by Mark Stevens
A hand clasped her forearm, locked on and dug for blood. She grabbed the gun by the muzzle and whacked the knuckles hard. The hand bounced off and she sprang away, shuddering.
She and the gun sat in the front seat of the 4Runner. Now make that 911 call. Two rings. She spewed out just enough information and gave directions, let the phone dangle off the hook after saying she was heading out to look for help.
The clutch went in too fast the first time and she killed the engine. She concentrated on being smooth, deliberate. The second time the engine snapped off with such authority she thought she might have done damage. The third pop with the clutch, the 4Runner jerked backward but kept rolling. She cranked the wheel after the car was outside to turn it around. With the clutch down, she practiced finding the four gears, keeping a nervous eye on the door to the house.
First gear. A lurch and she was off, down the driveway hill. She would get better at it. She was free.
“Meow.” It was a high-pitched whine but most likely an echo in her head.
She took the main road back to the interstate. Third gear, fourth. Keeping her mind alert, supple, focused, relaxed. Relaxed? Impossible. The world was vivid and alive and coming at her in a Technicolor rush.
“Meow.”
Even more demanding. She risked a look around. “Good Lord, Fossil. What are you doing?”
Two yellow eyes peeked out from a ball of black fur that had found a bed on her big winter coat. The cat didn’t move, but answered politely with the only word it knew.
Twelve
Allison’s A-Frame looked friendless and neglected, an untended orphan, in the dusk-lit clearing. But she wouldn’t be alone.
A boxy station wagon was parked off to the side of her house. The car was broadside to her view from the top of the road leading down. She couldn’t make out the car’s color, only the shape and its odd parking place off to the side as if it knew it didn’t belong.
A figure moved from her front stoop to the car.
She stood with Bear for a second in the road, kept an eye peeled on the car and headed down.
The man drifted back to her front porch. Something about his gait and build looked familiar, but she couldn’t connect her gut with good or bad.
Flame from a match made a gentle arc from waist-high up to his face and then was gone, replaced by a hot red dot that repeated the arc in reverse. There was a quick glimpse of skin, no meaning to it, even though she was much closer now.
One gentle turn remained in the road to the A-Frame. Now at least she knew he wanted to be seen. Bear snorted on cue.
The man was tucked half in the shadows. The orange cigarette tip bounced down her front steps and suddenly she recognized his froggy frame and pug-like profile.
Fishy Marcovicci was dressed in full winter padding and stood off to the side of her porch.
“I was going to give you another ten minutes. I’ve about had it, listening to my toes go pop, pop, pop,” he said.
“It’s supposed to be five below zero by dawn,” said Allison, hitching Bear up to the porch. “Something that couldn’t wait, I suppose?”
“Damn right about that,” said Marcovicci.
His puffy white cheeks were locked up tightly. He shifted his weight on the gravel driveway and the noise from underfoot, the only sound in the deadly cold, crunched like it was hooked to an amplifier.
She realized that the over-sized shadow with the rope had materialized at her campsite shortly after her chat with Marcovicci.
So, Allison thought, the assailant might still be sniffing around, chasing a trail. Working both sides.
“Are you still after Applegate’s rifle?” he said.
“Nothing has changed,” she said. Except finding a team to extract Rocky’s body and bring him down, she thought. But she didn’t want to go into it.
“Tomorrow,” he said. “You and me. Let’s go find it.” His look was maniacal and cock-sure.
“Do you know where it is?” she said.
“I didn’t say that.”
“Then why are you suggesting it’s possible?”
“I know we can get it. Just as long as there’s no—what might be the appropriate word?—involvement of those parties that now, um, possess it.”
“You mean I can’t squeal on whoever has it now,” she said.
“Precisely.”
“But I get the rifle?”
“You get it.”
“But you can’t tell me where it is?”
“Can’t,” he said.
“You have to show me?”
Marcovicci thought this over.
“It’d be like looking for a chunk of fool’s gold in Fort Knox. You’ll need help.”
