Cold Quiet Country

by Clayton Lindemuth

  “Where’s this going, Sheriff?”

  “We don’t know if Roosevelt’s dead or alive.”

  “More’n likely dead, the longer we jaw.”

  “More’n likely dead since before either of us got out here. But supposing he’s taken hostage in there. You think Odum’s got the stones to get him out? Alive? Take a step back and look at the big picture. You think Odum’s capable of looking a man in the eye that’s bigger and stronger and faster and meaner, and telling him he ain’t welcome? Capable of telling this big ornery sonofabitch he’s liable to wind up swinging by his balls from an oak tree if he sticks around?”

  “Maybe.”

  “No way in hell. Odum would book him. Judge would give him a fine, and he’d be right back doing what he was doing to begin with. Only now he knows nobody’s going do a goddamn thing about it. Tough love takes toughness. A goddamn spine. A sheriff has to be able to call up a mean streak. Has to be able to turn off that little voice that only looks at short-term right and wrong, and take the long view. After the dust settles, this town’s going to be better off with Gale G’Wain dead. So if I was sheriff, one way or the other, by the end of this evening, he’d be dead. You understand that kind of logic?”

  He nods slowly, like I’m dealing a trick question.

  “Well, Odum don’t. So take him out of the picture. You think Sager could understand that kind of logic? And if he did, you think he’d have the nuts to say, ‘I don’t care if Gale gives himself up, he’s as good as dead’?”

  “Nah. Not Sager.”

  “Hell no. He puked his breakfast at Haudesert’s after twenty minutes getting used to the corpse. Roosevelt’s likely dead. Odum’s going nowhere. Sager’s about as useful as a steering wheel on a mule. That leaves you. The only one of the bunch that can do the job.”

  “They’d change their minds if Odum screwed this up.”

  “Town council?”

  “They’d keep you on.”

  “Like hell.”

  It’s time for a smoke. My pipe bowl is crusty with carbon and ash. I pull a pocketknife and, arms out the window, scrape it clean. “No, Travis; I’m done. Don’t have the stamina.” I pull my arms back inside and fish my tobacco bag. “The job’s yours if you want it. Rules are a lot of words on a lot of paper. The town council will find the ones to back you. Only thing you got to think about is Odum.”

  Travis looks through the windshield again. Jaw locked, thoughtful. Come on, boy. You ain’t that fuckin’ dense. I shift my leg and groan like it pains me.

  “How?” Travis says.

  I shrug.

  Travis keeps his own council a minute. His brow wrinkles and his jaw sets. “You must be hurting after a day tromping through that.” He nods at the window. “How was she? The girl?”

  “Stabbed right through her heart, I’m guessing. Her eyes were closed.”

  “That ain’t normal, is it?”

  “No.”

  “Why would a cold-blooded murderer close his victim’s eyes?”

  “Make it look like remorse set in,” I say.

  “How many men are clever after killing their lover?”

  “Why did the snow on the road not get hung up in the tree limbs? Who the fuck knows? There’s always things that don’t fit.”

  Travis is silent. Finally he meets my eye. “If he starts shooting, there isn’t a whole lot we can do but defend ourselves. Bullets flying all over the place, maybe.”

  Travis glances at me like a child testing his answer.

  “All right. You go back to your car and wait on Odum and Sager. They’ll be here in a couple of minutes.”

  “Where will you be?”

  “I’m going up ahead, loop around. Take Election House Road back to town.”

  “You’re going back to town?”

  “I’m not sheriff anymore. You think on all that. Good luck.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  “Did Gwen ever tell you about the music?” Liz says. “She heard it when someone was about to die.”

  We’re huddled beside the fireplace. The kitchen and stairwell are dark. Most of the windows are blasted out. We’ve kept the fire small and take heat from embers and tiny blue flames. Sitting close on the hearth, we’re as grave as orphans telling ghost stories.

