Bad Moon Rising

by John Galligan

  The plane nose lifted. In the same gaze she could see both ridges and coulees, the rising sun gilding fields and pastures while shadowing watersheds as they fingered down into streams reflecting blue-pink sky.

  “Liberty Hill!” hollered Jack Bristol.

  Looking east, she saw the landmark flattened by perspective but still outstanding among lesser hilltops, as it must have been, with a tall flag flying, to Grover Cleveland campaigning from his railroad car. The Golly land extended ruggedly behind it, north. The plane tilted south toward a blue-green glint a mile or so away.

  “Elmo Quarry Pond!” the pilot hollered. “A couple more passes, we’ll be heading over what you want to see! What exactly are we looking for?”

  “Lay of the land,” she yelled back. “A road in. A homestead.”

  “Never seen anything like that!”

  “Somebody lives in there.”

  “News to me!”

  “Maybe a white truck or a green car.”

  “OK! My eyes are peeled!”

  She had to close hers and try to feel better. The morning had begun well enough. The entire Kick family had risen at farmer o’clock so the twins could get ready for the 4-H bus that would take them on their field trip to help set up the Bad Axe County Farm Breakfast, with the traditional sunrise stop to feed the mythical giant goldfish. There had been a minor conflict over how much stuff Taylor had in his backpack, which seemed ridiculously heavy, but she and Harley had exchanged eye signals and agreed to let it go. Then Taylor had been upset when the bus, because it arrived early, came all the way down the driveway to the house. For some reason he had wanted to wait by the mailbox at the road. But he had recovered and waved to his mom and dad from the window.

  Her stomach was leveling, and she was feeling glad for Taylor when her phone buzzed.

  Rhino said, “I can’t reach Bender.”

  “Bender? He’s off. He should be home.”

  “A lady friend—I didn’t know he had one, did you?—called around three A.M. to ask when his shift would end. I said, ‘Eight o’clock last night.’ I thought maybe you assigned him somewhere.”

  “No.”

  The plane banked over Liberty Hill and the Jon Golly farm—“Ten-four,” Rhino said, “will deal, sorry to bother”—and then cleared the nearest ridge to the north. For no more than three seconds they were passing over a narrow coulee bisected by a tiny rill of a stream. Upon the meadow landscape, still in shadow, she made out vague geometric sketches in the late summer foliage. Accidental shapes? She had hardly had time to wonder before the plane had flown beyond, looping back toward Elmo Quarry Pond.

  She pondered over Deputy Bender for several seconds—that he had a “lady friend,” for one thing, and if he was missing, where was he, and was he OK?—then looked down to see the short green 4-H bus parked at the quarry pond with specks of kids at the water’s edge. Maybe from up here she would see a spot of gold finning in the bright aqua water.

  No, of course not. But—

  “Stop!” she cried, twisting in her seat belt.

  “This is an airplane, Sheriff!”

  On the road a half mile from the pond she watched a single speck—a child?—walking along the road—and an old white pickup drifting up behind him.

  “I mean, go back, go back, circle back!”

  CHAPTER 34

  By dawn she had reined the horse aside twice to dodge him, the atrocious Papa, who was careening erratically down empty roads—I’ll tear you like a vulture—half-blind, steering that old white pickup. She had stiffened and hissed as he passed. Another time she had skirted them wide around the echoes of the dog baying for Faith.

  Now, at the brim of a paved road with a yellow double line, as twin beams prick a gray fog wall, she utters her first syllables.

  “Hup-hup-schnell,” she tells the horse, and they clatter at a new pace across asphalt, feeling its fervent yesterday breath.

  Past the ditch they disappear into high corn and turn toward a dome of thinner sky that suggests an awakening town.

  The dome dissolves as they approach. She hups the horse across a soybean field, through a tangle of shoved-up earth and shoved-downed trees, through a broken fence, across a small empty parking lot behind a cinder-block building, and around to the front of a store called Liquor City.

