Swift to Chase Page 5
“To putting down a murderous psychopath. Damned good at it, isn’t she? All those bodies? I’m sure lab work is going to connect your girl to the crime scene.”
“Shit, man. We were all there. That scene is a mess.”
“Montana’s finest,” I said.
“Put things in order,” Beasley said. “Be the hero who solved the case.”
“Huh. Think the curse is broken?”
Beasley shrugged.
“Can’t see how it matters for you. If it is, you’re sheriff for life. If the situation remains unchanged, nobody outside of our circle is gonna remember anything in a week or two. Besides, there’s Jessica’s not insubstantial fee. Check under my bed.”
“Yeah? How much.”
“Ten grand.”
“Beasley!” I said, too weak to jump up and slap him.
That did it. The clouds cleared from Sheriff Holcomb’s demeanor. He grinned.
“Okay, then. Okay.” He clapped Beasley’s shoulder. “Yeah, okay. Reckon I’ll mosey on back to camp and straighten everything out.”
Watching the predatory smirk and swagger of the sheriff, his easy acceptance of such a dramatic turn of events, was chilling. How many two-bit criminals had he left in the woods? How many hookers had he strangled and dumped along the highway?
I only exhaled when he tipped his hat and ambled toward town.
“Lean on me,” Beasley said. “I parked not far from here.” He half carried me to his truck and put me inside. He gunned the engine and got us moving.
“I can’t believe you gave that pumpkin-headed sonofabitch my cash.”
He smiled.
“Von’s gonna be hot. It’s behind the seat.”
I relaxed. A hundred aches and pains faded into the background and I almost smiled. Didn’t last long — the dead cop’s face would haunt my dreams, or worse.
“Where to?”
“Home. Ride with me as far as you want.”
“Oh, is it that easy? We’re done? Weren’t you planning to trap the…spirit in that den? Sure Mary and I didn’t totally blow the whole deal?”
“I’m done is all I know. Gave it the college try. You look sort of spectacular in what’s left of that dress, in case nobody mentioned it yet.”
We continued in silence until we hit the interstate and turned east.
Beasley reached over and patted my scraped knee.
“Yep, it’s over. The moon feels different.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell him the last thing I’d seen before I booked out of there in Sheriff Holcomb’s cruiser was Deputy Cooper’s grin, her eyelid sliding down in a ghastly wink. Could have been my imagination. What else?
Besides, Beasley was right. The moon did feel different. Surely it did.
I gave him a cheery smile and rested my head against the window. We drove deep into the night, cleaving through a vault of stars. The air thinned until the stars burned through the windshield. Beasley pulled over at a motel and got us a room with a radio and a box television. After showering off the blood, grime, and stink, I stared at my reflection in the bathroom mirror. My eyes were ringed from exhaustion and wide with the exultant aftermath of terror I’d come to recognize. Question was, were these the eyes of a doomed woman? I blinked, no closer to an answer.
Beasley had fallen onto the narrow bed, fully dressed. He snored counter-time to golden country oldies. I lay next to him, my hand on his arm, and regarded the ceiling. Those water-stained tiles were the bottom of an inverted tea cup, promising me, warning me of my fate. I waited for a coyote to yip or a wolf to howl. Waited some more as Hank Williams Sr.’s lost highway carried me into dreams.
LD50
Despite the pervasiveness of instant communication, smart phones, video-capable eyeglasses, and twenty-four-hour cable media, I generally slip under the radar. While I’m not homely, I’ve got one of those faces you can’t help but forget even though the name Jessica Mace trips off the tongue, the answer to a crossword puzzle, no doubt. In this age of daily horrors going at ten cents a bushel, what happened to me in Alaska three years ago is ancient enough news to be catalogued alongside floor plans for the Pyramids.
The first thing people ask if they catch me without a turtleneck or a scarf is, Oh my God, what happened to your neck? Then I tell them to go piss up a rope, with a rasp because the blade went deep, and that is inevitably that. We aren’t going to discuss it now, either.
Moving on.
I won’t give you the entire picture. You can have snapshots. Order them any way you please. Make of them what you will. This is your mystery to solve.
* * *
Late one summer I was hitching through Eastern Washington.
