"Yeah? So?"
"Momma moose attacked me last Fall, protectin her calf. Now I don't blame her for that. I don't hold a grudge. She was protecting what she loved. You see how that's different?"
"Whatever."
"Yeah yeah, whatever. Dismiss anything you don't wanna understand. Doesn't make a difference to me. But just so you know, any sane woman would have beat the everlovin crap outta you for threatenin to take away her son the way you did." A sharp nudge between her shoulder blades made Rainey stagger forward. As she started walking, the crazy bitch kept pace behind her. "D'you see that outhouse?"
She saw it near the edge of the woods. It looked like shit, which she supposed was appropriate for a toilet. Somebody didn't waste much time building it.
"That's where we're going," Bo said.
"In there? I not gonna sit my nekkid ass on a spider's web."
"You never piss in the woods?"
"Course I have."
"Then you know how to hover."
Rainey kept on toward it, her urge to pee stronger now that it was so close to being relieved. Her back teeth literally hurt. Clenching her thighs together as she walked, she willed herself not to piss her pants. She couldn't afford to give the bitch the satisfaction of seeing her any more humiliated than she already had.
She went around the front, the screen door facing the woods, and tore it open. As she stood looking in at the cobwebbed interior, the scrap of toilet paper on an ancient roll hung from a bent wire hanger, she suddenly realized her predicament.
"I can't take off my pants," she said, as shamelessly as she could manage.
"Turn around," the bitch said with an exasperated sigh.
Rainey turned. "Hey, if you'd untied my hands you wouldn't have to baby me."
Bo's eyes remained on hers as she bent to unsnap the difficult button on her jeans and unzip her fly.
"You ever taken off a chick's pants before? In college? Did you even go to college?"
"Would you rather piss in your pants?"
The smile dropped off Rainey's face.
Bo jerked the skintight jeans off her bony hips, and slipped them down past her knees. "Jeez, girl, how do these things not fall apart with so many holes?"
"Way to sound like an annoying suburban mom."
They stood looking at each other for an awkward moment. "Can you shake those off, or do you need me to pull em down for you too?"
"Pull them down." The bitch wanted to humble her, she knew it. Nudity wouldn't shame her, but begging would. "Please," Rainey said, grinding her teeth.
Bo nodded. Then she bent, maintaining eye contact. Rainey hated the unconscious twinge of arousal she felt as the bitch slipped the silky thong off her hips.
She blamed him for that. For making everything vaguely sexual. Couldn't even get a pap done without getting wet. As sexually free as she claimed to be, much of that was an act of defiance against her traitorous cunt.
With her panties below her knees, she scurried to the toilet, raised the seat with a foot, and flopped down, all worries of spiders forgotten for the moment. She sighed with pleasure as the hot stream of urine struck wood. A rancid smell rose from below, but it did nothing to sour the experience. Had pissing ever felt so good? Not fucking likely.
Bo had turned her back to the door. Rainey so wanted to take the glass out of her pocket and stab the bitch in the back of the head. Cut the rope and steal the truck. Again the image was so strong she had to fight it. Not with her hands behind her back. Not with her pants around her ankles, her legs as good as tied. She was at the woman's mercy.
For now, she thought.
Bo turned as the flow of urine slowed to a trickle, eyes on the wall behind Rainey. "You need to wipe?"
"Nah, I'll just let her air dry."
"Good. Stand up and take a look in the hole for me, would you?"
Rainey frowned. "Gross. I'm not gonna look at your shit."
"Nobody's taken a dump in that outhouse for three years. You asked me about Caleb's daddy? This was his outhouse. Built it himself. Note the craftsmanship," she said, sarcasm evident in her tone. "The attention to detail. That was Roy, through and through. He wasn't what you might call a vanguard. Or a renaissance man. He was a lazy prick. Always wanted to do things the easy way. When things got tough, Roy got going."
"Can I pull my pants up?"
"Look in the hole."
Rainey shook her head angrily, and squinted down into the darkness. Saw her piss splashed against the inside of the seat, and a pool of it glistening in the black filth below.
