The front door slammed open, and Nina Cruz rushed out onto the porch and down the steps. “Damn damn damn!” she yelled. “I’ve posted so many signs on my fences, the place looks like Hollywood Boulevard. What part of NO HUNTING are these assholes not getting?”
Nina was wearing faded purple sweatpants, cut off above the knee, a long-sleeved gray sweatshirt with UNIVERSIDAD DE NUEVO MEXICO printed on the front, and fuzzy pink bedroom slippers. Her spiky-cut hair, once blue-black but now bright white, stood up in clumps around her head. The bones of her face, always prominent, now threatened to knife right through taut olive skin. Her immense black eyes were frantic.
At that, she was by no means the strangest sight to greet Sally’s eyes. As Nina stood glancing wildly around the yard, the pink tufts of her slippers collecting fast-falling snow, two long-haired young people, a boy and a girl, ran out of the aspen grove, trailing long bright orange and hot pink streamers of plastic surveyors’ flagging, giggling and stark-raving naked. Nina stared in horror at the streamers stretched tight, as the young people skirted the edge of the clearing, sprinting from one aspen to another, wrapping circles around the trees. “This oughta show those murderers a thing or two!” hollered the boy as he and the girl separated and ran in opposite directions around a final tree, colliding, pulling each other upright, and tying off their streamers in a bow. They embraced, laughing, and dragged each other off to the school bus, folded open the accordion door, and disappeared inside.
“Wh-what in the h-hell is going on out here?” Nina exclaimed. Her teeth had begun to chatter in the cold, and her bare legs were stippled with goose bumps. She turned and hollered toward the still-open front door of the house, “Wh-whose idea was it to t-turn my woods into s-some kind of D-DayGlo cuckooland? This m-mess comes down right n-now!”
Dashing to the first tree, Nina ripped the flagging off, and then ran off into the aspens, leaving a trail of large, flat, fuzzy-edged slipper prints in the deepening snow. The storm was getting going in earnest now. Nina disappeared surprisingly quickly, darting between the silver tree trunks, into the dancing swirl of snowflakes and shimmering golden heart-shaped leaves. Even her tracks filled fast with snow, vanishing before Sally’s eyes.
Now a bearded, bare-chested man ran out onto the front porch, a pair of Gore-Tex boots in one hand. “Nina!” he yelled, sitting down on the porch swing and pulling on the boots before he caught sight of Sally. “Where’d she go, man?” he asked Sally.
Sally pointed into the aspen grove. “I think Nina’s taking down the flagging,” she told him. “She didn’t seem too pleased.”
The man looked up from lacing his boots, a puzzled expression on his face. “But she told us she needed to do something more to discourage the hunters,” he said. “We talked about it, and came to a consensus that the best thing to do would be something colorful and nonconfrontational, sort of a conceptual art piece.” He shook his head. “Oh well, I’d better go after her. She’s hardly dressed for the snow.”
Sally looked at his chest. “And you are?” she asked.
“Oh. Oh wow, man, you’re right. It’s cold out here,” he said, standing up, running a hand through his mane of graying brown hair, looking down and apparently noticing for the first time that he wasn’t wearing a shirt. He fondled the African beads hanging on a leather thong around his neck. Mr. Randy Whitebird, if Sally didn’t miss her guess. “Guess I’d better get something on,” he said.
As Whitebird was turning to go back inside, Sally heard another shot. The snow muffled the noise some, but still it seemed to have come from even closer to the house than the first three.
And then a scream.
All at once, the clearing was full of people, streaming out of the house and the school bus, coming out of the woods. A few dressed for the weather, others were in various stages of stunning unpreparedness. A more than middle-aged man, in jeans and a heavy fisherman’s sweater, stumbled out of the aspens. His hair was in two long braids, red threaded liberally with gray. His hands were covered with blood, and the tracks he made in the snow were stained pink and spotted with dark red. “Oh God, oh God,” he said over and over.
“What’s wrong? Nels, what’s happened?” shouted the shirtless man, running out into the snow and taking the bloody man by the shoulders.
“Deer. Oh man, Randy, I found a deer. Oh God, one of those bastards got one.”
