“And these people want bear parts,” Johns said. “Wild bear parts, not farmed, for some goddamn reason they’re convinced there’s a difference.” A steady supply of bear galls and paws sweetened the deals and gave the club an advantage with the best suppliers. The agency had given Johns some seed money and now with funding from the club, he and Mirra had developed a significant bear parts market in Virginia, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania.
“Sounds like you’re onto a good business proposition,” Walker said.
“It gets Mirra and me into the upper levels of the club. That’s where the organized crime is happening.”
“Rank and file ain’t involved,” Mirra said. Rice had wondered about a guy like Mirra betraying the brotherhood. He must have a beef with the leadership. Happened a lot, the higher-ups got greedy and cut out the membership; Johns had probably promised him only the higher-ups would be prosecuted. Might or might not turn out to be true.
Johns said he thought the investigation had the potential to take out a significant percentage of the narcotics supply in the mid-Atlantic all at once. Leaving a vacuum, Rice thought, to be filled within six months by a Mexican cartel. They’d be much better off leaving the bikers in place. He couldn’t imagine anyone still thought the whole war-on-drugs charade made any sense anyway. Johns didn’t strike him as a true believer, so this was all about his career. Rice wondered where Mirra would be left after it was over. He’d seen what happened to CIs for the DEA.
“So it’s for a good cause,” Rice said. “Killing all those bears.” The others looked at him. “They want our bear parts because their wild bears are pretty much extinct. You commercialize bears here and that’s what you’ll get, eventually.”
“Bears ain’t extinct here. Ain’t even close.” This was Mirra.
“It’s only for another six months, a year tops,” Johns said. “When we drop out the prices’ll crash again. Besides, bears have turned into a goddamn nuisance in a lot of places. People aren’t shooting enough of them.”
“Well, you’re not shooting any more bears at the preserve, not on my watch. Turk Mountain Preserve’s off-limits. In fact, my jurisdiction extends as far as I can walk, so you’d better stay off Turk Mountain generally. Serrett Mountain too.”
“Fuck you,” Mirra said, amiably. “That’s public land.”
“And I’ll be watching it.”
Johns appeared more outraged than Mirra. “You realize you’re threatening federal law enforcement personnel in front of a county sheriff.”
Rice knew he was reaching. “Not a threat,” he said. “I’m giving you information. Telling you how the land lies. I’m part of the geography. If you guys are poaching bears near Turk Mountain, I’ll be there.”
Johns stared at the sheriff, probably hoping for support, but Walker rolled his eyes. Mirra was still grinning, like once he’d started this new thing with his face, he just couldn’t stop.
“What about my truck?” He was asking Rice.
When the guy focused his attention on you, Rice decided, it was a little bit scary. Even if he was smiling. Rice had nearly forgotten about the damn truck.
“Come on. You know I couldn’t have done that.”
“Figured you had someone with you.”
“Not that I know of. Maybe the bears did it.” Actually he suspected the mushroom picker, whoever or whatever he was, but he wasn’t going to mention it.
Johns, impatient with the subject, insisted. “You’re paying for his truck, Moore. You’re responsible one way or another. Either that or you pay for his knee surgery, which you definitely are responsible for.”
In Rice’s peripheral vision, Sheriff Walker’s eyebrows shot up, and Mirra turned toward Johns, vaguely dangerous. “You said—”
“I know what I said. Agency’ll cover your medical. But we can’t do the truck. Moore pays for the truck.”
There followed a surreal discussion about the deductible on Mirra’s comprehensive auto policy and whether it was fair to ask him to make a claim. Eventually the sheriff promised the police report would make it clear Mirra was the victim of random vandalism, and the deductible turned out to be a thousand dollars, which Rice couldn’t afford, but then he remembered Delgado’s cash, and agreed. He would drop off the money at Walker’s office next week.
Johns drove out first, Rice following. Walker stayed at the cabin because his wife was bringing out a picnic later. When they’d passed through the open aluminum gate and onto the rutted gravel county road that climbed away from the river, Johns pulled onto the left shoulder.
