Bad Axe County

by John Galligan

  In five minutes Calvin Fanta returned, pigeon-toeing through the slush away from the tavern. She moved the volume of Broadcasters onto the backseat. Fanta slid in beside her with a sweetly alcoholic exhalation. He handed her two things: a tiny paper umbrella and a coaster.

  “How was your Singapore Sling?”

  “I hate pineapple.”

  “And Ladonna gave you these? Was it Ladonna?”

  “Yup.”

  The word skank traveled through the sheriff’s mind. She pushed it out with a deep breath. She tipped the umbrella under the dome light: a number was written on the underside. It looked like a Bad Axe County fire number, the kind posted to identify a rural property. The coaster was so brand-new that it smelled like ink, with a faint hint of pineapple. It advertised a place called Come Back Saloon. No such place existed in the Bad Axe, nor south in Crawford County, as far as she knew. Maybe Vernon County, north? Why would the Ease Inn give out another tavern’s coasters?

  “This is it?” she asked.

  “Yup.”

  “Any conversation?”

  “She said, ‘Bottom Road.’ ”

  “Anything else?”

  “Nope.”

  “How about my change?”

  “Missus . . . I mean, Sheriff Kick . . .”

  Calvin Fanta was shaking his head, exhaling ruefully, and rubbing his palms on his pant legs, like his grip had slipped and he had just grooved a home run. “I don’t know if I shoulda or not, but I figured . . .”

  “What is it, Calvin?”

  “Well, there actually was a little more conversation. Ladonna said, ‘You sure? Once I put that drink on the bar, you pay for it in full, in cash . . . no refund.’ ”

  “And . . . ?”

  “I paid a hundred bucks for that stupid drink.”

  A hundred-dollar gate fee? Wow. Then she felt surprised that Calvin had the cash. It probably confirmed that he was dealing. She thought for a minute.

  “That’s a lot of money for a drink. How about we call that your fine for possession?”

  “Yeah, sure. That’s what I was kind of thinking.”

  “Now, about the dealing . . .”

  At the Ease Inn’s side window appeared an unmistakable profile. Etched by the red neon of a Bud sign, Ladonna’s darkly skankish beauty was still a thing that jerked the eye to it. She must have been suspicious about Calvin Fanta buying a Singapore Sling. She lingered, seeing Calvin in the sheriff’s car, then moved away.

  “I’m not dealing, ma’am. That’s my dad’s new truck.”

  “You were smoking weed in your dad’s new truck?”

  “I’ve got Febreze.”

  “Well, that fixes it, huh? All right, Calvin. Buckle your seat belt.”

  Sheriff Kick put her locks down and started her cruiser rolling.

  “Wait—what? My dad’s truck!”

  She dropped him off, stoned, with a Singapore Sling on his breath, at his parents’ house. Curtains parted very cautiously, someone watching as he stumbled toward the door. Driving away, she recalled Ladonna’s gaze from the tavern window. Ladonna knew that she knew about the party. She would have to find it fast.

  * * *

  Five minutes later the sheriff bore the bound volume of Broadcasters under her jacket into the Public Safety Building. She left it on her desk. In the restroom, she splashed water on her face, moisturized her lips, did not allow herself to linger on the troubled woman looking back. She hurried down to Dispatch, where Denise’s computer screen displayed the property tax roster for Bad Axe County. A sticky note on the back of Denise’s hand recorded the property number written on the cocktail umbrella.

  “Here it is.”

  The sheriff squinted. The property was on Bottom Road in Snake Hollow Township, which filled the far southwest corner of the Bad Axe. Denise switched windows to display a PDF plat map of the township that looked hand drafted. She dragged it to her dual monitor. The property in question was on the south flank of Battle Bluff, a local landmark on the Blackhawk Trail. The Bad Axe River ran through the bottomland farm. Enlarged, the handwritten script identified its owner as E. Faulkner. Denise said, “Since the title to the property transferred in 2010, those records are online. Someone named Prayleen Brown is the legal owner.”

  While Sheriff Kick marveled at the name Prayleen—both lovely and absurd—Denise kept tapping her keyboard.