“Was that you screaming, Nels? Are you all right?” asked the formerly naked girl, now wearing jeans and a down parka with, Sally suspected, nothing underneath.
“No. No, I couldn’t make a sound. Oh my God...”
The scream came again, trailing off into a moan.
Whitebird left the girl in the parka to deal with the man with the braids, and ran off into the woods, toward the place they’d last glimpsed Nina. Sally, instincts too alert, dreading against dread, ran after him. Her light hiking shoes made soft crunching noises in snow that was packing down and piling up. The snow was falling now thick and fast enough that she might lose her way within a few dozen yards of the house. Whoever had screamed was now moving into full-bore hysterics.
And no wonder. There in the midst of her own Shady Grove, Nina Cruz was sprawled on the white ground, her arms and legs at wrong angles. She was twitching very slightly. Blood gushed from a ragged hole that seemed at once too small and too large, neatly drilled through the DE between UNIVERSIDAD and NUEVO MEXICO on the front of her sweatshirt. Bubbles of bloody saliva were gathering at the corners of her mouth. A thin blonde woman in an anorak parka and jeans stood a yard from the fallen Nina, keening and sobbing.
Nina’s mouth was moving. She was clearly in very grave shape, and she knew it. She was trying to say something. Sally and Whitebird bent down to try to hear over the blonde’s wails.
“K-k-k,” Nina said. “M-m-m-m.”
Sally took Nina’s hand. Her pulse was thready. “Don’t try to talk, honey,” she said. “We’ll get help. You just hang in there.”
Whitebird, shivering as snow caught in the thatch of graying hair on his chest, was leaning in to pick Nina up. “Don’t!” Sally yelled. “Don’t touch her. Is anybody here a doctor?”
Randy Whitebird stared at Sally for a second. “Yes,” he said finally, kneeling down to take Nina’s hand. “Nels Willen used to be a surgeon, before his epiphany.”
The man who couldn’t stand the sight of a shot deer had been a surgeon? Before his what? Half-a-dozen people had followed Whitebird and Sally to the spot where Nina Cruz lay. “Go to the house,” she said far more calmly than she felt, “and call nine-one-one. Tell the dispatcher to get the ambulance out here right now.”
“But it’s snowing,” said a woman in rainbow balloon pants and a black leather jacket.
Sally glanced down at Nina. Her skin had turned ashen, and the hand clasped in Sally’s had ceased to clasp back. Life was leaking out of Nina Cruz far faster than an ambulance could drive or fly.
It didn’t matter. Sally turned to the rainbow/leather woman. “Strange as this may sound,” she said in a flat voice, “it snows in Wyoming. It’s the busiest time of the year for the emergency folks.” Sally was still holding on, but Nina had slipped off to another place. Sally’s voice felt like it was coming from another person. “Just call fucking nine-oneone. And the sheriff. Tell them there’s been a fatal shooting at Shady Grove.”
Chapter 3
The Corpse Magnet
It shouldn’t have surprised Sally that several of the twenty people who were at Shady Grove at the moment when Nina Cruz was shot made an attempt to leave the scene the minute the word spread about the shooting. Sally was still crouching over Nina’s body, gulping air as if it were cold water, when she heard the sound of the first car engine starting up. She was dimly aware of ex-doctor Nels Willen kneeling next to her in the snow, feeling for a pulse in Nina’s neck, rising, shaking his head.
Sally battled sick dizziness. She climbed shakily to her feet, feeling, as the snow accumulated in her hair and t
he creases of her jacket, that touch of arthritis in the left knee, and stumbled toward the turnaround by the house.
Half-a-dozen Eurocar drivers were trying to elbow one another aside in the dash to be first out the driveway, spinning their tires, spitting enough gravel to crack the wind-shield of every vehicle in the lot, getting thoroughly in one another’s way. Sally began to run, shouting at them to park and stay put until the police came. But Willen was way ahead of her. Having determined that there was nothing he could do for poor Nina, he’d quickly moved on to deal with what came next.
