“Yeah,” Dave said, “but it’s also pretty wide. What happens if it gets narrow?”
“What happens if another stream feeds into it?” Pap said.
“I’ve never known such a couple of worrywarts! You already should have your poor-man’s waders and now you’re worrying about something else. What more do you expect to happen?”
That’s when the mosquitoes found them. The hum of the black cloud of villainous insects was almost deafening. They were so thick around Tully’s face he was afraid of inhaling them. Clearly, the tiny beasts hadn’t found another source of nourishment all spring and now three major banquets miraculously appeared. Pap tried to pull his torn shirt up to cover the exposed portion of his back but his face and hands were already black with mosquitoes. He killed them by the dozens with each swat of his hands.
“So much for outdoor adventure,” Tully said. “Well, there’s no point in just standing here, waiting to be eaten alive.” He struck off down the creek followed by Pap and Dave. They had moved scarcely fifty yards when a stream from a spring fed into the creek. The spring bubbled up out of a clay bank, and the three of them smeared their faces and arms with thick layers of clay. Tully even smeared Pap’s exposed back. The clay worked, and the mosquitoes soon gave up and moved away in search of easier victims.
“See,” Tully said. “Just leave it to the old woodsman to fend off irritations of the wilds.”
“Irritations!” Pap said. “I’m already a quart low on blood! I would have thought the old woodsman might have remembered mosquito netting or mosquito dope.”
Dave said, “How come the tallest, best-looking guy with the best hair always gets to lead? I’d rather follow someone who knows something.”
“If you’re just going to complain about piffling details, Dave, shut up. I’m trying to identify that sound.”
The three of them stopped splashing through the water and listened. “Sounds kind of like a waterfall,” Dave said.
“You’ll notice steep rock cliffs have closed in on each side of us,” Pap said. “I don’t like the sounds and looks of any of this.”
Tully scratched a piece of moss and a small stick out of the clay on his face. The sun was now beating down into the canyon and drying the clay. He glanced at Pap and Dave, much as he hated to. The clay had dried and cracked on their faces, with moss and tiny sticks protruding. They looked like escapees from a horror film.
“What are you looking at?” Pap said.
“Nothing,” Tully said, repressing a shudder. “Let’s find out what’s up ahead.”
The sources of the roaring turned out to be a water slide, smooth rock slanting down a hundred feet or so at about the same angle as a slide Tully had once seen in a children’s water park. A layer of green moss covered the rock with water flowing over the top. The slide ended in a scoop of sorts above a long deep pool of water. A fisherman stood whipping his line out over the pool. He seemed about the size of an ant.
Pap gasped out a limp profanity. Under other circumstances, Pap would have been ashamed of its feebleness, Tully thought.
“I ain’t going down that!” Pap said.
Tully looked at the canyon walls closing in on each side. Then he turned and looked back the way they had come. “We either have to go back through the devil’s clubs and the blow-down or do the slide. It’s impossible to make our way around the cliffs.”
Dave studied the slide. “It looks doable. The pool of water down below looks deep enough to cushion the landing once you get shot out of that scoop thing.”
Pap heaved a sigh. “So it all ends like this.”
“Don’t be such a pessimist,” Tully said. “This actually could be fun. It’s even better than some of those Disneyland water rides, like the one where you come down the chute in a hollow log.”
“I hate that one!” Pap said. “And this slide is ten times bigger! And there could be sharp rocks caught in the moss. Just imagine your rear end going over one of those rocks!”
Tully said, “Well, just imagine fighting your way through those devil’s clubs and climbing back up over the blowdown from the bottom side. Anyway, you don’t have to be the first, Pap. If Dave runs into any serious trouble on the way down, we can figure out what we want to do then.”
Dave had been scrutinizing the slide. He turned around. “What was that? I’m not going down first! No, our fearless leader is going first! That’s you, Bo!”
“Actually, I would, Dave, but I thought I should stay behind to look after my old father, while you see how safe the slide is.”