“Just a personal favor to me?” she said.
“Something like that,” he said.
“Where are you staying?”
She couldn’t reveal any slight mistrust, not if what he was promising was true.
“Man,” he said, already stepping off into the darkness toward his own car. “I thought you’d never ask.”
“I gotta make a few calls,” she said.
“I found something. Uh, somebody.”
“Body?” said Marcovicci, pronouncing it like buddy, not the street word for corpse.
She opened the door for Marcovicci, headed for the phone. Sometime soon she’d have to take Bear back to the barn.
“Yes,” said Allison. “Now there are two.”
****
“You two were eating lunch. Cozy.”
“She offered. It seemed—”
“Don’t tell me. Harmless.”
“Yeah. I suppose.”
“A sentimental jailer,” said Grumley. “Just what I needed.”
Boyles’ face was sunken. It carried a gold, unhealthy sheen. Grumley wondered if there was a plug he could pull, make the face turn the color of death.
“Felt like my innards were on fucking fire.”
A nurse giving a sponge bath to an old guy in the next bed glanced over.
“I gotta find Trudy,” said Grumley.
“I’ll bet she’s long gone.”
“I doubt it.”
“Because she doesn’t have any friends.”
“This is the part of the country she knows best.”
George stewed. Should he make a beeline to Alaska, right now? File a flight plan for Alamogordo but head to Juneau?
He had every refueling stop planned out. He had a friend of a friend who would trade him for a Mooney with a rebuilt engine outside of Spokane. For years the images in his mind about the day he’d disappear were all calm: an ordinary day in the summer, chatting with all the usual people, doing all the usual things; cash from the private and quiet sale of the store; cash from the private and quiet sale of the outfitting business; cash from the routine sale of his car and horses. That fantasy was dead.
He had never decided what to do about the house. He supposed in his head and heart he had always pictured leaving it to Trudy, so she could decide if she wanted to liquidate it, or part of it, to pay for her operation. Now it might be possible to sell the house if Trudy truly disappeared.
There’d be another couple hundred grand. If Trudy truly disappeared. Another couple hundred grand, minimum a hundred and a half if he was in a hurry to cut a deal. If she truly disappeared.
****
The Sulphur Inn carried CNN free of charge. The inn with its neon steam rising off the sign was tucked between a new Wal-Mart and a lumberyard out on the road to Carbondale, south of Glenwood Springs. The road provided a plateau of commerce in the otherwise steep canyon formed by the Crystal River.
The motel was laid out like a sideways H. Trudy asked the grandmotherly clerk for a room around in the back. She hadn’t even bothered to unpack before checking the cable. The sign out front had said “Vacancy, Free Cable, No Pets,” but she smuggled in Fossil when they weren’t looking. She had bought cat food, kitty litter and air freshener at Wal-Mart. She hid the litter box under her suitc
ase during the day, until after the maid finished her rounds.
She timed her brief trips to the grocery store to coincide with local news on the radio, but there had been no mention of the authorities finding a dead man at their house. A good sign. Perhaps Boyles had regained consciousness before the ambulance made it out there. Finally it dawned on her to call the medical center and ask for Boyles by name. The operator patched her through without a verbal blink. He was alive.
She wanted to drive back home and feed the cats, but she couldn’t work up the courage and couldn’t imagine what would happen if she ran into trouble like, say, George. In the rush she had forgotten the plan of slitting open a bag of cat food. Maybe she’d call into the barn and ask one of George’s helpers to swing by and look after them. It wasn’t as if they could trace her call or even know if she was nearby.
Everything pointed to going to the cops, but now there was an obvious problem. They would first want to talk to her about Boyles’ trip to the medical center and about why his stomach had to be pumped. She supposed if Boyles pressed charges, it would not be too difficult for any prosecutor to show that she should know, given all her plants, what ground vegetation to throw into a sandwich. There was a possibility the cops had already scooped up a few slivers or scraps from the kitchen counter. She wanted to try Allison Coil: ring her up. But she had probably asked too much already, then had given in so easily when George had shown up at the riverbank. She didn’t feel she had any right to lean on her again, to ask any favors.