  During our preparations, we cached candles and matches at the basement steps, and every rifle in the house is reloaded and repositioned by a window. We even dragged Cal and Jordan into the cellar.

  Liz has been indispensable and I don’t know a thing about her save she was Gwen’s friend and she tried to seduce me at Haynes’s that night I froze with the cows on death row. But all the help she’s given has just been her playing along to find out what happened. If she doesn’t like the way the story ends, our partnership will dissolve and she’ll be my worst enemy.

  Problem is, I don’t know why Gwen died.

  Liz says, “Gwen told me she saw faces with the music, and that’s how she knew who was going to die.”

  We can’t go back…they’ll kill you, Gwen had said.

  “She must have seen faces last night,” I say.

  “Maybe she didn’t want you to know.”

  An ember pops and the fire sounds like crinkling foil. A flame issues from the butt of a half-burned log, and though Liz is beside me and the firelight makes her face about as gentle as Gwen’s, I’m alone like that flame, and as weak.

  “You’re here to find out about Guinevere’s death,” I say. “But it won’t be long until the sheriff and his boys come for me. Every minute you stay risks your life.”

  “I don’t have a life to go back to.”

  “You got family—other’n your brother?”

  The question hangs.

  “Suit yourself. Since you can walk easier than me, you mind taking a peek through the kitchen window? See what’s going on outside?”

  She rocks to her feet.

  “Stand way back from the window. If there’s people outside, you don’t want them to make out your shape.”

  She regards me with a look that I interpret as meaning I’m less intelligent than she is. Or maybe it’s the harsh shadows across her face. In her behavior there’s a secondary melody that clashes with the main tune. It’s like she wants to be a coquette but doesn’t clearly remember the song and mixes lines from one instrument in with another and the whole thing sounds awful. This girl doesn’t quite know how to be a girl.

  She stands silently in the kitchen a few moments, and then her footsteps move more distant, and she is silent again.

  Can I trust her?

  I’ve told my story as if purging confusion with my words. Dying to have the truth out. There’s only one person alive who knows what happened to Gwen, and it’s me, and I don’t know what went on inside her. I don’t know Liz’s story, either. I shot her brother and she hasn’t said a word of complaint. Been too caught up in my drama to ask why she didn’t mind me killing him and is all-fire concerned with understanding Gwen’s last minutes.

  In her heart, is she on my side, or is she ready to turn as soon as she knows? Is Liz the one who kills me? Or is she still looking for me to help her run away?

  “I guess you went home that night after visiting me at the butcher’s?”

  She answers from the other room, “I had no choice.”

  “I was sorry about that—not being able to help.”

  Her feet shuffle across the kitchen and I squeeze the rifle’s grip.

  “There’s no one outside,” she says, rounding the corner into the living room. She stands to the side of the window overlooking the lake, where Jordan poked his rifle through, and watches. “Maybe no one will come. Why do you think they will?”

  “The first man I killed was a deputy. I woke up on the couch and he had a gun to my temple. He was here for revenge, and I guess he figured he’d make it look like I resisted arrest and he had to kill me. He didn’t know I had a revolver on my hip. If he figured out where I ran to, the whole mess of them can figure it out.
”

  “Finish your story about Gwen.”

  “There’s more than that. I’ve seen vehicles parked through the trees. They’re out there.”

  “What happened with Gwen?”

  “I’d prefer if you come over here, beside me.”

  She reaches to the rifle propped at the corner of the sofa and the wall, cocks the hammer and points at me. “I prefer staying over here.”

  “Oh, come on. Aren’t you tired of this yet?”

  “Tell me the story, Gale. I won’t leave until I’m satisfied with what happened to Gwen.”

  “Satisfied? That’s a hell of a word.”

  “Maybe if you’d tell the fucking story you’d be satisfied too. Maybe.”

  “Don’t point the rifle at me while I’m talking. You’ll have plenty of time to aim if you don’t like what you hear.”

