“I see you’re looking at padlocks,” the kid said. “That Master in your hand is the best in the store.” He seemed nervous, like he’d been told to work the floor but it didn’t come easy to him.
“Seems sturdy enough,” Rice said. The kid had a plastic name tag pinned to his black T-shirt. “You know how to work that chain cutter over there, Damien? I’ll need about five feet of the thickest one.”
“You locking up anything important?”
“Just a gate. Somebody cut the old lock with a bolt cutter.”
“You think they’ll come back?”
It seemed an odd question. “They might. Or somebody else might.” The image that had compelled him to stop at the co-op after dropping off Sheriff Walker came again: a dusty crew cab with Sonora plates pulling up to the gate, a lithe sicario sliding off the seat and inspecting the locked chain, the Mayan mask tattoo staring insanely from the back of his shaved head.
“’Cause a guy with a forty-two-inch bolt cropper could cut that lock without even trying. Or he could spray it with Freon and smash it with a hammer, or he could pick it or bump it if he knows what he’s doing.”
Rice hefted the substantial lock in his palm. It cost $37.99. He raised his eyebrows at Damien. “You’re a hell of a salesman.”
“A shrouded Abloy and a sixteen-millimeter boron composite motorcycle chain would be better. But then he’ll just walk over to the other end and knock the gate off its hinges with a hammer.”
“No, son, we got that top gudgeon reversed.”
The kid smiled for the first time. He had good teeth, and piercings in his left nostril and right eyebrow. These were just holes without anything in them, probably a concession to the clientele at the co-op.
“You some kind of security geek, Damien?”
“My dad’s a locksmith in Pittsburgh. We do some consulting.” Rice must’ve looked incredulous. He explained he was a mechanical engineering major at Tech, taking a semester off, living with an uncle in Blakely to maintain his in-state residency.
Rice folded his arms. The kid had steady brown eyes, a look of engagement.
“You have to keep all this to yourself.”
He described the Turk Mountain Preserve, the poachers coming in on ATVs, the long driveway. The gate at the front entrance was welded steel and opened out from the latchpost, which was made from an old telephone pole, same as the hinge post. Most of the road frontage was a steep bank, a new woven wire fence and salt-treated posts at the top. It occurred to him that the Traver Foundation must’ve put in the gate and fence when Sara started as caretaker. They’d had couples before, but as far as he could tell from the logbooks, she was the first single female caretaker the foundation had hired.
Damien thought for a few moments, nodding, scratching his belly. “I should look at a map.”
Someone was locking the front door, but Damien said not to worry about it, and Rice stood behind the counter watching him create a map of the Turk Mountain Preserve on his laptop, downloading tax maps from the county website and superimposing them on a topo. He pulled traffic estimates for Route 608 from the DMV site and downloaded aerial photos from a USDA site.
“This the house, in a big open pasture?” He zoomed in and pointed to the black rectangle representing the lodge. Two smaller squares for the tractor shed and the cabin lay nearby in the appropriate spots. “Who else might want to get in the front gate? Is it just poachers?”
“Let’s just say it might be somebody more serious.”
Damien leaned back, away from his laptop, and cocked his head a little to the side, showing off the elaborate tattoo on his neck, the bright green leaves, the long, curved black thorns. Rice had decided it was a fantasy plant, resembling nothing that occurred in nature.
“Say there’s a woman living there by herself,” Rice continued. “Somebody’s threatened her.”
Damien nodded and hit a few keys and pulled up a blank table, typing as he spoke. “The first thing to understand is there’s no way to stop someone from getting in if that’s what he really wants to do.”
Rice already knew this but it still made him a little sick to hear it. Consequences of Agent Johns burning his DIY WITSEC program kept tumbling into place. Sara was going to win the fellowship at the preserve, and she planned to move to the cabin as soon as classes were over. She would have to face the Stillers and various other local hostiles by herself, but that wasn’t what worried him. The new Sara could handle those clowns. It was the other thing. He planned to make his departure somehow conspicuous, hoping to take the cartel-related danger with him, but someone might still show up to search the preserve. When they didn’t find Rice, they would interrogate anyone they did find.