Maybe in a day or two, but not right away.
****
Marcovicci cleared his throat, sipped his coffee. “We had a deal, remember? You don’t get to care who owns the gun now.”
“Grumley.”
“So you’re a genius. You think of the crew up there hunting and you figure I’m here, in Ripplecreek. There’s not many other possibilities.”
“It’s Grumley, said Allison.”
Marcovicci took a long slurp of coffee and bit off a chunk of bagel to slop around in his mouth. Allison, standing by the sink, imagined a sponge in a warm bucket.
Marcovicci had slept on the spare bed, snoring deeply off and on all night. Allison had stayed awake for an hour, wide-eyed. She worked on figuring out why George Grumley would have destroyed Applegate’s rifle. She spent a minute imagining how Rocky died. That was followed by a minute of picturing Slater, relaying the news she’d given him over the phone to Sandstrom. And back around again.
How soon would they head up and get Rocky off the mountain? She wanted to tell Sandstrom herself, to rub it in, but she’d let the “Boy Scout” handle it. Perhaps they were already putting a team together, to be ready at daylight. A red bandanna stuck on a stick off the trail indicated Rocky’s body. Her footprints would lead them the rest of the way. And what would Marcovicci say? After chewing on that question for a half-hour, it was back again to Rocky. She imagined Trudy being told and it wasn’t hard to picture Trudy weeping. And so she cried, too.
Marcovicci’s mention of the “arsenal” had clicked. She remembered her job interview and the racks of rifles that lined his room in the barn, the definition of overkill.
“You think your pal Applegate could have slipped up?”
“Let’s put it this way. Now Applegate’s another one of the millions in this country looking for the fastest route up Moral Mountain to stake out a big piece of turf on one issue or another and to point accusing fingers down the slope at anybody who dares to disagree. Makes me sick.”
“Agreed,” said Allison. “But he’s your buddy.”
“Sort of. Are you trying to talk me out of helping you?” said Marcovicci.
Allison sat down next to him.
“Not at all. Who else did you tell that I had come asking around?”
“What’s the difference? You’re leaving him out of this. The deal, you know?”
“A few days after you and I talked down in Denver, I was up with a couple horses doing my rounds, checking on our camps. Coming down at dusk, I pitched a tent and built a fire in the snow. Nobody around, right? Out in the middle of nowhere. Except this guy shows up out of nowhere, jams my face in the snow, tells me to mind my own business. And strings me upside down from a tree.”
Marcovicci winced.
“So Grumley has Applegate’s rifle,” said Allison.
“I didn’t say that. I said I’d help find it.”
“Okay. You assume he’s got it.”
“If a guy shoots somebody, I think he should be a man and step forward. Confess. Can you imagine walking away from a person dying in the snow? A person you shot accidentally? Leaving him to die?”
“You don’t need to go with me,” said Allison. “I can poke around over there. I’ve got a friend or two if it comes to that. Tell me what I’m looking for.”
Marcovicci focused on a distant planet, then came all the way back.
“What am I looking for?” she repeated.
“It’s a Sako. The sight is chipped in spots underneath, around the trigger housing. On the butt of the rifle, my initials. S.M. Engraved. It’s one of a kind.”
“Your rifle?”
“Yeah,” said Marcovicci. “Four years back, Applegate said he liked it. We were out target shooting. I had bought myself a new one, so I sold it to him.”
****
Applegate’s chest trembled from the cold and fear as he approached the barn, a dull hulk in the pre-dawn starlight. It was twenty or thirty steps across the compacted, frozen snow to the side entry, a people-sized door within a horse-sized door. He gripped the door handle and tugged it open.
The barn was cold, too. The air was rich with the smell of animals. Horse heads hung with sleep, worry free. They made him nervous.
