Bad Axe County

  The sheriff’s breath stuck.

  “She said, ‘Him? That’s no gentleman, that’s Baron Ripp.’ ”

  She blinked at Otto Koenig, her mind already racing away.

  “The Ripps of Dutch Hollow,” he went on, “the youngest son of Roger Ripp. I heard his dad ran him out for using drugs and stealing. He used to truck cattle. You know who I mean?”

  She was all the way out of the Kwik Trip and into Yttri’s Tahoe, already with an idea of how to find Baron Ripp, when she said to no one, “Yeah . . . yeah . . . I know who you mean.”

  A bad old idea had just become her best new one. She turned her cruiser toward the Rolling Ground Shooting Range and smashed the gas.

  DAYBREAK

  Cindy Lemke @groundbeef

  @BadAxeCountySheriff don’t listen to the haters, you are a real bad axe #dairyqueen #yougogirl

  61

  He snores sprawled across her legs, across the sleeper doorway, his arms crossed over the pistol at his chest.

  Pepper Greengrass waits for daylight.

  Waits. Waits.

  Listens to the whip-poor-will, whip-poor-will, whip-poor-will.

  Breathes in his Dickel sweat, his fungal feet, his tavern-Dumpster exhalations. Her brother Bennie told her if the current takes you, go with it. Don’t fight it if it’s too strong, just go with it. Keep your head up, keep breathing, everything washes up eventually.

  * * *

  At last the new day breaks for Pepper, first as a linty gray that fills the half-moon window of his sleeper, then as a column of lighter darkness breaking over the lump of him where the sleeper opens into the tractor cab. Within minutes the whip-poor-will shuts down and in the plain new light she can see his face better than she wants to, a fortysomething hag of a man with bad teeth, big ears, lips flapping as he snores.

  Pepper has the box cutter. She catches the tab with her thumb and snicks the point out. The blade is made to break off in brittle half inches. But she could cut an artery. She pictures the slash, his oily blood, the fight for the gun. But go with the flow, Bennie said.

  She sits up, crosses her legs, watches him, snicking the blade point in and out. She has no clothes on. The carving on her back is hot and sticky. It stings. But what is the flow? This is what she waits to know.

  Now she has it. So many times she has reviewed how it all blew back on her with her stepdad, Felton Henry. Now she sees the flow is trust. The flow is he gets out first. Everything changes then. If he gets out first, because he trusts her, his choice becomes chase her or chase his truck. And men, as Pepper knows them . . .

  She nudges him awake.

  “I found this.”

  “Huh?”

  Into the shaft of gray light she extends the palm of her hand with the box cutter on it, its blade drawn into the yellow plastic sheath still crusted with blood and ink from her back.

  “I found this. I guess it fell out of your pocket. Don’t you want it?”

  He pries up on an elbow. He pats his chest to feel the gun. God, what a rat-faced little shit he is, squinting at the knife, finally taking it. He returns it to his back pocket and falls back asleep. Afloat in the flow, Pepper waits.

  62

  She felt less sure as she sped toward Crawford County. A horrific old idea had become the best new one she could think of.

  She was Heidi White then, fallen Dairy Queen. Twelve years ago, lost in grief and rage, high on booze and weed, and desperate to find a bad guy, she had presented the wrong gun, the .38 Cobra that Crawford County gave back to her, to Cecil Mertz at his Rolling Ground Shooting Range. Did he know the gun? Mertz had said yes. Did he recall who he sold it to? Mertz had said he recalled, and his answer, a lie, had sent her off with the intent to kill Dalton Rockwell, an innocent man.

  But that old story had a new point. The point was no longer the evil of Cecil Mertz’s lie. The new point was this: Mertz had known exactly where she could find Rockwell. Every zombie lowlife in a tricounty area, Mertz knew where to find them. That was her gamble.

