Hunting Season

by Nevada Barr

  That done, she took her little Mag-Lite from its place on her duty belt and, holding it away from her body, clicked it on. Randy was curled up on his side in the fetal position, clutching his right leg above the knee. In the black on black of the nearly lightless night, the beam of her flashlight sparked startlingly beautiful red from the blood oozing between his fingers and over the backs of his hands.

  Anna closed the distance between them, stood over him looking down. Anger, malice, even the cold precision of the predator abandoned her. If she felt anything it was only a sense of detachment, of being there without form or matter. “Boy, that must really hurt,” she said.

  Randy started screaming again; this time pain wasn’t the driving force but rage. When he’d run out of gender-specific invectives he yelled, “I’ll sue your ass. You won’t have a pot to piss in by the time my lawyers are done with you.”

  Anna believed him. He might well win a lawsuit. Juries were notoriously unpredictable. But she didn’t think so. “You ran the wrong way,” she said. Had Randy run for the woods, Anna might have let him go, knowing he’d not be on the loose for long. He’d run toward the road, the patrol car and the shotgun therein.

  Till the first car arrived bearing Clintus Jones and André, Anna did what she had to. Confident he wouldn’t go far if he moved at all, she left Randy lying in the muck, ran down to the car and brought back a larger flashlight and the first-aid kit from the trunk. Good sense and personal preference told her to let Randy bind his own wound. The pain was acute, color was gone from his face and sweat streamed amid the rain on his face, but he was sufficiently conscious to remember the rudiments of his EMT training. She hadn’t tried to handcuff him, nor would she. From various bits of horseplay she’d overheard between him and Barth she knew Randy was too big. The metal bracelets would not circle his wrists. The leather bellyband more recalcitrant persons were chained to would not fit around his middle.

  Squatting on her heels in the rain, semi-auto in one hand, the other holding the light on his wounded knee, Anna watched him cut away the pant leg. Rain fell on the exposed flesh and began to wash away the blood. Her bullet had struck about five inches above the kneecap and toward the inside of the leg. The entry wound was small and neat. The exit wound had blown away a chunk of meat nearly the size of a teacup.

  It’s only a flesh wound, she thought and smiled at the cliché. She considered sharing this with him but doubted he would see the humor.

  There was enough blood for show but no arteries had been severed. Knee and ankle still functioned, and though he groaned enough to indicate otherwise, Randy was not incapacitated by pain. No bones broken. There was a lot of flesh to be got through on Randy Thigpen before a bullet could find much in the way of vital organs or bone.

  To pass the time, Anna had tried to engage him in conversation, but after the final stream of abuse when she’d shot him, he’d said nothing except, “I want a lawyer.” Anna was happy with that. She preferred the sound of the rain to that of the human voice. Curiosity didn’t nag her. Most things she was fairly sure she’d figured out.

  Randy had been charging locals admission into his own private hunting club on the Trace, probably for years. This season a client had died. He’d been asked to take care of it. Thigpen was too cagey ever to admit anything, at least not till the information could be used to gain him an edge in court, or prison, but Anna guessed he’d been the master-mind behind stripping Doyce and leaving him in the Mt. Locust Inn with the Bible text highlighted. At a guess, he’d used old Mack’s wheelbarrow, the one he complained had been taken and not put away properly. Martin, Herm, even Badger had appeared genuinely baffled when the intimate circumstances of how the corpse had been discovered were relayed to them. Odds were good they had no idea till after the fact.

  Thigpen, an opportunist, wouldn’t have been able to resist. Fallen, quite literally, into his hands, was the corpse of the brother of his rival for the Adams County Sheriff’s badge. Randy would have known anything smacking of a sex crime in the family would doom Raymond Barnette’s campaign. When Anna and Clintus had chosen to keep the details under wraps, Randy had quickly leaked them to the newspapers.

  At length Randy had managed a good enough pressure bandage over the wound to lie back and rest from his labors. Supine he reminded her vividly of poor ol’ Doyce, stranded for all time like a beached walrus.

  Clintus Jones would be running unopposed. Anna could hire a new field ranger. Despite the mud and the blood and the unremitting rain, silver linings were popping up everywhere.

