Antler Dust (The Allison Coil Mystery Series Book 1)

by Mark Stevens

  Rocky stepped over to his backpack and dug out a small grease-stained notebook from a side pocket. He jotted down the GPS unit number and a note about the location and time of day, along with a few details about the animal.

  The elk was theirs. Tagged. Marked for death, though the date was unknown.

  “Nice work, as always,” said a voice behind him. Rocky whirled around.

  Grumley.

  Rocky’s boss was dressed for a week’s worth of icy air, goose-down pants with beaver-skin mittens dangling from his belt. He was holding a rifle in his right fist. A rusty Eddie Bauer watch dangled from a leather lanyard around his neck. There was a story to that watch. Grumley treasured the timepiece and insisted he would be buried with it around his neck. The watch had been taken from the stomach of a bear he’d shot. The bear had invaded a Boy Scout camp up near Meeker. None of the scouts had been hurt, but the scoutmaster had been mauled to death. It had taken Grumley three days of tracking through rugged high-country terrain to catch up with the bruin. When he had hoisted the bear from the branch of a tree for bloodletting, the watch had fallen from a slit in its belly. Grumley tried to bring the watch back to the scoutmaster’s next of kin, but they wanted Grumley to keep it as thanks for his efforts to protect others. The watch was still ticking.

  “Did I take you by surprise?” said Grumley.

  This was a loaded question. It was never a smart move to admit being taken by surprise in the high country, but there was no advantage in lying to Grumley.

  “Fuck, my heart’s pounding. Jesus, don’t ever do that again.” The notebook quivered in Rocky’s hand.

  Grumley had a peculiar look on his face.

  “Is that the bull we were after?”

  “Has to be,” said Rocky.

  “Good,” said Grumley. “A bonus.”

  Grumley wiped his beard and lips with the back of his hairy hand. He had a habit of scratching or twiddling at the thick, three-inch tuft of gray-white beard on his chin.

  Rocky didn’t understand what Grumley meant by “bonus.” Maybe he was supposed to know, but he didn’t ask. Grumley was not the kind of man who liked being pestered with questions.

  The elk began pawing at the dirt. It was starting to recover from the knockout drug injected by the dart.

  Grumley watched the animal with professional interest. He owned the hunting guide operation and Rocky knew Grumley saw the elk as only one thing: money in the bank.

  Rocky Carnivitas watched the elk with apprehension, hoping he had done everything correctly. Rocky didn’t like people looking over his shoulder and passing judgment on the quality of his workmanship. But then, who did?

  “How the hell did you sneak up on me?” Rocky said. “I thought you were with your buddies. And, say, did you hear the damn protesters?”

  “I’ve been thinking about your ... whaddya call it?” Grumley’s handmade twirling motions as he tried to find the right word. The gun swayed in his grip.

  “Proposal,” said Rocky.

  “Right.”Rocky felt a rolling earthquake sensation in his gut. How the hell had he missed being followed? And why was his boss here anyway?

  “Let’s review that proposal, shall we?”

  The last time they had talked, Rocky was able to screw up his courage to confront Grumley by knocking back a couple of double Wild Turkeys and then describing his proposal quickly. After Rocky had spelled things out, Grumley looked at him intently, thoughtfully—as if Rocky was simultaneously delivering a well-designed business plan and relieving Grumley of a chronic tension headache. The session had taken place in the barn a week earlier. Since then, Rocky had wondered when and how the subject would come up again. He had hardly suspected it would happen here and now, up in the high country, with a gun right there, flopping about in Grumley’s hand.

  “Okay, you want me to give you twenty grand,” Grumley said, “or some such healthy amount like that. Right?”

  “That’s just a for instance amount,” Rocky said, squatting down next to the elk to check the collar again, acting casual. As if this whole sordid situation was no big deal.

  “What do you mean? You said an amount but you don’t mean it?” said Grumley.

  “The ballpark,” said Rocky. “Not necessarily the final number.”

  “So the amount of money might go up from there?”

  “Or down. Depends on the situation.”

