Strike Dog

by Joseph Heywood

  The Missouri game warden scratched his head. “Best hope hit ain’t a big ’un.”

  14

  FOURTEEN, MISSOURI

  MAY 23, 2004

  They had been walking in the darkness almost four hours, following military crests, occasionally dipping down to the uneven floors of steep ravines before climbing back up. The humidity was overwhelming in the valleys, but there was an occasional swirling breeze on top, and Grady Service found himself falling into the mindless trance that came with long-distance hiking.

  Eddie Waco rarely stopped, and when he did it was usually for less than a minute before pushing on.

  During one of their pauses in a canyon bottom, Waco said, “Y’all stay put,” and moved into some stunted yellow-bark trees with intertwined trunks.

  Service waited five minutes and looked for shade. He had taken a couple of steps when the bark of a hickory tree in front of him exploded by his head, clipping his shirt and face. He dropped to his belly as a second round took a chunk off a tree just behind him, the reports echoing through the canyon, their source impossible to pinpoint.

  He had his hand on his SIG Sauer when he looked up and saw Eddie Waco grinning. “Stand down, Michigan Man,” the Missouri warden said. “Thet’s jes’ thim ole Mahan boys a-barkin’ on you’n.”

  Service got to his feet and brushed himself off.

  “Whin I say stay, you best heed,” Eddie Waco chastised him.

  “Barking?” Service said.

  “Thim Mahans got a still halfway up yonder ridge,” he said, pointing ahead. “Anybody they don’t know gits too close, they plink a few rounds inta the trees to discourage ’em. They don’t shoot to hit nobody.”

  Waco cupped his hands and shouted, “Ikey, you and your brother put down them long guns. This here’s Eddie Waco an’ I’m just passin’ through.”

  “We seen you hain’t alone,” a voice shouted down from some trees on the hill.

  “He’s the law, same as me. We hain’t comin’ yore way, boys, but you squeeze off another round, I reckon we gonna come up yonder, all ya’ll hear?”

  “We hear,” the voice called back.

  Waco looked at Service, nodded, and started walking.

  “A still?” Service said.

  “Don’t got ’em up where you’n hail from?”

  “Meth labs,” Service said. “And marijuana plots in the state and national forests.”

  “We got us a dandy weed crop down this away too,” Eddie Waco said. “I’d rather tussle with moonshiners.”

  Seven hours after they struck away from the Eleven Point River, they descended to a shallow, shale-bottom stream running down a steep canyon and walked into a clearing with a half-dozen dark stone buildings that looked like they had grown out of the ground. The dwellings were narrow, one-floor affairs, each with an oversize wooden porch under a steep roof. All of the wood needed paint. The roofs were covered with rich, yellow-green moss. The houses looked like sturdier versions of old mining company houses in the Upper Peninsula’s Copper Country.

  “Where are we?” Service asked.

  “Fourteen,” Eddie Waco said.

  “Fourteen what?”

  “Jes Fourteen’s how hit’s called.”

  Service stopped, knelt, and splashed cool water on his neck and face. It had misted off and on during the hike, but the longer they walked the more the sun stayed out. Tendrils of steam rose off the rocks and ground. He stood up and looked: buildings but no people. “Ghost town?”

  Eddie Waco grinned. “They’s likely fifty sets a’ eyes on us hain’t ghosts, I ’speck. Long guns neither. The Spargo clan’s partial ta goin’about armed.”

  “Elray Spargo lived here?”

  “Lived up top, but he was a-born and reared down here. These here is his people and they need to know what’s gone on.”

  “We should be moving,” Service said, thinking of the FBI and his own ambiguous role in the undertaking.

  “People got their own pace back this way,” Waco said. “Do you good, stand down a bit, pay attention, listen, mebbe learn some.”

  A man in a rumpled brown suit appeared from the tree line and walked slowly toward them. He had a shotgun slung over his shoulder, the sling made of soiled gray rope. He wore a thin black tie, distressed high-top logging boots turned gray from use, and a dusty black porkpie hat cocked rakishly to the side and back of his head. Service realized the man had the hat pushed back to keep his eyes clear for possible shooting. He had done the same thing too many times to not recognize it for what it was.

