Dark Paradise

by Tami Hoag

  Maybe she had come to rendezvous with Sheffield for a liaison. But why here, when there were a million easier private places to get to?

  “Too bad you can't talk, Clyde,” she said to the mule, stroking his slick warm neck. “You could tell me exactly what happened. Maybe we should get M. E. Fralick to help us. She could probably hang some crystals on you and commune with you on a psychic plane.”

  Clyde glanced back at her, a cynical look in his eyes, long ears wiggling as a deer fly buzzed around them.

  They stood at the edge of a clearing, resting. Mari had let the mule take a drink from the stream they had pretty much followed up the mountain. Now she let him bury his nose in the clover for a moment, the reins sliding through her fingers. She longed to climb down and stretch her legs, but she was already stiff and sore from her ride to the Stars and Bars the day before, and she was afraid if she got off, she might not be able to get back on.

  Overhead, gray clouds were rumbling across the sky like bloated sponges, filling up the blue bowl, shutting out the sun. Great. They were a zillion miles from home, and now it was going to rain. Consulting the map, she tried to discern where they were while ignoring her stomach's growls at the aroma of cheeseburger that clung to the paper.

  She was fairly confident about having passed the blue rock, but the dead cow was another matter. They had come across a scattered pile of bleached bones, but she wasn't exactly an expert on the skeletal remains of farm animals.

  “It might have been a cow,” she muttered. “Or we might be way lost.”

  Clyde's head came up suddenly and the mule jumped forward, gathering his muscular body beneath him, ready to bolt and run. The map flew out of Mari's hands as she scrambled to keep her seat and haul in the reins, and the rattling paper further served to frighten the mule, who leapt ahead another ten feet. Across the clearing, a pair of whitetail deer bolted in unison and glided away into the cover of the forest.

  Mari pulled the mule around in a galloping circle, her heart in her throat, every muscle tensed. Stay on, stay on, stay on! The words chanted through her mind a hundred miles an hour as she fought for control of her mount. If she fell and Clyde took off, it was a hell of a long walk back. Of course, if she fell and broke her neck, she wouldn't have to worry about walking.

  The mule came in hand and stopped, his head still high, his body quivering like a race car idling at the starting line. He pinned his long ears back and blew loudly through flared nostrils.

  “Good mule, nice mule,” Mari gasped, stroking his neck with a trembling hand. “Chill out, will you, Clyde?”

  The adrenaline rush subsided, leaving her feeling wobbly and light-headed. The cool, meadow-scented air surged in and out of her lungs in ragged gusts. But as Clyde made no further attempt to bolt, she began to relax. Belatedly, she wondered what had spooked him. The deer, probably. Or another of Bryce's hunting buddies?

  “Hey, anybody out there with a gun!” she called breathlessly. The mule shuddered beneath her. “I'm not an elk!”

  Silence. The breeze stirred. Thunder grumbled over the next mountain range to the west. A chipmunk chattered at her from its perch on a fallen tree trunk. Her call was not returned. The mule was still quaking beneath her.

  She didn't hear the crack of the rifle until a split second before the bullet smashed into the dead stump behind her. Then everything happened so quickly, her brain couldn't keep the order straight. She was falling backward. Clyde was a rear view of bulging hindquarters and flying hooves. She wondered dimly if she had been shot. Then she hit the ground and everything went black.

  When the world began coming back into focus, she didn't know if she was dead or alive. Alive, she suspected, wincing. Dead shouldn't hurt. Awareness of her body came back pain by pain, and she opened her eyes and gasped at the face staring down at her. It wasn't the face of anyone she had been told she would see in heaven, and she fully expected to go there even though she wasn't a regular at church. No, the face that stared down at her was the face of a cowboy, and something in his eyes told her he may not have come from hell, but he had very likely seen it.

  Beneath the brim of his gray cowboy hat, beneath the heavy rim of his brows, his narrow eyes were a stormy mix of gray and blue, swirling with what looked to Mari like madness. Anger, fear, a brittle tension that threatened to snap. He was probably fifty. His face was lean and weathered, brown and carved with lines like a tooled belt. Some mishap had left him with a puckered round scar the size of a penny on his left jaw. It pulled the corner of his mouth into a grotesque, perpetual frown. In his big, raw hands he held a very large, very deadly looking rifle.

