Putting Lipstick on a Pig

by Michael Bowen

  In an explosive surge of adrenaline, Melissa dashed through the door and began sprinting with long, loping strides away from the cabin, across Old Logging Road Lane, and through the calf-deep snow toward the austere woods.

  Chapter 31

  “Melissa! You’re pulling a Hayes on me! Don’t run off!”

  Melissa heard Stewart’s voice clearly but at a perceptible distance. Without looking back, she could tell he was running after her. She thought she had about two hundred yards on him. Striding through snow this deep felt like running in heavy sand, and her coat and winter boots didn’t help. The crust of the snow cut into her shins. Her legs already felt heavy.

  Come ON! When you were sixteen you could run three miles in twenty-two minutes thirty-eight point seven seconds. He may be super-fit, but you have twenty-five YEARS on him! Move it!

  She darted into the woods, dodging white-barked trees and ducking leafless branches. In the virgin snow she was leaving a trail that anyone could follow, but the trees would provide some cover if he started shooting. She tacked to her left, seeking a route that would take her parallel to the lakeshore while keeping her in the woods. The sound of Stewart crashing through the timber twenty or thirty seconds behind her pumped her a bit.

  But not enough. The frigid air she hungrily gulped seemed to sear her protesting lungs. She felt an ominous hollow in her diaphragm, the first warning that she was going to run out of wind before long. Those sub-eight-minute miles had come seventeen years ago, and thirty minutes on an elliptical now and then hadn’t kept her in shape for something like this.

  Stewart sounded like he’d fallen a bit farther behind. She sensed, though, that this reflected calculation rather than fatigue. He was sacrificing distance to preserve endurance, figuring that he’d follow the clear trail she was leaving and then close the gap fast enough when she ran out of gas and collapsed. She’d had to start at a sprint instead of beginning slowly and building her pace gradually. The price in pain was steep, and she was already paying it.

  Don’t quit! She sought some distraction, some mental exercise to take her mind off the pain. “You’re not a loser just because you’re defeated. You’re a loser only if you quit.” Who said that? G. K. Chesterton? No, an American. Hemingway? No, a politician. Theodore Roosevelt? Not orotund enough for him. Nixon! That was it, Nixon said it. She was quoting Richard Nixon! Well, he’d gotten that one right. That and China. Give him those two.

  Glancing to her left, she glimpsed the lake through an uneven screen of birch and pine. Running less than five minutes now, she felt sweat freezing on her face and soaking through her shirt. Sharp stitch in her rib cage, on the right side. That’s okay, that’s okay. You can run through pain. Pain just means you don’t want to run, not that you can’t. The way your body lets you know you can’t run any more is that you start throwing up. Or you die, that’s another way you can tell.

  She tripped on something buried under the snow and sprawled spreadeagled, bruising one knee and lacerating the other on a pointed rock. She swore fluently under her breath but willed the sobs not to come. You can cry later. What was Golda Meir’s line? “Tell Kissinger he can sleep when the war is over.”

  She scrambled franticly to her feet. For a terrible instant she thought her legs would refuse her command to run again. Then they moved, two strides, three, and she was off once more. She’d managed less than a mile so far, and her breath was coming now in shallow, scorching pants. If her plan was going to work it had better work pretty soon, because she didn’t think she had much left.

  She could still hear Stewart, a little farther behind than before but running steadily. No shouting and no shots. Just relentless mushing and an occasional branch snap.

  Pumping her arms, she reached a little deeper. That bought her another hundred yards. That was it. She begged her body for more, pleaded for just ten more strides, and her body said no. With a piercing gasp she fell to both knees and began vomiting violently into the snow.

  As soon as the retching stopped and she’d spat the last of the stomach acid from her mouth, she snapped her head around to look behind her. She saw trees and snow. She couldn’t see Stewart, just a vague, indistinct movement in the middle distance through the timber. Whatever he’d paid for that white camouflage jacket, he’d gotten his money’s worth.

