by Jim Heskett
“And you’re telling me this because…?”
“You yawned.”
“I did?”
“Yep.”
Harry felt himself blushing. “Oh, I see. That changes things.”
“I saw the barber had a D&D poster,” Serena said. “You going to ask him to join your game?”
“I was thinking about it. Probably should solve the case first, or that might be considered a conflict of interest. I’m not sure. Playing Dungeons & Dragons with clients didn’t come up on my private investigator license exam.”
“That’s surprising. I thought you said it was thorough.”
Harry eyed her. She had an innate ability to deliver a serious line or an ironic line with the exact same blank expression on her face and monotone delivery, so sometimes he wasn’t sure. But he reasonably assumed this was meant as dry wit, so he chuckled and tried to invent a funny reply but came up with nothing.
After a couple more turns, Harry was starting to think they’d reached the northern edge of the holler when something caught his eye and he hit the brakes.
“What?” Serena said.
Harry pointed to a path on their right. Dense trees provided a shadowy canopy over a driveway, with the arc of an entrance gate at the mouth of the trees. Except it wasn’t a metal entrance, it looked like it had been made up of animal bones glued together to form an arching gate. Mostly antlers, which gave the pointed edges a shade of menace to them.
“Wow,” Serena said.
“Don’t see that every day.”
“Have you ever seen that?”
He considered it. “There’s an arch a bit like this one in Jackson, Wyoming, but all those bones were bleached and shaped and arranged by an artist. This definitely looks less like a work of art and more like a warning to stay away.”
“In my experience, a place advising you to keep out is exactly the sort of place you want to explore.”
Harry’s heart bumped in his chest. “Yeah. You’re right. I guess we don’t have much choice but to give it a look.”
He drove under the animal bone arch, into the canopy. Harry’s car crept along and he resisted the urge to turn on his lights. The canopy made late morning feel like dusk. The occasional break in the foliage cast beams of sun through the darkness like alien sun lasers cutting through the trees.
After a hundred feet of tree tunnel, they came to a clearing, with a log cabin sitting in the middle. The truck was nowhere to be found, with the only vehicle a rusted Buick with no tires, sitting on cinderblocks. No smoke pouring out of the chimney hole atop the structure. No sound of a generator running.
Harry stopped. His hands wrapped around the steering wheel. “I’d like to check it out.”
Next to him, Serena shifted in her seat and grimaced. She seemed uncomfortable, a rarity.
“What’s that look?” he asked.
“Something isn’t right. I want to give the area a sweep. Will you wait here for me and lock the doors?”
“I can do that.”
For a few seconds, he had an urge to forbid her from leaving his side. But, that was a moment of unexplained panic that soon subsided, and he nodded toward her. “Be safe.”
“I’ll be right back,” she said as she left the car and lowered herself to skulk into the trees. Harry killed the engine and watched her go, sleek, like a cat. He envied the way she could seemingly turn her body into a liquid to zip around in an instant. Her thin frame led itself to all sorts of dexterous contortions and movements. Once, on an operation, Serena had hidden inside a suitcase packed on a luggage cart at a Dubai hotel. A bellboy unwittingly delivered her to the destination, a hotel room on the thirtieth floor. As Harry monitored her vitals and location from halfway across the world, Serena extracted herself from the suitcase and killed an Afghani arms dealer without breaking a sweat.
He sat back to wait for her return, first drumming his fingers on the steering wheel as he squinted at the cabin. For several seconds, nothing happened. He watched a pair of bunnies dart around the greenery in the surrounding hills.
He pulled out his phone to check his email, but then something caught his eye. On the front porch of the cabin. A single rubbery work boot sat, with mud caked near the sole. He didn’t know why this boot was so attractive to him, but it felt like it shouldn’t be here. Compared to all the other items in this small clearing, the boot seemed unnatural.
An irresistible urge compelled Harry to open the car door and stand next to it. He glanced toward the woods, saw nothing. He closed his eyes and listened. No sign of Serena. How long had she been gone? Two minutes? Three?
