McClusky picked up his rifle and slung the strap over his shoulder. “Let’s go.”
They trudged up the hill, breath steaming against the chill. The throw of the flashlights leading the way, the men blowing hard as they climbed uphill to the blind. It was no more than a few boards tacked together and dressed with branches and twigs for cover. Up on a hill that overlooked the bait and the trap in the gulley below. An opening in the boards for them to peer through without letting themselves be seen.
Jigsaw reached for the supplies he’d tucked under the slats and unfurled a tarp for them to sit on without getting their asses wet. The men hunkered down on it and laid their rifles across their laps. Jigsaw opened a small case and retrieved the binoculars. Night vision. He set the glass to his eyes and then adjusted the settings and looked downhill to the trap.
After a while he handed the glass to Roy. “Here. We’ll take turns.”
Roy peered through the eye-piece. “You sure this is gonna work? That thing, whatever it is, is gonna smell us a mile away.”
“That’s why we’re up here,” Jigsaw said, his voice low. “The wind should carry our scent off but the stink of the bait ought to just hang there in that gulley.”
McClusky took up the binoculars and looked out into the green-tinged world. “That thing’s going to hear you two jawing before it smells us.”
They shut their mouths and sat taking turns glassing the valley below. They had dressed for the weather, each man in a heavy parka and layers of clothing and good boots but it didn’t take long for the cold to set in, sitting on the frozen ground as they were.
An hour ticked by. It was Roy who broke first. “This is stupid. We ain’t gonna see nothing.”
“Shut up.”
“We’re gonna freeze to death before anything shows up.” Roy unfolded his legs, his knees popping under him. “They’ll find three dead jackasses frozen like popsicles come morning.”
McClusky lowered the binoculars and squinted at the settings. “I can’t see shit. How do you adjust this thing?”
“Hit the button then use the slide.”
McClusky tweaked the slide and raised the glasses and peered out and then lowered them again. “That made it worse.”
“Then don’t fuck with it,” Jigsaw griped. “Give it here.”
He handed them over and Jigsaw fiddled with the settings and then they heard it.
A snap, sharp and metallic.
“Holy Jesus.”
Jigsaw raised the lenses and glassed the gulley. Green trees against a black night, sweeping the ground. The trap was sprung, the iron jaws closed shut. There was nothing in it.
“Did we get it?” Roy huffed, peering through the slat.
“It’s empty,” Jigsaw said. He glassed up to where the bait was hung. The mesh bag was gone. A strand of rope swinging from the tree. “Damn thing took the bait too.”
“Let me see.”
He handed the glasses over and McClusky surveyed the territory. “Son of a bitch. How the hell did he pop the trap? How did even know it was there?”
Roy wheezed. “That’s messed up,”
McClusky scanned the night-vision over the terrain, sweeping past trees and scrub and more trees in a greenish ghost world. Something lumbered past a tree then vanished. Big. “Shit. I see it.”
“Where?”
“What the hell is it?”
“It’s gone.” McClusky lowered the glasses and peered out and then brought them back up to his eyes. Green tree trunks, darkness. “I don’t know what it was. It was big.”
“Gotta be a bear,” Jigsaw said. “What else has got the reach? He musta bumped the trap without stepping into it.”
Another noise. Low and animal. To their left and not far away. Every man froze.
McClusky swung the glasses towards the sound. Jigsaw and Roy took up their rifles.
“Do you see it?”
“No.”
“What the hell was that sound?”
It came again, sounding off from the darkness. A grumbling animal noise, but now it came from behind them.
“That sure as fuck don’t sound like any bear,” Roy said. They held their breath to listen. A rustling in the dark, twigs snapping. Coming up on their right flank.
“Holy shit. It’s circling us.”
The rifles came up, shouldered. Barrels pointing at the darkness, at nothing but night. Jigsaw hissed at McClusky. “Mac, the glasses. Do you see it?”