Sally had no idea what kind of epiphany Dr. Nels Willen had undergone, or why, or when. But right this minute, grizzled, gaunt, and gentle-faced, he’d clearly shaken off the shock of finding the dead deer. Long experience of coping with life-and-death situations in an operating room must have kicked in. Willen now stood smack in the middle of the driveway, scrubbing the last smears of deer blood off his hands with wet snow, speaking to the fleeing coastal motorists (five California plates, one Oregon) in the soothing drawl of somewhere in the Southland.
“Easy, easy all, y’all,” Willen said. “Everybody just find a nice place to park, and we’ll all go on up to the house and set tight. I reckon when the cops arrive, they’ll want statements from each and every one of us.” He looked around with calm eyes. “Anybody else hurt?”
No one was, at least no one in the clearing. Sally had no idea what other people might be on the property. Including, of course, whoever had fired the shots.
“I need to call my therapist!” whimpered the skinny blonde woman who’d found Nina. “My cell phone’s got a dead battery, and Randy’s on the phone at the house. I can’t deal with the trauma!”
Sally took a millisecond to admire the way Nels said nothing and looked sympathetic, even as Sally herself was getting ready to tell the woman what she could do with her trauma. Nels’s moment of patience broke the panic. The formerly naked girl walked up to the blonde’s car, holding a cell phone. “You can use my phone, Lark,” she said kindly. “The reception out here sucks, but if you stand right in the middle of the turnaround, you can at least get a connection.”
“Thanks, Pammie,” said Willen. “You just help Lark get through to her therapist, and everybody else can call their therapists if they want, too. I bet there are as many cell phones to go around as there are therapists.”
Sally suppressed a snort, reminding herself that this wasn’t even remotely a humorous situation. And then she realized she was trembling.
She bit down on her bottom lip and tried hard to will away the picture of Nina dying. God, she’d never ever seen anybody die before. So she kept biting that lip until she tasted blood. Let tears fall fast and hard as they would, as she fought to control the swirling faintness that threatened to take her away.
The faintness won. She raced for the base of the nearest aspen tree and gave up her morning latte. Horribly, that seemed to help. She scooped up a handful of snow, rinsed her mouth. Repeated the process twice, and then worked a minute more on getting first, her balance, and second, a grip. Falling to pieces made her part of the problem, not part of the solution.
Sally scoured her face with snow one more time, and suddenly she felt the cold. Then she walked back to where Willen confronted the crowd. “We should leave the house line free, in case the sheriff or the emergency med techs need to get through,” he told the stunned group. “Who has cell phones anybody can use?”
People began pulling cell phones out of nowhere. Half of the group weren’t any more dressed than Randy Whitebird had been. Pammie had gotten some clothes on, but there were several people in shorts, a couple of bare-breasted women as well as men, one guy in a saffron-dyed loincloth. Collectively, they offered a display of piercings and tattoos that would not have been visible among most Wyomingites most times of the year.
Not much in the way of handbags, backpacks, or pouches. Not many pockets even. It’d be a miracle if nobody succumbed to hypothermia. Still, half-naked and everything, they had their phones on their persons. Really coastal.
Nels looked Sally up and down. “You stay here and keep an eye on these folks while I go up to the house and get Whitebird off the phone,” he said softly. “Give me a couple minutes to clean up and see how things are, and then we’d better get everybody up to the house before they all freeze to death. Let’s gather everybody in the living room and make some tea and wait for the cops. Do you have any idea which direction those shots came from?”
“I’m not entirely sure, but it sounded to me like they came from down closer to the main road,” Sally said. “Off in the woods somewhere. I wish I could be more specific.”
“I do, too. I had the same impression, for what it’s worth.” He smiled sadly and introduced himself. Sally returned the favor. Then Dr. Nels Willen strode off toward the house, red-gray braids flying behind him.