Dave looked at Pap. “You know what, Bo, we could both grab Pap and throw him onto the slide and see how he makes out.”
“Sounds like a good plan,” Tully said.
“Ain’t gonna happen,” Pap said. “You’re going to have a hard time throwing an armed man onto that slide.”
Tully took another look at the slide. “Oh, all right, if both of you are too chicken, I’ll go first. Help me find a couple of short sticks to use as brakes. I’ll drag them along through the moss to slow me down.”
Dave waded over to the bank and snapped off a couple of foot-long pieces from a driftwood branch. He gave them to Tully, who was once again studying the slide. “You think these will work as brakes, Bo?”
“It’s pretty clever, if I do say so myself.” He put a stick in each hand.
“Well, shove off, Bo,” Pap said. “We ain’t got all day.”
“Shut up! I’m still studying the situation. Hey, down there!” he yelled at the fisherman. The man didn’t look up.
Pap said, “The water’s too loud. He can’t hear you.” He put a foot in the middle of his son’s back and gave a push. Tully never had a chance to use either brake. Pap said later he had the impression Bo had shot out from under his hat, which floated in the air for a second like a cartoon hat, then followed its owner. Tully streaked down the slide flat on his back, the two brakes held in the air. He briefly worried about the chute at the bottom, but then he was flying through the air. He landed in a splash halfway down the pool. He grabbed his hat and paddled over to a slab of rock at the edge of the water and pulled himself out. The clay was dripping down his face. He swept back his hair and looked around for the fisherman. The man was gone. His fly rod was lying on the rock.
Tully couldn’t understand how the man had disappeared so quickly. He peered up at the two tiny figures at the top of the slide. At least I’m not up there, he thought. Sitting down on the slide had given him the worst feeling he had ever had in his life. Dave streaked down next, holding Pap’s gold pan against his chest. He turned a complete somersault after leaving the chute and splashed down in the pool. Sputtering, he came to the surface, turned over on his back, and kicked to the rock ledge. Then Pap came flying through the air and splashed into the pool. He swam over to Tully’s rock and looked up at him. Tully looked down. “There, that wasn’t so bad, was it, Pap?”
Pap said, “I’ve had a lot of terrible things forced on me, but this is the first time I ever had to choose something that awful for myself.”
“Me, too,” Tully said. “It’s having to think about doing it beforehand that makes it so terrible.”
“Tell me about it!” Dave said, whitened fingers still clasping Pap’s gold pan to his chest.
14
THEY LEFT THE fisherman’s fly rod where it lay and worked their way around the lower pool. They came to a flattened area. The side of the canyon above them was covered with a slope of broken rock, but the ground next to the creek was carpeted with a patch of green moss. Tully looked at his watch. It was nearly noon. He took a metal flask of whiskey and a lunch of elk sausages wrapped in pancakes out of his belly pack. They sat down on a log next to the creek and ate in silence. After lunch, Pap tried his gold pan on some sand he scraped out of a crack in a large rock. Tully and Dave lay in the sun and watched him. “Hey, we’re rich!” Pap yelled.
Dave and Tully wandered over to look at the treasure. Pap stuck his index finger do
wn at the edge of a line of black sand and held the tip up for them to see two tiny specks of gold.
“How many of those do we need for a troy ounce?” Dave asked.
“About a hundred billion,” Pap said. “It does show there’s gold here, though. Might have been a lot more at one time, but like I said, these cricks get worked pretty hard by guys with portable gold dredges.”
Pap took a deep drag of whiskey from the flask. “Man, that warms me up inside and out. Now that I feel almost alive again, this looks kind of like the place I should take a nap.” He walked over to a sunny spot away from the creek and lay down on his back.
Dave looked up at the mass of broken rock that had slid down the mountain. “I used to know what they called a slide of rocks like that,” he said, pointing.
“A scree,” Pap said.
“That’s it, a scree. I guess it all came loose from that cliff up there. Water gets in a crack and freezes and breaks the rock loose and in a few thousand years you got yourself a scree.”
