“Earl and Rachel Sue didn’t raise me,” Browning liked to say. “Everything of value, I learned from my football coaches.”
Claire Hammond set the sharpened knife aside and touched the ragged edges of the wound at the wildebeest’s chest. This one hadn’t been a noble death.
Hours earlier, during the twilight hunt, Herbert Sanchez, governor of the state of Florida and Browning’s frequent guest at the ranch, had botched his first two shots, then squeezed off a grouchy third that nicked the wildebeest in the rump. The wounded buck folded to its knees, then promptly rose and stumbled toward a stand of slash pine. Claire ordered the governor to shoot before it disappeared.
“That’s enough,” he said. “I’m done. We’ll pick this up tomorrow.”
With darkness only minutes off, there was no option. No way in hell was she going to spend the night tracking the creature through two hundred acres of pinelands and hard plains.
She peeled the rifle from his grip, aimed, and fired. When the wildebeest dropped, the governor huffed at her impertinence. But ten minutes later after they’d hiked to the fallen animal and he’d tossed back two slugs from his flask, the big, fleshy man had recovered his good cheer.
He kneeled beside the buck, and jacked its head up for a photo—in that moment making it plain he was claiming the kill as his own. Claire was thereby sworn to secrecy about who’d actually bagged the wildebeest. Which was fine. In the last year on Coquina Ranch, her code of honor had grown flexible on this point.
Now as she looked down at the carcass spread before her, she took a calming breath. For no matter how many of these big animals she prepared, her hands always quivered at this final moment, the unveiling.
She stepped around the table, curled her fingers under the edge of the hide and tugged the skin off the meat of the wildebeest as one might peel a tight shirt off the back of a lover. When she reached the neckline, she picked up the capping knife and made a deep laceration in the throat, working the blade down till it severed bone.
All but done, she halted, listening to the night sounds beyond the barn, the field crickets, the tree frogs and bull frogs, a group of barred owls echoing one another in the pinelands, and louder than any of that were the men’s voices at the lodge. She heard the governor’s belly laugh, a whiskey wheeze at the end, then the sound of Browning and his friend Antwan Shelton joining in the laughter. But the voice she didn’t hear was Earl Hammond.
She considered again Earl’s story of Hemingway, Edison, and Ford, hearing the mournful echoes in his voice, his reproachful view of Browning. Wondering why, of all the stories of the ranch’s history, he’d chosen that one to share.
She set the knife aside and walked to the head of the dressing table.
Most skinners wore cut-resistant butcher gloves. Not Claire. She knew full well the dangers of working bare-handed around the razory blade and of the probability of stabbing herself on a splintered bone. She’d been tutored in her craft by several old-time skinners with missing fingers, and a couple who’d contracted infections that almost did them in.
Those were risks she accepted. These animals had been sacrificed so men like the governor could decorate their walls with trophies and fill their scrapbooks with grinning displays of manliness. The least she could do was send the wild beasts on to the pastures of afterlife without the alien touch of synthetic yarn.
In the last few years she’d learned to skin each of the exotic species on the preserve: ibex goats, gemsboks, Asian water buffalo, eland, sika deer from China, a small herd of African scimitar-horned oryx, even a few dozen American bison and Florida wild hogs. Call her foolish or New Age silly, but Claire Hammond took it as her sacred duty to keep this last rite as natural as possible.
She gripped the horns, one in each hand near the points, then jiggled them lightly as though guiding a motorcycle along an icy roadway. Testing the tension of the meat, the remaining grip of tendons and vertebrae.
When she had a feel for what was left, she set her feet and twisted the horns, leaned back, increasing the pressure until she heard the crackles of the last strands of gristle giving way.
Then she tore the head off the body.
FIVE
* * *
IN THE FIZZY LIGHT OF the propane lantern, Claire held the wildebeest’s head away from her stomach. A portion of the creature’s hide trailed behind the head like the cape of a magician who has vanished after his final trick.