  Sheriff Kick tore south on U.S. 14, detouring around the flooded Kickapoo River through a string of high-ground villages, using her siren twice to move milk trucks. She crossed into Crawford County, plunged back down alongside the Kickapoo, sped past what used to be Cress Springs Farm, her family’s place, crossed the swollen river on the new bridge at Gays Mills, then climbed again, at last careering along the hogback ridge toward the phantom town of Rolling Ground and Cecil Mertz’s shooting range. With five miles to go, Denise called and read over speakerphone everything law enforcement had on Baron Ripp. After a string of offenses in the Bad Axe and neighboring counties, Ripp’s rap sheet had moved west in 2012. In Williston, North Dakota, epicenter of the fracking boom, he had been busted for methamphetamine possession, pandering, battery, and check fraud.

  “Denise, I have to ask.”

  “Please don’t.”

  “I need anything germane to finding him.”

  “I got nothing.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Exclusively drunken sex on his favorite dirty picnic table, the same place every time. He was needy and possessive, and he blamed me for making him feel that way. He broke my arm.”

  The sheriff exhaled, let the cruiser coast into Rolling Ground. Ahead was Mertz’s range.

  “He broke your arm? I didn’t hear that on his rap sheet.”

  “I never told anybody. I said I fell off my horse.”

  They shared a silence.

  “We need to contact people in North Dakota, let them know we want him if he shows up there. We need an APB between here and there and we need to extend the Amber Alert.”

  “I’m on it.”

  “And, Denise?”

  “Yes, my queen?”

  “You don’t deserve anything he did to you.”

  “I know. I know, I know, I know . . .”

  She wrenched the cruiser to a stop on potholed gravel outside the range. She burped her siren to call out Mertz. Waiting, she gazed at the fog-shrouded shabbiness of the range, where nothing had changed: Mertz’s perimeter of cinder blocks, sandbags, and snow fence, his graveyard of bleached and busted deer torsos, the abandoned apple orchards that flanked the sick old man like the black-limbed invaders he needed to keep his paranoid fantasies alive.

  Here he came, shuffling out of his collapsing house in a bathrobe and slippers, mouthing curses in her direction. One thing had changed: he was much frailer, looked pathetic and defenseless at a distance. When he reached the shooting range he hooked a claw through his sagging fence and glared fearfully at the Tahoe. She could read his mind. All these years, the Crawford County sheriff had left him alone. But now here she was, that damaged girl he’d done his best to ruin, coming at him as the sheriff from the Bad Axe.

  She was out of the Tahoe. He scuffed away into his shooting shack. She followed into a grim cold space that still smelled of rat poison, bullet brass, and cigars. A poster lit by dirty window light pictured Ronald Reagan bottle-feeding a monkey. Mertz had gone behind his counter.

  “I’m here about Baron Ripp.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “I’m sure you know. He killed a girl.”

  Mertz retrieved a pack of Phillies from a pocket of his bathrobe. As he shucked one cigar from its plastic he eyed her up and down, his nude head spotted with necrotic brown.

  “Killed one, huh? Was she cute?”

  She had no time to feel that. “He has another girl right now.”

  Mertz snapped a Zippo. He twisted the cigar between his lips and the flame, squinting at her through the eruption of smoke.

  “I see. Another girl. Well, same question. Is she cute?”

  “I’ll ruin you, Mr. Mertz. It’s way overdue.”

  “Ha.” He spewed smoke and coughed—and spat—and tried again to laugh and coughed more. She had to look away. The caption on the poster showing a president bottle-feeding a monkey said I’ll be damned . . . Reagan used to babysit Obama.

>   When Mertz recovered he parked his cigar in an ashtray.

  “You’ll ruin me? How so?”

  As he was asking, both hands drifted beneath the counter. She had no time to gamble on his intentions. She shot her left hand across and caught the throat of his robe. Sure enough, as she hauled him across the counter he was spraying mace toward the ceiling with one hand and with the other hand wildly firing a pistol as if shooting at his slippers flying off across the room. She slammed him to the concrete, heard his skull hit. His grip opened. She batted his weapons away and jammed her Ruger behind his ear.

  “You tell me how to find Baron Ripp, Mr. Mertz, or I’ll leave your brains on this floor right here. That’s how so.”

  A mace cloud descended over them. Her eyes were tearing. She was starting to gag.

  “Tell me where to look for Ripp. Why is he in town? Where would he be?” She worried she had knocked him out. She dug in with the barrel. She slapped him. He wheezed and his rheumy eyes came flinching open. “Tell me now.”

