Bad Axe County

“You ain’t never been loved like that before.”

  “I know,” she says. “I know that.”

  “You had more than you could handle.”

  “Way more. I know.”

  He buttons his shirt. He smacks the light off and collapses beside her. Several dark and heavy minutes later he is confessing in gasps that he is bad sometimes, but not as bad as he seems, because he just needs to be respected. People need respect. Why can’t people just respect each other the way they’re supposed to? He’s bad sometimes, but that’s only what he does, not what he is. Respect him, everything is fine. Why won’t she say anything?

  “I know,” she whispers.

  “I understand,” she purrs.

  “Shhh,” she soothes him as her fingers travel in a searching caress. She finds the box cutter retracted in his back pocket, slips it out and palms it, easy.

  * * *

  Later again, all is black inside the sleeper. The rain stops tapping. Coyotes begin to howl. Then from somewhere below she hears a whip-poor-will, whip-poor-will, whip-poor-will, relentless in the greater darkness.

  I have the blade. Pepper sings along toward dawn. I have the blade, I have the blade, I have the blade.

  59

  The rain stopped. Barn owls hooted. Coyotes hollered behind the scrap yard. Angus heard the whip-poor-will up on Battle Bluff. He said, “Dad, come on. I left her over in the cave on Faulkner’s and tried to help the new sheriff find her. Now come on.”

  “Next snufbitch tries Lyman Beavers is gonna take a waterslide.”

  “OK. Sure. But let’s get somewhere safe.”

  “Down this pipe, whoosh, all the way from here to Norlins.”

  His dad was reeling on his pills. He was feeling no pain. “I’m going to get Brandy,” Angus told him. “We got her friend’s car still. We’ll go over to the Pronto station in Bishops Coulee. They’re open all night. Let’s get some of those mini egg rolls and a soda. Well just stay in there for now and be safe.”

  “You know who. Flush that fat snufbitch like a turd.”

  “Let’s go.”

  Angus stood exhausted in the waning dark and listened to the bird calling from the bluff beyond the meadow. Whip-poor-will, whip-poor-will, whip-poor will, whip-poor-will. He remembered being up at the outlook with Boog Lund just hours ago, looking down here. So close but so far.

  “Come on, Dad. Before you fall in and go to New Orleans yourself. Leave that. That ain’t gonna work. Come on.”

  When he came home from the cave, Angus had found his dad slinging more of other people’s garbage down his waterslide, or so he thought at first. By now a torrent of meltwater crashed through the pipe. It roared two hundred yards beneath the scrap and under the road. It was too dark to see yet, but Angus could hear it disgorging from the pipe mouth, a retching spew of sound, gushing and splattering into the meadow. But instead of sending garbage down to Bishops Coulee, his dad had claimed to be making a trap.

  “Lookit this,” he said again proudly.

  “That ain’t really gonna work,” Angus said. “Let’s go.”

  “Hell it ain’t. Your granddaddy Beavers used to pit trap black bear back when there was black bear in here. He caught one too. Me and Walter killed it throwing rocks.”

  He had stretched a tattered sheet of canvas across the hole above the opening in the pipe. He had weighted the corners with tires. When Angus had first found him up here, he was feebly kicking clots of mud and gravel onto the canvas, trying to make it look like the scrap yard ground around it, the way you disguised a pit trap. Now he twisted out of Angus’s grip and kicked more. The canvas slipped its corner weights, crumpled down, and with a whoosh it was sucked away down the pipe, gone. His dad had more old canvas. Feebly he began to shake it out.

  “Dad, they’re going to find her body now. I waited in that quarry off Bottom Road. I saw a sheriff’s car, and two of them went up there.”

  “Your granddad got a lot of deer too, ain’t wasn’t any season. That way the government never heard any gunshots.”

  “Word is going to get out fast. We can’t stay here.”

  “Sawdust,” said his dad. “Fetch me a barrow of that goddamn sawdust in the Quonset.”

  Now down the west end of Lost Hollow came headlights.

  “Dad—”

  As the vehicle pulled under the pink spray of the yard light, Angus could see it was the same faded-red pickup with the snowplow blade that he had seen from up on Battle Bluff, when Boog Lund had kept him away from home while his dad and Brandy got hurt. And he hadn’t got Brandy out of the house yet.

