by Joseph Flynn
“Yeah, right.”
“Really. Next one’s the big three-O.” She waggled her feet. “Like the shoes?”
“Too clean. They need to be stepped on some. But I don’t have the time right now.”
“That’s okay. I don’t have the energy. Spending all day hunting, and being very, very careful about it, is pretty damn tiring. I barely had the reserves to buy the shoes.”
Ron nodded toward her tip sheet. “It’s really a good idea to slug a mountain lion?”
Corrie Knox put her feet down on the floor. “Beats yelling, ‘Mercy me.’ Of course, like any other fight, it helps to get in the first punch. A good shot to the schnozz might actually discourage a cat if it’s not too hungry or otherwise has a burr up his ass. A good bash from a stick or a beaning from a rock is better, though. You get less torn up.”
She stood up and yawned and stretched.
“Needless to say, Tucker and I didn’t find the bastard yet. So, I thought you might want to distribute these safety tips. They’re pretty standard stuff, but the public is woefully ignorant.”
Ron considered the suggestion. “Yeah, it’s probably a good idea. I’ll get the mayor’s office busy on it in the morning.” In response to another jaw-cracking yawn from Corrie, Ron asked, “You want me to give you a ride back to your room? So you don’t fall asleep at the wheel.”
“Well, that’s another thing I wanted to mention.”
“What?”
“I let Tucker Marsden have my room, and I can’t stay there with him because … well, we were together once upon a time, and after we weren’t any longer, it took us a long while to put a working relationship back together. So I was wondering …”
“Yeah, it’s okay. You were right. Last time, I hardly knew you were there.”
Corrie Knox smiled sleepily and said, “Oh, I can make my presence known, if you want me to.”
Ron dodged the implicit offer with a counterproposal, to take Corrie to dinner. But she said she was too tired; she wouldn’t want her face to fall in the mashed potatoes. She suggested they go back to his cabin and just have some munchies on his front porch. The chief followed Warden Knox as she drove her GMC 4x4 back to his place. He stayed alert to her driving, ready to honk his horn if it looked like she’d fallen asleep at the wheel and was about to drift off the road. But they made it without mishap.
After they arrived, Corrie opted for a peanut butter and raspberry preserves sandwich on rye and a glass of skim milk. Ron went with a Foster’s lager, a dozen slices of sharp cheddar and a handful of hard pretzels from Hanover, PA.
Like Clay Steadman’s place, though on a far more modest scale, Ron’s cabin sat on a rise and overlooked the town and the lake. Behind the cabin loomed tree covered slopes that topped out at eight to ten thousand feet above sea level. Above the mountaintops, in a jet black sky, every star in the northern hemisphere tried to outshine all the others.
“Pretty nice place you got here,” Corrie said.
“Yeah,” Ron agreed. “It’s not bad for public housing.”
“You don’t own it?”
He shook his head. “Town does. I pay a nominal rent, which, if I stay on the job 10 years, can be converted to a down payment and applied to a purchase price that was set when I moved in.”
“Pretty sweet deal.” Corrie took a bite of her sandwich and washed it down with a slosh of milk. Ron sipped his beer, and for the next several minutes they ate quietly and listened to the sounds of the night.
“I talked to Mahalia Cardwell tonight,” Ron said finally. “She’s the grandmother of the man who was killed. I told her it would be helpful if she made a public statement saying the mountain lion attacks had nothing to do with her wanting to see her grandson’s killer caught.”
“Did she agree?”
Ron shook his head. “I don’t know if she’s just being perverse. Or if she thinks it will make somebody snitch. Or —”
“Wait a minute,” Corrie said. “Isn’t there already a $100,000 reward? If somebody had knowledge of the crime, wouldn’t that make him come forward?”
“That’s the carrot; Mrs. Cardwell seems to prefer the stick. She also seems to think that causing an uproar will motivate me in some way she’d like to see.” Ron turned to look at Corrie in time to see her licking peanut butter off a finger. “Do you think there’s any chance this cat might just move on?”
