Bearskin

by James A. McLaughlin

  He unfolded the green tarp in the grass and weighted the corners with firewood from the stack behind the shed, careful to avoid the piece the old man had used to club him in the head—it was probably contaminated with his DNA.

  The man’s boot soles were muddy. The soil up here might be distinctive, so he untied the boots, pulled them off, and set them aside. More splotches of mud on the man’s pants cuffs, on his jacket at the left hip, and on his shoulder, where he’d hit the ground. Rice used his own pocketknife to liberate the torture shears from their packaging. He cut vertically up both pants legs from the cuffs to just below the knees, then around the legs, converting the pants to shorts and revealing muscular calves wound round with barbed wire tats. He unbuckled the belt and removed the black Kydex holster. Finally he cut the jacket sleeves starting at the cuffs, up the arms, and across the chest to the zipper so he could skin the jacket away from the body. He tossed the jacket in a pile in the grass with the watch cap and boots and pants legs.

  With the body centered at one end of the tarp, he folded the edges over the man’s head and feet to overlap in the middle, taped them together, and started rolling, rolled the body up in the tarp, as tightly as he could, like rolling up a rug. He wrapped it with a whole roll of duct tape, round and round, triple-taping along the seam so nothing would leak out.

  This time when he lifted the body, it was easier to manage and it slid neatly into the back of the Tahoe. He pushed it into a slight curve to make it fit without folding either of the back seats down. After he deployed the cargo security shade and shut the rear door, the wrapped body was invisible from inside or outside the vehicle. He fetched a contractor’s trash bag from the cabin and stuffed the man’s boots and clothes in, tossed it on the back seat.

  Sara had parked her car in the usual spot and was on her way back to the forest for his truck. The sliding shed door stuck halfway and he had to wrestle it open, but the tractor started right up. He drove it out into the driveway near the cabin, pulled the lever for the three-point hitch to raise the bush hog up high, like it was time to sharpen the blade. The Tahoe fit in the tractor’s spot in the shed. He locked the vehicle with the remote on the key fob and pushed the shed door shut.

  Body in SUV, SUV in tractor shed.

  One more thing before Sara came back: he dragged the hose from under the front porch and washed away the blood in the grass. By the time she pulled his truck around the cabin and parked next to the Subaru, he was in the office dialing the old phone, just like he’d imagined in his fugue. His call went straight into Sheriff Walker’s voice mail, Suzy’s voice, telling him to please leave a message.

  They switched the power on and moved Rice’s stuff back into the lodge. Sara replaced his food in the fridge and freezer—she didn’t think it had spoiled—while he went back out to the shed and spent nearly an hour searching the Tahoe. Afterward he rinsed off fast in the shower. The clothes he’d been wearing went into the washing machine on a heavy-duty cycle with extra rinse.

  They ate a quick breakfast, homicide having no effect on their appetites. The dishes were rinsed and drying, coffee grounds dumped into a new trash bag. Everything normal. Rice laid the items he’d found in the Tahoe on the kitchen table. From the glove compartment, a registration to 77th Avenue Services Corporation, Phoenix, Arizona. Possibly a cartel vehicle, probably not stolen. No hidden compartments that Rice could detect. Under the driver’s seat he’d found two small Ziploc bags with a few dozen 9mm hollow points in one, .380s in the other. A black Nike gym bag contained clothes, toiletries, a folded copy of the Turpin Weekly Record. He dumped these in the trash and stashed the two pistols, ammunition, NV goggles, and the things from the man’s pockets in the gym bag. The Glock was a G18C, which he’d never even heard of, and the part that looked like a safety was a selective fire switch, allowing the pistol to fire fully automatic bursts. The thing was radioactive—if he were caught with a full-auto firearm he would grow old in prison—but he couldn’t quite make himself get rid of it, not yet. The future was still uncertain. He thought of Alan Mirra and his motorcycle club, and the possibility that the cartel would find out what had happened and retaliate against Rice. As dangerous as it was to keep the pistols, an argument could be made that it would be more dangerous not to have them.