  “Okay, the ballpark,” Grumley said. “The ballpark. And all of it buys me freedom from my wife and buys me solid gold guaranteed one hundred percent protection, because you are going to sit tight and not discuss my business operation with the authorities. Have I got it right? Is that the rough idea?”

  When Rocky had first conceived of the plan it had made sense, the kind of sense incubated in a bottle of Wild Turkey. But now he was not so certain of its wisdom. Rocky stood up. The clouds had thickened in the past few minutes and the air carried a fresh whiff of pine. He ignored the erratic twitching of the elk’s hind legs. It made a scrabbling sound on the rocks.

  “That’s more or less the idea,” Rocky said. “But if you want to talk—”

  “Good. Because I have a question, Rocky. Have you been screwing my wife?”

  Rocky froze. “What the hell do you mean?” he said, worried that the pause had given him away.

  “You little fuck,” growled Grumley. “She ...

  “She what?”

  “She wants—”

  “Oh, so you know what Trudy wants, huh?” Grumley scoffed. “Just beautiful.” He held both arms out as if he could hug the hillside. The rifle dangled loosely in his hand.

  Rocky spoke quickly. “Trudy only wants enough money to make another start.”

  “I can’t believe I’m talking to a guy who’s screwing my wife.” Rocky swallowed hard. He kept an eye on the gun. “It’s seed money to get her going,” he said. “Seed for two fuckin’ birds?”

  “It would only put a dent in your stash,” Rocky said with a note of certainty in his voice.

  “How would you know? Have you been examining my books?” said Grumley.

  “You screw my wife and you mess around with my business too, is that it? Did you hear what I said? My business. Think about it.”

  “It’s just a drop in the—”

  “Says who? Fuck you and your miserable plan.” Grumley pointed the barrel of the gun at Rocky’s face. “How does a nobody like you figure he’s gonna snap his fingers and make himself a somebody?”

  Snow began falling. It was sudden. No advance troops. The storm started in full battle mode.

  “Well—”

  Grumley took a step forward. Rocky backed up to where the elk lay scraping the rocks with its hooves. Grumley’s fist came up gripping the gunstock like a brick. Rocky reeled backward and reached out to clutch at a rock, any rock, to brace his fall. His cheek was on fire.

  Rocky crawled toward his backpack, coughing, spitting blood, disoriented. He shook his head and struggled to his knees, knelt over his pack and dug into it. There was one shot of xylazine left. He swung around and pressed the barrel of a dart gun against the elk’s still-quivering neck, a nice soft spot. The overdose would be as effective as a bullet behind the ear. The elk would die fast.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Grumley said. “Trying to get your goddamn attention.” Rocky cocked the dart gun.

  “Okay, okay,” said Grumley.

  Rocky felt a surge of relief. The situation was coming under his control. He still felt woozy from the sucker punch. The bruise on his cheek was going to be a humdinger.

  Grumley walked away. He made it fifteen feet.

  “Goddamn,” he snarled. He turned around, his rifle up pointed at Rocky. “My business is my fucking business!”

  But Rocky fired first. He pulled the trigger, sending the dart into the soft flesh of the elk’s neck. There was nothing Grumley could do now to stop the elk from dying. Rocky looked up at the muzzle of the rifle pointed at his face and realized too late he had
used the weapon on the wrong beast.

  ****

  The hour it took to get to the top of the mountain was given over to a thousand “what ifs” as Allison Coil contemplated the constant flurry of choices offered up by the world. The elk’s choices had led him to a bullet. Her choice had left Vic’s tent less crowded. With the sky dropping, her decisions now might turn out to be critical to her survival during the long journey down to the canyon. The gathering storm would no doubt curb the zeal of the protesters who had set up tents at the base of the mountain that morning.

  Allison had not given much thought to them until now. She imagined that most of them were like the men she had left back at the hunter’s camp, city dwellers out on a lark. But with the coming snowstorm, they might learn the hard way that Mother Nature was indifferent to the rights of everyone and everything on this planet. You might as well protest earthquakes, fires, floods and falling airplanes.

  A rifle shot interrupted her thoughts.

