Antler Dust (The Allison Coil Mystery Series Book 1) (22 page)

“I know where it is,” said Slater. “Our people can show you.”

Standing up, Allison winced as her arm again came under its own weight.

“You know, whatever it was I saw—originally ...” Allison let the thought hang, to see if Sandstrom bit.

“Yes?”

“... is connected with this.”

Slater took a breath and cocked his head as if his neck had a painful kink.

“You’ve stirred the bees off the honey pot, if that’s what you mean. Although I don’t think you’ve come clean with me, young lady. Speaking for myself and not the official government record, I believe one thing. When we find the brainless piece of particulate matter that killed Ray Stern and if we get a confession, you’ll discover that what you saw was Ray Stern’s killer, trying to hide things away. I don’t think you were exactly where you thought you were, with all due respect for your guide skills. I think you saw the spineless idiot who killed Ray Stern. Maybe he was cleaning up his mess. You were, after all, a city girl until recently, were you not? Those mountains, I mean, really. How many varieties of shapes, bowls, peaks and ridges can there be? Don’t they all look alike after a while?”

“Then where the hell is Rocky Carnivitas?” she said sharply.

“Whoa,” said Slater, standing up, reaching out. Allison stepped away, but kept staring at Sandstrom.

“Off following oversized hoof prints in the next county. There was nothing tying him down, nothing. Talk about your transient business, guiding is one fleeting way of life.”

“Find him,” said Allison. “Put out the word. Ask why his truck’s been parked at George Grumley’s barn in the same spot for a couple weeks now. I drive by it all the time.”

“It was a huge storm. He could have been trapped,” said Slater.

“It’s possible.”

Allison shot Slater a stare, upset that he’d derail her train. “Me or you,” said Allison. “Not Rocky, no way.”

Slater offered back a weak smile. Allison felt her heart begin to thump hard, felt a bit of confusion clog her throat.

“Track Rocky,” said Allison. Although he won’t be much use when you find him, she thought. She did the one thing she’d been sure she wouldn’t do; she wiped a sobless tear from her cheek. At least neither one of them came to comfort her. That would really have pissed her off.

“We’ll see what we can do,” said Sandstrom.

“Thanks,” said Allison and stood to leave without saying good-bye. “If you don’t find him, I will.”

Allison waited for Slater in her Blazer, thinking of spending a day scrubbing the cabin down within an inch of its life or giving Bear a thorough groom for the heck of it. But both activities involved her shoulder. She wouldn’t mind a day of not thinking about it, of not forcing the puzzle together. The view through the binoculars had seemed, at first, like it would remain clear forever.
When had the image started to wobble? Who was responsible for that? Could the moment she heard the shot really have coincided with the last moments of a human being’s life? One she knew? Was that possible?

Slater ambled out and stood by her rolled-down window. “You think the report amounts to anything, really? Telling Sandstrom?”

“A chance for him to talk in football lingo,” said Slater.

“It’s the season,” said Allison.

“You hit a nerve, anyway. Someone went to a whole lot of trouble up there, chasing you around. But when you get a minute, think about it. It might have been the protesters.”

“What?”

“Whoa now. A thought. This guy was suicidal.”

“So?”

“So maybe he had help with his wish and now, because of what you saw, maybe it wouldn’t look so good anymore. I’m saying it may not be the obvious.”

The idea was hollow, offered no substance as she unwrapped it in her head. It was a strange world—but not that strange. Not worth debating.

“Do you think Sandstrom will do anything?”

“Depending on what there is to do, yeah, he’ll take a look. Maybe someone else saw this guy, can give them a description.”

“Maybe,” said Allison.

He leaned down, kissed her briskly and headed to his own truck at a slow jog.

Out on the highway, Glenwood Canyon was draped in its late-fall garb. The canyon’s cliffs were dressed in their finest, butterscotch brown. Here and there, daubs of gold from the late-season aspens. She let her eyes go soft-focus. The scene looked as if a painter had come through with a brush full of water that forced the colors to run together. A long freight train picked its way along the opposite bank and she briefly thought she spotted a hobo poking his head out of an empty green boxcar. But the road veered sharply in front of her and by the time she flicked her eyes back he was gone, even though she could now see deep inside the boxcar. She sped up to see if she had the right car, but there were no other green ones on that whole section of the train.