Straining under the weight, she hobbled across the concrete floor and settled the head into a black plastic garbage bag. She tucked in the hide and closed the bag, then carried it in an awkward embrace to the icebox.
Freezing the hide stopped the growth of bacteria. Hides not frozen immediately after skinning risked hair slippage and rot. She’d done a decent job on the skinning, left enough cape for the taxidermist to work with. Excess could always be cut away, but too little cape sometimes meant no mount could be made at all. Governor Sanchez was not a man who’d easily forgive such a blunder and he sure as hell wasn’t a guy she wanted to be indebted to.
When she latched the freezer door and turned back to the cleaning table, the sudden silence stopped her. An icy prickle washed across her shoulders. The frogs had ceased. No owls, no voices from the lodge. Even the bugs had gone quiet.
She moved to the open doorway and peered into the darkness. Coquina Ranch observed a strict dark-skies policy. Outdoor lighting wasn’t allowed, no porch lights, no spots, not even ground-level solar lights. Ranch workers and guests used low-volt flashlights to move around the grounds at night, and even indoor lighting was muted. Earl Hammond Jr. was a fascist about starlight. Don’t mess with his Milky Way.
Claire stepped out of the barn. She cocked her head and peered at the soft light spilling from the lodge.
Over a hundred years ago the two-story bastion was constructed from slabs of coquina quarried along the coast of northern Florida, then hauled by wagon down the state so Hartwell Hammond, the family patriarch, could pay homage to a Spanish fortress he much admired, Castillo San Marcos, which conquistadors constructed on the shores of St. Augustine four centuries before. Coquina was Florida’s only native stone, a pulverized blend of clamshells and oysters and snails and fine quartz sand cemented together by acidic groundwater and forged for centuries beneath the crush of sedimentary layers. It was yellowish white, the color of a winter moon.
The thick coquina walls gave the lodge a fanciful air, more like an oddball tourist trap than a family residence where generations of Hammonds had laughed and quarreled and celebrated together. Though Claire had been slow to warm to the structure, she’d gradually come to see the virtues of coquina stone. Those heavy walls kept the interior spaces cool even on insufferable August afternoons, and the howling gales of hurricanes and tropical storms hardly registered within the lodge. Then there was the incense that permeated the interior spaces. She supposed it was some trace of the marine life that once inhabited the shells, releasing into the air the musky smolder of the sea, even though the Atlantic was sixty miles away.
Claire stared at the dark lodge, seeing no movement at the windows. Gone were the laughter and voices. Filling the night air was a stillness that bristled the hair on her arms.
Wary and uncertain, she walked across the corral, through the sandy parking lot where the governor’s black SUV was parked. Beside it was the Faust brothers’ Prius with the silly camouflage paint job.
Antwan Shelton’s white Mercedes sedan was parked there, too. A flashy running back, Antwan had been a teammate of Hammond’s at the U, and after college he had been drafted by the Dolphins. One championship ring and a blown knee later, Antwan had parlayed his sports fame into a career as a celebrity pitchman, hawking luxury cars in TV commercials or posing shirtless on billboards with skinny fashion babes draped on his muscular body while he sipped a shot of Grey Goose vodka.
At the south end of the lot, Claire spotted a truck that must have arrived while she was absorbed in skinning the wildebe
est. Gustavo Pinto’s rusty Nissan pickup. As ranch foreman, Gustavo hired the seasonal help, the fruit and vegetable pickers, the sod crew, and the loggers, and it also fell to him to oversee them after hours.
In her six years, Claire had never seen Gustavo inside the lodge. Even for such a high-ranking employee, and the son of Juan Miguel Pinto, who’d served in the same capacity for decades, these grounds were strictly off-limits. No one was permitted at the lodge except the Hammond family, a few invited guests, and their security men.
If Gustavo was at the lodge, there was serious trouble somewhere on the ranch, most likely with one of the workers.
