The Wilding Probate: A Bucky McCrae Adventure

by D. J. Butler

For that matter, the deputy’s uniform was there. Did that mean Marilyn’s lover Nick was the man I’d seen in the uniform?

  I reached the stream and stopped. The deer was still there, dead. I could even see the disturbed stones where I had splashed through the water the day before.

  “You almost sound like you’re saying good-bye,” he said. “As you stand over a corpse. Can’t say I like that.”

  “It’s not a corpse.” I knelt, upstream of the deer so the animal’s body and whatever microbes might be coming out of it wouldn’t contaminate my sample. “It’s venison.”

  “Nope, city girl. Venison is what you eat. That there is carrion.”

  I filled the second bottle with water from the stream and stood again. “Label on, stream water.”

  Evil nodded. “The picture of a mountain stream on the label ought to remind you.”

  I looked closer at the bottle. “Oh yeah.”

  “Let’s get back to the crime lab, shall we, Batwoman?”

  “I think it’s Batgirl, isn’t it?”

  “Sexist,” Evil said.

  We marched slowly back up the hill.

  I remembered staggering up this slope at full speed, thighs screaming in pain, just the day before. I remembered the feeling that a rifle was pointed right between my shoulder blades, and I might get shot any second.

  I shook it off. I needed to get the water to the sheriff. And I needed to tell him about the room.

  Just below the lip of the vale, Evil caught up with me and put his hand on my arm. “Hold on.” His voice was low, almost a whisper.

  “War wound twinge again?”

  He shook his head and put his finger on his lips. “Pretend we’re stalking a deer.”

  “I didn’t bring any Budweiser.”

  “Humor me.”

  Evil knelt on the slope and I knelt next to him. Each of us holding a bottle of water, we crept to the lip of the vale and looked over.

  “Damn,” Evil said.

  The driveway that we had left empty, but for Evil’s GSX, now held three black SUVs. I looked at the license plates: California.

  “Well,” I whispered. “I can tell you one thing: it isn’t the feds.”

  I felt the first drops of rain hit the back of my left hand.

  “We can’t leave the car there,” Evil said. “I mean, it’s in pretty good company with those Porsches, but still.”

  I only half heard him; I was concentrating on the people who had emerged from the SUVs. Several were big men in dark suits, who looked very Secret Service to me, but what do I know? Assuming Sheriff Sutherland was right and Secret Service agents fell into his category of “feds” who would have special license plates, these guys must be…what? Bodyguards? Mobsters?

  They weren’t talking into their wrists or anything, but they wore shoulder rigs, and carried guns.

  “Porsches?” I said, absently.

  “Porsche makes more than two-seater sports cars, you know. Those babies right there are hybrids.”

  His speech sounded a little slurred, so I looked at Evil. His face was pale.

  The rear door of the second car opened and a woman stepped out. She might have been Dad’s age, and she was wearing more than Dad’s net worth on her person, in the form of a tight, square-shouldered suit and multiple gold rings and bracelets. She wore so much jewelry, it almost didn’t feel American.

  It certainly didn’t feel Howard.

  “Don’t worry,” I whispered back to Evil. “I haven’t forgotten your precious Colonel Lee.”

  “General Lee.” Evil snorted. “Bo and Luke Duke drove the General Lee, named after Robert E. Lee. I thought your Dad came from, like, Tennessee or something.”

  “Yeah, but he’s on the side of the Union.”

  “Everybody’s on the side of the Union,” Evil hissed. “The question is: who’s on the side of awesome? And the answer is Bo and Luke Duke, that’s who.”

  “This is not the time, Evil!”

  Evil mollified a bit. “And Daisy,” he muttered. “And Uncle Jesse.”

  “We won’t leave the General.”

  “My car is not named the General Lee,” Evil said. Which I knew, I was just teasing him. “I mean that if we leave the car, people will know we’ve been here.”

  The thought of getting caught refocused my attention. The woman from the car was standing at the door now. Two of the big suited guys flanked her, a couple of steps to her back, with their hands folded across their belts. Several others stood around the driveway and the yard, looking out.

