Bone Dry (Blanco County Mysteries)

by Ben Rehder

  The biker hoisted the puppy up into the bed of the truck and shoved a bowl of water in front of it. When the puppy went to drink, the man slid the bowl out of its reach. The puppy tried again, and the man moved the bowl once more. After three or four attempts, the puppy lay down with its head between its paws. The man picked up the puppy by the scruff of its neck and gave it a good shake, as if scolding it for giving up so easily. With his free hand, the biker roughly jabbed the puppy’s belly.

  Slaton had seen all he needed to see. He wheeled his Ford out of the bank line and pulled in next to the yellow truck. He grabbed a tire iron from behind his seat and held it beside his leg as he approached the man in the vest.

  “Son,” Slaton said, “don’t you know you shouldn’t treat an animal that way?”

  The biker glanced at Slaton, then gave the woman an exaggerated, I can’t believe this shit expression. “Who the hell are you?”

  “I’m Emmett Slaton, and I believe I’ll take that dog off your hands.”

  The biker looked down at the dog. “This’n here? Gonna cost you a hunnert bucks.”

  “Your box says it’s free.”

  “Yeah, they was free to the general pop’lation, but for assholes, they’s a hunnert bucks.”

  Slaton reached down to pick up the dog and the biker grabbed his arm in an alarmingly strong grip.

  Slaton brought the tire iron down fast and hard and felt the bones give way in the biker’s arm. “Son of a bitch!” the biker yelled and laid down in the bed of the truck, bringing his knees up to protect himself from another blow.

  “Now, there,” Slaton said. “That’s how you treat an animal.” He glanced over at the woman, who smiled coolly and exhaled a mouthful of cigarette smoke. She gestured at the dog. “He’s all yours.”

  Sitting on his front porch Tuesday afternoon, Slaton remembered that afternoon as if it were yesterday. He had nursed the puppy to good health, and it became a strong, confident dog. For five years, Patton had been his companion, his best buddy, right there by his side day and night. Slaton loved that ornery old mutt, even if he didn’t always come when he was called.

  Slaton was heartsick. He had hung around the house all morning, even canceling a doctor’s appointment in San Antonio, waiting to hear the familiar yip at the front door. But it never came. If Patton didn’t show up by sundown, Emmett Slaton just didn’t know what he was going to do.

  It was one o’clock now, and Slaton got into his truck to take a slow drive along the county road near his home.

  About goddamn time, Vinnie said to himself as Emmett Slaton pulled out of his driveway. Vinnie had been waiting and watching from the same cluster of cedar trees he had hidden in the night before. He grabbed the Hefty bag off the ground and proceeded toward the house. He couldn’t help but grin. His dad would love the poetic symbolism of the act Vinnie was planning. It was pure genius, that’s what it was.

  He tried the back door, found it unlocked, and quickly made his way to the master bedroom.

  Emmett Slaton returned from his drive feeling worse than ever. No sign of Patton. That damn dog was going to give him more gray hairs than he already had.

  Slaton went to the kitchen, hoping to find new messages on his answering machine. He had left word with area kennels, veterinarians, and the county dogcatcher—asking them all to be on the lookout—but the red light stubbornly refused to blink.

  Slaton fixed a bourbon on the rocks and went to his den. He flipped the TV on but couldn’t get interested in any of the programs.

  He decided to go take a little nap, to give himself plenty of energy to continue his search later that evening.

  At his bedroom doorway, he noticed the door was closed. Strange, he thought. He never shut that door because the room got too hot if he did.

  He swung the door open and cautiously flipped the light switch. Everything looked normal. Nothing out of place. “Getting paranoid,” he muttered. “Either that or Alzheimer’s.”

  He sat on the edge of the bed to pull his boots off, then stood and peeled off his shirt and jeans.

  He tugged the blanket back and came face-to-face with a bloody nightmare. He didn’t even realize he was screaming. There, in his bed, was the severed head of his beloved Patton.

  Slaton gingerly picked up the head and clutched it to his chest, his screams now subsided to a low moaning wail. He staggered into the bathroom—he didn’t really know why—and placed the head in the sink. He began rinsing it off, watching the blood swirl down the drain.

  Even in his grief, the gears in his mind were frantically spinning. The head in the bed—I’ve seen this before, he thought. What was it? A movie?

  Then he had it. The Godfather. The scene where the Hollywood producer wakes up in bed with the head of his prize stallion.

  The anger—the pure, unadulterated fury—built in Slaton’s heart as it never had before. This was no subtle message. It was designed to taunt him, to tell him exactly who did it. And he received that message loud and clear. Cradling the sopping head of his dog in his arm, Slaton turned to retrieve his .45 automatic from his nightstand.

  CHAPTER TEN

  “Lester, you all right?” Marlin asked, carefully eyeing the wooded area around him. A man was down, and at this point Marlin didn’t know why. Common sense—and law enforcement savvy—told him to approach the situation with caution.