Joseph on a camel, there’s a whole lot of nothing for you. Chatted up a few locals and got the lay of the land. Twigged to the fact that that part of the world rivaled Alaska for incident rates of theft, murder, rape, and diabolism — amateur and professional.
A long-haul trucker who gave me a lift bragged that the meth labs were so prevalent they formed a Crystal Triangle. He worried that the Mexicans were taking over; first wave was migrants working the apple orchards and now the cartels had their hooks sunk, like in Arizona and Texas. Tourist attractions included the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, Walla Walla State Prison, and the J.W. Trevan Memorial Testing Facility. The first and the last concocted the poison and the middle supplied the control population. Kidding, everybody knew big animal shelters in Seattle and Spokane provided the subjects, forever homes his foot. He offered me a twenty-spot to blow him and I bailed at the weigh station before the wheels stopped rolling.
A farmer and his grandson chided me for thumbing, it wasn’t safe for a young lady, insert lecture here. The farmer was aggrieved because somebody poisoned his German shepherd and hacked off its paws. Stole the paws, left the dog. I mean, damn. That bad news was making the rounds. The waitress at the diner where I got dropped by Farmer Brown said it was a shame, the Devil Hisownself at work through the instrument of some godless sicko. Thirty dogs since Easter, said the fry cook as he watched me push my cheeseburger aside. Nuh-uh, eighty or ninety, chimed in a barfly who was sipping from a brown paper bag at nine in the A.M. A serial killer of mutts, said the cook, shaking his head. Pooches snatched from yards and kennels, later found stabbed, decapitated, pierced with arrows, ritually dismembered. You know what mutilating animals leads to, said the waitress. People! said the barfly and grinned. The sheriff’s department was on the case, which meant there’d be three hundred dogs slaughtered before that nimrod Sheriff Danker Brunner caught a clue. Then cookie got going on a rape trial concerning a high school football team the next county over and I tuned my brain to another frequency.
Did some loon think a dog’s foot might be a lucky charm? Did he string them from his rearview? Did he mount the heads on the wall of his shack? Did he have a Fido to call his own? Those interstate hookers might want to watch themselves, being a lateral link in the food chain, except nobody cares about hookers the way they get out pitchforks and torches for the plight of mutts.
Rednecks flying Dixie colors from the antenna of their monster truck chucked a bottle at me as I waited for the next hitch at the pull in. Who says you can’t go home again. Who says you ever get away.
* * *
I danced with a cowboy named Stefano Hoyle at a tavern near the freeway off-ramp. His shirt smelled of Old Spice and tobacco. He possessed an aura reminiscent of the Yukon fishermen and hunters I’d known in the Forty-ninth state. A radioactive strangeness that drew me like a magnet, made me all tingly. Said he’d never been to Alaska, had always lived here in purgatory. Hated the cold and Eastern WA got plenty. He didn’t have much more to give, measured his words as if they were pearls. I am a reader between lines kind of gal so we got along dandy.
One Cuervo led to a shitload more Cuervo and we fucked away half the weekend back at his trailer. Basking in the afterglow, I decided to hang around and see where the ride went.
Hoyle didn
’t ask about the bitchin’ scar in his haste to get my clothes off, although he was also pretty goddamned drunk and it was dark, so I figured for sure by the cold light of morning, etcetera, and still not a peep. Tall, dark, and handsome fixed us bacon and toast and I finally became exasperated lounging there in a bra and Hello Kitty panties and told him the score, how I got my throat cut and how I got back my own, or maybe got back some of my own, at the end of that spooky fairytale in the frozen north. Real deal fairytales are all about nasty sex, blood, and cannibalism, same as real life. I tend to babble after a righteous fuck, but I possessed the presence of mind to leave out a few details of the incident, such as me busting caps into a dyed-in-the-wool mass murderer. Girl has gotta hold something in reserve for the second date.
He shrugged and tipped his Stetson back and said how’d I like my eggs and then served them to me overdone as steel-belted tires anyway. That Stetson, incidentally, was the only thing he ever wore until five minutes before exiting the trailer to perform his cowboy routine.
