Hunting Season Read online

  “I’d been thinking Lundstrom for the driver of that truck made sense,” Anna said.

  “How so?”

  It was a fair question, but the smirk beneath the words suggested Randy didn’t believe her, that he thought she’d chosen to pretend previous knowledge where she had none.

  Pride pricked her into sharing the suspicions she’d been keeping to herself the past twenty-four hours. “It’s my guess Doyce, Badger, Herm, and Martin never played a hand of poker together. Their ‘poker nights’ were spent poaching from that stand by Mt. Locust. I got two samples of deer flesh, one from our meadow, one from Martin Crowley’s dog. I’ m betting when the DNA tests are done they’ll prove to have come from the same animal.”

  “One man poaching a doe on federal park lands is a far cry from attempted murder,” Randy said.

  “There was bark under Doyce Barnette’s fingernails, bark from a pecan tree. The stand is nailed to a pecan tree. And I got results back yesterday that the corpse had gunpowder residue on his hands.”

  “What? You figure Doyce was out hunting when he was killed? He wasn’t shot.”

  “No,” Anna said. “Cause of death was suffocation. Doyce and the boys are out hunting, illegally, up in a tree stand easily twenty feet above the ground. The stand’s beat to shit but for one corner and there the railing’s new, two-by-fours, spit and polish.”

  “So it got busted and they fixed it. I’m missing something here.”

  “What do guys wear in tree stands while they’re hunting?”

  “I give up,” Randy said and laughed. “Boxers or briefs?”

  Anna laughed with him, then she said, “Safety harnesses. Doyce falls or is pushed through the old rickety railing. He hangs in his harness, claws at the tree. Guy that fat, if he hangs long enough he drowns in his own fat.”

  “Okay, so Doyce falls. That’s an accident. Why not just call nine-one-one?”

  “Maybe it wasn’t an accident.”

  “He could’ve been by himself.”

  “Not likely. And he didn’t move his own corpse.”

  “Why not just leave him where he died?”

  “Covering up that they were poaching?” Anna phrased it like a question because it was a question in her mind. Poaching deer in Mississippi was not a serious enough infraction of the law to inspire three ordinarily law-abiding men to go to such lengths to cover it up.

  “Then what do you figure? The hunters get scared we’re figuring it out that they had something to do with Doyce’s accident and try and scare us off with that hootin’ an hollerin’ show. That fails. Lundstrom goes after you in a pickup truck,” Randy summed up for her. “Why’d they put poor ol’ Doyce on Grandma Polly’s bed in his underpants?”

  “I haven’t worked that out yet,” Anna admitted.

  They drove in silence for a while. Anna concentrated on the road. Over the bridges it was icy, she could feel the Crown Vie wanting to fishtail.

  Miles passed in darkness. Sleet, sluggish and black, slid in tarry trails along the side windows. They passed the meadow with the deer stand. Randy, staring out his window, stirred from his lumpish quiet to ask, “Why would Badger Lundstrom leave Doyce hang till he suffocated? Why not cut him down?”

  “Why did he loose a two-ton iron pterodactyl over my head?” Anna returned. “Because he thought it would be funny. Maybe this time the joke went too far.”

  Randy laughed unexpectedly. “You’ve got to admit your scuttling away from that thing was pretty funny. Too bad it was dark. You’d of been something to see by the light of day.”

  By the light of day. The phrase jarred Anna on a deep and disquieting level. Suddenly it became of utmost importance that she remember where she’d heard it recently. She almost asked Randy, but a voice she seldom heard but always listened to warned her not to. The ice water that was flooding the world came into Anna’s body.

  Backing her foot off the accelerator, she let her mind shift up from the asphalt and open to memory. Another mile past to the sharp stinging song of tires on wet pavement before the image came to her. It was the morning after her car had been demolished. Randy had come into the office. They’d spoken of the damage they’d noted to the car body. Then Randy had said he would like to see it in the light of day.

  He’d seen the wreck.

  He’d not seen it by the light of day.

  Randy had a park radio. He’d known where she was and what she was up to. All at once the pieces fell together.

