‘An arrow. Maybe a crossbow bolt, but I think it was an arrow. Broadhead, possibly with spring-loaded blades.’
Bill had the radio dialed over to the emergency band to call in the authorities.
‘An arrow?’
‘There’s something stuck in there. It’s not a bullet. It feels like a carbon-fiber shaft that someone tried to pull out and snapped off.’
Bill raised the police on the radio and gave them the GPS coordinates. A Coast Guard cutter came around the headland half an hour later, and a group of deputies jumped off and jogged up the beach towards the flashlights. Bill and Charlie waited in silence with Benni, who had curled around the legs of Monty’s body and took two deputies to drag him off when the body bag came.
The police raised holy hell, of course. The obligatory questioning about how they had happened to find the body just like that, two and a half miles to nowhere, in the middle of the night. If the sheriff hadn’t watched Lassie as a boy, they would have been questioned even longer.
And not only had they tramped around the crime scene, they’d uncovered the body, adjusted the clothing, and probed at the fatal wound. It had indeed been a broadhead, and it had killed Monty Argliss instantly.
Medically, speaking, at least - time of death is still marked from cessation of cardiac activity, which meant that he had sat there dead for ten seconds, feeling a pulsing black roar and unbearable pain boil over and pull him under.
Bill had little patience with the sergeant who was trying to lecture them.
‘Listen, someone’s missing you file a report, you tell someone. You don’t go off into the woods at night, alone.’ The man crossed his arms beneath his badge.
‘It takes a day to be missing, another to be searching. If someone’s out there, they could be dead overnight.’
‘You trampled a crime scene.’
‘Were there any prints?’
‘No, there -’
‘Any clues from the break in the arrow?’
‘No, but -’
‘Any evidence whatsoever?’
‘Blood on a branch fifty yards away, but it was animal blood, so no. No, we don’t have any -’
‘Looks like we didn’t trample jack shit then.’
As impolitic as he may have been, Bill did manage to cut the wait for the squad car to take them home from the station to a matter of minutes.
They spent the next evening on the dock behind Monty’s cabin, drinking heavy mugs of whiskey and staring down at scuttling crabs and shoals of baitfish. Benni lay balled up on the unmade bed, undisturbed by the police who had been through the cabin earlier that morning.
There wouldn’t be much to take care of. There’d been an ex-wife, down in Seattle, and she’d fly up to take care of the stuff that he hadn’t bothered to take out of her name. Bill had been looking in a phonebook for the name of the mother when Charlie told him the police called her straightaway and he felt a sick relief.
As soon as the police told him they could, they’d box up the rest of the stuff. There wasn’t a will, there would be a wake, and so it would go.
Bill got care of Benni the next day, as the ex-wife didn’t want him and he and Charlie didn’t want to – couldn’t - see the dog languishing in some pound somewhere. He knew it’d take a bit of adjusting for the both of them, but Bill had never married so the occasional incidents of furniture-knocking or dead animal retrieval were sure to be weathered without incident or hysteria. Charlie’s wife had cluck-clucked and tut-tutted about the poor man’s death, but when Charlie had mentioned again how the dog led them to him, she had fixed her husband with a flinty stare and said,
‘I sure hope that a nice family adopts the dog from the SPCA. Maybe his ex-wife.’
And Benni got a new bed at the foot of Bill’s, and a swinging flap in the kitchen door. Charlie took one look at the size of it and laughed.
‘Hell, you might as well get one of those cut-in-half restaurant models.’
Police didn’t offer up much in the way of evidence or leads. The arrow that killed Monty Argliss cost $6.99 at any sporting goods store, $5.99 each if you got a dozen or more through the catalogs. There was a trace of blood a few hundred yards away, but it turned out to be from an elk. If it weren’t for the fact that the arrow had been snapped off, and the missing piece nowhere in sight, they’d have called it a hunting accident.
They still thought it was a hunting accident - Monty Argliss was out in the forest wearing dull, woodsy colors, someone had winged an elk nearby, put it together for yourself - but the fact that whoever did it had noticed it, covered it up, and not gone to the police made it a murder.