  When Clintus and André arrived and Anna saw the car pull up at the bottom of the hill, she waved till their spotlight searched her out.

  André, proud of his youth and strength, attempted to bound up the steep slope of the mound and ended up crawling over the edge in a bedraggled, grass-stained state. Clintus used the steps cut into the west end. Even in the rain he looked unruffled and tidy.

  He started to apologize for letting Anna down, then thought better of it and paid her the compliment of treating her as an equal. “Good work,” was all he said.

  Lights and sirens broke up this wordless tête-à-tête.

  For the better part of two hours, everyone was caught up in the circus that grew out of trying to get a three-hundred-pound crippled man down off a mountain of grass and ice.

  In the end they loaded Thigpen onto a wheeled gurney, left in the collapsed state, and roped it up. Verbal once again, he was ordering ambulance personnel around and telling tales of Anna’s wanton kidnap of and assault upon his person. The Indian mound had nothing that could be used as an anchor. It took six men and Anna to belay Thigpen to the bottom of the slope and four of them to lift the stretcher into the back of the ambulance.

  Clintus and his deputy would ride with him to the hospital in Jackson, where he would remain under guard until the doctors released him to the legal system.

  Sheriff Paul Davidson had arrived shortly after Clintus and his men. In the hoopla of packaging and transporting Randy Thigpen, Anna had been able to more or less ignore him. Because it was deemed she was shaken and because she had no energy left to resist, the men had kindly planned out the next hour of her life. A deputy would drive her car back to Port Gibson following the ambulance. Anna was to ride with Paul.

  “Are you all right?” he asked gently when the noise and lights had faded and they were left alone together in the privacy of his car. Both were drenched. The heater was turned on high. Paul took her hand. “I was listening on the park frequency. When you called in I couldn’t not come.”

  Anna didn’t know what to say. She was too tired even to cry. For that she was grateful.

  “Let’s get out of here,” she said.

  He put the car in gear and trailed north in the wake of the others.

  Because she was afraid he would break the silence with the news with which he had threatened her earlier, Anna began to talk. She told him of the gun to her temple and her backward tumble to freedom. She didn’t tell him that her gambit had called for begging and sniveling. That she would never tell anyone. How much of it was acting and how much cowardice she would never know herself.

  “What set Randy off?” Paul asked when she’d run down.

  Anna had thought about that. “He knew Clintus was tracing the original owner of the truck that destroyed my patrol car,” she told him. “When Clintus radioed me and told me to get to a landline, Randy must have figured it had been traced. Clintus said the guy he’d talked to had sold it to Badger Lundstrom. Lundstrom must have traded it to Randy. He wouldn’t say what for, so my guess is it was in partial payment for his membership in Randy’s private hunt club. Clintus sent deputies out to pick up Lundstrom. He’ll stand charges for wanton disregard of human life, reckless endangerment, poaching, conspiracy to cover up a crime and, if we can prove he was with the men who chased me, attempted murder, though that one probably won’t stick.”

  They were quiet for a time. Anna could feel Paul building up his
courage to say something. It had been a trying day. When he finally opened his mouth to speak, she wasn’t ready to hear him and cut him off.

  “Barth and I made headway today on that cemetery business,” she said. “Looks like Mama Barnette’s land isn’t hers. It was ceded to a black man, Lanford Restin, shortly before the Civil War broke out. There’s no record it was ever bought back. Lanford died and the living Barnettes just absorbed it back into their own property lines. The old newspaper said Restin chose to be buried ‘back with his people.’ Barth thinks that meant in the slave cemetery behind Mr. Locust. There’s several Restins buried there. Barth got that from your deputy Lonnie. It fits with a grave being dug up, Raymond building a fine tiny coffin and reburying it on his mother’s place. After all these years there wouldn’t have been enough left of Unk to require much more than an infant’s coffin. There’s still living relatives. DNA from the remains could make a positive ID. Lonnie and his new bride might be getting three hundred acres of good farmland for a wedding present.”

  “Why would Raymond go to the trouble of making a nice coffin, reburying the remains?” Paul asked.

