by B. E. Scully
Shirdon made a signal to Martinez. “Can you talk freely?”
“No.”
“Is he armed? Is the person in the back seat armed?”
“No. Actually, yes, but…it’s not a problem. I don’t think it’s going to be a problem.”
“Are you in trouble?”
A pause. “No.”
Shirdon heard whoever was in the back seat say something to Mickelson, but she couldn’t make out the words. But she did know she wouldn’t get many more questions. “Do you want us to come with back-up?”
“No. Absolutely not.”
“Should we alert someone where we’re going?”
Another pause. “Not right away.”
“How about if I assign an officer to track your phone and the sedan’s G.P.S.?”
“Right. That would be fine. But absolutely no more than that. Absolutely not.”
“Got it. We’ll be there in ten minutes depending on traffic.”
“Okay,” Mickelson said. “And Shirdon? Traffic or otherwise, don’t waste any time.”
And then the phone went dead.
4
“I don’t know, Cass. This feels all kinds of wrong to me.”
Martinez peered through a set of binoculars at the figure in the ragged coat sitting directly behind Lieutenant Mickelson. The black sedan was in the corner of the parking lot like Mickelson had said it would be, almost hidden by a row of recycling bins and a huge dumpster. Martinez and Shirdon had parked two rows away in order to try and make some sense of the situation. But as soon as they’d recognized the man in the back seat as none other than Sean “Hound” Packard, they’d given up on the making sense part.
“That’s because it is wrong,” Shirdon said. “This whole thing is wrong. But I think the Hound is the only hope we have of making it right. Or at least as right as it’s going to get at this point.”
“Obviously Mickelson doesn’t want anyone else involved,” Martinez said, shaking his head. “Seems to be his standard operating procedure these days.”
Before they’d left the station, Shirdon had assigned an officer to monitor Mickelson’s G.P.S. That’s when she found out that the Hound had strolled right into the station in the early a.m. hours of that same morning and handed a note to the intake officer. Mickelson still had standing orders to notify him immediately if the Hound ever turned up again, and the intake officer had tried his best to keep the Hound at the station until Mickelson arrived. But the Hound hadn’t wanted to stay this time. He’d handed the sealed envelope over with the instructions to give it “only to the man in the picture there, and no one, I repeat no one else.”
The top-secret message had contained instructions on where and when Mickelson could find the Hound, and that’s how he’d ended up in a supermarket parking lot with a gun pointed at the back of his head.
“Mickelson must really think there’s something to hide here if he let himself end up on the wrong end of a loaded weapon,” Martinez said. “And in his own car, no less.”
“Mickelson purposefully didn’t tell anyone where he was going or why,” Shirdon said. “Which means he doesn’t think the Hound is dangerous. He probably doesn’t think the Hound will ever use that weapon he’s holding, if he even knows how. I don’t either, actually. He has no history of violent behavior.”
“Neither do half the clowns we end up arresting. They have to start somewhere. Me, I wouldn’t take chances with a loaded weapon if the combined twin spirits of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Junior came back and pointed it at me.”
Even though Shirdon knew Mickelson wanted to keep this one off the books, she’d also instructed the officer who was monitoring his G.P.S. to send back-up if he hadn’t heard from any of them in two hours. Shirdon figured that whatever Mickelson wanted from the Hound—or whatever the Hound wanted from Mickelson—two hours should be enough to get it.
But the reality of getting into a car with a mentally disturbed man with a loaded weapon and not much to lose suddenly seemed as insane as anything the Hound could come up with. And yet both detectives knew that if they were ever going to find out the truth about Morris Falten’s disappearance, the time was now.
Martinez sighed and opened his car door. “Now or never, right?”
At the parking lot, they’d tried calling Mickelson to find out exactly how to approach the car, but he wasn’t answering his phone. They figured the Hound had taken it away after he’d made his call to Shirdon, and they fully expected the Hound to demand both their phones and their weapons before they got in the car. But the Hound was no hardened criminal who knew all the tricks. Martinez and Shirdon had both concealed extra weapons before even leaving the station, and Shirdon had tucked away a spare phone, as well.