  Sara opened a thick manila envelope he’d found on the back seat and dumped out twenty-seven one-hundred-dollar bills in two rubber-banded stacks, a marked-up map of Turpin County, copies of Rice’s mug shots taken after his transfer from CERESO, and a printed skip tracer’s report showing the results of a months-long search for Rice’s whereabouts. A slim leather wallet contained four more hundreds and some smaller bills, a prepaid Visa card, and an Arizona driver’s license with the man’s picture, name of Paul Martin, a Phoenix address.

  She arranged the items on the table, inspecting each in turn. “You know this guy?”

  “Never met him.”

  “But you know who he is. Was.”

  “I know his name’s not Paul Martin.”

  “Uh-huh. And what makes you think whoever sent him isn’t going to come looking for him?”

  “I’m pretty sure he was hunting me on his own. Kind of a personal project. He hired that skip tracer himself.” The report was addressed to Paul Martin at a P.O. box in Tempe.

  “I thought the cartel was trying to keep you from testifying or something.” She leaned forward in her chair. She was focused but seemed calm, and Rice knew having her there was helping to keep him calm too. “Rice,” she began, “I’m being really patient over here, dragging the truth out of you like this. You appreciate it, right?”

  “I do.”

  “So . . .”

  “His name’s Delgado. Andrés Delgado. I didn’t testify against the cartel. I killed his younger brother.”

  “Shit, Rice, what in—”

  “Crotalito. That’s what they called him, the brother. He was a sicario, a low-level hit man for the cartel. I never knew his real name.” He ran a hand through his hair, rubbed his face as if he were trying to smooth out wrinkles, or wipe off some foreign substance. These words he was saying, he hadn’t even allowed himself to think them for so long. “When they couldn’t kill me inside they sent Crotalito after my partner to make sure she wouldn’t talk. It was his first real job and it was supposed to be a simple kidnap, assassination, and disappearance, but Crotalito was a sadistic shit, couldn’t help himself, he raped and tortured her, then he panicked and left the body on the U.S. side. It made the papers. The cartel didn’t like that.”

  Rice’s friends from CERESO had made inquiries, pulled strings, utilized back channels. The plan appealed to the cartel because it would eliminate Crotalito without alienating the influential and highly effective elder brother. The price was that Rice’s identity would be leaked to Andrés. The vengeful, grieving boyfriend had found his brother and killed him. It was very unfortunate.

  Rice hid the gym bag with Delgado’s things in the attic, first peeling off a few hundreds from the stack in the manila envelope. The Traver Foundation’s innocent-looking .22 target rifle was now a homicide weapon, but the bullet that had killed Delgado was gone, somewhere out there in the grass, disappearing into the earth, so he’d simply cleaned the bore, oiled the rifle, and replaced it in the closet.

  Sara agreed to hang on to the locked cash box with, as she put it, “whatever the hell secret shit you’ve stashed in there.” She would take it home and keep it in her apartment in Blacksburg. The tractor went back into the shed, and he drove the Tahoe down to the entrance, Sara following at a distance. He left the gate open for her to close behind her. Delgado had cut the padlock, and Rice was fresh out, at least until the new Abloy he’d ordered from Damien arrived, but Sara had said she would wrap the chain so it looked locked to people driving by.

  When he pulled onto Route 608, no one drove past. No one saw a Tahoe with Arizona plates leave the Turk Mountain Preserve. He wore a plain baseball cap, dark sunglasses, a canvas coat, and a pair of
old leather driving gloves he’d found in the lodge. The digital clock on the dash read 10:52 A.M. The gas tank was three-quarters full. He left Delgado’s cell phone turned on, the charger plugged into the cigarette lighter, so that on the outside chance that anyone was tracking it, they would see that Andrés Delgado had left the Turk Mountain Preserve and was headed north.

  Fifty-Two

  Sara appeared in the kitchen doorway soon after he started the coffeemaker. A foggy morning outside, scant gray light seeping through the kitchen window. Her eyes weren’t quite all the way open, and her hair stuck out in wings and tufts. She felt with her hand and tried to pat it down, then gave up and sat in the chair across the table from where Rice was eating a bowl of cereal. He’d set a bowl and spoon for her and she stared at the two boxes on the table as if the decision between them was beyond her capability.