  She lowers the muzzle. “You left off when you and Gwen entered the woods.”

  “It was getting hard to walk. The shock of the whole thing with Burt and the knife wore off and I was starting to think better. I don’t know if you’ve ever been really, really cold, but your mind gets cloudy and then clear. Tranquil, like everything’s going to be fine. By then we were at the forest and had difficulty crossing all the brush Burt left when he cut firewood a couple years ago. Gwen had to help me move my leg high enough a couple times. Once we worked through twenty or thirty feet of brush and briars, the trees calmed the wind and it wasn’t quite so cold.

  “I kept thinking about her foot, and that there was no way she’d escape frostbite. I couldn’t move fast enough. I swiped a few curls of bark from a paper birch tree and told her, ‘Hold up and we’ll build a fire.’ And she said, ‘Just a little ways farther so the smoke won’t catch anyone’s eye.’ I said, ‘There’s a grove of bull pine ahead.’ Ponderosa is good for holding the smoke and spreading it out before letting it go. I’d built a fire there the night before while I waited to go see her.”

  Liz nods.

  “Gwen took the lead. I watched her feet cut through the snow. Even in the woods it was deeper than her ankle. She didn’t say a word about it. I saw through the tree limbs that we were getting close to the pine and I wanted to build a fire and press her feet to my belly and make them warm, and then trade out with her and let her wear one of my boots, even though it’d be too big. We’d been in the snow fifteen or twenty minutes, and I still hoped…she’d be able to stay healthy. If I could have gotten her warm.

  “We got to a spot under a giant ponderosa where the snow was thin and Gwen said this looked good, and I said, ‘In a little ways we can be where I spent half the night. There might still be some coals.’ The night before I spent about eight hours drying my boots and socks. A rock overhang reflected heat from the fire. We kept going and it was only a couple minutes until we came up to the rock and the ashes were still warm.”

  I can hardly go on. Liz stares at the fireplace.

  “There were so many things we could have done! She could have put on one of my boots and snuck back to the barn for her shoe. We could have built a fire long enough to get her foot warm and then gone to Haynes’s, where at least we could lay low through the storm. She could have gone back to her mother and said I dragged her away and she escaped. Anything!”

  “What did you do to her?”

  I swallow. Exhale.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  It’s taken Odum a half hour to talk things over and start deploying his men. I drove ahead to the bend beyond where Roosevelt’s cruiser is parked half into the woods. Slipped back on foot, but on the other side of the road, behind it all. It’d be no good to have another unexplained set of tracks mingled with the rest.

  I knock a thin layer of snow off a log lying under the protective wing of a pine. Park my tired ass on it. The air is still and silent and my view to the farm is unobstructed. I turn away and light a pipe bowl.

  The line between dusk and night is never clear. The moon is already midway through the sky. It won’t get truly bleak until around midnight.

  That’s better for Gale than it is for Odum and company.

  Coates was a hunter and his house is an arsenal. He reloaded his ammo in the basement. Kept enough powder on hand to launch a brick house, let alone a wood one. G’Wain has access to all of it.

  And that house…I helped Coates replace the front door years ago. The jamb was water-rotted and we pulled it out. The walls are boards, four thick. Modern house, bullet hits a sheet of plywood, goes through some insulation, and then a little plaster. This house? Any bullet makes it through that wall is going to come out in ten pieces, and each one’ll drop to the floor.

  Suppression fire has to be direct, concentrated on the window Gale’s shooting from. They’ll have to expose themselves trying to keep him from shooting back—but they don’t have the manpower to cover all of Gale’s options. If Odum has any smarts, he’ll deploy two men on the same side of the house—the one with the fewest windows—and have a third covering escape out the back.

  But Odum’s got the brains of a frog fart, and G’Wain will pick off his deputies one by one.

  The dome light in Odum’s cruiser flashes yellow. Deputies spill out.