  He ran. In his headlamp-jarred field of vision, a figure in a hooded sweatshirt nearly fell from the pickup. He got his balance. Angus kept running. The figure reached back into the pickup and took out a gas can. He had trouble holding on to the can. Angus kept coming. Now one arm was looped through the gas can handle. It hung from his elbow like a purse while his two hands weirdly gripped a pistol and he tottered toward the house. He hadn’t shut his truck off. Angus hollered at him. “Hey!” He turned and fired and Angus twisted to avoid it, a batter’s box pirouette, a bullet at a thousand feet per second. He was hit before he moved.

  He was down, dazed, hearing that gun banging off inside the house. He forced himself up. Two more shots. He was on his feet. No pain yet. As he hunched toward the porch he heard a fourth shot. He lifted one of the cinder-block steps—now he felt a scorch of pain—but he hung on and took the block with him, a heavy, sharp-cornered weapon wielded in his big fist, that pain exploding into rage. A fifth shot from the gun.

  Inside, that gas can spun on its side on the kitchen floor, draining out amid the hoarded trash. Angus heard a scuffle in the hallway to the bedrooms, Brandy still alive because now she was screaming. He found her riding the attacker’s back while he staggered. His hood was off. He had no hair, no ears, no nose. He had holes. Brandy’s fingers plugged those holes like the holes in a bowling ball and she rode him as he lurched backward and slammed her into the wall.

  Brandy lost her grip. He flung her off. As he turned to finish her with the gun—clumsily, his fingers short and webbed with bright pink flesh—Angus gathered off his back foot and swung the cinder block against the side of his head. The blow dropped him on the spot, a sack of flesh inside his clothes.

  “Come on, Brandy. Come on, let’s go.”

  “That’s S’more. That’s mine and Brock’s friend.”

  He lay there twitching, muttering filth, his face like melted wax around those holes. Gasoline trickled under him. Angus saw movement at his side, those half fingers snapping at a lighter. He stomped the hand, crushed the bones, splintered the lighter.

  “Come on.”

  He pushed Brandy outside.

  “Where’s Dad?”

  “Up the yard. Messing around. I’ll go get him.” Angus bent where the bullet had struck him. “Get into his truck. He left it running.”

  “That was S’more. Yesterday he said don’t tell no one he was here or he’d kill me.”

  “Today he came to do it.”

  “But he was mine and Brock’s friend.”

  “Get in that truck. I’m fetching Dad. That won’t be the last of it.”

  He shoved her at the truck. He pulled his shirt up, saw a crease of open flesh above his hip. It hurt but not enough to stop him. At the top of the scrap yard, his dad had covered the hole over the pipe again, anchored more canvas with more tires. He had wheelbarrowed moldy sawdust from the heap in the Quonset shed. He had scattered the sawdust over the canvas. As Angus saw it in the dim predawn, as a pit trap it did not look half bad.

  “Let’s go.”

  “Get some chairs.”

  “Dad—”

  “This is gonna be a good show.”

  “We gotta go somewhere.”

  “Hell no. Get some chairs. We know who’s coming next. We’re gonna watch that snufbitch take a ride.”

  He strutted the uphill side of his trap, cocking his unswollen eye at the
road. Angus touched his wound and winced. His hand came back bloody. “He ain’t gonna step on your damn trap, Dad. He’s just going to shoot you.”

  “Naw, he ain’t gonna shoot me. That ain’t his style.” His dad wheezed a laugh. “Snufbitch is gonna come up here making threats and trying to cut another deal with me. He don’t think enough of me to shoot me. But this time he’s gonna take a ride all the way to Norlins, dead as a crawdad in a coon turd. Go and call him up.”

  * * *

  That melted face gasped in the hallway. His twitching body had sponged up spilled gas. Angus pickup up his pistol and opened the cylinder. There was one round left. He pushed the cylinder back in place. He rolled the wax man over, slapped his pockets, found his phone. His last received text said Go finish it. Angus touched the number.

  “We’re still here,” he said. “We want to talk.”

