Antler Dust (The Allison Coil Mystery Series Book 1) (26 page)

She climbed back on Bear. They made a straight shot up the ridge, at a right angle to her old heading. She tapped Fishy’s rifle to check again, wondering if she had wasted five minutes too many.

Up, bouncing on her feet in the stirrups as Bear climbed and crested a ridge, the wind smacked her in the face as quickly as she realized Bear was standing on grass. They were making tracks, but they wouldn’t be visible to someone in a hurry.

A gift.

Allison headed to the top of the ridge. She didn’t dare linger on a high spot too long. She feared throwing her own silhouette against the sluggish winter sun.

Allison guided Bear in a dance along the edge of the snow line until they ran out of rocks, and the barren, snow-free stuff came to an unceremonious end.

****

“I tell you she was asking about how to get to Deep Lake. Seemed innocent enough.”

“Seemed,” said Grumley.

“Hard to believe she circled back,” said Alvin.

“Fuck it,” said Grumley.

The tracks that dead-ended had set them back fifteen minutes. All the while Alvin hadn’t stopped with his endless theorizing, whining and complaining about his jaw. Alvin was coughing up globs of bloody crud. Grumley hoped a chunk would harden and make him choke. Now, up on the ridge top where she could have taken any direction back down, he was at it again. It was small minds like Alvin’s that made it difficult to trust anyone.

There had been one other set of headlights on the road before he reached the barn. Now he knew, after Alvin’s eleventh monologue about the sequence of events, that the first headlights must have belonged to Applegate. Grumley had flashed his high beams at the second set of lights, Alvin’s, and the two of them had headed back to the barn. At the time, he was thinking nobody should see how desperate he was to make sure Applegate’s rifle was still in place.

What Grumley couldn’t figure out was how Allison knew to lift the Sako, the only one missing from the rack. They had to shoot the lock off the office to get inside. What a mess.

“Maybe you gave her the rifle,” said Grumley. “Maybe you want into her pants.”

“Right,” said Alvin. “I’m sure.”

“The second you get off the phone with me, she happens along.”

“Like I said.”

“Yeah, yeah, the bit about Deep Lake.”

“That’s what she told me.”

“Casual conversation at six fucking thirty. She strolls up.” Alvin thought for a second. Maybe it was now clicking together.

“That’s what happened,” he said.

They were walking the long perimeter of the windblown ridge top, looking for tracks. Every minute it was more of a joke.

“We’re cooked,” said Grumley.

“She has to be around here,” said Alvin. “We’ll find her, come on. Let’s do another circuit of the ridge top, only in the snow, say thirty or forty yards down off the top here. You go one way, I’ll go the other.”

“How the fuck we going to find each other if one of us sniffs her drawers?”

“Together then.”

“It’ll take twice as long. Meantime, she’s making tracks.”

“One nosy bitch,” said Alvin. His fake sympathy.

“How the fucking hell did she know which rifle?” Alvin paused too long. A flinch.

“Not me, no way,” he said. The words came out in a funny, splattered jumble.

“You screwin’ her?”

“She wouldn’t have me.”

There was a touch of fear in the kid’s voice now, sensing that this line of questions might keep up.

Who really cared about Bobby Alvin either? Would he be missed? Grumley couldn’t stop thinking of the rifle in Allison’s hands, how soon she might get it in the hands of the cops. Would they believe her story that it might have something to do with Mr. Elk Suit? With Trudy gone and that whole mess too and fucking Applegate on the loose?

Too many problems, too much to sort out.

He had given Trudy’s trail to Popeye, but the guy spent a few hours driving around, grew queasy and gave it up. Still suffering the effects, he said. More likely he was too overwhelmed with the fucking prospect of not being able to find something he shouldn’t have lost in the first fucking place.

Why did he suffer losers?

Grumley’s mind swirled, but he couldn’t figure the advantage now of leaving Alvin here to think about his mistakes forever.

“Where we going?” said Alvin.

Grumley turned his horse around and headed down. On the other hand ...

He pictured a bullet in Bobby’s forehead.

“Are you okay?” said Bobby.

