Mercy River

by Glen Erik Hamilton

  Changed to what appeared to be nothing, a blank square. At first I thought the channel had no camera assigned to it. Then I caught a hint of movement. Staring intently at the dark screen, I made out crooked gray vertical bars at the edges of a black background. I tried adjusting the brightness of the monitor, and the higher contrast brought the image into marginally better focus.

  Trees. I was looking at trees. There must be another camera somewhere outside. I’d seen no other cameras on the building’s exterior, and there was no grove of trees close by the shop. But out behind the dead-end road, the edge of the nearest small forest crowned the top of the hill.

  What was the effective range of the wireless camera? Less than a quarter mile, I guessed. The camera must be positioned within that distance. Sure as hell Erle hadn’t run a fiber-optic line into the forest.

  Now, why would a man put a camera in the middle of the woods?

  I stared at the screen for a time. The movement that had first attracted my notice was erratic, and remained in a single spot on the screen. A loose branch, or something else on the tree trunk, fluttering in the wind. I committed what details I could to memory and took photographs of the screen with my phone for good measure.

  With a little hunting I might find that camera. But only after the sun came up. I returned the screen to its previous mode and switched off the monitor and cameras.

  My nose was stuffed full of the rotten blood smell. After my strange childhood and time in combat, the shop was just another place where something bad had happened. That didn’t mean I enjoyed being there. Retracing my steps through the firing range, I left the building, closed the back door, and inserted the pick and tension bar to relock the dead bolt.

  Something scuffed the ground behind me. I ducked as a large arm went around my head, missing my throat and wrapping across my jaw.

  I bit him. As instinctual as any dog, and as savage, my teeth piercing fabric and flesh. The man cried out and reflexively flung me forward. My skull bounced off the steel door. The man closed again, grabbing me, trying for the same choke hold. I shoved against the door, first hands, then hard with both feet, trying to bowl him over backward.

  It was like pushing a tractor. My thrashing only staggered him for a second. Pulling at his steel-cable arm with all my strength, I barely kept him from fully closing the hold and crushing my carotid arteries. My lights would be out within seconds, maybe permanently. He bore his weight down on me. I was losing. He pushed harder. I folded onto one knee.

  My leg hit something metal. One of the short lengths of rusted rebar. I let go with one hand and scrabbled to reach it. His arm closed on my neck like a python. I snatched the bar up and stabbed it down into the closest target, the man’s broad running shoe. He yelled in pain and tried to shift his stance. My vision went spotty. Blindly, I speared another, harder stab into the same spot. His arms fell away. I gasped in relief. Someone called out from a short distance behind us.

  I fled. Maybe I could have taken my attacker down with the metal rod, but with his size and my uncertainty whether the voice in the dark had been friend or foe, a strategic retreat sounded just fine. I staggered around the corner of the gun shop and took off for the alley running behind the stores on the dead-end road. Within half a minute I was far enough away from the shop to pause and listen.

  No one was pursuing me through the alley. No sound of car engines nearby.

  Who the hell had that been? Lester? Lester was large, but this guy had been altogether bigger, and much more fit. My neck ached. The son of a bitch had nearly torn my head off. Had he been lurking outside the whole time, guarding the shop? If so, why hadn’t he stopped me from breaking in? He wasn’t law. Or some citizen wandering past the back of the crime scene in the damn shadows.

  One thing was for certain: The big fucker would be walking with a limp now. If he hung around Mercy River, I would find him soon enough.

  Ten

  From east of the dead-end street I heard the throaty boom of a shotgun, chased by the crackle of its echo off the surrounding hills. I walked in the general direction of the sound, course-correcting with each subsequent blast.

  Leo might hear the gunfire from the jail. I hoped not. Being confined could already be pushing his stress factors near the breaking point. Leo’s particular brand of hell was the hypervigilance that so many vets couldn’t shake. For me, it was nightmares. We’d both reined in our worst symptoms with time and therapy. But those demons lurked just around the corner. Evil, and patient.