Sure enough, as soon as Shirdon cracked open the passenger door opposite where the Hound was sitting, he whipped his weapon around like a character in a bad T.V. cop show. His hand was shaking so badly Cassie feared the gun would go off accidentally whether the Hound wanted it to or not. In his weapon-free hand, the Hound held out a blue plastic bag with a yellow smiling face on the side.
“Put your phones and your guns in the bag! Do it now or I’ll come out blazing!”
“No need for the weapon, Hound,” Martinez said, moving with slow, exaggerated movements. “We don’t want to hurt you. In fact, we’ve been looking all over for you. We’re glad we finally caught up with you.”
“We’re glad we can finally talk,” Shirdon said, slowly placing her phone and unloaded weapon in the bag.
“No more talk!” the Hound shouted, pointing his gun at Martinez. “You, go and put this bag in the dumpster! And no funny business, either, or I’ll come out blazing!”
But Martinez was already shaking his head. “Not a good idea, Hound. Anyone could find the weapons and hurt someone or themselves. How about if a little kid found one of those weapons, what then?”
The Hound frowned, thinking this over. Mickelson, who had been monitoring everything in the rearview mirror, had his own suggestion. “Why don’t you have Detective Martinez lock the bag in the trunk? That way, no one can get at it, and the weapons will stay safe.”
The Hound nodded, warming to the idea. “Okay, you put the bag in the trunk, and you,” he said, waving the gun at Shirdon, “you sit in the back, next to me. After your friend puts the bag in the trunk, he sits in the front next to Twin Skeleton. But no funny business.”
Shirdon was glad he’d at least stopped threatening to “come out blazing,” and when Martinez climbed into the passenger seat, she noticed that the Hound’s entire body seemed to relax like a tightly wound coil suddenly let loose. He slumped into the back seat and pressed his hand against his eye patch, though the other hand maintained a firm grip on the gun.
Shirdon noticed that the pistol was covered in dirt and rust. No wonder Mickelson had said he wasn’t in trouble—it didn’t look as if the Hound’s pistol had been fired in years. It might not even function at this point, though she was with Martinez on that one—she wasn’t taking any chances with an even possibly loaded gun, and the concealed holster itching the hell out of her ankle was proof of that.
“So what’s the story here?” Martinez asked.
“The Hound asked to meet me here,” Mickelson said. “Only then he pulled a gun on me and informed me we were going for a drive.”
“I told you, I have very, very important business to finish,” the Hound yelled from the back seat. “Business that you especially will be very interested in!”
“And I believe you, Hound, but as I told you, there’s no way I’m driving off into the middle of nowhere with just me and a man pointing a gun at my head.”
“Which is why your friends are here,” the Hound said. “Three of you, one of me. So pull out of the parking lot and turn right.”
Mickelson eased the sedan into traffic.
“Turn right again,” the Hound said at the first stoplight. He kept directing Mickelson until the city fell away to farms and op
en fields, and then gave way entirely to the mountains.
The scenery was familiar. A year and half ago, Shirdon and Martinez had worked a strange case involving a young married couple who had moved into an equally strange house. The place was known locally as “Blood House” because of the red-rust hue produced by decades of neglect grafted onto the macabre paint job. The house had outlasted the marriage, and Cassie remembered the wife stopping by the station before she left town for less bizarre parts.
As the sedan sped past the crumbling red house just visible through the overgrown blackberry bushes, Cassie wondered what had happened to the husband before Blood House flashed out of view.
They kept going, climbing higher and deeper into the mountains until the last house disappeared. As they approached one of the many rest areas where hikers and tourists could stretch their legs and relieve their bladders, the Hound said, “Pull over here.” If it had been June, the place would have been crowded with cars and campers, but in Oregon’s cold, wet January, even the squirrels were in hiding.
“Now we get out,” the Hound said. “You first, in the driver’s seat, then you other two. Me last.”
