Hunting Season (16 page)

At least that was how Anna read it, and she was made weak by the glorious sensation that somebody cared whether she lived or died.

"If I'd known I was going to be accompanied on my evening constitutional, you would have been my first choice for an escort," she said and gave him the smile spite had been withholding.

"Tell me about it over a cup of coffee?"

"I was hoping for lunch," Anna said.

"Your car or mine?" Paul answered but Anna had seen the ghosts of the gossips haunting him before he'd answered. He was uncomfortable being seen with her, even in uniform.

"Coffee'd be better," she said. "I'm short on time."

Paul had the grace not to look relieved.

Barth had gone. Randy was still slothing about. He was on the phone when they walked in but hung up with a hurried "Call ya back," when he saw them. Probably talking to his mistress of many years. Once off the phone he seemed to Anna to be all eyes and ears. Either to avoid work, annoy Anna or to make himself feel important, Randy attached himself to Sheriff Davidson. He attempted classic man chat: sports, guns, dogs, internal combustion engines. Anna fought down the irritation that came with the belief that he was doing it on purpose to exclude her from the manly world of law enforcement. A tiny voice, whispered in her ear over twenty years before by a woman who didn't like Anna enough and liked Anna's husband Zach too much, came back. "Trust your paranoia."

"How do you take your coffee?" Anna cut through, choosing to pretend she didn't remember.

"Black."

Anna poured a cup of the disreputable-looking brew for herself and Paul and led the way into her office where, for once, she was grateful there were only two chairs. Undaunted by the lack of facilities, Randy lumbered after them and took up his old place in the doorway, three hundred pounds of lard Anna'd have to blast her way through to gain the outdoors.

The idea was beginning to appeal strongly to her when Thigpen was saved by the jarring bell of the office phone. She and Randy locked eyes as it rang a second time. On the third ring she said, "Would you get that for me, Randy? I need to have a word with Paul."

Reluctantly he pulled himself away only to reappear a minute later. "Tupelo," he said. "A motorist call in. Cell phone. Needs an assist up to Rocky. Dead battery it sounds like."

Again the staring contest. "Guess you'll be wanting me to take that," Thigpen grumbled. Anna said nothing.

"Don't you be going to Lundstrom's without me. I want to be in on that."

"You'll want to wrap up the motorist assist in record time, then," Anna said.

Finally he had no choice but to go, and she expelled the breath she'd not known she'd been holding. "God, but I hate that man," she muttered.

Paul laughed. "Gee, I'd've never guessed. So." He nudged her knee gently with his booted foot and at once Anna was warmed and connected. Love was most assuredly blind but its other senses were remarkably acute.

"First, who told you about last night's escapade?" Anna's question wasn't to seek out idle gossipers. The hunting stand "prank," if one chose to call it that, was the sort that the participants would want to brag about. It had all the ingredients of a bar boast except for the sex, and she doubted the perpetrators would have any compunction about using their imaginations to add that element. Anna was hoping they would boast. Realistically it was about the only chance she had of nailing the bastards.

"Triletta told me."

Paul named a new clerk at the Port Gibson Sheriff's department. Anna remembered not the woman but the name. Tired of white men's hand-me-down names, many African-Americans in Mississippi had taken to naming their children or, if their own folks were conservative, themselves, with exotic-sounding syllables that pleased the ear and annoyed hell out of the sense of spelling.

"The tooth," Paul said, tapping his front teeth to jog her memory.

"Ah." Triletta had capped a front tooth in gold with a diamond chip inset in an etching of a star. Another culturally based fashion. "Find out who she got the story from," Anna said.

"Will do. Now tell me."

Anna related her adventuring, enjoying the growing anger that burned in his eyes and tightened the muscles of his face.

"Randy Thigpen wasn't exactly Johnny-on-the-spot," he said when she'd finished.

"At least he showed up before somebody got hurt."

"I'll see what I can dig up on my end," he promised.