Pap thrashed around on the ground. “Of all the places I find to take a nap, I have to find the one with a pointy rock on it. He sat up and started to scrape away at the dirt. “Well, I’ll be darned. Lookee here what I found.” He held up the rusted head of a pick.
Tully and Dave walked over to look at the find. It was covered with rust but still contained a piece of the rotted handle. They both turned and looked up at the steep rocky slope above them. “Nothing up there,” Dave said. “Like a mine.”
“Doesn’t appear to be,” Tully said. “Maybe I’ll climb up a ways and have a look around.”
“Be my guest,” Dave said, lying down alongside Pap. “Maybe I’ll have a nap myself.”
Tully worked his way carefully up the scree. The rocks were loose and shifted under his feet, a sign they hadn’t been walked on much, not that there was any reason at all for them to be walked on. He climbed back down. Dave glanced up at him from the ground.
“Find anything?”
“No. Oh, I did find a rock with a perfectly round hole in it. It was too heavy to carry back here though.”
Pap sat up. “That’s got to be a drill hole. Maybe this scree didn’t just tumble down naturally over a million years. Maybe it was blasted loose from that cliff up there!”
They sat in silence for several moments. “The question is,” Pap finally said, “why would anyone want to blast all this rock loose for no reason at all? It’s totally useless.”
“Unless it was intended to hide something,” Dave said.
“Like the entrance to a mine,” Tully added.
Dave studied the scree and then looked at the water slide. “Say, Bo, hand me that picture Agatha gave you of Sean O’Boyle.”
Tully unwrapped the plastic and handed him the photo. Dave turned and held the picture out at arm’s length. “You know what that white stuff in the picture is?”
“Don’t have a clue.”
“It’s the water slide.”
15
THEY ROLLED ROCKS down the mountain for the rest of the day without finding what they were looking for, namely the opening to a mine. Then they climbed to the top of the scree and worked their way around the cliff. Tully had worried they would run into another blowdown, but the slope above the scree was sparsely covered with trees and relatively easygoing. They came up right at the Finch Mine and Tully’s truck.
They drove into Angst and rented a motel room. Tully washed and dried clothes at a Laundromat while Pap and Dave waited on a bench looking at months-old copies of People magazine. Then they took the clean clothes back to the motel and went over to Jake’s Café for dinner. Stubb and Gordy were sitting at their favorite table with two other loggers. Tully held up his hands. “No need to get up, fellas,” he said. “We can find a table in back.”
One of the other loggers said, “What was that all about?”
“Nothing,” said Gordy. “Just some guy smarting off.”
Bev came to take their orders. “You guys!” she said. “Welcome back!”
“Nice to see you again, Bev,” Dave said. “What’s good tonight?”
“I’m pushing the Canadian stew,” she said. “It ain’t good, but it’s the best we have.”
“Sounds delicious,” Tully said.
The four loggers, or whatever they were, got up and left. “Glad to see them go,” Tully said. “When you got assaulted the other day, Dave, I was about ready to flash my badge. That would have put them in their place.”
“Thanks a lot, Bo. It’s always nice to have someone rush to my rescue.”
“Where did you learn those moves anyway?” Pap asked.
“You promise not to tell?”
“Yup.”
“Right. Well, I’ll tell you anyway. I spent a year in Japan once. I didn’t have a whole lot to do, so I signed up for a martial arts course run by these polite little Japanese gentlemen in cute white outfits who didn’t in the least appear to be evil aliens from outer space. Because of their training, Pap, I could break both your arms in four places in three seconds, should you give me reason. So don’t give me any.”
“Three seconds?” Pap said. “I’m pretty slow now that I’m old, but it used to take me only three seconds to be half a block away. I’ve always found fleeing to be the best defense.”
“I come from a family of warriors,” Tully said.
“To tell the truth, I kind of like the idea of fleeing myself,” Dave said. “Those little guys beat me until I couldn’t crawl, let alone flee. And then they charged me big time for all the pain they caused me.”