  “They are bodyguards,” I whispered.

  Evil squinted past my shoulder. “If they start heading this way, screw the car. Run.”

  The woman rang the doorbell, and there was no answer. Then she banged on it, hard.

  “They don’t know we’re here,” I whispered. “They think your car is Marilyn’s.”

  “Marilyn!” the woman yelled, right as I said the name.

  “You know her?” Evil whispered.

  I shook my head.

  “Marilyn, get out here!”

  There was of course no answer. The woman stepped aside and pointed to the door. One of her bodyguards stepped forward and opened the door. The second man followed him inside, and then last of all came the woman.

  “What now?” Evil asked.

  I struggled with the same question. There were more bodyguards standing around, so we couldn’t get to Evil’s car without being seen. We could just walk away, but then it would be obvious we’d been here when Marilyn got back and found Evil’s car. I tried to think of a good lie to tell to explain what we were doing on the property. I thought Dad might be visiting her, and I needed to check with him on the status of his filing the will. It didn’t ring true. On the other hand, sometimes adults would take seriously from me statements that they wouldn’t accept from other adults. I get cut some slack for being young, and maybe I could use that.

  And of course, Marilyn might get back and find her attention…occupied by this woman and her guards. Maybe she wouldn’t even realize Evil’s car didn’t go with the SUVs. I imagined them all having a big argument in the house, and me and Evil sneaking into his muscle car and rolling down the canyon in neutral. But then, in my imagination, all parties started shooting at each other, and we were caught in the middle.

  I growled. “We wait.”

  “Okay,” Evil agreed. “And still, if they come this way…run.”

  At that moment, one of the men facing in our direction turned his face directly toward us. “Freeze,” I whispered.

  It wasn’t enough. He’d seen something.

  Pointing toward where our eyes peered through tall grass at him and his colleagues, the man started walking our way.

  Evil pulled me flat and then dragged me backward. He started to pull me away, to run down the hill toward Howard, but I pulled him the other way. We both crouched to stay out of sight.

  “Bucky!” he hissed.

  “That’s open country!” I reminded him. “We’ll be caught immediately!”

  We only had moments before we were seen. Keeping my knees bent and my shoulders as low to the ground as I could, I ran. Higher into the Ups.

  Toward Charlie Herbert’s place.

  Muttering under his breath, Evil followed.

  The rain started coming down in earnest.

  This is going to sound like an excuse, but it’s hard to run with your arm in a cast. You swing your arms when you run, and that’s part of your balance. Without arms to swing, it felt as if I was trying to hop really fast. That, the uneven ground, my hiking boots, and the fact that I still felt weak from loss of blood the day before turned my run into a complete shambles.

  “Bucky!” Evil had caught up to me and ran at my shoulder. “Can I assume you have a plan?”

  “Hide!” I managed to gasp. “Charlie…Herbert’s!”

  I didn’t dare look back, but nobody shouted behind us, and inside a minute we were crashing into a stand of aspens. I tumbled to t
he ground and lay still, and Evil dropped beside me.

  He crept back to the edge of the trees and looked out, his face pressed against a white, scabby aspen trunk.

  “See anything?” I whispered. I badly wanted a drink, and I felt I had to say something to remind both of us. “Remember the water is poisoned.”

  “Might be poisoned. Thanks.” He was quiet for a minute. “Nothing. I don’t think they saw us. Or maybe that guy saw us for a second, but talked himself out of it.”

  “Or they saw us but they don’t care. They’re here to see Marilyn.”

  “Who’s they?” Evil stayed where he was, watching.

  I chewed on that a moment. “My best guess is someone connected to Aaron Wilding. I’ve read his will, it didn’t mention anybody but his wife…so, maybe someone from his company?”

  “Condolences, or something? Hey…when I said ‘nothing’? Scratch that. A couple of those guys are coming this way. Slowly, but they’re coming. You think he died and the company sent someone out to see his wife?”

  “Does that sound crazy?” Big companies were outside my area of experience.

  Evil shrugged, and started crawling backward to where I lay, in dirt slowly being churned into mud. “Beats me. Let’s get out of here.”