They sat without speaking for a while. Anna let herself simply enjoy the companionship, the sight of him against the green and gold and blue that leaked through her one fly-specked window.

At length he began to fidget, the small shifts and wriggles preparatory to leaving.

"What do you know about a Badger Lundstrom," Anna asked. The question was legitimate—Lundstrom lived in Paul's county—but Anna asked it to buy a few more minutes of Paul Davidson's time, and she hated herself for the pathetic need it evinced, if to no other judge and jury but the one in her head.

"Lundstrom."

"Owns a scrap metal yard," Anna said.

"Okay. Got him. He's a local boy. His folks and their folks all lived right here. Big man. Heavy drinker but never been in trouble for it—no DUIs, not the sort to get into brawls or anything, least not that's ever conic to my attention. Used to be a big football star when he was in high school. To my way of thinking he never much got past that stage. Kind of a class-clown type, though he's got to be pushing forty if he isn't already there. Not a church-going man to my knowledge. Divorced some years, if I remember right." He thought a bit and Anna waited to see if anything more floated up from Mississippi's pool of communal history. In the country, where everybody knew everybody else's business, secrets kept were necessarily buried deep, covered in years, sometimes generations, of lies. The anonymity of the city could not be counted on to mask antisocial behaviors.

"That's all I got," he said finally. He glanced at his watch.

"It's a help," Anna said, then added, "I guess I'd best be getting back to work," to make up for keeping him longer than he'd intended to stay.

"Me too." He stood, took his Stetson from the counter. Reaching out, he touched her hair lightly. "Call me when things happen. Call me at home, at night, at work. Don't shut me out. You need somebody to be there for you."

Anna said nothing. Not sure what she felt and afraid to trust anything to words.

"I need to be there for somebody," he amended.

Anna collected herself enough to say, "I'll call." She doubted she would, at least not when things were new and raw. Too needy. Perhaps not for him, but for her to have to witness in herself. Maybe she sensed if she ever let herself need somebody she'd fall into a bottomless pit of it.

Behind her the radio began babbling. Her number wasn't mentioned and Anna ignored it. Paul drove away with a crunching of gravel and still she stood in the doorway, not mooning over her departed lover, merely bereft of the will to move, to act, to do.

The other door being pried open galvanized her into looking alive even if she did not feel it.

Thigpen barreled in on a waft of stale cigarette smoke.

"That was quick," Anna said, too distracted to keep a note of accusation from her voice.

"I radioed Frank up at Rocky. He's going to jump the battery. Problem solved," Thigpen said. Frank was the maintenance man at Rocky Springs campground. Anna hadn't known he had cables and was certain the little three-wheeled cart he drove lacked the guts to jump a car battery.

As if he read her thoughts, Thigpen added, "He's got the stuff in that old truck he drives."

Anna knew she'd probably get complaints from maintenance because one of her rangers was leveraging off his work onto their people, but there was little she could do about it at the moment.

"Problem solved," she agreed. She looked at her watch. Ninety minutes to kill before Clintus Jones returned. Scheduling duties awaited on the derelict computer in her office. She'd not yet begun the chore of writing up reports on the Barnette murder or the incident at the hunting platform. She'd pulled her gun. If every cop on television had to write up a detailed report every time they unholstered a weapon, prime-time would be about paper shuffling. The NPS insisted a ranger have justification for first pulling the weapon; then if, God forbid, one actually pointed it at someone, a whole new set of explanations was required. That and civil litigation partially accounted for why police all over the nation were under fire in the media for looking the other way when crimes were being committed. Easier to let the perpetrators die of old age than justify every action taken in subduing them.

Thigpen was staring at her. She'd yet to move from the doorway. Anna looked at the dingy light leaking from her office, then at the rich glow of the November afternoon outdoors. Paperwork would have to wait. Her brain was getting claustrophobic. Time had come to air it out.

