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

by Deborah Coates

  “And last night?” Boyd asked.

  “I’d just gotten back to town again,” Tel said. “Saw the fire trucks. I was a volunteer myself until last August when I had knee surgery. It’s a habit.”

  “Meg Otis says you knocked on my door earlier.”

  Tel stared at him, then he looked away, and when he spoke he was studying the light off the glass on his back door. “Jesus,” he said. “Yeah, I did. Look, it wasn’t just the one phone call. I’ve been getting phone calls all week. Usually there’s no one there. Not even someone breathing. Just … nothing. Then once, this voice—still can’t tell you if it was a man or a woman—said, ‘How much are you to blame?’

  “How much are you to blame?”

  “Yeah, I don’t know,” Tel said. “Though you’ve got to think it’s related to all this, whatever it is.”

  “Why come to me?” he asked. “Why not just talk to the sheriff?”

  “Well, this seemed more like your kind of thing,” Tel said.

  Your kind of thing. Boyd guessed it was.

  “You could have said all this,” Boyd told him.

  “Yeah, well, I don’t explain myself to people. And I don’t like that state agent—Gerson, is that her name? None of it’s any of her business,” Tel said, as if that were as good a reason as anyone ever needed.

  “I’ll check it out,” Boyd told him.

  “Spend your time looking at someone else,” Tel said. “Prue never did me any favors, but Laddie was a friend of mine once too, and you’d be better off spending your time finding who killed him than looking at what I’ve been doing.”

  “Don’t worry,” Boyd said. “We’ll do both.”

  Hell of a day off, he thought as he and Becky Gerson drove back to West Prairie City; the snow, though still not much more than a few dry flakes, flew straight at the front windshield, like driving into a tunnel. Too dry to stick, just up and over the top of the SUV.

  “I wonder if someone’s after the stones,” Gerson said thoughtfully after they’d driven in silence for ten minutes or so. “Assuming it’s not Tel Sigurdson, and while I suppose he could have an accomplice, it seems far-fetched to me. What I can’t figure is why now? Why wait twenty years?”

  “What I can’t figure, is what your angle is,” Boyd said abruptly. “Why did you give the stones to me? Why me?”

  “I thought you could continue to investigate here,” Gerson said mildly.

  “No,” Boyd said. It was a reason, but it wasn’t enough, not with everything that had happened. “There’s some reason that you gave them to me instead of, say, Cross. You’ve gotten me into the middle of this, people are dying for those stones, and I want to know what you know and what it means.”

  Gerson didn’t pretend that she didn’t know what he was talking about, though it took her a minute before she answered. “First of all,” she said, sounding calm, though Boyd could hear tension too, like razor wire underneath, “you were already in the middle of this.” Which Boyd had to admit was true, if they were talking about Prue’s death. But it wasn’t the only thing they were talking about. Not anymore. “Second, well, Ole told you that I know about these things, didn’t he?”

  “He said you don’t know as much as you think you do or as much as you should.” Boyd slowed for a turn. It was late enough in the day that the light had gone flat and landmarks were losing their dimensions. The landscape, stretching out in all directions, looked emptier than usual.

  “Fair enough,” said Gerson. “I don’t know as much as I’d like to. No one does, though I guess it’s part of my job to pretend I do. There’s a—‘network’ isn’t really the right word, it implies a structure and formality that, frankly, we don’t have—but there are a few of us in law enforcement who investigate the unexplainable. Things like those stones, but also people who call in and report that ghosts have barricaded them in their houses or who claim that someone’s trying to drag them to hell.”

  Boyd saw a shape in the waist-high dry grass, something pacing them as they drove. He couldn’t make it out, just a shadow among shadows in the late afternoon light.

  Gerson continued, “Usually, there’s nothing to it. Someone trying to explain how they came to kill their spouse or their brother without actually implicating themselves, someone whose lost their grip on reality. But sometimes, sometimes there’s something that actually can’t be explained by anything we understand. I look for those things. I try to figure them out. There are a dozen others around the country who do the same. We get together once in a while. We exchange information.”