Nice enough body, could have made the grade for a young nekkid Marlboro Man calendar in a pinch. It was also obvious that between chain smoking Pall Malls, chugging booze, and taking a beating from the elements, he’d be a woofer in a few more years. Weathered, is the polite term and it’s why my policy is to snag them while they’re young.
He pulled on a long sleeve shirt and blue jeans and grabbed a rifle from where it rested against a pile of laundry. Flicked me a Gila monster glance as he limped into the yard. Real deal cowboys, not assholes who wear ten gallon hats and dinner plate belt buckles to the office or while sipping wine coolers, are bowlegged, and all of them limp, speak Spanish like it’s the mother tongue, and hail from the State of Coahuila. I gave Hoyle a pass on the last item.
When you call out to a real deal cowboy, he turns his body, not his neck. Busted ribs, busted vertebrae, and yeah getting kicked in the face by a bucking bronco smarts. They all chew, or smoke, or both, and they drink. Every mother loving one of them.
His trailer was an Airstream from the ‘50s. One door. Windows so tiny you’d have to be a rattler to shimmy through. It teetered on cinderblocks, verging that big ass nothing I mentioned earlier. Two acres of empty chicken coops, junk cars, and a pair of corrals taken over by ant mounds. A fire ant colony, the advance guard of a South American invasion force. The barn had collapsed. Country & Western version of the projects. He’d inherited the whole shebang from his folks. Dead for ten years, Mom and Dad; a brother, or sister, in Canada soaking up that sweet, sweet, socialized everything. No pets, pets were a tie down. I looked around at the desolation when he said that, kept my mouth shut for once.
Hoyle proudly showed off his motorcycle, a Kawasaki he’d gotten on the cheap from his pal Lonnie. Did I know anything about motor bikes? Told him my late uncle was a motocross fanatic, took me riding on the Knik Flats when I was a kid, showed me how to tune a carburetor and change a spark plug; the basics. Hoyle seemed impressed with my tomboy ingenuity. His bike had some problems, it stalled and stuttered, and he wasn’t exactly a mechanic, although he tinkered with it every chance he got. His cousin died in a motorcycle crackup, rear-ended a semi at highway speed and after divulging that info he changed the subject by not speaking again for half an hour.
Way off through the haze and the hayricks and rough hills were mountains, the ancient worn down kind. The landscape was arrested mid evolution; all the worst qualities of salt plain and high desert and not a tree for miles, frozen like that forever. Could have been tar pits from the look of things, mammoth tusks scattered. Even in hot weather -- and Jesus it was hot that year -- the dry wind had an edge. The grit between my teeth tasted of alkali and it was always there, always made me yearn to rinse my mouth. Made me wonder if it was the same phenomena here as on the tundra, if the emptiness treated your mind like a kid deforming a slinky.
I asked where to as he climbed into his old Ford flatbed. Gods, I hated my voice. Sounded like a rusty hinge. Another detail that raised brows, but not his. Unflappable he, I bet a scorpion could scuttle over him and not get a rise. He laid the rifle on the rear window rack and cranked up his rig. Of course the radio was dialed to a station that spun the ghosts of Hank Williams, Roger Miller, and Ernest Tubb.
The roads were either cracked blacktop, dirt, or wagon trails, depending. You traveled in a cloud of dust. I lighted another cigarette and squinted through a pair of sunglasses I’d swiped at a liquor store in Vancouver.
“Last book I read was Stallion Gate,” Hoyle drawled. A recitation. “Favorite movie is The Food of the Gods. You agreed to come home with me because there’s something about my eyes.” This was in response to a survey question I’d asked at the bar thirty-six hours prior. So it went with him. Drop in a quarter and the music would play sooner or later if you stuck in there.
“Smith’s least appreciated book, that movie is terrible, and yeah. You’re right on. You’ve got angel eyes, like Lee Van Cleef.” I shifted on the bench seat because the Ka-Bar strapped to my hip was digging in. I’d ditched the .38 since I didn’t qualify for a concealed carry permit and none of the cops I’d met had any sense of humor, so a pistol was too risky for my taste. The knife had already earned its keep when a sketchy dude hassled me at a campsite along the AlCan Highway. Scared him off, no slicing necessary. I didn’t think Hoyle harbored ill intentions, hoped not. Time would tell. Mr. Ka-Bar gave me a little security anyhow.