  “I’m okay, John,” Lester said, standing up. “But this ol’ boy ain’t doing good at all. I woulda called for an ambulance or somethin’, but it’s too late for that. I started to wait for your call at the house, but I figured I’d better come on back down here, keep the buzzards away.”

  Marlin looked for footprints in the area, didn’t see any, and carefully stepped up beside Lester. He gazed down at the dead man and saw a familiar face.

  The man was on his back, his head tilted to one side, eyes open but unseeing. Marlin noticed lividity—pooled blood—in the cheek closest to the ground, while the other cheek was white as a newborn’s butt. No need to even take a pulse; the man was long gone. A rifle lay by his side and the center of his camouflage jacket was dark with blood. His hands, too, were covered with dried blood.

  “Bert Gammel,” Lester said dryly. “One of my hunters. I figure it was a stray shot that got him. Either that, or he somehow managed to shoot hisself.”

  Marlin didn’t reply, but eyed the apparent entry wound. Dead center in the chest. Very unlikely that it was self-inflicted, even accidentally. Keeping his feet in place, Marlin bent low over Gammel’s rifle, trying to catch a scent of cordite, but there was none. It didn’t mean the rifle hadn’t been fired, but Marlin’s intuition told him it hadn’t.

  “Did you move the body?” Marlin asked.

  “Naw, just felt for a pulse. Gave me the willies, to tell the truth.”

  Marlin stood and said, “Lester, I want you to step over here with me for a minute and answer a few questions. If you can, try to walk back to your truck the same way you walked in.” Marlin knew that Lester, even as tough as he was, would think more clearly if he wasn’t staring at a corpse. Also, Marlin had to protect what might be a crime scene.

  Before questioning Lester, Marlin radioed the dispatcher and asked for assistance. Before long, the area would be swarming with personnel, including the sheriff, deputies, and the medical examiner.

  With help on the way, Marlin grabbed a pen and notepad and turned to Lester, but the ranch foreman didn’t have much to tell. Lester said that he kept a spiral notebook at his house; hunters were supposed to sign in and out when coming and going from the ranch. Lester said that Gammel had hunted yesterday afternoon but had never signed out. It happened all the time. Hunters simply forgot, or didn’t want to bother with stopping at the foreman’s quarters on the way out.

  When Lester came down this morning to repair a hole in the southern fence, he saw Gammel’s vehicle. He scouted the area, found the body, and immediately called Marlin. “I didn’t want to call the sheriff’s office just yet, John.
Small town, you know, and I didn’t want to start a bunch of rumors. I knew you’d handle it right.”

  Gammel was an employee with the county Public Works Department, a well-known figure around town. If word got out that he was found dead, the entire population would know by the end of the day.

  “Did you hear any shots yesterday afternoon?” Marlin asked.

  “A couple.”

  “Can you remember what time?”

  “I think there was one at about four o’clock, another at around five or five-fifteen, and then one more right before dark.”

  “A little after six?”

  “Yeah, I guess. Thereabouts.”

  “Did any of the shots sound like they came from this direction?”

  “The last one did. I figured it was probably Gammel, but I checked the notebooks and they didn’t show that he had killed anything.” The foreman was required to keep a second notebook that listed the date and time when all deer were killed on the ranch. “That’s when I noticed that he hadn’t signed out. Figured he forgot.”

  “What time did he sign in yesterday afternoon?”

  “Three o’clock.”

  “Did you see him come in?”

  “Yeah, he waved at me over at the barn. I was feeding the horses.” The ranch owners, the Hawleys, kept several quarter-horses on the property, coming out occasionally on weekends to ride. But they rarely showed during deer season.

  “Was there anybody with him?”

  “Nope.”

  “Were any of the other hunters out here yesterday?”

  “Jack Corey was here. Signed in at three-twenty; out at six-thirty. Didn’t shoot nothin’. But I never saw him, just what it says in the notebooks.”

  Marlin gestured toward the neighboring property across the fenceline. “That’s the Bar T. They doing any hunting over there nowadays?”

  “Not that I’ve heard of. Hasn’t been hunted in ten years.”

  “You haven’t heard any shots from over there, or seen any hunters?”

  “Not a one. I see the foreman on occasion. Sometimes we shoot the breeze over the fence for a while. Saw him a week or ten days ago. He didn’t say nothin’ about opening it to hunters this year. And if they had, I’m sure me or you woulda heard about it.”

  Marlin paused for a moment and scribbled a few notes. Then he asked another question, trying to keep his tone casual: “Lester, have you ever heard or seen any kind of disagreement between Gammel and any of the other hunters? You know how a deer lease can get—guys get kind of possessive of their favorite hunting spots, or they don’t want anybody shooting does, things like that. Ever have any problems out here?”

  Lester removed his Stetson and rubbed the back of his free hand across his brow. “I’ve had a few of them come to me over the years and ask me about a couple of things, wanting me to settle a disagreement or something. But nothin’ that would lead to somethin’ like this.”

