Back of Beyond (7 page)

“Jesus,” she said. “You are such an—”

“Sticks and stones,” he said in a way that even charmed
him.
And he noted she hadn’t rolled her window back up.

“Carrie, do you remember when you asked me to be a source? Remember? It was in the Windbag.”

She was quiet. Cautious. “Yes.”

“I’m ready,” he said.

“Are you jerking me around?” Her voice was attractive, kind of husky.

“No, ma’am.”

“Are there conditions?” she asked. Her voice had become businesslike. Which for some reason made him want to take her home again, but he’d settle for another cigarette. He slapped his raincoat until he found the pack and matches.

“Those things will kill you,” she said.

“Bring it on,” he laughed. “Bring it on.”

“Cody.”

He got the cigarette lit and turned and dropped to his haunches so he was eye-level with her in the car. She didn’t draw back away from him, he noticed. He wished he could see her face better.

“Promise me what I tell you will be confidential,” he said. “My name can’t be in the story and you have to promise you won’t even hint at where this comes from.”

She hesitated, then said, “Okay. But it’s got to be of substance.”

“It’s of substance. And you can’t do one of those ‘an unnamed source in the sheriff’s department’ kinds of things. Or I’ll make your life so miserable you’ll have to leave Montana.”

That made her wince, and she sat back. “Don’t threaten me like that.”

“No threat,” he said. “Just what it is. Are we clear?”

“We’re clear.”

He looked around. Although he couldn’t see everyone at the cabin, he did see flashlight beams bouncing around.

“This isn’t an accident, whatever the sheriff or Skeeter tells you. It’s a murder.”

“Jesus.”

“And whoever did it tried to cover his tracks by burning the place down. The victim was a great man named Hank Winters, and we’re gonna find who did it.”

She shook her head. “Why would the sheriff or Skeeter want to cover that up? I don’t understand.”

He whispered conspiratorially, “Because it’s important to them not to call it a murder. It’s political, and it’s big. Bigger than hell. This could be the story that gets you on the map if you play it right.”

“Oh, Cody,” she said, reaching out of her window and touching his arm. Her eyes glistened in the reflection of the flashlights at the scene.

“Look,” he said. “The murderer left a clue to his identity. I can’t tell you what it was but we’re going to follow it to the killer once we get some outside experts up here with some special equipment. And we
will
get him. He’s on borrowed time until the analysis comes back.”

“What kind of analysis?”

“That I can’t tell you yet.”

With that, Cody stood and patted her hand back. “Remember,” he said, “you didn’t hear this from me.”

After a beat, she said, “Thank you, Cody. I owe you.”

“Just no scratching this time,” he said as he turned to walk away.

As he passed under the crime-scene tape he nearly ran into Larry, who stood in the dark with his flashlight off. Cody felt the familiar grip of guilt that came with secret drinking.

“What in the hell are you doing?” Larry said in an urgent whisper. “I heard what you told her, you son of a bitch.”

Cody reached out for Larry but Larry backed away. Cody said, “I’m baiting the trap.”

“What the fuck are you talking about? What was that about special equipment and analysis?”

Cody found himself grinning maniacally, and couldn’t douse it out. He held out his hand to Larry, and said, “I’m pretty sure she bought it.”

Larry stared at him, unmoving. They faced off for over a minute with no words.

Finally, Larry said, “You found a bottle, didn’t you?”

“Yup.”

“And now you’re going to self-destruct and try to take me with you.”

Cody shrugged. “You don’t have to come, Larry.”

“You asshole. You stupid jerk.”

“I’ve been hearing that a lot tonight.”

Larry said, “What am I going to do with you?”

Cody suddenly felt sober. It happened at the weirdest times, he thought. He said, “Help me find the guy who killed Hank. I’ll take it from there.”

Larry moaned.

Cody stepped close to Larry and said, “Larry, I’m a drunk but I’m not a joke. You’ve never seen me unleashed before and believe me, it’s a sight to behold. I’ll go after this guy like nothing you’ve ever experienced. And when I find him I’ll kill his ass a million times over.”

Larry stepped back. “Man, are you okay?”

