Hunting Season

by Nevada Barr

  Neither happened. Bent, malevolent, headlights broken, taillights streaming red, the truck waited. Bubba’s nightmare of Christine, Anna thought and for an instant believed the truck itself, like Stephen King’s sentient automobile, had fomented the assault.

  Hunkered like a beast of prey over its kill, it was watching, waiting to see if Anna was dead. The driver is waiting, Anna told herself. A man, not a machine.

  Aided by rivers of bloodred running from the taillights, a sense of the surreal caught Anna in a soft grip creating a sense of ghostliness, of watching her own brutal death from a distance.

  Her brain scuttled through half a dozen reactions. She noted with detachment that first and foremost her feelings were hurt. Shock at the violent need someone had to see her dead was next. Then anger came; hot, welcome, reattaching her to the world. In a singularly unwraithlike act, she pulled her nine-millimeter from its holster. Stillness, eerily deep after the hellish cacophony of crashes, poured down with the incessant rain. She was shaking so badly she couldn’t hold the semi-auto at arm’s length. Attempting to move forward she discovered she’d fallen to her knees. Icy water had filled her boots. She felt as numb as the corpse the anonymous driver thought he’d made of her.

  Anna forced herself to her feet, stumbled, found her balance and began wading up the ditch toward the crouching vehicle.

  “Come on, you son-of-a-bitch,” she muttered. “Come on, goddamn it. Get out, admire your handiwork.” As if in answer to her heretic’s prayer, she heard the crack of a door being forced open past warped metal.

  Her brain ordered her legs to run and they tried, but numbed with cold and boots full of water, she moved with nightmare slowness.

  From the north came the familiar whoop of a siren. An instant later the flashing blue lights of Barth’s patrol car were visible.

  Metal barked again. The truck’s door slammed. The pickup came to life, backing rapidly away from the wreckage.

  “Damn.” Anna cursed Barth’s timing and wiped the water from her eyes. The pickup roared backward, wheels milling heavy spray from the road, taillights riddling the night with watered reds.

  It passed not twenty feet from where Anna stood. No license plate. Burgundy. She raised her sidearm and fired. Protocol on acceptable levels of force would not allow her to try and kill anyone, much as she ached to do so. She aimed at the tires, hoping to cripple the vehicle sufficiently so she could lay ungentle hands on the driver.

  On the range, Anna was a dead shot, top honors. At night, shaking, in a ditch full of frigid water, she was no better than the average schmo. Maybe she hit a tire, maybe she didn’t. The truck never slowed. Still traveling backward, it grew smaller till darkness or a bend in the road took it from sight.

  Impotent with fury, she stared at the black place that swallowed her killer. The sound of her name being shouted called her back to herself.

  Barth had arrived. In the pulse of blue lights she watched him run to the twisted mess that had been her patrol car, yelling her name, pulling at a door fused shut by the truck’s impact, peering frantically through the shattered safety glass.

  Wearily she slogged out of the ditch and walked down the center of the Trace.

  “Anna!” Barth shouted again, then snatched his radio from his belt.

  “I’m here.”

  The big man squealed and Anna laughed. It was grossly ill-mannered but she couldn’t help herself. The laughter carried her on a wave of mild hysteria that part of her mind watched with thin-lipped disapproval.

  On the heels of the scream Barth did a classic triple take, looking from her to the car and back to her again. Though it was perfectly executed comedy, the genuine concern in his face dried up her laughter.

  “I’m okay, Barth. I wasn’t in the car.”

  “You weren’t in the car,” he repeated stupidly, his usually fine mind slowed by the drama.

  “No.”

  “Thank God,” he said simply.

  Anna wasn’t in the mood to thank anybody.

  13

  Much as it galled, Anna was forced to let the assault truck and its driver go unpursued. Her vehicle was totaled, the wreckage blocking the southbound traffic lane. Until it was towed she and Barth had to remain, lest some unwary traveler plow into the mess and kill himself. The best she could do was to radio the Natchez and Port Gibson sheriffs’ departments and the state troopers to put out an all points bulletin for an old Ford pickup, probably burgundy, driving without headlights and sporting a homegrown cast-iron grill probably with bits of National Park Service ranger patrol vehicle stuck between its teeth.

