“You mean, when the cow went missing,” Darryl said. “When you told Mom and Grandma it was probably a mountain lion, but you know for sure it was actually a person, don’t you?”
“Correct,” Greg said, but averted his gaze again. “More than one person, actually. I said the mountain lion thing because…”
“I know why you said it, Dad. It’s fine.”
“Well, the thing is…when they ran off the other day, they headed into the deep woods beyond the stream, and I’m pretty sure I’ve seen their tracks over there. I don’t want to run into them. That’s why I’m not going that way.”
The logic might have made sense if Greg hadn’t already aroused so much suspicion with his behavior. His father was not good at being sneaky, so his words rang untrue. Even the slight warble in his voice gave him away. If anything, it was just further confirmation of Darryl’s suspicion. They were headed now directly toward town, as if that had been his father’s real destination all along. Off to the right, Darryl caught sight of the snowy back road.
No wonder he hasn’t managed to bring anything home from his hunting trips, Darryl thought. He’s not even really hunting…not animals, anyway. Dad, you’ve gone off the deep end.
As he followed his father, he heard a soft crunching sound off to his left. Darryl stopped in his tracks, though his dad kept going. Bracing himself against the nearest tree, Darryl turned slowly in the direction of the sound, trying to make as little movement as possible. It didn’t take long to spot the small buck in a clearing about forty meters to the east. The animal was standing with its right flank to them, its head turned away as if looking back in the direction of the stream. A perfect target.
Darryl slowly, achingly pulled the Remington off his shoulder. His father continued to walk in the direction of town. Darryl didn’t dare say anything to him, lest he scare off the deer, and just hoped his father wouldn’t make any loud noises. Raising the rifle, he socketed the butt against his shoulder and took careful aim. He wished now he had the SIG with its amazing scope, but the Remington had a decent enough scope of its own. Darryl lined up his shot.
The buck turned its head in his direction, and for a second they seemed to lock eyes. Darryl sensed the sudden tension in the animal as it prepared to leap away. He pulled the trigger. The sudden crack of the rifle caused his father to cry out in alarm. The buck bolted, made it about five steps, then its front legs collapsed. With a final swing of its head, it rolled onto its side, exposing the perfect bloody bullet hole right behind its shoulder.
Darryl stood there marveling at his aim, feeling the curious trembling excitement of a successful hunt. He’d brought it down in a single shot, even with his father tromping around behind him! He was tempted to cheer, but suddenly he felt a firm hand clamp down on his shoulder. He turned, expecting to see his father glaring at him. Instead, he found Greg giving him a huge toothy grin, his eyes practically sparkling.
“My goodness, son, you did it,” he said. “You brought it down in one shot. I didn’t even notice the damn thing. It could have snuck up on me and given me a kick in the butt, and I still wouldn’t have known it was there. Great job!”
“Thanks, Dad,” Darryl said, slinging the rifle over his shoulder and heading toward his kill. “I can’t believe you didn’t hear it. It was so close.”
Greg’s smile faltered only for a fraction of a second. “I guess I’m getting old. Hearing’s not what it used to be. Do you know how relieved your mother and grandmother are going to be when we drag this thing back to the ranch? You have no idea how much weight you’ve just taken off my shoulders.” He gave Darryl another big, friendly clap on the shoulder. “I owe you big time for this one.”
“See, now, aren’t you glad you brought me with you?” Darryl said.
“Absolutely,” Greg replied. “You just saved my bacon.”
“I saved your venison, technically.”
Greg laughed far too hard at this. It wasn’t entirely forced. Clearly, his dad was relieved that they would have something to show for themselves.
Did I just help him cover his tracks? Darryl thought. Is he relieved because now they won’t get suspicious about his little hunting trips? I think it’s too late for that, Dad. Emma, at least, already knows something’s up, and so do I.
They field dressed the deer, which was—as always—a bloody business. Darryl didn’t particularly enjoy it, even though he’d shot, skinned, and butchered a variety of animals by now. He was fairly good at it now, at least. Tabitha and his mom had helped him improve his technique, so he did most of the work while his father grinned beside him.