Cody said, “I’ve never been okay. But now I’ve got a
purpose.
” He spat the last word.

Larry’s eyes got wide and he shook his head slowly. “You’re out of control,” Larry whispered.

“Maybe.” Cody winked and walked back to his Ford for the bottle. The rest of the night he functioned in a blackout. And he woke up the next morning in his apartment covered with blood. Not his.

5

On the night he shot the coroner,
Cody Hoyt was back at Hank Winters’s cabin, hiding in a copse of pine trees in the dark. Waiting.

The last twenty hours had been a dense, almost impenetrable fog. He’d called on his reserves to simply stay upright for most of it. As he sipped from the pint bottle of Evan Williams bourbon he’d brought with him to Vigilante Campground, certain disconnected scenes came up to the surface as if for air and he recalled them before they sunk again to be replaced by another.
Whack-a-mole memories!
he thought. Just like the bad old days.

He tried to put them in order.

Driving down from the mountains following Larry’s car, Larry pulling over twice to get out and curse at him, saying Cody nearly gave himself away when he was slurring his words to the evidence tech and EMTs as they bagged the body and collected all the evidence they’d tagged. Telling Cody that luckily, the sheriff and undersheriff were back in their vehicles at that point, bitching about Skeeter and not thinking about why one of their lead investigators had to lean on trees or the cabin to keep upright. Noting that Carrie Lowry was long gone, and Skeeter was annoyed about that. Not objecting when Larry pushed him away from the cabin in the dark so no one could hear him talk or see him trying to maintain his balance;

Cutting up the dead cow elk with Larry on their way down the mountain, quartering it with a bone saw Larry had in his gear box, all so Cody could take the meat to the battered women’s shelter even though he could barely stand and the huge chunks of raw, still-warm meat had covered his clothes with blood. Ignoring Larry as he bitched and moaned about it, saying those women had plenty to eat as it was and they’d think Cody was crazy;

Hauling the quarters into the walk-in freezer of the shelter after waking up the manager, winking at Larry when she cried and said how grateful she was, how the women and kids staying there would love the meat, offering to clean him up and make some coffee because there was something wrong with his eyes;

Climbing back into the Ford ten minutes after Larry dropped him off at his building, his promises to his partner that he’d go straight to bed and stay off the bottle ringing in his ears, then coming right back out the door when Larry was gone and starting the engine and driving away;

Pounding on the door of a man who ran a roadside liquor store, waking him up because it was four hours past closing, demanding a case of beer and two pints of bourbon, paying for them with a hundred-dollar bill and a pat on the grip of his .40 Sig Sauer to remind the owner to keep quiet about the intrusion;

Calling Jenny, his ex-wife, waking her and making her angry, asking to talk to his son Justin to tell him he could borrow anything he wanted to borrow and to stay away from alcohol and parties, but Justin wasn’t there. He was already gone, with Jenny’s new rich fiancé, on a goddamned male bonding adventure in the wilderness. Jenny calling him an asshole which made him laugh because he’d been called that so many times that night that
it just might be true,
and her slamming down the phone and refusing to pick up when he called her number three more times until he passed out in his lounge chair with the receiver stuck to his hand by congealing blood;

Waking up covered in stiff brown blood, his pants, shirt, and hands caked with it, dried flakes spackling his hand like cracks in a dry lake bed. Swirls of it in the shower, rich and red and revolting. Kicking at the pink swirls and flakes with bare feet, trying to get them to go down the drain;

Swallowing six ibuprofens to blunt the savage pounding in his head, throwing them up in the kitchen sink, taking six more, finally drinking a beer and a raw egg for breakfast which eased him back into the slipstream and stopped his hands from shaking and made it possible for him to brush his teeth and shave without mutilating himself;

Showing up for the eight thirty staff briefing with the town cops from across the hall, Undersheriff Bodean outlining the circumstances of the death of Hank Winters, sleeping through it with his eyes wide open until the sheriff stormed into the room waving the morning’s
Independent Record,
cursing Carrie Lowry and especially that damned Skeeter, who must have been the one who fed her full of lies about the accident being a murder and a lead left at the crime scene that would identify the killer, ordering all of his cops to boycott the local paper until they apologized and ran a front-page retraction;

