Harold grasped at the barrel as the rifle jerked in recoil. He saw Job working the bolt to chamber another round, and again the bore crossed his body, its black eye no longer lazy but swimming in tight ovals, and then he both heard and felt the concussive blast of a second shot. The big body tensed under Harold’s hands, then abruptly released.
Has he shot himself? No, that wasn’t possible. Harold tore his attention away to look for the rifle, which had fallen from Job’s grip, even as the muscles of the big man’s arms surged back to life, the claw of his hand seeking Harold’s throat. Harold brought up his hands to fight the death grip on his neck. His right hand was still on the chain, and seeing an opening, he wrapped a loop around Job’s head and pulled, released to make enough slack to get a second wrap, and pulled.
As Job twisted onto his back, Harold placed his right foot against his shoulder for leverage and leaned back, the constricting steel coils biting into Job’s throat. The fingers of his scarred, crablike hand flew around his face like the bats in the cave.
Time bled away and Harold found that he was staring at his reflection in the man’s bulging eyes. The tongue came out between purple lips and the face pearled a sickly gray color, then darkened into a mask, and the eyes slid away to look into space, then came back, found Harold’s eyes, focused briefly, then again slid away. Harold closed his eyes with the effort and was still pulling when the red behind his eyelids began to spot with color, green at first, then black. He felt something release from his body, and then he was no longer in the canyon of the Smith River fighting for his life, but was a small boy running toward his grandfather’s outstretched arms, and running, he leapt into the air and was a bird, soaring, and then as he settled back to the ground, the bird was gone.
* * *
—
When Martha heard the first shot, she shouted “Stay low” to Marcus. The sound had reverberated from the area where she’d seen the glinting from the rockslide. It had been a rifle barrel, she knew that now, even as she tried to empty herself of thought, although a part of her couldn’t help but wonder if Sean or Harold had been hit. Then the second shot sounded. It also was from the vicinity of the slide but different, not a split of thunder that echoed off the cliffs like the first shot, but muffled, lower in decibel. Lower in decibel generally meant lower in velocity. A handgun? Her handgun? She remembered pressing her service revolver into Sean’s hands before he crossed the river.
No more shots followed, and in the silence the minutes ticked. She wanted to be doing something, anything, to crack the tension.
“What’s going on?” she heard Marcus say.
She spat back at him to stay quiet. Then said “Sorry” under her breath.
“You said there could be two of them, right?”
“Yeah.”
“You ever see either of them with a handgun?”
“Yeah.”
“They both have rifles?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, shit.”
She put her right eye to the scope. The rockslide was too far away, at least a half a mile, and the detail too small, to see anything unless someone was standing right in the middle of it. She was too busy looking to notice Marcus scrambling up beside her.
“I told you to stay back.”
“Can’t you see him?”
“Who?”
“Can’t you see him? It’s Dewey, Job’s brother-in-law. He’s got a rifle.”
“How do you know?”
“I know his hat.”
“Where?”
“He’s behind Table Rock. Maybe twenty yards back of it. He must have been following my track.”
“But you didn’t go there.”
“He’s skirting to get a vantage. There he is. He’s coming closer.”
Still, she couldn’t see him.
“Are you sure?”
“Pretty sure. He went out of sight.”
“Why wouldn’t he be heading toward the shots?”
“He does what Job tells him to do. If Job said, ‘Follow that trail,’ he’s going to do it, no matter what he hears.”
“You think he spotted our fire?”
“How could he miss it?”
“Wouldn’t he think there was something didn’t add up, you right out in the open like that?”
“He doesn’t use the same numbers they teach you in school.” His voice rose in excitement. “There he is. See him? He’s got a green hat.”
Now Martha saw. There was a patch of color, like the quilted patterns of moss on the rocks. The color shifted.
“Are you going to shoot him?”
Martha didn’t respond. It wasn’t a justified-use situation. She couldn’t see a weapon, and as yet there was no proof of imminent threat. And it was too far for her to shout and announce her presence.
“You see the fly rod?” Martha said, without taking her eyes from the scope.
“Yeah. You want me to give it a pull?”
“I want you to crawl away from me farther up the log, so if he shoots at me, he won’t hit you. Take cover there. Then when I give you the word, pull the line.”
She heard the reel spool click as Marcus paid out line.
Something in the circle of her scope shifted, suddenly resolving into the shape of a man. He was lying prone on the ground, just behind the limestone pedestal of Table Rock. The old K-4 Weaver on Martha’s rifle had been sharp and bright for its day, but its day was forty years ago, and the figure in the crosshairs was fuzzy.
“Shit,” Martha uttered under her breath. And to herself, If you get out of this, you’re going to buy a new Leupold scope, one you can crank to a higher power than four.
The gunshot startled her. Or rather the sharp smack of the bullet that beat it by a split second. She hadn’t signaled to Marcus to pull on the line, hadn’t seen the hat come off the effigy. She craned her head to see beyond the fire. The effigy swayed back and forth. There was a second smacking sound. As the air rent with the thunder of the shot, the flimsy effigy broke and pitched forward, falling into the flames.
