by Bart Paul
I stood up and took a long pull from the Crown Royal bottle we’d left a couple of nights before. “Let’s go.” I started to put the bottle back on the sideboard but decided it might be more useful in the truck.
A bit of moonlight hit the lake ahead of us as I rolled through the aspens down to the pavement. Lester was about as quiet as I ever saw him, so I let him be. If he noticed the half-full box of 150 grain .270 soft points sitting on the dash, he didn’t let on or care. We turned left at the north edge of town about ten minutes later, then headed west across the valley toward Dominion headquarters.
“You think GQ’s putting the moves on her?” he asked. “I think he’s got other things on his mind. Jesus, Lester, focus. She’s one girl that can sure take care of herself in that department.”
“I guess,” he said. That notion didn’t please him much either.
The Reno Highway made a hard right at the old ranch house in the cottonwoods where the Dominion foreman lived, then curved north out of the valley toward Hell Gate Pass. He didn’t say another word. After the Sonora turn-off, we were in West Frémont canyon, the road slow and twisted through big timber, with the river close by the pavement on our right. We’d catch glimpses of the water flashing when the headlights hit it in a curve and could see the pines rocking in the wind, but no moonlight shone down in the canyon, so mostly it was dark as hell.
I slowed when I saw red lights ahead through the trees. Lester caught me dropping my right hand behind the seat to feel for the rifle. He glanced behind the seat and gave a laugh when he saw what I was reaching for.
“Easy, pard,” he said. “Just some fisherman missed a curve. Happens all the time. Remember that gamblers’ bus?”
When we got closer, we could see a whole mess of lights. Two sheriff ’s cruisers, a county ambulance, a Forest Service Suburban, a tow truck, and some stalled traffic. A couple of sheriffs with flares were stopping cars going both ways.
“Shit-fire,” Lester said.
I pulled up behind a camper, and we waited as a deputy with a flashlight walked toward us. Ahead of us we could see lights shining out into the stream, and we could make out lines stretching over to a car out in the shallow water. There were a couple of guys in the stream up to their waists hanging on to ropes or cables, looking slick and dark. Probably wetsuits. Lights flashed behind us, and a second ambulance passed us northbound in the southbound lane. I saw Lester’s face in the flashing lights. It didn’t look good. When the deputy got closer, we saw it was Sarah. She stopped when she saw it was us, only coming as far as the camper just ahead. After a second she jerked her head and walked back up the road to the commotion. We got out and followed her. We were still a ways away when we could see in the spotlights that the car on its side in the river was Callie’s black Nissan. I heard all the air and the life go out of Lester in the same second. He hung back like not seeing it up close would make it go away.
“Shit, Tommy,” was all he could get through his windpipe. He said it a bunch of times.
“Come on.” I led him into that mess of people. We stood on the gravel under the pines with the red, blue, and white lights flashing and the radio crosstalk and the rush of the river and some county officers talking and laughing among themselves about something else entirely with their back to the river like nobody had just died, making everything all jumbly and crazed. Lester started breathing deep, and I led him to a big Jeffrey pine and parked him there, letting him watch, kind of hugging himself and rocking back and forth like a hurt kid.
I walked to the Dodge Ram and got the bottle of Crown Royal. I hurried back to the tree and handed it to Lester. He nodded thanks and took a big pull. Then I walked over to find Sarah. I just stood there next to her as the crew in the wetsuits stumbled on the boulders as they fought the current pushing that bubbling water down toward State Line. They were hauling something with ropes from the center of the current and it didn’t take much light to guess it was Callie. I glanced back at Lester, but he wasn’t watching. He was plugging in his headphones and fiddling with the screen on his phone. He took another pull on the Crown Royal and looked to be talking to himself.
When I looked back at Sarah, she was studying me. It always made me feel funny when she’d do that. She gave her head a little nod and walked away from the water’s edge.
“So tell me where Callie was heading after she called in sick.”
Sarah had already done some legwork, and there was no telling how much she knew. She wasn’t about to give me a hint.