  She sagged back, resting her bottom on her heels. She lacked the strength even to stand. It wouldn’t be long now. Thirty seconds? Forty? Well, she hadn’t quit. Rep would know that, and he’d be proud of her.

  She glanced back again. The obscure movement was much closer, no more than forty yards away. If she was right she had ten seconds to live.

  Rifle shots barked crisp and clear through the frigid air. The indistinct movement abruptly stopped.

  Melissa’s eyes widened. She recoiled, and a quick, shrill shriek escaped from her. If I was right, I just saved two lives. And whether I was right or wrong, I just killed a man.

  With standing up still out of the question, she lurched forward, catching herself on her hands as they sank into the snow in front of her. On all fours, head sagging, she sucked air in short, shallow drafts. She forced her mouth closed, made herself breathe through her nose, held the breath as long as she could, then pursed her lips and expelled it through her mouth. Nine more of those and then she chanced a deep breath, gulping cold air into her lungs. She winced as pain lanced through the right side of her body.

  No fun, but she could handle it. She jerked her torso upright. Her bare hands were raw from their immersion in the snow, but she scarcely noticed. She was kneeling now, with no light-headedness and no black dots dancing in front of her eyes. That was the important thing. She brought her right leg up, planting her foot in the snow. Then, laboriously, she pushed herself erect. A queasy wave of nausea rippled from her belly to her throat, but she closed her eyes and held her breath and it passed.

  Numbly, senses dulled, she began to stumble back the way she had come, toward where the indistinct mass had stopped after the rifle shots. She had her hands buried as deeply in the parka’s pockets as she could get them. She couldn’t feel her fingers. So this is what it’s like to be in shock. She’d had that kind of reaction before. So this is what it’s like to smoke pot. And not long after that: So this is what it’s like to make love. Except that one had just been what it was like to have sex. Making love had come much later. Each time she’d had the same reaction, the reaction she was having now: That’s it? What’s the big deal?

  She knew she was getting close when she heard chatter, first as a vague rumble and then sharpening into understandable words from three distinct voices. All male, she thought, one sounding a bit younger than the other two.

  “It wasn’t your fault.”

  “I was shooting at a deer. I didn’t even see him.”

  “Wasn’t your fault. Not a thing you coulda done.”

  “You saw the deer, didn’t you? I had him in my sights, I swear. This guy just came outta nowhere.”

  “Look at him. No blaze orange, no red, no colors at all. Like he was trying to get shot.”

  Melissa came within sight of the trio. They stood around Stewart’s body, splayed prone in blood-soaked snow. In a 1950s movie Stewart would still be alive, rolled over on his back, a gaping exit wound mysteriously reduced to a small puncture politely oozing manageable trickles of blood. He’d gasp out some helpful exit line. A confession, perhaps, but not necessarily. Maybe a wry, ironic commentary, a curtain speech with style and a touch of class.

  But this wasn’t a 1950s movie. Melissa didn’t know if Stewart had been dead before he hit the ground. She didn’t know if he’d heard the shot that killed him. But she knew he was dead now.

  The three men looked up sharply at her, their expressions surprised and a bit shocked, as if she were naked. Then she realized that, in a sense, she was: she didn’t have a rifle. One of the men hastily dug a flask from the side pocket of his hunting coat and offered it to her. Melissa
hadn’t had undiluted bourbon in more than ten years, but she accepted the proffer and helped herself to a modest swig. The occasion seemed to demand it, and she figured it would warm her up.

  It did.

  “Who are you?” one of the older men asked.

  “My name is Melissa Seton Pennyworth. I’m staying in the cabin about a mile from here, on Old Logging Road Lane.”

  “Do you know who he is?”

  “Listen,” the younger guy blurted, before she could answer, “did you see a deer a few minutes ago, running through here?”

  “Yes,” Melissa said dully.

  That was a lie, but she figured it was a lie he needed to hear. She glanced around the group. She hadn’t told them the body was Ken Stewart’s, and she didn’t want to, at least not yet.

  “Has someone sent for the police?” she asked.

