by Nevada Barr
As the men reached for the front door, hidden in premature night beneath a peaked suggestion of a gabled roof, one of the iron shadow monsters detached itself from a clump of oak hydrangeas and rushed toward Anna.
The animal, a pit bull, ran without sound, no barking, no growling.
“Dog,” Anna said with much the same urgency she would have said “gun” to warn her fellows if a suspect suddenly produced one. Had she been alone, she would have pulled her Sig-Sauer. All cats were divine till proven otherwise; all dogs were suspect until cleared. Pit bulls got the least benefit of the doubt. Perhaps their rage was nurture not nature, but she’d taken against them when reports of them attacking and killing children had hit the newsstands.
“Elsie!” came a call from the house. “You leave that nice lady alone.”
Elsie stopped so abruptly her hindquarters nearly caught up with her ears. Anna moved her hand away from the pepper spray on her belt. The old stuff, mace, hadn’t worked well on non-human aggressors. The spray adopted over the last ten years, made from the essence of hot chili peppers, was much the same as the spray marketed to dissuade grizzly bears. Anna had never tried it on a dog but, theoretically, it would have worked.
The dog underwent a personality transformation at the sound of her master’s voice and came to Anna wriggling and wagging like a joyful shih tzu. Anna was not impressed. To bond with Lundstrom she bent down and patted the beast. As Elsie groveled under her hand, Anna realized she’d left her weapon holstered, not because a charging pit bull was insufficient provocation but because, should the dog prove non-threatening, she didn’t want to appear a coward and fool in front of her field ranger and live through weeks of nasty verbal digs that would be mined from the incident.
Bad form. The kind of peer group pressure that could get a woman killed. Straightening up, she promised herself she wouldn’t grant Thigpen that kind of power.
“Elsie’s a pussycat,” Lundstrom was saying. He’d emerged from the darkness of the vestigial porch. During her short walk through his garden gallery, night had sucked the remaining light into its belly and Anna could see the man no more clearly than she could when he’d first appeared.
Big was the impression she got. An ex-football player, Paul said. His silhouette looked it. Six foot, maybe six-one and built square. By the way he moved, Anna guessed he’d not let himself go to fat in middle age.
“What with the Smokey Bear hat and badge, I’m figuring you for Anna Pigeon, one of them rangers on the Trace.” He stuck out his hand and Anna shook it. His skin was warm and dry, palm and fingers callused from years of working with his hands. It put her in mind of the hands of the ranchers and cowboys where she’d grown up.
Lundstrom totally ignored Clintus and Randy, though he’d had to walk past them to get to her, and Anna wondered why. “Ranger Pigeon, ya’ll,” he turned and belatedly acknowledged the others, “Why don’t you come on in.”
. Dutifully the three of them trailed into his house. He’d not asked why they were there. He apparently recognized Anna and showed no interest whatsoever in the sheriff or Randy. The man was behaving as if Anna were a welcome and anticipated guest who’d brought along two strangers unannounced. He was as bizarre as his front yard, Anna thought. Then the obvious came to her. Herm Thorton would have called all the poker buddies. She was, if not welcome, most certainly anticipated. Lundstrom was possibly ignoring Clintus as a slight to his race, and Thigpen he hadn’t expected.
Having solved at least one tiny puzzle out of the mess of puzzles that beset this case, Anna felt better.
The inside of Badger Lundstrom’s house was clean—probably due to the ministrations of a cleaning woman—but had the cold unsettled look shared by a majority of bachelor abodes Anna had had cause to enter. The nesting instinct so pronounced in women seemed absent in men, at least straight men. No brightly colored runners graced tabletops, no flowers stood in vases. The knickknacks leaned toward the puerile: whoopee cushions, fake vomit and a device Anna remembered seeing advertised in the backs of comic books when she was a kid—a buzzer that could be strapped to the palm to shock and amaze those one shook hands with—as well as plastic dog poop, a coffee cup with a ceramic spider affixed inside, and a foam rock looking real, weighing nothing.