“You like to shoot?” he said out of the blue.
The road reeled us further and further into North American badlands variety of veldt. I almost laughed, caught myself, lowered my shades, and gave him a bug-eyed glance that passed for innocence.
“What are we shooting?” I said.
“Sunday’s my day of rest,” he said. “So, coyotes.”
“One thing leads to another.”
“What?”
“It’s not a country song,” I said.
* * *
Hoyle parked in the middle of nowhere and we walked to a blind of grass and brush built on the lip of a gully. Perfect three hundred and sixty-degree view of the great empty. Patches of cattle tried to stay in the shade of cloud dapples. Fences between them and us. Corroded barbed wire, petrified posts, rocks, tumbleweeds, lightning-struck charred bones.
He brought a jug of water and a pair of binoculars; decided against the Varmint Suit, as he called it: an olive gray camo set of matching pants and coat; a sniper outfit webbed with netting and faux vegetation. Gave me the chills to see it bundled there by the spare tire like some discarded rubber monster suit from a Universal sound stage. I felt relief that he didn’t climb inside, didn’t strip away his humanity through the addition. The VS was hot and bulky and he saved it for tricky hunts, the kill of kills. Today wasn’t tricky, it was straightforward as she got.
We nestled onto a mat in near darkness of the shelter and peeked through cunning slits in the blind at the bright old world. The blind was one of a dozen he’d erected across the prairie. His custom was to tour them over the course of a season, catch as catch could. Mainly, he strung wire and drove tractors for the neighborhood farmers. This was how he earned tequila and cigarette money. Picking up bitches money, is what he mumbled, or what I heard.
“I don’t think I like this,” I said, quiet as if we were in church.
He told me how it was, laconic, nothing wasted.
Government paid fifty bucks a pelt with a waterproof form to fill in — time, date, sex, method, latitude and longitude, a tiny print wall of other bureaucratic bullshit. The state predator culling program guide claimed winter and spring to be superior to late summer for purposes of controlling the population. Hunters didn’t give a damn. Fifty bucks was fifty bucks and a dead coyote was one less coyote, which was good.
“Predators-schmedators. Everything’s got a right to live,” I said, believing it.
“They eat kittens,” he said.
“Coyotes do not eat kittens. Where the hell do they find kittens?”
“Kittens? Really?”
“A pack went for a baby at a picnic a few years back. A human baby.”
“Ah. This is a noble enterprise. You’re an exterminator. That it?”
“Sure. I guess.”
“You enjoy it so much, I’m kind of surprised you don’t do something about all these fire ant condos.”
He cracked a smile. “Now, that’s not neighborly. They’re getting a foothold this far north. Besides, I don’t get paid to blow up anthills, Jess.”
Normally, Hoyle used electronic decoys and artificial scents and other kinds of high tech bait. Culling was an art and he’d learned everything that he knew from a true master, wouldn’t say who, though. That afternoon he kept it simple with a pocket call. A piece of plastic that created a spectrum of horrendous screeches, squeals, and yowls. Distressed and dying rabbit was his specialty. A scrawny female coyote slunk from the tall grass and froze, nose lifted to get a fix on lunch. He shot her dead at two hundred yards.
We went to the carcass and he dressed it on the spot with a buck knife while the sun hammered and cooked. The slices went A B C. Done it before a thousand times, easy, you could tell. Blood, guts, the works went into a plastic bag and he made his notations of record on the waterproof form. Then back to the truck and a hop, skip, and a jump to another vast quadrant of prairie and a fresh killing blind.
“Next one’s yours,” he said and handed over the rifle.
“No way, Jose,” I said. “I’m not bushwhacking some hapless critter.”
“Oh, yeah you will.”
“Get bent,” I said.
“This is sacred. You’ll offend the gods.”
I worked the bolt to test the action, and maybe to back him off his he-man perch a tad. An ex taught me plenty about shooting, it simply wasn’t my pastime of choice. That said, the rifle, a Ruger .223, was sleek and ultra-phallic. I tasted the linseed and Three-In-One oils on it, whiffed the powder tang from the barrel. The stock fit my shoulder, snug. Deer gun, a woman’s gun.