Hunting Season

by Nevada Barr

  Jerri smiled. “You want a refill, darlin’?”

  “These people’ve got to go, Jer, and I got things to do.”

  In the well-mannered homes of the South, his comment was tantamount to being tossed out on one’s ear. Anna left her coffee and followed Martin to the living room. Despite the freezing rain, Jerri walked with Anna and Clintus to the edge of the abbreviated porch. Her white Lexus was parked crookedly near the sheriff’s car. Jerri saw Anna looking at it and said, “Bought it used off one of those rental car dealers. Don’t I just feel like the Queen of Sheba driving around town?

  “Oh!” she said suddenly, startling Anna. Over her shoulder she called, “I forgot, what with the company and all, your stuff’s back from the butcher, baby.”

  Ignoring the rain, Jerri trotted out to the Lexus, apparently oblivious to the cold. “Hang on a minute,” she said to Anna as she and Clintus reached the patrol car. “I’ve got a treat for you.” Having opened the trunk, she grabbed out a small paper package wrapped in butcher from a pile of like parcels in varying sizes. “Genuine homegrown venison.” She cocked her arm to toss it like a football.

  Martin, rudely flopped in his chair as they’d left the house, was now on the porch barefoot in his pajamas.

  “Jerri, you leave that be! Hear me now. Let it alone.” The venom in his voice was uncharacteristic after the displays of obvious affection between him and his wife. Jerri didn’t seem accustomed to it either. She faltered, but he’d yelled too late to reverse the order from her brain, and she threw anyway, wide and wild.

  Instinctively, Anna dove for it and, sacrificing the knee of one trouser leg to the icy mud of the drive, managed to catch it before it hit the ground.

  For a long moment, made longer by cold and awkwardness, the four of them waited for the mood to change. Anna was comfortable in polite society, and she was more or less comfortable in a fight. Nobody was comfortable in a domestic altercation: motives were too tangled, emotions ran too deep. The good guys and the bad guys kept exchanging hats.

  Jerri didn’t have the look of a woman accustomed to verbal violence. Dripping, beginning to shiver, she wore the stunned face of a favored child slapped down for behaviors that once earned only praise.

  The rigidity born of anger or fear—Anna couldn’t even guess—left Martin’s face. “Sorry, baby. That ven ... the uh steaks... I was planning to, to give them to the Catholic Charity in Port Gibson.”

  The excuse was so lame, so patently made up on the spot that Anna, who an instant before could think of nothing she wanted less than a bloody hunk of flesh that had once been a magical woodland creature, was now determined to keep her venison at all costs.

  “Thanks a million, Jerri. They won’t miss one tiny steak,” she called gaily and, hugging her dripping prize, ducked into the sheriff’s car and slammed the door.

  “You a big venison fan?” Clintus asked as they drove away.

  In the side mirror Anna could see Martin Crowley, still on the porch, watching the car leave. Jerri had darted inside.

  “Martin didn’t want me to have it,” Anna said.

  “And you know why?”

  “Probably poached,” Anna said.

  “Martin’s been around long enough he’d know we can’t prove nothing without catching him red-handed.”

  “I know. There’s something more,” Anna said. “And I want to find out what.”

  12

  At Port Gibson the sheriff dropped her at the ranger station and headed to Natchez to catch up on work he’d let pile up while chasing the National Park Service’s murderer. Anna stayed in the office just long enough to reassure Barth that finding Mrs. Jackson’s son and hunting down old records of cabinet makers was a worthy use of the taxpayer’s money, and to read her messages.

  The last was from Paul Davidson. Anna stared at it too long. “What’s wrong?” Barth asked finally. “Feeling up to your back pockets in southern sheriffs?”

  That was precisely what Anna was feeling. A woman with a lick of sense would have fallen for a veterinarian, a high-school teacher, dog catcher, anything but a local priest and sheriff. And she would have made damn sure he was single before she did it.