There was no giving up.

Now, as she headed home, the thought of being alone wasn’t unpleasant. Her arm and shoulder still stung. Her mind swirled between Sandstrom’s odd interview style, which was too carefree, and the snapshots of sounds and images—snorts and strange horse tracks—leading up to the assault by the fire.

How long would it have taken for somebody to find her body hanging from a tree? Her brain zipped through the events like a mental mobius strip that forced her to relive each moment again and again, sometimes in slow motion.

After freeing herself from the rope, she had lain awake in her sleeping bag, gingerly avoiding putting any weight on her stinging arm. Fear turned every creak of a tree branch into the return of her attacker. She had fed the fire every hour. At dawn she’d hopped over to Bear in her socks, her feet in frozen agony. Climbing up on the saddle, she had guided him around and stood on his back to retrieve her boots, still stuck in the rope. She had warmed the boots and her feet by the fire. She had stared into the flames, replaying the attack as if it had been a movie. She had to watch the movie over and over. It was the only theater in town. There was only one person in the audience. There was nowhere else to go.

****

It was the same space. Same cats, same plants, same everything. But Trudy felt shaky. She could not adjust to the sensation of being a prisoner. Her mind ran wild with theories and speculation. She kicked herself for giving in to George and leaving Allison there on the riverbank, for only putting up a minor fuss.

Trudy tackled chores and routines, letting the small stuff soak her up. She repotted plants and cooked a bit, but nothing freed her mind, let her relax. She made a game out of making nice with her half-hearted captors, those switched temporarily out of “Trudy Duty” to “Jail Guard.” Every morning they passed the baton. Once or twice they had even overlapped for a few hours. She could hear them both in the living room, laughing and shooting the breeze while they ate their coffee cake and worked their way through a pot of good French roast, not that they knew the difference. It was all very civilized.

George hadn’t said much of anything. The point was clearly to stay put and mind her business, but how was that possible? Her mind tried to slash its way through a thicket of anger and uncertainty. She felt trapped by the facts from Allison. It all made sense except for the sheer scale of the hole George had dug for her, a hole from which she hadn’t been able to see much of anything but a pinprick-size glimpse of his whole dealings. Rocky must have gotten caught up in the tangle of money and illegal junk. Trudy half wondered if it was something she had said that might have given Rocky the feeling that he could be more bold confronting George. She wondered what Allison would do with the information, where it all might lead. She knew that it wouldn’t work to sit back and wait. Someone had to make a move.

****

The trail was trampled, mucky in spots. The snow was beginning to yield to the steady power of the sun. The dead elk had been gnawed and picked over by more than a few predators. They had picked their favorite parts. It was not a cheerful sight. Nature’s version of an autopsy wasn’t attractive.

The landscape was lifeless, as she had feared. She didn’t want to go another step, but she climbed off Bear gingerly, cautious with her tender arm. She took in the sounds of wind and air and her own breathing.

“Rocky?” She said his name out loud. “Where are you?”

She had seen Rocky and Grumley confronting each other, in her mind, over and over. Maybe it was over Grumley’s wife. Or the business. Or both. Poor Rocky, standing up to a gruff boss and at the same time soft enough to want to care for Trudy.

It was Rocky, more than anyone except Weaver, who had accepted the city girl into the fold, showed her the ropes, literally. He never let on that he expected her to fail.

Failure. An interesting word. Wings fail to provide lift and the result is a flying machine in the cold, salty drink. And dead bodies bobbing all around. Whose failure? And why? And why did it happen when it did? Failure? Or nature? Meant to be? A matter of fact? Just deal with it? Which question led to the best chance of your brain accepting what it was being asked to absorb—and live with it forever? Would blame ease things? Could you really assign it to the winds of fate? Did that make it any easier?