  “OK, I know who this is. Prayleen was Emerald Faulkner’s daughter. Emerald passed maybe ten years ago. There’s a brother in that family, William. Yes, you heard me correctly. High school English class, right? The Sound and the Fury? William Faulkner?”

  “You’re joking.”

  “Me? Joke?”

  “Who in the hell would name their kid William Faulkner?”

  “Oh, that’s nothing,” Denise said. “I have a whole list of doozies like that in my head. Don’t get me started. I’ll give you one more just for now, and it will blow your freaking mind. Abraham Lincoln. And trust me, Clove and Peetey Lincoln, neighbors of my great-uncle Gunnar, probably never even heard of the other guy. Anyway, our own Abe Lincoln drowned in a bucket when he was three.”

  She shared this while scrolling to the top of the deed, moving too fast for the sheriff, who looked away, feeling dizzy.

  “Prayleen Brown now lives in Topeka, Kansas. And . . .”

  Denise switched into Google, typing so emphatically that her Aaron Rodgers bobblehead bobbled. “And William ‘Billy’ Faulkner, Blackhawk High Class of ’85, is now in Chicago. So they’re absentee. I bet they rent the land. I have to tell you, this all sounds like a stag party.”

  “What? Why?”

  “People call them stags. It’s been a thing in the Bad Axe forever. Secret parties in the hollows. Men only. Except for the entertainment.”

  “Why hasn’t anybody told me?”

  Denise answered with a shrug. “I never knew about them until I married Dirk. He always told me he was going to a Ducks Unlimited meeting and came back smelling like chicks instead of ducks.”

  “Sonofabutt, Denise. I’m from freaking thirty miles away. I never heard of secret stag parties out in the hollows.”

  “Because you’re a good girl.”

  The sheriff made herself stay quiet. For about six months of her life, after losing her parents, she would have stripped for booze money, easy. Thirty miles away and ten-plus years later seemed to be enough distance, thank God, that most people in the Bad Axe didn’t know. Boog Lund could have a field day with her past. Without noticing how it happened, she was drinking coffee from the pot on Denise’s hot plate, out of a pink mug that said I DONUT CARE. Oh God—had she checked for Skoal spit first? She put the mug down.

  “OK, are these like bachelor parties? What goes on?”

  “I could never get a straight answer out of Dirk.” The way Denise said her ex’s name made it sound like a kind of knife. “But drunk men and cheap women, what else? All you can drink. Amateur strip contests. Lap dances. Take it from there, right? Goes all the way back to when Ladonna’s grampa Boyd Weeks cooked moonshine and ran a brothel in the thirties. It faded for a while, but when meth hit the coulees, and now there’s heroin too, suddenly there was a big new batch of girls willing to party, if you know what I mean. Gibbs was only the latest sheriff who looked the other way. You’re surprised?”

  “I really shouldn’t be. Yet I am. Yet I’m not.” Her pulse had sped up. Harold Snustead’s assailant was headed for that party, and she might be able to help that girl, maybe more than one girl, if she could get there in time.

  She had picked up Denise’s mug again. Empty. Her tummy squealed. She retrieved the cocktail umbrella with the property number written on it.

  “Wish me luck,” she said.

  Her move to exit seemed to remind Denise of something. “Oh, Heidi, by the way, while you were at the library, the new Crawford County DA stopped by looking for you.”

  She paused in the doorway, only semisurprised. “Crawford County?”
r />   “As in, our neighbor to the south, where you grew up?”

  “He was looking for me?”

  “He was a she,” Denise answered. “Kinda young and preppy. She was going home from a meeting in La Crosse, passing through. Something about open records?” Denise frowned now. “There was some kind of conflict with a clerk, it seemed like. She said she wanted to get a little background from you.”

  The sheriff stalled, feeling suddenly exposed. The problem wasn’t open records, it was closed records. All those years ago, she had been denied the details of how Sheriff Ken Skog and his medical examiner had arrived at murder-suicide as the cause of her parents’ deaths. What was the physical evidence? What suspects had been considered and rejected, and why? Skog had disbelieved her when she said that the murder-suicide weapon, the .38 Cobra he had returned to her after the case was closed, was not her father’s gun. Her father’s real gun, she told Skog, was a family heirloom Colt revolver that shot Whiz-Bang bullets—and that gun was missing, along with a whole box of Whiz-Bangs, the whole box, from where he kept it atop a hewed beam in the barn. Skog’s explanation was money pressure: the farm was going bankrupt, so her dad sold the valuable old gun and bought a cheap one . . .