  “How do, Agent Waco,” the man said, staring at Service. “Your’n partner be sippin’ thet crick watern, he’ll soon be havin’ runs a-spurtin’ outen ’is backside.”

  “You drink the watern?” Waco asked.

  Service shook his head.

  “Not too much trouble, we could use some sweetwater, Cotton,” Waco said.

  A young girl came out of the woods with a couple of quart jars and gave one to each of the two game wardens. Service noted that she kept her eyes down. She wore new white Asics tennis shoes with gaudy red and gold trim.

  The water was cold and pure. Service looked at the girl and thanked her as she slunk back toward the trees.

  “Sir, I done come ta talk,” Waco told the old man.

  The man in the brown suit walked over to them, gave Service the once-over, and squatted. Waco and Service squatted with him. “Cotton, I’m ­powerful sorry to tell you’n Elray got hisseff kilt.”

  With no emotion in his voice or face, the man said, “That what the ruckus over to the Leven Point was about?”

  “Yessir, hit was.”

  “Did the boy die brave?” the man asked.

  “He lived plenty brave; I expect he died the same,” Eddie Waco said.

  The man reached down and scooped up a handful of white dust, which he let play through his fingers. “Was a jimsonweed Christian,” the man said. “The Lord never took hold with the boy.”

  “He was a lawman,” Eddie Waco said.

  “I reckon. You on your way to tell Fiannula?”

  “Yessir.”

  The man nodded solemnly. “Reckon I’ll jes mosey along with all y’all. You’n know how Fi kin git.”

  “Suit yerseff.”

  It occurred to Service that Waco was overly deferential to the old man.

  “Fiannula packs ’at scattergun whin Elray’s away,” Cotton Spargo said.

  “She knows me,” Eddie Waco said.

  “She frees thet wildcat, thet won’t matter,” Cotton said. “They gon’ fetch my boy home?” the man asked.

  “Thought I’d use the radio at Elray’s to take care of it.”

  “Be good, we get the boy on his way to the Lord. How long since he done went?”

  Waco looked at Service, who said, “About forty-eight hours.”

  “We ain’t got much time left, this weather’n all,” Cotton Spargo said.

  The men stood up. No other people appeared. The man in the brown suit led the way with Waco and Service following. The man walked with remarkable grace at a brisk pace. Service guessed he was in his eighties.

  “The body’s legal evidence,” Service whispered to the Missouri agent as they marched up a steep hill surrounded by a thick forest of gnarled pines.

  “Things is differ’nt in these here hills,” Eddie Waco said.

  “Jimsonweed Christian?” Service whispered.

  “Hush,” Eddie Waco said softly. “Save your questions.”

  The house on the hill was built in a clearing with no trees closer than two hundred yards. The building was one story with rooms protruding at different angles. Something about it reminded Service of base camps in Vietnam, designed so that anyone approaching would have to cross a long stretch of open ground. Open space and the way rooms jutted out at nin
ety-degree angles suggested the place had been designed to create shooting lanes. It looked like a tidy fortress. Unlike the houses in the valley, this one was all wood and freshly painted, but in a brownish-gray color that made it difficult to see until you were actually in the clearing.

  “Was Spargo ex-military?” he asked as they started across the clearing.

  “Taught survival skills ta flyboys out ta Washington State,” Eddie Waco said with a frown. “No more questions.”

  There was a small woman waiting on the porch. She had a sawed-off side-by-side shotgun in the crook of her right arm and a baby in the crook of her left. She had auburn hair in a severe bun and looked to be in her late thirties, her skin leathery from too much sun. She wore oversize bib overalls embroidered with colorful flowers, and yellow flip-flops. Service saw small faces in several windows. The woman’s eyes were dark coals in red beds. She had been crying.

  “Fiannula,” the elder Spargo said.