They ended up having to move some of the Californians’ cars anyway. The snow was falling thickand fast, but in spite of the worsening visibility and road conditions, the sheriff and the Albany County EMTs arrived within the hour, lights flashing, a red-shirted state game warden hard on their heels. The law added another six vehicles to the already crowded lot, one of those an ambulance big and heavy enough to churn up swerving ruts in a driveway rapidly denuding of gravel and slipping into muddiness. Sally stood on the front porch of Nina Cruz’s house and watched them roll in. Four deputies leapt out of the first two county Blazers, the game warden right behind them, toting short-barreled shotguns and rifles, zipping up fleece-collared jackets, the deputies fanning out in all directions, the game warden shouting that he needed somebody to show him where the deer had gone down.
They all had their work to do. Someone, after all, had fired the shots that had killed Nina Cruz and a hapless deer. That person or persons were still at large. Sally walked down the stairs, out into the rising storm, passing another deputy running up the steps of the house. She headed straight for her old friend Dickie Langham, now sheriff of Albany County, standing in the falling snow, calmly telling everyone what to do.
“You know,” Dickie Langham said to Sally as they stood amid the careful choreography of cars and trucks, the headlight beams gone murky in the whirling whiteness, “if I’d known how much of law enforcement was going to be directing traffic and moving motor vehicles, I’d have given more thought to staying in crime.”
“Not true,” said Sally, who had after all known Dickie back in his criminal years, when he’d been Laramie’s most popular dope-dealing bartender. She knew how often the line between ragged and right, for him, had been precisely a matter of directing traffic—of another kind. She had little idea where he’d been or what he’d done during the eleven years he’d gone missing, but the fact that he’d returned clean, sober, and ready to go to cop school suggested that he’d learned something about avoiding fatal collisions. “You were born to be a good guy. That’s why you’re here with the badge.”
She looked up at him. Dickie Langham was a big, tall, pear-shaped man in a fleece-lined khaki jacket with an ALBANY COUNTY SHERIFF patch over the chest, and a dove-colored felt cowboy hat quickly filling at the brim with an accumulation of lacy wet snow. A man who’d befriended her when they’d both been young and frigging crazy. He had stuck by her even at her most erratic and self-indulgent. She’d stood fast for him, even when he’d grown spacy and paranoid by turns, blowing off his friends as well as suppliers, customers, and the leg breakers who came more and more often to collect debts.
They had lost contact for sixteen years, reuniting only a couple of years ago. But joyously. Dickie Langham and Sally Alder were beloved friends, now and forever.
Dickie peered back intently from under his hat, trying to gauge her state of mind. “I suppose you’re just out here paying a casual social call on a lady friend in the middle of a blizzard.”
“No, you don’t. I’ll level with you. I’m here because Nina’s ex asked me to come out and check on her.”
“
Her ex? Stone Jackson? Some old Hollywood flame you’ve forgotten to mention to your hayseed Wyoming pals?” Dickie asked.
“No. Don’t mock me,” she said. “It’s kind of a complicated story. But to make it short, he’s a friend of a friend, and he knew I knew Nina, so he came to my office yesterday and asked me to come see if she was okay. He was worried about her.”
Dickie nodded slowly. “Why?” he asked, his voice very soft.
“He thought she was acting weird. And he didn’t like the company she was keeping,” Sally explained.
Dickie thought that one over. “I begin to think you ought to wear a big sign that says ‘Here comes trouble.’ ”
Sally inspected the toe of her shoe, digging into the snow. He was right. She had become something of a corpse magnet in the past couple of years.
“Aw Jesus, Mustang, I’m sorry. But how the hell does this keep happening?” he asked. “Never mind. We’ll go over all that stuff. I just hate the idea that we keep meeting over dead bodies.”
Sally shook herself, took a couple of hard breaths, and began to explain. “Nina wasn’t dead when I got here. She was pissed off. Hunters were trespassing on her land, killing animals. The groovy earth people she’d invited in were treating her aspens as if they were stage props in some historic reenactment of a sixties happening or something. She came running outside in her fuzzy pink slippers, looking like somebody in the middle of being driven crazy. I can definitely understand why, and as soon as you meet these people, you will, too.
“I’d already heard a couple of shots,” Sally continued.
“How many?” Dickie asked.
She thought a minute. “Three. I was just getting out of my car. I ducked when I heard them.”
Dickie kept listening.
Bye, Bye, Love Page 3