Rice stopped alongside and rolled down his window, cut off his engine. The air was warm and smelled of crayfish. Mirra watched him through Johns’s open passenger-side window. He still seemed to be in a good mood, maybe because Rice had promised to give him a thousand dollars. Johns stared straight ahead, his forearms resting on the steering wheel.
“Where’d you get the names, Moore?”
“Only so many places I could get them, right? But what you’re really wondering is whether I know you covered up Sara Birkeland’s rape, and whether I have proof, and whether I’m going to give it to Sheriff Walker.”
Johns didn’t seem surprised. “You think you can blackmail me?”
“Only sort of. I want you to find a way to take those three fuckers down. If not for the rape, then for something else.”
“You know damn well I can’t touch those guys, not yet.”
Rice spoke to Mirra. “You weren’t happy about what they did, were you? Not your typical rank-and-file MC members. No loyalty. They set you up. If it hadn’t been for Johns, you’d have done time for a rape you weren’t involved in.”
Mirra didn’t answer him. He seemed only idly interested in the exchange.
“Why don’t you two put your heads together,” Rice said. “You’ll think of something. We can talk again in a month, see how it’s coming along.”
Now Mirra perked up, like he’d been waiting to ask. “What about the Mexican?”
“What Mexican?”
Mirra turned and said something to Johns that sounded like I fuckin’ told you, and Johns leaned over him to give Rice an outraged, incredulous look. The thought of Rice surviving an assassination attempt seemed to bother him more than the blackmail. “Los Ántrax, for fuck’s sake.” He cranked the ignition and Mirra raised the window as Johns floored the gas and spit gravel, fishtailing off the shoulder and around a curve, headed back toward the highway in some kind of hurry.
Fifty-Four
Rice drove west over the Dutch River bridge at first light. He’d seen no traffic, so he pulled off the road on the far side and walked back to have a look at the river. The bright washed air and indigo skies that had followed the tropical storm hadn’t lasted long. A fine misty rain drifted around him, a wetness more of the air itself than anything falling from the sky. Rain showers overnight had wakened him several times pounding on the roof of the lodge. He peered over the concrete railing at the river fizzing against the abutments, swirling on the downstream side in brown foamy eddies that trapped the usual floating detritus: milk jugs, bright yellow motor oil containers, bits of Styrofoam, plastic bags.
He’d called Boger last night to thank him for the warning about the Stillers and the biker gang, and he’d asked when would be a good time to stop by with something. Also he was out of the honey Boger had left him and would like to buy some more, if he could spare it. Boger said well if you ain’t busy up there watching leaves fall off the trees you can stop by first thing in the morning and help me switch out a culvert. I’ll give you the damn honey.
He drove slowly in the dense fog along Sycamore Creek. When he turned onto the gravel drive, a yellow glow appeared at the edge of the forest, indistinct dog shapes milling in the kennel as Dempsey, lit by a bare bulb in the wood-frame run-in shed, scooped kibble into big round aluminum pans. The dogs triggered a memory, a nightmare from the night before, and he braked too hard, skidding in the gravel. He shut off the engine but d
idn’t open the door. The windshield wipers stopped in mid-swipe, fine raindrops beading on the glass. They accumulated into larger drops, pregnant and then bursting to run down the glass and out of sight. He watched the rain on the windshield and then he was watching his dream, himself, walking along the base of a high cliff in the inner gorge, under a vast curving overhang where water seeped silently down the rock in slow glistening sheets. Someone’s camp, lean-to shelters and a stone fire circle in an overarched cavity out of the weather, the dirt floor stomped smooth and swept; animal skins were stretched in rough wooden frames made from branches with the bark still on, a big one with tawny fur leaning up against a boulder black with woodsmoke.
Dempsey shut the door of the shed behind him and approached the truck. Rice got out and pulled on his rain shell. Dempsey wore a dark canvas coat, already wet on the shoulders.
“You mind a little mud?”
“No, sir.”