  By the time I cleared the last building and saw a field a third of a mile down the road, the shotgun booms had increased in frequency. Faint whoops of celebration heralded each blast. A line of Tiki torches illuminated thirty or more men, appearing more shadow than substance at this distance. The long guns they carried lent their silhouettes extra limbs.

  I wasn’t the only person attracted by the gunfire. A handful of the curious wandered toward the field, some of them still holding cans of beer from their last stop.

  The glowing green dot of a luminescent clay pigeon soared into the air at the far end of the field, only to be immediately obliterated by flying pellets of birdshot. Another pigeon, thrown by a second mechanical trap, for a different shooter, followed almost immediately. As I drew closer, I counted four separate traps operated by volunteers, each small catapult loaded with a stack of green disks ready for launching. As each shooter finished, he handed his ear pro to the next in line. Not all of the shooters were Rangers; there were civilians as well, both men and women.

  A scattered throng had gathered to watch the show. Flags on posts marked the safety line. I scanned the field, on the narrow chance that my attacker had fled here by car after our fight. A couple of the men were large enough to be candidates, but neither was favoring one foot.

  “Hey,” a voice called. I turned. The shaggy Ranger I’d seen at the saloon was behind me on the road, a backpack and a shotgun slung over his shoulders. If he was still wearing the heavy metal T-shirt, it was hidden under his bright yellow Gore-Tex jacket.

  “From the bar, right?” he said.

  “Right,” I said. “Van Shaw.”

  “Zeke Caton.”

  It was lucky I wasn’t chewing gum. I would have choked on it.

  “Yeah, I figured that would get a reaction,” he said, raising his voice over the ongoing booms of the shotguns. “You’re the buddy of the guy they arrested, yeah?”

  “Right again.” I shouldn’t have been surprised by Zeke knowing who I was. People kept reminding me how fast news traveled in Mercy River.

  “I was hopin’ to run into you. Look, I don’t have anything against your guy. I don’t even know if he’s the one who aced Erle. Shit, it was old Henry who actually saw him there.”

  “You’re local.”

  “All my life. Except the years where the Army had me by the nuts.” He grinned, a mouthful of teeth wider than average in his sharp face. “I grew up right the other side of the county line, and everybody knows damn near everybody here.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  “What’s your bro’s name?”

  “Leo. Third Bat like me.”

  “I was First. Still feels like I am,” he said.

  “I got out last January.”

  “Then you know.”

  A rusty white pickup truck roared past us. It honked at a knot of men moseying in the middle of the road, urging them into unsteady retreat. One of the group gave the truck’s taillights one middle finger each.

  Zeke shrugged. “No hard feelings, all right? I’d shake on it, but . . .” His hands were full of gear.

  I nodded agreement. The slight movement made my sore neck twinge. “Give me a rundown of that morning.”

  “I gotta get this to my bud.” He hoisted the backpack. “Come on.”

  We walked through the spectators, past the four shooters and their staccato symphony of clacking traps and shotgun blasts. A tall wiry Latino knelt in the light thrown by the headlights of a Jeep,
setting up a fifth trap.

  “Van, Rigoberto. Rigo, Van,” Zeke said, lowering his pack to the ground.

  Rigoberto glanced up from his work long enough to say hey. Zeke laid his pack out and unzipped it all the way to show stacks of clay pigeons, some painted the Day-Glo green I’d already seen and others in equally bright orange, sealed in plastic bags. He handed a bag of greens to Rigo, who silently set it aside while he completed leveling the trap.

  “Not much to tell you about yesterday morning,” Zeke said. “I wanted to hit the gun shop when they opened. The Rally always spurs a huge run on nine-mil ammo, so the sooner I got mine, the better. I saw Henry, and we walked down the road together to Erle’s. Henry tried the door. It was unlocked, so we went in. And there was Erle on the floor.”

  “How long would you guess Erle had been lying there?”

  “The blood on the walls was still a little gluey. That part flipped Henry out. I don’t know CSI shit. But it couldn’t have been long, right? I mean if . . .”

  “If Leo had shot him after he arrived. Go on.”

  “We’d seen Wayne Beacham up on Main Street, so I ran up the road to find him. That’s pretty much all.”