  Travis gets in his vehicle and drives forward. Sager heads to the corner by the driveway, and keeps looking at the others as he moves closer to the house under the cover of trees. Once he gets to the pasture, he’ll stop. Odum walks fifty yards along the road toward Roosevelt’s ditched vehicle, and turns into the woods.

  Travis drives to the opposite side of the field in front of the house and parks. He steals along a windrow. Looks like he’s going to follow it to the slope by the lake and angle to the house.

  Odum takes off into the woods, like to make a circle and come at the house from the orchard. So him and Travis will come in facing each other, the house between them.

  Odum’s already fucked this up.

  I clean out my pipe and tuck it into my pocket. Step out from under the bull pine limb and start moving toward the house.

  * * *

  Liz’s finger is on her trigger. “What did you do to Gwen?”

  “I dropped the birch bark I’d picked off the tree onto the ashes and walked off to find wood. I’d burned up every last bit of what I’d had the night before, thinking it might keep the coals burning longer in case I had to come back. I brought a few pieces of brush and knocked the snow off them. They were too big to light with a few scraps of birch bark, so I had to find some pine scrub. I said, ‘Hang on, baby. I’ll have your feet warm in no time, and you can take my boot.’

  “Her eyes had been melancholy but they firmed. She stood and walked through the snow to me like she was walking across a ballroom floor in the middle of July. She took my face in both her hands and then slid them to my neck and pulled me to her, began kissing me with her eyes open. She said, ‘I love you, Gale.’”

  Liz comes forward a little and sits on the arm of the sofa. Her rifle points toward the stairway.

  “I told her I loved her too and she should just hold tight a few more minutes and we’d figure out how to get out of the mess we were in. I hugged her. You know how a dismissal hug is different from an I-love-you hug? I gave her the quick kind because I was in a hurry to get a fire going. I was only a few feet away, reaching into a ponderosa branch, when I heard a whoomp! sound, and I turned around and Gwen was lying face down by the fire. I ran back to her, best I could, and rolled her over.”

  I wipe my eyes. I’ve avoided this picture all day. There’s no explanation for what she did.

  “What happened?” Liz says, on her knees before me. She tugs my sleeve. “What happened?”

  “She had a knife sticking out of her chest, buried clean to the hilt. She’d fallen on the same knife she’d pulled out of my leg.”

  “No!”

  “She did!”

  “No. No.”

  Liz weeps and I wipe my eyes. There’s only one more thing to tell her.

  “She was alive for a minute,
though the knife went right through her middle. I—I know where a person’s heart is and she must have too. She smiled, though her eyes were wet and full of panic.”

  “Did she say anything? Did she say why?”

  “She said something…”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know what she meant. Maybe… I don’t know.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What did she say? Tell me!”

  I look past Liz to the window overlooking the lake. “She chose for her very last words, ‘I stole your music.’ I held her eyes closed for five minutes after she was gone. To make sure they stayed that way.”

  Liz nods slowly, and then faster. Tears roll down her face like two columns of soldiers.

  “She stole your music.” Liz lifts the rifle in her hands and points it at the ceiling. “You know what she was telling you? You—”

  “Music was like her soul, I think. Maybe she meant she’d take a part of me with her.”

  “You fool.” She smiles and clears phlegm from her throat. She makes a face like she has a mouthful and looks at the fire, and then turns, heads for the window. She spits through it and as she turns to me the wood at the window splinters. A rifle shot explodes at almost the same time.

  “Down!” I yell. “Are you hit?”

  She leaps behind the sofa and scrambles to her rifle. I low-crawl, more of a wriggle with a useless arm and half-dead leg, to the living-room window farther to the right.

  More shots echo from outside—some close, some far away. There’s rifles on two sides of the house, and something smaller. A gun that yips like a small dog. Three men? Counting the dead deputy, that makes four. One shy of the whole department. They’re keeping things in-house, and one man in reserve.