Rice climbed up onto the skidder as Dempsey fired up the ferociously loud engine, drove past the house and onto a muddy logging road where he picked up speed. The skidder clearly wasn’t meant to be a passenger vehicle, and Rice hung on as best he could, bracing his butt against the welded-on dog kennels as the machine bucked and roared up the mountainside, spattering him with mud from the big knobby tires.
At the first landing Boger stopped the skidder next to a flatbed trailer with a yellow Caterpillar backhoe and two big corrugated metal culvert pipes chained alongside. They traded the skidder for the backhoe and continued another half mile as the road followed the contour southwest and made a deep bend into a forested hollow. A bold creek flowed over the top of the road where the culvert had been plugged on the upstream end and then completely exposed by erosion. It was old, a rusted iron pipe that Boger’s ancestors must’ve put in.
“This first one ain’t so bad,” Boger said.
They dug out underneath the pipe with long-handled shovels and lay in the mud to push thick chains under and around so Boger could pull it out with the backhoe. Boger had skill with the backhoe, performing improbably delicate maneuvers with a toothed steel bucket the size of a bathtub, but a lot of the work still fell to shovels and iron digging bars, sifting rocks from the fill soil, building sluices at each end of the pipe to protect the channel from erosion. Later, Rice figured in the course of the day he must have lifted and placed a ton and a half of rock with his hands. Boger was strong and fit and the work turned into a contest between the two of them, the older man refusing to be outworked by the sissy-pants caretaker from the nature preserve. Rice started to worry when Boger’s gaze lost focus and he began tripping over his feet, but the stubborn lout clearly wasn’t going to give up, so Rice asked for a break.
It was early evening when they rode the skidder back down the two miles of switchbacks to Boger’s house. Rice hopped down and Boger looked at him.
“You didn’t bring no clean clothes, did you?”
“Didn’t occur to me.” Both men were caked with mud from head to boots.
“Nothin’ of mine’ll fit you. Meet me over to the kennel and we’ll get you hosed off. Still be wet but won’t be muddy.”
Boger tried the door of the house but his wife wouldn’t let him in, so he stood there until she handed him out a heavy paper grocery bag. He came back carrying the bag and two Buds in his other hand, folded towels under one arm, and Sadie the setter trailing along behind. She ran to Rice when she saw him, favoring the back leg. He knelt down, scratched the silky tangled fur behind her ears. She sniffed at his mud-flecked face, whiskers tickling his ear while he cracked open his beer with his other hand.
The hounds in the kennel bayed at them halfheartedly while Boger sprayed the mud off Rice with the chrome spray nozzle. It was high pressure, probably what Boger used to hose off the concrete slab of the kennel, and it hurt like hell but he didn’t say anything.
Boger tossed him a towel and he dried his face and hair. He took off his shirt and wrung it out, put it back on. A little water wouldn’t hurt his truck seat any. He handed Boger a sealed envelope with “Turk Mountain Preserve” written on the front.
“This is a key to the new lock at the front entrance,” he said. “If you lose your hounds on Turk Mountain, come on up the driveway and we’ll go get them.”
“Your bosses know you made a key for a bear hunter?”
“For a houndsman. Yeah, she knows. She and the board want to try a new approach to things. We’re not allowing bear hunting, but we’ll try to involve some of the folks who live around here in what happens at the preserve. We’re starting with you because I trust you and I’m going to need your help with some projects up there. If you have time.”
Boger grunted something noncommittal, which was better than Rice had hoped for. He’d opened the door of his truck to leave when Boger stopped him.
“You hang on just a minute. You and me ain’t square.”
Rice grinned. “You probably saved my life. It’s going to be hard to square that.”
“That’s not what I mean. We ain’t square on you killing Monroe.”
The bear hound. Lying in the gravel that morning, the wet fur, legs stiff with rigor. Seemed years ago, but he should’ve known Boger wasn’t over it yet. He waited.