  She yanked the reins and instinctively rose in the stirrups to get a bearing on the sound. No point in walking into crossfire. She was at the top of Black Squirrel Pass, the summit of the ridge that formed the west wall of Ripplecreek. Sounds traveled strangely in the mountains.

  She waited and listened. She reached for her binoculars that were tucked in a front saddlebag. Bear peered around inquisitively, lowered his neck. He chomped on a stray tuft of meadow rue. The pack mule, Eli, looked asleep.

  The scrub ahead was vacant, but the chest-high brush farther on could hide a large herd of deer or an army of hunters.

  The upper bowl of Ripplecreek was nearly a mile across. Through her binoculars, the falling snow at the top of the pass was compressed into a porous white whirl that turned distant clumps of trees into nothing more than dark blotches with undefined edges, vague shadows.

  Something moved. It was so small in her field of vision that it did not register at first. A tiny shape was moving near a cluster of rocks, off the trail, near Lizard’s Tongue. It was a gray splotch with legs and muscles. Somebody struggling or pulling.

  The shape disappeared, gobbled up by a small stand of trees.

  Allison lowered the binoculars and squinted. With the naked eye, there was no detail except swirling snowflakes. She raised the lenses again.

  There was nothing but fuzzy whiteness now. She replayed the mental movie: four or five seconds’ worth of film, a man tugging an object, a shape, something of substance through the snow. Dragging a deer? A lone do-it-yourselfer using a sled to haul a carcass? Perhaps.

  She put the binoculars back, cinched her hat down against the chilly wind and gave Bear a cluck. She dug into her jacket pocket for a Fig Newton. The trail would take her past Lizard’s Tongue, where she could get a closer look at what she had seen through the binoculars. The man’s body language told her one thing: he was in a bit of a scramble, hurrying as if the clock was ticking. She looked up at the oncoming storm. Perhaps it was.

  Two

  At the mouth of the canyon, Dawn Ellenberg sat in base camp holding a walkie-talkie while two reporters with notepads stood nearby chatting with each other. Maria Nash was the poorly dressed, slightly nervous cub scribe from Glenwood Springs. Robert P. Calkins III was a more seasoned reporter, a brash young man from the Vail Trail. Neither had taken a note in over an hour.

  Ellenberg had poured countless hours into her PR campaign, pumping the event as having Woodstockian dimensions. For all her troubles, Nash and Calkins were the only two “journalists” she had managed to muster to the scene. Not one television crew had shown up. No USA Today. No People magazine. No Denver newspaper reporters either, even though she had bought lunch for a Denver-based correspondent and had extracted from him a “we’ll see, maybe” over curried chickpea tofu. No one had even bothered to make the drive over from Aspen.

  Maria Nash and Robert P. Calkins III. That was all. There she was; there they were. The word would go out from her mouth to their pencil tips and through their meek little computers to their editors. Ultimately, it would be another afterthought in the big, flying sweep of worldwide news. Nash had asked her fair share of questions, but nothing out of the ordinary.

  “What is the size of the army of protesters?” she had asked earlier.

  “About five hundred,” said Ellenberg.

  “How many did you anticipate?”

  “There was really no way to know, but we’re thrilled with the turnout.”

  “Is it enough to get the job done?”

  “You bet.”

  Calkins had held back, letting Nash do the nuts-and-bolts dirty work, then weighed in.

  “Is the big meat-eating public out there really with you?” he asked. “Have you studied the meat-eating statistics lately? The numbers are up, I’ve gotta tell you.”

  Ellenberg responded at first with a thoughtful pause.

  “Every great cause starts with someone saying ‘enough, enough.’ We need to educate the public,” she said. “We need to enlighten the public and that’s why we are here today.”

  Dawn Ellenberg was the founder and lead piper of FATE, which stood for Fighting Animal Torture Everywhere. She was the star of the show—which amounted only to a mini-show at this point.

