Gray Ghost Murders (9781101606070) (25 page)

Stranahan stood and motioned with the gun barrel.
Up.
Crawford nodded. It was an old man Stranahan saw getting to his feet, and for a moment his mind flashed to Polly Sorenson, the fly tier, and another piece of the puzzle found its place.

“Satisfy my curiosity,” Stranahan said. Crawford raised his head, his expression resigned.

“What was the deal with Polly Sorenson? Was your job to recruit him for E.J.'s next arrangement? Is that why you invited him up to your house?”

“I suppose you could say I was baiting the hook. But not for E.J. One way or the other, E.J. was going to be out of the way.” Ego seeped back into his voice. “I was going into business for myself. I was saving him for me.”

“But he didn't bite.”

“No, but he might have a couple months from now, or next year, when it was getting harder for him to breathe. You see I'd put a . . . I had a plan.”

“What was your plan?”

“Don't you know? I thought you were a smart fellow.”

“Tell me.”

Crawford's eyes narrowed. He stood up straighter. “No, I'm not going to give you that satisfaction.”

The defeat Stranahan had seen in Crawford's posture had once more been replaced by defiance. Stranahan sought to shatter it. He said, “You know what I see when I look at you? I see a man who doesn't have the balls for a fair fight. Not even with a sick man like Polly Sorenson. All that talk about facing up to old m'bogo, it's just an act. I'll bet if I talked to any professional hunter you hunted with, he'd tell me how you ran when the charge came. Admit it. The only thing you have the courage for is putting bullets into a paper buffalo.” He paused. “Or a sleeping man in a tent.”

A sound that was a cross between a howl and a growl came out of Crawford.

He sneered, his teeth showing whitely. “Try me,” he said. His voice was guttural. The animal in him, the heat and concentration of dark energy that radiated from the man, seemed to engulf Stranahan. “Drop your gun and try me right now.”

The forest was dead silent. “Now who's the coward?” Crawford spat out the words. He turned his back. “I'm going. I'll take my chances with the courts.” He started to shuffle away toward the edge of the bench, in the direction from which Stranahan had first seen him. It looked to be as easy a way down to the main trail as another and Stranahan followed him without comment, staying ten yards behind, his finger tense on the trigger.

They had proceeded fifty yards or so when Crawford tripped over a stone and fell heavily, swearing as he writhed on the ground. Stranahan wondered if it was an act, an attempt to get him to drop his guard. He wasn't going to be fooled that easily. “Get up,” he said.

Crawford rubbed vigorously at his knee with his uninjured hand. “I can't seem to get my balance,” he said. He shuffled off again, a drag to his left foot.

“Stop right there,” Stranahan said. Something was bothering him, but he couldn't place it.

“You're not cut out for this.” There was bravado in Crawford's voice now.

“Shut up.” His instinct told him something was wrong.
What
was it?

“You're beginning to think, aren't you? You're making a mistake. You'll wish—”

“Just walk.”

Crawford started off, dragging his leg, and just as Stranahan registered that it was the other leg that he'd hurt when falling, the right, not the left, Crawford stumbled again, then made a lunge forward.

To Stranahan it seemed to happen in slow motion, Crawford's body pitching forward over the fallen trunk of a pine tree. He was there, then gone from sight, gone like that, and as Stranahan raced forward he saw a glint, a flash like metal beyond the rusted needles of the dead tree. Crawford had a rifle in his bloody hands and was raising it, the muzzle climbing, and Stranahan, trying to raise the Weatherby, felt as if he were trapped in a dream where you can't will your body to move. Then the air split with thunder and he didn't feel the gun jump in his hands or even know that he'd shot. An image froze: Crawford's head jerked to the side, his cheek an explosion of red, bulging outward.

Stranahan felt a hot spray against his neck as Crawford collapsed, his head and chest draped over the bole of the fallen tree. Crawford's left eye, bulging out of the socket, stared obscenely at nothing. Stranahan reached out and touched the eye with the muzzle of Peachy's rifle, the way Sam had told him you touched an elk's eye to make sure it was dead. He was dead all right. On the far side of the tree, the rifle Crawford had gripped lay on the ground. It was a single-shot with an exposed hammer, a plains rifle, something you'd see in an old western. He realized it must be the rifle Crawford had taken from Cummings's camp, that he'd ditched it behind the log when he stalked forward toward the sound of the hawk call, before shooting at the effigy Stranahan had constructed.