  Marlin nodded.

  “Let me back up for a minute,” Lester said. “I should say that I’m in charge of the lease and everything. I collect the money, lay down the rules, and get the hunters’ signatures on the leases. But as far as how they divvy up the ranch or whose blind goes where, I leave that all up to them. So there coulda been some disagreements I ain’t never heard about. But there is one thing that seems to have caused some trouble over the years. Mind you, when I say trouble, it really hasn’t been that big of a deal.”

  Marlin waited patiently.

  “It’s been about spikes,” Lester continued, referring to bucks who have two nonforking antlers, rather than the multipointed antlers most deer carry. Many hunters consider spikes to be inferior deer, and insist they should be culled from the herd to prevent them from passing along their genes. “Can we talk off the record for a second, John?”

  Marlin knew he was about to hear about some hunting violations—minor considerations when investigating a hunter’s death—so he told Lester to tell him anything he needed to.

  Lester glanced over at the body. “Bert was big on shooting any spike that came along. He’d just shoot it and throw it in the ravine. Probably shot three or four every year. He wasn’t being an asshole or anything, just thought it was the right thing to do.”

  Marlin nodded. Each time Gammel had done this, he was committing two game violations: one for failing to tag the deer, and the second for wasting the meat.

  “And some of the other hunters wanted him to ease off?” Marlin asked.

  “Yeah, there was a couple. The one time I saw it come to a head, Gammel almost got in a fight up at the barn where they butcher their deer.”

  “With who?”

  “Jack Corey.”

  “What happened?”

  “I arrived in the middle of it all, but I guess they had a few words and Gammel popped Jack in the jaw. Ol’ Jack was in the middle of gutting a doe, so he had a knife in his hands. It looked to me like he was thinkin’ of using it. But I stepped between them and it cooled off real quick. Bert said that he shouldn’t have lost his temper, and then he just left. Most of the guys seemed to side with Jack and had a few things to say about Bert after he took off.”

  “When did this happen?”

  “Middle of last season.”

  “Anything else happen since then?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  Marlin knew a deputy would want to cover all this ground with Lester again, maybe in front of a tape recorder, but it was good to get everything down on paper now. Marlin asked several more questions, but nothing of relevance came up.

  “Lester, do me a favor. I’m gonna take a quick look around for a minute. I need you to just wait in your truck, grab some coffee. We don’t want to make more footprints around the body than we need to.”

  “Sure, John. No problem.”

  Marlin followed the same path toward the body that he had originally taken, careful to watch for footprints, tire tracks, or any other type of evidence. He saw none.

  Standing over the corpse, Marlin tried to re-create the shooting in his mind. He could picture Gammel climbing down the ladder from his blind, taking a few steps in the haze of twilight, then—Boom!—a high-powered slug rips through his chest.

  Television viewers often think that a body is thrown back violently when a person is shot with a rifle, but this is rarely the case. Depending on where the victim is hit, the bullet often passes through quickly and cleanly, hardly swaying the victim at all. Deer hunters can attest to this, as whitetails rarely ever fall when struck through the lungs, but instead race off in a frenzied sprint until the oxygen is depleted from their system.

  Marlin could envision Gammel dropping the rifle, clutching at his chest, then falling to the ground in a heap, his heart a shredded, useless clump of muscle.

  Looking beyond the corpse toward the blind, Marlin could see the spray of Gammel’s blood and small bits of tissue from the exit wound. Marlin carefully stepped around the body and sighted back down these lines of blood. He found himself staring down a long, alleylike opening through the heavily wooded area. The alley dead-ended at a clump of cedars just across the fenceline.

  Rather than walking directly down the natural alley, Marlin worked his way through the dense surrounding cedars until he came to the barbed-wire fence. He eased his way over the wire and approached the massive cedar tree at the end of the alley. Once again, he was careful to watch for shoeprints, shell casings, or any other signs of recent activity.

  Marlin knew that in such a heavily treed area, a bullet could not have traveled far in a parallel path to the ground. Of course, the bullet might have been a stray, coming from a great distance in a large arc. They’d know if that was a possibility later, when the body was in the hands of the medical examiner, Lem Tucker. But Marlin had a hunch the bullet had traveled right down the alley, which was, in essence, a perfect shooting lane for a hunter. Regardless of what was being hunted.

  Marlin peered through the low-hanging limbs of the bush-like cedar and notic
ed a partially broken, inch-thick limb dangling downward. Looking more closely, Marlin saw several smaller limbs and twigs on the ground a few inches below the tree’s lower branches.

  At this point, Marlin donned a pair of latex gloves from his jacket. He gingerly reached underneath the branches and grabbed one of the fallen twigs. It appeared to be cleanly cut—as with a small set of hand snippers. In a month or so, these cuttings would turn brown and be easily visible. But for now, they were hardly noticeable, blending in with the rest of the tree. Marlin never would have seen them if he hadn’t first spotted the broken branch.