  “Who does? Who is this?”

  Angus held the phone away and shot the man with the wax face through his forehead. His brains blew back across the floor, greasy and pink, spreading in the puddle of gas. Angus brought the phone back in.

  “Beavers,” he told Boog Lund.

  60

  Sophie Ringensetter thawed in lurid brightness on the logging road.

  The Bishops Coulee Volunteer Fire Department, deploying ATVs that towed utility trailers, had brought in a generator and floodlights. Deputy Eleffson circled the body with an evidence camera, while Schwem led VFD searchers along the near side of the raging creek. She had taken Yttri’s Tahoe keys and sent him on foot upstream to find a crossing point over smaller water. If he could get down the other side and into the cave, the sheriff would send more people to search it. Vernon County was sending mutual aid deputies. She had alerted Groetzner’s Funeral Home, the de facto county morgue. The county coroner, Herb Elder, was on his way to Groetzner’s to wait for a body that he would not know what to do with. Time of death: four years ago.

  The sheriff was on hold for Rick Rogers, the sheriff in Allamakee County, Iowa. Sheriff Rogers came on. Their connection wasn’t good.

  “I need you to notify family,” she told him, “and send someone to the morgue over here.”

  “Aww, God . . . those poor people . . .”

  She felt it too, swallowed a surge of sadness. “We need a positive ID. It seems like she was frozen and just moved to where we found her. She still has all her basic features. There may still be physical evidence preserved.”

  “Aww . . . hell. . . . God help us . . .”

  Deputies Bench and Dowel had been called on duty early, overtime issues be damned. Crawford County had agreed to help with flood-related calls and traffic as much as they could. All this time, the sheriff’s mind had been on Pepper Greengrass—and on Angus Beavers, who was coming into focus as part of this. That was him at Clausen Meats, she felt sure now, trying to put Sophie Ringensetter into the freezer. She gave Deputy Dowel control of the crime scene and hiked back out to Bottom Road. There she had a shock. Rush Creek had swallowed the bridge. It flowed a hundred feet wide, only the bridge’s reflector posts sticking up. She took Yttri’s Tahoe.

  On the ridgetop, as she detoured south to pick up U.S. 14, the long way around to Lost Hollow Road, her phone stirred against her skittering heart. A message had drifted in from sometime earlier in the night. “Heidi,” Harley began through static, “I’m sorry if I haven’t told you everything you need to know. I guess there’s a lot of bad stuff that I just want to deny is out there, because I can’t stand thinking that you might have to deal with it. But I’m going to try. I’m sorry. I love you.” He paused and there was background noise. “OK, kiddies, hit it.”

  They sang her “Llama Llama Red Pajama” until the connection was lost. She covered the wet highway sniffling and gripping the wheel so tightly that her elbows went numb.

  Then Denise was calling.

  “OK, Heidi. Here’s what I have. Angus Beavers played for the Jacksonville Jumbo Shrimp. They say he just disappeared two days ago. They say he had a big blue gear bag.”

  “OK. That was him. I was just now heading to the junkyard.”

  “But also, Heidi?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “We found Otto Koenig.”

  * * *

  The most recent wave of rain had just stopped as she finished the circuitous drive and pulled into the Kwik Trip in Zion. A disheveled man slumped at one of the two small café tables inside, scratching his way through an impressive stack of lottery tickets.

  “Been here all night,” the clerk said.

  He looked harmless, depressed, and exhausted. It was hard to imagine he had the willpower to commit any crime, let alone two acts of sexual violence. Still, she approached warily.

  “These are the fresh ones,” he informed her as she arrived at his table. “I been waiting on the fresh ones.”

  “I need to see some ID, please.”

  He had his driver’s license out already. That was interesting, as if he knew she was coming. Yes, this was Otto Koenig.

  “Today is when the fresh ones come in. The fresh ones are the best.”

  “The scratch-off tickets get stale, do they?”

  “They get the stink on them.”

  “The stink.”

  “Yes, ma’am, the stink.”

  “Mr. Koenig, Allamakee County has a report from four years ago saying you saw a girl at the Ease Inn, a runaway, somebody they were looking for.”