Heart rattling, Harry retrieved his briefcase from the car and gripped his knife, leaving it in the sheath. For now. He shoved it in his pocket and took a breath to calm himself, then he shuffled toward the cabin. Each step felt like Godzilla setting down a heel strong enough to rattle the earth.
Before he set foot on the porch, Harry drew latex gloves from his back pocket and slipped them on. His hands shook, and the sweat in his palms made the gloves feel sticky.
He crouched next to the boot and lifted it. Sure enough, the pattern on the bottom seemed to match the pattern on the scuff left in the mud outside the barbershop. It wasn’t conclusive and it probably wouldn’t fly in court, but according to Harry’s eyeballs, it seemed close enough.
“Where’s the other one?” he whispered. But he already knew the answer to that question, and his eyes focused on the two front windows he could see. From here, there was still no motion, so nothing had changed since he had arrived. If someone hiding inside planned to rush out the front to escape, that would have already happened before he approached.
Harry stood and knocked on the front door of the cabin. He pressed his ear against it to listen for activity on the other side and heard nothing. But he still wasn’t convinced of the small structure’s emptiness.
He knocked again. “Hello? Can you come to the door, please? My name’s Harry Boukadakis, and I’d like to ask you a couple questions. I’m not police.”
Again, silence. Harry dipped a hand in his pocket and let his fingers touch the hilt of the knife. More seconds passed, still with nothing. No sound of movement, no shifting shadows in the windows.
He had to do something. Standing here, he felt frozen in time, waiting for his body to decide on its own to make a move.
Then, he reached down and tried the doorknob, and it turned in his gloved hand.
The door drifted open and Harry started when he saw the figure on the floor face-down. With a pool of blood spread around him, lay a man wearing one muddy work boot.
9
Serena Rojas moved through the brush as quietly as possible. She had drawn her SIG Sauer P320, but kept the barrel pointed at the ground and her trigger finger firmly on the slide rail. While not wearing the stealthiest clothes, she kept her body low to the ground to minimize her visual impact.
In this section of the holler’s valley, tree trunks crisscrossed the hilly forest floor. A result of a flood, maybe. While the downed logs made the valley tricky to navigate without tripping, the real problems were the nooks and crannies they created. In spaces where multiple trees had fallen over the years, sometimes they formed little structures large enough to hide a person or two. Plenty of shrubs and branch piles littered the area, too. Anyone with a little foresight could dig a pit to hide themselves and cover it from the inside.
Serena had hunted and killed in the forests before, but this felt different. Chaotic and disorganized.
No matter what sinister things hid on this hillside, something told her they had come to the right place. And that also told her not to stray too far from Harry. She had a feeling he might not abide by her request to stay in the car. For a grown man, sometimes he still acted like a stubborn child.
The former government assassin stayed low, with her weapon arm ready to fire. Now, two minutes after leaving her boss at the cabin, she wasn’t sure why she’d come this way. By all appearances, she was
alone out here in the woods. But she couldn’t shake that feeling of eyes on her. Also, the uneasy hindrance of being on foreign ground, since there was no way she could know this area as well as a local. That disadvantage cast tension on the back of her neck, making her unsure of each movement. Serena detested being unsure. Her skills worked best when used confidently, or barring that, impulsively, which sometimes simulated confidence. Second-guessing each step was a poor way to push forward.
She could hear things in the distance, even though she couldn’t see any of it. Tires turning on dirt roads. A chainsaw roaring far away, echoing and repeating across various hills. Crickets chirped and various birds tweeted to each other among the tree branches. But no human sounds nearby. No sounds of feet in the leaves.
Her steps carried her past a nook made by three trees collected in a pile. She swung her weapon into the hole created underneath and found nothing but a space where raccoons probably made their bed at night. This forest felt empty. It seemed like the perfect time to holster her weapon and return to Harry.
And no sooner had she thought that than a whiff of motion appeared in her peripheral vision. A burn of dark red fabric. Like a flash and then gone.