Feeling Larry’s absolutely chilling glare from across the room while Tubman ranted;

Cutting out early after the briefing because he couldn’t concentrate and he needed a beer, taking his notes and camera with him;

Spending the afternoon at the Windbag and the Jester, seeing his old friends, laughing at their stories and telling some of his own, feeling like it was a family reunion of sorts for the men and women who drank in the daylight,
his people!
;

Taking the Ford back up the mountain as dusk came, shotgun in the rack and pistol in his holster, hoping to avoid hitting another elk, hoping against hope that whoever did this to Hank would read the paper and be puzzled as hell and return to the scene to try and retrieve whatever it was the cops found;

Knowing it was nuttier than hell but somehow made complete sense;

Parking the vehicle on a road a half mile from Hank’s place so it couldn’t be seen and hiking through the dark forest still dripping with rain from the storm that afternoon, carrying the shotgun, packing his pistol, and swinging a six-pack of beer by the plastic holder.

*   *   *

He didn’t know how long
he’d been passed out when the sound of a motor woke him up. Cody moaned and opened his eyes. His head throbbed. He found himself sitting on the damp ground, leaning back against a tree trunk. The cold wet had soaked through his jeans and underwear, and his butt was freezing.

Since it took a few moments to figure out where he was and why he was there, the sound of the tires on gravel and the motor confused him. Then he realized his plan had worked, that the killer had returned to the scene.

He stood up and the waves of dizziness and nausea nearly buckled his knees. He kept his head down, waiting it out, trying to listen to what was going on through the roaring. He heard a man’s voice say, “Here it is,” and he thought:
There’s more than one of them.

Unless the guy was talking to himself, which was doubtful.

“Here?” A woman’s voice.

“There, on that frame that was once a couch. His body was there.”

Cody took a deep breath of cold mountain air and it cleared the clouds from his mind a little. The night and his situation started to come into focus. He wished he’d been lucid when they drove up so that he could have seen them before they got out of their car. But that moment had passed.

He left the three full beers and the empty bottle of bourbon in the grass, and took a step toward the back of the cabin. His legs were rubbery, and he lurched to the side, about to fall. Luckily, the trees were close together and his shoulder thumped into a trunk and kept him upright. He inhaled and held the cold air in his lungs, hoping it would sober him up.

“So what are we looking for?” the woman asked.

“I really don’t know,” the man said. “Whatever was left. If anything.”

The unburned part of the cabin was between Cody and the visitors, so he couldn’t see them. A shaft of light sliced through the air—a flashlight being turned on—then quickly descended out of view. They were looking for something in the black muck.

He thought,
I have you now
,
you scumbags.

“This is sick,” she said. “I wished I knew what we were looking for.”

“Probably nothing,” he said. “It might be the sheriff’s idea of a stupid trick to make him look like he’s doing something. He may drag this out past the election, is my guess.”

The back of the cabin was suddenly in front of him. Cody reached out with his left hand and touched the rounded logs. All he’d need to do was slip along the lengths of the logs until it opened up on the burned section, and they’d be there in the open.

Then he realized he’d left his shotgun back where he’d passed out. Hesitating, he considered feeling his way back to retrieve it. But he’d gotten this far in silence without slipping or stepping on a dead branch to reveal himself. Doing it twice more without making a sound was unlikely at best. He cursed himself and reached up and pinched his cheek so hard he winced. But it helped wake him up. Then he reached down and slowly unsnapped the plastic restraint on his holster and drew his Sig Sauer. As always, there was no safety to worry about and one in the chamber so there’d be no need to rack the slide.

He’d had Trijicon self-luminous sights put on his weapon back in Denver, and he raised it and fitted the front green dot between the twin dots of the back sight. Although he’d never fired at anyone at night on the job, he’d put in hours at the range. He knew if he squeezed the trigger when the three dots were horizontal he should be able to hit what he was pointing at. His only issue was whether or not he’d take out the both of them without warning, or identify himself first. Of course, however it went, in his after-action report he’d say he ordered them to freeze and they didn’t, so he had no choice.