“Ten points,” Greg noted. “Not bad. You want to mount the head in your room?”
“No, that’s fine,” Darryl replied. “It would give me nightmares having this dead-eyed thing staring down at me in the dark. Stuffing animals was Grandpa’s hobby. I’ll just eat the meat, if you don’t mind.”
Once it was all gutted and prepared, they trussed it up in a long length of nylon rope—yellow like the bit of rope they’d seen hanging from the tree. Darryl noted this fact, but again said nothing. He didn’t like finding out his father’s secrets. It was a singularly unpleasant feeling. For now, he rode the surface of his emotion and just enjoyed the successful hunt and his father’s happiness.
“Let’s get this thing back home,” his father said, picking up the ropes. “We’ll have venison steaks for dinner.”
The immediate reaction to them dragging the carcass through the gate was exactly as his father had anticipated. Tabitha, Marion, and Emma came down the porch steps clapping and cheering. Emma walked right up beside the carcass and bent down close, as if to examine it.
“Ten-point buck,” she noted. “What are you going to do with the rack?”
“Make you a nice hat with real antlers on top,” Darryl joked.
“Actually, there’s a lot you can do with antlers,” Emma said, following them toward the front of the barn. “The book had diagrams for making a coat rack, a lamp stand, a curtain holder, even table legs.”
“Well, the antlers are all yours,” Darryl said. “Experiment to your heart’s content. Make drinking straws out of them, if you want. It’s up to you.”
As soon as they’d butchered the deer and removed the antlers from the skull plate, Emma took them and went running off to the house. That night, they had plenty of fresh venison. The rest they salt-cured with the last bit of salt from the Carmichaels’ stash. Although it was still red meat, the taste was just different enough from beef that it seemed to reinvigorate everyone. Justine joined them, placing her seat so close to Darryl that their shoulders were touching, but she didn’t talk once the entire meal.
Horace even dared to leave the den and walk to the dining room, though he still seemed rather weak. Tabitha and Marion made sure to keep heaping praise on Darryl, to the point that he went from appreciating it to being embarrassed by it to being annoyed.
“It sure was a good idea to bring him along,” Marion noted, cutting into her medium-well venison steak. It was perfectly charred along the outer edges. Darryl had to respect his father’s grilling technique. “You two make a good hunting pair. Don’t you think, Greg?”
Greg hesitated a second, a chunk of meat stuck on the end of his fork and hovering just in front of his mouth. “Yeah, he’s a pretty good shot,” he said, finally, taking a bite. “He’s got better hearing than me too.”
“Well, there you go,” Tabitha said, jumping in. “You’ve found yourself a hunting buddy. You guys could bring us back a variety of meats. That’d be good for our diets.”
“I’m sure we’ll go hunting together again sometime,” Greg said, chewing as he spoke. He did not, however, glance at Darryl.
Darryl didn’t let it bother him, as he continued to enjoy the meal, but he was too wise now to his father’s ways. He knew what was up, and he made plans accordingly. After dinner, he helped clear the table as Greg washed the dishes. Justine had excused herself after dinner and gone
outside, so Darryl went to check on her. He found her sitting in one of the rocking chairs, cast in the warm glow of an oil lamp.
“I’ll be setting out early tomorrow morning,” he said, “but I hope to be back before lunchtime. Are you okay with that?”
“Another hunting trip,” she said. “Is that going to be your daily ritual now?”
“No.” Darryl glanced over his shoulder to make sure the front door was shut. He heard the clink of dishes coming from the kitchen. “My dad doesn’t know we’re going hunting together tomorrow. I plan on surprising him.”
Justine brushed her hair back over her ears and gave him a confused look. She was slightly flushed. Maybe from the cold, maybe from the pregnancy—Darryl didn’t know, but he thought she looked quite lovely in the candlelight.
“What are you up to?” she asked. “You look like a kid planning to steal candy from the convenience store.”
“I think Dad is going to get up early and try to give me the slip,” Darryl said. “He’s up to something, and I intend to find out what it is.”