“Okay, now what?” Martinez asked when all four of them were standing staring at each other in the late afternoon gloom.
The Hound waved the gun toward a narrow footpath snaking away from the rest area. “Now we walk,” he said, redirecting the gun toward Mickelson. “You first, then you other two. Me last. Just keep walking until I tell you to stop.”
The path stayed flat for about a quarter of a mile and then began a steep upward climb. Shirdon could hear Martinez wheezing and panting behind her. Ever since he’d quit smoking, Martinez had won the war against his deadly habit at the expense of his battle to control his weight, which on his big, meaty frame had been a challenge even with the help of cigarettes. Shirdon sent up a silent prayer that her partner wouldn’t pass out or, god forbid, have a heart attack.
As if reading her mind like he often did, Martinez grumbled, “How the hell much farther is this?”
Instead of answering, the Hound kept climbing higher.
They trudged on in silence until Mickelson finally said, “I know this trail. Morris Falten and I used to ride here sometimes.”
Shirdon checked her phone, but this deep in the mountains, the signal was gone. They’d left the supermarket parking lot over an hour ago and had been hiking at least as long. The cop monitoring the sedan’s G.P.S. would send someone out, and it wouldn’t be hard to track them up the trail from the rest stop. Shirdon just hoped they’d found what they were looking for before then.
Finally, at the crest of a mountain ridge that took a sharp left toward another, even higher mountain ridge, the Hound shouted for them to stop.
“Here!” he said.
The three cops stood looking at him, waiting. The Hound dropped to his knees on the mud-puddle riddled path and said it again: “Here.”
“Here what?” Martinez asked.
“Here’s where it happened. Here’s where Manlike Woman came to get Bone Man.” Hound suddenly jumped to his feet and pointed the pistol at Martinez. “She was only doing it to protect me, you understand! Manlike Woman is a good person, not a scoundrel or a liar like Edouard Chambreau!”
Mickelson stepped toward the Hound. “There’s no one around for miles, so you don’t really need that weapon anymore, Hound. It’s just us out here, and we’re not going to hurt you.”
The Hound hesitated, gazing at the pistol in his hand as if seeing it for the first time. “I won’t point it at anybody any more. But I’m going to hang onto it just the same.”
He tucked the pistol into his coat pocket and went back to contemplating the ground.
“What did Manlike Woman do to Bone Man, Hound?” Shirdon asked.
The Hound went over to the side of the trail and pointed toward a fern and moss covered gulley at the bottom of a steep drop-off. “I was down there. The snow had left by then, but the rain was still here. Wet and cold. I was hiding in the woods like Manlike Woman said. But I was miles from here, at the old logging trail. Manlike Woman led me here, and even though I was about out of food, I came. She showed me a spot, right beneath this cliff. It’s perfect—here, I’ll show you!”
In one quick flash the Hound scrambled off the trail and went skidding heel-first down the side of the embankment. He inched down on his back until he was at the bottom, then called up to the detectives, “Come on, I’ll show you! That’s why you came all the way out here, right?”
They stood looking at each other and then down the embankment at the Hound. Finally Shirdon said, “Oh, well, now or never,” and slid down after him.
“I’m wearing a brand new pair of pants and my favorite boots,” Martinez grumbled. “No one told me to dress for an outdoor adventure.”
“This is Oregon,” Mickelson said, “you always dress for an outdoor adventure.” And then he went over the side.
By the time Martinez’s hulking form came sliding down the embankment in a cloud of dirt and obscenities, the Hound had disappeared beneath a natural cave formation where the cliff wall hollowed out above a forest floor thick with ferns and pine needles.
“I tore my new pants,” Martinez grumbled.
“I tore my leg,” Shirdon countered, dabbing at a runner of blood on her left calf. “And got the world’s sharpest rock jammed up the back of my shirt.”
Only Mickelson seemed unfazed. He went over to the shallow cave and peered inside.
The Hound was crouched among the black basalt walls, which were dripping with winter condensation.