“I don’t know. Its behavior is already abnormal. It might move on, or it might stay right here and go back to eating its usual prey. I don’t see that second possibility happening, though.”
“Why not?” Ron asked.
Corrie explained her theory that the cat was getting old, losing its ability to run down and kill its usual prey. She went on, “Tucker and I were talking today, wondering if people would stand for anything less than nailing this animal’s hide up in your Muni Complex. Seems to me if this lion just moved on and we don’t kill him, people could never rest easy around here.”
Ron said, “That’s probably true. But I think if that were to happen, people would want Mahalia Cardwell’s hide, thinking she brought all this trouble on them in the first place. And because Mahalia Cardwell is black it could spill over into an ugly racial situation.”
“I didn’t know you had many minorities up here.”
“The year round population of the town’s about twelve thousand. Perhaps ten percent are minorities. Part time residents and visitors might add another five hundred minorities at any given time. Before last Friday, I wouldn’t have thought anybody had any reason to worry about skin color. But then Isaac Cardwell got nailed to a tree, and I got a chance to read some local hate mail. Now, I’m worried.”
Corrie had finished her sandwich and she got up. “Want another beer?” she asked.
Ron shook his head, just gave her his empty bottle. She went inside and came back a minute later with her feet bare. She pulled her chair closer to Ron’s and put her feet up on the porch rail.
“If I fall asleep, just throw a blanket over me, will you?” she asked.
“If that’s what you want.”
“Well, you could carry me inside. But I have to warn you, I go one fifty.”
“I think I can manage.”
She gave his upper arm a squeeze and waggled her eyebrows. Then she laughed her deep laugh again but this time it had a nervous edge, and Ron thought if the light were better he’d have seen her blush.
“Okay, back to business,” she said. “The best way to battle superstition is with, what else, education. It seems to me your town could use a brief history lesson and a short lecture on wildlife biology.”
“You going to provide them?” Ron wanted to know.
“I could write the scripts, but I think a local authority should present them.” She grinned at him mischievously. “How about you doing it?”
“How about the mayor? He’s got his own daily TV show.”
“Okay. He’d be good, too.”
“And what would he say?”
“Well, he could say how for most of our history the population in the West was relatively small, and what people we did have were allowed to slaughter the wildlife at will. But we all know how crowded California is now. And in 1990, the people of this state, in their wisdom, passed Prop 117. Which made mountain lions a protected species. You protect a species and — barring environmental degradation — it will flourish.
“So, here we are. More and more people are competing for land with more and more mountain lions. Even with Prop 117, there’s no question people will prevail, but the wild beasts will have their moments. More and more of them, in fact.”
“So you don’t worry about job security much?”
“Hardly at all. Unless something changes, the number of attacks on people will increase.”
“This is good news?” Ron asked.
“No, but it’s the kind of news people can understand. Show them the data, and they’ll see the results are perfectly natural and predictable. No hocu
s-pocus to the situation at all.”
“What about the biology?”
“Well, I can jot a few things down about the effects of feline leukemia and other diseases, what might happen if a cat loses an eye or becomes lame, how even predators lose their teeth, and how they adapt to that.”
“How do they?” Ron inquired.
“Mostly by going after smaller game, and when even that gets to be too much, by starving to death. What I’m getting at is if you give people the facts then seemingly aberrant behavior becomes more comprehensible. Reasonable precautions can be taken.”
“And if people don’t want to be reasonable?”
Corrie frowned and thought for a minute. “Then we go one of two ways.”
“Yeah?”
“One, we offer anyone who believes in the curse a little mountain lion doll and a pin.”
Ron laughed. “Voodoo?”
“Sure. Fight one superstition with another. Or with humor. However they take it.”
“And number two?”
“We find the sucker and nail his hide to a wall.” Corrie stood up and stretched. “I’ve got to get to bed. And don’t bother carrying me.”
“No?”
“No. I wouldn’t want you to say you sprained your back or something. Give you another dodge to get out of that basketball game.”