  The troopers or sheriffs might turn up something, but Anna doubted it. The Trace, fairly straight and decidedly narrow, harbored hundreds of small, half overgrown dirt tracks that provided access and egress to those who knew the country. Even in winter the growth was thick enough to hide a whole battalion of pickup trucks.

  After setting flares at intervals fifty yards to the north of the wreck, there was nothing more for them to do, and Anna and Barth retreated to the shelter of his patrol car. Trying to drive out a chill that had soaked more than bone deep, Anna cranked his heater up high. Her trousers, even her hair, steamed as the super-heated air struck them. Rivulets of water ran from her boots and trouser legs to pool on the seat and floor mat. The windows were as fogged as those of a pair of teenagers at Lover’s Lane, and Barth was dripping more with sweat than any residual rain. If Anna noticed she was broiling her compatriot, she was too distracted to care.

  To assuage her need for the hunt, she listed the things she wanted done at the open of business the following day. Barth, his paternal—or survival—instincts in good condition, said little and wrote everything she said in a small notebook. A lesser man would have had to show her his knowledge. Barth let her unwind in her own way.

  “We’ll need to call the local body shops to be on the lookout for a truck with damage to the front end, and wrecking yards to watch for anybody looking to cannibalize headlight assemblies,” she said. “Probably dead ends. By the looks of it, the truck was a junker. Any repairs’ll be done by the owner if at all.

  “We’ll run a check in Adams, Jefferson, Claiborne and Hinds counties. See if they got a record of anybody with a truck of that description registered.” Anna laughed and let her head drop back against the headrest, wringing a stream of cold water down into her collar.

  “What?” Barth said, sounding alarmed.

  His dark face was a strange color, the green of the dash lights reflecting off the sweat on his forehead and chin. Personal concern focused in his eyes and tightened up the muscles of his cheeks. She’d never before noticed how seriously he took his caretaking duties. It wasn’t a new side of him, she realized. She’d seen it the previous spring when he’d come and taken her out of the hospital in Jackson. It had been there all along; she’d just never bothered to notice it, never asked him if he had kids, liked to teach, wanted to study emergency medicine or disaster relief.

  Managerial shit, Anna told herself and made a promise to be better.

  “What?” Barth asked again.

  “How many hits you figure we’ll get from the departments of motor vehicles if they run a search for old trucks in this part of the country?”

  Barth laughed with her. “More than we got the manpower to follow up on.”

  They didn’t speak for a bit, both listening to the rain and their own thoughts, watching for the arrival of the tow truck.

  “Scratch the DMV search,” Anna said after a while. “The truck had no plates. Probably isn’t registered. Maybe hasn’t been registered in years. The only way we’re going to find it is luck. By now it’s hid out back of some bam with a black tarp over it weighed down with old tires.”

  Barth didn’t risk a remark but conscientiously drew a line through the last item on the list. Silence returned, mellowing with the passage of time. “Want to tell me what happened?” he asked.

  Anna’d given him the short version when he’d
arrived: “Bastard rammed me. I wasn’t in the car.” Now she told him how the events had unfolded.

  “You couldn’t see who it was?”

  “Nothing,” Anna said. “The guy’s dash lights were out or masked and with the night and the rain...”

  “Maybe it wasn’t a guy. Could’ve been a woman.”

  “It could have been,” Anna said.

  A woman. The thought jarred as she thought of the one woman who might want her dead: Mrs. Paul Davidson. Nausea formed a hollow in the pit of her stomach at the tawdriness of dying because of an adulterous affair with another woman’s husband. No honor in that. Anna’d only met Mrs. Davidson once when the woman had engineered a “chance” encounter at Rocky Springs to drop a fragment of information Paul had neglected to mention: that he was a married man, three years of separation notwithstanding.