"Do ya see it?"
Small spots of white stood out among the black. At first she mistook them for mushrooms, growing down there in the dark. But the bitch wouldn't have brought her out here to show her mushrooms, not unless she was making a metaphor about how good things that can grow out of shit, her being the shit or the mushroom, she didn’t know.
Then she made out two long slashes of white, speckled with soil, side by side. And another one, pointing up from the muck, looked just like—
"Jesus, lady, what the fuck…?"
A ribcage. A finger. Bones.
She staggered back. Bo caught her. Spun her violently around.
"That's Roy," Bo said, grinning into her face. "Or what's left of him. Actually, his real name was Alfred Tunney. Three years ago, he threatened to run off with Caleb. Swore we was close to being caught. So… I hit him with the axe. Threw it at him, actually. Hit him right in the throat. Big mess. Huge. Thank God Caleb was at Sunday school. Gave me time to clean up, and bury him in his favorite place." She nodded toward the hole. "Up to his eyeballs in shit."
"You're crazy…" Rainey breathed.
The bitch grabbed her by the shoulders. Rainey tried to shake off her hands, but her fingers dug into the flesh, wedging themselves in the painful divots of her clavicles, almost dropping her to her knees.
"We set down roots, goddammit! This is our home! You don't just up and leave because things might get tough." She calmed, letting out a breath through her teeth. Her fingers withdrew to her sides. "Buuut that was Roy for you. Or Alfred. When things got tough, Al got going. That's why we left Louisiana. Moving to Alaska, changing our names? That was Al's idea."
"You won't get away with this."
"I have gotten away with it." Her smile was robotic, devoid of emotion. "Three years, and nobody's come calling, wondering where Roy Lowery got to. Sheriff Boise, the law around here, he's certain Roy will come crawlin back, tail between his legs, all apologies. Then you show up, and fuck up the life I made. Threatenin to take away my boy. Makin him a murderer."
"You did that, you bitch—!"
Bo's fist connected with her stomach before she could react. The breath rushed out of her lungs as she fell to her knees, her ass bare to the world.
"I'm just trying to impress upon you the lengths to which I'll go to protect my boy," the bitch said, pacing in front of her like a caged animal. "If you don't play along… them bones down there are gonna have some company."
Rainey's lungs burned as she coughed, clutching her stomach, struggling to get a breath. She looked up at the crazy woman—the murdering bitch—and saw wildfire burning in her eyes.
How long can I fight her off? Someone's gotta be looking for me by now, right?
DETECTIVE OKALIK SAT in her sedan at the scene of the accident, looking at an image on the screen of the swivel-mount laptop in the passenger seat. A tow truck winched the Escalade out of the ditch to her immediate left. Up the road in either direction, several troops—everyone in the area at the moment, even a couple of Wildlife troopers—swept the ditches and the road, looking for any sign of Layne having staggered off from the crash.
So far, nothing. Not a drop of blood. Not a shred of clothing. No footprints. No sign.
Funny thing about the crash: one of Boise's deputies found bits of bark in the crushed metal above the front bumper. The closest tree was forty, fifty feet down the road in the direction the Escalade would h
ave been traveling from. In the other direction, if the car had spun out before crashing, though there were no indications on the road of skidding, it was closer to a hundred. Neither tree, from the look, had been damaged. The bark, according to Deputy Hewson—a man who had a heavy-lidded, dopey look but appeared to be at least somewhat intelligent, a Godsend in Fort Garry, as far as Okalik was concerned–was likely some kind of oak, although he'd said oaks were rare in this area. Hewson said the majority of trees along the side of the road were black spruce and white pine, and Okalik agreed it appeared to be so.
So the question remained: where did the bark come from?
Okalik wanted to pass it off as a prior accident. The right rear was dented above the bumper, suggesting the driver—or at least this driver—might be accident-prone. But something about it nagged at her. An itch at the base of her skull, refusing to be scratched.
You just want it to be something more than it is. You want it so bad you're looking for signs where there's no sign to find.