Damien was describing the tools available to the “determined intruder”: Freon spray, manual bolt croppers, pneumatic bolt cropper, hacksaws, angle grinder, cutting torch, lockpicks, hammers, drills, cable cutters, chainsaw, even a bull-bar on his truck so he can ram the gate itself. In a rural setting, he said, the best you could do is turn away casual trespassers and create a delay for the bad guys.
“The length of the delay depends on how good your overall design is, how much inconvenience you can put up with getting in and out, and how much money you’re willing to spend. You get to the point of diminishing returns pretty quick, especially given that somebody who’s extremely motivated will just walk in, or cut the fence and ride in on an ATV, or two guys could lift a dirt bike over and ride in on that.”
“A dirt bike. Shit.” Assassins in Mexico used motorcycles all the time, two guys on a bike, the shooter riding pillion. It was something they’d picked up from the Columbians. “So far you’re not doing much for my peace of mind.”
“You can still control the situation.” Damien started typing again, explaining how to fix weaknesses at the entrance. He asked about the driveway, how long it took to drive up to the house from the road. Rice kept it in good shape with a blade on the tractor, but the water bars that controlled runoff also acted as speed bumps. Ten minutes, he figured, even if you were in a hurry.
“Okay, that’s your best feature, ten minutes is plenty of time to get ready. A driveway alarm will give you time to load the shotgun, make a phone call, get in the safe room, whatever. They’re cheap and effective, we got ’em in the store. Picks up the magnetic field of a vehicle and you get a warning if someone breaches the gate and drives in. We can order you a strong padlock and chain that’ll deter your poachers. Then if the alarm goes off you know you got a different kind of problem.”
Or someone with a key, Rice thought.
He drove home fast in the spitting rain and arrived at the entrance just before dark. Low, scudding clouds enshrouded the mountains, and the world steamed and glowed in the failing greenish light. He’d decided Damien was a good salesman after all. They’d loaded a bundle of thirty-six-inch rebar in the back of the truck, along with a new mattock and a supply of PVC piping and conduit. On the front seat was a driveway alarm that would sense a vehicle driving over it and send a radio signal to a small walkie-talkie receiver. The receiver and the battery pack for the transmitter were plugged into the cigarette lighter, charging. He’d also ordered the fancy padlock and motorcycle chain with expedited shipping, so he could set them up before he left. It meant STP was going to have to swallow a significant charge on the foundation’s co-op account, which she wouldn’t mind once she understood the extra security was for Sara. She was going to be less excited about the prospect of finding a new caretaker.
Working with the mattock, he buried the sensor under the driveway in a length of PVC pipe about a hundred yards up from the gate, far enough so that any off-road vehicle that drove around the gate would be back on the driveway by then and would set off the alarm. He dug a shallow trench and buried the wire from the sensor in the flexible conduit running fifty feet to the transmitter box, which he bolted on the far side of a big white pine where you couldn’t see it from the driveway. He installed the batteries and propped the PV
panel out of sight—he would tell Sara to come back on a sunny day and find a better spot for it—adjusted the frequency, and turned it on. When he drove across with his truck, a peremptory male voice spoke from the handheld receiver on the seat beside him: “Alert, Zone One.” It repeated until he hit the reset button.
Soaked with sweat and rain, he drove back to the entrance and turned his truck around so his headlights lit the gate. Damien’s prescription to discourage would-be trespassers from chainsawing the gateposts—and the first few fence posts on either side—was to drive three or four lengths of rebar into the ground alongside each post, then staple them to the post with big fencing staples so they’d be a pain in the ass to remove. He hesitated now, wondering how that was going to look. STP cared about aesthetics. The rain had abated temporarily and he walked out onto the wet pavement. The gate and the fence were set back about twenty yards from the road, with a wide gravel entranceway where the gate swung out. He didn’t think you would notice the rebar from the road.