  “Tell me about Henry Gillespie.”

  Zeke cocked his head. “You know his name, huh? Guess I’m not the first person you’ve talked to about this.”

  “Is he reliable? As a witness?”

  “Henry’s Henry. He’s a lawyer, pretty much the only one they got in town. He and Erle got along well. That’s a rare fact.”

  “Erle wasn’t social.”

  “Erle was an asshole. Always tryin’ to be the smartest guy in the room, and got his panties in a wad when he wasn’t.”

  “Zeke,” Rigo said. Zeke reached down to fish a handful of shotgun shells out of his ruck. He pocketed all but two, which he loaded into the two barrels of the over/under shotgun he was carrying. Rigo unzipped a nylon rifle case on the ground—one of three he’d brought—and removed a similar weapon.

  “You shoot a lot?” I said.

  “Skeet?” said Zeke. “Hardly ever. I’m killin’ time before the pistol competition on Saturday. But Rigo here, he’s fucking world-class with a scattergun.”

  Rigo didn’t respond, except to swing his loaded shotgun closed with a smooth click. Like Zeke, he was probably still shy of thirty years old, but his resting expression and high hairline carried the somber quality of someone hitting middle age and not enjoying it. The tragedy mask to his grinning buddy Zeke’s comedy.

  “Check this out,” Zeke said, and loaded two green pigeons into the trap. A double thrower. Rigoberto donned glasses and ear pro like funky old-school headphones.

  “You want me to count it down for you?” Zeke said, loud enough for Rigo to hear him through the mufflers.

  “Screw off,” Rigo answered. It was the most he’d said since we’d arrived. Zeke laughed and pulled the cord.

  The two pigeons leapt into the air as if in terror, flying in different directions. Rigo fired, turned, fired again, without seeming to really aim, the sound of the two shots overlapping as if they were one bang heard from a far distance. Against the backdrop of the dark hills, the explosions of the green dust and fragments vanished instantly.

  “Nice,” Zeke said.

  “Too slow,” said Rigo, already breaking his shotgun to reload.

  “If Erle was such a dick,” I said to Zeke, “did he have enemies?”

  Rigo looked at me while his hands did the work. “You fishing for reasonable doubt?”

  “For anything that might help Leo.”

  Zeke grimaced. “You gotta be seriously pissed to blow a man’s chest apart like that.” He loaded the trap with one of the phosphorescent orange pigeons.

  “It could have been impulsive,” I said. “It was a gun shop, with weapons around. Was Erle arguing with anyone?”

  “Shit. Erle had ten quarrels a day. His nature, you know?”

  Meaning I either had an endless number of possible suspects, or none at all.

  Zeke turned to the line of trap shooters and waved a red flag. After a last shot or two, the volunteers and shooters turned to watch him.

  “A little demonstration,” he hollered to the crowd. “Rigo, you ready?”

  Rigo raised his shotgun to his shoulder, casual to the point of bored.

  Zeke pulled the cord and the bright orange pigeon flew skyward. Rigo gave it an extra few milliseconds to get some distance before he fired.

  A bright white flash and a bang easily three times the decibels of the shotgun blast assaulted my ears. It made me wince. I wasn’t the only one. The first words I could make out were vehement curses from men shaking their stunned heads, even as they laughed over the trick.

  Zeke was chuckling, blinking the spots from his eyes.

  “Okay, okay.” He raised his hands until the crowd had quieted. “Now that I have your fuckin’ attention. We’re selling these beauties for five bucks each, all proceeds to the Rally. See Her Hotness over there at the Jeep for yours.” He jabbed a thumb toward the Jeep with its headlights on, where a blond Redcap waved from the open tailgate. “Buyer assumes all risks and all that bullshit.”

  I reached down to pick up one of the orange pigeons from Zeke’s backpack. “What’s in it?”

  “The usual nitrate and aluminum, plus thermite so it goes boom with lower-velocity rounds.” He made a finger gun and dropped the hammer. “Our buddy’s secret recipe.”

  “Maybe too much in this batch,” Rigo said.