The next day, Bill and Charlie met at the diner in town to have lunch. Benni stayed outside, curled up in the back of Bill’s truck. Talk soon strayed back to Monty Argliss.
‘You ever know anyone to have a grudge against him?’
‘No,’ said Charlie, ‘no-one.’
‘Shit,’ he continued, ‘I’m not even sure how many people he knew. Never went in to town much, ex-wife back in Seattle, no kids.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Anything else you’re doing today?’
‘Not much. Just need to pick up some rebar, landscaping nails for the beds. Maybe walk Benni around the park.’
‘Mind if I tag along?’
‘Nothing of it.’
Bill left a couple of bucks for the coffee and they went to the hardware store.
They stood in line at the checkout, holding the rebar, nails, and a couple of bags of cement (Charlie had decided to redo the pilings on his porch that weekend) when Dave Kellerman happened by.
He was a bit of a town outsider, on account of his drinking and temperament, which is to say he was the happy bosom buddy of most of the barflies and fisticuff boys within fifty miles. Had a similar familiarity with the constabulary of three islands, too. He lived in a cabin out on a ten-acre island in the Sound his grandpa had handed down, along with a small trailer on the mainland, and mostly fished and hunted to supplement whatever money he found.
‘Morning, boy-os.’ He was in the next lane over, picking up electrical supplies (salt air was hell on the generator he had for television and beer-cooling.)
‘Dave.’
‘Dave.’ Nods.
‘How’s it going, gentlemen?’
‘About the same.’
‘Been out hunting yet?’
‘No. Stuff around the house.’
‘I hear ya. Hard time of it myself,’ he held up the bag of zinc-plated contacts, ‘but see ya ‘round.’
Charlie and Bill nodded and absently waved as the cashier rang the last of Charlie’s stuff up. She was putting the cement onto a dolly to roll out, over Charlie’s protests, when savage growling split the air. Bill jerked to look out the window.
‘Shit.’
Dave Kellerman’s bag of fix-it supplies lay spilled across the asphalt as he pressed himself back against his p.o.s. Ford Ranger. Two feet away, Benni scrabbled at the window of Bill’s truck, snarling and spitting and, Bill saw with a feeling like drowning in ice-water, putting hairline cracks into the reinforced safety glass.
He dropped the rebar and sprinted out around the waist-high wall of fertilizer. Dave scrabbled at the handle to his truck now, but in that state Benni would vault the truck in a second, second and a half if he got through the window.
A couple of people were screaming, a few more stunned at the scene or cowed by the sight or the sound. Bill jumped in through the driver’s side and grabbed the heavy leather leash he’d tossed in between the seats.
Ears cracking at the roaring barks in the enclosed cab, he looped the handle around and through the seat support and then, one of the scarier things he’d done in his life, reached out and clipped the leash around Benni’s collar. The dog didn’t seem to notice.
Christ, he’d known that the dog was bred for bear – he thought he’d known that - but this was something else. Just when he thought the glass was about to break, just when h
e was afraid Benni would make the leap and half hang himself, Dave got the motor turned over and tore out of there, Benni throwing himself against the windshield to try and follow.
Dave pumped the bird out of his window as he turned onto the street and then he was gone.
Bill jumped out of the cab and slammed the door, sinking to lean against the side of the truck. He panted and hung his head.
Charlie ran up.
‘Jesus, what the hell was that about?’
‘I have absolutely… no idea…’
Inside the cab, Benni rocked around, pawing at the glass and whining. Bill was just glad that he was no longer trying to demolish his passenger side door to maul his neighbor.
‘Do know… one thing…’
‘What’s that?’ Charlie asked.
‘FUCK… taking him to the dog park.’
Later that evening, Bill and Charlie sat at the table in Charlie’s kitchen (Benni was tied up over at Bill’s place; the first time he’d felt the need to chain the dog) and had a couple of beers.
‘Shit, man, you ever see anything like that before?’
‘No, no. Maybe he just plain didn’t like Dave.’ Charlie threw it out there. ‘Dogs sense those things.’