  We stuck to the trees and moved away from Marilyn Wilding’s house in a straight line. I went first and Evil followed, and it took me a few minutes to recognize where I was headed. As I realized what I was doing, I stopped and looked back, and Evil said what I was thinking.

  “Going to the grow building, huh? Does that feel safe?”

  I could see men in the trees behind us. I didn’t think they’d seen us, but their presence made me feel unsafe. “It feels hidden,” I said. “Right now, I’d really like to feel unnoticed.”

  “You’re not Batwoman after all,” Evil said. “You’re Potwoman, and you want to hide out in the Potcave.”

  I laughed, if only a little. “You okay with that?”

  He nodded, and we headed out again. We found a paved road, and I figured from its angle and curves it had to be the private road connecting Charlie Herbert’s house and the pot lab. The Potcave.

  I looked toward Herbert’s house and wished we could go there to wait out the black SUVs. But it felt too close to the Wilding place. Even the Potcave didn’t feel hidden enough, with the road leading straight to it.

  “Dang it,” I said, moving off the road to keep to trees and brush, “we’re going to end up riding a wheelbarrow down to the marina.”

  “This time you push,” Evil said.

  I looked down at my cast and snorted. “It’s gonna be a short ride.”

  I looked to Evil, expecting him to chuckle or grin. Instead, he looked even paler than before. Soaked, the white bandage wrapped around his head was starting to look gray, and I couldn’t tell whether darker spots were wetter from the rain or darkened by Evil’s blood. The rain ran freely down his nose and made him look a little like a gargoyle, spouting water.

  “Yeah,” Evil said.

  Then he collapsed.

  “Evil!” I clapped a hand over my own mouth.

  I knelt by him on the asphalt in the rain and felt his pulse. It was there, a little weak and maybe a little irregular. Concussion, I thought. Or exhaustion or shock? He’d banged his head in the house, maybe that had triggered something. It was my fault, whatever was wrong. We should have stayed home, watched a movie, and taken our meds.

  The Potcave…how far was it? I turned and looked, and saw that we’d nearly made the entire hike. I wasted a moment trying to drag Evil off the road, but with only one working arm, it just wasn’t going to happen.

  I turned and ran for the cave.

  It felt as if it took forever, but it can’t have taken more than a minute of sloshing and jogging through the rain to the little parking lot. The truck was still there. The keys…were the keys inside the truck? I thought maybe they were, but even if I drove the truck back, what was I going to do, park it over Evil to keep the rain off?

  I pushed the door of the cave open and went inside. It didn’t look disturbed from yesterday, though surely Sheriff Sutherland and his deputies must have searched it. Surely, at some point, the sheriff…or somebody…would have to come confiscate the marijuana, but it hadn’t happened yet.

  I found a short stack of fire blankets in the corner—I’d ridden in the wheelbarrow under one the day before. I threw two of them over my shoulder. That was a struggle in itself but then, because I was afraid and I couldn’t think of anything smarter to do, I also picked up an ax.

  It was more of a hatchet than an ax, really. I guess it must have been there for use in a fire emergency, or maybe it was just a gardening tool. But I felt the edge and it was sharp, so with the hatchet in my left hand and two blankets over my shoulder, I turned and jogged out into the rain again—

  And stopped.

  One of the two men stood there. He was tall, with a big chest and a face like a broiled pork butt. His suit jacket was soaked and he smelled of sweat and cheap cologne, from ten feet away.

  And he had a pistol pointed at me.

  I registered the pistol, saw that it was an M1911, a bit of a connoisseur’s pistol, these days. It was a pistol that suggested the guy thought he was a badass.

  “We got your friend,” the big guy said. “He ain’t conscious, but he’s alive, for now. And I think you better start explaining yourself.”

  “I just…explain what?”

  “Why were you spying on us back there? You work for Marilyn Wilding? You work for Indra?”

  Indra? I was cold enough to be almost numb, but something about that word seemed familiar. Maybe it was a corporation? Was that the name of the company Aaron Wilding owned? In fact, I did work for Marilyn Wilding, but it didn’t seem like a safe thing to admit.

