Denise shook her head no, then yes. The sheriff let a long silence pass.
“You know the guy from the hospital this morning? Brock Pabst? He’s the one who beat up Walt Beavers. I was going to kill him last night. I chased him and I ended up in the river. I wanted to kill him this morning. I’ve been out of control.”
Denise nodded and reached out to touch her shoulder, nodding to keep her talking.
“These people seek nothing. The boy zombies steal shit that amounts to nothing and hurt people for no reason. The girl zombies take their clothes off for strangers and they feel nothing. What do they get? What do they want? It’s all about nothing.”
Denise waited, still nodding.
“Fuck all this nothing. I’m at war with it.”
“Yes,” Denise said finally. “Yes, you are. And I can’t blame you. But the favor is, Heidi, before it’s too late, please stop.”
She thought a soda can cracked in the hallway. She thought she heard hissing, drips on the tile. Was Yttri still out there? She waited, heard nothing more.
Denise said, “Can you listen now?”
“I can try.”
“You have to stop. People are talking. The Randy Brundgart thing. Your cruiser in the river. Then Skog comes up here from Crawford County, and supposedly you’re suing them. The board is taking notice. You can’t go around in a cloud of secret vengeance investigating a closed case from another county, not on Bad Axe time, and not on your own time either. It doesn’t matter about Bishops Coulee, it doesn’t matter if you might be right and there’s a killer still out there, it doesn’t matter if you’re wearing blue jeans and driving a minivan with your kids and pretending not to be the Bad Axe County sheriff. You are the Bad Axe County sheriff, and you need to stay that way.”
Denise stopped for breath. She took the sheriff by the shoulders.
“Heidi, nobody is cutting you slack for your pain from the past. You’re in charge here. You’re the boss. It’s not OK to be trigger happy. It’s not OK to drive into the river and not remember why. You can either do this job or you can’t. We need you to do it, we need you to file for the election, but if you can’t separate the past from the present, even the people who support you are going to freak the fuck out. I wouldn’t vote for you either. And Lund will flush your entire career down the toilet. He would love nothing more.”
Denise had moved to the window. She used her reflection against the rainstorm to dab up her smudged mascara. “OK? So here’s the plan,” she said. “So that you don’t fuck this up, here is what I’m asking you to do.”
The sheriff waited uneasily. Was that the squeak of Yttri’s shoes? She took a step closer to the door, cocked her ear.
“Give me the list.”
“What?”
“I know you have a list.”
“List?”
“Harley called. He told me. You have a list of names and you’re going through it. He gave me the idea. Your suspects. Your zombies. Your war plan. Guys who could have killed your mom and dad. Give it to me.”
“But . . .”
Denise scowled as she loaded in a dip of Skoal. Her bottom lip swelled. “Give me the goddamn list. I mean it.”
“But what would you do?”
“Are you kidding me?”
Denise found her can and spit with force.
“Are you fucking kidding me, Heidi? You think I don’t have a talent for sniffing out the very worst men in a tricounty area. I got this. And nobody will know a thing. Do your job.”
In relief, the sheriff’s shoulders fell, her eyes filled, and she closed them.
“I’ll give you a thumb drive tomorrow.”
“Good girl. Now let’s get back to work.”
The sheriff stopped at the door. She lifted the rubber rattlesnake from her side table and dangled it. “By the way, any idea what this means?”
Denise was surprised. Then she made a face and she nodded. Yes, of course she knew.
55
She updated Olaf the Handsome on Walt Beavers’s story as they drove toward Otto Koenig’s place in Red Mound. The warm rain was surging and ebbing. Every low spot on the road sent up a huge splash. Here and there Yttri had to steer around a minor mudslide or a tree limb in the road.
“Rattlers players?” he repeated. “They gang-raped her, then killed her?” He couldn’t quite believe it yet. “And they tried to pin it on Walt and Lyman Beavers? What was the deal again?”