The inkling of a notion tickled along the back of Bill’s brainpan. He shook it off, for the moment.
‘You don’t like Dave any more than I do, but what do you do when you see him? You sure as hell don’t haul off and take a swing at him.’
Charlie shrugged. ‘Maybe dogs’re different.’
‘They ain’t that different - can’t be.’
‘Who knows then.’ Neither of them, that was for sure.
When Bill waved goodnight and started the hike back along the road to his house and a calmed-down Benni, he returned to the niggling little thought that had been tugging at him. By the time the walk was over, and he was letting the dog in with a watchful eye, he was already wondering what he should pack the next morning.
‘Jesus, Bill, it’s eight in the morning.’
‘Up and at ‘em, Charlie. We’ve got a day ahead of us.’
Bill stood on the porch decked out in fluorescent orange vest and hat, a light lunch slung at his hip. Guns were in the truck.
‘Hunting?’
‘Yeah. There’s an elk somewhere around here that I want to try and find.’
He explained further after Charlie had gotten dressed and kitted out.
‘See, the wildlife service over on Shaw has tagged most of the big game animals around here.’
‘What, everything’s illegal to take?’
‘No, no, not like that. There’s this little fluorescent orange plastic tag on the ear, you take it and give it to them and tell them when and where you found it, give a few samples of the body, you get a hundred bucks or so. Some of the hunters call them ‘red-tag specials’, and a few of them might be willing to take a shot at it out of season.’
Charlie tromped through a stand of obstinate ferns. They’d driven back to Bill’s and proceeded on a meandering course through the forest between Bill’s house and what he had come to consider after only a short week, with a faint shudder, the old Argliss place.
‘So what’s up with this elk, then?’
‘Remember how the police found blood a ways away when Monty was killed? I figure that whoever shot him, took a shot at whatever elk was bleeding. Probably they were the one who bled it, even.’
‘And? It’s an elk. I doubt that Sheriff Rasiah will accept its eyewitness testimony.’
‘I know it’s a long shot, but they didn’t find any arrow or bolts at the scene, other than the one that got Monty. If we’re lucky, might find a complete arrow in the elk.’
Bill stopped and turned as Charlie fell behind.
‘You really think that you’re going to find this and figure out what happened out there.’ Bill only shrugged. It wasn’t really a question.
‘Hell, if not, at least I’ll take a shot at the elk. And the hundred bucks, maybe.’
They’d stopped for a spot of lunch when something crackled through the brush a hundred yards away. Their ears pricked to it immediately, attuned to the frequencies of snapping sticks and shushing fronds. Steady hands unholstered rifles and took up spread positions. Meals forgotten, they moved forward slowly, slightly, flanking the source of the sound.
A small creek ran through the woods, coursing down towards the bay. A massive head raised up from the banks with a burst of bright feathers alongside and they both took a bead on the elk. Two shots, and it dropped with a spasm.
Bill splashed through the stream and kept the gun trained on the animal’s head as Charlie rounded the other side. Neither of them could have been too careful - animals like this had thick skulls, and wounded, in close quarters, them with long legs, things could get ugly.
With a cluck of the tongue, Charlie pointed down at the elk’s ear where a brightly colored and slightly scuffed identification tag bore the address and phone number of the ranger’s station. His finger pointed past that to a yellow feather-fletched arrow protruding from the muscular shoulder. Dried blood matted the fur around it, and a slight swelling appeared where the wound had started to heal.
‘I’ll be damned.’ Bill stepped over the dead elk and knelt to examine the wound. Sure looked like a broadhead, all right, although he couldn’t be sure. He pulled his bowie knife from a thigh sheath and made the first of the cuts to free the tip.
‘What are you going to do about it all?’ Charlie asked Bill as they set about jointing the carcass. In all the bemused wonder at actually finding the one in a thousand elk with the arrow, they had both forgotten the logistics of pulling hundreds of pounds of meat out of the woods.
‘I don’t know.’ The arrow, tip nearly cleaned, was wrapped up in a piece of cloth and tied onto his pack. ‘Maybe tell Rasiah about it, I’m not sure. I’ll figure something out - he’d like to know, probably.’