  A strong wood fire burning a few feet away helped beat back the growing grayness and the cold. She hoped the glow of firelight cast her apple cheeks and long, full hair in an earnest light. Even if there weren’t photographers she still wanted to look the part of a revolutionary leader. She bent down, planted her boots flat on the ground and rubbed the heat from the fire into her legs.

  Whenever team leaders radioed in, bizarre noises filled Ellenberg’s walkie-talkie. The faithful had brought drums, snares and bongos. They had dragged up cymbals, whistles, wood blocks, bells, horns, boom boxes. They played everything from rap to Beethoven. There were yellers, barkers and howlers. They were scattered throughout the canyon, making their presence known. But when her radio was silent, the effect was not as impressive. She had wanted a pervasive sense of bedlam that would send every mammal scurrying out of harm’s way.

  Next year she would recruit animal lovers from the entire country, draw them all in for a seminal bash that would define the word “protest” for decades to come. It would be like Burning Man, only with purpose and results. The 1968 Democratic Convention, G8 Summit and European anti-nuclear marches were all known for their massive protests.

  She would put this canyon—and FATE—on the map.

  The storm was unwelcome. Had the TV cameras been there, it might have appeared to the viewing audience that the protesters were committed troopers—real warriors, not city wimps—willing to take on the hunters in even the toughest elements. But there were no cameras. And if it wasn’t on TV, it was no revolution.

  “Give me your wrap-up thoughts,” said Nash. “Success or not?”

  Nash had a husky voice. Her eyes jumped like she was in a rush. Her stringy black hair fell indifferently. If the public relations success of this day depended on reporters like Nash, Ellenberg didn’t hold out much hope.

  “This is a miserable day for Colorado hunters,” said Ellenberg, with all the gravitas she could muster. Nobody respected whiners. “Anyone who has ever loaded a rifle in the name of wholesale slaughter has to be nervous. They’re on the run now. They’re scared. The wholesale slaughter has got to stop, will stop, can be stopped.”

  It was the speech she had rehearsed for a gaggle of reporters and cameras. But by the time she looked up, Nash had already stopped writing. Calkins hadn’t budged. Maybe he had a secret digital recorder and was getting it all.

  “This is hell day for hunters,” she said, straight to Calkins. “Things do change. Americans used to smoke at work. Americans used to drink and drive. But society made changes and it will soon make another. This is hell day, the beginning of the end, for hunters. Not only in this pristine Colorado canyon, but in every hollow, in every field and along every stream where the hunters’ holocaust takes place. They have
heard the noise today. Believe me, they have heard. From now on, it’s their days that are numbered.”

  She gazed solemnly into the fire.

  “How will you know for sure this worked?” said Nash.

  “If I know in my heart that one animal has been spared from the wholesale slaughter, then it worked.” She paused for effect. “One animal. That would suffice.”

  Nash clicked her pen.

  “Praise the animals,” said Ellenberg, her cheeks baked in the fire’s heat. “We are at one with them today.”

  ****

  Allison slowed Bear at the base of Lizard’s Tongue, a distinctive spire of rock like a castle turret. The snow fell with intensity. Down to the right, where the slope dropped quickly, was the rocky scree where the man had disappeared.

  If the deer was already dead, no hunter in his right mind would have contemplated negotiating such a steep pitch. On top of that, a deer would not drag well in one piece, unless it was a fawn. And no one could have cut it into pieces so soon after the shot. For whatever reason, the man might be in trouble, might need help. She could not glide past the spot without seeing if he would resurface.

  She turned around in her saddle, thinking she might be able to spot Black Squirrel Pass and reverse the line of sight in her mind. She could barely see three hundred yards.

  She gave Bear a pat on the neck and climbed down. She checked on the stoic Eli, who never seemed to mind much of anything. She squatted at the trail’s edge and peered down across the tops of the rocks. Each rock was coated equally with a white stocking cap on its featureless face. She wrapped Bear’s rein around a rock and headed up to Lizard’s Tongue.

  From near the top, Allison found a perch where she could steady herself and look farther down the slope. There were more rocks and snow. The view was of a broader landscape, but still empty. She panned the scene through the binoculars, panned back with even more care, overlapping every frame. Nothing.