  * * *

  Five minutes later she was reporting to Denise.

  “Ripp traffics stolen construction equipment from out west. He works with Dermit and Ladonna Weeks. They broker the stuff out of Faulkner’s barns. He drives a red tractor cab. He takes girls back the other way, apparently. I’m on my way to Faulkner’s now.”

  The farm gate was chained. She plowed her cruiser through and heard the gate strike a tree. The Bad Axe River had risen nearly into the driveway. She spun through fresh tire ruts in the mud. At least one heavy vehicle had entered since the party two nights ago.

  She cornered the main barn and found the swampy tractor road that Yttri mentioned, which led deeper into the property. A quarter mile in, she saw the gray roofs of the two hidden barns. She stopped and approached behind the tree line, on foot.

  But there was no red tractor cab—just a sooty trailer like she had seen in the lot of the Ease Inn yesterday. Down a ramp out of the trailer backed a forklift. On its tines hung a huge spool of copper wire. At the forklift controls was the blimp shape of Dermit Weeks. She crept closer, made sure. No, Ripp was not around.

  Then she was running, reaching the cruiser, jerking it through a Y-turn and heading out. She tossed her phone on the passenger seat and hollered toward its speaker as she snaked out the muddy farm road.

  “He’s still in the Bad Axe!”

  She hit the end of Faulkner’s driveway, Bottom Road ahead.

  “Denise, I’m sorry . . . but you had drunken sex on which picnic table . . . his favorite dirty picnic table . . . where?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Where did Ripp take you?”

  “Really, Heidi? How much do I need to relive that trip to hell?”

  “He’s waiting for his trailer to get unloaded. He’s hiding somewhere with Pepper Greengrass, taking her west when he’s done. Come on, Denise. Where is his favorite spot?”

  “Oh, God . . .”

  “Yell at me, Denise!” The Tahoe’s engine roared as she waited for direction. “Tell me where to go!”

  63

  She should have made Felton Henry chase his truck. This is the flow she went against the first time. A man and his truck. Truck versus woman. This is the flow she rides now.

  Pepper Greengrass has light enough inside the sleeper cab to see some other girl’s skirt and top and panties wadded on a shelf below his tiny TV. This is good, because she won’t get very far nude. She stretches to reach. Her back stings but she ignores it. She snags a corner of the clothing wad. Tugging gently, she makes it fall down into her lap. This doesn’t stir him, still sprawled across her legs. Taking her time, she aligns a hole in each garment, shoves the clothing up her arm, storing it for later. She puts that arm behind her back. She bends at the waist and blows into his hairy jug-handle ear.

  Now he stirs.

  Another puff. She whispers, “Pee-pee.”

  “Huh?”

  “Sorry, hon, I gotta tinkle.”

  He jerks up to sitting, touching the gun beneath his shirt. Breathing hard, he glares at her with lethal rage, his bloodshot eyes showing no recognition, no idea who she is.

  “You lost this again.”

  For the second time she hands him the box-cutter knife.

  “You keep losing it. I keep giving it back to you.”

  “Unh.”

  He slumps against the sleeper wall with his chest caved around the holstered gun, eyeing her naked body like something he might need to kill to protect himself. She keeps the elbow-threaded wad of another girl’s clothes behind her back. He doesn’t notice because he follows her other hand down between her legs. She pinches herself and squirms.

  “I really gotta go pee-pee. Don’t you?”

  With both hands he rubs his hatchet face. “Shit.” One more time he has lost track of the box cutter. One more time she gives it back.

  “Jeez. Put that thing away somewhere. You keep losing it.”

  He yawns rot. He rubs his face again but can’t erase the deep exhaustion. He pulls his phone from his pocket and looks at it.

  “Huh.”

  He scowls at her. Confusion. He does this to a lot of girls. Which one is she again? The stupid one, who keeps giving him back the knife.

  “Don’t you gotta pee-pee too?”

  “Like a goddamn racehorse. Then we’re moving.”

  Easy as that, he heads out first. He jams his feet into his boots. He wobbles into his cab, slides across his seat, and slings down with an angry squeal of a fart.