McClusky brought the glasses up and then lowered them and raised them to his eyes again. “I don’t see anything.”
“Come on, man.” Roy tried to keep the rifle barrel from trembling but could not. “It’s right there in front of us.”
“Screw it. Lose the glasses. Just listen for it.” Jigsaw laid his cheek to the stock and sighted down the barrel. “Next time it sounds, shoot it.”
Stillness and the dark. Then a crunch of snow.
The rifles erupted, all three men firing in unison and the collective crack of gunfire echoed off the treetrunks and went peeling off into the night. The hunters looked one to the other.
“Did we hit it?”
The roar, when it came, was a guttural volcano of rage unlike anything they had ever heard. The thing, what it was or was not, bounded up from the low darkness and bowled into them. They saw outsized teeth and an enormous frame. Too fast to be a bear, too monstrous to be anything comprehensible at all. It knocked them about and Jigsaw landed on his back and blasted his rifle blind. The thing roared and pounced and vanished.
He raised up on one elbow. “Roy? Mac, you guys okay?”
McClusky had sprawled into the brush and he scrambled the snow for his weapon and he clawed it up and vowed to never let it go. “I’m here.”
“Roy, where are you?”
Roy could be heard hollering and crashing into trees. Already halfway down the hill and falling and still running on, hauling ass in the blind night for the road.
They ran after him, calling out to him to stop. McClusky remembered the flashlight in his pocket and hit it and the two of them chased the spotlight dancing crazily over the trees and the snow. Slipping down the slope and crashing through the brush, raked and clawed by piny spines.
Jigsaw tumbled through thicket, his friend crashing into him. They staggered on and then stopped when the sound came back. That godforsaken roar. The men froze, balls shrinking at the sound.
Then the high lonesome sound of their friend, lost out there in the dark. A single rifle shot. Then the screaming, the naked terror in the man’s cries for help.
Silent again. The looked at each other, then pressed on without a word.
They found Roy not ten feet from the truck. Half of him, at least. The throw from the flashlight picked out the dark trail of blood in the snow and followed it along to where it disappeared into the trees.
McClusky felt his legs buckle under him. He felt a tugging and looked up to see Jigsaw dragging him towards the truck and screaming at him to get in, get in and get the fuck in.
FOURTEEN
“AFTER THAT FIRST time, I knew right then and there that I could never go back. Never.” Lara opened the grate on the stove and dropped in a length of wood. Sparks roiled up as it hit and she closed the metal door.
Gallagher sat on a wooden crate with the shotgun laid crosswise in his lap and watched her. Her movements were slow, her hands shaky. She was weak, that was plain enough. Malnutrition, exhaustion. He scanned over the hovel and its meagre contents. He watched her ease slowly onto the bedroll, her face wincing in pain. “Are you hurt?”
“It always hurts.” She looked around the debris on the floor. “There’s a jug of water around here somewhere.”
It had rolled into a corner. He brought it to her and went back to the crate. The vent on the stove threw firelight over her face. She had lost so much weight the veins stood out. Her eyes dulled from running on an empty tank too long. “Go on,” he said.
“I thought it was the day after
. Thought I’d been gone just that night, you know. I found a newspaper, saw the date. It had been three days.” She sipped the water and it spilled down her chin. She didn’t notice or didn’t care. “I found my way back home. Saw the police tape across my own door. Do you know how weird that was? I’ve seen taped doors a million times but to see it across my door, my home? It was like seeing your own headstone. I had been missing for three days and, in all likelihood, presumed dead. Fine. I waited until dark, broke in and took what I needed.”
He took the shotgun from his lap and stood it against the wall. Then a deep breath to stifle the anger rising in his throat. “Why didn’t you call me?”
“And say what?”
The crackling of the fire filled the silence. “I could have helped.” His hand clenched into a fist. “You didn’t have to run.”
“How could you have helped?” Her gaze flit to the shotgun and then she closed her eyes and rubbed them with the heel of her hand. “What day is it?”