  Badger Lundstrom had not been driving the truck, or, if he had, he’d not been alone. And they were not going to his house now. There’d been no last minute call from Clintus.

  Anna had been a fool. The price for that would be high.

  20

  Randy was blathering on in his mellifluous voice, but she no longer heard the words. The obvious, or what should have been obvious had she not been so blind, so stupid, was slamming into her mind, being transmuted into ice water and pumped throughout her body till her bowels quivered and her extremities were numbed.

  Randy demanding weekend nights. Her phone ringing after midnight on Fridays and Saturdays since...? Since hunting season had started, she realized. There was little public land in Mississippi. Hunting was done in privately owned clubs. Clubs were expensive. Badger, Martin, Herm, and Doyce were men of limited means. Randy had accommodated them, running a hunting club of his own that met on Friday and Saturday nights when no one patrolled the parkway but him. On those nights Randy must have rung Anna at home, making sure she was safely tucked in her bed and out of the way before the festivities began.

  He’d not been late when she’d called for backup the night the hunters had ambushed her. He’d been early, maybe at the stand itself when she radioed. That’s why they had been lying in wait when she arrived. The new leaf, the anger when she interviewed Crowley without him; Randy had wanted to be in on the investigation to control it, divert it, feed answers to his cohorts.

  Anna felt an utter fool. She deserved to be smacked upside the head for it. She did not deserve to die for it. Unfortunately, for fools in law enforcement, death was too often the penalty for even minor lapses.

  Slowly, she came back to herself. Only seconds had passed. She was still behind the wheel, conning the car over the slick road. Randy was still talking. Her mind cleared of self-recrimination and chain of circumstantial evidence. For now she needed to get away from Randy. Summon help if she could. Options clicked through her brain and were discarded. If she reached for the radio, sped up, slowed down or did anything out of the ordinary Randy would realize she knew. So long as he thought her ignorant she was safe. At least until he led her to wherever it was this journey was to end. She was armed but so was he and he had every advantage. Wearing a long jacket buckled down over her gun belt, tricked into driving, Anna was rather neatly trussed up and helpless. Randy, she noted in a sideways glance, was coatless. His right hand, out of sight behind his paunch, undoubtedly rested on the butt of his service weapon. Randy was a smart man. His plan was probably simple. She would disappear, her body buried in the mire of the woods. A great hue and cry would be raised, a search would begin, run, in her absence, by Ranger Thigpen. Her car would be found, left in a place far from where the body was buried. The search would center on the location of the vehicle while her bones moldered to dust in an unnamed grave miles away.

  They approached Mt. Locust. Anna noted the rain-dark sign in the spill of the headlights. She needed to take control of their geography. It was a lesson girls were taught in defense classes: regardless of what is promised, never let the villain take you to a second location. If she could get free of the car, the seat belt, while keeping Randy off the scent, there was a chance she could escape. Randy was quick for a fat man but not so quick as Anna.

  “I need to stop in here a minute,” she said. “I left my camera at the Mt. Locust Ranger Station.”

  “I’ve got mine with me,” Randy said easily. The lie was well made but, without coat or bag, unless he car
ried it in his hip pocket, utterly transparent. He realized it and for an instant their eyes locked, the pale blue of his glittering in the phosphorescent green of the dash lights, then going black as he moved his head a fraction of an inch.

  “That’s okay,” Anna said. “I may as well get mine. I have to go to the bathroom anyway.” Her voice was natural, light even, but it was no good. The moment their eyes met information had been passed.

  In a move so quick Anna realized his gun had not been holstered but waited ready in his hand, he shifted it neatly to his left hand and pressed it to her temple. She heard the hammer draw back and the unmistakable click as the cylinder of a wheel gun rotated a bullet into place. Randy, too clever by half, carried not his service weapon—a nine-millimeter Sig-Sauer semi-automatic like she wore—but a revolver probably unregistered and untraceable.