  She dismounts. The horse wheezes beneath him. She aims the shotgun butt and with a blow to the window’s geometric center she obliterates the Liquor City emblem. An alarm starts to bray as she clips jutting shards from the window frame. She gathers her dress and steps in. She walks up an aisle sweeping the gun barrel along a shelf of bottles, scattering the floor with broken glass and a spreading pool of alcohol. She grabs a bottle as she rounds the aisle and comes back the other way drinking from it, leaving wreckage in her wake.

  She hands the bottle up to him.

  It tastes like fire.

  Then she climbs back inside his arms.

  “Hup-hup,” she tells the sagging horse. “Schnell.”

  CHAPTER 35

  “Circle back over the pond! Hurry!”

  “This old bug-smasher can’t go over seventy-five knots! With this spray tank under me, she gets wonky if I tilt her more than thirty degrees! Hang on!”

  She yelled at Rhino: “I need someone heading toward Liberty Hill and the quarry pond!”

  “The log on Bender’s GPS indicates he been near there for several hours. But I can’t raise him.”

  “Just get someone moving!”

  The plane wallowed so wide north, then so far east, that they passed over the borders of Vernon and Richland counties.

  “Deputy rolling, Sheriff. What is he looking for?”

  “The 4-H kids are at the pond! I might have seen Hubbard’s white truck! We’re circling back! I’ll update!”

  So slow. She aimed her finger to call Harley and saw that he had texted her.

  Dylan left his letter. I opened it. Pic attached.

  “Here we come! Better look!”

  They approached the pond again. The bus remained there, the kids. But now the road was empty. The solo child and the white truck were gone. Desperately, as the plane slid away into irrelevant space, she twisted one way, twisted the other, lunged against her seat belt to see beneath the wing, but the truck had vanished from the landscape.

  She looked at the photo of Taylor’s apology letter that Harley had attached.

  I am not sory. I will never be sory. No one will make me sory when I am not sory. HE will see who is sory.

  Then Harley was calling.

  “Heidi, the bus driver did a head count. Taylor was there. Now he’s gone.”

  “No.”

  It was all she could say.

  “He ran away, Heidi. When they stopped at the pond.”

  “No.”

  “They just did a roll call. Taylor wasn’t there. Dylan said he and the other kids saw him sticking his thumb out on the road. The driver made him come back. But he must have snuck off again.”

  “No. I’m sure he’s there.”

  “Heidi… he had a hammer in his backpack.”

  “No.”

  “Dylan saw him put it in there. That’s why he insisted on taking the backpack. Dylan didn’t want to tattle.”

  She wrenched around to look behind at nothing.

  “Put me down,” she said.

  As the plane came around to the south and outer Farmstead appeared beneath, Jack Bristol reached across and squeezed her hand.

  “Soon as I can.”

  CHAPTER 36

  As the little yellow plane zooms over rooftops, she slides off the horse to the pavement and drives her shotgun butt through the window of Dollar Heaven. The glass shatters. Her free hand swirls with the alarm, seems to be conducting it, invoking someone or something.

  He watches her roam the aisles. In quick succession, she plays with dolls, stuffs her rough feet into hot-pink flip-flops, tries gum and spits it out in surprise. She puts on a Disney princess mask before
she shoves a shelf over, then another, until they all go down like dominoes.

  She wears the flip-flops and the mask outside.

  The horse spooks but she settles it.

  She cracks the shotgun, loads two shells from her dress pocket, climbs aboard, and they ride on.

  CHAPTER 37

  It was all the sheriff could do not to shove the door open and jump. When she saw Bristol was heading toward the Mississippi, she hollered, “No! Not in Iowa!” She pointed at the road scrolling under them. “Put me down right there!”

  “No can do, ma’am.”

  “Land it.”

  “I got a big belly full of juice.”

  “I don’t care. That’s Hefty Road. Put me down.”

  “Not safe or legal.”

  Rhino filled her other ear. “Sheriff, I’ve got alarms going off at two Rickreiner properties. Babette is on my other line. Your permission to ignore?”

  “Ignore.”

  “OK, I’ve got everybody moving, and I’ve just put out a three-state Amber Alert. Denise is on her way in to help. Take your time and be safe. We’re all on it.”

  “Stay on the line, Rhino.”