“What were you doing in Japan anyway?” Tully asked. “Government work I bet.”
“Afraid not. Strictly private enterprise.”
Two men at a nearby table got up and headed for the door. They seemed to be having an argument. “You got to be kidding me!” one of them said. “You heard a loud screeching and then a monster came flying through the air and splashed into the pool you were fishing? Give me a break!”
“I’m not lying! The face on the thing was horrible!”
Pap and Dave watched the men leave and then turned to Tully.
“I don’t recall any screeching,” he said.
“What about the horrible face?”
“That kind of hurts my feelings.”
The waitress brought their food.
“Wow,” Pap said. “Looks like my favorite dish—Canadian stew!”
Bev laughed. “Next time you boys come in you can have Canadian hash. Jake changes the name on the stew whenever it’s more than a week old.”
Just then a young couple came through the front door, both of them wearing floppy sandals. Suddenly, the man grabbed the woman by the shoulders and tried to turn her back out the door. The woman said, “Bo, it’s you!”
“Aha!” said Tully. “If it isn’t my trusty deputy Ernie Thorpe and Miss Bunny Hunter!”
“It’s like this, Bo,” Ernie said. “Bunny—Miss Hunter—had to run a few errands in town, and I thought I’d better come along and protect her, in case Kincaid was around and like that.”
“What about Agatha and Bernice?”
“What about them? Those are the toughest old ladies I’ve ever seen. They’re armed to the teeth. If Kincaid should stop by, he won’t be leaving, at least not under his own power. I take it he is still on the loose.”
“He’s up in the Snowies,” Tully said. “Anyway, join us for dinner. It’s on the county.”
“I recommend the Canadian stew,” Dave said.
“Yeah,” Tully said. “But by all means don’t ever order the Canadian hash.”
Bunny and Ernie sat down directly across from Tully, which improved his view enormously, at least in regard to Bunny. Several times she gave him a nice smile, for no reason at all, except maybe to let him know that Ernie wasn’t a serious entity. Pap got up and wandered back toward the kitchen. Bev came rushing out, and he squeezed some bills into her hand. Before she could protest, he returned to the table. Tully
nodded at him and gave him a smile. That’s when he felt a foot slip up the bottom of his pant leg and rub up and down on his leg. Bunny was looking at Ernie, pretending to be interested in some stupid story he was telling. Tully, Dave, and Pap finished their after-dinner beers and reluctantly, at least for Tully, headed back to the truck.
Driving to the mine, Tully couldn’t help but smile. He still had it. Why he ever thought an oaf like Ernie could beat him out with Bunny, he’d never know.
“Why you smiling, Bo?” Pap asked.
“No reason.”
“Good. I was hoping it wasn’t because I ran my foot up your leg during dinner. Almost gave myself a cramp getting my boot off without you noticing.”
Dave shouted, “Cripes, Bo! You almost ran us into the ditch!”
Pap cackled and started to roll himself a cigarette.
“You better roll a cigarette,” Tully growled. “It could be your last. On second thought, I think I’ll wait and kill you right after I kill Ernie Thorpe.”
“Oh, if you’re thinking of killing me, I’d better come clean,” Pap said. “On my way back from the kitchen, I noticed Bunny slip off her sandal under the table. I figured she was up to no good. A minute later, I saw your eyes bug out and your face light up like a Christmas tree and Bunny was grinning like the Cheshire cat while she pretended she was listening to Ernie babble on.”
“You better not be lying, Pap!”
“Cross my heart.”
“And hope to die?”
“I don’t think I’d go that far.”
16
THE NEXT MORNING, Tully hated even the thought of rolling rocks for one more day. The fact they had found one drilled rock would keep him at it but not for much longer. There could be no reason for anyone blasting a cliff in this particular area, except to conceal something. “I’m losing all interest in Tom and the boy,” he told Pap and Dave. “They’d both be dead by now anyway. So what’s the point?”
The Double-Jack Murders: A Sheriff Bo Tully Mystery (Sheriff Bo Tully Mysteries) Page 9