  “And this? The stones?”

  She made a movement, maybe a shrug. It was hard to tell. She wasn’t looking at Boyd as she spoke.

  “There’s a police captain in St. Paul I talk to on occasion and who claims that he can see ghosts—he’s been telling me for years about magic sinks. He didn’t tell me they were stones, just places that stored magic, magic without consequences because the price has already been paid. I don’t know if he even knew exactly what they were. I mean, physically. I don’t know that he knew they were stones. He says that the ghosts talk about them, though, about what someone could do if they were lucky enough to have one. Ghosts know more about magic than we do, apparently.”

  “Ghost don’t talk,” Boyd said.

  He could feel Gerson’s gaze on him. Two large trucks, one of them carrying half a dozen big round bales, the other empty, passed them going the opposite direction. “They talk to him,” she finally said.

  Boyd filed the information for later, the idea that ghosts manifested differently to different people—to the few people who saw them. It didn’t make sense to him, but he was learning that if magic and death and the ways that they manifested made sense, it was in an entirely different way than anything else he knew about the world.

  “I don’t think they tell him much in the general way,” Gerson continued, “but they’re kind of obsessed with magic, at least the ones who talk to him. He and I have wanted to get hold of a sink or at least figure out what it was for years. But the dead, according to him, are forgetful and they don’t always make sense.” Which Boyd also knew was true. “We never discovered more than that there was a way to store magic and that we should do our damnedest to get hold of it.

  “He also told me that the ghosts in St. Paul have been pretty agitated for a while. Since before the first of the year. More ghosts, talking more. Everywhere he goes lately, he says, he finds ghosts. It used to be one every month or so, and now it’s dozens and all the time. They talk about this place. Taylor County. They don’t call it by name, but he says it’s pretty clearly South Dakota. He called me and we pieced it together from things they were saying about buildings and cemeteries. Ghosts talk a lot about cemeteries, apparently.

  “When a call came in for DCI in Taylor County, you can bet I was going to be on that case.”

  “Hmm…” Boyd wasn’t sure he trusted Gerson or that she was telling him her real motives. He also wasn’t sure it made a difference. He had the stones. She didn’t even know where they were. And she hadn’t asked. “Do you talk to ghosts?” he asked. “See the future? Know what people are thinking?”

  Gerson shook her head and Boyd couldn’t tell if she was regretful or relieved. “No. Nothing.”

  “Laddie Kennedy talked to dead people.”

  “Ghosts?”

  It was Boyd’s turn to shake his head. “He said they were different. Not ghosts. Just dead.”

  “The photograph said, ‘All the talents,’” Gerson observed. “Now Prue Stalking Horse is dead. Laddie Kennedy is dead. William Packer has apparently been dead for twenty years. And someone just tried to kill Tel Sigurdson.”

  Suddenly, a blast of frigid air rocketed through the car, hitting Boyd square in the side like it had suddenly become solid. He jerked the steering wheel hard to the right, recovered, took his foot off the gas, and slowed. The blast hit him again, harder and colder, like a block of ice. A hard swerve, the sound of something
shattering, and the passenger window behind Boyd exploded in a thousand shards of safety glass. This time Boyd kept his foot on the gas and drove straight off the road and a hundred yards into the field, dry grass hitting the underside of the SUV with an occasional crack as something solider—the needled branches of a small cedar, an old fence post—thwacked into the undercarriage. He slammed to a stop, punched off his seat belt, leaned across Gerson to open the door, and pushed her out. To her credit, she grabbed her bag and rolled out immediately, followed quickly by Boyd, trying to stay below the windows. Boyd pulled his pistol and his phone, motioned to Gerson to work her way to the front of the vehicle as he proceeded to the back.