“D on’t know.”
She looked around at the crowd of cars and trucks and lights. “But you’re here, Tommy. Right on her trail.” She put her hand on my arm. “You always found what you were tracking. That’s what my dad said. Even if it was gutshot or busted-legged and dead when you caught up with it. So why were you trailing Callie Dean?”
After a second or two when I had no kind of answer, I figured I’d try a lie. If I kept at it, I had to get better at telling one.
“Lovers’ quarrel?”
She made a bullshit sort of sound. I suppose if I didn’t believe it there was no reason she should.
“Right now,” she said, “it looks like a single car accident. Driver’s error. She was probably in a hurry to get somewhere”—she looked me right in the eye—“or away from somewhere, hit a turn too fast, spun out, and flipped into the river.” She turned to the crew attaching cables in the water. “Happens all the time.” She looked back at me. “You know that.”
“I do.”
“I just wish you’d tell me what else you know,” she said.
“Old Callie always had a wild streak, I guess.”
“Well, that streak ran out tonight.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Yeah. Don’t scamper off just yet.” She left me there and walked back to the bank where they were dragging the body out of the water. I walked over to where Lester was holding up the tree. He kept his eyes on the river but handed me the bottle. I took a drink and handed it back. He made a big sigh and tried to say something that half sounded like why did this have to happen to her just when things were about to come our way. He’d sob then choke it back and try to talk some more.
“You about ready to go home?”
He nodded yeah.
“Nothing we can do here.”
He nodded again.
“You sit tight, and I’ll go tell Sarah we’re leaving.” There’s just nothing to say to a person.
The ambulance crew was getting the body squared away on a gurney when I got there. An EMT was checking it over, while half a dozen folks watched. I was the only one who wasn’t in uniform, so I hung back and let them do their job. Callie was wearing what was left of a short little dress. She had pretty outstanding legs and liked to show them off when she wasn’t at work. I guess she wanted to catch Gerald Q’s eye. If she’d been wearing shoes or underpants, they’d been torn off by the current and would show up in Tiny Arriella’s alfalfa field in Hudson Valley by the end of July. They rolled her back and forth on the gurney, writing down injuries. She had a tramp-stamp across the top of her butt, a Chinese-looking tattoo that a boyfriend could read if she was in the right position, and if he understood Chinese. Lester had never bragged about it, so she must have had it before they ever met. Her skin looked blue-white in the spotlights.
After Sarah officially identified the body, she sidled over, slipped her arm in mine, and walked me away from that mess like we were at a dance.
“We’re trying to sort this out,” she said. “Callie called Ed at the Sierra Peaks around four o’clock to say she wasn’t feeling well enough to come to work. But when Judy Burmeister shows up to waitress at six, she sees Callie talking to somebody in the Hunters’ Lodge parking lot across the street. Judy didn’t tell Ed ’cause she didn’t want to get Callie in trouble, but she told me.”
“So who was she talking to?”
“Some city guy in an expensive car,” she said.
“Oh that narrows it down.”
“Don’t be a smartass, Tommy. Your girlfriend is dead.”
I nodded over to Lester under the tree. “His girlfriend.”
“She was your friend, too.” Sarah looked about as pissed off at me as I’d ever seen her. She described the guy Judy said Callie had been talking to. It sounded like one of the Cuban fly fisherman we’d seen a few hours earlier. Sarah looked at her watch.
“It’s almost eleven now,” she said. “The crew figures by body temp she’s been in the water two to three hours. So she leaves Piute Meadows at say seven thirty and loses control at eight. Just about dark. Did Les hear from her between four and eight?”
“Nope. He was with me, and we were just coming out of Aspen so she couldn’t have reached him. Didn’t get back to the pack station till after dark.”
Sarah looked truly surprised. “You had a trip today?”
“Nope. Just fixing trail.”
She looked at me the way my mother used to when I’d been out partying in high school and came home stinking of Coors. She poked me in the chest.