  She’d underestimated Thigpen. He was a rotten ranger because he chose to be, not because he was incapable of the moves. His right hand lifted cuffs from his shirt pocket. Anna’s hands, neatly aligned on the top curve of the steering wheel, were smoothly cuffed together. The entire action was over in seconds. Quick as it was, it was not quicker than thought. Ideas scattered up in Anna’s mind thick and loud as a flock of blackbirds: moving her hands so she could not be cuffed, trying for the door handle, stepping on the gas or the brake to unseat Randy, even crashing the Crown Vic into the trees on the chance that, in the mess of airbags and broken glass, she could get away.

  She did none of these things for the simple reason that she believed with every ounce of her being that Randy would not hesitate to pull the trigger if she deviated in any way from his dictates. No matter what she tried, his heaving finger on a two-pound trigger-pull would be faster.

  Anna was not particularly afraid to die—a fact she hid from others as it seemed to set her apart, make her an object of suspicion. But to have one’s brains blown out at close range, seat belt fastened, hands cuffed, weapon still holstered, and to have it done by Thigpen—that would surely condemn her to a special kind of hell. Maybe working as a lap dancer at aluminum-siding sales conventions.

  The ratcheting sound as the cuffs were tightened stopped the skittering of her brain. The gun was still hard at her temple. Randy’s right hand, closed over hers on the steering wheel, clamping so tightly she could feel the blood being pressed from her fingers as they were crushed between his and the hard plastic.

  “Do what I tell you,” Randy said shortly. Either nerves or the exertion of moving quickly had set him to panting. The smell of stale cigarettes on his breath was intense.

  “Why don’t you eat a mint or something,” she heard herself say irritably. “You smell like a rancid ashtray.” Part of her was scared stiff, another part, evidently the part controlling the vocal cords, really didn’t give a damn. Disassociation; she’d heard Molly mention it. Was that what she was doing?

  “Randy, you are such a piece of shit. If you kill me, I swear to God I’ll never live it down. You wrecked my office chair, smashed my car up, what the fuck do you think you’re doing now?” Again with the mouth. The saner Anna shook her head, feeling the barrel of the gun grind half an inch across the flesh of her temple.

  “There’s something wrong with you,” Randy growled. Emotion edged his voice. Fear maybe. Excitement. Probably a mixture of both.

  “Oh, man,” Anna said and was shocked at the exasperation and contempt she heard in the words. “You’ve never killed anybody before, have you?” It sounded as though she sneered at overripe virginity. “If this is going to be like Paul Newman and what’s her name in Tom Curtain with you flopping me around sticking my head in the oven and whatnot, just give me the gun and I’ll shoot myself.” If she didn’t focus, and soon, this split personality business was going to get both personas killed.

  From the comer of her eye she could see beads of sweat forming on his forehead. “Shut up,” he said. Her verbal sniping had unbalanced him; she could hear the dangerous teetering when he spoke. Instinct and reason reunited behind her eyes, and Anna realized she’d needed to shake him but hadn’t realized she had the balls to do it. Balls had been found, the terrified mother lifting the tractor off her infant in microcosm.

  “Turn right to Emerald Mound,” he said. Randy’s hand over hers, they’d traveled several miles south of Mt. Locust. Emerald Mound, the finest Indian mound Anna had ever seen, was on Trace property at the end of a narrow un-lighted road. Several ramshackle homes edged the lane. If the residents happened to be looking out their windows on such a night as this, seeing a park service car checking the mound would arouse no comment.

  Anna did as she was told. “Turn out the headlights,” Randy said. She did that, too.

  In less than a minute they were at the mound.

  “Pull off.” Anna did. Randy dropped her hand long enough to switch off the ignition, then grabbed it again. She’d known Randy was a big man. She’d not realized he was huge. His hand covered hers to the wrist. His bulk, behind the barrel of a gun, filled the Crown Vic’s cab. The terror she’d kept separated from by mental alchemy broke through taking an old familiar form: claustrophobia. Suddenly she could see herself snapping, struggling, clawing for air, a loud noise, then her brains mixed with the window glass on the dirt outside. Even then none would venture out of their snug homes. It was hunting season. The sound of gunshots was commonplace.

  “Here’s where we get out.” Randy’s voice cut through the panic rising in her chest. “This is the end of the line.”