Maybe.
Then there was this video. Layne had uploaded it to her social media accounts the previous morning. She'd deleted the original video soon after, but had been reblogged and shared so many times a copy was easy to find.
In the video window on her laptop was a freeze frame of a very angry woman who'd been accosted by Layne and her supporters, fellow wolf cull protestors. Layne had riled them up to shake and batter the truck. The woman's young son, eight or nine by the look, sat in the passenger seat, frightened out of his wits. Understandably, the woman was mad. She'd floored the accelerator, nearly hit some people, and Layne had to jump out of the way.
I probably would've done the same thing, if that was my kid.
And Layne had had the gall to post the video as if she'd been assaulted by a crazy lady, not the other way around. Her several million followers had shared, liked, and commented. Lots of nasty snipes about the woman's looks, her hair and clothes for the most part. Some had even called her son names.
Poor kid. Poor woman. She probably didn't know what hit her when she got caught up in Rainey Layne's storm of shit.
Okalik's cell rang. She picked it up. "Okalik." Her friend in digital forensics spoke on the other end. She'd laugh at me thinking about it in such old fashioned terms as "ends of the line," Okalik thought when she should have been listening. She'd caught the gist of it, anyhow. "Oh really? That's great. Sure, send it right over. Thanks, Jaycee."
She looked out over the road. Officers shuffled along like zombies in the heat haze. A moment later the computer twiddled an email alert. She switched to it. Jaycee had sent the data for the last 24 hours of Layne's cell phone.
Okalik scanned it. Looked like Layne kept her GPS on all the time. She'd stayed in one place three or four times during the period Jaycee had sent. The longest was from 18:12 to 20:35, when she'd been at the hotel drinking and popping pills. After that she was in transit, logged again at 20:51, heading south at a good clip. She'd stopped again just after 21:00, about thirty miles north of where she'd started, at the Snowcrest Lodge.
Should be here. That's no surprise.
But the phone had moved southeast a few miles after that—heading back toward town, she thought, as opposed to the direction she'd assumed Layne had traveled.
For a laugh, she turned on her own GPS, let it find the satellite.
The latitude and longitude came back. They did not correlate to the accident site.
She looked closer at the report, scanning the shorter periods. Three times during the day she'd been in the exact same spot, or thereabouts. Just north and slightly west of here. There for about twenty minutes the first time, early in the afternoon. Again, during the time Okalik had assumed was the accident. Then again overnight. The GPS picked her up in slightly more southern location early this morning.
Then the trail ended. Either she'd shut it off, or someone had shut it off for her.
The tow truck rumbled off toward town, Layne's Escalade rolling behind it. The driver had been given special instruction to drive it out to the impound lot behind the Sheriff's office and make sure it was covered and was not to be touched.
Okalik got out of the car. She marched up to the Sheriff's cruiser, and rapped on the window. His feet were up on the passenger seat, a newspaper spread out between himself and the steering wheel. He shuffled the pages, lowering his feet to the floor, and reached over to zip up the window.
"Howdy, Detective. Anything new?"
"I'm going to head up the road a bit," she said.
He narrowed his eyes, whether in suspicion or because of the sun, Okalik didn't know. Nor did she care. "Something I can assist you with?"
"Nope, just following a hunch. I'll call if I find anything."
Boise grinned, almost darkly. "You be sure and do that," he said.
"Any word on that helicopter?"
"Should be here any minute now," he said with a tight smile. He zipped up the window, returned his feet to the passenger seat, and flamboyantly flapped open the paper.
Lazy son of a bitch, she thought, heading back to her car. She started the engine and turned it around, driving by two officers who both tipped her a nod and a wave as she passed.
She punched the co-ords into her GPS. The road she was on—Boise had called it Taco Box, but that couldn't be it—wasn't even marked on the map. The destination was in the middle of nowhere.
