Coates, Deborah - [Wide Open 03] - Strange Country

by Deborah Coates

  “You saw her?” Hallie knew, in some vague intellectual way, that Brett had passed her EMT certification the previous month, that she was a member of the West Prairie City volunteer fire department’s ambulance service while she finished her master’s in Rapid City. In her head she pictured minor injuries from traffic accidents, broken legs from horses, drunken brawls at the Bob. Because she didn’t want Brett to see the things she’d seen, wanted there to be a different life somewhere in the world, where people never got shot and if they did, no one had to see it.

  Which was stupid. She knew it was stupid. She wanted it anyway.

  “No,” Brett’s voice was low. “Because there wasn’t any reason for us to go out.”

  Oh.

  Laddie made a noise that Hallie couldn’t quite interpret. Then he stood abruptly and walked out the kitchen door. The slap of the storm door marked his departure, and Hallie realized Brett had been talking the whole time. “… was apparently right there when it happened,” she said.

  “What? Who was there?”

  “Boyd. Weren’t you listening?”

  Hallie bent forward like someone had kicked her in the gut. “Wait. What? Is he all right? What happened?”

  A brief pause, then Brett said, “I’m trying to tell you what happened. Apparently, Prue called the sheriff’s office last night. Technically this morning, I guess. Around three?” Like it was a question, though Hallie guessed that it wasn’t. Hallie paced, couldn’t have stood still if she’d wanted to. And the kitchen was too small—feet and yards and miles too small. She strode through the dining room into the living room, turned abruptly at the front door, and headed back.

  “She called dispatch to report a prowler. And Boyd was on last night, which you probably knew. So he went. And he was there. I don’t know a lot more. He went, he checked things out, I guess, and when he was leaving—they were on the porch or something—someone shot her.” She paused, then continued, as if she knew that Hallie would want the details. Yes, Hallie thought, because it happened how it happened whether anyone told you the grim parts or not. “One shot,” Brett said, her voice carefully devoid of emotion. “High-powered rifle.

  “No one saw anything. I mean, Boyd didn’t even see anything. The shot came from somewhere across the street. The cemetery’s over there, an empty field beyond, then the county road. It could have been anyone,” she added helpfully, in case Hallie had been thinking the shot was fired by a neighbor leaning out their upstairs window.

  Hallie took a sharp breath and let it out. “Jesus.”

  “Yeah,” Brett said.

  “Jesus.”

  It wasn’t that there weren’t murders in Taylor County. Less than six months ago, Martin Weber had killed Hallie’s sister, Dell. He’d killed Hallie and Brett’s friend Lorie Bixby too and, as it turned out, at least four other women going back three years or more. And though Martin was unique in a lot of ways, he wasn’t the only one who’d ever murdered anyone in Taylor County. When Hallie was in sixth grade, Sten Cofield, who was the sheriff before Ole, went home one day for lunch, shot his wife and then himself. No one had liked his wife, or Sten much either, which meant most people still felt guilty about their deaths twelve years later. There had been one other murder, back when Hallie was too young to remember, probably a few before she’d been born, and several deaths over the years that could be called “misadventure”—shooting accidents, drunk driving, a sucker punch in a brawl. Not so different than any place, and yet different, because you always knew who and sort of knew why or at least knew afterwards when it was too late to do anything.

  Shot in the head with a high-powered rifle was different and other and not the kind of thing that happened in Taylor County.

  “Do they know who? What are they doing? How do they even handle a murder in this town? Do they call in the state? Boyd’s not on duty now, is he? They sent him home, didn’t they?” Because Boyd would think he should finish his shift. Or maybe he already had finished his shift. And he hadn’t called her. Why hadn’t he called her?

  “Hallie,” Brett said.

  She stopped.

  “I don’t know any of those things,” Brett said patiently. “You know I don’t. You should probably—”

  “Yeah, okay, I know.”

  “Call me,” Brett said. “After.”

  Hallie disconnected.

  She had her hand on the back door when she stopped. Prue was dead. There was nothing Hallie could do for her. Someone had shot her. Not a reaper. Not Death, except in the abstract sense. Not Martin Weber.