“Walt Beavers got to be a Rattlers coach. The kid, Angus, went away to an expensive baseball academy. And for that, Lyman Beavers would take care of the body. His brother is not sure what he did with it.”
Yttri processed this through a long curve where the road was half under water. “And now jumping to the present,” he said, “Walt Beavers confirmed that Pepper Greengrass was at the party. And he’s seen King Cream doing business on Backpage.com.”
“He thinks the guy is from around here, like Kling thought.”
Her deputy slowed, looking through his wipers for a turn. “Dark out here. I’m sorry if I made Denise upset, pushing her about Ripp. But she’d seen that rubber rattlesnake before?”
“Right. Personal experience. It’s a team thing. Some kind of initiation for girls who want to show their loyalty to the Rattlers. It goes back a ways, Denise thought maybe thirty or more years, back to the eighties sometime. She knows it from the late nineties.”
The sheriff was still trying to wrap her head around such a sad and degrading idea. A visit to a cave, a rattlesnake named Buster Hymen Johnson, bare breasts, a photograph, and then you were a Cave Girl, which apparently earned you the right to be exclusively molested.
“The point, Denise thinks, is that the snake is kept in a cave on Rush Creek.”
“OK,” Yttri said. “I think I know where that is.”
“As a reformed Cave Girl herself, she’s almost positive that it’s the same snake. At least it’s one just like it. Either way, she thinks the intention is to tell me I should go to the cave. She said it’s on Faulkner’s land upstream from the bridge over Bottom Road. Is that the one you’re thinking of?”
“I fish through there a couple times a year,” he said. “I know it well.”
She and Olaf the Handsome both fell quiet for a while. They were getting close to Otto Koenig’s place.
“I know you know this,” Yttri said at last, “but you’ve had people throwing curves at you since this whole thing started. I’m not sure you want to get led. You want to stay under control.”
She glanced at him. Stay under control? Had he heard from the hallway?
There was no vehicle on the premises of Koenig’s small ridgetop farm. No one answered the door when they knocked.
“Let’s check the barn,” the sheriff said.
They stepped back into the rain. It rattled off their yellow slickers as they passed through the barnyard. It smelled like fresh manure, so Koenig still had an animal or two. Sure enough, they heard hoof-sucking noises in the dark. Then they could see spots of white through the rainy gloom. Then some plane in the darkness was broken by three massive black-and-white creatures with steaming nostrils and rolling eight-ball eyes, hungry for attention, bowing the barbed-wire fence for a scratch on the nose.
Yttri paused to satisfy one. He said, “It’s almost like someone has figured out how to get under your skin, how to make you dangerous to yourself.”
Yes, she was thinking, and it’s almost like someone lingered in the hallway.
“You’re the one in charge,” he went on. “We’re all in trouble if you get your wires crossed. Lund will ruin you.”
That made her eye him sideways, frowning beneath the cowl of her slicker. He scratched the cow’s nose. “This job can really trigger your emotions.”
She couldn’t contain it anymore. “You know, it’s nice that you left me and Denise alone. Thanks for that. Emotion makes us stronger. It’s something men don’t get.”
“OK. You’re welcome.”
; She shined her flashlight at the side of her deputy’s face, bisected by his dripping hood. The cow began to lick the sleeve of his rain slicker.
“You had no business listening.”
“Listening? I got a soda. Then I took a call in the dispatch room. Some guy jackknifed a horse trailer over a gully in Dutch Hollow. A flash flood hit him broadside, flipped the trailer, which torqued the truck onto its side . . .”
He finally put a hand up to block the beam. “I’m not sure what I’m doing wrong here.”
She kept the beam on him. The cow’s twelve-inch tongue got too close to Yttri’s face. He backed away. She sighed and released him. “Never mind.”
She moved her beam across the door of Koenig’s small, tilted barn. Its emptiness chilled her, and it looked about to collapse. She shined her light up the road. She listened to her deputy exhale, like he was waiting to see if he was safe to continue. He finally did.