  “Don't kill me,” Mari whispered, wondering wildly what she might do to prevent him, wondering if death might not be the most pleasant alternative she had. She was suddenly all too aware of just how remote this area was. Fragments of lines from her guidebooks flashed through her head—nearly a million acres of wilderness, ninety percent of it roadless. He could take her anywhere, do anything to her, and there would be no witnesses except the wildlife. Her heart shuddered like a dying bird.

  “If I had meant to kill you, ma'am,” he said in a low, hoarse voice, “then you'd be dead.”

  The voice. She blinked hard, as if that might somehow clear her head. The voice was J.D.'s voice, but lower, rustier. The face was a harder, abused version of J.D.'s face. Slowly, she pushed herself into a sitting position, her gaze darting from the face to the rifle and back.

  “Del Rafferty?” she ventured weakly.

  He narrowed his eyes to slits. “Yes, ma'am.”

  “And Quinn said I'd never find you.”

  Del walked ahead of his horse, his mood as sour as the acid churning in his stomach. He hadn't meant to saddle himself with the blond woman. He had meant to scare her off. The last thing he wanted was a woman at his place, especially this woman.

  His mind tried to scramble things around, as it often did, tried to make him think she had followed him up here, had been stalking him because she had sensed his presence, because she knew. It tried to tell him she was the other one in disguise, come to haunt him. But he brought the boot heel of reality down on those wild rantings and squashed them like June bugs. She wasn't the other one. She was the new one and she was just here, that was all. He didn't have to like it. All he had to do was deal with it. Tolerate her, then get rid of her.

  Her mule was probably halfway home by now. Damn shame she couldn't have managed to keep her fanny on its back.

  “So, you live up here?” she asked.

  Del glanced at her over his shoulder and said nothing. She sat in his saddle on his grullo gelding, her hair a wild mop of streaky blond, a bruise darkening on her right cheekbone. He supposed she was pretty, but he had long ago given up thinking about women in a sexual way. He tried never to think of them at all, same as he tried never to think about the 'Nam or the period after he had come home, which he referred to as his black hole period, when everything had been sucked into the dark void of his mind. He lived his life a second at a time, focusing totally on the moment, just to get him from one to the next.

  “My friend was killed somewhere around here a couple of weeks ago. Shot in a hunting accident. The sheriff told me you're the one who found her body.”

  Del just walked on, trying not to hear her. He concentrated on his breathing, on putting one foot in front of the other as he led the horse up the steep trail to the summer cow camp. If he ignored her, she might become invisible to him—or he to her. That idea held great appeal. If he were invisible, she might stop talking.

  “I was hoping you could answer some questions for me. If you don't mind, I'd like to get some details. You know, fill in the gaps in the story.”

  On the other hand, there was always the grim possibility that she never stopped talking. She had been talking to the mule when he had first brought her up in the cross hairs of the Leupold 10X scope.

  “Quinn told me you didn't come across the body until two days after the fact, but I w
as wondering if you might have heard anything or seen anything that day she was shot?”

  The images flashed before his eyes—darkness, moonlight, the woman running. Suddenly blind to his surroundings, he stumbled on the trail and jerked himself back to the present, cursing himself mentally and cursing the woman. He could hear her ragged breathing, roaring in his ears as if it were coming over loudspeakers. He could hear the dogs. His heart pumped hard in his chest.

  “. . . Anything might be helpful. I just need to know—”

  “I don't know!” he screamed, wheeling around so fast he frightened the horse. The gelding spooked and, wide-eyed, jerked back against the reins. Del ignored him. His gaze was hard on the blond woman, a corpse sitting in his saddle with a ragged, gory hole blown through her chest so that he could see straight through her, halfway to the Spanish Peaks. “I don't wanna know what happened to you! I don't wanna know about the tigers! Leave me alone! Leave me alone or I'll leave you for the dog-boys, damn you!”