“Never better,” said Grumley. He pulled out his pistol, the ’58 New Army Texas, a .44. A replica. It should do the job.

“Hey,” said Alvin, as he started to dive. But it wasn’t a dive. An invisible force separated him from his saddle. He landed in the snow on his side.

The sound of the shot echoed in Grumley’s head. There was something satisfying about making a decision.

****

A week after her taste of the harbor, Allison had been in decent enough shape to ask for the newspapers that covered the accident. Her parents had flown in and her dad, a chronic newspaper hound, brought the stack of past issues of The New York Times. She glanced at the pictures and scanned the copy, grating at the notion that a see-it-all-writer looking down from above could use the verb “flopped,” as if the jet was a human form that could choose between a cannonball or a headfirst dive on its entry into the water. “Flopped” wasn’t what had happened inside the cabin. “Flopped” had a fun and frolicking tone to it. There was nothing frolicking about the crash. The newspaper headline was the first time she had known how many had died, but she certainly hadn’t needed to be told that many had, in fact, perished.

Walking now with Bear, she thought of Peter McBride, one of those naturally open, relaxed people who were always seconds away from a comfortable smile. He wore round wire-rims, sported short but tousled hair, and was about her size—compact, trim and lean. He had bright, clear eyes, like blueberries in a pool of milk. They were talking like good, old friends in the terminal long before they boarded. Their flight was late departing because the plane hadn’t even left Baltimore at boarding time. Within a few minutes, she recalled, he had mentioned Zen. And she had pressed him a bit, discovering he had spent a week in the equivalent of a closet, meditating on the trouble his life and his being had caused his parents and others around him. He told her they were asked to break their lives down into three-year blocks and consider all the ways their mere existence had impacted the lives of those around them, right down to the nitty-gritty details of contemplating the number of diapers their parents had to change, no questions asked, before they could deal with their own shit.

Her mind had jumped at the exercise. Even as they continued to chat, her mind had gone busy scouring the memory banks. She scraped together bits and pieces of things she hadn’t thought about in years. At four, she had pretended that a neighbor girlfriend had fallen from the roof of the house. They had poured ketchup around where she had “fallen” to give her mother a jolt, at least from a distance. She recalled old tantrums, battles with her mom over not wanting to waste time in the stupid grocery store and fights with her brothers over who knew what.

When she had the stack of newspapers, she felt it before she read it. And her parents probably assumed, when she started to bawl, that it was the overwhelming reality of reading about the accident that had caught up with her. But it was the name in newspaper ink. Too real. Too painful.
PETER McBRIDE, 28, Boulder, Colo.

It didn’t seem possible at the time, it didn’t seem possible now. Time hadn’t fixed that one. Bear picked his way in the general direction that would dump them out on the road, perhaps a mile or two down from her A-Frame. It was three o’clock and going on dusk in the ravines. They had slurped water from creek beds. She had found an old granola bar in the otherwise empty saddlebag. Bear won the snack. She felt hungry, but couldn’t imagine depriving him of a morsel.

Working on Peter’s problem, she thought of the rooms in the houses where she had lived and how memories were mostly place. Nothing could happen without a place for it to occur. She remembered Peter tapping her on the shoulder. He boarded last, a stand-by. He could have been in this place, this space, this airplane. Or inside the terminal, bumped from the flight. What if each city had a dozen more good jobs for traveling businessmen, through a slightly better economy, and what if there had been no room for stand-bys on that flight? Peter would have stayed behind, safe and dry.

The woods thinned out. The grade turned gentle. The day’s light was being given a brief reprieve as they moved out and away from the darkened north face of the ridge and through an expanse of aspens, spaced like they had been purposely planted a horse-width apart. They wound their way to the edge of a broad clearing that fell away, not so gently. The pitch was dotted with bush-size evergreens and scrub oak. The ravine ended a few hundred yards down, but so steeply she couldn’t see the bottom. The other side climbed as quickly, but was topped by a small section of familiar looking guardrail. A stretch of no more than a few dozen feet was all she could see. And down to the right, to the east, a cherry-red house, a farmhouse, basked in the soft glow of the setting sun. It was a mile off, maybe more.

Behind her, someone followed.