  “I smelled coffee,” she said.

  The coffee machine groaned and she glanced at it.

  “Give it another minute,” he said.

  Yesterday afternoon he’d abandoned the Tahoe in a southeast D.C. neighborhood infamous for its high incidence of murder, drug busts, burglaries, and car theft. It was a risk driving Delgado’s vehicle into an urban area, but he’d been careful about the speed limit and had made sure all the lights and blinkers worked before they’d left. He’d found a quiet street that looked like it might be popular at night with the right sort of crowd and left the keys in the ignition. He’d worn gloves, but he still scrubbed everything he’d touched with wet wipes. On a whim, he’d decided at the last minute to keep Delgado’s phone, pulled the battery and the SIM card, and zipped it all in his jacket pocket. Before walking away to meet Sara several blocks west, he’d wedged a flimsy metal handcuffs key chain in the latch of the rear cargo door and jammed it shut. Whoever accepted the gift of Delgado’s vehicle would be taking Delgado along with it. Sara had objected to the plan, she’d said they were dumping their dead assassin problem on people who were by definition poor and desperate enough to steal a vehicle, but Rice felt they were also dumping a late-model SUV on them, that it was a more or less fair transaction with an unknown and admittedly unwitting counterparty. The Tahoe would make its way to a chop shop and, in return, someone would be obliged to get rid of the body, creating a gap of pure randomness in the sequence of events. The evidentiary thread connecting Rice with Delgado would fray, unravel, disintegrate.

  On the way back they’d traded off driving every hour because they both kept getting drowsy. Near Woodstock they’d pulled off the interstate and found a diner: grilled cheese sandwiches, coffee intended to fuel the last leg, but what it had fueled was an argument. Sara had no problem with today’s homicide, but she kept pressing Rice about his execution of Crotalito, asking how old he’d been, speculating pointedly about the unimaginable poverty he must have come from, how vulnerable his teen brain would have been to the temptations of the cartel, surely he idolized his famous older brother, how much coercion might have been involved, how culpable was he really, like a child soldier, and so on until Rice told her he wasn’t going to talk about it anymore. The kid had raped and tortured his girlfriend. He was a sadistic killer. Rice had put him down. He started cooking up an argument based on what he remembered about hunting squirrels in the forest last week—something about the predator’s necessary and adaptive suspension of empathy—but he was too tired to pursue it very far and he had the sense to keep his mouth shut. They’d agreed to disagree and gone straight to bed in opposite wings of the lodge when they got home. Rice couldn’t sleep, so he’d spent most of the night in the office entering historical logbook data on the laptop.

  Sara pondered the cereal boxes. She might’ve been trying to read the ingredients. Finally they watched her hand lift from her lap as if of its own independent volition and clasp the box of generic wheat flakes. She peered at Rice while she dumped cereal into her bowl.

  “You called him already?”

  He nodded. She poured in some milk.

  “What’d he say?”

  “I got Suzy. She’s the receptionist, or dispatcher. I’m not really sure what she is. Sheriff’s gonna set up a meeting.” He’d told Sara a DEA agent was mixed up in all this and might be able to do something about the three bikers. He’d described their connection with Mirra and the Stillers, though not how he’d found their names.

  “Suzy?”

  “What?”

  Sara’s pale blue eyes rose up from behind the cereal box. His face must’ve turned red.

  “You like Suzy?”

  “She’s okay. She’s funny.”

  “Funny ha-ha?”

  “Yeah. Funny ha-ha.”

  What Suzy had said was that Sheriff Walker was already out and about, dispensing justice in a waterlogged Turpin County, and he’d asked her to tell Rice when he called that Agent Johns wanted another face-to-face with Rice, that the names Walker had passed along to Johns had—and here she’d performed an uncanny imitation of Walker’s voice—“got that SOB’s attention.” Then she’d asked Rice if he liked to dance. He’d said no, and she’d sighed like that was the answer she’d expected and asked how about dinner and a movie? He’d said sure but wouldn’t she get in trouble with the sheriff and she’d said she was always in trouble with the sheriff.