  She dialed Boyd’s cell phone. It rolled to voice mail. She dialed it again. “Call me,” she said when it rolled to voice mail a second time. He was alive. He hadn’t been shot. Those were the important things. But he hadn’t called. He might be writing reports. He might be answering questions. He might even be sleeping, though she doubted it.

  Back in November after they’d rebuilt the walls between worlds, Hallie had told Boyd everything: how she’d watched Hollowell choke the life out of him, how she’d waited for the moment of his death—his actual death—because that moment, when a reaper took a soul, was the only moment the reaper himself was vulnerable. Boyd had said it was okay. He’d said she didn’t have a choice. He said he understood.

  But he didn’t.

  She could tell by the way he talked about it, by the way it sat so lightly on him. And yet, she wondered if he hadn’t called her this morning because some subconscious part of him did understand and had pulled away.

  She called her father.

  “Yeah?” He answered on the fifth ring, which surprised her. He never picked up the phone if he could possibly help it. She’d been prepared to leave a message. “Brett called me,” she began.

  “About Prue?”

  She should have known he would know. “Yeah,” she said. “When did you hear?”

  “I been over to the Dove.” She could almost hear him shrug across the phone lines. Not that he didn’t care or that he didn’t think it was big—major—news. But because he didn’t want her to ask what it meant to him or how he felt.

  “You want to come over for supper?” she said instead. It wasn’t like she hadn’t known him for twenty-three years.

  “Guess I gotta eat,” he replied, which meant yes. Because if he came to supper, he still might not tell her how he felt that someone he’d known for a good twenty years was dead—and not just dead, but shot in the head with a bullet from a high-powered rifle—but at least he’d be doing something other than sitting in his kitchen with one light on or working on some old piece of farm equipment until his fingers were too cold to hold the tools.

  “Be here at seven,” she said. “Bring meat.”

  “You want steak?” he asked.

  “Beef or bison?”

  “It’ll have to be beef,” he said.

  “Good,” she said. “See you then.”

  She found Laddie leaning against his truck on the far side out of the wind, the brim of his cap tilted down over his eyes. Maker was there—Hallie’s more or less personal harbinger of death—just outside the hex ring. It stared at Laddie, didn’t even move its head when Hallie approached, like Laddie was the only thing it had ever been interested in.

  “Laddie,” Hallie said cautiously.

  He was smoking, something Hallie hadn’t seen before—his house didn’t smell like smoke and neither did he. He looked over at her, straightened and flicked the butt away, then he gave a huffing half laugh, crossed the few feet between where he was standing and where the butt had landed, picked it up, snuffed it, and stuck it in his jacket pocket.

  “I used to have a dog that loved cigarette butts,” he said. “I probably smoked an extra two years before I gave it up because that dog got such joy out of the butts. Died of cancer, though,” he said after a pause. “So … yeah.”

  Hallie waited and after a moment, Laddie said, “What happened?”

  “I don’t know,” Hallie told him. “She was shot. Prue
Stalking Horse.” In case he hadn’t gotten that part, though she was pretty sure he had. “Middle of the night. She’d called in about a prowler, I guess.”

  “I didn’t like her,” Laddie said. He took his hands out of his pockets, looked at them like he thought they ought to be holding a cigarette or something, then shoved them back into his pockets again. “I’ve told you before I didn’t like her. I didn’t trust her. There was a time—well, that’s water under the bridge now, I guess.”

  Hallie turned up her collar, shoved her own hands in her pockets, and moved closer to Laddie so the truck could shield her from the wind too.

  “I didn’t talk to her much anymore,” Laddie continued. “But we did have kind of a fight a few days ago over to Cleary’s.”

  “Kind of?” Hallie knew that Laddie and Prue had some history, though she didn’t exactly know what that history was. When she’d been looking for information on reapers, Laddie sent her to Prue, but he also said she couldn’t be trusted.

  “It was a little loud,” Laddie said, still looking at some distant spot on the horizon. “She had this idea. She’d get ideas in her head and they were stupid, dangerous ideas.”