  “Whatever else he is, he’s a good undertaker. He takes his duties to the dead seriously.”

  Paul thought about that for a while. Covertly, Anna watched him. The faint light from the dashboard tinted his features. She’d known him less than a year, but already she knew his face as well as she did her own and yet could not read it.

  “Before the end of the war, though Unk—Lanford—was a freedman his Mt. Locust relatives would still have been slaves. A slave couldn’t inherit legally. Barnette will have the law on his side in that at least,” Paul said.

  “Making reparations is big in politics at the moment. Mama and Raymond will have a fight on their hands.”

  “You figure Raymond vandalized the graveyard signs to make a point? Obliterate the name ‘Restin’?” Paul asked, trying to tie up loose ends.

  Anna shook her head. Raymond was a lot of vile things, but she doubted he’d ever desecrate a cemetery. “My money’s on Mama Barnette for that,” she said, remembering Claudia’s tale of the old woman mud-splattered and exhausted from some bizarre outing that sapped her strength. Mama fit with the profile of those who defecated on the goods of their enemies; there was a touch of psycho about both the woman and the house she lived in.

  “Are you going to try and prove it? Prosecute?” Davidson asked.

  Anna considered it for a moment then said, “Nope. She’s old. I’m just going to hope she dies soon.”

  It was a distinctly un-Christian attitude, but Paul had chosen to lie down with heathens; it served him right if he got up with blasphemies.

  They reached Port Gibson as the ambulance, followed by the sheriff’s car, was pulling out of the gate. The sheriff’s car stopped until they drew alongside to pass along the information that Anna’s keys had been left atop her front tire on the driver’s side.

  Paul parked and switched off the ignition. Neither made a move to get out of the car. Heat and immobility wrapped Anna in lethargy. She didn’t know what Paul’s problem was. Didn’t want to know. Not tonight at any rate.

  “You look worn out,” he said kindly.

  For reasons pertaining to wives and “good talks,” Anna resented the concern. “I am,” she said curtly.

  “Why don’t I take you home, fix you something to eat and put you to bed?” he said and took her hand.

  Anna snatched it away childishly.

  “What is it?”

  “You said you wanted to talk.” Avoidance had become too tiring. Anna wanted to take the hit and get it over with.

  “Why don’t we get you something to eat—”

  “No. Now is good,” she said stubbornly.

  Paul looked startled, hurt, but Anna was unmoved. Rage undiminished by the satisfaction of besting Thigpen—even of putting a bullet into his unwholesome carcass—welled up inside her, and she began counting backward from ten in Spanish to keep it from spewing out.

  “Okay,” Paul said, saving himself for the moment. “Though I’d pictured it differently, maybe candlelight and soft music.” He smiled.

  Anna didn’t smile back.

  “Okay,” he said again. “Like I said I had a good talk with my wife.”

  Anna braced herself, kept counting.

  “She’s agreed to the divorce. It seems she’s found a fella.”

  The words reached Anna’s ears, but it was a moment before her brain could take it in. When it did, she exploded. “Why in the hell didn’t you tell me that over the phone?”

  Paul didn’t rise to meet her anger. “I wanted to be with you,” he said simply. “I was afraid once you knew I was free you’d run away from me.”

  “Fat fucking chance,” she said irritably, her linguistic skills eroded by recent events. At least she retained the grace to laugh at herself. Paul laughed with her.

  “A fella?”

  “The one who’s been pouring evil gossip into her ear about you, evidently.”

  The way to a man’s heart might be through his stomach. The way to a woman scorned was through her bile.

  “Steve,” Anna said suddenly, his mysterious project all at once illuminated. “Steve Stilwell, the Ridgeland District Ranger is dating your wife. What a guy.” Laughter, giddy from the relief at being alive and not alone, took Anna over for a minute, bubbling through at inopportune moments as she told Paul the story, piecing it together in her mind as she went.

  When she’d finished he looked grave. “I’d hate to see her hurt,” he said.

  Anna wouldn’t but she had sense enough not to say so. Hoist on my own petard, Stilwell had said. “I think Steve has fallen for her,” Anna reassured him. “He’s a good guy. She’ll be all right.”

