Lone Creek

22

A distant sound jolted me awake, too dazed to grasp where I was.

Then I remembered.

When I'd gotten home, not long before dawn, I'd come in quietly and made sure nobody was around, then gone into the woods to a spot that was well hidden and gave a clear view of my cabin and the road. I'd wrapped myself in a sleeping bag and sat back upright against a little berm, with my old man's pistol in my lap. I wouldn't have believed I could have closed my eyes, let alone slept, but my adrenaline had evaporated and exhaustion slammed down like the lid of a coffin. Now the hazy light of an autumn morning was filtering down through the pine branches around me.

The noise I'd heard was from a vehicle coming up my drive-a sheriff's cruiser.

It pulled up beside my truck. As the driver unfolded his lanky frame out of the car, I saw that it was Gary Varna.

He'd abandoned his usual button-down shirt and jeans and was in full uniform-counting his Smokey Bear hat, six and a half feet of khaki and leather. Ordinarily, you never saw him with a gun-he probably carried a small one concealed, like most off-duty cops-but on formal occasions he strapped on a more traditional Montana sheriff's weapon, a.44 Magnum that looked the size of a jackhammer. He was wearing it now.

I got up fast, shoved my gear into the brush, and hurried to meet him, keeping the cabin between us so it wouldn't look like I'd been so far away. My head, ribs, and wrist all reminded me of details from yesterday.

When I got to Gary, he had my truck's hood up and seemed to be admiring the engine.

"Morning, Hugh," he said. "I haven't seen this much of you in years."

"Sheriff."

"Out for a stroll?"

"Just to take a leak."

"Nice old rig," he said, patting the fender. "What you got in here, a 327?"

I nodded. "My dad had it bored and revalved for the changeover to unleaded, so it's a little bigger now."

"Nice," he said again. He closed the hood with a clang that made me wince.

"Come on in," I said.

His blue-gray eyes took in the cabin's interior without seeming to, in that practiced cop way. There wasn't much to see-the nook I euphemistically called my kitchen, just big enough for an old Monarch wood cookstove and a sink; a bed made of three-quarter-inch plywood with a worn-out mattress on top; a table and some other pieces of furniture; and some bookshelves and prints and such that I'd mounted on the rough log walls.

The clock read 7:39 AM. I hadn't expected this visit so early, or that Gary himself would come. But I'd known that somebody would, and I'd done a little staging of my own, rumpling the bedding and leaving a bottle of Old Taylor and some empty beer cans around.

"Sorry to interrupt you," he said, hooking his thumbs in his gun belt. "You look like you could use some more sleep."

"I got pretty fucked up last night." I didn't have to pretend much about that. I was bleary-eyed, rumpled, and still wearing dirty work clothes-although not the same ones as yesterday.

"The kind of day you had, I can't blame you," he said.

"Thanks. I'll make some coffee."

"Don't worry about it on my account. I already drunk a gallon." So. He'd been up and on this for a while.

I started filling the kettle, mostly to give my hands something to do. "You're looking very official," I said.

"Not by choice-just in case something comes up. I got a call about five this morning from Reuben Pettyjohn. He'd just got a call from Kirk's girlfriend. I guess she didn't want to talk to our office directly-she's got a couple little drug issues pending. Anyway, seems Kirk never came home last night."

I kept my hands moving and did my best to put on a wry face.

"I don't find that too hard to believe," I said. Kirk had a well-known penchant for sliding around on his live-in squeeze, Josie. Even Helena had its meth whores, and he was popular with them.

"That's what me and Reuben would of figured, and so did Josie, at first," Gary said. "She drove around town a while, checking the bars and other gals' apartments and all that. She kept calling his cell phone and he wouldn't answer, which ain't hard to believe, either.

"But then an hour or two after midnight, her calls started going straight to the phone's answering machine. Now, it's possible he turned it off or it ran out of juice, but she says he was crazy about that phone and he made damn sure to keep it working twenty-four seven, no matter what."

Son of a bitch, his cell phone. He must have had it stashed in the Jeep. I'd rummaged through there quickly, looking for my camera, but I hadn't found that and I'd never even thought about the phone.

"The only other way I know of that can happen," Gary said, "is when they get damaged."

Sitting at the bottom of Canyon Ferry Lake would damage a cell phone, all right.

I glanced at Gary, wrinkling my forehead in concern.

"You think something happened to him?" I said.

"I got two minds about it. I'm still mostly willing to bet he fell in love for the night. Maybe he did turn it off, or dropped it or stepped on it or run over it. But together with him not turning up-that's unsettling. So we're asking around." Gary's gaze stayed on me.