“Koenig isn’t here. If he was, his cows wouldn’t act like this. His vehicle’s gone. We’d be better off canvassing the bars.”
“No,” she said. “Take me there.”
“Where?”
“To that cave.”
She sensed his hesitation. “What?”
“There are a lot of rubber snakes, Sheriff. There are a lot of psychos and haters out there too. And you know somebody’s been messing with you.”
She put her flashlight back in his face. He said, “I’m just saying maybe we should stick with basic police work and find Koenig first. And with flash floods, I don’t think we should try to get to that cave tonight. It’s dangerous even at low water in the daylight.”
“Let’s go.”
Yttri looked at her too long.
“Lead me, Deputy.”
He winced as he shrugged. “Somebody sure is.”
56
She rode with Yttri across the Red Mound ridge and down into Snake Hollow, her second visit in two nights. The storm clouds bellied low, dropped sheets of rain, and it was all dark along the sluicing gravel roads, the headlights of Yttri’s Tahoe boring like drill bits through the drop-speckled black. He stopped at a bridge where the swollen Bad Axe River boiled through the upstream guardrail and skimmed at uncertain depth over the road. They got out and looked.
“If we cross this,” Yttri judged, “we may not get back.”
She splashed out to the center, surprised at the push of the water as it flooded into her boots. “It’s only hubcap-deep. Let’s go.”
“Sheriff, I don’t know.”
He shined his flashlight upstream. Normally a dainty spring-fed river, the Bad Axe looked ominously wide and flat and brown. The lower boughs of stream-bank trees swept and bounced on the current. Heavy flotsam spun through Yttri’s beam.
“I think we should turn around and see if we can get in from the other direction. Maybe that South Fork bridge isn’t breached.”
Her boots squished as she passed him. “Let’s go.”
Yttri’s gaze lingered on the swollen Bad Axe as he folded back into his cruiser. His Tahoe forded the floodwater. In the next hollow, he slowed at another inundated bridge, this one overcome by Rush Creek, a few miles upstream from where it fed the Bad Axe. Taillights receded ahead of them, disappeared in the rain.
“This is it?”
“This is the other end of Faulkner’s land right here. That’s Rush Creek. That cave is on the creek, up that canyon. No way we should go up there.”
“Lead on.”
“Sheriff, this could cut loose any minute. That canyon could fill up in seconds. That cave will be under water.”
“With a girl in it, if I’m guessing right, maybe Pepper Greengrass. Let’s go.”
“We can’t leave the cruiser this close—”
“You wanna wait here and watch it? Catch me when I come floating down? Or just park it uphill a little?”
She hiked behind him up the ill-used road, so narrow that branches raked their shoulders. The road penetrated dense woods for several hundred yards, staying just above the creek’s flooded margins. Then the canyon tightened and the road elevated to rocky ground, continuing on crumbling road cuts that must have been traveled by horse-drawn milk trollies and logging sleds. The roar of the creek below was deafening. At last Yttri stopped. His tone was neutral.
“The trail goes down here.”
He shined his flashlight down the ravine side of the road.
“The cave is on the other side of the creek.”
She followed his beam down a steep tumble of brush and rocks. A hundred feet below, mud-brown water coursed from right to left, its pace measured by a length of shattered tree that spun through the beam.
“A flash flood will fill this ravine. All these side gullies are draining the ridgetops, all the farmland up there. It’s a timing thing. It all hits at once. This will fill up in seconds.”
He held his light on the spot where the trail met the water and disappeared beneath foam.
She thrust her phone toward him. “Hold my beer.”
“Ha. Sure.” She saw his perfect teeth, bared in an anxious smile. “Sheriff, seriously—”
“Oh, I’m totally serious. When you fish, how do you get down there?”
“On my ass. I use a stick. Look, there’s just way too much water. And it’s only getting started. This is not worth the risk, Sheriff.”
“A stick like this?” she asked him, grabbing a broken branch and heading down.
