Hunting Season (26 page)

Anna forced herself to her feet, stumbled, found her balance and began wading up the ditch toward the crouching vehicle.

"Come on, you son-of-a-bitch," she muttered. "Come on, goddamn it. Get out, admire your handiwork." As if in answer to her heretic's prayer, she heard the crack of a door being forced open past warped metal.

Her brain ordered her legs to run and they tried, but numbed with cold and boots full of water, she moved with nightmare slowness.

From the north came the familiar whoop of a siren. An instant later the flashing blue lights of Barth's patrol car were visible.

Metal barked again. The truck's door slammed. The pickup came to life, backing rapidly away from the wreckage.

"Damn." Anna cursed Barth's timing and wiped the water from her eyes. The pickup roared backward, wheels milling heavy spray from the road, taillights riddling the night with watered reds.

It passed not twenty feet from where Anna stood. No license plate. Burgundy. She raised her sidearm and fired. Protocol on acceptable levels of force would not allow her to try and kill anyone, much as she ached to do so. She aimed at the tires, hoping to cripple the vehicle sufficiently so she could lay ungentle hands on the driver. on the range, Anna was a dead shot, top honors. At night, shaking, in a ditch full of frigid water, she was no better than the average schmo. Maybe she hit a tire, maybe she didn't. The truck never slowed. Still traveling backward, it grew smaller till darkness or a bend in the road took it from sight.

Impotent with fury, she stared at the black place that swallowed her killer. The sound of her name being shouted called her back to herself.

Barth had arrived. In the pulse of blue lights she watched him run to the twisted mess that had been her patrol car, yelling her name, pulling at a door fused shut by the truck's impact, peering frantically through the shattered safety glass.

Wearily she slogged out of the ditch and walked down the center of the Trace.

"Anna!" Barth shouted again, then snatched his radio from his belt.

"I'm here."

The big man squealed and Anna laughed. It was grossly ill-mannered but she couldn't help herself. The laughter carried her on a wave of mild hysteria that part of her mind watched with thin-lipped disapproval. on the heels of the scream Barth did a classic triple take, looking from her to the car and back to her again. Though it was perfectly executed comedy, the genuine concern in his face dried up her laughter.

"I'm okay, Barth. I wasn't in the car."

"You weren't in the car," he repeated stupidly, his usually fine mind slowed by the drama.

"No."

"Thank God," he said simply.

Anna wasn't in the mood to thank anybody.

13

 Much as it galled, Anna was forced to let the assault truck and its driver go unpursued. Her vehicle was totaled, the wreckage blocking the southbound traffic lane. Until it was towed she and Barth had to remain, lest some unwary traveler plow into the mess and kill himself. The best she could do was to radio the Natchez and Port Gibson sheriffs' departments and the state troopers to put out an all points bulletin for an old Ford pickup, probably burgundy, driving without headlights and sporting a homegrown cast-iron grill probably with bits of National Park Service ranger patrol vehicle stuck between its teeth.

The troopers or sheriffs might turn up something, but Anna doubted it. The Trace, fairly straight and decidedly narrow, harbored hundreds of small, half overgrown dirt tracks that provided access and egress to those who knew the country. Even in winter the growth was thick enough to hide a whole battalion of pickup trucks.

After setting flares at intervals fifty yards to the north of the wreck there was nothing more for them to do, and Anna and Barth retreated to the shelter of his patrol car. Trying to drive out a chill that had soaked more than bone deep, Anna cranked his heater up high. Her trousers, even her hair, steamed as the super-heated air struck them. Rivulets of water ran from her boots and trouser legs to pool on the seat and floor mat. The windows were as fogged as those of a pair of teenagers at Lover's Lane, and Barth was dripping more with sweat than any residual rain. If Anna noticed she was broiling her compatriot, she was too distracted to care.

To assuage her need for the hunt, she listed the things she wanted done at the open of business the following day. Barth, his paternal—or survival—instincts in good condition, said little and wrote everything she said in a small notebook. A lesser man would have had to show her his knowledge. Barth let her unwind in her own way.

"We'll need to call the local body shops to be on the lookout for a truck with damage to the front end, and wrecking yards to watch for anybody looking to cannibalize headlight assemblies," she said. "Probably dead ends. By the looks of it, the truck was a junker. Any repairs'll be done by the owner if at all.

"We'll run a check in Adams, Jefferson, Claiborne and Hinds counties. See if they got a record of anybody with a truck of that description registered." Anna laughed and let her head drop back against the headrest, wringing a stream of cold water down into her collar.

"What?" Barth said, sounding alarmed.

His dark face was a strange color, the green of the dash lights reflecting off the sweat on his forehead and chin. Personal concern focused in his eyes and tightened up the muscles of his cheeks. She'd never before noticed how seriously he took his caretaking duties. It wasn't a new side of him, she realized. She'd seen it the previous spring when he'd come and taken her out of the hospital in Jackson. It had been there all along; she'd just never bothered to notice it, never asked him if he had kids, liked to teach, wanted to study emergency medicine or disaster relief.

Managerial shit,
Anna told herself and made a promise to be better.

"What?" Barth asked again.

"How many hits you figure we'll get from the departments of motor vehicles if they run a search for old trucks in this part of the country?"

Barth laughed with her. "More than we got the manpower to follow up on."

They didn't speak for a bit, both listening to the rain and their own thoughts, watching for the arrival of the tow truck.

"Scratch the DMV search," Anna said after a while. "The truck had no plates. Probably isn't registered. Maybe hasn't been registered in years. The only way we're going to find it is luck. By now it's hid out back of some barn with a black tarp over it weighed down with old tires."