  “What are we going to do now?” Sara asked. She had to teach this afternoon and would be driving back to Blacksburg early.

  He got up to pour their coffee. “I’ll ride with you down to the gate on your way out, just in case. You probably should stay in Blacksburg till we can be sure it’s safe here. Might be a week or two.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, we don’t know this is over, not yet. A cop might have come across the Tahoe before anyone took it. And I might be wrong about Delgado freelancing, going after me without cartel support. They could send someone else. If I’m still alive in a couple of weeks we’ll know I was right.”

  Fifty-Three

  The eighties-vintage A-frame stood in hemlock shadows on a low bluff overlooking the Dutch River. Rice knocked on the back screen door and Walker let him in, led him through a musty great room to a screened porch with a view down to a bend in the river. The place was owned by a friend of Walker’s wife. It was private, he’d said, and less damn depressing than that abandoned motel they’d used last time. He’d set out a pot of coffee and mugs.

  “This is civilized,” Rice said.

  “Not sure coffee is what Johns needs, but I need it.” He poured two mugs, didn’t offer sugar or milk, so Rice sipped the black coffee and watched the river. It was roiling and turbid but the flood had receded, exposing broad bars of muddy cobbles on the far bank, willow thickets and sycamore saplings still bent downstream. When he’d driven past Stiller’s Store on the way, the front door was propped open and Bilton and several other people Rice didn’t recognize were inside, mopping the muddy floor.

  Walker stood beside Rice at the screen. “I can guess why you’re interested in those bikers.”

  Rice nodded. He hadn’t said anything about bikers but he’d assumed the sheriff would look into the names himself. “Unfortunately I don’t have anything you can use. It’s a little bit complicated.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  He was about to ask after Suzy when they heard another vehicle pull up behind the cabin. Walker went to see, and Rice heard him say, “Well hell.”

  Rice smiled, realizing what Johns was up to. Low voices in curt greetings, footsteps, more than two people, creak of hinges and the door pulling against the rusty spring. Rice turned with his coffee.

  “Mr. Moore,” Johns said, looking belligerent and pleased with himself. “I think you’ve met Alan.”

  Mirra stepped through the door, limping but somehow still giving the impression of coiled violence, an elaborate metal and fabric brace strapped over his jeans on his left leg. He wasn’t smiling. His dark beard had grown out some in the past week and his face, like Rice’s, still looked like he’d been in a fight and hadn’t slep
t much since. The sclera of his left eye was a deep red and the flesh around the eye was purple, swollen. Rice didn’t think he’d hit him in the nose, but clearly he’d had it broken more than once. Probably in his late twenties, he looked angry, but he might always look angry. It was the kind of face you wondered what would happen to it if it ever did smile. The look he gave Rice was cryptic, but if forced to call it something, Rice would have said it was curious.

  Rice watched Mirra’s eyes for a moment, then he said, “You’re the guy from those nightmares.”

  A long pause followed while Mirra seemed to struggle, dredging something up from inside until a barrier gave way and it happened, the guy did smile, shaking his head, and his face didn’t break. Suddenly a more complicated sort of fellow.

  “Back the fuck atcha,” he said.

  Johns glared at Mirra, disappointed at not wrong-footing Rice. “What, you two are buds now?” He took a cup of coffee from Walker and turned officious, brusque. Business at hand. What he wanted from Walker was room to work, room for Mirra and him. Same deal he’d worked out with the game warden months ago. “You’re here,” he said to Rice, “because you’re the local vigilante who gets a free fucking pass from the sheriff’s office, so I have to negotiate with you, too.”

  Walker said if they wanted anything from him, they were going to have to say what they were up to, and what they were up to, it turned out, was acquiring bear parts for the motorcycle club to trade for drugs in East and Southeast Asia. The club was growing its operations there, securing cheap sources of large quantities of meth, opiates, and designer drugs.