  In a blink, the corpse was gone and the new woman was staring at him as moon-eyed as the horse, her face chalk white.

  “L-Lucy,” she stammered weakly. “Her name was Lucy. I'm Mari.”

  Del jerked around, ashamed and embarrassed, and kept on walking. This was why he stayed at the summer camp. He couldn't be around people. They broke his concentration, snapped it like a thin rubber band, and then everything in his head came apart, the jagged fragments exploded outward, bright and dark and bloody. Beneath the metal plate, his brain began to throb.

  The sky rumbled overhead and rain began to fall.

  Mari didn't say another word on the ride to his cabin. Del Rafferty had told her to begin with that he would radio for someone to come and get her. After his little break from reality, she could only hope it wouldn't take that somebody too long to get up here. His mind obviously wasn't firing on all cylinders. It would have been nice if someone had seen fit to tell her that right from the start. Of course, Quinn hadn't believed she would find the man, and J.D. had warned her off—twice—which would have been enough in his mind. He probably couldn't conceive of anyone going against his high-handed dictates.

  The camp finally came into sight through the branches of the pine trees. A small cabin, complete with outhouse, a three-sided shed, and a corral with four horses in it. A trio of dogs raced out to meet them, barking, baying, yipping with excitement as they dashed around the horse and their master. Rafferty ignored them. He tied the horse to a hitching rail and went into the cabin without so much as glancing at Mari.

  The rain came a little harder. Mari slid down off the gelding and darted for the shelter of the cabin before the man could lock her out. As she reached for the door-knob, she turned her head casually to the left and came face-to-face with a rattlesnake.

  A scream ripped from her throat and she threw herself back, clutching at her heart. The snake sat coiled and poised to strike inside a box constructed of a wood frame covered with two layers of chicken wire. The cage was one foot square and nailed to the wall of the cabin at head height half a foot away from the door. The snake looked big enough to wrap itself around its prison several times over. It was as thick as her wrist, tan and brown and black with elliptical eyes as bright and shiny as jet beads. It flicked its tongue at her, its tail quivering.

  What kind of lunatic kept something like that nailed to the side of his house?

  The door swung open and Del Rafferty glared at her. “Leave my snake alone. Get in here where I can see you.”

  He grabbed ahold of her wrist and pulled her into the cabin, jerking her past the snake so quickly that she had no time to worry about the thing striking her.

  The cabin consisted of just one large room. There was a kitchen area with a one-burner wood stove, a tiny refrigerator, a crude table with two chairs. Open shelves were stocked with necessities. Canned foods, condiments, canisters of sugar and flour, cans of Dr Pepper. There was a sink with a pump-action faucet. The rest of the cabin was taken up by an old couch, a narrow, neatly made iron bed, and a dozen or more rifles, cleaned and polished and lined up in racks along the end wall.

  Mari stared at the arsenal, jaw slack. The guns were all huge and deadly looking, some with scopes of exotic size and shape. Del Rafferty slipped the one he'd shot at her with off his shoulder and went about the business of unloading it and wiping it down, completely ignoring her as he did so. She thought of the way he'd fired at her, never offering so much as a word of apology afterward. She thought of Lucy riding into that same clearing.

  Sheffield claimed he hadn't seen her. Had Del Rafferty?

  She backed away from him, her gaze locked on the scar that disfigured his jaw. The backs of her knees hit the edge of a kitchen chair, and she sat down abruptly, her hand landing on the tabletop, sending a hunting knife skittering.

  Her stomach rolled over like a dead dog as she turned and, for the first time, took in the knives neatly lined up beside a sharpening stone and a can of 3-In-One oil. Del walked straight up to her, picked up the buck knife with its wide, vicious blade, and set it out of her reach, as if he thought she might somehow spoil its edge just by touching it. Her heart slid down from her tonsils to the base of her throat.

  He called the Stars and Bars on a radio tucked among the condiments on the small kitchen counter. His only words on making contact were “Get up here. There's a woman. I want her gone.” Then he went out to tend to his horse, leaving Mari alone with her imagination.