  He couldn’t see anything, didn’t expect to. This was an area he knew well, drove this road at least a dozen times every time he was on duty. He knew where the shooter was, knew where they’d parked their car and where they’d taken up their position to wait for his car. Across the road, a hundred yards on, was a turn-in for semitrailers. It wasn’t used much anymore, the interstate took all the traffic, but some of the ranchers used it to load out cattle for market and occasionally to park and ride with someone going to the city. At an angle to the county road, not particularly noticeable or notable. It would be perfect.

  Without looking at his phone, he dialed dispatch. Ole answered again. “Shooting,” he said once he’d identified himself. “On CR54 two point five miles east.”

  “Someone’s shooting at you?” Ole said. “Why is it always you?”

  Boyd didn’t bother to answer. Ole didn’t expect him to.

  30

  Boyd had just hung up from Ole when he heard a vehicle approaching along the highway. Gerson began to rise, but Boyd grabbed her jacket sleeve and pulled her back. “It could be the shooter,” he said. He had an odd feeling that he’d dreamed this moment. Not the field or the SUV or Gerson next to him, but this particular time of day, the sky gone gray, the sun just at the horizon, not quite dark, still enough light for shapes and objects. And he remembered this feeling, that something was wrong, the air was wrong and the sky was wrong and even the ground was wrong. Escape was impossible. That’s what he remembered.

  He pointed behind them with one finger, holstered his pistol, and said in a low voice, “Go.”

  “You don’t really think—”

  “Now,” Boyd said, knew that under most circumstances, she would be, should be in charge. But he knew he was right about this, knew that whoever was approaching wasn’t going to help them. And they had to go now because they were in an open field filled with waist-high dry grass that would betray them in an instant if they didn’t go to ground right now.

  Gerson looked at him. He wasn’t sure she’d listen to him, but then she nodded and slid nearly soundlessly away into the grass. Boyd followed. Up on the road, he could hear the car slow, hear the engine idling. A door opened, a brief silence, then it closed again. He urged Gerson forward. They’d have to stop soon or whoever it was would hear them. A few more yards and Boyd paused, tapped Gerson on the leg. He could hear someone moving slowly through the grass, flattened himself to the ground and hoped that the low light and the fact that they’d moved close to the ground would make their retreat—not invisible, that was nearly impossible, but unnoticeable. He stretched a hand into his inside jacket pocket and turned the volume on his phone down to mute—no sound, no vibration, nothing the shooter could sense or hear.

  Boyd could hear that the person had stopped moving. Then they started again, walked slowly all the way around the vehicle, opened doors and closed them. Moving quickly, looking for something. The stones? Boyd wondered. Well, they weren’t going to find them. He heard the soft rush as the back door on his SUV opened, heard the rip of Velcro as the person unfastened and refastened the things Boyd had stored back there.

  “Maybe we could get the drop on them,” Gerson whispered so low, it almost wasn’t sound at all.

  Boyd shook his head. “The grass. It would make too much noise.”

  Gerson breathed out a long sigh.

  Boyd lay as close to the ground as he could, tried to see through the twenty feet of grass that separated them from the shooter. If he lifted his head slightly, he’d be able to see the dark shape of his electric blue SUV and maybe a shadowed figure, but he couldn’t see anything from where he was lying.

  The back door of the SUV closed. No footsteps. Boyd imagined the shooter scanning the landscape, looking for some sign of them. A rustle of grass, a pause. He could see something that looked like a shadow, slightly darker than the surrounding grass.

  He wanted to tell Gerson to crawl farther into the grass, to get away now while there was a chance, but there wasn’t a chance. The only choice they had was to hold and hope the shooter didn’t spot them. Gerson presumably had her gun. He had his, but in the uncertain light and with only a pistol, it would be a tough shot. The shadow moved forward one step, paused. There was movement back and forth, as if he or she were searching. Eventually they’d pick a direction or start a sweep slowly outward from the SUV. If they were lucky, a patrol car would get here before then, but it would depend on who was available, on how fast they moved.

  The shadow took another step forward. Something so cold, it felt like a piece of the Arctic blown straight down from the north rocketed past Boyd’s head so clear and real, he’d have sworn it ruffled his hair on the way past. There was a choked-off exclamation followed by the sound of something smacking into the side of the SUV as if the shooter had stumbled sharply backwards.

