Antler Dust (The Allison Coil Mystery Series Book 1) (33 page)

“You’re certainly not part of the solution, showing up here with this oaf,” said Slater.

“You betrayed everything.”

“I was waiting until it was all mine.”

Feeling the handle of the pot of beans behind her, the question in her mind was whether it had boiled down too much. The mess flew easily. Slater gagged and shouted as the hot beans coated his face. Allison scrambled around the corner of the butcher block and ran for the door, avoiding any glance at Weaver’s body. There was no way around it. Weaver’s weight had pushed the door shut and his body blocked it. She had struggled to pull it open. His corpse was a perfect doorstop.

Slater was coming after her as she squeezed through.

The ignition in Slater’s pickup held no keys. She checked Sandstrom’s car. It was keyless too, but a gun, gleaming chrome in a holster, sat on the floor. She grabbed the gun, let the holster drop off.

She ran down the driveway, thinking she might be able to out-hoof Slater to Weaver’s barn. Her legs churned, fueled by fear. She gasped for breath but her legs worked as if they didn’t really care if they got oxygen or not. The long dirt driveway turned dark, the glow of Weaver’s place faded. As she was swallowed up by the night, a rifle shot cracked behind her. She ran harder, waiting for the next bullet to fly. Zig two steps, zag three.

She slowed. A car started up. Allison risked a glance around as headlights flicked on and she was in the crosshairs of the light.

The barn loomed ahead. She tried to outrun the edge of the light, her lungs heaving and burning. The pickup roared, the lights flicking onto high beams and splashing her shadow across the side of the barn. She reached the door, flipped the latch up and stumbled inside.

A light from the inner office cast a faint glow on the far side of the cavern. A horse snorted. She could see the animals in their stalls and wondered if one of them could spirit her away, bareback. She ran across the floor looking for a place to hide and wondering if a stall would do. The horses would give her away. Hayloft? No way out. Tack room? No cover, nothing. She kept moving, searching.

She reached the far door and threw it open, wondering if Slater might assume she had run through the barn if she left it open.

Slater’s car skidded to a stop outside, the engine snapped off. He shouted something and she heard her name muffled in the yell.

The barn was open and empty except for the five elk sleeping on the floor in a corner.

Skins—hides spread out in heaps.

She heard the door swing open and she dropped, lying flat on the floor. She rolled over between the fourth and last skins, yanking the clumpy wrinkles of one of them over her body.

The warm, fleshy feel of the hide and the light odor of salt enveloped Allison as she froze, hoping Slater would sprint through the door she had left open, to chase madly after her into the darkness.

“Allison?”

Slater’s voice was close, too close. And calm. He wasn’t going to be fooled by an open door. She kept a vise-like grip on the gun. She could hear him stepping through the barn and tried to let her weight sink into the straw beneath the skin.

“I know you’re in here,” he said. Allison clutched the gun at her knees.

One door opened and slammed shut, perhaps the closet where they hung the rain gear. Next it would be the tack room.

Allison’s heart throbbed and she worked to keep its shock waves from rippling through her body.

She heard him rustling around. Two minutes or two seconds, she couldn’t be sure. Her mind raced off to a place that was dark blue and peppered with stray, uncontrollable flashes of purple and black. Salt on her tongue. Panic balled up in her throat. Her eyes strained for an opening in the dense skin. She tried not to inhale. She heard the metallic ching, ching of knife on sharpener. The sound had to be the Buck knives, stored in slits in a big chunk of wood in the tack room.
Ching
.

But he has a rifle.

What the ...

“Nice blades.”

Her grip on the gun tightened.

“Nice skins, too.”

Voice above her.

Something went
whomp
on the ground. Nearby. Very close. Maybe he had dropped to his knees. The sound was to her left. Every muscle in her body wanted to spin away from the noise, to react.

She stayed put.

“Nice skins, all salted out.”

She heard the sound of knife cutting through fur and drying elk flesh, a soft but violent sound. He gasped and struggled.

“I smell you. Female mixed with fear,” he said. “Very distinct. Well, this one’s empty.”

Two skins to go. Or three?

“Too bad,” he said. “Just too bad. We had it all, Allison.”

The next skin was getting carved up. His voice sounded wet and slobbery.