Martha’s right eye centered the figure in the scope. Targets across an expanse of water always looked closer than they really were. She calculated the range at three hundred yards, a distance where the 180-grain boat-tail bullet from her .30/06 would drop sixteen inches.
She raised the crosshairs to what she judged to be the right height, yet still she hesitated. If the shooter thought he’d killed Marcus, wouldn’t his natural course be to walk closer to make sure? The shooter would present a bigger target if she waited. She might even be able to take him alive.
The explosion of bark came an instant before the cracking echo. Martha ducked. She felt a burning sensation in her right eye and frantically rubbed at her face, feeling the stubble of splinters digging into her cheeks. She looked at the blood on the backs of her knuckles and blinked, wincing at the pain as her eyelids caught on the bits of bark showered by the impact. She brought her head to the scope. More sensing then seeing the blob, she fired.
A third shot from Table Rock came in the echo, the bullet thudding into the bole of the cottonwood.
Martha could feel the heat of Marcus’s body next to her. How did he get here?
“Keep your head down!” she said.
She crawled to her right a foot, then shifted the rifle from her right shoulder to her left, so she could take aim with her left eye, which she could still see through a little. Keeping her right eye shut, she looked through the scope and saw the patch of green. Indistinct, but not as blurry as before.
A fourth shot from the rocks, the bullet whining away over the log.
Martha ducked. Slowly she brought her head up, centered the green hat in the crosshairs, and raised the rifle to allow for the bullet drop. Breathing in, then letting out half the breath, she pressed the trigger with her left index
finger.
The butt of the rifle slammed against her shoulder with the shot. The barrel lifted in recoil, obscuring her sight of the target.
“Did I hit him?”
“No.” She could hear the breath coming rapidly as Marcus spoke. “You’re too high. I can see the dust where it hit the rock.”
Martha deliberately slowed her breathing. For a second she flashed to a vision of the whitetail buck she’d hung in her barn last fall during hunting season, the red wine color of its hollowed-out body cavity that turned in the wind when she slid open the double door. She’d shot it as it ran past her at forty yards, leading it like a duck in flight.
You can do this, Martha.
She jacked in another cartridge. Again she brought the crosshairs to bear on the green shape and raised them, but only by a few inches this time.
The rifle thundered, then rang away in echoes.
“He’s hit.” Marcus’s voice seemed to come from under water after the concussion of the shot. “You got him!”
Martha looked toward Table Rock through the scope. She saw movement there, then a shower of small rocks falling off the cliff, and then, suddenly, the figure of a person was going over and she saw a glinting of metal, heard a cracking sound, then another, and a moment later a heavy thud. Then, silence.
Martha found that she’d bitten her lip and spat out blood.
She could hear Marcus say, “He’s still rolling. Okay, he’s stopped. He’s dead.”
Setting down the rifle, she got to her feet. Marcus was beside her and she leaned against him. “Help me down to the river.”
“Don’t you think we should stay here? The other guy might still be alive. We don’t know where he is.”
Of course he was right.
“The channel then. It’s protected.”
Reaching the bank of the runoff channel, which was a few yards wide and flowing with off-colored water, she knelt down and cupped water with her hands to try to wash the debris out of her eyes.
“Can you see?”
“A little with my left eye. There’s still some grit.” She waded into the shallows, braced her hands on the cobblestone bottom, and dipped her face under the water. Using her thumb and forefinger to open each eye as wide as she could, she blinked, feeling the cold against her eyeballs. In her blurred vision, she saw a stonefly nymph, magnified by the water, crawl up on the top of a submerged stone, the gills on its middle body segment feathering. It seemed to be looking at her, and she remembered the card case at the homestead, the Creature from the Black Lagoon. She brought her face up, took a breath, and dipped under again. The little monster was gone.
“Better,” she said when she’d stood up. She saw Marcus standing on one leg ten feet away, leaning on the butt of the Winchester for support. She had completely forgotten that his Achilles tendon was ruptured.
“If you were Harold, you’d probably pee in the water. Act like nothing of significance had happened.”
And then she thought, Harold.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Last Leg to Eden
Even from three feet away, Harold looked dead. But under Sean’s hands was a string of pulse, the heart song quiet but the notes clear and distinct. Sean pried his fingers from his grip on the chain, releasing them one by one.
He’d already checked the ABCs—airway, breathing, circulation. No apparent injuries, though his right calf was distorted compared to the left, swollen tight against his pants cuff. The left side of his face showed an old bruise, yellowed with brown patches, an ellipse of green under the eye.
Sean felt around Harold’s body for blood, careful not to push against his back in case he’d incurred a spinal injury when he fell off the cliff.
Shooting with Martha’s revolver from the top of the cliff, Sean had aimed for the lower part of Job’s body, so that even if he was off by several feet the bullet wouldn’t strike Harold. He turned his attention to that man now, whose back was on top of Harold’s chest. Sean did not recognize the man, but knew it had to be Rayland Jobson. There was a stain of blood on the shirt. He ripped at the buttons and saw the dark worm of the entrance wound. As he watched, a bubble formed at the hole and broke. Then another as the gases escaped, the air turning fetid with the odor of bowel.
