Endangered Species

by Barr, Nevada

  Near nine o’clock, with Tabby presumably safe in bed, it was dark enough for decency. She drove the three miles down through the Chimneys and out to the beach. Floating on the tide, she began at last to feel free of wildlife.

  Away from home, the daily routines of life, and the people she’d come to know over the years she’d been at Mesa Verde, time came unhinged. A peculiar sense of having always been gone, of all other lives being just a memory of a dream, closed over her. Over others as well, near as she could tell. This disconnection allowed for behaviors that wouldn’t be considered in the familiar matrix of real life. Without the checks and balances provided by friends, family, and the eyes of one’s neighbors, risks were taken and rules forgotten. Anna wondered what would happen to Flicka when Dot and Mona left the island, if Guy was having—or hoping for—an affair with Lynette, what Slattery Hammond had done to deserve a restraining order, why he kept used tampons in his freezer.

  Letting the waves nudge her toward shore, she touched bottom with her hands and felt her body bob sweetly on the sea. A stray statistic about a majority of shark attacks occurring in less than three feet of water rose in her mind. She banished it.

  Eye level with the night beach, she let the disparate images of the past several days flutter through her brain in no particular order: Guenther, Shawna, the shotgun wound, Hanson, the shovel, the sack, the digs, Lake Whitney, the camp, the ruler-straight snake trail, the basement of Stafford, the fawn, the fertilizer, the weed killer. The pieces came together; a pattern once seen suddenly became so obvious she cursed herself for a fool.

  She rolled over on her back. Sand being pulled from beneath her fanny and heels gave a disconcerting sense of movement. Full of stars, the surface of the sea glowed. On the horizon there was the hint of a moon yet to rise.

  If she was right—and she was certain she was—there wasn’t anyone she dared tell. With the exception of Alice Utterback, no one on the island was off the hook as a suspect. Should she do “the right thing” and confide her suspicions to the local sheriff, his first call would be to Chief Ranger Hull. Anna wasn’t convinced that would be such a good idea.

  Sliding from the Atlantic on elbows and knees, much as she imagined the first sea beast had made its way onto land, she enjoyed a last wave across her backside, then stood to let the kind night air dry her skin. Hair slimed down her back nearly to bra strap level—had she not metaphorically burned that offensive garment two decades back. Water, feeling clammy now that she’d become a creature of the land, trickled from the sodden tresses. Again she thought of scissors, the freedom of shorn locks.

  The moon pushed out of the ocean and laid a silver trail to shore. As the desert does, sea and sand collected each scrap of illumination, reflecting it back from shell, water, and salt till the air and land seemed alight from within. The magic of the night began working on Anna. Returning to the couch in the Belfores’ grief-soaked apartment, exposing her flesh to the artificially chilled air, struck her as repugnant. This was a night to wander alone like a wolf or an owl, seeing, not seen, becoming part of darkness and shifting light. A deeply buried maxim of training warned her to wake Dijon, Al, Rick, or Guy and bring them along on her quest. Two things argued against it. Firstly, the adventure should take less than an hour. She had no intention of endangering herself. The second and more compelling argument was that she had been so much in the society of human beings, eating, drinking, and sleeping with the sound of others’ breathing in her ears, that to give up her solitude was too great a sacrifice.

  Dressed in running shoes, the baggy Nomex trousers, and a T-shirt she’d bought to commemorate the Jackknife fire before it had become national news, Anna drove slowly north along the oceanfront. She kept the vehicle near the water’s edge where the sand was firm. Not only would any itinerant loggerheads be safe from her wheels, but her tire tracks would be erased by the incoming tide. The moonlight was such that she drove without headlights. In the directionless light the landscape was painted in a thousand shades of gray, silver, and gold.

  When she’d first come to Cumberland all the beach looked the same; fourteen miles of white sand with dunes west and water east. The sameness had struck her as tedious. After countless forays up and down this stretch of coast, she’d come to know its ways: where the alligators liked to come down to fish the tide pools, the paths that snaked out from the woods where cabins or camps once existed, dunes that hid lush interdune meadows where horses and deer grazed, a rise of earth held in place by oat grass where the loggerheads had laid their eggs and where every day Marty Schlessinger checked his precious treasure, each hoard marked on a map and jealously guarded from harm.