  “Sven went hiking off to look for a warden. If he doesn’t come on one before he gets to a working phone, he’ll call it in. Worst case is he has to go all the way to the highway and flag someone down. Shouldn’t be too long. Is there a phone in that cottage?”

  Melissa started to say, “Not working,” but checked herself. She needed an exit line of her own. She didn’t know the protocol for reacting to corpses lying in the forest, but she suspected it didn’t involve just walking away without some kind of official sanction.

  “I actually haven’t tried the phone there yet.” The second lie came more easily than the first, just as Grammy Seton had warned her when she was seven. “I’ll go over and check.”

  As she began to move, the men parted to make room for her.

  “Excuse me,” one of the older ones said as she stepped past him, “but what were you doing out here? I mean, obviously you’re not hunting.”

  Melissa supposed that, now that she’d started down the slippery slope of depravity, the third lie should have tripped effortlessly off her lips. But it didn’t. She told the truth.

  “I was running from him,” she said, looking down at Stewart.

  “Why was he chasing you?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  The truth again. It might get to be a habit.

  Chapter 32

  Melissa’s cell phone double-chirped about halfway between Plover and Stevens Point, fifty-some freeway minutes south of the cabin. She was riding next to Rep, who was driving Kuchinski’s Escalade.

  “Please pull over as soon as you can, honey,” she told Rep. “My cell phone just found a signal and I’m not sure how much farther we can go without losing coverage again.”

  “Okay. A sign back there said there’s a rest area in a mile or so.”

  Melissa punched her voice-mail code into the phone and raised it to her ear. She played the latest message twice, and lowered the phone only eighty seconds later, just as Rep eased the Escalade into the rest area’s parking lot. He pulled it over parallel to a bank of plowed snow on the far side of the lot instead of parking in one of the marked slots near the nondescript building housing pay phones and vending machines.

  “That was a message from Gael,” Melissa said. “She got the voice-mail I left from the pay phone before we got under way.”

  “So she knows you’re headed to Madison to talk to her?”

  “Yes, but she said she’ll be heading back anyway and wants me to call her so we don’t just drive past each other.” Melissa was already punching a new number into her phone.

  “Gael, this is Melissa Pennyworth,” Melissa said a few seconds later in a tag-you’re-it voice that told Rep she was responding to yet another voice-mail prompt. “I just picked up the message you left when you returned my call. I really want to talk to you face-to-face as soon as possible. Rep and I are at the rest area near Exit 153 on I-39. My phone is about out of power, but Rep and I will wait here for you.”

  ***

  “Melissa Pennyworth is planning on being back here mid-afternoon or so,” Kuchinski told the deputy sheriff at the cottage door a few minutes later. “You’re welcome to wait inside if you like.”

  The deputy looked reasonably trim for fifty-five or so. Unfortunately, Kuchinski figured, he was probably about twenty-eight. His khaki uniform shirt collar showed above a chocolate brown leather jacket. And no hat. The day had warmed slightly but it wasn’t no-hat warm, not by a long shot.

  “Are you real sure she’s going to be back?” the deputy asked.

  “Well, she’s driving my SUV with the best buck I ever shot tied to its luggage rack, so if we don’t see her by sundown I’ll join the posse myself.”

  “Just what did she think was more important than a dead guy?”

  “The dead guy’s widow,” Kuchinski said, lowering his voice. “Melissa wants Gael to hear about what’s happened face-to-face, from her.”

  The deputy chewed that over for about three seconds and then gave Kuchinski the slightest head movement that could possibly qualify as a nod.

  ***

  Leaning against the driver’s side door of the Escalade, Rep glanced over at Melissa. She stood about five feet away, gazing glassy-eyed at the freeway. She had left her coat open during the long drive and didn’t bother to re-zip it now. Without making a production out of it, Rep strolled behind her, slipped his right hand under the collar of her coat, and began kneading the tense muscles below her neck with practiced, circular movements of his fist.

  “That’s heaven,” she murmured, arching her head back.