  “We brought a shit-ton of it,” said Zeke. “We’ll draft some volunteers at breakfast tomorrow to pack the powder into one-pound cans. Instant flash-bang targets for the rifle matches.”

  “Good advertising,” I said, handing him the pigeon. A line had already formed at the Jeep.

  “Wait until I post video of tonight.” He spun the orange disk on his finger like a basketball. “We’ll be selling these firecrackers nationwide.”

  I left Zeke and Rigo and pointed my feet toward the rental house. It had been something like forty hours since I’d slept, and I was feeling the weight.

  Eleven

  I woke early to leaden light coming through the bedroom window, the sight of it chasing away what little memory remained of the dream I’d been having. Not a full-on nightmare. Those left no questions in their wake, only sweats and trembling. This dream had trailed off into a lingering disquiet, like sensing an unwelcome visitor might be lurking in your house, if your house were your mind.

  That unease had become familiar after the trouble last summer. I felt it as often during waking hours as after dreaming. Addy would say it was guilt. I thought it might be something closer to temptation.

  My mouth and throat felt dry enough to store rice paper. I downed a bottle of Evian—Ganz had apparently had groceries delivered sometime last night—and filled it again from the tap, which tasted even better. I brought the bottle with me as I showered.

  The backstreets made the fastest route to the sheriff’s station. Iron clouds hovered low enough to touch. A first raindrop, heavy and arcing on the wind, splatted into my windshield and smeared a line of dirt. By the time I reached the middle of town, the patter of drops on the roof sounded like a drumroll and the windshield was next door to clean. I pulled my cap low to jog from the truck into the station.

  Deputy Roussa was in position at the front desk. Her mouth tightened a little at the sight of me.

  “On duty again,” I said. “Split shifts?”

  “The department allows overtime while the Rally is in town.”

  “Looks like the Rally brings in a lot of revenue, directly or not. Must be popular.”

  “Enough that we haven’t kicked this bunch out.” She stopped herself.

  “Who’d you run out of town before?”

  In place of an answer Roussa reached below the counter for the ceramic bowl. While I unloaded my pockets and mused on what group or groups Mercy River had seen fit to banish, she retrieved a hanging clipboard
from a nail by the cell block door. She recorded the time and my driver’s license number next to my name, which was already listed on the page. Maybe Ganz had gotten me some kind of preapproval.

  “How’s Leo been?” I said as she swept the metal detector over me.

  “Easy.”

  “I meant his health.”

  “Improving.”

  And that was all I got out of the deputy. I was trailing after her toward the cell block when the door opened and the heavily tanned Ranger I’d seen with Zeke Caton at the saloon walked out. We both stopped short.

  “You’re here to visit Pak?” he said in a soft Southern drawl.

  “Yeah. You know Leo?”

  “Not personally. I heard the man they arrested was from the 75th,” he said. Instead of chinos, today he wore black waterproof running gear, still wet from outside. “Wanted to meet Pak for myself. John Fain, with the Rally.”

  We shook hands. I imagined the Rally organizers had their collective asses on fire about Erle’s murder. One day before the event, and a Ranger supposedly kills a citizen. Very bad PR.

  “Let yourself in once you’re ready, Mr. Shaw,” Roussa said, and went back to her paperwork.

  “I saw you at the saloon yesterday,” I said to Fain. “Was that about Leo, too?”

  “That was about keeping good relations with the town. We wanted to know if there was any damage, and to slip that tall fella who owns the bar a few bucks for his trouble.” Fain spared a glance for Roussa, who was out of earshot. “Pak told me his buddy already got him a lawyer. You moved fast.”

  “He’d do the same for me,” I said.

  “Still, it can’t be easy to drop everything and come on the run. You staying for the Rally?”

  “For as long as Leo needs. He might have a concussion.”

  Fain’s expression hardened. His weathered and somewhat gaunt face reminded me of the cowboys in black-and-white movies that my grandfather would watch on quiet afternoons when there was no European football on television. Easy to imagine Fain’s narrowed eyes scanning the plains for rustlers.