She follow the road until it looked like she'd have to start going west or risk driving too far south of the marker. The sky ahead was black from smoke. A moment later she passed a darkened entrance into the woods. She slowed the car, and backed up to it. Two wheel ruts extended into the trees under a canopy of mainly spruce and pine. A little ways in stood a wooden, paint-flecked sign: PRIVATE PROPERTY. Behind it stood another sign, impossible to read from the road.
Okalik left the engine idling and stepped out. She headed down the drive, grass in between the ruts up to her shins in places, some kind of tree nuts crunching underfoot. Under the canopy, the air was cool. Mosquitos whined. She slapped one on the back of her neck, her own blood streaked on her palm.
The sign, a piece of bald gray wood, said LOWERY.
Beyond it, the ruts continued off into the woods a ways before they disappeared behind a thick copse of trees.
She returned to the car, waked the GPS, and studied the screen. Not too far from the destination, just a little ways north and west. Could it be?
Okalik dialed Sheriff Boise. The man picked up on the third ring—two rings too many during a missing persons investigation, as far as she was concerned. "Yup?" he said.
"It's Detective Okalik."
"Figured I wouldn't hear from you for a while yet," Boise said. "What can I do ya for?"
Patience, she reminded herself. "Well, Ed, I got the GPS track points on Layne's cell phone sent over, and I've been checking into some points of interest."
"That right? Didn't think to keep me in the loop?"
"I didn't want to waste your time on a wild goose chase," she said. She expected a smart reply. When none came, she continued. "Anyway, it's probably nothing, but it looks like Layne was at a place very near where I'm standing twice during the day and evening. Do you happen to know a Lowery?"
"Bo Lowery?" He sounded surprised. "I know her, yep."
"Bo. That's a woman?"
"And her boy. You're at her house now, huh?"
"Well no, I'm standing in the road where he drive heads into the woods. That's a private residence, is it?"
"She's about as private as they come. But I don't know why Miss Layne would have gone out there, unless…"
As she headed back to the two-rut drive, Boise didn’t speak for long enough she thought the call might have dropped. "Unless?"
"Well, I'm sure it's nothing, but… well, the two of them had a bit of a run-in the other day, during the protest. Witnesses claim she—Bo, that is—just about run Miss Layne off the road."
The angry woman. "That was Lowery?"
"So they say. Look, she's a good woman, I got no reason to believe—"
"She had an altercation with Miss Layne, who was in this area twice yesterday, and you don't think we should at least talk to her?"
"Talk to her, by all means. But you're wasting your time."
"When do you expect to see some backup, Ed?" she asked again, exasperated. What about that helicopter?"
"Oh, should be any minute now."
Okalik fought the urge to shout at him. Instead, she hung up.
She took a long hard look down through the gap in the trees on the Lowery property, trying to imagine what sort of trouble the woman might have gotten herself into. Something crunched underfoot. The cracked acorn on the ground caused her to frown. They were scattered all over the road, and some in the ditch.
Didn't the Deputy say oaks were rare out here?
"What are the odds?" she wondered aloud.
10 – Blood
RAINEY STRUGGLED AGAINST the ropes as the bitch stomped to the back of the house and knocked on Caleb's door. She heard his muffled reply, and the sound of his door opening. Behind the chair, she felt the ropes loosen. Still too tight to reach the glass in her pocket, let alone escape.
"No, Momma, don't! Leave him!"
Rainey wrenched her head back, trying to look over her shoulder as her dog began to bark excitedly. "Hottie? Leave my dog alone, you bitch!"
She heard Bo draw the lock on the boy's door.
"You wanted your dog, you can have him," Bo said, returning to where Rainey sat, tied to the chair. She came into Rainey's line of sight, holding Hottie by the scruff like luggage. He looked stunned, his little black eyes wet and wide, his teeth bared, all four legs dangling.
"Give him to me, please…"
The knife scraped against the counter as Bo picked it up, and brought the blade edge it to the dog's throat.
"Oh my God, please don't hurt him—"
"You want me to let him go? You talk to the police, tell em exactly what I told you." She put the knife down, and snatched up the receiver from the phone on the wall. Held it out to Rainey with the cord dangling.
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