Serena turned uphill and squinted, searching. She slowed her breathing to focus all her energy on listening and looking, but neither sense revealed much above her. There may have been a glimpse of a person between the trees, but she couldn’t be sure now. Rather than stay put and miss out, she launched toward the hilltop, holding her pistol close, across her body.
She kept her eyes up to spot threats and raised her knees high on each stride to avoid tripping on the woodsy rubbish underfoot. Each step up the hill strained her hamstrings, but no way would she take it slow.
At the top, she spun around to catalog the valley all around her, but she couldn’t see much of it. Mostly trees. No hidden figure observing her, though. No gun-toting redneck threatening to take her head off like those flirty and racist idiots back at the bridge.
Still, she couldn’t shake the feeling there were eyes on her. Despite having no evidence, the feeling lingered like a headache. She fiddled with the crucifix hanging around her neck for a few seconds as she inhaled and exhaled slowly to mute the thumping of her pulse.
There seemed to be no reason to stay here. Just a hilltop, trees swaying in a light breeze.
“Probably a coyote or something,” she whispered.
But she knew it wasn’t a coyote. Those were light brown, and she had definitely seen something dark moving. Maybe a wild hog? No, she would have heard it grunting.
As she squinted and continued to turn in a circle, her phone dinged. After another rotation to check for threats, she pulled it out to see a message from Harry on her lockscreen:
I need you at the cabin.
Serena shoved her phone in her pocket and sprinted as fast as she could back where she’d come from.
10
Harry crouched in front of the corpse on the floor as Serena entered the open cabin door behind him. He held up his hands, covered in yellow latex. “Do you have gloves?”
Serena nodded as she eyed the corpse on the floor. “Is that our cigar thief?”
The body was prone, on its stomach. Looked male, 40s. A small circle of blood on his shirt indicated a stab wound in his back. His lower body had twisted, lying in the blood.
“Probably. The boot print is very close to the one in the mud outside the barbershop. Not going to move the needle in court, but it looks reasonable enough to me.” Harry groaned as he stood to his full 5’8”. “I was waiting for you, but now I can do my Sherlock Holmes thing.”
She spread her arms wide, inviting him to explore.
Harry strolled around the one-room cabin. A hot plate and styrofoam cooler were stacked in one corner; the kitchen. A bed in another corner, and a footlocker was in front of the bed. As far as Harry could see, there were no other storage options. The closet contained a few blankets and cardboard boxes full of dusty antiques. None of it seemed to identify the owner of the cabin.
Harry pointed at the footlocker. “I’m going to open this.”
Serena narrowed her eyes and hunkered down next to it. She scooted around to check the front and back, with a pained frown on her face like she was trying to recall a piece of long-forgotten information. She held her hands close to the footlocker, but not actually touching it.
“Are you expecting a poison dart to shoot out at us?” Harry asked.
“You never know. I’m just doing my job.”
“Fair enough. I do appreciate your efforts to keep us alive. I’ll make sure to note that on your next performance review.”
The joke bounced off her like a foam bullet as she eyed him with a blank face. “As far as I can tell, there’s no trigger on this lock. But I can’t be sure, so no guarantees. Want me to do it?”
“No, I think I can handle this.” He kneeled in front of the foot locker. It had no lock, so he lifted the catch and then the lid with a gloved hand. At first, he saw a haphazard arrangement of broken glass and bits of fabric and metal and plastic. After a couple blinks, the contents came into focus.
A murmur escaped his lips.
“What is it?” Serena asked.
Harry adjusted his glasses and squinted at a collection of items in the box. Bottles of liquor, bags of marijuana, sex toys, convenience store scratch cards. And all of them were broken, torn, or smashed.
“It’s a collection of things people aren’t likely to report stolen.”
Harry listened to Serena’s footsteps stop behind him. “Why’s it all smashed up?”