Elsie’s bed was a ragged blanket folded into one corner. As docile as the pussycat her master vowed her to be, the dog trotted over, circled twice and flopped down with an audible sigh.
The one delight in the room was the collection of little sculptures. The living room resembled a nursery for the giant creatures that guarded the lawn. Lizards, birds, dragons and other beasts born of Lundstrom’s idiosyncratic mythology perched in places of honor on the mantle and end tables.
“Sit yourselves down,” Lundstrom was saying. In the light of three torcheres Anna recognized from the electrical appliances aisle at the Super Wal-Mart, she began to fill in the man from the hulking silhouette that had greeted her on the front walk.
He was handsome and somehow Anna was surprised. He looked both like an artist and a scrap metal dealer: craggy, hardened from years of work in all weathers. A boyish sense of fun was in the crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes and the permanent smile that had etched two sets of parentheses around his mouth. Like his skin and hands life had hardened the lines, and Anna wondered if there wasn’t a touch of malicious enjoyment when he served up coffee in his spider mug or put his fake vomit on somebody’s laptop.
“Can I get anybody coffee or maybe something a little stiffer? Adjust our attitudes?”
Lundstrom looked as if he could use a drink. Strain showed through the jovial host routine. Nothing big: nervous flicking of the eyes, the smile held too long. Three officers descending on house and home might have that effect. So would jonesing for a drink if one were an alcoholic.
Clintus and Thigpen accepted coffee. Anna abstained, not willing to sip while anticipating what sort of flora or fauna might come peering up from the bottom of the mug.
Introductions made, duties done, tumbler of something on the rocks, time came to get down to business. Left with nothing to busy himself with, Lundstrom’s comfort level dropped. First he sat in a soft, low armchair, the fabric spotted from dinners in front of the television. Apparently feeling at a disadvantage, he stood again and went to lean on the mantel, soothing himself with swallows of booze and strokes down the rustic back of a saber-toothed cat, its body made from an oversized spring, a lug nut for a head.
Clintus was opening his mouth to speak when Randy cut in too loud, too fast, anxious to be in charge.
“Mr. Lundstrom—” he began.
Badger’s head jerked around. “Randy,” he said, then, for no reason Anna could see, he laughed nervously.
“Mr. Lundstrom,” Thigpen plowed on firmly. “We’re just here to ask a few routine questions to find out where Doyce Barnette was before he was killed. From Mr. Thorton we know he was supposed to meet you for a poker game around six. He never showed up. Nobody phoned him, just figuring he’d got caught up in something. You fellas played till around midnight then everybody went home. That ’bout it?”
It was all Anna could do not to drop her head in her hands and groan. Thirty years in law enforcement and Randy hadn’t learned a damn thing about interviewing. He’d given Badger Lundstrom his story—if, indeed, he needed one, wrapped up and tied neatly with corroborating details. Clintus was looking as appalled as she felt, and a wave of embarrassment washed over her as if she and the National Park Service were personally responsible for Ranger Thigpen’s ineptitude.
“That’s pretty much it.” Lundstrom took the testimony Thigpen offered on the proverbial silver platter. There was no way of knowing if he was relieved at the gift or if it was simply the truth.
Either way, it served to make him more comfortable. He left off petting his cat statue and seated himself at the hearth, elbows on knees, his drink cradled loosely in his hands.
Anna asked him a dozen or more questions about the poker
night. His story matched with Herm’s in every detail, matched with the handy Cliffs Notes version Thigpen had so thoughtfully recited. Clintus came at him with the same questions phrased differently and got the same answers. Thigpen, seemingly satisfied with his brilliant introduction to the evening, remained quiet. Elsie eased out from her blanket nest and crept across the carpet on belly, elbows and knees so Randy could scratch behind her ears. Now there were two good things Anna knew of Thigpen: he wasn’t a racist and he had a way with animals. Every little bit helped.
Poker night sufficiently rehashed, Clintus asked the standard question: “Do you know anyone who might’ve had a reason, or thought he did, to kill Doyce?”