The sound of an engine, diesel, high-beams shining down the straightaway. Feeling jumpy—even more than usual—he went for the pistol in the truck, tucked it in his pants, stood so the engine block of his truck was between him and the oncoming vehicle.
The vehicle slowed, hesitated, then Dempsey Boger’s pickup pulled off the highway. Sadie the broke-leg setter stood up on the front seat and poked her head out the open window. Rice came around the front of his truck.
“Dempsey. Sadie.” He stepped over to pet her and she wagged and sniffed his hands. Boger finished a cigarette and stabbed it out sparking in the open ashtray under the dashboard.
“She’s out of her cast,” Rice said. “How’s the leg?”
“It don’t seem to hurt much. But the vet said it’ll always be a little stiff.”
In fact her left hind leg stuck out toward the dashboard.
“She seems pretty content. Gets to ride around in the truck with you.”
Boger peered toward the shut gate. “You lose your key?”
“I was about to work on the gateposts, put some rebar on ’em.” He figured it wouldn’t hurt for the local bear hunters to know he was beefing up security. “Ordered a new lock and chain too.”
“I reckon you did.” Boger chuckled and turned off the ignition, cut his headlights. He opened his door and slid out, left the door open, the yellowish interior light spilling into the bed. He stretched and walked around to the back, stepped up on the bumper with one boot, leaned forward to lay his heavy forearms on the top of the tailgate with his big calloused lumberjack’s hands hanging loose, resting. He tilted his head up to the black sky, the trees tossing in the warm wind.
Rice figured here comes some weather talk, but Boger peered at him in the light from the cab. “You don’t look so good,” he said.
“Thanks.” Rice left the setter with her head hanging out the window and leaned on the edge of the bed just behind the diamond-tread aluminum toolbox.
“You jumping ex-marine bear poachers in the middle of the night now?”
Rice thought he sounded a little bit happy about it, like the episode confirmed his dire predictions, his suspicions about Rice.
“Naw. That’s just crazy talk.” He reached up to feel the stitched cut on his jaw. It was still sore from his encounter with Derek the friendly police dog. He let the long silence hang, wondering if he should approach Boger about keeping an eye on Sara after he was gone. If he could see past their philosophical differences. Rice was about to explain that he would be leaving soon when Boger spoke again, his voice losing its lazy rhythms, like he was struggling with what he had to say.
“Somethin’ you oughta know. Stiller boys been running their mouths, they’re scared, must be what you done to Alan Mirra. They say Mirra’s biker gang is fixing to get rid of you.”
Rice almost laughed, but Boger clearly wasn’t joking. “Get rid of me? In what sense?”
“Hell should I know. That gang they’re in, you could just use your imagination.”
“He turned up yet? Mirra?”
“Not that I’ve heard.”
“You don’t seem surprised he was poaching.”
Boger was silent. A violent gust shook rainwater from the trees along the road. It occurred to Rice that Boger didn’t just happen by, that he’d come to warn him. That he should take this seriously.
“I think Mirra and the Stiller boys were in on it together,” Rice said, “setting up bait, shooting the bears at night, selling the gallbladders. Did you know about that?”
They both stared into the empty bed of the pickup. Dented and scraped, swept clean except for some grease-caked sawdust in front of the wheel wells. No reply. Rice suppressed a grin. Boger simply ignored you when he thought what you were saying was asinine. Pretended you hadn’t spoken. It was pretty effective.
“I need to talk to those stupid bastards. Do you know where they live? Bilton wouldn’t tell me.”
“They used to rent somewhere out near the interstate, but they was laid off at the sawmill back in July, got evicted. Heard Alan Mirra let ’em move into a old trailer on his place.” Boger held Rice’s eye for a moment: he might withhold information or he might give information and Rice was going to have to deal with that. What he’d done just then was he’d let loose some information, a gift to an outsider, which was, despite the animus between him and the Stillers, against his usual inclinations, and Rice had better be paying attention. Then he stepped around his truck, yawned, put his hand on the open driver’s-side door.