  Boyd heard the faint echo of sirens, like something blown in on the wind from a hundred miles away, but distinct and real. A quick rustle of grass, and the shadow in front of him was gone, the sound of someone moving rapidly back to the road. In a low crouch, Boyd moved forward. If he couldn’t see the shooter, he hoped he’d at least be able to see their car. He reached his own SUV, heard an engine start out by the road, was rounding the rear bumper when he heard the car pull out, scattering gravel though not going particularly fast. He rose then and ran, reaching for his phone, trying to redial dispatch. He couldn’t make out the model, though it was a sedan. If he could get hold of the deputy who was heading out of West PC right now to where he and Gerson had been shot at, he could ask him or her to be on the lookout for cars headed to town, but even as he watched, the car made a left turn and its lights winked out.

  He still ran. Just in case he wasn’t too late to see something.

  Dispatch, not Ole, answered and he said, still running, “Tell them to turn onto the old Stuart Road. Car traveling without lights. Damnit.” This last uttered as a car with red and blue lights flashing came screaming up the road, passed the turnoff for the old Stuart Road, kept right on past the spot where Boyd’s SUV had left the road, going another full quarter mile before slamming on the brakes and reversing.

  Boyd and Gerson had both reached the side of the road when the patrol car returned and stopped. Teedt and Ole climbed out.

  “What the hell?” Ole said. “Was it the shooter?”

  “As far as I know,” Boyd said.

  “Goddamn,” said Ole.

  They drove back over to the turn-in where Boyd was sure the shooter had waited for them.

  “You can’t identify them?” Ole asked on the brief drive.

  “Not enough light,” Boyd said and Gerson agreed. Boyd could feel an intense cold against the back of his neck. He put his hand back there, but there was nothing. It had to be a ghost, must have been a ghost that had warned them just before the shot was fired, a ghost that had shot past him in the field. But why could he feel it? He’d never felt ghosts before. Had the shooter felt it too? And if so, if he and the shooter had both felt it, why did no one else in the car right now appear to be affected?

  The turn-in was lit by a single dusk-to-dawn light. There wasn’t much to see, though there were tire tracks in the dirt at the entrance. “Who knows if it’s worth anything, but let’s get pictures,” Ole said.

  They spent a few minutes phot
ographing a large portion of the bare dirt of the turn-in. Ole visited briefly with Gerson and they agreed to send a technician out in the morning and also agreed that they weren’t likely to find much.

  * * *

  When Hallie finally reached her truck, it was only a few minutes after seven, but already the sky overhead was dark and clear, the quarter moon low, nearly on the horizon. The driver’s seat was stiff with cold, hard and unyielding, and her fingers felt thick and useless as she fumbled with her keys. As the truck warmed up, she leaned her head against the steering wheel and did the thing she almost never did—wondered if she’d done the right thing.

  She’d just sent Beth Hannah into the underworld. Sent her to hell, really. Beth had wanted it. She’d gone after it. But she had no idea.

  Hallie knew she had no idea, and she’d helped her anyway. But she hadn’t sacrificed her. It had been Beth’s own decision. She hoped that counted for something, but she wasn’t entirely sure that it did.

  It wasn’t that she didn’t believe that people lived their own lives, that there wasn’t much you could or should do to change that. It wasn’t that she hadn’t seen soldiers, younger and more naïve than Beth, grow up because they had to, because they owned the choices they’d made. It wasn’t even that she didn’t think Beth could handle it—she didn’t really know whether Beth could handle it or not, just like every other person she’d ever met. It was partly that she couldn’t make things okay for anyone and partly that she was thinking about Laddie and how he didn’t deserve to die, and thinking of him in the under, waiting. It made his death sadder and more immediate, even, than seeing his ghost did. Finally, it was because Beth’s going made things easier for her, Hallie, and that seemed like exactly what Beth herself had called it—a cheat.