  “Heidi? Hello?”

  But why seal a routine case file? The reason Skog gave—confidential financial information establishing the failure of Cress Springs Farm, in turn establishing her father’s motivation—had always smelled like a smoke screen to her. Last week, as her grief and suspicion were reawakened by the Bishops Coulee murders, she had exchanged words with the Crawford County clerk, and in the heat of the moment she had threatened to sue. Anyone wanted background, Crawford County DA or otherwise, that was it.

  “She said she’d call you in the next day or two. I said you were kinda busy right now.”

  “I am.”

  “I said you had enough to do up here in the Bad Axe.”

  “I do.”

  “You don’t mean to tell Crawford County what to do.”

  “I don’t.”

  “And right now you have a party to attend.”

  “I do.”

  “Go.”

  Wish me luck, she nearly asked Denise again. A profound aloneness stopped her. She put on her jacket and headed into the snow toward her Charger.

  13

  After he is released from the ditch, the next thing Dale Hill does is forget that he found the road before, and he gets lost again looking for it. He drives in stormy circles back to where he went into the ditch. This is once more the fault of that rip-off bitch Ladonna at the tavern. He yells at Pepper Greengrass to pay attention, but he doesn’t say what to pay attention to. This is men, as Pepper knows them. She tells Dale that he’s the one who needs to pay attention. This time he connects a hard fist-strike to her collarbone as she twists away too late.

  She snaps and snaps the rubber band against the veins of her wrist. None of this is hurting, not at all. What she can’t solve is the presence of her backpack on the backseat.

  She did not bring it. Dale did, for a reason he won’t tell her. None of your goddamn business whose goddamn business the fuck it is. . . . So all this time, the backpack has ridden along behind her like a translation of the day’s events, events she thought she understood, into a language that she doesn’t know. She snaps the band.

  “Why don’t you give him a ride?”

  They have come up behind that same hooded guy from the Kwik Trip toting a heavy blue bag, in the middle of nowhere, plodding along this tiny potholed road. His breath steams into Dale’s headlights as they swing around a curve. He has nowhere to get out of the way. Pepper worries Dale will hit him. She lunges, pounds the horn. He takes one thick hand off the bag strap and raises a go-fuck-yourself bird into the plunging slop. Dale explodes, rushes his window down, and shoves his own middle finger over the van’s roof, shrieking that the guy should go fuck himself, himself. Pepper snaps the band.

  Finally Dale finds Bottom Road. They cross another iron bridge, then turn down a dark and narrow lane mushy with black mud all churned up in the frozen output of the storm. The lane twists until Dale’s headlights flash on a farm gate and a battered pickup parked alongside.

  A man in coveralls heaves from the truck and turns out to be almost some kind of giant. The expression tall enough to hunt geese travels through Pepper’s mind. Someone once said this about her true dad, Bernard Greengrass, carrier of the Plains Sioux genetic code that gave Pepper long legs.

  The tall man in coveralls spits brown juice through Dale’s headlights, then stoops at his window. With a gnarled and massive hand, he meat-hooks away the coaster Dale got from the tavern—it’s a ticket, Pepper sees—then limps across the slushy mud and swings the gate open.

  “They’re just now telling me,” he looms in to notify Dale, “that on account of the storm this party ends at midnight.”

  “You charge a hundred bucks”—Dale is gearing up to take this guy’s name—“you at least oughta give decent goddamn directions.”

  The big man ignores him. “We don’t want folks stuck in here.”

  “You oughta be ashamed”—Dale stops halfway through the gate—“charging a gate fee for management. A hundred bucks my ass. All I’m doing is bringing a dancer to the show.”

  “What I’m ashamed of is letting my neck get wet jawing with a horse clod like you.”

  “Give me your name,” Dale demands.

  “My name is Ed Burney. But I’m gonna keep it. You’re not out this gate by midnight, I’ll be seeing you again.”