“Wednesday. December nineteenth.” He watched her head dip and her shoulders sink but he went on. “What happened then?”
“I made a few stops, gathered all the cash I could manage and left.”
“For where?”
“I didn’t know. Somewhere remote where there were few people around. I didn’t have a plan, other than to get out of Portland.” She straightened her back and turned to him. “I knew I was leaving you in a bind. Left to answer what happened but I couldn’t do anything about that.”
He grunted. “A bind. Yeah.”
“What happened to you?”
“They suspended me. The murder of a police lieutenant is no small thing. They didn’t like my answers to their questions so they fired me.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “What did they make of the Lieutenant’s death?”
“Pretty much what I told them. That he’d been attacked by Prall’s dogs.”
“There were other officers on scene that night. Some of them must have seen how the... seen what happened to Vogel.”
“Only one. You remember Bingham? He saw it but by the time the sun came up he was drooling. He’s been hospitalized ever since.”
“What about Prall?”
“We found him. Or pieces of him anyway. But we found him, the man. Not the other thing. They cremated the son of a bitch and dumped him in a ditch.”
“I can’t believe they fired you. Were you a suspect?”
“Hell yeah. As were you but you had gone missing so...” He shrugged. “They put together a little task force to find you but nothing turned up. After a week, the assumption was you were dead and the file on Vogel’s death couldn’t be pushed any further.”
“That must have been hard. Under suspicion, getting fired. What did you do?”
“Got drunk. Stayed that way for a week. Then they gave me my job back.”
“They did?”
“Homicide detail was bleeding detectives. You remember the rash of retirements they had, just before you made the detail? Well, you were gone. Vogel was dead and Bingham had lost his wits so they quietly brought me back on. Hell, they were so desperate even Kopzych made homicide.”
She almost laughed and he tagged it. A tiny light coming into her eyes and for a brief second, Lara Mendes looked liked how he remembered her. It didn’t last long.
She scrutinized his face. “You look tired, John.”
“Me? You seen a mirror lately?” He reached down to a stray bottle lay near his boot and he picked it up and turned it in his hands. “It’s been a rough go since you vanished. Everyone gave up on you, assuming you were dead and gone. Not me. I’ve spent every day for the last three months looking for you.”
Her face, drawn and expressionless as it was, changed and he saw her wince. Like something inside her cracked. He could almost hear it in the quiet of the room. How rough had this been on her? Scared and alone and on the run.
Her hand fanned the air as if shaking loose whatever had bitten home just now. Her eyes cleared and swung back to him. “Why?”
“I had to. I knew you weren’t dead.” His eyes darted around the walls, the window. Anywhere but her eyes. “What was I supposed to do? Just leave you out there?”
The dog rolled onto its side and went to sleep.
“I’m sorry.” She stared into the fire. “I was so desperate to disappear but later on, I was kind of sad or disappointed that no one found me. That I could be forgotten about that quickly. Dismissed. Like I was never there at all. Or I had made no impact on anyone.” She shook her head. “It’s crazy I know, but. Well.”
“You weren’t forgotten.” He straightened up, turned to see her better. “But I still don’t understand why you ran like that. You should have come to me. After what we’d gone through with Prall? Hell.”
“You’re the one I had to stay clear of the most.”
“I’m the only one who knew.”
“Do you think I can control this? Turn it on and off? I was afraid I would hurt you. Or your daughter.”
He shut his mouth after that. She was right, plain and simple. His own safety he could take care of but Amy? Amy was a different story. And so Lara Mendes had fled alone into the wilderness and let the world think she was dead to protect him and his daughter. It was his turn to crack and he felt something snap inside and could not look at her.
Lara brightened. “How is Amy?”
“She’s good. Growing up too fast.”
“She’s a great person, John. I don’t just mean a good kid but a good person. You know?”
He nodded. Sometimes he forgot that. Shame on him. He straightened up, looking to change the subject. “I’m starving. You hungry?”