  She ordered Bristol, “Land it on the road.”

  “I’d lose my license. I can only do that in an emergency.”

  “This is an emergency.”

  “An airplane emergency, ma’am. Problem with the plane.”

  She pointed at a cabled lever on her side of the cockpit. “What’s that?”

  “That stiffens up my rudder flap in high winds.”

  She kicked it clean of the dashboard.

  “It looks broken. Land the plane.”

  * * *

  She did not expect to be picked up by Interim Chief Deputy Dick Bender, driving Lyndsey Luck’s Tahoe. Bender was rumpled and perspiration-stained and appeared exhausted, a mad gleam in his eye as he told her, “Rhino sent me.”

  She didn’t want to get in.

  “Where have you been all night, Deputy?”

  “Off-duty.”

  “Not my question.”

  “You’re wasting time.”

  “Where is your vehicle?”

  “You’ll see.”

  “Goddamn it, Bender. I don’t trust you. Get out. Leave the keys.”

  He didn’t budge. He gripped the wheel with his small hairy hands and stared ahead. Sweat rolled down his temple and along his unshaven jaw. Over the radio, Rhino announced another break-in, this time at Dollar Heaven.

  “Bender, get out.”

  His right hand released the wheel and trembled as he reached to lower the radio volume.

  “No, Sheriff. I’m Oppo. I know where the white truck is going. Get in.”

  * * *

  As Bender rocketed the Tahoe toward Town of Leavings, she felt so agitated that her tongue stiffened and her body went numb. Beneath her crashing heartbeat, she heard her interim chief deputy begin to explain himself. Yesterday afternoon, Denise had sent him to the Bad Axe County Library to window-dress the Vigdis Torkelson improper-campaign-activity complaint, just to shut up Becky Rilke-Rickreiner. From Mrs. Torkelson, he had heard about Leroy Fanta’s interest in a Town of Leavings property still owned by the Golly brothers.

  “I thought them two jokers were long gone. I had to take them food from my church one winter. As far as I knew, they sold out and left after Gibbs cleared them for the Ronald Rickreiner murder.”

  She did her best to listen. While he was at the library, Mrs. Torkelson had fed Bender the tidbit about Barry Rickreiner cheating in her high school English class. Later, Deputy Schwem had reminded him that the candidate had also cheated on a urine test as an EMT, not long after Babette had bribed him out of a DUI charge.

  “We’ve all been watching out for you,” Bender said, “one way or the other, once we saw who our next boss could be. I’m Oppo,” he said, “but I’ve got a team.”

  He had pushed the Tahoe up to ninety. She hardly felt movement, though the vast feedlot of Vista Farms had come and gone in a flash.

  “By this point,” Bender was telling her, “Prickreiner’s campaign and this Greevey-Goodgolly mess began to seem, to my mind, like different parts of the same shitstorm.”

  He braked and separated from the highway with a reeling right turn. Ahead were the steep hills and sharp curves of Muchlander Road. Bender sped in the style of a local, using both sides of the center line.

  “So last night after my shift I tried to track down Fanta. He wasn’t home. He wasn’t at his office. I spent until midnight searching the taverns. By then I was worried for him. I had a hunch—that name Goodgolly just rings all kind of bells—and I drove out here, where we’re headed now. I thought I might find him at Goodgolly’s farm.”

  He pumped his brakes for a doe crossing the road, timing her, then came to his senses. He slowed hard and stopped Luck’s Tahoe to wait for two fawns to skitter out, halt in panic, and gallop after.

  “That time of day,” he muttered. As he accelerated, her tongue came unstuck.

  “Dick, I thought you hated me.”

  “Personal feelings got nothing to do with it.”

  No sooner had he rammed the Tahoe back up to speed and crested a sunlit rise than he had to hit his brakes again for an Amish wagon rolling down the backside. A plow horse shuddered against the weight of the wagon and its precarious heap of cut hay. Two wide-eyed tykes in straw hats rode at the very top of the heap.

  “How the hell they don’t fall off of there…” Bender grumbled. With blind curves ahead, he had to be patient. She had to be patient with him.

