Lizardskin by Carsten Stroud Page B

nodded through it all, considering how it would look to the district attorney.
    When Beau reached the point where he had fired to wound Joe Bell, Eustace shook his head slowly and made a couple of notes on his desk calendar.
    Beau was wrapping up his story when the intercom on the lieutenant’s desk buzzed.
    “Meagher here. What is it, Myron?”
    “Ballard’s here. You want her to wait?”
    “Tell her just a minute, Myron.… Well, Beau. This is it now. She’s gonna want to tape the whole thing. Not a formal Q and A, but it’ll be part of the official record. Also, she’s gonna be a tad pissed as well. I hear we’re getting sued. You want to go ahead now, or I can say you’re still in a reaction from the stress of the encounter, tell her to do this later tonight?”
    “Oh yeah—tell the Dragon Lady I’m stressed out? No way, Eustace. Bring her on, and damn the torpedoes.”
    “Well, I think we’re in good shape here. There’s a precedent for wounding fire if an officer perceives a danger to citizens. Just stick to your notes, and don’t let her get you rattled, okay?”
    Meagher leaned over and hit the intercom button. “Please ask Ms. Ballard to come in.”
    Beau and the lieutenant waited in taut silence for a minute. Beau tried to keep his heart from speeding up, tried to breathe slowly and steadily through his nose.
    “Cut that out, Beau. You sound like a church organ—
Hello
there, Vanessa!”
    Eustace and Beau got to their feet as the assistant district attorney for Yellowstone County came gliding into the room on a wave of poison and the squeak of rubber on hardwood.
    Vanessa Ballard was a problem for Beau. He was always a little off balance when he was in the same room with this tall, slender horsewhip of a woman with a golden bell of blond hair and creamy white skin, eyes a little too far apart and as blue as glacier ice, a rich red dahlia of a mouth, always a little breathless, long-fingered surgical hands ending in blood-tipped nails as red as taillight glass, and legs that went, Beau assumed, all the way to heaven in a flawless sweep of jazzercise and good genetics.
    Today The Ballard was exquisitely fine-tuned in an imperial purple suede suit with a radically abbreviated skirt and little touches of solid gold at the silky hollow of her throat and the supple turning of her wrists. She wore, as usual, one of what seemed to be hundreds of different pairs of expensive jogging shoes in a spectrum of shades. Today’s shade was pale lavender.
    “Hello, Lieutenant Meagher.” She shook his hand twice, hard, making excellent eye contact. Ballard was radiating testosterone today, as she always did when she had to go out and tolerate policemen, a breed she seemed to consider an evil necessity, like tick birds on a rhino.
    “I’ll need the desk,” she said, and seated herself behind it.She began to riffle through her black snakeskin attaché case, head down, a glittering sweep of heavy golden hair hiding her face. Her voice was a velvet growl, her enunciation as honed as a glass blade.
    “This situation, gentlemen—I’d say the word
sucks
catches the essence of it. Joe Bell is sitting on his ass in Sweetwater”—at this point she looked up through her waterfall of cornsilk hair and fixed Beau with one steel—blue eye—“perhaps I should say lying on his belly over in Sweetwater General, having a seance with Dwight Hogeland even as we speak. And if I know Hogeland, that man will do his level best to sue us all into Go-Home Bay for his two-thirds contingency fee and all the troopers he can butt-fuck. This means
you
, McAllister!”
    “Hey, Vanessa!”
    She slammed a tape recorder down on Meagher’s desk and threw her hair back in a kind of wild-horse twist Beau could feel in his belly.
    “How many times are we going to have to explain this stuff to you, McAllister? If you
must
shoot the citizenry,
shoot to kill!
It’s a hell of lot cheaper to kill one—only eighty cents a round for your