I shrugged. "Last time I saw him was yesterday afternoon at the ranch, right before I came to visit you."

"He was holding a rifle on you, is that right?"

I'd suspected that would get thrown at me sooner or later, too, but it was still the hardest jolt yet.

"Well-yeah," I said.

Then I swung around to face him.

"What are you getting at, Gary? Nothing happened between Kirk and me-we never even talked. He was just there in the background, doing his job."

"That's all I'm doing, too-just my job. This is informal, but if you don't want to talk to me, you don't have to."

It didn't look informal, with that uniform and hogleg.

"Sure I'll talk to you," I said.

He lifted his chin in approval. "Why don't you give me a quick rundown of what you did last night?"

I'd rehearsed this over and over during the drive back here and the hour or so before I'd fallen asleep, but it was still like walking through a minefield. I spoke hesitantly, as if I was trying to remember.

"I got home from jail. I was pissed off and restless. I went down to O'Toole's and had a couple. Then-can we keep this private?"

"For now," Gary said. "Not if it comes to bear legally. So think it over."

"It's nothing that serious. I went out to the ranch and picked up my tools."

"Am I remembering right that Balcomb eighty-sixed you from there?"

"Yeah, but the way he was fucking with me, I was nervous he'd impound them or some goddamn thing and I'd never see them again."

Gary pushed his hat brim back and scratched his forehead.

"I can't say that was a good idea, but I can see it," he said. "Give me a time frame to hang this on."

"I probably left the bar around ten and got back to town around midnight."

"That's a long trip out there and back."

"I took it slow, on the ranch. Kept stopping and listening, in case there was somebody else around."

"All right, you got to town about midnight," he said.

"I stopped by Sarah Lynn's to pay her the money she'd lent me. Then I went home and took that slow, too. I had a lot to think about."

"Anybody see you during all this?"

"Not that I know of. I mean, people might have seen me, but there was nobody I talked to."

"What time did you get here?"

"I never looked. It must have been at least two o'clock, maybe three." I hadn't wanted to say that-it was in the time range when Kirk's cell phone would have gone on the blink.

"That puts a little kink in my brain," Gary said. "Your truck engine seemed a touch warm. You'd think on a chilly night like we're getting, it'd go stone cold between then and now."

Son of a bitch again. So that's what he'd been doing with the hood open.

The only answer I could come up with was bone lame.

"I might have driven around longer than I thought."

Gary didn't say anything to that-just took another look around the cabin, then stalked to the door. I followed him.

"OK, Hugh," he said. "That all seems reasonable, even if some of it ain't exactly legal, and we can check it out if we have to. Let's hope we don't."

"Look, you know Kirk and I aren't buddies." I was careful not to use weren't. "But we get along. I'd sure never wish him any harm."

"That's good to know. Unfortunately, it don't much matter. What does is if something bad happened to him. And with him being Reuben Pettyjohn's son-" Gary paused, then added, "Make that, 'last surviving son'-it kind of turns up the heat on me, know what I mean?"

I knew, all right. He'd do his damnedest to put somebody away, and he wouldn't bat an eye at bending the rules.

"Anything I can do to help, Gary, just let me know."

"I appreciate your cooperation."

I couldn't tell if he meant what he said any more than I did.

Stepping outside, he raised his head and sniffed the air, then turned his gaze to the heap of charred wood and dirt a hundred feet away.

"I thought I smelled something, coming in," he said. "What you been burning?"

I'd been nursing the faint hope that he'd assume it was slash or other debris and not say anything. Fat chance. I damned well couldn't accuse Kirk-that would give me another motive for revenge, this time in neon lights.

"Balcomb's lumber," I said, shifting my shoulders uncomfortably.

For the first time, Gary showed surprise. "Well, now, how the hell did that happen?"

I looked at the floor. "I pounded down some drinks after I got home from jail, and I just blew up. Next thing I knew, I was scrambling to put the fire out."

"You did it?"

"Yeah."

Gary didn't like the sound of this, it was clear.

"How come you didn't tell me?" he said, hard-voiced now.

"I feel like an asshole about it."

"We're not talking about your goddamn feelings, we're talking about withholding information."

"I didn't think it figured in."

"That been happening to you often?" he said. "Blowing up and doing something stupid without even realizing it?"

"Come on, Gary, you know me better than that."

"I used to think so. This worries me, Hugh. Drunk driving, trespassing-hell, those are the kind of things that could happen to anybody. But when a guy goes flat crazy and shoots himself in the dick, that makes an old cop nervous. Anything else you forgot to mention?"

I shook my head, squeezing my closed eyes between my thumb and forefinger.