  Predictable as most women in a like situation, she called him back. Paul said he needed to see her. Needed: his word. Again, appallingly predictable, she said sure. Then he did something that surprised her. He invited her to his house for dinner. She’d been there before, but not after dark, not since they’d become lovers. Paul’s home was in one of the many fine old houses that still existed in Mississippi. Even tiny towns on the back roads boasted a few. Most were not the antebellum mansions one thought of when envisioning southern architecture, but aped that graciousness and were better for it. Ceilings were high, nine, ten, fourteen feet, doorways wide, windows generous, floors of hardwood and banisters curved. Too many of the old homes, fallen on hard times, were beyond saving. Paul’s had been rescued structurally but pillaged by bad taste in the 1970s. As a new owner, Paul—or more probably Mrs. Davidson—had struck back. Evidently the marriage ended before the renovations. Scars remained where partitions had been knocked out. Wallpaper was steamed off and never replaced, carpet pulled up but the battered oak floors remained unsanded and unsealed. Mrs. Davidson had moved to Jackson and put ten thousand dollars down on a new condominium. Paul kept the house, living there, a tidy but indifferent tenant. Paul and, she had to admit, she herself preferred the spurious privacy of Rocky Springs.

  Personal and managerial duties completed, Anna left Barth to his historical sleuthing and drove south, following Sheriff Jones toward Natchez. On a miserable Wednesday afternoon in November there was virtually no traffic. Come the weekend, hunters and football fans, traveling to or from Alcorn State in Lorman to attend games, would people the asphalt. Today she had it to herself. Even in the relentless gray rain, she found the natural world to her liking. Had she been in a wet backpack on a muddy mountainside, she might not have been so sanguine, but protected by Detroit iron with radio, heater and the comforts of home, she enjoyed the subtle play of muted colors, the tracks of raindrops on the side windows, naked branches etched stark and ink-black across a gray rice-paper sky. She reveled in being warm and dry yet still an integral part of a cold, wet day.

  Once she reached her destination, the meadow with the illegal deer stand, she had to get a whole lot more integral and a whole lot less warm and dry.

  She’d anticipated a quick trip through the weeds to where she’d located the remains of the field-dressed doe she and Randy had found. Instead she spent just under an hour once more gridding the small meadow in a painstaking foot search. The poached doe’s head, feet and entrails had disappeared. Coyotes possibly, black vultures, foxes, even wandering dogs; Mississippians used hunting dogs a good deal during deer and turkey season. Finding a beagle wearing a collar with a phone number on it was a common occurrence. People would pick them up and call the owners. Things got sorted out.

  A quarter of an hour more disabused Anna of the scavenger theory. The rain would have washed away blood and drag marks, but something of the butchered doe would have remained: a bone, a hoof, a scrap of hide. Creatures that dine with tooth, beak and claw simply were not that tidy, yet there wasn’t a single piece of the poached deer left behind.

  The maid who’d so carefully swept the stand had apparently returned.

  Another forty minutes of icy rain running under her collar, soaking through the leather of her boots, and Anna got lucky. Whoever had cleaned up had been too lazy to haul the stuff off. It was buried under the branches of a feral azalea bush on the southern edge of the meadow.

  Without help, Anna never would have seen the scraps, but a little dirt never stopped a determined predator. The burial had been unearthed, the tasty pieces of treasure consumed, the inedible parts strewn around. Anna claimed a partially gnawed head with a nice bit of skin and a few tags of flesh remaining under the jawline. Wrapping her find in a clean oil rag, she trotted back to the car.
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br />   It was nearly seven o’clock and rain still fell from a sky so low the car’s high beams snagged its underside. Winter and weather had stolen what light the day might have left. Anna was soaked, her hair pasted to her skull, sodden wool trousers dragging at her knees. Even with the Crown Vic’s heater turned to maximum, she couldn’t shake off the chill but was pleased with the day’s work.

  The idea to search the meadow had been planted by Martin’s unsouthem attitude about sharing the kill. She’d said nothing to Clintus. It wasn’t that she was afraid she’d look a fool if it didn’t pan out—she’d looked a fool more than once in her chosen profession. Most people feared that above all things, but Anna had come to know it wouldn’t kill her. Besides, this idea had thunked home in her brainpan with the solid feel of truth. The problem had been words. Truth did not need to be articulated. Evidence did. Now that she had the evidence, she’d have no trouble finding the words to share it.