  “The pitching coach for the Milwaukee Brewers always feels his pitchers’ neck and shoulder muscles when he visits them on the mound, to see how worked up they are,” he said. “If you were a pitcher, I’d be signaling the bullpen with both arms right now.”

  “You don’t think of people from rich families fighting in Vietnam,” she mused, out of nowhere, as much to herself as to him.

  “That’s true. Vietnam was a working class war. Hillbillies, farm boys, factory workers, ghetto kids. That was the stereotype.”

  “Ken made some crack about Vietnam. Some macho thing they used to say there. And I felt this little jolt inside my brain. Ken had served in that war. I guess I’d known that at some level, but it was buried.”

  “He certainly didn’t have to go,” Rep said. “He could have ducked the draft even more easily than Vance Hayes did. If he hadn’t wanted to stay in school his family could have gotten him a National Guard slot, and that’s just for starters. Instead he volunteered for Officer Candidate School.”

  “Vietnam would have been a logical place for Ken to pick up that special model revolver that killed Levitan.”

  “More logical than Roger Leopold buying it in the underworld equivalent of a flea market,” Rep said, continuing the massage. “Detective Washington made that Smith and Wesson sound like it was two steps up from a flintlock. I suspect Leopold would have opted for something a bit more state of the art.”

  “You’ve been reading ‘Crimestoppers Textbook’ from the old Dick Tracy comic strips again, haven’t you?” A trace of banter at last brought a glimmer to her voice.

  “Was it the Vietnam crack that made you sure Ken was going to kill us instead of just bullying us into silence?”

  “I never got to be sure. When I started running I was about sixty percent confident that I was right. I might not have led him into the woods if I hadn’t noticed there was no car or a truck outside. How had he gotten there? I figured he must have come on the snowmobile I’d seen this morning, hidden under the dock.”

  “Implying that he’d snuck in and had been watching the cabin from hiding.”

  “That’s the way I saw it. You don’t have to cover your tracks like that if all you’re interested in is a little heart-to-heart chat.”

  “It hangs together, all right.”

  “But it’s not conclusive, is it?” Melissa asked—said, really, making it a question just to be polite.

  “I don’t have the slightest doubt that you did the right thing, if that’s what you’re asking
.”

  “That’s just because you love me unconditionally. You’d think I’d done the right thing if I’d shot him in the back while he was sleeping.”

  “That would depend on how many shots you took.”

  She shrugged her coat off her shoulders.

  “A little farther down, on the right,” she said. “Ahh, that’s perfect.”

  “In re doing the right thing, your unconditional love comment hit it right across the seams. I figure in this discussion you need a husband more than a lawyer. If you’d like, though, I can do clinical and analytical too. But that will involve suspending the massage.”

  “Be my guest.”

  Rep freed his right hand and tramped toward the rear of the Escalade. He opened the hatch to reveal the garage door opener that Kuchinski had jury-rigged into a winch. The clip-ring still dangled from the chain. The paintball gun and the remote control lay on the floorboard beside it.

  “This is a paintball gun,” Rep said, picking up that item.

  “So far I’m keeping up.”

  Rep dropped a round, red paint pellet into the chamber, then fired at the pavement ten feet away. A vivid, red splat stained the concrete.

  “Very impressive,” Melissa said with boys-will-be-boys archness.

  “If you’re twelve. It gets better.”

  He dropped a misshapen lump of gray lead into the chamber.

  “Is that a bullet?”

  “It used to be.”

  “Where in the world did you get it?”

  “Walt always saves the spent slugs from when he sights in just before deer seasons starts. He brings them along on the hunt for good luck.”

  “Won’t it be too big for the barrel?”

  “Shouldn’t be. The paintball gun is forty-two caliber, and the bullet is only a little over thirty.”

  “How confident are you this is going to work?”

  “Nowhere near your sixty percent, that’s for sure. A mental image of this snapped into my mind this morning when I saw Walt holding the remote control for this contraption as if it were a Dictaphone. But mental images don’t count. We need a working model.”