by Jeff Carson
Now you’re a drunk. The voice taunting him was an eight-year-old girl’s.
“Sir?”
Wolf looked down at Patterson through his slit eyes. “What?”
“I said, that’s why you parked down here? Because of these tracks?”
The twin ruts were distorted by melting and blowing snow. They cast a wide arc, stopped, backed up, and headed back down the unplowed road.
“They caught my attention. They were left sometime after the snowstorm.”
Rachette folded his arms. “What am I missing? What does this mean?”
“I have no idea.” Wolf walked toward his SUV.
“Where are you going?” Rachette asked.
“Home.” He popped his door open and sat inside the warm SUV. Ignoring the three faces watching him, he fired up the engine, turned around, and headed down the valley, back to his dark living room, a dozen episodes of The Rifleman, and maybe some hair of the dog that had bitten him.
Chapter 2
You’re asleep. This is a dream.
Wolf’s conscious mind had a knack for cracking the curtains of his unconscious, poking its head in, then ducking out again just as the good part came.
He stood among the tall, swaying grass, watching a line of people board a CH-47 Chinook helicopter atop a small rise set in a clearing of the jungle. The heat suffocated him. Sweat streamed at odd angles across his body, like a demon’s tickling fingers.
He pushed up his helmet and studied the Sri Lankan boy standing at the edge of the jungle.
He was eight years old, Wolf knew that with certainty.
Same age as Ella.
The boy wore a dirty yellow backpack that hung low, as if it contained half his body weight in lead.
Wolf stepped forward, seeing more commotion in the trees.
Men. They saw Wolf, turned, and disappeared into the leaves.
Wolf’s skin slipped and slid underneath his ACU as he stepped forward. His stomach sank as he realized what was happening.
The boy held a black detonation rod in his hand, thumb poised over the button. He locked his eyes on the line of people boarding the helicopter and snuck through the grass toward them.
Wolf’s heart raced. He raised the M4 scope to his eye and gasped at the bouncing image.
It was not a bomb detonation device, but a paintbrush with a tip doused in red paint. It was not a yellow backpack, but a pink one. The vision flitting through the grass was not an eight-year-old boy, but a girl with a bobbing auburn ponytail.
Wolf’s finger tensed on the trigger. His heart hammered as waves of panic pulsed through his body.
Why was the gun still raised to his shoulder? She was not a threat.
A grasshopper landed on his face. The weight of the overgrown insect pulled on his cheek, its claws pinching his skin as it struggled to find purchase.
He pulled the trigger.
“No!”
Wolf sat up, slapping his face.
Sweat streamed from his hair down over his temple and ran down his neck.
He tried to free himself from the blanket wrapped around his body, but the fabric pulled him into the couch like a drowning man’s arms.
His breathing accelerated. The room was dark, the blinds drawn. A television playing a silent episode of The Brady Bunch provided the only light.
Finally, he got to his feet and freed himself from his captor, the Denver Broncos World Champions blanket he kept draped over the back of the couch.
“Jesus.” He sat down.
The glow of sunlight behind the window coverings told him it was still daylight. He eyed the half-empty fifth of Dewar’s on the coffee table, felt the pounding headache for a few heartbeats, and knew he was wrong.
He walked to the front door and opened it.
A blast of frozen air chilled his sweat-soaked body through his boxers and T-shirt.
His breathing normalized as he stared out at a landscape in stark contrast to a Sri Lankan jungle. Snow blanketed the flat acreage in front of his ranch house, framed by the pines of the Chautauqua Valley coated in the remnants of last week’s snowstorm. Movement caught his eye, and a bull elk snorted in his direction, sending twin jets of steam out of its nostrils.
Pink light licked the tips of the western peaks.
“Shit.”
He shut the door and read the wall clock—6:35.
Through the alcohol-haze, his voice of reason had to scream to convince him it was the morning and not the evening.