She dug her heels into Bear. No coaxing, no time to be choosy. Bear lowered himself down on his hindquarters as his front legs paddled and scraped and pranced, hoping for footing and braking when they started to slide. She tapped Fishy’s rifle, scooted low in the saddle and kept her weight back to help Bear stabilize. The guardrail disappeared and so did the farmhouse as they burrowed down in the hole, too steep. Bear angled off on his own compass, sensing an extra degree or two of grade that was beyond his capabilities.

She risked a glance back up. He was a big man, Grumley-size, but all she had was the three-quarter silhouette of him, on horseback. He watched her, standing where Bear had stood.

Bear was halfway down. The far side of the ravine was better lit. And it didn’t climb fast enough to do her much good, provide any cover. Nobody would think twice about a couple of gunshots, if there was anything left to hear after the ravine swallowed up the noise.

She turned her head around to look back up the hill as Bear reached the bottom. Her pursuer was halfway down, making it look easy. She let Bear take a few strides in the relatively gentle pitch of the ravine bottom. There was no creek but it was rocky and uneven under the snow. Bear balked and hesitated, shot forward when he reached the far bank and found better footing, heading up. She worked to keep a straight line and hoped the cherry farmhouse would come into view when they crested the top.

The sound of the rifle shot had been in her head all along. She flinched at the crack and waited. Bear kept his stride, what was left of it. She took a second to find her breath again and wished she could meld into the saddle. She couldn’t find a clear thought. She hoped for the farmhouse.

Boom
.

Bear’s nose plunged into the snow. She waited for her own flick of pain as Bear’s front legs buckled and his rear rolled sideways and the snow came up to whack her. Suddenly, the background of farmhouse and dog pens and sky tumbled. Bear struggled to bounce back up, worked to right himself out of instinct, snorted and growled at his own frustration. And agony. Allison found herself splayed across his neck staring into his skyward eye. She rolled off and buried herself behind his shoulders, already starting to mourn before she saw the wound and the blood gushing from his haunch. Bear’s head settled down onto the cool snow.

She tried to think of what to say, anything. His eyes turned milky and distant.

The rifle. She slid the rifle from the scabbard, thinking it had been fifty-fifty that she would have been able to reach it at all. If it had wound up under Bear, no way. She held it up to show the bastard what she had, in case that alone would make him scram. She propped it on Bear’s sweaty chest and lined up the man’s— was it Grumley’s?—frame in her sights. She turned the rifle over, found the safety, hoped for ammunition, and put him back in her sights. He stood there.

She aimed at his head and moved it off a barrel’s width to the west, her finger still hesitating.

The blast of her rifle spun the man around on the spot as he realized he was the wide-open target and she was the one with cover. He kicked his horse around and scampered off. Her ears rang. She stood and placed the rifle at the back of Bear’s skull, between the ears, wasting no time for a good-bye with the next shot. Her heart cried as Bear sank another inch lower and she turned and ran through the calf-deep snow toward the dogs.

Her legs churned on an untapped source of power and fear. Two large pens flanked the farmhouse. A dozen or more dog-houses were scattered around both pens and each dog was linked by rope to its own house. The dogs howled and scraped the dirt, desperate for a ringside seat. She dashed up between the house and the pens, followed a beaten-down path along the side of the house and around to the front.

A woman stood on the front steps, holding a bundled-up toddler in her arms. An older girl stood wide-eyed next to her mom. Long red hair poked out from the hood of the toddler’s jacket. A sack of groceries stood in the driveway, plunked down in the mud. There were more groceries in the back of a Subaru station wagon, the rear door open.

“Oh my,” said the woman, clutching her daughter more tightly. “No, no. Don’t worry,” said Allison. She held up her free hand like she was stopping traffic. “It’s over. I think. I hope.”

“What? Who are…?”

“I was being chased,” said Allison. “Shots. My horse.”

“They were shooting at you?”

“My horse,” she said, but barely this time. The two words took forever to utter. “Shot my horse.”

Bear
. Could it be?

Her breath was a draining search for oxygen.

“Oh my, oh my,” said the woman, pulling the toddler closer, panic on her face. “Come in the house—now.”