She relaxed, caught her breath. That had to be it. At that very moment Earl or Browning was probably on the phone with Sheriff Prescott. A tomato picker had gotten into a scuffle with a townie from Palmdale or Clewiston, drunk versus drunk.
She halted at the threshold of the bridge that spanned the alligator moat. She’d caught herself just in time. She’d been about to break into the lodge wild-eyed over nothing, disgrace herself in front of that gang of good old boys who’d have a few hoots at her expense. And she could picture the look on Browning’s face as he added this episode to the list of grievances against her.
Coquina Ranch traditions were established more than a century earlier, and those rules were still rigidly upheld: no women permitted around the campfire bull-sessions or inside the lodge when the elite gatherings were under way. No women. Period. The sexist rule pissed her off mightily, and for her first year she campaigned for Browning to discard it, but he claimed it was beyond his authority. So grudgingly she abided by the anachronism, another concession she made out of respect for Earl Hammond and the ranch’s fabled traditions.
As she turned back to the barn, the toe of her boot stubbed something in the grass and Claire stumbled against the railing.
Only later would she realize how that fractional deviation in her stride would forever alter the world she’d come to know. If she’d simply walked back to the barn to wait for the gathering to break up, the night would have swung a different way, another outcome with consequences beyond her reckoning.
But no. When she righted herself, she stooped to peer into the darkness and spotted an odd gleam at the base of the oleander bush. More than odd. She passed this way dozens of times each day and could navigate the pathway blindfolded. Knew every rock, stump, outcropping of roots.
Claire squatted down and stretched her arm into the snarl of limbs, brushed her fingertips across the object. Not metal.
She pried open the branches and waded deeper into the foliage.
Lustrous in the soft light was the toe of a highly polished shoe. Claire took a breath and forced herself farther into the bush and made out the khaki trousers and white polo shirt the guy had been wearing earlier in the afternoon.
His name was Brad Saperstein. Heavy-jawed man around fifty with graying haircut in a GI flattop, he was an officer with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, assigned as the governor’s single bodyguard. A smug bastard who’d openly eyed Claire like she might be on the evening’s menu.
She spoke his name. When he didn’t respond, she touched his bare arm and found the flesh as cool as the slaughtered wildebeest’s.
A bubble of acid broke in the back of her throat. Claire flopped backward on the path, crawled on her butt away from the body. She groaned, then struggled to her feet and swung around to stare at the silent lodge.
Its two-story windows were glowing faintly. Tonight, as on most nights, there was only that muted halo radiating a few feet from the structure. Maybe a couple of table lamps illuminating the big den where the men had gathered to socialize.
Calling 911 wasn’t an option. The only landline was inside the lodge, and her cell was upstairs in the master suite. Even if she’d had access to a phone, police assistance would’ve been a long time coming. As far as she knew, not one of the county deputies had ever been to the lodge, and she doubted any were experienced with the maze of unpaved roads that crisscrossed the vast tract of prairie, scrub and pine flatlands. Few landmarks, no road signs, dozens of gates to open and close, dead ends and dusty, rutted Jeep trails that went on for miles. Navigating at night was even trickier. Veteran farmhands sometimes lost their way.
These were the seconds that Claire would have to account for. What she saw, what she heard, every word spoken by her or others. She would explain how she’d managed to regain her composure and from that moment on stay resolutely calm. Why wasn’t she paralyzed with fear? The investigators were suspicious. A young woman finding a security guard dead in the bushes outside a strangely quiet house. Why hadn’t she run for help? It simply wasn’t credible. They would treat her as if she knew more than she was saying. That she was covering up, or involved somehow. Doubt would be in their eyes, skepticism lacing every question.
She’d explain how that flush of terror dissolved and everything downshifted to slow-mo. She couldn’t account for it. It was a knack she’d had since childhood, and it served her well as a college athlete.
Claire went cold and quiet. Saw every detail frame by frame. A sharp focus, eye on the goddamn ball.