Badger thought about that for a while. Anna could tell he wanted to give them names: a common reaction. Once the heat was off, people liked to talk, liked to be seen as someone with important information. To his credit, Lundstrom didn’t give in to the temptation to make something up. For the first time since they’d begun talking about the killing of Doyce Barnette, Lundstrom’s poker buddy, he looked saddened by the death of his friend.
“Just nobody. I didn’t know Doyce all that well. We’d only been ... playing poker together a little while but he seemed a nice guy. Harmless, if you know what I mean. Shoot, half the time you hardly knew ol’ Doyce was around.”
Silence followed, a moment given over in honor of the dead, then Anna asked, “How’d you come to know Herm, Thornton and Doyce? They’re Natchez boys?”
Badger twitched slightly as if he’d been bitten by a horsefly instead of asked what Anna’d thought to be an innocuous question. For just a moment confusion—or fear—tightened his weathered face.
“Thorton’s in surplus. Bound to come across scrap metal in that line of work,” Ranger Thigpen suggested helpfully.
Clintus shot Thigpen an angry look and again Anna suffered a pang of embarrassment on her field ranger’s behalf.
“I bought stuff off him now and then. We weren’t real social outside of that or anything.” Maybe Thigpen had been right on the money. Maybe Badger was just taking the hint and running with it. “I was down, loading up an old caterpillar tread he’d run across, and he mentioned this Friday night poker game he and some guys were putting together. Well, my dance card wasn’t what you’d call full up so I joined’ em.”
Apparently there were to be no great revelations. Clintus thanked Badger, hands were shaken all around. The scrap metal dealer and his dog escorted them to the door. Rather than vanishing back into the house, the man and his best friend stood on the aborted porch as the rest of them headed down the curving walk to the sheriff’s car. Southern tradition and Clintus’s careful good manners dictated that Anna go first. She didn’t mind. Lundstrom’s size and bluff good cheer were mildly oppressive, and it was a relief to be in the chill night air. The moon had yet to rise but, free from the light pollution of the cities, stars shone vividly. Summer’s golden tint was gone, replaced by a hint of ice blue she remembered from winter skies farther north.
Behind her she heard a final hostly remark that detained her companions. She kept walking, thinking of Taco and Piedmont and food, none of which she had seen hide nor hair of since leaving the house ten hours earlier.
Faint squeaks, metal on metal, cut through her preoccupation. The sound was so alien to the natural rhythm of the night her internal alarms went off. Instantly hyper-alert, her feet stopped moving. Her chin came up as a dog’s would when scenting the air for danger. As inappropriate as it seemed, the noise had come not from the house or road, but from overhead. Feeling wild and alive with the sudden injection of adrenaline, Anna’s eyes scanned the treetops.
Ahead and to her right a starless chunk of the perfect sky detached itself from the rest, a black hole, swallowing stars. For an instant she could not make sense of it. Another squeal of metal and she realized that the half ton of scrap iron forged into sharp beak, claws and wings of an ancient beast of prey was swooping down, plummeting from thirty feet up in the branches of a live oak to rip her to pieces with talons forged from the teeth of a derelict harrow.
Hurling herself forward, Anna struck grass and concrete walk, rolled once and came up on hands and knees crawling. A nightmare sense of moving in slow motion was upon her, and as she moved she waited for the first deadly bite of Badger Lundstrom’s freak.
The sound of laughter caught her up short. On all fours like a dog, she looked over her shoulder. Badger was laughing so hard he’d had to rest his hands on his knees to bear up under the load of merriment. Thigpen joined him and held his big belly with both hands in an ugly parody of St. Nick. Clintus stood apart, halfway down the walk between Anna and the men on the porch. His face was lost in silhouette but he made no sound.
“Whoo-ee, that was a good one. You done good, little lady. Most folks just lie right down and die when old Spot there come for ‘em. I do believe you’d’ve got clean away,” Badger managed on gusts of unholy glee.
Anna got to her feet. Above where she’d stood when the sky began to fall the iron bird swung gently on three chains. These tied into a rope that fed into a pulley high in the branches. Against the drop of night, Anna couldn’t see it but there would be another rope running to a second pulley above the porch where Lundstrom could operate it to abuse his visitors.