Human beings can be propped up and strapped down in rows six seats across with an aisle down the middle one second and then tumble, through external forces and events way beyond their control, into mess and fury the next. She had learned that from personal experience. One moment, events are calm and peaceful and the world functions in an orderly fashion. The next moment, life—right down to the molecules—comes unglued. You cannot reach out with your hands and put any of it back together, even though you want to and think you can. Once the egg starts cracking, it cannot be made whole again. Since the airplane flopped into the water, in fact, she realized that a thin, fragile shell bubble-wrapped each waking moment. Life, for people or animals, could be shattered apart at any moment. And here it was again, that feeling, now more distinct than ever in the stark, snowy landscape. The plastic bubbles were right there, all around her, and they were starting to pop, one at a time.

You’re here on the side of the mountain, Allison thought, breathing fresh air. And somebody else is long gone—simply because of a seat number. There was no time to prepare for the lifeless bodies in the water next to her. They were all so recently alive. And there really was no good way, no surefire way, to absorb the loss after it was over, after the survivors had been rounded up and counted, after the dead had been lined up and counted, after the crash had been folded into the wrinkles and warps of history.

“Stay here, Bear,” she said, eyeing an out-of-place lump, down off the steep slope, up against a tree. She trudged down, but once her angle had changed she lost track of which tree she thought displayed something irregular. At the bottom, she had trouble resetting her bearings. The trees were all similar in size, build and stature. The snow was packed, less conducive to wading. It was like gooey gelatin, not yet set. She picked a tree and headed for it. Whatever had been semi-clear from the trail was murky here down at snow level. Allison stepped slowly. The base of one tree was smooth, ordinary. So was the second. Should she go north or south? She glanced back at Bear, who wasn’t even watching.

Her heart went for a brief sprint in her chest, looking for a safe rhythm to run a marathon.

From a few paces away, the shape suddenly revealed itself, a snow-covered, sitting-up shape. Her chest tightened. She gulped for air.

There was nothing to fear, nothing that could hurt her, only acres of snow and mute trees. But her brain wasn’t finding a way to connect up and get in gear. Allison kneeled down and dug through the snow at the top of the sizable lump where no rock should be.

She brushed at the snow and instantly something non-white appeared, something light brown. A hat.

Her stomach had time to register its opinion by slamming itself up inside the back of her throat and trying to crawl out on its own. She buckled, spit slime. She scooped a glove full of snow and patted it on her cheeks and stumbled off a few yards and stood up. Deep, long drags of the mountain air filled her lungs.

“Rocky,” she said. “Shit.”

She scraped more snow and thought of all the times Slater and Sandstrom had dismissed what she had seen and heard.

There was a side to his face that was normal, except the awful pallor, and another that hardly existed. The bad side was shattered bone and muscle and a blown-out eye socket.

There was no need to dig any further. There would be no lifting him up to the slope and then to the trail, no way to flop him over the back of Bear, no way to budge him more than a few feet.

She reached for his hat, every bit as good as fingerprints, but stopped. This was a crime scene and she had to leave everything intact.

Everything had fallen into place, as she’d hoped it wouldn’t.

****

“Hey, why would I be worried about the gun?”

“If I was you, I’d make sure it really disappeared.”

“I’ve told you three times what I told them; I hiked it back up into the mountains and gave it a good heave.”

“She’s onto something. Sniffing hard.”

There was always a good steady background buzz of clatter and chat and bustle at FATE headquarters, so agreeing to meet at the office with a Grumley pal, in this case Sal “Fishy” Marcovicci, seemed at first like a low-risk proposition, especially in the partitioned cubicle which served as his office.

“You think she’s onto something?” said Applegate. “There’s nothing to be on to.”

“Earnest kid, I must say. Lot of experience in a meager frame. Although she’s got a sweet rack on her.”

“Please,” said Applegate.

“Oh, Mr. Sensitive now. Sorry.”

“So what did you do?”

“I called George, of course.”

“And—”

“He didn’t like the idea of getting tangled up in all this mess any more than I did. And that’s why I called you, because she was mentioning your name quite a bit too.”

“Thanks. She’s wasting her time, whatever it is she’s trying to do.”