57
She unsnapped her own flashlight at the bottom and shined it on Rush Creek at close range. She was a coulee girl. She had seen high water. She had once forded Cress Creek on her family’s farm after ten inches of rain had flashed the creek out of its banks and separated a week-old calf from its mother. Nothing about that rescue had been pretty. Maybe in some ways it was stupid. She had cut herself on something under water, and she had badly dislocated her thumb. But she had brought the calf back.
At close range the creek was opaque with mud, fast and inscrutable. It could be two feet deep or ten. But either way it was no more than twenty feet across, and her beam reached the cave, about four feet above a foam-swirled eddy. There, an overhanging lip of limestone looked eroded by the oily touch of human handprints. A shoe, half charred by fire, bobbed in the eddy, nearly caught by the pell-mell current before it spun back upstream past the gulping throat of the cave. She put her stick in the water ahead of her and stepped in.
She was drowning instantly. The current flipped her so fast that she was midinhale when her face hit the water, quicker than her brain could stop her diaphragm. Water rushed into her lungs, and as she was tossed downstream she had no chance to open her mouth and expel it. This was drowning, so sudden, this was what drowning felt like—this stifled coughing, this retching stuck inside her, her own air exploding in her neck and face and blowing up inside a brain that launched signals that her helpless body could not answer. She was drowning.
She spun and her legs struck a rock. The current stood her up—for a split-second she inhaled more water—and then the water’s power tossed her headfirst. Now she was somersaulting, her hands raking up the stream bottom, the current a thousand times stronger than gravity or her own failing grasp.
Next, a lightning bolt inside her heart muscle, a dull chill after it. She spun, losing awareness, the water feeling strangely hot as she drifted feetfirst with her arms and legs loose, her eyes open on nothing . . . then jarred back to consciousness by a sticky, bristly sensation, the pressure of the current folding her against the fulcrum of her waist, bending her up into sharp objects.
Then her blind head emerged. She twisted with all her strength and grabbed anything while the water levered her until she thought her spine would snap. At last she was pushed as far as she could be pushed. Her eyes came open. The current had jammed her into the madly jittering top of a downed tree, beside another body.
She heard Yttri hollering. She coughed water, vomited so hard it burst into her ear canals. She fought her head around
to see. The current pinned her to another body. Side to side. A small body, cold and bent. A girl’s gray eyes gazing into hers.
She ripped the dead girl through branches, dragged her halfway ashore by her thick and mealy ankles. Was this Pepper Greengrass? Yttri’s light flashed. He was working downstream, hanging on to limbs and brush.
It seemed like forever that she hung on to the body rather than protect herself as she was shoved and bumped along by the rising creek. She hit a tree, sieved through a submerged thicket of buckthorn or wild rose, took a cruising deadfall branch to the back of the head. Then Yttri got there. He pulled her ashore by her uniform belt. He put his beam on the body as it hung facedown across her lap.
“Look,” he panted. “Look at that.”
Etched crudely with a knife into the small of the girl’s back, written in wormy old welts: KING CREAM.
She was a short-legged blonde. She was half frozen. This was Sophie Ringensetter. And King Cream, whoever he was, wherever he was now, had Pepper Greengrass.
58
He spits, cuts, wipes. He smears ink, wipes, hisses Dickel through his teeth. He cuts, smears ink, wipes, spits Dickel. He tells her one time this silly little cuntling forgot who she belonged to and thought these young pricks were hot shit and thought it was hers to give away and how did Pepper think that idea worked out for little miss cuntling? That’s right, not at all.
“You’re mine now.”
“I know.”
“You’re lucky.
“I know that.”
* * *
Later, inside his sleeper cab, she can’t lie on her back, on the fresh tattoo. She has to take him on her hands and knees. He keeps the light on. Whatever he does back there is brief and drunkenly performed and leaves him sucking air through his ruined lungs. When she turns around his shirt is hanging open on that silver pistol holstered in the pit of his chest.
Bad Axe County Page 24