.”
    “Nope. So we better get this right.”
    “Hell. Why can’t women just do what God made them for?”
    “Beau, I tell you, that’s what God made her to do. She’s the best DA in eastern Montana.”
    “I know that. She still makes me jumpy.”
    “When they told you these were the nineties, Beau, they didn’t mean the
eighteen
nineties.”
    “Damned affirmative action.”
    “That’s not how Ballard got here. You saying that’s how I got here?”
    “You know what I’m saying, Eustace. You didn’t get here because you’re black. You got here because you were a hotshot fed and a good cop. Nowadays, the only way to get into the force is to be a Native American lesbian dwarf with a wooden leg and an ACLU card. Cover a shitload of federal quotas there. Just don’t be tall enough to reach the pedals on the cruisers or help out in a bar fight. Last week, remember that go-round at Twilly’s?”
    “I remember.”
    “So do I—I’m getting the shit kicked outta me by Johnny Karpo and that huge Crow girlfriend of his, Brenda Roan Horse? Who shows up but the Munchkin.”
    “He did okay, I hear.”
    “Oh, yeah—pulled some of that oriental martial arts stuff, and Brenda comes up behind him and throws him over the bar. That was fun to watch. Only reason I lived,