Flapping wings bore down on him and Applegate ducked away, something bigger and nastier than a barn swallow. The hard fluttering was gone but his heart matched the rhythm. A light flashed through the window next to the door and he bounced back out of the way. He watched the beam flicker across horse heads, climb the far wall and switch off. A car flew up the road and was gone. Applegate slumped against the inside of the door, mentally wracked. The cavernous, imposing interior of the barn, packed with that cold quiet, taunted him: you’ll find nothing here.
Fishy’s voice drove him on. Among all the things he couldn’t imagine, having the rifle linked to him was the last. The world would laugh in unison.
To the office. He had seen Grumley dozens of times dig for the key in a saddlebag hanging in the tack room, near the front. Why would he have changed the location? The saddlebag was there. So was the key. The lock snapped open and Applegate returned the key back.
Flick on the light.
A few rifles? Maybe fifty. Maybe a hundred. Maybe more. All lined up neatly, stock down, side by side around the walls in racks. He scanned them all up close at trigger level. He picked up a few and held them to his shoulder, looking for a feel. One and another and five more, ten more. Back to the first. Different but similar. One felt close; they all felt the same. The weight? The length? All were within a narrow range. It was too subtle.
Finally one felt right. He flipped the rifle around in his hands. He sighted the rifle again and forced himself to touch each of the others in the racks. The process was like trouble-shooting a computer program. You had to scrutinize each comma and parenthesis. Study them: each barrel, each trigger.
Suddenly a thud and a slow whine of a door hinge. A shuffle of boots followed by a soft snort from a horse. The doorframe filled back up.
“Whoa Jesus, thought I heard something.”
The kid had his hands stuffed in his jean-jacket pockets.
“Who the hell? Christ. I know you.”
Applegate recognized the kid, one of Grumley’s helpers. Bobby Alvin.
“You’ve been on TV. What the fuck you doing?”
“Looking for George,” said Applegate.
“A bit early to be rousting him.”
“Don’t bother,�
� said Applegate, wondering if by any chance the kid might know one rifle from the next.
“You’re the one that’s working for all them animal groups. I remember you.”
“Grumley is a friend, for Chrissakes.”
“Some pretty weird shit going on here lately. Boyles in the hospital with his stomach all ripped apart. That Allison babe asking all those questions. You ain’t supposed to be here. I can smell it. The fuck ... I will wake up George.”
Alvin headed for the desk.
“Don’t,” said Applegate, stepping between Alvin and the telephone.
“Get the fuck outta my way,” said Alvin, giving him a shove. Applegate pushed him back. Alvin stumbled, rattling a couple of rifles as he reached for a grip to break his fall.
“Asshole,” said Alvin as he charged back.
Applegate’s fist connected on the fuzzy and freckled jaw. Falling to his knees, Alvin spit blood from his low-slung head.
Applegate grabbed Alvin off the floor and shoved him against the desk, body-checked him against the wall. He pounded his fists into Alvin’s stomach and around his head, frustration and anger pouring from his whole being and his knuckles growing raw. His arms grew weak but the rage kept coming. Alvin was reduced to a sputtering mass of self-protection.
Applegate stumbled from the barn, Alvin’s moans far behind. The cold didn’t register. The seats in his car were blocks of ice— no spring, no give, just cold. The engine turned over with a snarl.
****
The solid whack had been flesh on flesh, followed by coughing and gagging. Allison stepped back into the stall, the horse’s stiff belly wedging her against the wall. She hoped the animal didn’t spook. She stroked his flank with one hand and patted his cheek with the other.
One of the two had headed out. She recognized Bobby Alvin’s posture as much as the his voice, but the shadowy shape that drifted past, inches away, had been too tall to be Bobby.
The door slammed shut. Her adopted horse shook its head like a dog with fleas, stretched out its neck, shifted around as if to see, in the dark, what person was crowding his space without giving him the benefit of a brush. The car revved up and took off.