  Her find in the trunk, she was feeling pleased with herself. Tonight, dinner with Paul. A bath, a little perfume, lipstick, who knew? Maybe she’d get lucky again.

  The car’s heater finally pumped out enough hot air to penetrate Anna’s wet clothes. The luxury of heat, coupled with the visions of priest/sheriffs she had dancing in her head, was putting her to sleep.

  Headlights appeared in the rearview mirror, and Anna came out of her waking dream. Visibility was nil, the road was slick with rain and dead leaves; it was not a night to be asleep at the wheel. The FM radio was turned to Public Radio Mississippi. Anna turned up the volume on “All Things Considered” to help keep her mind from drifting.

  The headlights drew closer. She glanced at her speedometer: fifty miles per hour on the nose. Fifty was the posted speed limit on the parkway. On a dry sunny day it seemed too slow for cars and citizens engineered for the fast lane. On this classic dark and stormy night it was, if anything, a tad too fast for the existing conditions.

  The idiot was speeding. Anna was in no mood to stand in the rain again to give some bozo a traffic ticket.

  Lights bore down, high beams lancing from her rearview mirror. She flipped it to its nighttime angle and cursed the rudeness and incompetence of the driver. Even southerners, with their ingrained manners, became cads when given the anonymous opportunities the highway afforded.

  Anna slowed to let him pass. Forty-five, forty: the car remained on her tail so close she could read the Ford logo on the grill in the reflected red glow from her brake lights.

  “What the hell...” Braking gently, Anna came to a full stop. The car—truck, a pickup, the color unclear in the rain and darkness—stopped ten or fifteen yards behind her.

  For a moment she sat, motor running, and waited to see what would happen next: a motorist assist, maybe, somebody needing help, a drunk so lost to the booze he just followed the lights in front, and when they stopped, he stopped. It could even be a good Samaritan of great heart and little brain, thinking it was Anna who was in need of help.

  She watched her mirrors, waiting for the other driver to make the first move. Opening the side window, ignoring the rain blowing in, she listened. Over the hum of the Crown Vic’s engine she heard the pickup idling, punctuated by the faint chronic cough of an exhaust system that had seen better days.

  “What do you want?” Anna whispered. The situation was sufficiently bizarre that she was beginning to get nervous. Having picked up the mike, she radioed dispatch in Tupelo.

  “Three hundred, five-eight-zero, I’ve got a vehicle stop at mile marker—” Anna’d been driving in a daze. She had no idea precisely where she was. Each mile of the 450-odd miles of the Natchez Trace was neatly marked with four-by-four posts pounded into the ground about bumper high. Though beautiful, much of the Trace had a green hypnotic sameness that, without numerical divisions, would have made finding specific locations a nightmare. The meadow with the deerstand was between mile markers twenty-three and twenty-four. At a guess, she’d been driving under ten minutes. “Mile marker thirty,” she hazarded. “A late model truck possibly mid- to late seventies, Ford. No license number as yet.” Narrowing her eyes, as if squinting could help penetrate the mixture of running darkness and stark light, Anna studied the rearview mirror. “The truck’s got some kind of grill or homemade bumper welded on the front. Maybe to support a winch. Looks to be made of angle iron.”

  Not for the first time Anna wondered at the wisdom of Mississippi’s Department of Motor Vehicles in requiring tags to be displayed only at the rear of the vehicle. The space on the front that car manufacturers provided for license plates was used for all manner of strange announcements, “Jesus is Lord” being among the favorites, followed by the rebel flag. Mud obscured the front plate of the truck behind her, but it looked like the masked mascot for the Bandits, Jackson’s hockey team.

  Car and truck were stopped in the middle of the traffic lane. In wet weather, to pull off the road was to be stuck in mud. To reduce the hazard somewhat, Anna eased two wheels off the asphalt and turned on her overhead blue lights. The truck didn’t move, not to pass, not to park.

  Anna unbuckled her seat belt. Satan or Samaritan, the driver of the truck clearly had no intention of braving the elements to declare himself.