Boger nodded toward the house. “Maryanne’s got three retired hounds living in there already. She won’t let me retire ’em proper, the .357 way.” He didn’t smile, but Rice suspected this was just tough talk. “Soon as one dies of old age, anothern comes out of the kennel and into the house. She goes and picks one out, the oldest and weakest, the one the others are pushing off the food, and then I got to find and train me up a new hound. It’s three broke-down hounds in the house all the time. But I do draw the line. At three. There ain’t no room for Sadie. You have to take her. In the bag you got a week’s worth of kibble so she don’t starve ’fore you go to the store. Your honey’s in there too.”
Rice felt a little stunned, like Boger had gone upside his head with an open hand. It took him a moment to reply. “You want me to take Sadie?”
“That’s what I just said.”
“I don’t kn—”
“She gets around good but she’ll always have that stiff leg. Remind you what a asshole you are.”
“I’m not sure my situation is a good one for a dog.”
“I didn’t ask about your situation.”
Rice breathed, feeling his situation change. The man had made up his mind. He nodded, and spoke to the dog sitting expectant on the grass between them as if waiting to hear a verdict.
“I reckon that’s fair.”
They arrived back at the lodge after dark. Rice opened the door for her, and Sadie hopped out of the truck and chased an animal, a fast, dark flitting thing that turned out to be Mel the black cat. Mel ended up in the rafters above the front porch, with Sadie standing underneath, pointing with her nose, frozen except for a slow sweep of her tail. When Rice turned on the porch light Mel gave him a look. “You got a dog?”
He called Sadie inside and shut the screen door and went and stood under where the cat was sitting, utterly calm now, mute, dignified, unflustered.
“You know you almost got us both killed the other day,” he said.
Fifty-Five
A cold gentle rain fell most nights, and in the mornings thick fog crowded the mountain like giant batts of cotton. He worked in the cabin all day and into the moon-dark evenings while Sadie explored the edge of the forest or rested on the porch, staring out at things Rice couldn’t see. He laid in the insulation and hung the drywall. A crew from an outfit in northern Virginia installed the antique cabinets STP insisted on. The floor was installed and sanded, and he’d applied the nontoxic finish that STP had ordered. At night Sadie slept on an old towel on the floor in his bedroom and stank of wet fur, waking him up when she whimpered in her dreams. She stopped chasing the cat, and the two animals practiced ignoring each other. Mel stayed around, possibly glad for the extra company despite herself. She lapped up the off
erings of fish-smelly water Rice squeezed from his tuna cans into a cereal bowl on the porch railing.
Before bed, he sat outside on the front porch with Sadie at his feet and the skinny black cat grooming herself on the railing. He drank a couple of beers to settle himself and watched the distant lights in the valley.
Ever since the night of the hurricane, Rice had found himself drawn to water. Some mornings he and Sadie walked down to the river, where she liked to creep along the bank and point frogs as if they were quail. Rice sat and listened to the current rush and thrum over the cobblestone bed, watched the light come slowly onto the rippling surface, flat metal light from an overcast sky. After lunch he let the dog chase him around in the tall grass of the meadow. When she caught him she pawed at his calf and he fell on his back as if she’d knocked him down. She stood there wagging, her face leaning down to peer into his. A little puzzled. She probably had never interacted with a human in this way before. She probably thought he was insane.
He’d taken apart Mirra’s bait station, buried the deliquescent cow head, and packed out the cable and the rebar he’d pulled from its eyes. The two bear carcasses had mostly disappeared.
Dempsey Boger had brought him three bodark staves from a cousin’s farm in the Piedmont, and he’d been trying to carve a longbow. The first had failed but the second attempt seemed like it was going to work, and as soon as he figured out how to straighten arrows he would start practicing.
On several nights he was awakened by the same dream, the driveway alarm—Alert, Zone One. He sat up in bed, his hand already on the .45, but there was no sound but Sadie’s soft snoring.
When he walked transect surveys, he kept Sadie on a rope leash so she wouldn’t range and skew the species count. He made a scheduled water test and the last aquatic bug survey of the year in Perry Creek, switched out the data cards on all the trail cameras, and uploaded the images, recorded the data in Sara’s spreadsheets.
Bearskin Page 28