  “I used to get my fresh tickets at the Ease Inn. Now the delivery stops here first.”

  “Mr. Koenig, listen,” she said sharply. She waited for his attention. “You’re a witness in an Allamakee County sheriff’s report about a missing girl a few years ago. Yes?”

  He slumped more deeply over his tickets, looking down at them.

  “Yes.”

  “Can you tell me what you saw?”

  “A little blond girl with blue hairpins.”

  “How did you know they were looking for her?”

  “I saw her picture at the Pronto station over in Lansing,” he said and sighed deeply, “where I get my fresh Iowa tickets. I saw her face on a poster and recognized her from seeing her at the Ease Inn. I called it in to Allamakee.” He began to grip his oily hair. “They sent a deputy to Red Mound to talk to me.”

  Was he nervous? Lying? She couldn’t tell. She took a half step back and put her hands to her belt. For now, keep him talking.

  “When you saw her at the Ease Inn, she was doing what?”

  “Oh, yeah, well, she was hanging around, chatting with a fella next to his pickup. It looked like he was mad at her. He kept pulling her by the neck and kinda hissing at her.” He looked up with sad eyes. Did he want her to pity him? Or chase someone else?

  “What else did you see?”

  “I came back out with my tickets, he had got her inside his truck.”

  “Did you know who he was?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “But you told Allamakee what he was doing with the girl?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “You described the man?”

  “Yes, I did. Kinda long hair in the back, I guess. Mustache that went down around his mouth. Jeans, boots.”

  The sheriff looked away. Otto Koenig had just described half the young men in Bad Axe County, including just about any player on the Rattlers, including her own husband. It was an easy lie, if he was telling one.

  “Can you describe his truck?”

  “I didn’t pay attention to it.”

  “You talked to the deputy from Allamakee County on August 13. Did Allamakee ever come back and talk to you again?”

  “No,” he said. “But later that day Sheriff Gibbs did.”

  That startled her. Gibbs did?

  “And you told Sheriff Gibbs?”

  “No, Sheriff Gibbs told me. He came out to my place to tell me that they found the girl and not to worry about it. Later the same day Deputy Lund stopped by and said the same thing. They were both in street clothes, just
dropping by neighborly. She was found, they both told me, don’t worry.”

  “So you didn’t worry about it.”

  “Until now.”

  Otto Koenig looked up at her with surprising clear intensity. No, he wasn’t lying. No, he was not King Cream.

  “Ma’am, I know you’re talking to me about that little girl for some reason. And I’m guessing it’s because those two sonsofbitches took off their badges, Gibbs and Lund, and lied to me.”

  “Yes. They did. We found that girl’s body a few hours ago. She was murdered.”

  “Then . . .” He fiddled with his tickets, stacking and restacking. “Then it’s a good deal that I can tell you who he was, this fella who acted like he owned her.”

  “You just said you didn’t know who he was.”

  “I’m not a liar, ma’am. I’m a lotta things. You probably looked me up and you know that. But I didn’t know who he was at the time when Allamakee asked me. Then I did, the next day, after Sheriff Gibbs and Boog Lund talked to me. But by then it didn’t matter who he was, if the girl was found OK, which is what they told me and what I believed. It wasn’t no longer any of my business.”

  His eyes had clouded. He was tearing up, stung by the girl’s death and by the lie that Gibbs and Lund had told him.

  “I need the name. And how you know it.”

  “I won a hundred bucks on a Powerball ticket. I went back to the Ease Inn the next day to cash it. I saw that same fella gassing up his truck. Black truck, now that I paid attention. He was going somewhere. It looked like everything he owned was in the back of that truck. Just to be friendly I said, ‘Off to seek your fortune, I guess.’ ”

  Suddenly her face burned and she could hardly hear his voice. Harley had been driving from Middleton to the Bad Axe for Rattlers games. They had two new babies, were outfitting a double nursery. He had been hauling back furniture from the estate of an uncle who had passed away, using an old black Ford F-250.

  Koenig continued, “Well, that fella just about shaved my ass with the look he gave me. I got inside the store, I was just curious, so I asked the clerk who the gentleman was. She said, ‘Him?’ ”