  “Well, I appreciate—”

  “I will just be goddamned,” he blurted, pumping the brake, “if Prickreiner is going to wear that badge.”

  “I appreciate that. You don’t have to like me.”

  “I’ll quit if he gets elected. But I’m afraid of that. I don’t know what else I’d do.”

  “Dick, I appreciate that.”

  “It’s good to be appreciated.”

  “I appreciate you, Dick.”

  “Good.”

  At last he got enough straightaway to ease around the hay wagon. Clear, he flattened the accelerator, throwing her head back. Four roller-coaster miles later, he took the final turn and launched the Tahoe east on Liberty Hill Road, spewing dust and gravel behind.

  Halfway into Jon Golly’s driveway, she jumped out, pushed open the heavy swing gate, and jumped back in. As Bender hit the gas, she felt disembodied, as if someone else had just done that. Oh, Taylor. Oh, God, please.

  She felt blind with terror as they bounced through Jon Golly’s sun-scorched yard past the house and clothesline, the sawmill and barn and wellhead pump, then out the tractor road on the north end of the farm where a steep green coulee wall rose and filled the windshield. There was Bender’s Avenger, parked beside the stream that cut the coulee. The sight startled her back to the task. The Avenger’s tires were knifed. Its windows were smashed. The radio and onboard computer were damaged. A failed attempt to penetrate its trunk had ended with an old-fashioned farm tool, a scythe, embedded in the lid.

  Bender shut off Luck’s overheating engine.

  “I had a hell of a night, Sheriff. There wasn’t anybody around when I got here. I came this far to look. I meant to turn around and head back, but then from that direction…”

  He pointed across the stream, toward the coulee wall beyond which he had found Jim Golly’s hidden homestead. The tractor road emerged on the opposite bank. From there it arced through tall thistles across unused pasture, then bent sharply and headed parallel to the stream across a scree of sandstone below a bluff and disappeared into heavy forest.

  “… I heard gunshots. I heard someone whistling and a dog barking. I shouldn’t have left the car here, I guess, but I didn’t want to get stuck driving across, and there was nobody around. I decided to wade across and quick-see. I know I shouldn’t have left the car…”

  “I don’t care about the car, Dick. We’ll get you a new
one.”

  She felt short of breath and sick to her stomach again. The small relief of night had already dissolved in the new day’s thick heat.

  “Release the tail door and give me Deputy Luck’s keys. Then what happened?”

  As she opened Luck’s gun vault, Bender said behind her, “Well, when I got into the woods over there, I found some bloody clothing hanging in a tree. So I kept going.”

  Luck’s tactical rifle had been the sheriff’s own, back when she was the rookie. Still, she fumbled with it.

  “I figured Daniel Greevey ran out of somewhere over there, gunshot, throwing off clothes to slow down a dog. He stole those rubber boots here. He took off on the Goodgolly buggy and got tossed out where we found him. So I figured what I was hearing might be someone else over there getting chased like Greevey was.”

  Bender opened the trunk of his ruined car and lifted out his own rifle. She still fumbled with her old weapon. How did the magazine load again? And the scope had been rotated for storage. How did she align it?

  “It’s sod buildings in there, Sheriff. It’s goddamn pioneer times. Dark as hell. Somebody moaning inside one. I found Hubbard’s truck and Fanta’s car. But sure as hell Grape’s little Toyota didn’t get across this crick. Too much water here. That truck could handle this, but Fanta must have gone in another way, maybe a backup route since the trouble here yesterday, maybe followed whoever lives back there.”

  “Jim and Faith Golly,” she said. Her chin dripped sweat. Her slick hands felt like someone else’s. But finally the magazine clicked into place.

  “When I came back, I found my car like this, and there were lights on inside Goodgolly’s house. A vehicle took off, a hot new engine.”

  “Rickreiner,” she said, “looking for Patience.”

  “I didn’t have much juice left in my phone. I had planned to charge it from the car. I hiked out to Liberty Hill Road and got part of a message off to you before it died. It was a long goddamn walk until somebody picked me up on the highway. I was just getting back when you called from the airplane.”