Twenty-five minutes to get into work. He would be late again.
He stood rubbing his eyes, trying to think. If he put his clothes on now, he could probably get to the office right on time, but given he hadn’t showered yesterday, that was a bad idea.
He walked into his bedroom and slipped into the bathroom, ignoring the half-folded laundry on his unmade bed and dirty clothing strewn on the floor.
He managed to brush his teeth without looking at himself in the mirror, but then decided to take a glimpse, if only to see the state of his beard.
The face that stared back at him would have startled another version of Wolf. His beard was an inch, inch and a half long, full and messy, with a white fleck of something dangling near his bottom lip. His normally large, chocolate-colored eyes were half-exposed through swollen lids.
The right side of his face was red. He felt the oversized insect hanging off his skin and rubbed his cheek. His shoulder twitched as he felt the rifle’s kick, and he flinched. The memory had woken from hibernation.
He blinked, trying to bring his thoughts out of the fog.
Fifteen minutes later he toweled himself off and stared in the mirror again. He’d decided to shave the homeless-beard, but that only served to expose the red skin of his chubby cheeks. An image of a pile of dog shit with a dollop of whipped cream on top came to mind. His eyes were worse than before.
He hurriedly dressed, pulled on his boots, grabbed his Glock, and shot out the door.
The landscape was waking up, brighter as the peaks above gathered more sun. But the air was frozen solid, scraping his nostrils as he breathed.
The interior of his SUV was an icebox, and he shivered as he fired up the engine.
He accelerated down the driveway, adjusting the heating vent to blow its deathly chill onto the windshield instead of his face. As he passed through the headgate and tipped down the hill, he realized he was going a little fast, so he pumped the brakes. The tires locked and squealed on the packed snow. The world swirled in the windshield as he fishtailed sideways. The cab shuddered, and change rattled in his center console as his momentum carried him toward the river. He held his breath and let out an unintelligible shout as he slid out onto the road below. And then he came to a stop, pointed back up the hill.
“Shit.” He checked the side-view mirror and saw the Chautauqua River flowing by behind him, indifferent to whether he decided to take a dip in her this morning.
He turned and headed along the river toward town, taking it slow in four-wheel-drive. The department-issue snow tires were top quality, and his last year’s model Ford Explorer handled the elements like a snow mobile, but it had been warm yesterday and now the dash thermometer read five degrees. The road shone like a freshly Zambonied ice rink.
And he was still drunk.
He pulled a box of Altoids out of the center console and threw three in his mouth. If he’d had eye drops he would have poured half a bottle in each eye, but who was he kidding? He worked with three capable detectives. It was going to take them less than a second to see he was hungover again.
February had been a blur. And now he was working on his fifth or sixth hangover this March. That was a conservative estimate.
What was the date?
A small voice in his head said something about dangerous amounts of alcohol and job security, but he failed to make out the words behind the bluegrass floating out of his speakers.
Fifteen minutes later, he was stuck in an inexplicable traffic jam at the e
dge of town. What the hell caused a traffic jam on a Tuesday morning this early?
He sat watching the dash clock change from 7:20 to 7:21, then decided to hang a right on First and take the back roads. A minute later he was in the parking lot of the county building and jogging through the cold to the rear automatic sliding glass doors.
“Howdy, Chief.” Deputy Tyler stepped out of the doorway as Wolf entered.
“Hey.”
“Didn’t find anything.”
Wolf stopped in front of the second set of doors, puzzled. “What?”
“Yesterday. With Mittens.”
“Oh. Yeah … and she didn’t find anything?”
Tyler shook his head. “Nothing. Covered the entire property and then some. Checked the trees on the west and south. Went up and down the driveway. We’re headed back up now to continue.”
Wolf could sense Tyler studying his appearance.
“Right,” Wolf said. “Okay, thanks.”
“Yep.” Tyler turned and left.
Wolf headed for the elevator bank and pressed the up button.