  South of the nesting ground a wrinkle of sand beckoned and Anna parked the pumper behind its sheltering crest, safe from view either by land or by sea. Keeping to the valleys between the dunes, she made her way toward the woods. In her pack she carried water and a flashlight. A compass was in her pocket. The need to stay close to the truck in case there was a fire call-out, coupled with heat, ticks, and general lethargy, had kept Anna from exploring this four-mile-square chunk of official wilderness in the heart of the park. From the maps, she knew it was free of private lands, roads, inholdings, campgrounds, trails, or any other form of “improvement” that might hamper its wilderness status. Having been religiously protected from the cleansing qualities of wildland fire, the area was dense with palmetto, oak, and pine. Robbed of sunlight by the forest canopy, it allowed little else to grow.

  According to the topographical map Wayne and Shorty had used to plot the location of the wrecked Beech, the plane had gone in a mile south and 1.7 miles east of the loggerhead nesting ground. An educated guess put Hanson and his grader slightly further north, almost on a straight east-west line with the nest sites, near where Shawna estimated they were when Guenther was shot.

  As soon as she reached the cover of the woods, Anna walked north along the tree line, keeping a practiced eye on the dunes. When she reached the place just inland from the turtles’ nests, she pulled out her compass. The forest closed overhead and she waited for her eyes to adjust. Live oak branches, grown wide in their search for light and air, created a living ceiling, but such was the spread of the branches that enough light trickled down so that, with care, Anna could make her way with only occasional assistance from her flashlight.

  Her estimate of an hour’s outing had been overly optimistic. Burdened as she was by the need to move silently and without light, circumnavigating thickets of palmetto and stands of pine, the mile she had to walk took on the dimensions of a serious cross-country hike. Still, if it hadn’t been for the mosquitoes, she would have enjoyed herself. The dark, the stealth, the knowledge that she was the hunter and not the hunted, gave her a sense of power and freedom. She thought of Hanson and his pig rifle, of hunters out for sheep and elk and deer, and wondered that they could find this same thrill with such helpless prey in their sights.

  Complying as rigidly to her westward heading as the vagaries of nature would allow, she eventually reached the clearing she knew had to be there. When strung together, hints as to its existence had formed a compelling picture. Hanson had evicted Dot and Mona from Stafford’s basement so he could store fertilizer, weed killer, and PVC pipe there. On the edge of Lake Whitney, the only reliable freshwater source on this end of the island, was a line straight as a die. Guenther had been shot but had neither seen nor heard his assailant. Days later Hanson was removing something from earth and trees in the same part of the forest.

  A marijuana field was the only explanation that fit all the facts. The PVC pipe laid into Lake Whitney provided the needed water, the hapless U.S. taxpayers the fertilizer, the farmer’s time, and undoubtedly much of the equipment used in the cultivation and the building of booby traps to scare off marauders—both accidental and those intent on stealing the illegal crop. It would have been one of these traps the Austrian had stumbled into: a shotgun shell rigged to a trigger device buried beneath the duff. With the plane crash
and the shotgun incident focusing attention on this part of the island, Hanson must have decided to remove his booby traps, begin to fold his tents preparatory to slipping quietly into the night. That was what he’d been in the process of doing when Dijon and Anna had come upon him.

  She secreted herself in shadow, a live oak between her and the moon, and studied the operation. “Clearing” was too grandiose a term. What lay before her was more accurately an opening in the woods. Trees were scattered throughout—enough for camouflage, but widely spaced so sunlight could make it down through the canopy to the plants. For the space of an irregular acre, planted in a hodgepodge so as not to call attention to themselves from the air as a man-made cultivation, were cannabis plants. It looked as if Hanson had begun prudently. There were only ten or twelve mature plants and they’d been placed in careful disarray, most snuggled up to a palmetto or tucked in a grove of immature pines to disguise their nature from casual eyes and their bolder green foliage from calling attention to itself from the air. Hanson hadn’t built any telltale structures. He either carried the tools he needed in with him each time or had them cleverly cached—probably in a shallow underground bunker.