“Constantly.”
“I got some stuff in the truck. We can heat it up on the stove.” He got to his feet and plucked the flashlight from his pocket. “If I can find my way back to the truck.”
“Follow your footsteps,” she said and then wavered, remembering what was out there. “Take the shotgun with you.”
“What for?”
“We’re out in the boonies. There’s animals out here.”
“Animals?” He cocked an eyebrow at her, unable to tell if she was fooling with him. He snatched up the gun and pushed the door open.
The tinsel was tangled in knots, three runs of it mixed together in a butcher’s twine of silver, gold and red. It should have been wound up separately before being put away, instead of tangled together like this, and Amy had a suspicion that she herself had done this. She loved decorating the house for Christmas and putting the tree up but she absolutely hated pulling it all down and packing it away. She found it depressing and was prone to just toss everything into the boxes and be done with it. A silver ornament tumbled out and rolled under the couch.
It took ten minutes to untangle the tinsel strings without snapping them and she laid them over the back of the couch to keep them straight. They didn’t have a tree or a wreath on the door and Christmas was less than a week away. Dad had said that he wasn’t much in the spirit this year and asked if they could leave the decorations packed in the garage. Amy told him she was fine with that but in truth, she wasn’t. The neighbors had put up their lights and strung up tinsel and her own house seemed drab and depressing in comparison. She never looked forward to the season until it got close and now some of that old glee she felt as a kid crept in every time she heard an old Christmas tune or saw another porch strung with twinkly lights. Unable to take it anymore, she had fetched up the boxes from the garage and broken them open. What a mess.
She unpacked the tacky Santa that always went on the table in the front hall. Then there was the wreath she had made in the third grade. It wasn’t much to look at now, the pieces of tinsel had fallen away, but her dad insisted on hanging it up every season. Most of the stuff in the box was for the tree which they didn’t have and, without the truck, she couldn’t get.
“That blows,” she muttered. The tree was the most important part. If only for the smel
l of it wafting through the house. That pine scent triggered memories of every Christmas she could remember. But the truck was gone and she was stuck without a tree. Merry frigging Christmas.
She tried his cell again. Three rings before clicking over to an automated voice informing her that the customer was not available at this time. Meaning wherever he was, there was no signal or service. It was the boonies, she reminded herself. He wasn’t crashed in a ditch or anything else her mind conjured up.
Still, he was alone, he wasn’t himself. Traumatized and delusional and chasing some ghost of a chance over someone who was, in all likelihood, dead.
The banging on the door scared her witless. She marched to the hall, ready to unload on whatever unlucky Jehova’s Witness was bothering her this late.
Gabby beamed at her when the door flung open. “Looky here, it’s the shut-in.” Gabby marched past her, kicked off her shoes and dropped her coat to the floor. “Can I come in or is the pitbull gonna attack me?”
“It’s a husky, not a pit.” Amy closed the door and followed Gabby into the kitchen. “What are you doing here?”
“I was bored. Thought I’d come rescue the princess from her fortress of solitude.” Gabby opened cupboard after cupboard until she found a bag of nacho chips and popped it open. “Dad’s away, time for Amy to come out and play. Hey, you got any salsa?”
Amy watched her friend cram a handful of nachos into her mouth, crumbs spilling all over the floor. Gabby was just like that. Messy, bossy, brash. But that was part of the reason why Amy liked her. The girl was an unapologetic bull in the china shop of life and her unstated philosophy was that anything that broke under her bulldozing charm wasn’t worth it anyway.
She took the bag from Gabby’s hand and scrounged up a bowl and emptied the chips into it. “Some other time. Try eating over the bowl.”
“Fussbudget. Listen, there’s no harm in it if he doesn’t know, Amy. It’s okay to get in trouble and break rules. If you get caught just act like you’re all in turmoil and confused. Parents eat that shit eat up, you walk.”
Bad Wolf Chronicles, Books 1-3 Page 35