"I'm going to head on down to that meadow," she made a sudden decision. "Look around again. I should be back before Clintus gets here but if I'm not, ask him to wait. It shouldn't be more than a few minutes."

Randy Thigpen followed her as she stepped into her office to retrieve her hat and duty belt. Velcroing it on, Anna was aware of the familiar pain on her hipbones where the heavy belt bruised them. She needed to put on a little weight, pad herself.

Thigpen was blocking her way out again. A flash of anger so hot and irrational flared in Anna she was mildly surprised her hair didn't catch on fire.

"What is it?" she asked.

"Mind if I ride along with you?"

Nomore than I'd mind being staked out naked on a fire ant nest,
Anna thought, but said nothing. Maybe she needed food. Something was making her more vicious than usual.

"I need to have a talk with you," Thigpen said. His voice was somehow different, his stance less aggressive, the eternal sneer gone from his one visible lip.

Anna relented. This manager shit was killing her. In good clean fieldwork one was not obligated to give second and third chances. "Sure," she said. "I'll drive."

8

 Randy was uncharacteristically quiet for the first few miles. Anna summoned calm and strength by concentrating only on the deep blue of the sky, the patchwork curtain of foliage that screened the Trace from the real world of Quick Stops, billboards, car dealers and fast food. The colors had peaked two weeks before. The first hard rain would strip the last of them from the branches. Having grown up in the high desert of eastern California, where hardwoods existed only in front yards and forests were of pine, Anna never tired of the falling of leaves in a true deciduous forest. Day after day, as though there were an endless supply, leaves rained down. A deluge of yellow, orange, rust and red. They fell slowly, erratically. Anna could catch them on their casual journey into oblivion.

Now, to either side of the narrow ribbon of asphalt the Crown Vic confined her to, she could see this peaceable storm whispering behind tree line. As always she was charmed, amazed and enjoyed the sense of reality and time being suspended.

"I need to have a talk with you," Randy repeated his earlier sentiments. Reality slapped back down, cold and smelly as a dead carp on a chopping block.

Randy waited for her to graciously invite him to share. Feeling petty, Anna didn't. Finally he gave up and began again.

"I know that we've had our differences," he said.

Mentally Anna rolled her eyes, sniffed and said,
"Gee, ya think?"
Corporally she merely drove, eyes on the road, the glamour of the changing forest lost to the tunnel vision of the highway.

"I guess maybe I owe you an apology. All I can say in my own defense is that I pretty much figured the district ranger position would go to me. I been here nearly thirty years. Got old driving this stretch of road. Been a GS-7 living like the poor folk most of that time. Finally the s.o.b.s make me a GS-9, then the district ranger leaves and, the way I look at it, they owed that spot to me."

Randy had segued smoothly from apology to whine to belligerence. The teensy-weensy spark of camaraderie and understanding that his first words had ignited behind Anna's breastbone was rapidly being extinguished.

Maybe Randy saw the faint light die. Maybe he heard the changing tone of his own voice. For whatever reason, he took a breath and changed tactics.

"Anyway,
enough of that," he said. "They hired you and I guess they had to, you being a woman and all..."

"If this is an apology, it's downright crappy," Anna said without taking her eyes from the road.

Thigpen was quiet for a moment, then he laughed. It was the first truly sincere noise Anna'd heard him make and she found herself smiling. Though she hated to say or even think anything favorable about the man, he did have a lovely voice, light and clear and warm. His laugh was even better, a throaty chuckle Burl Ives would have been proud of.

"Okay, okay," Thigpen said. All traces of his borrowed southern accent vanished, and Anna heard the more natural iron and granite of his New Jersey upbringing ring under the words. "I'm a hidebound, opinionated, sexist pig," he said. "That's how I was brought up and when I die I'm going to be carried to my grave by six men in suits, and if the preacher who recites the Twenty-third Psalm over my grave isn't wearing pants, I'm going to sit right up in my coffin and raise holy hell."