Strange Country

by Deborah Coates

  A block farther down Main Street, Hallie thought she saw a shadow running across the granite front of the old bank. She slammed on the brakes so hard, a Suburban behind her honked its horn, and when she waved it past, a woman not much older than Hallie yelled at her, though Hallie couldn’t hear her through the glass of both their closed windows.

  Jesus Christ, she thought. A shadow. Not now. Not today. Because Death had been a shadow back in November.

  She pulled into slant-street parking and turned off the engine. Maker didn’t even raise its head. She took a steel prybar from behind the seat, one that had been primed with sacrament and dead man’s blood—her blood—so it was as good as iron, and got out of the truck. She had trouble closing the door for some reason, her hand not gripping the handle properly, and she stood at the curb for a long few seconds. At the spot where she thought she’d seen the shadow, there was nothing. A flag above the courthouse across the street snapped in the brisk morning breeze. Maybe that, she thought, maybe that had been the shadow. She looked at the slanting sun, at the thick bank of clouds just below.

  Maybe.

  And maybe her heart was pounding hard in her chest because it had already been a long day.

  Get a grip, she told herself.

  She returned to the truck, threw the prybar behind the seat, and after a minute or two or maybe three, she backed out of the parking space and went on.

  Boyd’s brand-new steel blue Ford Escape sat in his driveway. Until a few months ago, he’d driven a red Jeep Cherokee, but he wrecked that down in Ames, Iowa, tracking down Travis Hollowell. In the wrong place at the wrong time, hit by a dump truck running a light. A coincidence that, given everything that had been going on at the time, seemed harder to believe than ghosts and harbingers, harder than the fact that there was an underworld and that Hallie and Boyd had been there. And yet, it had happened. Boyd had the new SUV to prove it.

  Hallie pulled into the drive.

  Maker sat up and sniffed the air. “Be careful,” it said.

  “Of Boyd?” A gust of wind rocked the little pickup. The rough dirt in Boyd’s front yard looked colder than the brown grass lawns and bare-limbed trees of his neighbors’ yards.

  Maker sniffed again. “Something’s in the world,” it said. Then it disappeared.

  “Thanks,” Hallie said to the empty space Maker had left behind.

  Outside, it felt as if the temperature had dropped at least ten degrees between the ranch and town, though it was probably just the wind grinding bitter and cold across the landscape. Hallie buttoned her jacket, turned up the collar, and shoved her hands deep into her pockets. She jogged across the churned-up yard, another legacy of November, knocked on the front door, and tucked her head low as she waited for Boyd to answer.

  Nothing.

  She knocked again.

  After a minute, she stepped off the porch and circled the house. The damage from November had been repaired—windows, porch railing, everything except the front lawn and a blue tarp covering half the garage roof, tied down so expertly that there were no loose ends to flap in the rising wind. Hallie tapped lightly on the side door to the garage, then opened it and went inside.

  There was an electric heater plugged in and running several feet from the door. It didn’t make it warm inside, but it softened winter’s bite. In the middle of the floor under two work lamps fastened to the joists above it was a Farmall M tractor, more primer gray than faded red, with rust and bare metal mixed in. The tires were off, propped against the far wall, the tractor itself sitting on low blocks. In a neat circle on the near side were a carburetor, spark plugs, a starter motor, oil filter, generator, and a battery that looked new.

  Old tractors. Hallie wanted to laugh.

  Boyd was on a stepladder bent over the engine, cranking at a stubborn bolt. He straightened at the rush of cold air from the open door and stepped down. As he walked across the garage, he picked up a rag from the workbench along the wall and wiped his hands.

  “You didn’t call,” Hallie said, and hoped it didn’t sound like an accusation. Because it wasn’t, not really, though it was a question.