  It should have painted an incongruous picture: the petite and carefully coiffed Mrs. D in her pumps and hose behind the wheel of a killing truck, but it didn’t. Projection, Anna said to herself. Maybe she could see it so clearly because there’d been too many times over the past months when she had wished Paul’s wife would come to a timely end.

  Not liking the person that made her, Anna forced the sheriff’s wife out of her mind. Immediately it was replaced by an image of old wizened Mama Barnette behind the wheel, her head barely higher than the dash, fingers crooked with age and arthritis clamped on the steering wheel like claws. Anna laughed. “It could’ve been,” she said again. “Fords are an equal-opportunity weapon.”

  “Do you think he was trying to kill you?” Barth asked, reverting to the masculine pronoun. “I mean kill you specifically?”

  Anna thought about that. The attack felt personal but that didn’t mean it was. In the dark the driver of the pickup might not have known who was in the driver’s seat of the patrol car. He had the advantage of high beams but, rain filming her rear window, they couldn’t have provided much more than a watery silhouette.

  “One of us,” Anna said. “You, me, Randy. It’s common knowledge there’s just the three of us for ninety miles of road. One of us or the park service in general. I suppose it could have been a Unabomber thing. You know—one lunatic against the federal government.”

  “Randy and I’ve been here a long time,” Barth said speculatively. “Nobody’s ever tried to kill us.”

  Anna shot him a sideways glance to see if there was an intentional cut under the words. His face was guileless; the sweat came from the sauna she’d insisted on, not guilt. Still it hurt. “Mama Barnette brought a double-barreled shotgun to the door thinking Clintus was you,” she said peevishly. “What was that about beside murderous intent?”

  “Shoot,” Barth said, oblivious of the pun. “That old woman wants to kill half the county. Folks think she’s still fighting the Civil War, trying to get back to the glory days when her people were rich and genteel plantation owners with darkies to empty their chamber pots. If she’s taken on a personal hate for me, it’s because I’ve been asking questions: her, her neighbors, looking up old records, researching the Mt. Locust graveyard. The Barnettes were nothing but poor dirt farmers, most of them living worse than slaves. At least slaves had enough to eat. There was no money in that family till old lady Barnette’s great-grandfather moved into town and apprenticed himself to a carpenter.”

  “Would she want to kill you for knowing that?” Anna asked. She was serious. In another part of the country that would never pass muster as a motive for murder. In the South—even the “new” South—Anna wasn’t so sure.

  Both of them looked through the steaming windshield at the crushed and twisted metal of the car Anna’d been driving. Had she not slithered out the right-hand door into the mud, she’d still be inside it, shrapnel from the driver’s door where her left lung and heart once resided.

  “Mrs. Barnette’s meaner ’n a snake,” Barth said. “Kind of that mindless, ugly, old mean, like a cottonmouth.”

  “How about Raymond?” Anna asked. “I keep feeling he factors into things somehow, but he’s got an alibi for the night his brother died. Vestry dinner.”

  “You think this is something to do with Doyce’s murder?”

  Anna didn’t answer because she had no answers. It just made more sense than a sudden crime spree on one of the quietest sections of the Natchez Trace Parkway.

  The car was towed. Reports, verbal and written, as to how she’d managed to destroy a government vehicle had been postponed till the following day.

  Anna showered, melting away the chill in her bones. She dressed with the obsessive care of an adolescent on prom night, donning a soft green velvet dress that flattered her boyish figure. Her short hair she fluffed to accentuate the white streaks at the temples. Then, in a last-minute reversion to type, she threw the graceful ensemble onto the floor and pulled on Levi’s, moccasins and an old lambs-wool sweater that had belonged to her husband, Zach. When she left, Piedmont was curling up on the soft forest-green velvet, improving its color and texture with a wealth of orange cat hair.

  By 8:15 her Rambler was parked in Paul Davidson’s driveway, and she was standing on the porch of his Port Gibson home. Rain still fell, as did the temperature. The roads would be covered in black ice before the night was over. :

  For some reason Anna was loath to ring the doorbell. Paul had invited her to dinner, to his home. In a small town, her car in his driveway at eight o’clock on a weeknight was tantamount to a public avowal of... of what? A relationship? Friendship? Assignation? Given his situation, the priesthood in the balance, possible jeopardy to the upcoming election for county sheriff that was going on throughout the state, inviting her to his home smacked of a final decision.