It puzzled him a moment. The cartridge he'd taken from Cummings's pants pocket was one that fit the big African double rifle that had killed Gutierrez. Well, that was something to think about later. Stranahan lifted the bolt of the Weatherby to extract the spent shell. The cartridge jacked onto the ground and he saw that it was intact, the bullet still seated in the neck of the cartridge case. He hadn't felt the jar of recoil because he hadn't fired. As he stared at the cartridge, a sound penetrated the buzzing sensation inside his head. A shout.

“Sean, are you all right?” Below him, he saw Martha Ettinger climbing over the lip of a ravine. Harold Little Feather appeared moments later. Both were carrying rifles. Stranahan waved them up.

They came at a trot, breathing hard, up to the log. Harold leaned his Winchester lever action against it. Ettinger, her elk rifle slung over her shoulder, bent over and put her hands on her thighs. She hung her head a few moments and then glanced at the body. The bullet had entered just above and a little forward of the boil below Crawford's right ear, blowing off the far side of the cranium. Nobody said anything. Finally, Harold said, “He seems to have lost his looks.”

“Jesus, Harold,” Martha said, and walked away a few feet and was sick.

“Who do I thank?” Stranahan said. He reached up to wipe blood and brain matter off his neck.

Harold jutted his chin toward Ettinger. “She had her scope on him ever since he spun on you the first time. But you were in the line of fire then. You weren't this time.”

“So you heard?”

“We got the drift of it,” Harold said. He walked over to Ettinger and put his arm around her. She turned and buried her face in his chest.

“I never shot a man before,” Stranahan heard her say.

When she disengaged from Harold, she was Martha again. “I don't know which of you smells worse,” she said.

“I just smell like a man,” Harold said. “It's Sean smells like an elk pissed on him.”

•   •   •

I
t took hours to get off the mountain. Ettinger radioed the office and got through to Walt, just back from his trip to Chicago, who drove down to take preliminary statements and video the scene. Then they backtracked Stranahan's footsteps to Cummings's camp and from there visited the carnage in the creek bottom, getting their ducks in a row regarding the facts and their initial assessment of what had transpired. At one point, Ettinger said, “I just shot a man who carried the county by two thousand votes in a national election. I'll be lucky to work animal control next term.” No one argued with her assessment.

It was a bedraggled group that filed the last two miles down to the trailhead. Harold was leading Sally Ann. Stranahan and Walt traded off carrying the dog. It was still alive, and once when Stranahan clutched it to his chest during a creek crossing, it had lifted its head and licked his face. Martha lagged behind them, lost in her thoughts. What she was thinking about was the Moleskine notebook she'd discovered in the bottom of the feed bag of oats. It was Cummings's journal, the first entry dated July 10, three years before. The first line, in a very small and precise hand, began, “Yesterday I learned I was going to die.” There had been no time to read the journal, but her hopes were high that the story it told would shine a light into shadows not yet lifted from the mountain behind them.

As they rounded the final bend, Stranahan saw Sam's pickup in the turnaround. When the big man opened the door, the cab light came on and he could see Martinique on the bench seat. She was setting aside the mangy Maine coon cat that Stranahan had twice seen lurking at the trailhead. Leave it to Martinique to have coaxed it out of hiding.

“I see the cat lady has found another one,” he said in an attempt at levity.

“Just hold me,” she said.

Later, when they were sitting at the table in the grain elevator, Stranahan still riding an adrenaline rush, she said, “I'm going to call him Sphinx.” The cat, wild-eyed, big as a yearling bobcat, crouched on the stairs, staring at them.

Stranahan said, “I'm not sure what I'm going to call her.” They had dropped the dog off at Jeff Svenson's veterinary clinic on the drive back. He'd told them it had a collapsed lung and damaged right eye, but would live.

“She's got a name,” Martinique said. “Someone will remember. But you're sure about it? Shelties can be a handful.”

“I don't know,” he said. “Cats and dogs, I don't want them to come between us.”

“They'll sort it out,” she said. She looked at him, her eyes shining. “This is where you say, ‘We will, too.'”