“But you’re here now and you won’t say why.” She looked over at Lester. “Great. Get him out of here,” she said, “just go.” She walked away, pissed as hell.
Chapter Seven
I got Lester led halfway back to my Dodge when he pulled away and ran over to the ambulance. They were just buttoning things up, but most of the county people knew Lester and let him through. He took a long look at the body, then gave a halfway nod to the EMT and walked away hugging his arms as hard as he could.
When I was turning the truck around, I asked him if he wanted to go anywhere or see anybody. His folks lived over the mountain in Grass Valley now, and I would have tanked up and driven half the night to get him there if he’d said so. He just mumbled he wanted to go home, so I headed back towards Piute Meadows. The road was empty and dark.
“She called me her fiancé,” he said, apropos of not a damn thing when I pulled into the Shell station in town about twenty minutes later.
When we rattled over the little bridge below the pack station about twenty minutes after that, the Crown Royal bottle was clanking on the floorboards and he was passed out. I walked him into the trailer and dropped him on his bed. I pulled off his boots and threw a blanket over him. There wasn’t much I could do for him after that till hangover time at sunup.
I walked back outside. I took the rifle scabbard and box of cartridges from the truck and sat back on the porch of the tin shack. It was a good spot, a bit off to the side of the trailer in the trees and the little bit of yellow light from the kerosene lamps inside the trailer didn’t reach it. It gave me a good view of the dirt road winding toward me through the aspen from the bridge and of the hill across the creek where the road dropped down to the meadow. I took a beer and the tacklebox with my cleaning kit from the trailer and sat back down. Then I gave the Remington a good cleaning and oiling, taking my time, pulling the bolt and setting it down on a piece of newspaper next to me, feeling every part there in the dark without even trying to look at it. I was out there a long time, just enjoying the night, studying the dark line of trees in the half-moonlight. When I was finished, and I’d wiped down the action and polished the walnut stock with a clean rag and rubbed the leather sling with glycerin soap, I loaded the magazine with the soft tips and slid the bolt shut. I found a rusty metal lawnchair with springs that Harvey’d left under a tree, brushed the dead leaves off the seat and set it on the porch. I sort of dozed there in the chair with the loaded rifle across my lap for half the night. I remember the moon was down when I woke one time, and it was cold. Finally, I got restless and got up. I cradled the rifle in my arm and went walking along the curving dirt road through the aspen down to the bridge with the morning star low in the east and bright as a jet coming in to land. I sat in the sagebrush with my back against a rock and studied the bridge in the dark. It was nothing but the undercarriage of an old railroad freight car, just two big I-beams with steel plate and planks over it and no railings, not even a bit of board to tell you if your wheels were going off the edge. How the hell Harvey got it up the logging road and down into the canyon is anybody’s guess, but it had been there for as long as I’d been coming here. I remember the first time I drove Harvey’s stock truck over it when I was sixteen and you couldn’t see the edge of the bridge from the cab it was so narrow. Harv laughed like hell as I tried to look down. He told me to keep my eye on the far bank and the nose of the truck heading straight down the center of the bridge, and we wouldn’t fall eight feet over on our side in the cold water with six really surprised mules.
Above the bridge the road climbed a cut to the trailhead. Just past the rise on the right there was a locked aluminum gate that kept the backpackers’ cars from going any further up the south side of the canyon. Only the Forest Service, Harvey, and Bonner and Tyree, who held the grazing permit, had keys.
When the first hint of gray showed down-canyon, I rousted myself and walked back to the trailer in the sweet dawn. There was no breeze in the early morning, and the quaking aspen leaves were as quiet as church. Lester was still snoring away. I covered him with another blanket, blew out the lamps, and crawled into my bedroll in the front room to catch a couple of hours downtime.
