Open Season (33 page)

Joe handed the telephone back to Sheridan and looked over his shoulder at Marybeth.

“When will you be back?” she asked.

“Late,” Joe told her. “There was an explosion in the mountains.”

“You mean like a plane crash?”

“He didn't say that. The explosion was a few miles off of the Hazelton Road in the mountains, in elk country. Barnum thinks there may be some game animals down.”

She looked at Joe for further explanation. He shrugged to indicate that was all he knew.

“I'll save you some dinner.”

 

Joe met the
sheriff and Deputy McLanahan at the exit to Winchester and followed them through the small town. The three-vehicle fleet—two County GMC Blazers and Joe's dark green Game and Fish pickup—entered and exited the tiny town within minutes. Even though it was an hour and a half away from darkness, the only establishments open were the two bars with identical red neon Coors signs in their windows and a convenience store. Winchester's lone public artwork, located on the front lawn of the branch bank, was an outsized and gruesome metal sculpture of a wounded grizzly bear straining at the end of a thick chain, it's metal leg encased in a massive saw-toothed bear trap. Joe did not find the sculpture lovely but it captured the mood, style, and inbred frontier culture of the area as well as anything else could have.

 

Deputy McLanahan led
the way through the timber in the direction where the explosion had been reported and Joe walked behind him alongside Sheriff Barnum. Joe and McLanahan had acknowledged each other with curt nods and said nothing. Their relationship had been rocky ever since McLanahan had sprayed the outfitter's camp with shotgun blasts two years before and Joe had received a wayward pellet under his eye. He still had a scar to show for it.

Barnum's hangdog face grimaced as he limped aside Joe through the underbrush. He complained about his hip. He complained about the distance from the road to the crime scene. He complained about McLanahan, and said to Joe sotto voce that he should have fired the deputy years before and would have if he weren't his nephew. Joe suspected, however, that Barnum also kept McLanahan's around because McLanahan's quick-draw reputation had added—however untrue and unlikely—an air of toughness to the Sheriff's Department that didn't hurt at election time.

The sun had dropped below the top of the mountains and instantly turned them into craggy black silhouettes. The light dimmed in the forest, fusing the treetops and branches that were discernable just a moment before into a shadowy muddle. Joe reached back on his belt to make sure he had his flashlight. He let his arm brush his .357 Smith & Wesson revolver to confirm it was there. He didn't want Barnum to notice the movement since Barnum still chided him about the time he lost his gun to a poacher Joe was arresting.

There was an unnatural silence in the woods, with the exception of Barnum's grumbling. The absence of normal sounds—the chattering of squirrels sending a warning up the line, the panicked scrambling of deer, the airy winged drumbeat of flushed Spruce grouse—confirmed that something big had happened here. Something so big it had either cleared the wildlife out of the area or frightened them mute. Joe could feel that they were getting closer before he could see anything to confirm it. Whatever it was, it was just ahead.

McLanahan quickly stopped and there was a sharp intake of breath.

“Holy shit,” McLanahan whispered in awe.
“Holy shit.”

The still-smoking crater was fifteen yards across. It was three feet deep at its center. A half dozen trees had been blown out of the ground and their shallow rootpans were exposed like black outstretched hands. Eight or nine black baldy cattle were dead and still, strewn among the trunks of trees. The earth below the thick turf rim of the crater was dark and wet. Several large white roots, the size of leg bones, were pulled up from the ground by the explosion and now pointed at the sky. Cordite from the explosives, pine from broken branches, and upturned mulch had combined in the air to produce a sickeningly sweet and heavy smell.

Darkness enveloped them as they slowly circled the crater. Pools of light from their flashlights lit up twisted roots and lacy pale yellow undergrowth.

Joe checked the cattle, moving among them away from the crater. Most had visible injuries as a result of fist-sized rocks being blown into them from the explosion. One heifer was impaled on the fallen tip of a dead pine tree. The rest of the herd, apparently unhurt, stood as silent shadows just beyond his flashlight. He could see dark heavy shapes and hear the sound of chewing, and a pair of eyes reflected back blue as a cow raised its head to look at him. They all had the same brand—a “V” on top and a “U” on the bottom divided by a single line. Joe recognized it as the Vee Bar U Ranch. These were Ed Finolla's cows.

McLanahan suddenly grunted in alarm and Joe raised his flashlight to see the deputy in a wild, self-slapping panic, dancing away from the rim of the crater and ripping his jacket off of himself as quickly as he could. He threw it violently to the ground in a heap and stood staring at it.

“What in the hell is wrong with you?” Barnum asked, annoyed.

“Something landed on my shoulder. Something heavy and wet,” McLanahan said, his face contorted. “I thought it was somebody's hand grabbing me. It scared me half to death.”

McLanahan had dropped his flashlight, so from across the crater Joe lowered his light onto the jacket and focused his Mag Light into a tight beam. McLanahan bent down into the light and gingerly unfolded the jacket, poised to jump back if whatever had fallen on him was still in his clothing. He threw back a fold and cursed. Joe couldn't see for sure what McLanahan was looking at other than that the object was dark and moist.

“What is it?” Barnum demanded.

“It looks like . . . well . . . it looks like a piece of
meat
.” McLanahan looked up at Joe vacantly.

Slowly, Joe raised the beam of his flashlight, sweeping upward over McLanahan and following it up the trunk of a lodgepole pine and into the branches. What Joe saw, he would never forget. . . .