  “We’re hiking,” I said. I’m not a great liar, so I hoped that fatigue and the rain would help me out. “We saw you guys…and you looked scary.”

  “Yeah?” The big man chuckled. He raised his aim from my chest to my forehead. “I look scary to you now?”

  Thunk.

  As if it had suddenly sprouted there, a length of rebar appeared, poking out of the man’s sternum.

  I didn’t scream.

  I’d like to say that was a reflection of my gutsiness and pluck. Really, though, I was just too tired.

  The guy with the iron spike in his chest toppled sideways, collapsing to his knees and then sinking onto his side as dark blood soaked the front of his shirt. He shuddered as he fell, his fingers curling into claws. I felt my breath squeezing in and out of my throat like a six-inch-thick cable grating through the eye of a sewing needle.

  Then someone behind me pushed me, and I stumbled forward into the rain.

  “Hey!”

  The shouting voice didn’t come from behind me, from the Potcave. It came from his companion, the second man. He stood over Evil like I stood over his friend, and he pointed at me as he shouted.

  “Dock!” he shouted again. Dock must be the guy on the ground. The dead guy, I thought. “You!”

  That meant me. I staggered and almost fell over, dropping the fire blankets, and then the second man rushed my way. He had a pistol out, a Beretta like Dad’s, and he pointed it at me.

  “Run!” I yelled. I was yelling at the guy pointing a gun at me. As I shouted, I sprinted away from the Potcave, toward the trees on the other side of the little parking lot.

  “Hold it!” the guy with the gun shouted. He turned, following me with his line of sight, and I braced myself for the bullet.

  It didn’t come. Instead, I heard a meaty thwack and then the softer thud of a body collapsing to the ground. At the edge of the trees I caught a pine branch and let myself swing, off balance, around the tree’s trunk, to get a look at what had happened behind me.

  The second man lay on the ground, with an ax in his head. The ax I’d just dropped.

  Standing over him was Michael Fellows. This was a guy who’d sat
in Dad’s office two days earlier with big city written all over him. Now he leaned in the doorway of a backwoods marijuana farm, stained bandages wrapped around his chest and shoulder, and a wild look in his eyes. He was battered, but standing.

  And in the mud between us were two pistols.

  I dove for the guns.

  Cursing, he fell forward, too.

  I landed on one of the pistols, across the body of the dead man with the rebar stuck in his chest. Fellows scrambled toward the second pistol, which had fallen from the grip of the other gunman. He dove with outstretched fingers—

  And I swatted my hand sideways, knocking the gun out of his grasp.

  I rolled back, pulling the pistol with me. I was afraid I’d shoot myself in the confusion, but I managed to roll completely over at least once and wind up on my back, with the weapon in my hands.

  Fellows sprang up and raced for the second gun.

  “Stop there!” I yelled. To make my point, I fired my pistol at the sky.

  The gun clicked, but didn’t fire. Maybe mud stopping the pistol from cycling?

  He’d have the other gun in seconds. I racked the slide and tried again.

  Nothing.

  “No!” I yelled. I tried to scramble to my feet, I grabbed the hatchet and yanked, but couldn’t pull it out of the corpse’s head. I choked back sour bile.

  Michael Fellows picked up the second pistol, and only then did I realize that the pistol lay just a few feet from Evil Patten. I felt very, very cold.

  Fellows didn’t point the gun at me. He pointed it at Evil.

  “I think you know I’m willing to shoot your friend,” he said. “In fact, I kind of owe him.”

  “You owe me.” I immediately regretted my words, because I didn’t want to get shot any more than I wanted to see Evil take a bullet. But I had to say something to slow Fellows down. “I’m the one who shot you.”

  Fellows chuckled, a soft, dry sound. “Good point. Technically, I only owe your friend a hard head butt. But I like to repay my debts with interest.”

  “If you do that,” I said, “you’ll never get the will.”

  Fellows’s eyes narrowed. “Throw away the gun!”

  I obeyed. My hand shook.