  It took J.D. an hour to reach the camp. An hour in the cab of his truck, lurching up the side of the mountain on the old logging trail, a torrential downpour obscuring his vision to a watery blur and turning the trail into a quagmire. The old truck slid and skidded, bounced and jolted, rattling J.D.'s temper with every bump. By the time he climbed out of the mud-splattered 4X4, he was fit to wring somebody's neck. Del hadn't named names, but there was little doubt in J.D.'s mind that the woman plaguing his uncle's solitary existence was Mary Lee.

  Del's hounds came running through the puddles, baying. Zip jumped out of the truck bed with a bark of welcome for his pals. The four dogs trotted around the pickup, sniffing and peeing on the tires. The rain had moved on to the other side of the Absarokas, on toward the Beartooth range, leaving everything dripping, glistening, fragrant. A million bugs filled the air, and the birds sang sweet spring songs.

  All J.D. noticed was the mud that sucked at his boots as he stomped across the yard toward the cabin. When he got back home, they would be inoculating steers and heifers up to their asses in muck. On the up side, he could put off changing the irrigation dams to the hay ground for another day or two. He would give that job to Tucker and let Chaske get a start on trimming and shoeing the cow horses while he drove into New Eden to meet with the banker about the Flying K deal. The plans and schemes and worries zoomed around in his head like the swallows swooping through the air to feast on the post-rain insect swarms.

  Del appeared out of the shadows of the woodshed looking pale and angry. His forehead was banded with lines of tension. The scar on his jaw jerked his mouth down at the corner.

  “Don't want her here,” he said tightly.

  “That makes two of us,” J.D. grumbled.

  “Never stops talking.”

  “She claims to be capable of silence. I haven't witnessed it yet myself.”

  Del grabbed his arm in a viselike grip. His eyes were glassy. “Sometimes she's the other one,” he blurted out desperately. “I don't want the other one coming back. I don't want anyone here. This is my place.”

  “I know.” J.D. gentled his tone, reining back his own temper as he turned and faced his uncle.

  His heart sank like a stone. Del was on one of his mental ledges. There had been a time when J.D. had fully expected him to hurl himself off into the great abyss—literally—but he had thought those times were past. The old soldier had been passing fair for a long time. He did well up here by himself—as well as could be expected, considering the war had fractured his mind b
eyond repair. He tended the cattle when they came up to summer pasture. The rest of the time he spent with his rifles and his dogs.

  City people would have called that crazy, but for Del it was a reasonably sane existence, better than what he'd had in the V.A. hospital, better than what he had found in countless bottles of Jack Daniel's after he had come back from the war. He had found a balance. Now that balance was slipping—thanks to Mary Lee Jennings.

  “I'll take her away,” J.D. said. “She'll never come back. That's a promise.”

  A shudder jolted through Del. He stared at his nephew and wanted to cry like a child. He was a disgrace: weak, crazy, a burden on his family. The shame of that twined inside him with the threads of old memories, old fears, things from the past, from the 'Nam. All of it coiled together in his brain like snakes, writhing and biting one another, impossible to separate. He had tried to calm himself, to push all the bad stuff out of his head, but he was beyond calming. He had reached the point where the mental fist of self-protection had closed tightly over that small part of his mind that was sanity while the snakes battled and twisted and his heart pumped frantically.

  “What about the other one? I don't want the other one coming back.”

  J.D. sighed heavily. “She won't come back, Del. She's dead.”

  Del shook his head and turned away, rubbing the disk of smooth, hard flesh on his jaw, his fingers coming away wet with saliva. The North Vietnamese bullet that had shattered his face and blown a hole through his skull had severed nerves en route. Now he drooled like an idiot. He wiped the trail of spit with his shirt-sleeve. J.D. didn't know the dead came back to him on a regular basis. J.D. didn't know he often saw them in the trees at night, moving among the dark trunks—the corpses of men he had served with, the rotted bodies of men he had shot. The blonde. People said the dead were dead and gone. They didn't know anything.