  Behind him Pepper, scooting fast, slings out the arm with the other girl’s clothes accordioned at her elbow, shakes the wad down around her hand to muffle the sound, and punches in his yellow brake knob. She steps on his clutch and works his gear shift into neutral. She keeps her foot on the brake pedal. He stumbles off toward the shelter and the picnic table, fighting with his zipper. She waits until he has it out. When he starts spurting, she lets the brake pedal go, jumps down, snatches out wheel chocks—she hesitates one second, two seconds, watching, making sure—yes, the truck begins to roll—and she runs.

  She hears the truck snapping branches. At the rock wall above the bluff she glances back. See? He chases it, not her, his promises to kill her fading as he disappears down the swath of forest cut by his plummeting truck.

  She surveys beyond the stone wall. Loose rock tumbles down the sunlit flank of a treacherous, brush-clogged descent. Way down at the bottom, a brown-water flood spreads across a foggy bottomland strewn with rusty farm machines.

  Beyond that, a junkyard, a house. Go.

  64

  Sheriff Kick had one fraction of a second to see that she and Denise had guessed right—Ripp had taken Pepper Greengrass to Battle Bluff—and the remainder of that second to understand that his truck was going to crush her.

  The tractor cab sheared a small tree as it shortcut a narrow corner of the overlook road. Then it hit Yttri’s Tahoe head on.

  As her spine snapped forward and the airbag inflated into her face she could feel the car driven backward down the narrow access road. Then the Tahoe’s tail end struck something that made it pivot. Ripp’s truck pushed through and past and then the weight of it was gone. A collision below shook the earth. Then everything was quiet.

  Her airbag deflated. The Tahoe’s engine died. Slowly her senses reconnected. Her door worked. She staggered out, saw that Ripp’s truck had kept descending, mauling its way through another hundred yards of forest and underbrush until a huge red oak had stopped it cold.

  She drew her weapon and approached. The engine was off. The driver’s door was open, no one inside. A howl of wrath came from uphill, at the overlook.

  On her way up, based on the drinking she did here in high school, the layout came back to her. The dirt road she now ascended at a tortured sprint left the county gate at the bottom, zigzagged up the forested south flank of the bluff, and ended where there was a picnic area at the top. The overlook faced north, a panoramic view of the
Bad Axe from a deep bluff that overhung a creek, a meadow, Lost Hollow Road, and the eyesore of Lyman Beavers’s junkyard beyond.

  The little park at the top was strewn with cigarette butts, empty plastic water bottles, a pair of tall black boots. The girl’s soggy clothing hung randomly from trees down the slope. The sheriff headed for the stone wall behind the Blackhawk memorial plaque. She looked over. Ripp skidded down the rock face below. The risen sun glinted off a large silver handgun as he disappeared into a tangle of buckthorn and sumac where rockfall had collected.

  Where this scrub forest opened at the bottom, the entire hollow was flooded. A black-haired girl in a pink top and white skirt waded into the wide sheet of brown water.

  She holstered her pistol and vaulted the stone wall.

  65

  Pepper looks up at the steep descent she came down, boulders and brush, the top out of view. She can hear him screaming. She can’t see him. She looks ahead at a creek flooded way beyond its banks, a wide meadow full of water flowing from her right to her left, the road and the junkyard on the other side. Now she sees there is an old red pickup with a snowplow blade parked there. As she wonders if this means there are people there who will help her, another red vehicle appears on the road, an SUV. It stops near the house. A heavy old man gets out, looks around but doesn’t see her waving, looks the other way when she whistles through her fingers. He lumbers up into the junk. OK, so now she needs to go.

  As she steps in, she remembers water like this, thick brown, in the Kickapoo where Bennie taught her to swim. She has no idea where the bottom is. She waits for each step to come down on nothing. At hip-deep, the water hardly pushes. But at roughly the center of the expanse she needs to cross is a seam of chop and curl and froth. She keeps an eye on this as she feels along the bottom. Out there a full-size log bobs and twists, then strikes the rusty bin on some kind of farm wagon that is moored in fast water. One of the log’s shattered branch stumps punches through the bin wall, turns the wagon over and drags it along. The wagon’s flat tires spin out mud in the sunshine. Then the log and bin separate and the log plunders on.