“There he is!” Tammy Granger’s voice echoed through the reception area at the front of the building. Then her footsteps came closer.
“Hi, Tammy.”
He pulled out his phone and pretended he had something to check, then surprised himself with a stone-dead screen staring back at him.
“You going to the Equinox Festival Thursday?” Tammy asked.
The Equinox Festival. The traffic jam now made sense.
He turned toward her and tried to paste on a smile.
Her face dropped. “Oh, honey. Not again.”
“Hi, Tammy.”
She stared at him, and then at his profile as he turned toward the opening doors. “Have a good one,” he said, stepping inside.
Tammy said something under her breath as she walked away, but Wolf was already out of earshot and pressing the third-floor button.
He took the ride up, pressing his knuckles into his eyes to relieve the pain, then removed them when an eight-year-old girl’s face enclosed in a rifle sight flashed across his mind.
The doors slid open and Patterson stood a few inches outside, almost colliding with him as she barged inside.
“There you are.” She backed up and out into the hallway.
He sidestepped her, but she followed him.
“What’s up?” he asked, disappointed she hadn’t continued on a trajectory away from him.
“I was headed down to talk to Tammy.”
Wolf’s office was down the terrazzo hallway, third door on the right. At the far end of the hallway, the squad room opened up, and this morning it was filled with bustling movement and noise. Beyond that stood MacLean’s office, an aquarium that butted up against the exterior windows.
MacLean had stated that he liked to keep his blinds open at all times, that he valued transparency in leadership. This morning the blinds were closed, which meant he was having a meeting with someone that required opacity.
Wolf sighed as he reached his office door and pushed it open. Opaque-mode usually meant MacLean was meeting with DA White, or some other person Wolf had little desire to talk to this morning.
“MacLean sent me to come looking for you,” Patterson said. “I called you. And yesterday. Both times your phone went straight to voicemail.”
“Yeah.” Wolf unzipped his coat and hung it on the tree next to the window.
He twisted open the blinds and took in the sight below. Two front-end loaders, probably operated by the Nanteekut brothers, pushed snow into evenly spaced piles for the skijoring race that would take place in two days.
Patterson stepped next to him and looked down. “You going to do it?”
“What?”
“The race.”
The skijoring race consisted of strapping on your skis, grabbing a knotted rope, and being towed by one of the fastest horses in town while slaloming back and forth through gates and bounding off five evenly spaced six-foot-high jumps.
“Nope.”
She looked up at him, an obvious hint of sadness in her big blue eyes. “I heard you won it one year.”
He sat at his desk and shook his computer mouse.
The monitor crackled to life, revealing a screen-saver of him and Jack standing on Mount Harvard two summers ago. Wolf avoided staring at the thin, clear-eyed version of himself atop the fourteener, and pushed the email icon.
“To recap: MacLean’s looking for you.”
“What’s he want?”
“He’s with White. They want to talk Warren Preston, I guess. And I spoke to Lorber this morning. He’s cracked into Preston’s phone.”
He nodded, knowing this was basic information for a sober person to comprehend, but it was like she was flinging topics of conversation at him like rocks.
She sucked in a breath as if preparing a long speech, then said, “Take some Advil.”
He waved a dismissive hand.
The door shut and he sat back in his chair, thinking nothing as he felt the pain eddying inside his body.
His CSU Rams football clock ticked on the wall like a construction worker’s hammer. The hum and rev of the front-end loaders’ diesel engines seeped through the triple-pane glass behind him, sounding like a drag race had ensued outside. He needed a handful of Advil, but his mouth was dry and he had no water. He’d have to walk down to the squad room, grab a bottle from the refrigerator, and come back without being seen by MacLean. That, or suck it up and get it all done at once.
“Shit.” He put his elbows on the desk and massaged his temples with his fingers.
A strange sensation rippled through his chest, like a fluttering of his heart. It caused him to suck in a breath and straighten.