“He’s not really hunting?” she said.
“I don’t want to make any assumptions, but we’ll see,” he said.
She frowned and said, “Well, if he’s doing something stupid, please don’t go along with it.”
“I won’t.”
And with that, he excused himself and went to bed. Before he lay down, he opened the blinds of the window and parted the curtains. With no alarm to wake him, he wanted the first pink light of sunrise to rouse him. He stripped down to just a t-shirt and sweatpants and removed the top blanket on his bed, hoping that the cold would help him sleep lightly. Then he lay down, folding the blankets so they only came up to mid-chest.
It worked like a charm. He struggled to fall asleep, shivering. Finally, he had to pull the blanket up to his neck, if only to stop his teeth from chattering. It was enough, and he proceeded to skim the surface of sleep through the night. By the time the very first light of morning was shining through the window right onto his face, he was wide awake and ready to go.
He hopped out of bed, trembling violently, and put on his extra layers of clothing. Then he crept to the bedroom door and pressed his ear to the thin wood. It didn’t take long to hear someone moving around downstairs. They were trying to be quiet, he could tell, but the creaky old floors gave them away. Darryl cracked his bedroom door open and slipped through, tiptoeing down the dark, quiet hallway. Every bedroom door was shut.
As he reached the top of the stairs, he heard the distinctive soft clatter of Horace’s SIG Sauer CROSS being pulled from the mantel, then the softer sounds of his father muttering under his breath.
What are you really up to, Dad? Darryl wondered. Why don’t we find out?
He heard the front door whoosh open and then quietly shut. Once his dad was outside, Darryl felt a moment of intense debate. Was he really going to follow him? His father wouldn’t appreciate him butting into his business. Plus, Justine had asked him not to do anything crazy, and what if his father was indeed up to something crazy?
Just go. You can always turn back, he told himself.
He made his way downstairs, grabbed the Remington off its shelf, and checked the magazine. Loaded and ready to go. He slung it over his shoulder, counted to twenty, then headed outside. His father was already through the gate, but his fresh footprints were apparent. Light snow had fallen in the night, giving him away. Darryl pushed the front door shut and started down the porch steps, following his father’s trail toward the gate.
18
His father’s footprints cut a straight path from the gate to the trees and then directly to the back road. Greg was moving with purpose this morning. Darryl followed him, keeping far enough back to remain unheard and unseen. The fresh tracks made it easy. They led him straight down the back road, as if Dad had intended to go to town all along.
My suspicions were right, he thought. He wasn’t hunting. No wonder he was annoyed by my presence yesterday. I sidetracked him from his secret mission.
Any hesitation or regret he’d had about following his dad was gone now. Indeed, Darryl found himself fighting a growing bitterness toward the old man. Dad had become practically insufferable around the house. He was lousy at keeping secrets, and he’d soured the mood at home with his rotten attitude. Darryl fully intended to tell him so when he got the chance. As he followed the tracks down the road, he worked through the conversation in his mind. Dad could be grumpy and sullen when he didn’t want to talk about something, but Darryl was going to push through.
You’ve been lying to everyone, Dad. You can’t keep secrets like this. Whatever you’re up to, we all deserve to know, because we’re all in this together. You’re old enough that you should know this. Your seventeen-year-old son shouldn’t have to remind you.
At a bend in the road, he thought he caught a glimpse of his father, so he stopped in his tracks and used a nearby walnut tree for cover. They’d gone almost half a kilometer, and his father was leaving the road. Apparently, he didn’t intend to go through town. Darryl waited a few seconds, then resumed following him. Just where the heck was the old man going? Darryl might have thought he was headed for the town hall—Mayor Filmore’s old headquarters—but apparently not.
Dad appeared to be circling east around the town, going wide enough to avoid the houses. However, as Darryl followed his path, he realized there were older tracks moving in the area, many of them. They’d been partially filled in by the previous night’s snow, but they weren’t that old. Who the heck was moving around so much out here in the woods north of Glenvell? They couldn’t all belong to his father, could they?