  Finality: that was what kept her standing in the dark listening to the rain blow against the side of the house.

  A plethora of emotions cold and damp as the gusts of rain-laden wind blustered through Anna. She was beset by a sudden longing to return to the safe familiarity of the loneliness that worked so well for her.

  “Not good,” she said, paying lip service to mental health more as a tribute to her sister than anything else.

  She reached for the bell.

  Paul beat her to it. The door opened to warmth and light. He folded her into an embrace that banished loneliness so completely that Anna groaned aloud and felt unwelcome womanly tears flood her eyes.

  “Doggone it, Anna, I was worried half to death. Why didn’t you call?”

  His arm, still strong around her waist, brought her inside and closed out the night and the storm. “I’ve been half out of my mind. If I hadn’t known you’d never forgive me for it, I’d’ve driven out there myself.”

  Anna let herself fall into a kiss that hit her like warm brandy on an empty stomach.

  “I’m not all that late,” she managed when her lips were free from more pleasant duties. “How did you know?”

  Paul hadn’t let her go and her words were muffled against the flannel of the shirt he wore. He held her like he never would, and Anna felt no compunction to wriggle away.

  “I leave my radio on tuned to the park’s frequency when you’re on late,” he admitted.

  Radio.

  Anna pulled back, breaking the comforting circle of his arms. Anyone who had a scanner and the park’s frequency would have known it was her in that car: not Barth, not Randy, not an anonymous government representative. As was required by NPS regulations, she’d called in her location at the deer-stand meadow and called in again when she left. Not only her identity but where she was had been broadcast.

  The attack was personal. Somebody had wanted to see her crushed and broken. Had Barth been a few minutes later, that person would have stepped from the safety of the truck and into the sights of her Sig-Sauer. She never thought she’d be cursing one of her rangers for responding too promptly to a backup call, but she did now.

  “What is it?” Paul asked. “Are you okay?”

  Anna told him: how cold she’d been, how scared, how angry,
the noise the collisions made, the disorienting play of light and water. As she talked, Anna felt a growing understanding of the women she’d met during her career who had loused up schemes for both the law abiding and the law breakers by blabbing to “the boyfriend.” At the time, these incidents had left her with a baffled contempt for the blabbers. Now, tonight, she experienced the heady liquor of sharing. That, coupled with the dangerous stuff of trust, could elicit secrets from just about any woman on the quick side of the River Styx.

  During her recitation, they ate bowls full of curried chicken stew, the entire chicken, sans guts, brains and feathers, tossed in the pot for twelve hours, bones still to be picked out as they turned up in one’s spoon. There was salad from a bag and good bakery bread.

  From the dining table in the kitchen, they moved to the fireplace. Like many in the Deep South it was propane with fake logs, the two or three weeks of true winter not meriting the dirty business of cutting, hauling and storing wood.

  Shoes off, feet on the stuffed arm of a couch with down pillows, her head on Paul’s lap, she finished her tale as the grandfather clock at the base of the stairs was striking ten.

  Paul asked questions as she went along, fueling the story, and Anna was content to be warm, lying in a man’s lap, hearing a mellow bell marking the passage of time. After eleven strokes, when the gong fell quiet, there was a sweet aftertaste of sound soaking into the antique wood of the clock and the house. Then it, too, was gone and the sonorous rhythm of the pendulum and the tick of the seconds drifted back into the room.

  “I’ve got my own story to tell,” Paul said after a while. Warmth and the sound of the wind had sent Anna drifting peacefully. His words jolted her back. Suddenly no longer comfortable lying on her back, throat and soft white underbelly exposed, Anna struggled upright and propped an elbow on the back of the sofa. The down-filled cushions she’d enjoyed a few minutes earlier were now too soft, too yielding, like quicksand ready to trap and hold.