  Her eyes were locked on Eddie Waco and Service.

  As they got closer Service smelled something sweet. The woman looked over her shoulder. “You young ’uns git away from them winders or I’ll be cuttin’ me a switch!” The faces disappeared instantly.

  “Word done come about Elray,” she said, turning back to her visitors. “I was jes about ta put on the black.”

  Service wondered how she knew, but Yoopers also had a grapevine that often surprised him in its speed and accuracy.

  “They gon’ fetch him home?” she asked

  Cotton Spargo said, “Agent Waco here will see ta Elray, Fi.”

  “Obliged,” the woman said with a faint nod to the conservation agent.

  “Okay ta use the base radio?” Waco asked.

  The woman nodded toward the house and made eye contact with Service. “Furriner,” she said.

  “Game warden from Michigan,” Waco said. “Good man.”

  The woman sighed, said, “All y’all c’mon in the house,” and shouted, “You kids fetch tea!” She had the bearing and demeanor of a drill instructor, Service thought.

  The interior was neat and clean. There were bouquets of forget-me-nots in mason jars on every surface.

  The woman led them into a large room with a long table and ten chairs around it. Everything appeared to be handmade, but there was nothing amateur about the work.

  A boy of nine or ten brought a pitcher of tea and glasses.

  They all sat down. “They best be gettin’ my husband home right quick,” she said. Service considered telling her that the authorities were slow to release bodies in cases of homicide, but this was Missouri, not Michigan, and he was a game warden, not a homicide detective. Curiously, the woman did not ask any of the normal questions about Elray’s death, and he wondered how much she knew.

  A couple of younger girls came into the room and crawled into Cotton Spargo’s lap. Service drank his sweetened tea and kept quiet.

  Eddie Waco came back and poured tea for himself. “Doug Hakes will make sure Elray gets brung up by helicopter, have him here at dayspring.”

  The woman nodded. “Them feds gon’ raise a fuss?” she asked.

  Service wondered how she knew about the feds.

  “Sheriff’s a-takin’ care of hit,” Eddie Waco said.

  The woman’s fingers tapped the trigger guard of the shotgun, which lay on the table. “Elray tell about his dream to you’n?” she asked her father-in-law.

  The elder Spargo nodded. “I told him not to go see the man if’n he had the dream two nights in a row.”

  What dream? What man? Service wondered.

  “I told ’im the Lord works in mysterious ways,” the woman said. “But Elray, he laughed at me and said hit was my job in the family ta talk ta the Lord.” She shook her head and flashed a wistful smile. “No way ta change thet man,” she added. “You Spargos.”

  The old man said, “My Liddy used to say stubbornness takes more men ’n pride.”

  The widow clucked her approval. “My Elray was a stubborn one.”

  Service wanted to ask questions, but Eddie Waco pressed a knee against him and Service got the message.

  “You seen Cake?” Eddie Waco asked.

  The woman stared at Waco, got up, and took the baby and shotgun away.

  While the woman and her kids made dinner, Service and Waco sat on the porch in handmade wooden chairs. “What’s going on?” Service asked.

  Waco said, “I wanted to get over here and hear what got said. People here­abouts got they own ways.”

  “Nobody seems overly broken up about this,” Service said. “What was Spargo’s dream, how come his wife’s not asking for details and knows about the feds, and how are you going to get the FBI to release the body?”

  Waco grinned. “You’n listening real good, Michigan man. I done asked the sheriff and he’ll take care of it. These people need to git Elray inta the ground. Feds want to exhume later, they can go through the courts. Old Doug Hakes will get ’im up here and the fun’ral will be tomorrow afternoon. You’ll see plenty of sad then. Right now they’s blinded by the git-evens.”

  “Like the start of a feud?” Service asked.

  Eddie Waco chuckled. “You git thet from some ole Hatfield-McCoy movin’ pitcher?”

  Service felt like a fool, but the other man interrupted his embarrassment. “The real old days was sure ’nuff like thet, but it always got kept betwixt hill people. If an outsider done this, they got other ways. Widder will ask for a champeen.”