  A plot this size—of sinsemilla, a prime strain—carefully husbanded and harvested, would augment one’s salary considerably. At a guess, Anna put the profit at about thirty thousand dollars annually. If he kept it on a small scale, Hanson probably could have gotten away with it for the seven years until he could once again retire and pick up pension number two.

  Fortunately for law enforcement officers, enough is seldom enough. Apparently Hanson was running true to form and getting greedy. Dozens of immature plants had been planted in the open areas between the mature cannabis, quadrupling the size of the original plot, calling for more pipe for water, more fertilizer, making booby traps a necessity, and soon becoming obvious to low-flying aircraft. When this many plants matured, all but the most brain-dead pilot would question the dark green cancer spreading beneath the dusty gray of oak leaves.

  Until Slattery Hammond started flying drug interdiction, Mitch’s little operation would have been fairly secure. Had Hammond seen the plot? Told Todd as the island’s law enforcement ranger? Was their last flight the one in which he would show Todd the plants? That seemed likely enough. As Alice Utterback said in the beginning, the job of drug interdiction brought with it its own cadre of enemies.

  Considering Slattery’s less than spotless reputation, it wasn’t too great a leap of logic to picture him demanding a slice of the profits in return for his silence. Hanson, just absorbing the cost of expanding his business, chose to add murder to his credit list rather than blackmail to the debit column. Or Hammond saw nothing, knew nothing, and Belfore was the victim, the blackmailer, or both.

  As Anna’s mind opened to the possibilities, the details of the clearing began to manifest themselves. In the open area, a grassy place around a single lightning-blasted oak, was a derelict hog pen, its weathered boards falling together to form a ramshackle lean-to. On either side of this structure, maybe twelve feet away, was a pile. At first glance Anna took them for branches and other forest litter that had been cleared away to make room for the new marijuana seedlings.

  The careful way they’d been stacked, in neat bonfire cones, intrigued her. Ten minutes motionless in shadow, eyes and ears open, convinced her she was alone. Rising to the obnoxious cracking of knees and ankles, she ventured out into the dappling of moonlight. The cones were of marijuana plants, young plants, rudely pulled up by the roots and tossed on what looked for all the world to be burn piles. A drug war? Villain number two destroying villain number one’s cash crop for spite or business? On a plot as small and inaccessible as this one, that struck Anna as highly unlikely, but stranger things had happened in the history of the war on drugs. A war the average American was losing and the politicians and drug dealers were winning. Fear buys votes, and drugs are a politically correct evil to rail against.

  Voices, low and murmuring but unmistakably human, rooted Anna to the spot. On the tail end of the sound came a slash of light, two flashlights probing her darkness like Darth Vader’s sword.

  Instinctively, she dropped to the ground. Footfalls and light approached rapidly. Whoever it was moved without any attempt at concealment, probably unaware they were not alone. Anna was determined to keep it that way.

  Directly in front of her, offering its questionable refuge, was the derelict hog pen. Choosing not to think about what other life-forms might have taken up residence within, Anna crawled beneath the rotting boards. Inside, there was just room to sit up, her head brushing the lumber. The sticky touch of spiders’ webs trailed across her left cheek and she steeled herself for visitations from many species. Trapped in the close dark of a sty, the Golden Orb, for all her impressive proportions, was preferable to brown recluses or black widows.

  Contemplation of arachnids was pushed aside by the arrival of potentially more injurious beasts. Anna arranged her legs in a half-lotus beneath her and folded her hands loosely in her lap, mimicking the attitude of meditating swamis. It was a position she could maintain for several hours if need be. In front of her was a triangle where the boards of her makeshift hiding place opened out onto the clearing. Though she felt exposed, she knew she sat far enough back in the shadow that, short of a direct beam of light shined in at ground level, she would remain invisible.

  With a discipline born of long practice, she evened out her breathing and emptied her mind. In the forced calm the voices became recognizable. Hanson—as she had surmised—and one other, a woman. If she’d ever heard her voice before, she couldn’t place it, and she settled down to listen.