  “And that was the last time you saw her?”

  A hawk landed on the peak of the barn roof, its feathers ruffling in the wind. Laddie’s gaze was fixed hard on it, the hawk looking steadily back like it was gauging whether Laddie was too big for prey. “She called me last night, late.”

  “Why?”

  Laddie shrugged. “Doesn’t matter really. It’s old news now.”

  “Ole will want to talk to you,” Hallie said.

  “Yeah.” Laddie drew the word out long. A sharp breeze whistled around the corner of the truck and rattled the tailgate pins. He rubbed his hands down the front of his jeans. He didn’t look at Hallie, staring past the barn and the horse corral at something in the middle distance. “It was just … she should have stopped,” he said.

  “Laddie…”

  “Goddamnit!” Laddie pushed himself away from the truck with a quick sort of violence, walked ten yards to where the hex ring was marked out with tattered bits of cloth tied to tall stalks of dried grass, stood there looking across the open plain, then walked back. Maker watched him every step of the way.

  “Look,” Hallie said. She stamped her feet and wished they were having this conversation inside, back in the kitchen, drinking coffee. Except this was exactly the sort of conversation that took place in the open, where words could be misheard in the wind and denied an hour later, where things were brought back down to size by the arc of the sky and the weight of the winter clouds. “I have to go to town,” she said, could feel the urgency like a drumbeat along the base of her skull. “But we can talk later. About Prue. About your stone if you want.”

  Laddie’s jaw was set in as tight a line as Hallie had ever seen. He’d told her once that he’d stayed in Taylor County because this was his place, even if he didn’t have land anymore, even if everyone believed, or wanted to believe, that it was the Kennedys’ own fault they’d lost their ranch, not bad luck or bad weather or bad cattle prices. Because if it was Laddie’s fault, or his brother Tom’s, then maybe they wouldn’t lose their cattle or land or livelihood. People said the Kennedys were bad luck. Tom had left afterwards for Seattle or Denver or someplace farther west with his wife and two kids. Laddie’s wife had left too. Laddie himself made most of his living reading the future in tarot cards and conducting unconventional séances. People talked about him in coffee shops. Sometimes they laughed.

  And still he stayed.

  Because sometimes all you could do was go forward. Hallie’d served in Afghanistan, her sister had died five months ago, she’d had to go into the under to save Boyd. She knew a lot about going forward and getting through. More than she’d ever expected or wanted to.

  “It’ll be all right, Laddie,” she told him.

  He gave a funny little quirk of his head, like a shrug. “Well, if it ain’t, it’ll be here anyway,” he said.

  Then he climbed in his truck, started it up with a throaty whine, backed it around, and rattled down the rough drive.

  Maker trotted after the truck for half a hundred yards, stopped, looked down the driveway, wagged its tail once, turned, and trotted slowly back to the edge of the hex ring. Then, with a brief look at Hallie, it turned around once and disappeared.

  5

  Twenty minutes later, after Hallie had showered, changed her clothes, and grabbed her other jacket off the hook by the back door, she was finally ready to leave for town. Boyd still hadn’t returned her call. He was all right; she knew he was all right. She’d know—someone would call—if he weren’t.

  She didn’t want to talk to him on the phone anyway; she wanted to see his face.

  Outside once more, she crossed the yard to her pickup, started it up and backed it around, then paused as she always did these days when she reached the edge of the hex ring. The walls were back now. There were few spare moments these days when she didn’t remind herself of that fact. Death wasn’t in the living world. He couldn’t be. She would not be coming face to face with him if she stepped outside the hex ring.

  She looked for him anyway. She looked for everything, looked for signs of harbingers, of reapers, of things that didn’t belong in the world but could be sent after her—or that she was afraid could be sent after her.

  She hated to admit it, but with each week that passed and no sign of Death, she left the ranch less and less. She had excuses—too busy, too late, too early. Still.

  Damnit.

  Which pretty much summed up her feelings every time.

  Well, it couldn’t be helped. None of it. She stepped on the gas, let up on the clutch, and crossed the line with a jolt. In nearly the same instant, Maker jumped through the side of the truck and onto the passenger seat.