“Manlike Woman showed me this place. A sacred place, millions of years old.” He picked up one of the lunar volcanic rocks covering the cave bottom. “Born of fire.”
“Is this where you were staying when you saw the Bone Man?”
“Had to get out of town. I said to Manlike Woman, ‘I won’t see you again for a long time, will I?’ And she said, ‘No, but I’ll always be with you. But you have to hide, you have to stick to the mountains. They will always protect you.’ And she was right. That’s why she brought Bone Man here. Because this place is safe. It’s sacred.”
Hound sprang to his feet and shot out of the cave. “That’s where I saw them! She told me to wait here, that she would come back soon, and that Bone Man would be with her. She said it had to be that way—it had to be finished. And she was right! They did show up, just like she said!” He pointed up toward the trail where they’d just been. “Bone Man was up there, on a bicycle, and Manlike Woman was there, too.”
Martinez was leaning over with his hands on his knees, still trying to appease his punished lungs. “And then what happened, Hound?”
The Hound closed his remaining eye and pressed his hand against the missing one. “And then…and then Manlike Woman did what she had to do.”
“What did she have to do, Hound?”
The Hound opened his eye, but he wasn’t seeing any of the detectives. He was seeing a wet March afternoon eleven years ago. He stood up straight, held up his hands, and made a motion of pushing something—something big, like a man balanced on a bicycle—a man who might lose his balance and go straight over the side of a steep embankment. A man who might end up at the bottom injured or even dead already from the fall.
“To protect me,” the Hound whispered. “But not only me—everyone. All of us. And that’s why she had to disappear. That’s why she had to go into hiding just like me.” The Hound dropped his head and swiped at his eye. “But I miss her. I miss her more than anything.”
“And what happened to the Bone Man?” Martinez asked.
The Hound dropped to his knees in the gulley. “He was lying right here. Looked straight up at me! Looked up at me right here,” he said, stabbing the mossy ground. “Looked at me and said, ‘I swear on my son’s life that I will see them both dead.’ I knew he was talking about Manlike Woman, because she’d just pushed him off the mountain, but I wasn’t sure who else he wanted to
see dead until it hit me—it had to be Twin Skeleton. And it was.”
Shirdon glanced at Mickelson, but he hadn’t taken his eyes off the Hound.
“I couldn’t let him hurt Manlike Woman, don’t you see?” the Hound continued. “She pushed Bone Man off the mountain to protect me, and now I had to do the same for her!”
“And what did you do to protect her, Hound?” Shirdon asked.
When the Hound just shook his head, Mickelson tried another approach. “Why did Bone Man want you to kill me?”
The Hound looked at Mickelson for the first time since they’d left the car. “Bone Man didn’t say. He was hurt. He didn’t even tell me who to kill, but I knew who he meant just the same. Who else could he mean but his twin skeleton?”
Mickelson was still eying the Hound intently. “You knew I was his partner.”
“Twin skeletons never even knew I was there,” Hound said, laughing in pleasure at his stealth. “But I saw them just the same, walking around town just as if they were ordinary men.”
Shirdon took a step toward the Hound. “What happened to the Bone Man after Manlike Woman pushed him, Hound?”
“She told me I might have to help. Not like Ivy!” the Hound shouted, and Shirdon and Martinez exchanged a glance. The files they’d been pouring over just hours earlier had mentioned several times that J.J. Wroe had been covered in tattoos in a snaking ivy pattern that went from his ankles all the way up to his neck.
“The Bone Man tricked me about Ivy,” the Hound said. “I should have listened to Manlike Woman—I should always listen to Manlike Woman! I didn’t with the Bone Man, but I wasn’t going to make that mistake twice, no, sir. Manlike Woman was right about the Bone Man, and she was right about this place.”
The Hound sprang to his feet and ran back to the cave. He dropped to his knees again and began digging at a rectangular pile of rocks at the cave’s outer edge. “Soil is as soft as cotton here,” he said. “No weeds or roots or anything. Just millions of years of soft pine needles and rich, dark earth.”