‘That’s it, then?’
‘I guess so. No smoking gun - I don’t know if I thought that there’d be a sign on it or what, fingerprints after days in the rain and muck, maybe.’
They resumed sawing in silence broken by grunts and muttered oaths and curses. More thoughts swam through Bill’s brain, as they often did. Living out in the woods, hunting and fishing, not much in the way of white collar employment, most people would think he was sort of slow. Most people would be right about that, too, but that wasn’t to say Bill was dumb. Where he was going, he got there, sooner or later.
He wondered at just why exactly, Charlie’s question, he had been so keen on this arrow. Thought led to thought, and he pondered in a nonverbal, impressionistic sort of way why the arrow in Monty Argliss had been broken off. Hell, Rasiah wasn’t exactly CSI, but even he and the coroner would know that a man was killed with an arrow and not a bullet or a knife. No point trying to hide that.
So why trouble about it, then?
Bill stopped by Charlie’s house on the way in to town the next morning. Charlie’d already gone in to work, but Elizabeth invited him in for coffee.
‘All right. I should have some time before Ricky Barnes opens up.’ He sat down as Charlie’s wife poured two mugs and sat down across from him.
‘Ricky Barnes? You’re a rifle man. What are you going to see him for?’
Bill said nothing, intent on stirring his half and half and sugar in.
‘This is something about that Monty fellow, isn’t it?’
‘Charlie tell you about that?’
‘No, not so much, I just figured.’ She stared at him. ‘I don’t want the two of you getting mixed up in another one of your schemes. Sheriff Rasiah’s covered for you enough, and I don’t think that -’
‘Ain’t right. Killed like that - even a lone soul like Monty ought to have someone there for him.’
‘Nothing to do with the law?’
‘Honest, ma’am.’ Bill held up his hands. ‘We aren’t interfering or nothing, just poking around the woods after all the offic
ers’ve had their fill and left.’
She nodded, slowly. Ten minutes later, when he was thanking her for the coffee and heading out the door to go and see Barnes, the talk had long since turned to happier trivialities. Still, Elizabeth stood on the porch in the brisk fall air for a long minute after the truck left, thinking about why Bill Morgan would need a fletcher.
‘That’s the thing, Charlie. I think I got it figured.’
‘How?’
‘Whoever shot Monty broke off the arrow, right?’
‘Yeah. Sheriff said he musta panicked, an accident or something.’
‘What kind of hunter panics like that, though?’
Bill pulled out the arrow from the elk and laid it in the center of the table before continuing.
‘You shoot a man with an arrow, the cops - even the cops around here - are gonna know he was shot with an arrow, anything short of burning the body. Even then,’ he shrugged, ‘so he wasn’t trying to hide shooting him.’
‘All right.’
‘And the tip that he left in the body was a mass-market thing. Hell, I probably have a few bouncing around my tackle box.’
Charlie nodded.
‘So what does that leave for him to try and take, and why?’
Their eyes tracked up and down the arrow pulled from the elk, the match-mate of the one that ended Monty Argliss’s life. Charlie noticed it and looked up.
‘Fletchings. Arrows sell at the store with rubber-flap fletches, maybe nylon bristles if you’re upscale. Nobody around here sells feathers mounted like that on anything other than birch arrows. It had to be a custom job.’
The two men locked eyes, and Charlie spoke first.
‘You saw Ricky Barnes.’
‘He said Dave Kellerman.’
The pickup truck bounced across the rutted dirt road out to the Kellerman place, just a trailer that had decayed enough to meld into the landscape like a real house. Benni slept curled up in the middle of the bench seat, fur overflowing onto the two men on either side of him. They stopped and got out softly, to which Benni gave the merest roll of his shoulders and a snuffle.
As they walked down the rutted dirt road towards the trailer, Dave came out from around back, flannel shirt rolled up to the elbows. A puzzled face resolved into a wide drunken grin at the sight of the visitors.
Kzine Issue 1 Page 4