  Paul sat for a minute then turned the key in the ignition. “Home?”

  “Home.” For the first time since coming to Mississippi, the word didn’t feel strange in her mouth or in her mind.

  Turn the page for a sneak preview of

  Nevada Barr’s new Anna Pigeon mystery,

  FLASHBACK

  Available from Berkley Books!

  Until she ran out of oxygen, Anna was willing to believe she was taking part in a PBS special. The water was so clear sunlight shone through as if the sea were but mountain air. Cloud shadows, stealthy and faintly magical at four fathoms, moved lazily across patches of sand that showed startlingly white against the dark, ragged coral. Fishes colored so brightly it seemed it must be a trick of the eye or the tail end of an altered state flitted, nibbled, explored and slept. Without moving, Anna could see a school of silver fish, tiny anchovies, synchronized, moving like polished chain mail in a glittering curtain. Four Blue Tangs, so blue her eyes ached with the joy of them, nosed along the edge of a screamingly purple sea fan bigger than a coffee table. A jewfish, six feet long and easily three hundred pounds, his blotchy hide mimicking the sun-dappled rock, pouting lower lip thick as Anna’s wrist, lay without moving beneath an overhang of a coral-covered rock less than half his size, his wee fish brain assuring him he was hidden. Countless other fish, big and small, bright and dull, ever more delightful to Anna because she’d not named them and so robbed them of a modicum of their mystery, moved around her on their fishy business.

  Air, and with it time, was running out. If she wished to live, she needed to breathe. Her lungs ached with that peculiar sensation of being full to bursting. Familiar desperation licked at the edges of her mind. One more kick, greetings to a spiny lobster (a creature whose body design was only possible in a weightless world), and, with a strong sense of being hounded from paradise, she swam for the surface, drove a foot or more into the air and breathed.

  The sky was as blue as the eye-watering fishes and every bit as merciless as the sea. The ocean was calm. Even with her chin barely above the surface she could see for miles. There was remarkably little to soothe the eye between the unrelenting glare of sea and sky. To the north was Garden Key, a scrap of sand
no more than thirteen acres in total and, at its highest point, a few meters above sea level. Covering the key, two of its sides spilling out into the water, was the most bizarre duty station at which she had served.

  Fort Jefferson, a massive brick fortress, had been built on this last lick of America, the Dry Tortugas, seventy miles off Key West in the Gulf of Mexico. At the time construction started in 1846, it was the cutting edge of national defense. Made of brick and mortar with five bastions jutting out from the corners of a pentagon, it had been built as the first line of defense for the southern states, guarding an immense natural—and invisible—har—bor; it was the only place for sixty miles where ships could sit out the hurricanes that menaced the Gulf and the southeastern seaboard or come under the protection of the fort’s guns in time of war. Though real, the harbor was invisible because its breakwaters, a great broken ring of coral, were submerged.

  Jefferson never fired a single shot in defense of its country. Time and substrata conspired against it. Before the third tier of the fort could be completed, the engineers noticed the weight of the massive structure was causing it to sink and stopped construction. Even unfinished it might have seen honorable—if not glamorous—duty, but the rifled cannon was invented, and the seven-to-fifteen-foot-thick brick-and-mortar walls were designed only to withstand old-style cannons. Under siege by these new weapons of war, the fort would not stand. Though destined for glorious battle, Jefferson sat out the Civil War as a union prison.

  Till Anna had been assigned temporary duty at the Dry Tortugas, she’d not even heard of it. Now it was home.

  For a moment she merely treaded water, head thrown back to let the sun seek out any epithelial cell it hadn’t already destroyed over the last ten years. Just breathing—when the practice had recently been denied—was heaven. Somewhere she’d read that a meager seventeen percent of air pulled in by the lungs was actually used. Idly, she wondered if she could train her body to salvage the other eighty-three percent so she could remain underwater ten minutes at a stretch rather than two. Scuba gave one the time but, with the required gear, not the freedom. Anna preferred free diving. Three times she breathed deep, on the third she held it, upended and kicked again for bliss of the bottom.