  “What a shame,” the woman said.

  “It was a crazy-ass thing to do anyway.” Hanson. “Cost is no object when it’s not you paying.”

  “Still and all—”

  “Hand me that.”

  These fragments were accompanied by the crisscrossing beams of light and the noises of rummaging: something metal, a chunk of wood or hard plastic, shoes stomping through dead leaves. The pocket of noise moved from the edge of the clearing toward Anna’s shelter. Bars of light fell through the rude wood as the beams scratched over the tumbled-down hog pen. Anna cringed as if the light burned, but the touch was fleeting. Discovering her hiding place was not the goal of this nocturnal excursion.

  “Think anybody’ll see it?” asked the woman.

  “Not at night. By daylight nobody’ll even know it happened.”

  An odor, peculiar in the wilderness, assaulted Anna’s nostrils. Lighter fluid. A gasp escaped her lungs and her heart began to pound. Forcing again an internal stillness, she felt the panic recede to a prickle on her scalp and a queasiness in her stomach. With a few deep breaths these symptoms, too, were banished.

  The voices were ten feet away. The lighter fluid was not meant for her.

  She heard the avaricious crackle of flame before she saw it. When orange splintered through the boards of the sty, Anna put her eye to the crack. Hanson, squatting, his back to her, had fired the pile of marijuana plants. The glow lit the face of the woman next to him. His wife, Louise; this was a family business. Anna remembered Alice Utterback’s cynical plan of a crime ring of middle-aged ladies. Utterback had been dead on. No one, Anna included, would have suspected Mrs. Hanson of any crime more sinister than munching a few grapes before the bunch was weighed at the local Sack & Save. Even on a moonlit night, in the woods, burning an illegal drug crop, Mitch’s wife looked innocent. She was in her fifties, slightly overweight, with chin-length brown hair tied back with a scarf. Big-rimmed plastic eyeglasses dominated her face, and her hands were protected by gardening gloves, the kind with elasticized cuffs and sprigs of little green-and-pink flowers.

  Smoke from the burning pile drifted in Anna’s direction. The light piercing her shelter became tangible as orange fog poured in. She pulled the neck of her T-shirt up over her mouth and nose. The gesture was largely futile; cotton knit had no proven capabil
ity for filtering out noxious gases, but old habits die hard. The smell of the smoke triggered a time warp in her brain. Other than the occasional whiff from around a campfire or the cab of a vehicle she’d pulled over, Anna had not breathed marijuana smoke in quantity since college. The odor was unmistakable and, for a goodly number of those in her generation, nostalgic. It swept her back to the days when the world’s great evils were either unknown or considered combatable; a time when she was an immortal, invincible and all-powerful in the sublime ignorance of youth.

  From habit long dead and, she’d thought, forgotten, she inhaled the smoke and held it trapped in her lungs. In less time than it took to think it through, Anna realized what she was doing and breathed out. Jesus Christ, am I out of my fucking mind? She rubbed her face to clear it of real and imagined cobwebs.

  “It’ll go,” Hanson said. “We don’t want a big fire anyway. Though I suppose if it got away it’d cover a lot of sins.”

  “Now, Mitch,” the Mrs. said reprovingly, and Anna had an almost unbearable urge to laugh at the absurd domesticity of the scene.

  “You know I wouldn’t,” Mitch defended himself. Anna bet he would the moment the apron strings were untied.

  The two of them crunched together through the leaves, their feet and legs visible from the door of Anna’s sty. Resisting the temptation to hold her breath—and so more smoke in her lungs—she focused on becoming at one with the spiders and the pig shit.

  A couple of yards to her left, the Hansons stopped and repeated the ignition process on the second burn pile. Smoke from both sides now; Anna fought to keep from coughing and giving away her location. The next time she had to pee in a bottle for the federal government’s drug-screening lab, she was going to have a lot of explaining to do. The image struck her as unsupportably funny and she felt the giggles mixing with the coughs till it seemed she must explode. At that thought anxiety, bordering on mindless panic, swept through her so suddenly her bowels grew watery.