  Dale pulls through, still bitching. Around the next curve, the lane is lined with snow-pasted vehicles tilted into the ditch. The lane goes on. Like some weak-ass turkey bitch at a Dells outlet mall, Dale drives all the way in to where the action is—an abandoned farm, broken machinery, boarded windows, a newish metal barn that pulses with energy—and once there, he throws a fit about no parking, then turns around and drives too fast back out to the end of the line. Pepper marvels. Dale and her stepdad, Felton Henry, they share so much.

  “Get pretty,” Dale commands, snapping on his dome light.

  “I was born pretty.”

  “Don’t fuck with me.”

  Pepper tips the visor mirror down. Cinnamon skin, blue eyes, ass-deep Greengrass black hair. Any beauty issues derive from her half-German mom’s cheese wheel of a face, but Pepper knows how to build cheekbones, how to lift out eyes that look slightly poked into her face. She refreshes her lip gloss. She snaps the rubber band. You can’t hurt me.

  “Who needs to fuck with you?” she follows up with Dale. “You’re too busy fucking with yourself.”

  He is drilling a Basic Light into his lungs. As he exhales, he seems to be letting something go, and his calm surprises her.

  “Keep it up. See where it gets you.”

  14

  Sheriff Kick’s pulse leaped suddenly. A cold sweat broke along her spine. She lifted her right foot, her whole leg trembling.

  She had been doing eighty-five on a snow-covered highway, with almost no visibility, ranting at Sheriff Skog for not believing her, then cursing herself for finally giving in, then acting self-destructively, behavior straight from her darkest of nights.

  She let the cruiser drift down to thirty.

  Now she crawled along, taking deep breaths, squinting through her wipers still at full speed. She was just passing the sign that would have announced her entry into Snake Hollow Township had it not been glommed with sticky snow, when her radio crackled out fragments of Denise that dissolved into static. A moment later her phone stirred in her breast pocket. She camouflaged her inner distress with a dumb bit of banter.

  “Did you miss me already?”

  “Heidi, the radio relay must be iced over again. I’m glad I caught you before you got down into Snake Hollow. Your cell won’t work down there.”

  “You’re not going to tell me I drank your tobacco spit, are you?”

  Her dispatcher let pass about three terrifying
seconds. “Are you there, Denise?”

  “This is a tobacco-free zone, Sheriff. I have no idea what you’re talking about. But if I did, the answer would be no, you’re good. You just stole the rest of my coffee.”

  The sheriff pumped her brakes, brought her speed down even more. She was looking for Weber Ridge, the turn down-hollow toward Faulkner’s farm on Bottom Road. “So what’s up?”

  “You’re gonna have to come back. I just took a ten forty-five from Earwig at the home.”

  The sheriff saw Weber Ridge but didn’t take it. She coasted through the junction feeling the slick macadam under the snow beneath her tires. Who was Earwig? What home? In Dane County, where she had memorized the 10 codes, a 10-45 was a stranded boater.

  “Sorry. Earl Wiggendorf, night supervisor at Bad Axe Manor, tells me somebody just called in a bomb threat. We have to respond.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “A pile of it. But it’s a county facility and there’s protocol in the county legal code. We have to respond.”

  “Ladonna Weeks. She saw me with Calvin Fanta after he had his Singapore Sling.”

  “I wouldn’t put it past her. We don’t have a number to trace, but Earwig said the caller was a woman. Anyway you’d better turn around.”

  She had already started, using the narrow shoulder as she tried to picture the layout of Bad Axe Manor. The first hospital in the region was now a sprawl of dilapidated quarried-sandstone structures beyond the right-field fence of the diamond where the Rattlers played. She hit the gas as hard as she dared, heading back toward Farmstead.

  “So . . . what’s the protocol?”

  “I have it right in front of me: ‘Bad Axe County Emergency Management Bomb Threat Protocol.’ Step one is that I have to notify the emergency management coordinator, who calls the shots, including the deployment of the county sheriff for evacuation and assessment of the threat. So you take orders from the coordinator.”

  “And that’s Marge Joss?”

  “It is. And she’s a Boog Lund kinda gal. She’d like to deploy you right out of town.”