Sean remembered that the man had jerked and stiffened when he shot him, but then seemed to recover. Perhaps the slug had creased the spinal column, the shock rendering him momentarily unconscious. No matter. He was dead enough now, his eyes staring at something, or maybe that’s what eyes that stared at nothing looked like.
“Is he dead?”
Sean turned his head. Harold coughed. Sean saw his chest heave.
“He’s dead,” Sean said.
“You kill him?”
“I gut-shot him. I would have shot him again, but he was on you and I couldn’t take a chance. No, you killed him.”
“Good,” Harold said. “Drag the son of a bitch off me.”
A look crossed Harold’s face, as if he’d forgotten something of importance and just remembered.
“Did I hear shots, or was that just in my head?” Words formed at his lips, were said silently, then aloud.
“My son.”
* * *
—
It was a battlefield reunion—Martha, her face full of splinters, eyes red under sandpaper lids, each blink feeling like claws raking; Marcus, propped on one good leg, a stick for a crutch, Cochise crow-hopping beside him; Harold, his right knee sprained in the fall, limping on a severed tendon, his mind clear but his tongue having a hard time making words.
As the only one who hadn’t left a trail of blood during the course of the day, Sean took charge. His first priority was to use the satellite phone and call in the Air Mercy flight out of Great Falls. Harold’s infection, when they had managed to get the swollen leg out of his pants, didn’t look good at all, with angry red lines running up his calf. Sean was put on hold, then told the helicopter was engaged. By the time it completed its current mission and returned to the hospital, it would be too dark to attempt a landing on the Smith, even with night-vision goggles, unless the situation was life or death. Neither Harold’s infection nor ruptured tendon reached the bar.
That left the dead to deal with, and Sean eventually thought it best to leave them where they had fallen. He called in the GPS waypoints to the Cascade County Sheriff’s Office. The coroner and a forensics team would be dispatched. Birds would lead them to the bodies if the coordinates didn’t. In fact, a pair of gray jays had already found Dewey Davis, and Sean’s inclination was to let them have at it. He walked over to see the rifle that Davis had dropped over the cliff as he began to fall. Like the Mannlicher-Schönauer that Job had carried, and which Harold had fought him for, the rifle was a European-made bolt-action, but with a caliber of 9.3×62. It had a peep sight. Not a long-range weapon at all.
Martha walked up behind him as he covered the rifle with rocks, so it would remain undisturbed until the forensic team appeared on the scene.
“You got lucky,” he told her. “If that rifle had a scope, you’d be dead. You were sitting ducks behind that log.”
“Don’t I know,” she said.
Davis’s body lay a few yards away—crumpled, lifeless, small. An insignificant man in death, as in life. He had survived the fall after Martha shot him. At least he had survived long enough to blow a bubble of blood, which burst and spread obscenely over his face when Martha touched it with a twig.
“Here’s your hillbilly,” she said. “Your nightmare from Deliverance. Everything but the missing teeth.”
“What do you think it means?”
“It was your dream. You tell me. On second thought, don’t. I don’t want to know.”
Twenty-six miles of river remained between Table Rock and the take-out. That was too many by half to cover before dark, and the river was in
gloom when they reached Ridgetop Camp, where they decided to stop for the night. While the others stumbled about, pitching the tents and gathering wood for a cooking fire, Sean flashed a small streamer called a Black Ghost and caught three trout in a run opposite camp. Enough to fill the pan.
“So who’s got the head tonight?” Martha said. “What, no takers?”
When no one volunteered to bring Harold’s boat bag inside their tent, Sean treated it the same way he would hang food from bears. He tied a rock to the end of some paracord, tossed the rock over the stout branch of a pine, and tied one end of the cord to the heavy bag. Then he pulled the bag up under the pine canopy to a height of ten or twelve feet.
“You’ve been complaining about that bag for years,” Sean said to Harold, as everyone looked up, the bag swinging over their heads like a metronome, gradually slowing. “Now you have an excuse to throw it away and get a new one.”
“Nothing a little soap and water won’t fix,” Harold said.
Of the Scarecrow God, they had found not a trace. Nor would they find one in the fifteen miles they covered the next morning before reaching the take-out at Eden Bridge, where an ambulance met them to take Harold and Marcus to the hospital in Great Falls.
“We’ll do this again someday,” Harold said.
And Martha just shook her head. Men.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
The Silent Tickler
On October 1, four months after the head of Fitz Carpenter was reunited with his body in the cold storage facility at the Cascade County morgue and the story of their separation became public, a late-season floater intent on a bit of Montana cast-and-blast—fly rod in one hand, shotgun in the other—found a prairie rattlesnake at the Canyon Depth Boat Camp. He had nearly stepped on it, and the snake gave no warning before it struck. Fortunately for the floater, he was in his camo waders and the heavy boots deterred the fangs. The man promptly decapitated the snake with a charge of #4 tungsten shot from his Ithaca Model 37 shotgun. It was only then that he discovered the reason that the snake hadn’t shaken its rattle. It had no rattle to shake, only a single segment formed at its last skin shedding. Bad luck, as he’d had plans of making it into a hatband.
A Death in Eden Page 28