"It was like you said-I had a world-class bad day. I handled it piss poor, and I'm sorry. Real sorry, because now I owe Balcomb another thirty-five hundred bucks on top of everything else."

"I'm afraid you're going to be more sorry yet," Gary said. "I was just about to tell you your luck was changing. I went out to see Wesley Balcomb first thing after I talked to Reuben, in case Kirk might be around the ranch. He let me know he was dropping all charges against you, including the demand for restitution. Said he only took it so far because you seemed to have an attitude, and he wanted to, quote, 'impress upon you the seriousness of the matter.' Unquote."

I sat down heavily in the doorway. "I think I'm going to cry."

"I don't blame you. I'll leave you to it in peace."

The tires on Gary's cruiser glistened where the black tom had sprayed them, sending a telegram to cats at the next stops along the line. I watched him pull away, with my pulse hammering so hard I could feel it in my head.

All charges dropped. Now I was going to have to wrestle again with whether I'd been wrong about Balcomb, or this was another of his ploys.

But first I had some urgent problems to deal with-starting with hiding a body so it would never be found.

"Had a feeling I better find out how you were doing," a gravelly voice said.

I lurched to my feet, swiveling toward it so fast my neck burned.

Madbird was standing beside the cabin's rear corner, looking like he'd just materialized there.

Neil McMahon – Lone Creek

"I got another feeling that ain't just coincidence," Madbird said, jerking his head toward the fading dust cloud from Gary's car. He must have hiked in around the back of my property like I'd done last night. In the woods, Madbird was a ghost.

"I didn't tell him anything about you," I said. "But somebody might have seen us leave the bar together."

"I can handle that. Kirk?"

I hesitated. I'd never in my life been so glad to see anybody as Madbird right now. But from this point on, anybody who helped me or even knew about Kirk was on felony turf.

"I've gotten you in too much trouble already," I said.

Madbird acted like he hadn't heard me. He strolled over to the remains of the fire and paced around its perimeter, here and there nudging a clump of wood with his boot toe, each time releasing another cloud of charred dust to crawl up into my nostrils-little reminders that I wasn't the guy who'd started this trouble.

When he came full circle, he looked straight at me and gave me that grin.

"You can't go leaving me half jacked off," he said. "That'd hurt my feelings."

I made the same walk around the fire, kicking at chunks and thinking. Some of the embers were still warm.

"All right, let's take another drive," I said. "Maybe I've got something to show you, but maybe things turn out like last night-it's not there. If you don't see it, you're out of this."

We took his van again We wouldn't be trespassing this time, but my truck was the kind of vehicle that people might remember or even recognize.

Disposing of a corpse wasn't an easy thing to do, I had started to realize. Burying, burning, submerging, every method like that had some weak point that was vulnerable to discovery. Trying to increase the safety net required significant time and preparation. I didn't have a D-8 Cat and several thousand acres of private land handy, and Gary Varna was breathing down my neck.

I'd done my best to cover my tracks last night, starting by transferring the beer cans and pistol to Kirk's Jeep, then driving it half a mile farther along the lakeshore and dumping it over a cliff where the water was twenty feet deep. It made a pretty good splash. Sooner or later it would be found, but time and damage would be on my side.

I'd jogged back, shoveled up all the bloody earth I could find and thrown it in the lake, and scattered loose dirt and brush to make the site look undisturbed. It wouldn't fool search dogs, but unless he'd told someone exactly where he was going, there'd be no reason to look there.

Then I'd turned to Kirk. Especially in my frantic rush, I couldn't come up with anything smart. The single thing I most wanted to avoid was leaving a scent trail to my place that dogs might be able to follow, so I decided to take him in another direction. I had no choice but to carry him in my truck bed, but I wrapped him up good in a nylon tarp, and figured I'd slosh gasoline around the bed when I got home, as if it had spilled. Any scent that came through would be faint, and I could say he'd hopped in for a lift at the ranch a while back. Before I got inside the truck, I changed into spare clothes and boots and stuffed the old ones in a duffel. Later, I scrubbed myself as clean as I could in the shower, and took the final precaution of fishing through my dirty clothes for jeans and a gray T-shirt like the ones I'd been wearing earlier. I smeared them with ashes from the fire, as substitutes for the ones that were soaked with Kirk's blood.

Those I'd stashed temporarily along with his body, a couple of miles up an abandoned logging road the next gulch over. The area was national forest, empty of habitation and generally deserted. But hunting season would start soon, with sharp-eyed men scanning the brush closely, and there were occasional hikers with dogs. If I left him where he was now, critters would scatter body parts and bones, making discovery likely.