Finally, on the far side of town, Dad’s tracks curved back to the south. The snow wasn’t quite as deep thanks to the dense tree canopy, but that made it a little harder to follow the tracks. Darryl passed within sight of a home with a small fenced backyard. There appeared to be older tracks that went right up to the middle of the fence, then came out from the gate. Strange.
Another twenty or thirty meters on, he heard sounds coming from straight ahead. He slowed down, taking careful steps and moving from cover to cover. Soon, he spotted his father in the distance. The old man was crouched behind a tree, the SIG rifle poised on a low branch. He was peering through the scope. Darryl had to shift position to get a clear view through a gap in the trees. When he did, he saw the corrugated outer shell of a large warehouse.
He knew the place. Justine’s mother had worked there. A grocery distribution business that had been abandoned after the EMP. The owners of the place lived a few towns over, and they’d never come back. There was a single small door in the side of the building, and it looked like Dad was pointing the rifle in that direction.
So this is it, Darryl thought, his bitterness building. This is what you’ve been lying about for days. You haven’t been hunting. You’ve been hiking out here to this old warehouse to spy on it.
But just what was he doing? Waiting to snipe someone when they came out of the building? Was Dad planning to assassinate a specific person? Darryl hunkered down as quietly as he could and waited. A few minutes passed, and suddenly the side door swung open. Darryl tensed, expecting his father to shoot, but he didn’t He just kept staring through the scope as two people bundled up in black coats and ski pants stepped outside. They spoke for a minute, one of them gesturing broadly, then went back inside.
Maybe those weren’t Dad’s targets, he thought.
His father didn’t move. He stayed right where he was, peering through the scope as the minutes passed. Darryl had had enough. All the anger and tension was making him restless. He rose and began creeping backward. Once he felt like he was a safe distance away, he turned and headed home. He’d seen enough.
Well, I hate to break it to you, Dad, but your secret’s out, he thought, seething. We’ll just get it all out into the open and have a nice chat about your second life as a spy.
It was a long, miserable hike. At one point, he heard
an animal scampering about somewhere off to his right, but he didn’t even bother trying to hunt it.
After a good hour or more, he finally came in sight of the ranch and stormed his way to the gate, sliding it open and trudging back across the yard. When he stepped into the living room and set the Remington on its shelf, he found Tabitha, Marion, and Emma sitting at the table eating breakfast. Darryl moved to the couch and dropped down, sinking into the cushions.
“Any luck hunting this morning?” Marion asked.
“Kind of,” Darryl replied, trying his best to keep the seething resentment out of his voice. He wasn’t entirely successful. “I’ll let Dad tell you all about it.”
“Is everything okay?” Marion asked.
He lay down on the couch, leaning his head against the armrest so he wouldn’t see anyone in the dining room. “Everything’s just fine. Like I said, Dad can tell you all about it when he gets back. He’s got an interesting story to tell.”
“What does that mean?” Marion asked.
“Just wait,” he replied. “I’ll let him tell you. He can tell the story a whole lot better than I can.”
“Is there a problem?” Tabitha said.
“Not sure,” Darryl said. “It’s not for me to say.”
He heard Emma make a soft little grunt. Did she already know? Had she figured it out? Maybe. She suspected something was up, but soon she would know for sure. They would all know. Darryl realized it was somewhat hypocritical to force his father to reveal a secret when Darryl and Justine were keeping a secret of their own, but there was a distinct categorical difference. Anyway, Dad’s moping was affecting the whole house.
The others resumed eating. He heard the scrape of forks against plates, the clank of cups on the table, occasional hushed conversation. Maybe fifteen minutes passed before he heard his father tromping up the porch steps. Then the front door swung open, and the old man stood there, silhouetted in sunlight. He’d removed his toque, and his head was steaming, his sweaty blond hair sticking out in strange tangles. Now that he knew the truth, Darryl thought he could see the guilt in his father’s blue eyes. He stepped inside, carrying the SIG in his right hand, and the whole house went still. Tabitha, Marion, and Emma stopped eating.
EMP: Return of the Wild West Box Set | Books 1-3 Page 37