“Clever,” Anna called and laughed good-naturedly. “Clintus, Randy, we better hit the road before anything else comes to life.” She waved good-bye to the practical jokester and led the way to the car.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” she hissed, effectively shocking Clintus to stillness in the midst of buckling his seat belt. From the rear seat she heard a snort from Randy that might have been amusement. He had the good sense not to laugh in such close proximity to her.
“If I’ve so much as got a grass stain on my Class-A uniform trousers I’m going to bust that son of a bitch for assault on a federal officer, reckless endangerment and littering.”
She’d gotten more than grass stains. Her shoulder ached where it had struck the sidewalk. Humiliation or instinct kept her from admitting any weakness.
9
A 1940s vintage, candy-apple red pickup truck was parked in Anna’s drive when she rolled into Rocky Springs just after seven o’clock. Tired, hungry, the residual humiliation of Spot the Pterodactyl’s attack clinging to her like a bad smell, she was still not sorry to see she had a visitor. At least not this visitor.
Steve Stilwell, the district ranger from Ridgeland, just north of Jackson where the Trace resumed, stepped out from the shadows as she pulled in. Seeing Steve always cheered Anna. Though nearing fifty, he retained a boyish charm that had never soured. Grizzled hair, worn too long for the brass’s taste in Tupelo, fell over an unwrinkled brow, and a devilish smile glowed from his neatly cropped beard.
“Hey, Steve. You’re about the only company I wouldn’t shoot on sight this evening.”
“Rarified air,” he said in mock ecstasy. “I am living in rarified air. Pity the poor mortals who are not me.”
Before Anna was hired, Stilwell had the onerous duty of running not only his own district but serving as acting district ranger in the Port Gibson/Natchez District. When Anna had first arrived, she’d found a note from him and five gallons of bottled water waiting in her kitchen. Once she’d tasted the Rocky Springs water, she understood the thoughtfulness of the gift. Not only did the water emerge a brownish color but it tasted as if cottonmouths had been eating, sleeping and giving birth to their young in it shortly before it arrived at her sink.
Feeling better than she had in a while, Anna ushered him inside. While Taco made a fool of himself in a bid for the Ridgeland ranger’s attentions, she made herself a grilled cheese sandwich.
Fortified by food and seduced by good company, she spilled her romantic woes. Nursing a single malt scotch liberated from the glove box of his truck, Steve listened with flattering attention. Anna stuck to tea. Fortunately whiskey had never tempted her. She’d consumed the stuff on occasion to be sociable but h
ad never gotten past the point where it tasted like something used to remove varnish from ships’ decking. And the high had never been giggly or warm like the giddiness wine brought, but merely a dullness and a lowering of the I.Q.
When she finished recapping her soap-opera role in the Davidson vs. Davidson vs. Pigeon affair, he took a pull on his scotch, savored the burn on his tongue, swallowed and said, “There’s a quote attributed to Marlon Brando that comes to mind. ‘With women, I’ve got a long bamboo pole with a leather loop on the end of it. I slip the loop around their necks so they can’t get away or come too close. Like catching snakes.”’
For a second Anna was stunned. She wanted to laugh it off, be strong and cynical and worldly. With nothing but a cheese sandwich shoring up her backbone she couldn’t quite pull it off. “Oh, God, what a grisly image.”
Unable to suppress a groan, she laid her head back against the cushion of her grandmother’s morris chair. Concerned, Taco came over. A calculated swat from Piedmont stopped him from laying a sympathetic chin on her thigh.
“You’re really stuck on Paul, aren’t you?” Steve asked. His voice was devoid of the underlying playfulness that was both his charm and, Anna suspected, his defense against the world. This being sufficiently rare, she was inspired to open her eyes.
“Maybe.” Hearing the surprise in her own voice she repeated the word, “Maybe.”
“I worked with Paul a couple times when I was ADR down here. I don’t think he’s the Brando type,” Steve said kindly.
Anna said nothing. She was afraid if she spoke he would know how deeply the thought that Paul Davidson was toying with her affections frightened her.