  Again she picked up the radio mike. “Five-seven-nine, five-eight-zero.” Five-seven-nine was Barth Dinkins’s call number. He answered immediately and Anna blessed him for it. “Barth, this isn’t a routine traffic stop.” She told him the situation and approximately where she thought she was located.

  “I’m two miles south of Port Gibson headed toward Natchez. I should be there in five minutes or so.” Anna thanked him and signed off.

  For another half a minute she sat in silence listening to the rain and the sporadic racing of the truck’s engine as the driver gunned it. Probably trying to keep it running at idle.

  The utter wrongness of things was abrading Anna’s nerves. Her senses were sharpening, growing more acute as adrenaline dripped into her system. She could drive on, see if the truck would continue to follow. She could sit out the slow minutes till Barth arrived. Or she could go out in the rain and do her job. Safety was important, her own safety first as befit a sensible law-enforcement officer. Face was also a factor. Not foolhardy bravado but, being female in a male profession, one that still had a strong undercurrent of cowboy machismo; saving face was important if she wanted to be a successful manager. Men would follow a woman who did not willingly enter into pissing contests. They would not follow one who would not lead once the contest had been declared.

  “Damn,” she whispered. “And I was just getting dry.” She took the baton from under the seat. Patrol cars came from the factory with most of the niceties of civilian cars intact. One of the first modifications made was to disconnect the wires that automatically turned on the overhead light when the doors were opened. That small edge would do Anna no good this night. With the truck’s beams spotlighting her, she was exposed and vulnerable. Since she’d pulled to the side of the road, its headlights no longer hit her square but were angled, highlighting the driver’s side door. The passenger side was left in darkness.

  Anna was a small woman, barely five foot four. The headrests might cover the fact she was no longer in the seat. Crawling on her belly, she slunk quickly across the front seat, shoving open the door on the passenger side, slipped out on her knees and quietly closed the door. Slick as an otter, she slid down the bank into pure darkness under the trees crowding the shallow ditch.

  A moment later she was standing, threading the baton through a loop on her duty belt. Should this degree of stealth prove unnecessary, all it would cost her was the five bucks to get her trousers dry-cleaned. Wading through ankle-deep water, she walked up the ditch, wanting to approach this mystery driver from an unexpected—and protected—direction.

  The pickup’s engine was given gas once more, revving up till it screamed with unaccustomed power. With an unexpectedness that startled a squawk from Anna, the truck leaped forward, smashing into the tru
nk of the patrol car. Glittering light, fragmented by raindrops, exploded into shards as her taillights and both headlights of the truck shattered. Brakes set, the Crown Vic skidded ahead, slewing sideways, putting the driver’s side door at a right angle to the road. Blinded by its own assault, the truck was slammed into reverse.

  The collision had been vicious but in no way deadly. Anna expected the driver of the truck to turn tail and run, his point, whatever the hell it might be, made.

  Gears ground, engine screamed, the truck picked up speed and smashed into the driver’s side of the patrol car, buckling the door inward. The side mirror rolled across two lanes of black asphalt like a severed head as the Crown Vic was bulldozed sideways.

  Again the truck backed off, gathered RPMs and was launched. This time the entire side of the patrol car, weakened by the other blow, caved in. The truck’s tires spun a moment, the smell of heated rubber mixed with the wet night air. Then the tires gained purchase and the iron grill bit into the side of the patrol car and began pushing. Metal screeching against metal. Fifty feet from where the cars had stopped was a stone bridge over one of the many creeks that crossed the Trace. Building up speed, the truck smashed the car into the stone railing with such force the roof of the Crown Vic burst upward. Whoever the driver was had not seen Anna get out; she was sure of it. Though the car had been knocked broadside, without headlights there was no way to tell that she was no longer inside. This was not harassment but attempted murder.

  When there was no give left in the twisted metal that had once been Anna’s car, the truck’s backup lights flashed on. Its grill was imbedded in the Crown Vic. Shrieks of tearing metal accompanied the hiss of tires spinning and the whine of an overworked engine.

  A lesser explosion, the sound of the crash played backward, and the truck was free of the wreckage. For a moment Anna thought it would charge again, though for what reason—excepting blind rage—she couldn’t fathom, or turn and speed away reckless and blind, behind the curtain of night.