“I had it all figured.” Was he sniffling? One to go?

She heard him stand up, or thought she did. She listened to the terrible silence for a long second and heard him drop to the elk skin next to her, plunging the knife, jabbing and ripping and flailing the skin and grunting as he worked to slice it.

She aimed in her mind first. She stuck her head out and poked the gun upwards from beneath the skin. Slater stared at the spot that rose toward him like a leather volcano. His mouth opened and he started to raise the knife. And started to say something.

Allison fired.

Slater staggered back, his body slammed into the wall. He sagged to the floor.

Allison slumped, shuddering.

She crawled away and stood up, didn’t look back. This time, for once, she realized she wasn’t wondering whether all the pieces should be put back together.

Seventeen

It was high noon, and the streak of warmish air teased them with spring, still months away. Allison wanted something to melt, something around her to change dramatically, but that would be many moons away.

Trudy sat bundled up next to her on Allison’s front porch. They sipped giant cups of strong black coffee. An old quilt was wrapped around their legs. Allison tipped her head back against the wall to soak up the low-slanting sun, which added an ounce of warmth to the midday breeze.

The authorities had all come running when Allison called in breathlessly for help from Weaver’s house. Sandstrom was making his way to his feet, groggy and plenty pissed. He needed attention from an EMT, a few bandages. The interviews had lasted all evening, well into the night.

When they were finally done, Allison had shared her bed with Trudy, who had come up the valley after hearing the commotion on the news. Trudy slept, at least for awhile. Allison hadn’t managed sleep. She was unable to shake the idea she’d taken a life, no matter the situation.

Now, the coffee helped. Allison knew she needed rest, but that would come eventually. An occasional police car cruised up and down the road. They counted four news trucks, too.

“How are you doing?” said Allison.

“Okay,” said Trudy. “Better. You?”

“Weird. Sad,” said Allison. “Mostly sad. Very, very sad. Pete Weaver deserved so much better. And it’s so hard to understand why I never saw what Slater was up to.”

“Don’t beat yourself up,” said Trudy. “You’ve got competition when it comes to being a bad judge of character.”

“I should have stopped to put a few things together, really taken a hard look,” said Allison.

“You did good,” said Trudy. “You were right all along. Don’t forget that.”

“If you insist,” said Allison.

“You took off his mask,” said Trudy. “Their whole scheme is done.”

“Until someone else decides to find a way around the law,” said Allison. “Quite the racket they set up.”

Trudy shook her head. “Terrible,” she said.

Some day down the road, Allison knew deep remorse would surface, most likely when she least expected it and when it was most inconvenient. For now, there were too many what ifs to run down and digest in order to nail the appropriate emotion. Feeling good about being right was in the mix, too, and that didn’t suck.

“Now it’s time for me to get back,” said Trudy.

“Back home?”

“Back to my animals.”

“A good idea,” said Allison. “I’ll take you. Can I help?”

“Sure,” said Trudy. “I also want to make a few calls down to Denver, see about an appointment to get this brain fixed.”

Allison smiled, offered Trudy a hug. “Seems like a reasonable idea to me,” she said.

****

In the late spring, when the snows up high had given up their grip on the warming earth, Allison rode up to Black Squirrel Pass. She came up the long way around. She stopped her horse, McCartney, about where she figured she had been when she saw Grumley dragging Rocky’s limp body across the rocks.

Allison matched her memory with her current field of view, now on the cusp of green. The air was clear. She imagined Rocky and Grumley tangling on the trail, the shot being fired. Heard it in her head, the dull echo.

She walked McCartney down and around, a faint wisp of apple or pear and muddy earth in the air.

Everything was wrapped up. Grumley’s federal trial for illegal exports was a few months off. But nobody argued the resolution of that case, especially with the murder charge tacked on. Bobby Alvin’s body had been found. Applegate had been dealt with a few minor charges and faced a suspended two-year sentence while he was out on probation. He was fined twenty thousand dollars. Grumley’s ranch was sold.

Trudy had made it for two whole months without a seizure. Before the sale of her house, Trudy’s kitchen had become a frequent tea stop for Allison, who was starting to get to know the cats by name. Plants, too, by type. She’d never met anybody who defined the phrase “new lease on life” as much as Trudy did. In fact, Allison had taken her on a cool, late-spring camping trip on horseback. They wound up around a campfire in a high clearing and shared stories late into the night. Trudy confessed it was her first night out in the open since high school.