  “You know what I like?” Boyd said. He had a streak of grease along the back of one hand, like someone had marked him out. “I knew that you would come, that I wouldn’t have to call or tell you over the phone, because it doesn’t…” He hesitated. “Because I could have told you about Prue over the phone. That’s easy. Or, not easy, but … yeah, in a way, easy.” He flipped over the rag he’d been wiping his hands on, folded it, and laid it on the workbench. He took the socket off the wrench and put it and the wrench back in their case. He closed the lid. Only after he’d finished all that did he say, “It’s easy because it’s just words. It’s not as if your father died and I had to tell you. Or my father. Or even a good friend. So, telling you about Prue’s death in the ordinary way would be sad and probably unpleasant, but ultimately pretty easy.”

  He moved closer. Something tightened in Hallie’s chest, like her heart was beating too fast, though it wasn’t. “But I was right next to her,” Boyd said. “Right there. And I couldn’t save her. I mean, no one could have saved her. I know that. I do. But today. This morning.” He took a breath. “I was the one who didn’t.”

  Afghanistan had been the sort of place where—whether it happened often or not—someone could shoot you, or the person next to you, anytime. The sort of place where there was always someone who wanted to shoot you. Hallie had lived in that place. She’d survived there—pretty nearly. But one of the reasons she was so good at separating Afghanistan from Taylor County, South Dakota, was because she didn’t expect that here.

  So, she knew, she did. And yet, what she wanted to say was—I’m sorry. I’m sorry I let you die. I’m sorry I made that choice. It colored everything, like she’d failed in some fundamental way she couldn’t recover from and that, her failure, led inexorably to this, had made him unlucky in some way neither of them understood, cursed to be surrounded by events exactly like this one. That he didn’t see it that way, that he probably would never see it, made it worse.

  She heard the muffled thump of a car door slamming.

  She put her hand on Boyd’s chest. He wrapped his own hand around hers. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry she’s dead. I’m sorry you were there. And I’m sorry that if you had to be there that there wasn’t anything you could do.” She meant all that. And she meant, I’m sorry it wasn’t me instead of you.

  He gave her a wry smile. “I’m not,” he said. “I’m not sorry I was there, I mean. She would have died anyway, whether I was there or not. Someone would have shot her anyway. At least she didn’t die alone.”

  She pulled away from him. “Don’t,” she said. “Be angry or something. Be pissed off. Be upset. Aren’t you upset?”

  “Would you feel better if I shouted? If I cried?”

  “The question is, would you feel better?”

  “No,” he said, “the question is—”

  “You don’t even know,” she said. “You don’t even admit that you could have died. It could have been you.”

  There was something dark in his eyes, just a flicker, like the reverse flash from a camera. “This is not that kind of thing, Hallie. This is not Travis Hollowell or Death or any of it. That’s over. He’s not coming for you. And this isn’t something you have to be involved in.”

  “Boyd—,” Hallie began.

  Someone knocked hard on the garage door.

  6

  When Boyd opened the door, a man and a woman stood outside, stamping their feet in the cold and talking in low tones that sounded like an argument.

  “Boyd Davies?” The man, who looked about Boyd’s own age, maybe a few years older, turned to face him and flipped his badge open. “Special Agent Cross. And this is Special Agent Gerson. From the DCI,” he added as if they were not the only special agents wandering around West Prairie City on a cold March morning.

  “I wasn’t expecting you before this afte
rnoon,” Boyd said. He’d known they’d come; the sheriff’s office didn’t have detectives, though they were perfectly capable of gathering the initial evidence.

  Cross looked at Gerson, who said, “We’d like to get your statement about what happened at the victim’s house this morning. We called.”

  Boyd actually had no idea where his phone was, which was unusual enough that it made him pause for half a second before he answered. “I could have come to the station,” he said.

  He meant what he’d said to Hallie, that he was glad he’d been there when Prue died, that he was glad she hadn’t died alone, but since it happened he’d felt like he was half a step removed from the world, like the things he did weren’t quite the right things or he wasn’t doing them quite right.