She sprinted back to the barn, ducked into the tiny office, pulled down the twelve-gauge, loaded it, and trotted back to the house. See the dead guy, go fetch the shotgun. A handful of seconds to race back to the lodge. Less than a minute. No thoughts buzzing through her mind. Not a trace of the earlier panic.
There’d been no drills for such a moment, though given the steady stream of politicians, sports stars, diplomats, literary lions, painters, musicians, and movers and shakers of every stripe, and all those grimfaced bodyguards, more than once Claire had considered a worst-case scenario. Still, nothing like what was unfolding. Nothing that put her dead center.
In a light-footed crouch, she crossed the bridge, went up the steps. Pressed her ear to the door. She made out one low voice. It was Browning’s, but she couldn’t distinguish the words. His tone was stern, like the voice he used on ranch hands who’d screwed up, a stiff restraint that barely masked his disdain.
She thumbed the latch, shouldered the door open an inch, set her feet, then barged into the foyer. Two minutes max since she bumped Saperstein’s shoe.
With the shotgun at her shoulder, she stepped forward into the den.
Twenty feet away Gustavo Pinto held a pistol in his right hand. A silencer was attached to the barrel and the handgun was aimed down at the floor. Gustavo’s cheeks glistened and his eyes were red. Ten feet in front of him, Browning and Earl stood stiffly at opposite ends of the big burgundy couch.
A long oak coffee table separated the two of them from Gustavo. Rolled out on the table was a survey map dotted with red circles. Governor Sanchez stood paralyzed behind the couch, Antwan Shelton at his shoulder.
“Gustavo. Listen to me,” Claire said. “I don’t care what’s going on here, but you need to set that pistol on the floor and you need to do it right now. Do it now, Gustavo. No debate, no mistakes.”
Claire stepped closer, the cherry stock of the Remington cool against her cheek.
“Shoot him,” Browning said. “Shoot the fucking bastard.”
Browning glared at the small man. Tears sparkled on Gustavo’s cheeks.
“For your family!” Browning yelled. “Shoot him!”
Less than three minutes since she’d discovered Saperstein in the oleander. Three minutes. Everything frame by frame. Her finger tightened against the trigger.
“I’m sorry,” Gustavo said. “Mr. Earl, I’m sorry. God forgive me.”
“Shoot him, goddammit!” Browning roared.
If Claire hesitated for a few seconds, it was because Gustavo’s right arm was slack, his handgun aimed harmlessly at the floor. And because she knew him to be a gentle soul, with a wife and several grown children. Like his father before him, he worked his ass off alongside the pickers and ranch hands. Once in her early days on the ranch, Gustavo rescued Claire when she’d become hopelessly lost while d
riving around the ranch, trying to familiarize herself with her new home. Night falling, she was on the brink of despair. Gustavo appeared in his pickup and guided her back to the lodge, never mentioning the incident again. Unfailingly polite, Gustavo was the one employee on Coquina Ranch she considered a dear friend.
Seconds passed. Claire waited for her order to register with Gustavo, waited for him to drop the pistol, waited as any reasonable person would. That was all. With Browning yelling, commanding her to open fire on the gentle soul.
Gustavo’s pistol rose, Claire saying no, no, as that long cylinder wobbled upward toward the men across the room.
There was no choice. No time for pleading. God help them all. She tensed her finger and set off a blast that seemed to rattle the foundation of that house.
Though she’d fired that shotgun hundreds of times and knew its kick, she was staggered and spun awkwardly to her right. When she swung back she saw the spray of pellets had blown out the twenty-foot window and a cascade of bright needles was raining down on Gustavo’s body.
She dropped the shotgun on the stone floor and turned to the couch. It was then she realized that in those seconds of delay she’d lost more than a friend.
Earl Hammond, who’d been born on Coquina Ranch and spent decades nurturing the land and the people under his care, strictly maintaining the customs of his ancestors, Earl Hammond Jr. was sitting oddly erect on the leather sofa. His head was turned to the side as if he were watching the scenery pass outside the window of a car. The expression on Earl’s face was too serene for this world.
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