Ten minutes later, Corrie was asleep, and Ron had showered and lay in his own bed. He felt better, at least about Ms. Knox. He sensed not only was their attraction mutual but so was their nervousness. It reassured him that she had doubts, too.
He was just about to turn out the light when his phone rang. He picked it up on the first ring and still had time to run through a list of possibilities of who might be calling: Sergeant Stanley, Oliver, Clay Steadman, Leilani . . .
“Hello, Ronny. You there, Son?”
His father. Walter Ketchum. The unrepentant bigot.
“Yeah, Dad. I’m here.”
Ron and his father had been estranged for more than thirty years, from the time Walter Ketchum had beaten DeWayne Michaels half to death until the time Ron used his unfortunate upbringing to defend himself in the wrongful death suit brought by Marcus Martin on behalf of the family of the late Sharrod Carter.
Ron had agreed when his lawyer, Jack Hobart, suggested using the twist on the disadvantaged youth defense. He knew immediately, of course, that this would be a slap in his father’s face, but he didn’t care. At that time, he occasionally had trouble even remembering what his father looked like. It bothered Ron only a little when Jack told him they’d have to subpoena his father to corroborate that Walter was, in fact, the cracker sonofabitch they made him out to be.
But what Ron hadn’t expected in the least, could never have imagined in a million years, was that the trial would lead to a grudging peace between the two of them, if not an outright reconciliation.
The day Walter Ketchum showed up in court to testify, he didn’t avoid looking at his son. He didn’t swear at him. He didn’t spit at his feet. He strode right up to him, embraced him, and cackled that he hadn’t had such a good laugh in years as when he heard what his son’s defense strategy was going to be.
“It was goddamn brilliant!” Walter said. “Take the spooks’ own favorite lament — Wasn’t my fault, Your Honor, I was deprived — and turn it right around on them.” When Walter had told all his old retired cop buddies of this ploy, he informed his son, two of them had laughed so hard they’d given themselves hernias.
Then Walter took the stand and didn’t hesitate in painting himself as the redneck racist his son said he was. He was shameless in laying out his prejudices for the world to see. Ron had a hard time not squirming as he listened to his father testify.
But he knew how effective the old man had been when Marcus Martin said he had no questions for the witness. After finishing his testimony, Ron’s father stopped him in the corridor outside the courtroom.
“Ronny, I was happy to get up there for you today,” Walter Ketchum said. “I know you’ve hated me for a long time now, and maybe from your point of view, you’ve had reason. But this trial of yours brings up an interesting point, one maybe you never thought about. That is: If you really got twisted around because you had a racist for an old man … maybe I did, too.”
Then his father kissed Ron on the cheek and left.
Four days later he suffered a stroke that almost killed him.
“Your voice sounds better, Dad,” Ron said, “like you’re getting stronger.”
“That’s Esther’s doing. Makes me do my therapy every goddamn day, whether I want to or not. I get more exercise now than when I was a cop, kicking ass and taking names. You want the truth, I think she just likes to torture me. Get back at whitey every chance she can.”
In the background, Ron heard Esther Gadwell, the African American LPN who took care of his father, tell Walter to watch his old fool white trash mouth or she’d show him what it really meant to put a hurt on somebody.
“Esther, says hello,” his father told Ron.
“Tell Esther I hope she’s fine, too. What’s up, Dad?”
There was a pause before his father spoke. “Ronny, I’m not trying to stick my nose in here … but how’s that case of yours coming?”
“We’re working it. Making some headway. But you know how it is. I can’t go into details. For all I know, the press or the feds may have my line tapped.”
Walter Ketchum snorted. “Press! There was some faggot here today from one of those New York tabloid rags trying to get me to dump some dirt on you. If I still had two good legs under me, I’d have kicked his ass all the way around the block.”
Having been ministered to by a black woman the past three years, Walter Ketchum had come to make the reluctant admission that a dark skin wasn’t always the sign of either a criminal mentality or natural rhythm. But he was completely hopeless when it came to homosexuals. He would never allow a gay person near him, so he’d never get to see gays as human beings.