Digging a grave deep enough for security would take several hours; and in this kind of stillness, the sound of metal hitting stone could carry for a mile or more. If someone heard it-say, a forest ranger or game warden-they'd come to find out who was excavating on national forest land. Trying to take him someplace else left all the same problems and added the risks of transportation.

When Madbird and I got to the spot, I was still coming up empty.

We parked the van and I led him into the brush to where I'd carried my burden a few hours earlier. I knelt beside Kirk's head, loosened the tarp's folds, and pulled them out of the way.

Madbird gazed down at the pale face and slashed neck, raggedly streaked with congealed blood. Then he knelt, too, and lightly pushed Kirk's eyelids closed with his fingertips.

"You better understand something, Hugh," he said. "You just walked into a different world. Ain't nothing ever going to be the same again."

Neil McMahon – Lone Creek

"How's it looking?" I said.

Madbird leaned back and eyed the cliff face critically. We were dangling ten feet down into a little coulee, roped to a tree, wearing the harnesses we used for bridge work. Kirk was wedged upright into a fissure in front of us, covered with a mixture of sticky foam insulation, dirt, and rocks several inches thick.

"You missed a spot over by his left ear," Madbird said. "The rest ain't bad."

I got another can of foam from the sack hanging off my belt and popped the seal. The gunk came out in a thin rope like toothpaste from a tube and quickly swelled to several times that size, an expansion that was powerful enough to bow window and doorjambs. I filled the divot and packed it with soil to match the surroundings.

He grunted OK. "I'll throw you some brush," he said, and hauled himself up his rope hand over hand.

This time he hadn't just helped me out. He'd flat saved my ass-sized up the situation, muttered that if the old downtown bars were still open we could just set Kirk on a stool and nobody would ever notice, then drove us to town for a quick supply run. When we got back we carried Kirk half a mile farther into the woods, lowered him over the cliff, and started foaming him in.

I took the handfuls of brush and duff that Madbird dropped down to me and created a tangled little deadfall in the narrow cleft above Kirk's head. Then Madbird trotted around to a vantage point and gave me directions while I dusted the foam once more with scree, trying to make it look like the natural result of years of rain and erosion. Within an hour it would harden like lightweight concrete, and hold its shape after the flesh decomposed. Big animals wouldn't have any perch for digging him out, and varmints or ravens weren't likely to chew their way through several inches of toxic polyurethane embedded with rocks. The foam dried to about the same color as the soil, so any that showed through would barely be noticeable. The rare human who might happen along would see only another debris-choked crevice in a cliff. An earthquake might shake him loose, but this wasn't earthquake country. I was willing to take my chances there.

When we got back to Madbird's van we spent a couple of minutes trying to scrub hardened foam off ourselves, without much luck. You couldn't walk across the street from the stuff without getting it all over you, and although we'd worn rubber gloves and long-sleeved shirts, it had managed to sneak inside them. Gasoline or WD-40 would cut most kinds of gunk pretty well, but it barely touched the top layer of this stuff. The rest came off only with your skin.

But that was only a nuisance. The really bad part had been facing Kirk from only a foot or two away while we'd walled him in. We'd kept him wrapped in the tarp to avoid getting scent on us, but I'd felt him as clearly as if I could see through it. Neither Madbird nor I had suggested turning him around. That would have been like burying somebody facedown in a coffin.

It was starting to come home to me that I had made a living human being dead-someone I'd known all my life. I'd pitied him more than I liked him, but in some strange way, that almost made it worse.

I screwed the top back onto the red plastic gas container and stowed it in the rear of the van.

Then, out of nowhere, I started crying. Blubbering like a little kid.

After a minute or so I was better. I blew some snot onto the ground and got my eyes clear. Madbird was leaning against the van with his arms folded.

"You go a ways up in them mountains, there's a place nobody much knows about," he said. His right hand extended, forefinger pointing northward. Something about the gesture suggested a distance that wasn't measurable on a map. "It ain't exactly what you'd call a burial ground, but people been going there a long time to take care of their dead. My mother and my stepbrother Robert, my first wife and our little girl that got meningitis-their ashes are hanging from a tree in leather bags. We can go there some day if you want."

He spoke casually, still not looking at me. He'd never mentioned this before.

Still shaky, I said, "I'd be honored."

He finally turned to me. I'd never seen his face like that-gentle, patient, with a hint of things he'd been through that I couldn't begin to fathom.

"If you're feeling sorry for him, remember he tried to kill you first," Madbird said. "From behind."

I shook my head. It wasn't just sorrow for Kirk or for myself that I was feeling. It was a much vaster grief, for all of this that was happening and for everything else like it that ever had.