  It almost didn’t startle her.

  “What was that before, with Laddie?” she asked.

  She didn’t say hello, or I haven’t seen you in a few days. She particularly didn’t say I missed you, though it was possible she had. Hallie’d thought, immediately after everything, that Maker would have been shoved permanently back into the under when the walls rebuilt, back under Death’s thumb. But it still came. She liked having Maker around even though it worried her too. If Maker could cross over to the living world, what else could cross over? She told herself Maker was different. Harbingers had always left the under. Usually they left to do a job, not to hang out on an old broken-down ranch in western South Dakota with someone they found interesting, though.

  “Shadows,” Maker said in answer to her question.

  Hallie looked sharply over. “Like Death shadows? Like Laddie’s going to die shadows?”

  “Not today,” Maker said.

  Well, that made it all fine, then. Hallie stopped at the end of the drive, checked both ways for traffic though there was never any traffic, and made a left turn onto the county road.

  “Laddie’s not going to die,” she said.

  Maker huffed out a breath, like it was laughing at her. “Everyone dies.”

  Which statement Hallie didn’t really have an answer to.

  They were a mile or so down the road when Maker said, “Something happened.” It sat straight up on the seat and looked out the window, like the something was right out there where anyone could plainly see it, though all Hallie could see at that moment were two dead deer, one right after the other along the west side of the road.

  “Prue Stalking Horse died,” Hallie said.

  Maker looked at her. It neither knew nor cared about names.

  “The cheater,” Hallie said.

  “It’s not her time,” Maker said, like it made a difference.

  “Yeah, I guess you’re wrong,” Hallie said.

  Maker looked at her with its head tilted to one side as if it didn’t understand what she was saying. It looked out across the open fields. “That’s not it,” it said.

  “Not it? Not
the something?” She thought about the note from earlier—It is time to face your fear. The note itself was bullshit. Because, frankly, that was all she did, face things. It was the why—why was it out there, who put it there—that was the mystery.

  Maker didn’t answer—it was possible it didn’t know. It circled three times and lay down on the seat, nose to tail.

  Four pickup trucks, each one more battered than the one before it, passed Hallie going south. One had a crack that ran almost the whole length of the windshield, and one had an open window on the driver’s side. The driver, whom Hallie didn’t recognize, had his elbow on the doorframe, fingers on the steering wheel despite the frigid twenty-degree temperature. The last of the four had barely gone past her when Hallie had to step hard on the brakes as a coyote crossed the road in front of her moving fast. It leaped across the shallow ditch on the far side, all four legs stretched nearly horizontal.

  A few minutes farther on, Hallie asked Maker, “Is she a ghost? Prue?”

  Maker huffed out another breath and curled in tighter.

  Hallie didn’t want Prue Stalking Horse following her around. Didn’t want any of the ghosts who had already followed her or would follow her in the future, if the truth were told, but Prue … Hallie didn’t want to solve Prue’s problems, to take care of her unfinished business. And frankly, she didn’t need to. This time the police were involved. It was clearly murder, with a high-powered rifle. Someone else could take care of it.

  Right.

  Though it was past seven, there was no one on the road other than the pickups she’d already passed. Entering West PC, Hallie drove past Cleary’s, where the parking lot was nearly full. Cleary’s didn’t serve breakfast on either the bar or restaurant sides and wasn’t usually even open until eleven. But people had clearly come when they heard. It was somewhere to be, to talk about Prue as they remembered her, to talk about what the hell kind of a thing this was.

  She drove past the sheriff ’s office on Main Street—three patrol cars and a nondescript gray sedan parked outside. If she turned left at the next intersection, she’d come out on Cemetery, one block west of Prue’s house. She had an urge to go there, though she was pretty sure there would be a police presence and they definitely wouldn’t let her inside. She wouldn’t be able to do anything more if she went now than sit on the road and stare at the front door. Which she was pretty sure a lot of people were already doing. Still, she’d go, sooner or later. Because it felt like a way to say good-bye.