“I don’t know.” He drew his sheathed knife from his pocket and used it to dig around in the broken objects. With all the jagged glass inside, he wanted to avoid slicing his gloves to pieces.
“Ahh,” Harry said as he scooted a motorized pot-smoking machine out of the way. “Not all of it’s broken.”
Below the device was a clear plastic box filled with things that at first glance looked to Harry like crack pipes. But a second look told him it wasn’t as insidious. They were vaping pens, with small glass vessels sitting atop batteries. There were twenty of these pens in the box, all of them seemingly in perfect condition.
“Maybe he didn’t have time to smash those before someone killed him.”
“Maybe so,” Harry said as he stood and continued exploring the room. Not much else to observe here. He noted a series of carvings on the walls in one area near the bed. There were vertical slashes in the wood, as if someone had been marking the days or counting something else. He stood near these for a few seconds, running through possibilities of what the marks could mean. But without a journal or other notes for context, he couldn’t make any conclusions.
Harry returned to the corpse and crouched near the head for a better look at the face. Then, like a light switch flicking on, the man’s facial features came together in a cohesive picture. The feeling came bubbling up from inside Harry like a stomach cramp, then worming up his spine and sending a pulse of nervous energy into his brain.
“I know this guy,” Harry said. “Holy crap, I know him.”
Serena flicked a gloved finger along the slashes in the wall, then she walked toward him with a cocked head. “Seriously?”
Harry spent a few second putting his thoughts in order. “I didn’t grow up in Eureka Springs, but we used to visit Grandma here, then my mother once she moved back.” He pointed at the dead guy. “His name is Lukas Marlowe. No, wait. Maslow. Lukas Maslow.”
“You sure?”
“I mean, I haven’t checked his wallet, but that looks like him.”
“Are you going to check his wallet?”
Harry swallowed as he looked at the jeans Lukas was wearing. The body’s lower half twisted, and Harry would have to dig under it. Serena must’ve sensed his hesitation, because she didn’t wait. She rooted around in his pockets, but turned up her palms and shook her head.
“How do you know it’s him?”
&n
bsp; “This looks exactly like Lukas Maslow’s dad, but it can’t be. If he’s still alive, he’d be in his seventies. Given the timeframe, it’s the only explanation.”
“Friend of yours, then?”
“Not exactly. More like a friendly acquaintance; someone in the same social group but not someone I would hang out with solo. I was only here a week or two every summer, but I used to see him around. He was a few years younger than me, and he was… slow.”
Serena put her hands on her hips. “Like mentally handicapped?”
“Yeah. He disappeared… about twenty-five years ago. I remember it being a big deal at the time, because he had the brain capacity of a child. When he didn’t turn up after a few days, everyone assumed he was dead.”
“Well, this corpse looks more like twenty-five minutes old than twenty-five years. I’d put his time of death as sometime late last night or early this morning.”
Harry nodded and squinted at the body. While the medical examiner would have a say, he suspected Serena was right. Harry wasn’t a crime scene expert, but he could tell from the way the blood had pooled in the body that it had not been moved after death. Someone had killed him right here, inside this cabin.
“Where have you been, Lukas? Why were you smashing up vibrators and bongs?”
He fiddled in his pocket until he found the car keys, then handed them to Serena. “I’ll call the cops. You take the car. I’ll catch a ride back with them.”
She shook her head. “Keep the car or the cops will turn you into a suspect. I didn’t get in a run this morning, so I’ll jog home.”
“Are you sure? It’s kinda far back to town.”
“I haven’t had a long run in forever. This’ll be perfect.”
“I only run if someone is chasing me, so I can’t relate, but have a good time, I guess.”
Given Serena’s former occupation, she didn’t like hanging around to talk to the police. Harry understood. When he’d retired, the US government had given him a fully detailed (and mostly fabricated) civilian history, so he had no trouble mixing with normals. Serena also had been given the same, but her guarded nature never failed to put local uniform cops on edge whenever she came near. For everyone’s benefit, Serena skipped out on these sorts of procedural bits.