  He heard the scrape of a boot behind him and turned. He’d almost forgotten that Hallie was there. She stepped up into the doorway beside him, looked the two special agents over, like she could judge them completely with one swift glance. “I have some errands to run,” she said, as if she’d just been leaving anyway. She grabbed his arm and leaned in close. “Come to supper tonight,” she said. “Seven o’clock.” Then she kissed him on the cheek, and even that felt off to him, both the way she did it, quick and light, and the way it felt, his jaw rough with unshaven stubble, which it almost never was. She stepped away, loosed his shirt at the last moment, left, and didn’t look back.

  Boyd could feel the warmth of her hand even after she was gone. He rolled down his shirtsleeves, buttoned the cuffs, turned off the heater, and locked the garage door before walking across the yard with the two special agents flanking him.

  “Storm damage?” Gerson asked, taking a quick glance at the ravaged lawn, the blue tarp on the garage roof, and the new glass and framing in several of the windows.

  “Something like that,” Boyd said, letting them in the back door. There was a small table in the kitchen, but he invited them into the dining room and asked if they wanted any coffee. Cross nodded as he seated himself at the head of the dining room table. Gerson said, “Just water, thank you.”

  Boyd had made the coffee when he got home—he glanced at the clock—an hour ago. He’d thought he would come home and sleep, but as soon as he walked in the door, he’d known that wasn’t going to happen. He’d made coffee, changed his clothes, and gone to the garage to work on the M, not quite mindless work, work that required some concentration, and maybe work that kept him from seeing Prue Stalking Horse fall over and over again.

  In less than five minutes, Boyd was sitting at the table with Cross and Gerson, a white ironstone cup of black coffee in front of him that he knew he wasn’t going to drink. He didn’t feel numbed by what had happened at Prue Stalking Horse’s last night. He didn’t feel angry or frightened or shocked. Well, maybe shocked. Maybe this was shock. Because none of those words, anger or fear or shock, was right—exactly. He was angry that Prue was dead, blamed himself for not seeing something that he should have seen, because there must have been something. He was frightened that it was a random killing, the kind of killing that meant more people would die unless he—unless everyone involved—was smart and quick and made no more mistakes. And he was shocked that it had happened in the middle of the night on a quiet street while he stood there—and did nothing. He was all those things and too numb to really feel them.

  He wondered if he was supposed to talk first, because neither Cross nor Gerson said anything. Any other day he wouldn’t have wondered. Things would have simply proceeded as they were meant to proceed. Any other day he wouldn’t be sitting in his own dining room with two special agents from the state Division of Criminal Investigation talking about a murder he’d witnessed, but not prevented.

  “You have my report,” he said, not quite a question. How long had they been in town? He checked his watch. 8:05. He wondered if they’d been to the crime scene yet.

  Gerson looked at Cross, who was fiddling with his pen. It looked expensive, Cross’s pen, though Boyd didn’t know all that much about pens. He was particular about a great many things, how they appeared and whether they had places and were in them, but all he asked of a pen was that it have the right color ink and that it work. Cross’s pen was silver, looked heavy, and had some sort of engraving in a spiral along the shaft. Crooks was twisting it apart and tightening it, twisting and tightening as if it were this task and no other that he had come to Boyd’s house on a dry, cold day to do.

  Finally, Gerson said, “Yes, we’ve read your statement. It’s clear and concise, which I appreciate. You went to Ms. Stalking Horse’s house on a prowler complaint, is that correct?”

  Boyd wanted to say, It’s in my report, everything’s in my report. Instead, he said, “I received the call approximately three twenty-five A.M. I was at the southwest end of the county, so it took me approximately twenty minutes to reach the house.”

  “Is that unusual?” Cross had put his pen back together, but he didn’t look at Boyd when he spoke.

  Boyd frowned. “That it took twenty minutes or that I was in the southwest end of the county?”

  Cross looked up then. “Your position when the call came in,” he said, like Boyd should have known from the way he asked the question. It was clear to Boyd that Agent Cross wasn’t from South Dakota. His accent was flatter, like St. Paul maybe or Chicago, though he could have been from anywhere, wasn’t necessarily from a city. He wore a dark suit with a dark gray tie, a wool topcoat, and dress shoes. Gerson was dressed more practically in wool slacks, hiking boots, a fine-gauge turtleneck sweater, and a parka with a fur-lined hood.