Sadie whined at Rice. He rubbed her throat and she lifted her head, leaned into his hand. He smiled through the cab at Boger. “And Alan Mirra’s place. Where might that be?”
Forty-One
Heading south out of Wanless, he turned on Cougar Lane, wondering about the road-naming process, and what complicated, contradictory psychology had led to the locals requesting the name of a predator intentionally hunted to extinction 130 years ago. Did they think they’d seen a mountain lion here? You heard reports all the time, though the sightings usually turned out to be big housecats, bobcats, or golden retrievers. He’d wondered if a lion might be hiding out in the gorge on the preserve, but he’d never seen any sign.
The Stillers’ place wasn’t hard to find—he only had to follow the Harleys and pickup trucks. He’d sort of planned to just knock on the front door and see what happened, but a party was ongoing in a ratty-looking trailer lit by a yellowish security light on a pole. A second trailer a quarter mile deeper in the wooded lot, windows dark, lit from above by another security light, was likely Mirra’s. At the near trailer they’d set up a couple of big blue tarps lashed on a metal scaffolding out front, a kind of awning that snapped in the wind, Christmas lights strung across the top.
Rice paused to watch from the end of the driveway. Rainwater dripped from white extension cords onto the unconcerned heads of a half-dozen large bearded men in shiny wet black leather jackets. Orbiting around them were a handful of eager-looking younger men fetching beer and lighting smokes. Women of various shapes and ages stepped in and out of the trailer, where more people moved behind the windows. Three tapped kegs lay askew in tubs of ice. The rain came down hard, quick violent sprays going crosswise on the windshield. He got the wipers flapping faster. He needed to think of a new plan. No one paid him any attention, and he drove on up Cougar Lane until he came to an old logging road. He backed in and got out, pulled the hood of his rain shell up over his head. Walked back toward the party.
Out back of the trailer they’d built an old-fashioned wood-frame outhouse, likely not to code. Another string of Christmas lights ran from the trailer on a couple of metal poles to the outhouse. The string of lights passed under the eaves of the outhouse and lit the space inside. While Rice watched from the forest, two skinny girls emerged, one in a red puffy down jacket, and ran cursing through the rain to the back door of the trailer. The music was loud inside but all he could hear was the bass. Sounded like 1970s and ’80s souther
n rock, and some classic metal he couldn’t quite place. Laughter, harsh voices raised over the music. Maybe three dozen men and women packed inside and under the shelter out front. A guy walked around from the front and pissed in the weeds grown up at the edge of the forest not ten yards from where Rice stood. He gave his dick two quick ungentle shakes, like he didn’t want anyone to think he was whacking off, zipped and turned, and walked back to the party.
Rice returned to his truck and grabbed a roll of duct tape and a length of old climbing rope from behind the seats. He released the magazine from his pistol and ejected the round from the chamber, thumbed the seven rounds from the magazine, reached back into the cut in the seat cushion for the spare magazine, and emptied it onto the passenger’s seat as well. He took off his boots and damp socks, put his boots back on, and dropped all fifteen rounds into a sock. He fit that sock inside the other and wrapped them with duct tape to hold the ammunition in a tight ball at the toes. A knot tied at the other end would serve as a stop for his grip. Holding just below the knot, he swung the heavy weight in a short horizontal arc, smacking into his palm.
Waiting again in the woods behind the trailer, he bet himself that Jesse would be the first of his three potential targets to come out for a pisser. He waited with a quiet mind, motionless, placing himself in the focused fugue he’d learned over the past few weeks in the forest. The predator’s patience is not an act of will, of holding oneself in check, but one of faith, of an absolute certainty that prey will come. For Rice, a little more than an hour passed altogether pleasantly in the storm before DeWayne opened the back door and took one step into the grass before stopping to make his water. Too lazy to walk to the woods.
“Hey, DeWayne!” Rice moved to the edge of the yard and played his flashlight in the dark weeds behind the outhouse. He laughed, trying to sound drunk. “There’s some bitch lying in the bushes back here!”
Bearskin Page 22