Barth didn't risk a remark but conscientiously drew a line through the last item on the list. Silence returned, mellowing with the passage of time. "Want to tell me what happened?" he asked.

Anna'd given him the short version when he'd arrived: "Bastard rammed me. I wasn't in the car." Now she told him how the events had unfolded.

"You couldn't see who it was?"

"Nothing," Anna said. "The guy's dash lights were out or masked and with the night and the rain..."

"Maybe it wasn't a guy. Could've been a woman."

"It could have been," Anna said.

A woman. The thought jarred as she thought of the one woman who might want her dead: Mrs. Paul Davidson. Nausea formed a hollow in the pit of her stomach at the tawdriness of dying because of an adulterous affair with another woman's husband. No honor in that. Anna'd only met Mrs. Davidson once when the woman had engineered a "chance" encounter at Rocky Springs to drop a fragment of information Paul had neglected to mention: that he was a married man, three years of separation notwithstanding.

It should have painted an incongruous picture: the petite and carefully coiffed Mrs. D in her pumps and hose behind the wheel of a killing truck, but it didn't.
Projection,
Anna said to herself. Maybe she could see it so clearly because there'd been too many times over the past months when she had wished Paul's wife would come to a timely end.

Not liking the person that made her, Anna forced the sheriff's wife out of her mind. Immediately it was replaced by an image of old wizened Mama Barnette behind the wheel, her head barely higher than the dash, fingers crooked with age and arthritis clamped on the steering wheel like claws. Anna laughed. "It could've been," she said again. "Fords are an equal-opportunity weapon."

"Do you think he was trying to kill you?" Barth asked, reverting to the masculine pronoun. "I mean kill
you
specifically?"

Anna thought about that. The attack felt personal but that didn't mean it was. In the dark the driver of the pickup might not have known who was in the driver's seat of the patrol car. He had the advantage of high beams but, rain filming her rear window, they couldn't have provided much more than a watery silhouette.

"One of us," Anna said. "You, me, Randy. It's common knowledge there's just the three of us for ninety miles of road. One of us or the park service in general. I suppose it could have been a Unabomber thing. You know—one lunatic against the federal government."

"Randy and I've been here a long time," Barth said speculatively. "Nobody's ever tried to kill us."

Anna shot him a sideways glance to see if there was an intentional cut under the words. His face was guileless; the sweat came from the sauna she'd insisted on, not guilt. Still it hurt. "Mama Barnette brought a double-barreled shotgun to the door thinking Clintus was you," she said peevishly. "What was that about beside murderous intent?"

"Shoot," Barth said, oblivious of the pun. "That old woman wants to kill half the county. Folks think she's still fighting the Civil War, trying to get back to the glory days when her people were rich and genteel plantation owners with darkies to empty their chamber pots. If she's taken on a personal hate for me, it's because I've been asking questions: her, her neighbors, looking up old records, researching the Mt. Locust graveyard. The Barnettes were nothing but poor dirt farmers, most of them living worse than slaves. At least slaves had enough to eat. There was no money in that family till old lady Barnette's great-grandfather moved into town and apprenticed himself to a carpenter."

"Would she want to kill you for knowing that?" Anna asked. She was serious. In another part of the country that would never pass muster as a motive for murder. In the South—even the "new" South—Anna wasn't so sure.

Both of them looked through the steaming windshield at the crushed and twisted metal of the car Anna'd been driving. Had she not slithered out the right-hand door into the mud, she'd still be inside it, shrapnel from the driver's door where her left lung and heart once resided.

"Mrs. Barnette's meaner 'n a snake," Barth said. "Kind of that mindless, ugly, old mean, like a cottonmouth."

"How about Raymond?" Anna asked. "I keep feeling he factors into things somehow, but he's got an alibi for the night his brother died. Vestry dinner."

"You think this is something to do with Doyce's murder?"

Anna didn't answer because she had no answers. It just made more sense than a sudden crime spree on one of the quietest sections of the Natchez Trace Parkway.

 The car was towed. Reports, verbal and written, as to how she'd managed to destroy a government vehicle had been postponed till the following day.

Anna showered, melting away the chill in her bones. She dressed with the obsessive care of an adolescent on prom night, donning a soft green velvet dress that flattered her boyish figure. Her short hair she fluffed to accentuate the white streaks at the temples. Then, in a last-minute reversion to type, she threw the graceful ensemble onto the floor and pulled on Levi's, moccasins and an old lambswool sweater that had belonged to her husband, Zach. When she left, Piedmont was curling up on the soft forest-green velvet, improving its color and texture with a wealth of orange cat hair.

By 8:15 her Rambler was parked in Paul Davidson's driveway, and she was standing on the porch of his Port Gibson home. Rain still fell, as did the temperature. The roads would be covered in black ice before the night was over.

For some reason Anna was loath to ring the doorbell. Paul had invited her to dinner, to his home. In a small town, her car in his driveway at eight o'clock on a weeknight was tantamount to a public avowal of ...
of what?
A relationship? Friendship? Assignation? Given his situation, the priesthood in the balance, possible jeopardy to the upcoming election for county sheriff that was going on throughout the state, inviting her to his home smacked of a final decision.

Finality: that was what kept her standing in the dark listening to the rain blow against the side of the house.

A plethora of emotions cold and damp as the gusts of rain-laden wind blustered through Anna. She was beset by a sudden longing to return to the safe familiarity of the loneliness that worked so well for her.

"Not good," she said, paying lip service to mental health more as a tribute to her sister than anything else.

She reached for the bell.

Paul beat her to it. The door opened to warmth and light. He folded her into an embrace that banished loneliness so completely that Anna groaned aloud and felt unwelcome womanly tears flood her eyes.

"Doggone it, Anna, I was worried half to death. Why didn't you call?"