  “We have only one deputy on duty at night,” Boyd said calmly, “except Saturday nights in good weather and a few days when we call people in. We cover the entire county. At any given time, I’m going to be somewhere.”

  “Your primary population points are West Prairie City and Prairie City, though, correct?”

  “And Templeton,” Boyd said.

  “Which has its own police force?”

  “That’s correct,” Boyd replied.

  “Are you certain it was a high-powered rifle that killed her?” Cross asked. He hadn’t taken any notes, like he already knew the answers, which he would, if he’d read Boyd’s report.

  “It must have been,” Boyd said. Did they think he’d shot her himself? Or that someone had walked up behind him and shot her? Or that he had been sleeping in his car and woke at the sound of a gunshot? “And we have the bullet.”

  “Mm-hmm,” Cross said, the sound strangely emphatic.

  Gerson frowned and made a note in a small notebook.

  “Everything’s in my report,” Boyd said.

  Agent Gerson laid down her pen and looked at him. “You’ve had some unusual activity in Taylor County this winter,” she said.

  “Unusual?” Boyd asked. You have no idea, he thought.

  “Mysterious explosions. For example,” she added after a slight pause. There was something intent about her gaze. She seemed relaxed, her hands folded neatly over her notebook, her face calm. And yet, it felt as if she was waiting for him to say something or do something that she didn’t entirely expect him to do or say, but hoped he would.

  “This isn’t—,” Cross began, a brittle edge to his voice.

  Gerson held up her right hand. “We agreed,” she said. She looked at Boyd again. “Deputy Davies?”

  “Are you asking if this could be related to what happened out at Uku-Weber?”

  “Is it related?”

  “I have no idea,” he said honestly. He didn’t see how it could be.

  The landline in the kitchen rang. “Excuse me,” Boyd said.

  “Jesus, is your phone off?” Ole didn’t bother to identify himself. But then, he almost never had to. He’d been the sheriff for nearly twelve years, and he’d told Boyd once that if people didn’t know him by now, they weren’t likely to.

  “My cell phone?”

  “Hell, yes, your cell phone. I’ve been trying to call you for ten minutes.”<
br />
  Boyd rubbed his eyes. He didn’t precisely remember where his cell phone was. He might have left it in the car. “Has something happened?” he asked.

  There was a pause; Boyd could hear Ole draw in a breath and let it out. “Tell the Division of Criminal Investigations that I need them over here at the Stalking Horse place pronto.” He pronounced each syllable in “Division of Criminal Investigations” as it were an individual word. “You better come too,” he added. Then, “Jesus.”

  Boyd went back into the dining room and told Gerson and Cross what Ole had said.

  “No details?” Cross asked, like Boyd were responsible for the cryptic nature of the message.

  “No,” Boyd said.

  Cross frowned. “All right,” he said, as if Boyd had issued a challenge or told a tall tale that was about to be disproved. While the two agents donned their coats and gloves, Boyd collected the two coffee cups—his and Cross’s—took them to the kitchen, emptied the undrunk coffee into the sink, and stacked the cups in the small dishwasher. He returned for Gerson’s water glass. He put the water glass in the dishwasher, took his own coat, a pair of leather gloves, and a baseball cap from the closet by the back door. “I’ll take my own car,” he said.

  Cross looked like he was going to argue, but Gerson said, “Fine, we’ll meet you there.”

  He let them out the front, locked the door behind them, and left by the back door, locking that as well.

  It took less than five minutes to drive from Boyd’s house on the west side of town to Prue’s on the north. Gray sunlight filtered through thin clouds, and the wind buffeted his SUV as he parked on the street. There was no sidewalk, just a shallow slope of yard to tarmac. The driveway was on the west side of the house, two narrow strips of concrete with brown grass down the center. Cross parked in the driveway behind two Taylor County sheriff’s cars, the tires of his nondescript gray sedan missing the concrete strips by nearly six inches.