“Is that what you called about, Dad?” Ron was getting tired.
“No. I called because I have to spend so much time sitting on my ass, and I’ve used most of it the past few days staring at the picture of that boy nailed to the tree in your town.”
“And?”
“And I think it would be a mistake on your part to think this was a racial thing.”
Which was just what Ron had told Oliver. But hearing the same thing from his father made him get his back up.
“Why wouldn’t it be a racial thing?”
“Why? Because it’s too … shit, I’ve been trying to think of the word … I know! What it is, it’s too artistic.”
“Artistic?”
“Yeah, for a redneck. A kill all the niggers moron is gonna nail a guy to a tree? Make him look like Christ in blackface. It’s too precious.”
“I hate to sound like an echo, Dad, but precious? Nails?”
“Look, Ronny, I’m telling you. I study this picture in the paper, what I see is a painting. I don’t see a redneck murder. Sure, somebody obviously hated this poor joker, but it was for personal reasons.”
“Dad, everything we’ve turned up on Isaac Cardwell says if he’d been any holier he’d have been able to multiply loaves and fishes. Nobody had any personal reason to hate this guy.”
Unless it was Jimmy Thunder, but Ron couldn’t share that thought with his father.
The old man showed he was still capable of surprising Ron. He backed off. “Okay, so maybe you’ve got some facts I don’t know about or you can’t talk about. But just believe me on this one thing: The Klan, Nazi skinheads or any other of those pus-brains, they’d killed this Cardwell, you’d have found him tied to that tree or hanging from it.”
“How do you know that?”
“Hey, I’m the expert, remember? That’s why you had me testify in court.”
Ron couldn’t argue with that, so he simply told his father goodnight.
Chapter 29
Tuesday
Ron and Oliver got together that morning in the chief’s office. They exchanged the information they’d gleaned they day before. They agreed that some facts fit neatly with each other, and they agreed that the “white” man Pastor Brantley thought he saw at the back of St. Mark’s almost certainly was their killer, but they debated who that white man might be or even if he was white at all.
“Okay,” Ron said, “we’re splitting hairs here. We both like the guy at the back of the church. We both agree that he’s fair-skinned. So whatever the hell racial category society assigns this bastard is really beside the point. Agreed?”
Oliver nodded.
“So, I’ll tell you my idea and you tell me yours. Fair?”
“Fair.”
“What Ms. Royce and Ms. Chenier told me was that Jimmy Thunder’s got himself a case of the financial shorts.”
“You trust them?”
“Not at all. But then Art Gilbert, the landscaper, tells me he overhears this character Didi DuPree talking to Thunder about money laundering. This I believe. Because what reason would Gilbert have to lie about it?”
The deputy chief was stuck for an answer to rebut that one.
“And,” Ron continued, “Caz Stanley found out Jimmy Thunder, Didi DuPree and Deacon Meeker were all at Huntsville together. And DuPree and Meeker are cousins.”
Oliver started flicking the top of his cigarette lighter. Ron was half-tempted to tell him to give in and go outside for a smoke. But he maintained his focus.
“Now, what would Thunder want with anything as heavy as money-laundering if his own perfectly legit operation was rolling right along raking in bundles of cash? That wouldn’t make sense.”
“Maybe DuPree came to Thunder instead of the other way around,” Oliver suggested. “Told the man I’ve got a business proposition for you here that you accept or else.”
Ron gave the idea a long moment’s thought. “That doesn’t quite work for me. Thunder went both straight and big-time after getting out of the joint. A lowlife, even one as scary as this DuPree is supposed to be, tries to muscle a citizen with money, he’s taking an awful risk. A rich citizen comes to us, saying he fears for his life from some scumbag, he knows he’s going to get deluxe service. All the stops will be pulled out to send the scumbag right back to stir, if we don’t cool his action permanently. And I think a guy who’s got away clean with killing as many people as DuPree supposedly has would be too slick to force his way in where the risks would be so high.”