By late morning I’d fed Lester some aspirin, a big omelet with Tabasco, bacon, coffee and a beer, and we’d talked some. Outside I started stringing electric line for the yard lights we’d be needing come deer season. I hooked up a big spotlight above the loading chute first. I kept the rifle in the scabbard nearby just out of habit while I worked and slung it over my shoulder when I walked away from the corrals. I was running wire from the generator down through the aspen outside the pasture fence when I saw Sarah’s rig making the turn above the bridge. I could see there was a horse in her trailer. She stopped when she saw me step out of the trees right in front of her, the rifle resting across my shoulder like a baseball bat. Sarah just looked at me as I walked past the cab of her pickup, took a foothold by the trailer wheel well, and swung up. She eased the rig on down the road and I looked in at the horse. It was a big sorrel colt and didn’t pay me any mind. I skipped off the trailer as Sarah circled the rig and parked next to our horse corral. I waited for her to get out. She wasn’t in uniform, just Wranglers, ropers, a tanktop, and shades, which is uniform enough. She watched me slip the rifle into the scabbard lying in the grain trough of the hitching rack before I unlatched the trailer gate.
“Expecting trouble?” she asked.
“You were so pissed at me last night I thought I’d best protect myself.”
She gave me a dirty look, and we unloaded the colt. He was a bit snorty at the new place, but he settled in when I put him in the holding pen by the chute with a flake of hay. He challenged a couple of our knotheads at the corral fence, then set to eating.
“Dad really appreciates this,” she said. She handed me three one hundred dollar bills.
“That’s too much.”
“You haven’t got on him yet,” she said. “This’ll get you started.”
Lester stepped out of our trailer to see what was going on and sat on the steps wearing his shades, nursing a beer. He put his headphones on and went to listening to music, not looking at us.
“How’s your partner in crime?” she asked.
“He’s thrashed, but he’ll get over it.”
Sarah walked over to the hitching rack where I’d set the rifle. “You must be a mind reader,” she said, tapping her finger on the scabbard leather. “We had a team all over the crash site this morning. There was a second set of tire marks.”
“Head on?”
She shook her head. “Same direction. And there were fresh paint scrapes on the driver’s side of her car. So it looks like somebody forced her off the road.” She studied me that way she did. “It could be an accident, maybe some drunk just trying to pass on a curve and running out of room or nerve. Or it could be intentional.” She flicked her fingernail a
gainst the scabbard again. “But you’re not surprised, are you, Tommy. You obviously think that’s a possibility.”
I just let her talk. As soon as she said that, I knew somebody killed Callie Dean for the lies we told.
“Right now, bare minimum, we’re treating it as felony hit-and-run,” she said. “We’re sending paint scrapings to the lab in Sacramento.”
“Okay.”
“You don’t give anything up, do you? Mister name-rank-and-serial number.”
“Them’s the rules.”
“She didn’t die right away, Tommy. Her neck was broken, but she drowned, probably still conscious. Not a fun way to go.”
When I didn’t say anything, she picked up the scabbard and slid out the .270.
“It’s loaded.”
“I wouldn’t expect any less from you,” she said. She held the rifle like a pro but kept her hands off the bolt. She slid it back in the scabbard and set it down real easy in the grain trough like she found it. “I remember your dad hunting with that rifle with my dad,” she said.
“What else is on your mind, Sarah?” She was making me uncomfortable as hell.
“We found crystal meth in a ziplock bag in Callie’s car,” she said.
“Girl had her faults. You know, like being a nymphomaniac and all, but she wasn’t no tweaker.”
Sarah looked over at Lester sitting on the steps. “Boy,” she said, “a girl would have to be a nymphomaniac.”
“I thought all you ladies loved Lester.”
“Les is a child,” she said.
“He’s almost the same age as me.”
“You’re the wise old man, Tommy. You were born that way.” She looked at me kind of cranky. “What—you don’t think I know exactly how old you are?”
“Well, I don’t feel so wise right about now.”
“No,” she said, “I guess you don’t.” She just stared at Lester on the porch. “If it’s any consolation, I don’t think she was a tweaker either. Callie was too vain to trash her looks.” She thought about things for a minute. “If she were using that garbage she would have had her stuff handy, loose and careless like they do, not double sealed in two ziplocks. Somebody wanted it to survive a couple of hours in the river.”