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Return of the Past

B
y the time Martha Ettinger attended to her cats, fed Goldie and brushed down Petal, and shut the barn door for the night, the tears on her cheeks were almost two hours dry. She looked at the waning moon above the horizon. She'd known it couldn't last with Harold. They'd been having ups and downs for weeks. But why did it have to happen on the night she'd shot a man? As if that weren't enough of a bad day. It wasn't television, where you put killing the bad guy behind you with a wisecrack. It would haunt her for months, she knew it. And to have it happen with Harold the way it had, right there on Main Street in Ennis, with the jukebox blaring from the Silver Dollar, the crowd spilled onto the sidewalk, ranch hands and trout fishing guides drinking their PBRs and longnecked Buds.

She'd assumed Harold would caravan with her back to her place after they picked up the department Cherokee, which she'd left outside the bar before climbing into Harold's truck to drive to Cummings's ranch house that afternoon.

“I'll see you there, huh?” she had said. And Harold, leaning back against the hood of his pickup with his arms crossed so that she could see the weasel tracks circling his upper biceps, said, “About that, Martha. I think I'm just going to go crash at my sister's in Pony.”

Martha had sensed there was more. “What?” she said. “You think because of what happened up there today, that I won't be in the mood? Why make the drive if the most you can expect is a peck good night?” Trying to make the remark light but hating herself, knowing how it sounded.

“It's not that.”

“Then what is it?”

“You know when I drove to Browning, I said it was personal?”

“Yeah. Your brother had a drink. Dishes were broken.”

“Well, there was that, and then, Lou Anne, she wanted to see me.”

Lou Anne was Harold's ex. Martha had never met her, but she'd heard the tone in Harold's voice when he had talked about her and she felt it coming, felt her heart beating and reached up and placed two fingers on her throat.

“Are you . . . seeing her again, Harold?”

“Well, you know the past, it keeps coming back sometimes.” He shifted uncomfortably, the weasel tracks changing their shapes.

“You weren't dwelling on the past a couple nights ago. They're still on the sheets, the petals of that white rose you bought me.” She felt the heat rise in her face.

“This doesn't have anything to do with you, Martha.”

“Obviously.”

A bottle broke on the sidewalk outside the bar. She heard the doors bang open, voices raised. “What the fuck, Bob?” she heard someone say. And someone, maybe Bob, say, “First cousin, man. I swear I didn't know 'til I opened my eyes. She was riding me like the Pony Express.”

Martha sighed.
Men.

“So what now?” she said. “We don't see each other?”

“For a little while, while I sort this out.” Harold stubbed the toe of his cowboy boot, turned over a pebble. “Shouldn't change anything at work, though, right?”

“Sure, Harold. We're all adults here.” And she'd felt the weight behind her eyes and held the tears in until she drove off, because she was damned if she was going to let him see her cry, and then all the way back she'd been hoping to find his headlights in the rearview, wanting them to blink her to a stop and Harold to walk up and say that it was more than maybe it had been, that she hadn't been just fooling herself thinking that it was.

She took off her uniform and got into bed, but she wasn't going to sleep no matter how tired her body was, and so she got up and went into the bathroom and found the box of latex gloves. She pulled on a pair and unzipped the plastic bag containing E. J. Cummings's journal and sat down in the stuffed chair her cats used as a scratching post. Tomorrow, the notebook would be entered into evidence and dusted for prints.

An hour passed and she made herself a cup of chamomile. She sat back down and stared into the distance until the tea cooled a bit and took a sip. When she finally zipped the notebook back into the plastic bag and set it aside, she could hear the first of the morning's robins outside the window. She would never think about E. J. Cummings again without feeling his confliction nor the immensity of his loneliness, nor think of Alejandro Gutierrez or Orvel Webster as bones in the ground.

The bedroom was still dark and she turned on the lamp and set her watch alarm for two hours. She felt a magazine under her and lifted her hip to push it aside. The night before she'd been reading an article by a celebrity doctor on the health benefits of sex. A study revealed that women who had one hundred orgasms a year lived 6.5 years longer than those who didn't. Martha grunted, thinking back on her failed relationships and the gaps in between. She scratched Sheba's cheeks, the Siamese coming to lie down by her head. “At my rate,” she said to the cat, “I live to forty I'll consider myself lucky.”

Then she reached up and switched off the lamp.