Allison stood on Lizard’s Tongue and gazed out over the valley. She wound her way down to the picked-over elk carcass, now a mess of bones. The bulletless elk surely indicated where they had tangled, where Grumley had confronted Rocky.

She stood away from the heart of the bunker, wondering how many paces Grumley might have taken before aiming his rifle at Rocky. She strolled around, her eyes casually glancing down here and there, thinking it would be a small miracle if she spotted anything, but it was possible. The bullet shells that held Rocky’s fate were right here, in this spot. Grumley had probably tied Rocky up and dragged him to get him off the main trail.

Allison studied the grass around her boots and pushed aside the leaves on a small bunch of alumroot where she couldn’t see the ground. It was possible the earth had swallowed them up. Or a chipmunk had decided to take them back to its den and placed them on a chipmunk mantle, over a chipmunk fireplace. Souvenirs from the big bad world above.

She found nothing, of course nothing. And what difference did it make? Just another piece of the world she couldn’t pick up and put back together.

Allison backed up a few paces, stood square. She sighted her rifle down over the elk carcass, saw Rocky there, pleading for mercy. She checked Black Squirrel Pass and imagined herself coming over the ridge. She looked at McCartney looking back at her and made sure there was nothing in her line of fire.

She fired three rounds and on the last two looked for the shells ejecting and twirling. Both arced up, bounced off a rock and hopped down and away.

She followed them, studied them, a few feet apart from each other. The third was there, too. The three shells formed a gold-tipped triangle on a scrap of barren earth. She crouched and picked up each one and let her eyes go soft-focus, searching for anything else man-made in her field of view.

There. Worn down by winter. Not so bright. A much larger shell, pointing downhill. The shell with Rocky’s name on it. She held it up to the sky between index finger and thumb and wondered about the sound it had generated. Rocky had heard it ... or maybe not. And George.

And her. She heard it. And what if she hadn’t?

Then what? Maybe somebody would have found Rocky’s shot-up body in the spring and maybe all the same questions would have been asked, maybe all the same answers would have been found. On the other hand, maybe Grumley would have returned and found time to dig an even deeper, more permanent grave. Maybe Rocky would have disappeared forever.

What if she had left it alone? What about Weaver, Alvin? What about Bear? Did her questions lead to their ...?

She couldn’t answer that question. She wouldn’t answer that question. How far back in the phrase “chain reaction” did one have to travel to find the source? The airplane crash had led to years of legal hassles and assigned blame. An arbitrary dollar amount was set to balance the big scales in the sky, to make her whole. Nearly half of the nine hundred thousand dollars was now committed as a hefty down payment on Weaver’s ranch. Justice, in theory, was done.

Really? Was it?

Had she sought more, she realized now, studying the beat-up shell from the bullet, she might actually think the government was the enemy or, at least, a fearful master. She made a silent promise. The money would be used for a perfectly good government cause. The money would underwrite her time on the Flat Tops. She would be an unofficial sentry, an extra pair of ears and eyes. The money would be invested, essentially, in protecting a government asset. It was money well spent. Even if nobody ever knew her role, it would be her way of justifying the fact that she’d cashed the check.

She put the shell in her pocket as a reminder and headed off. She would find a place for it on her own little mantle.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to all my friends in writing and fiction: Mark Graham, Gary Reilly, Mike Keefe, Phil Reed, Ted Conover, Laura Snapp, Mike Booth, Bill Briggs, Ralph Beall, Mark Eddy, Diane Carman, Irv Moskowitz, Allyn Harvey, John Hickenlooper, Helen Thorpe, Mark and Wendy Klemick, Steve Metzger, Gregg Mundt, Ann LaBotz, Bruce Caughey, Dixie Good, Phil Good, Marilyn Saltzman, Ted and Susan Pinkowitz, Dan Slattery and Parry Burnap. Thanks also to Nick Zelinger for inspired imagery for the cover and to Melanie Mulhall and Betsy Zelinger for their tenacious, thoughtful editing. Many thanks also to Catherine Lutz for a solid read-through and spiffy improvements for the paperback edition.