  Inches from her ear Anna heard the hammer of his revolver falling gently, slowly. Terrible calm came then, a sense of utter timelessness. An explosion, a bullet to the brain did not follow. Randy was decocking the pistol. Life clamored back, and Anna was almost sorry. Almost. “It doesn’t have to be the end of the line,” she said. “So far you’re not in much trouble. Poaching’s no big deal. What’ll you get? A slap on the wrist. Two months and you’re retired. Don’t screw it up.”

  She sounded as desperate as she felt. Randy liked that; she could see it in his face no more than a foot from her own. He wanted more of it. Her humiliation was a balm to his withered soul. That was good. She had something to offer in trade.

  “You didn’t kill anybody. You weren’t even there, were you? What? Did they call you in to save their own skins? Get you to move the body?”

  Randy’s lower lip tightened, and Anna lost the teensy-weensy opening her obvious fear had bought her. Gun pressed hard to her temple, he reached behind him with his other hand and opened the passenger door. Not for a second did his eyes leave her.

  There would be a moment when he opened her door. He was heavy. She could get out more quickly. If she could keep her feet under her, she could get to cover. Randy wouldn’t want to carry the body far. He was lazy, out of shape and knew better than to get blood on his uniform. He’d want her to walk to her place of execution. Anna’s mind raced. The farther he took her from cars, road, houses the less time she had to live.

  The moment was not given her. Grabbing the cuff chain between her wrists, he snapped her seat belt free and lurched backward, dragging her face down onto the seat. An elbow cracked into the dash, Anna’s head struck the radio on the floor. Her boot twisted as her legs wrenched, awkwardly trying to follow her body. She registered these assaults but felt nothing. Helpless as a rag doll she flopped and slid. Fight and she died now. Allow the inevitable and she died later. Later was good. Randy grunted. Cigarette breath washed over her, then a welcome gust of cold air. He got his feet on the ground, pushed his butt over them and hauled on the chain. Anna felt herself slide. Then she was jerked to a sudden halt. The cuffs cut hard into the underside of her wrists, but her body wouldn’t move. Pain sharpened and maddened.

  “Don’t fuck with me,” Randy hissed.

  “Or what? You’ll kill me?”

  Randy put his considerable weight behind the next yank. Cuffs cut deeper, Anna’s arms were stretched in their sockets and she cried out.

  “Shoulder str
ap, you dickhead.”

  When he’d cuffed her Anna’d been wearing her seat belt. He’d inadvertently cuffed her hands, one on either side of the shoulder belt that effectively kept her tied to the car.

  Anna pushed her head up to look at him. There was little light. Nothing from the dead dash, nothing from the sleet-weeping skies. She sensed rather than saw his fear. Something had gone awry. He would kill her now, get it over with. She lay absolutely still, legs twisted under the steering wheel, upper body pulled across the seat. Over the beating of her heart other sounds came to the strained peace of the cab: Randy panting, sleet—almost hail—striking the roof of the car, a tiny snick of metal releasing. Randy had recocked the pistol.

  “No. No. Please don’t kill me. I’ll do anything,” she whimpered. “Please. Oh, God. Don’t hurt me.”

  “You just had to have a man’s job didn’t you?” Randy sneered. Her sniveling was soothing him, taking the edge off his panic. Anna kept it up. The act came easily, and she despised the ring of sincerity her groveling conveyed. She didn’t want to die trussed up like a prize pig on the front seat of her own patrol car, become the poster girl for why women shouldn’t be allowed on the front lines. If Randy killed her she half hoped her body would never be found and he would never be suspected. It would be too humiliating to have it known she was bested by a dink like Thigpen.

  “Please, please,” she whined.

  “Nobody wanted you here,” Thigpen said. “Things were fine till you horned in.” He brought the pistol close to Anna’s head. She cringed smaller. Another inch and she would strike out like an adder, bury her teeth in his wrist. If nothing else, maybe the son of a bitch would get rabies and die.

  Two shots fired in quick succession near her face. So close, the muzzle Hash struck her eyes like lightning and the thunder of the reports left her deaf and disoriented. Blind and dazed, she felt herself being delivered from the suffocating confines of the car and onto the cold wet earth. Randy had shot twice through the webbing of the shoulder strap and dragged her free.