A moment later the sensation passed.
That was new.
He pulled out the Advil bottle from his top desk drawer, shook out three brown pills, then another, and put them in the breast pocket of his flannel.
Before he could stand, two knocks hit the door and it swung open.
MacLean poked his head inside. “You’re here.” He ducked his head back outside. “He’s here!”
The sheriff walked in uninvited, letting the door swing open and bang against the inside wall.
“Sheriff.” Wolf nodded, not letting the pain inside his skull outwardly express itself.
“Look shittier than ever today,” MacLean said, meaning every word of it. He scraped back one of the two chairs from the desk and sat down, keeping his eyes on Wolf’s as he did so. Like a magician, MacLean produced a bottle of water from thin air and slapped it on the desk. “Here.”
Wolf tried not to look too eager as he gripped the cold plastic and scraped it across the desk toward him. He fished three of the four pills out of his pocket, tossed them into his mouth, and cracked open the dew-covered bottle. The water massaged his throat as he drank. And then it caught, and he coughed, spraying liquid across the desktop.
“Jesus, boy.” MacLean remained motionless, watching Wolf mop the liquid with a sleeve.
DA White appeared at the doorway, shut the door, and sat next to MacLean. “My God, what happened to you?”
“Hi there, Sawyer,” Wolf said.
“Seriously.” White leaned forward and sniffed. “Smells like a distillery in here.” His eyes never left Wolf’s as he sat back.
MacLean was dressed in his formal khakis today, and the Sluice County district attorney in his customary pinstriped suit and earth-colored tie.
“What brings you down to our offices today?” Wolf asked, directing the question to White, who had an office almost directly above Wolf’s head.
“What brings me down …” White repeated under his breath as he got comfortable in the chair. “Well, Chief Detective, we have a man well-known in the business environment of Rocky Points who’s vanished, leaving behind a vehicle filled with snow. Come noon, we’re going to have a gaggle of reporters down in the press-room lambasting the sheriff, looking for answ
ers. I’m here wondering what answers you and your team have, so we can avoid looking like buffoons today.”
Wolf cleared his throat. “Right. Well, we’ve searched his house and the surrounding area, and we’ve still not found him.”
White pinched his brows and leaned forward. “Listen, Detective, this is the Sluice–Byron County Sheriff’s Office that you’re sitting in right now. This is your office, where you work.”
MacLean turned toward White. “Sawyer.”
“I’m just making sure our highest-paid employee knows where he is right now, Sheriff. Because from where I’m sitting, he’s seven sheets to the wind. And from what I’m gathering, I’m already seven steps ahead of him in this investigation!”
“You are?” Wolf asked. “Let me in on the news.”
White straightened in his chair and sucked in a breath. He stood up and walked to the windows.
Wolf knew the man was thinking about how to bolster his conviction rate, and anything less than black and white, eight months before elections, was like a triple shot of anxiety to his system.
MacLean would have been petting his silver walrus-style mustache if he’d been concerned about anything. But the sheriff sat preening his nails. He would be running unopposed.
Wolf turned and saw White’s gaze leveled on him. Menace and calculation sizzled behind his eyes.
“I assure you, we’re on it,” Wolf said. “I would have my team in here right now, discussing our plan of action, if we weren’t having this conversation.”
White flicked a knowing glance at MacLean. “Just keep me posted.” He exited the room in a hurry and left the door swinging open.
“What was that about?” Wolf asked.
“You know damn well what that was about. He’s on the way out. He’s hyper-sensitive to anything that might make him look bad.”
Wolf sipped the water and watched MacLean’s gray eyes never waver from his.
“And no offense, but if he was standing next to you right now, he’d look pretty bad.”
“I’d think he would look good in comparison.”
MacLean blew a puff of air from his lips. “A man in his position is very dangerous. You’re not careful, he’ll pull you under to save his own breath.”