  Service didn’t ask what this meant. “What’s this about a cake?”

  “Why we’re here,” Eddie Waco said. “Elray hardly went ta the privy without Cake Culkin skulkin’ nearby.”

  “Culkin was an enemy?”

  “More like a partner, though he don’t wear a badge. Elray sent ’im off to jail a long time back and looked after his kin while he was away. Cake come out and they bin fast friends ever since. I’m thinkin’ that whatever happened to Elray, Cake will know something.”

  “The wife already knew,” Service said.

  “Word moves fast in these hills,” the Missouri game warden said. “The old man knew too, and I’m thinkin’ hit was Cake brung word.”

  “Jimsonweed Christian?” Service asked.

  Waco smiled. “Not a true believer,” he said.

  “There’s a radio here?” Service asked.

  Eddie Waco said, “Yup, but you don’t need to be a talkin’ at thet FBI woman. Word is she’s in hospital down ta Wes Plains an’ all drugged up.”

  “What happens now?” Service asked.

  “We red up for supper,” Eddie Waco said. “Then we eat, but don’t be eatin’ big on account we gon’ be eatin’ a whole heap till we git done here.”

  Red up? The local dialect and terms had Service befuddled, and suddenly he thought he knew what it was like to be a troll wandering into a village in the black spruce swamps of the Upper Peninsula for the first time. The people here, he decided, were a lot like Yoopers, and he found the thought comforting.

  Service and Waco got a couple of sleeping bags out of the room in the house where the dead conservation agent kept his gear cache, took them out in the field, made a fire ring of stones, took wood from a pile near the house, kindled a fire, and settled into their bags to catch some sleep. Kids from the house brought them biscuits and ham and some kind of beans in runny red gravy.

  Service was physically tired and sore, but couldn’t sleep. Whenever the breeze let up, mosquitoes dropped on him en masse. He paid no attention to them. It seemed to him that people continuously filtered in and out of the house, most of them carrying food and other things the family might need. Two carpenters set up sawhorses just off the porch and hammered and sawed all night, making a simple coffin of white oak planks.

  There were no stars and not much light from the house. Service could smell m
ore rain in the air and wondered how long until it moved in. Sometimes the wind seemed to pick up, but then it would die away, which told him they were on the edge of a front rather than in the bull’s-eye. If it stiffened and held, he knew the rain would quickly ride in on it.

  His own cases back home sometimes had taken odd twists, but this was in a class of its own. How could somebody have been killing game wardens for so many years with impunity? As far as he was concerned, a bulletin should be sent immediately to all state fish and game agencies, wardens doubled up on patrols for safety, and all of them alerted to what was going on. But this had not happened, and probably wouldn’t. One thing was certain: When he got back to Michigan he would make damn sure that Chief O’Driscoll heard what he had to say, even if he had to go over the chief’s head to Governor Timms. Hell, she was the one who’d put him into this damn mess.

  In his short time as a detective, he had learned that making a case required intense and continual attention to detail—and some luck. The greater the focus on details, the more likely you’d catch a break. So far he’d seen little in Tatie Monica’s approach to create confidence. She was like an inexperienced angler in a major hatch, frantically chasing from fish to fish rather than focusing on one until it was caught, or stopped rising. Jumping around created movement, not direction, and movement for its own sake was not progress. He was beginning to have serious doubts about the special agent’s abilities to manage this case. Or maybe it was inexperience and he just ­couldn’t see. But it seemed to him that the team should have remained in Wisconsin at the kill site to investigate it, rather than running down to Missouri to start all over. Something in the sequence and priorities just didn’t set right.

  The number of visitors seemed to increase well before sunrise. Eddie Waco led Service into the woods and downhill to a spring where they stripped off their shirts, rinsed with freezing spring water, and used their fingers to straighten their hair. They spent some time trying to knock the dust and dirt off their clothes and boots in order to achieve some semblance of presentability.

  Cotton Spargo met them with a pot of coffee and two cups.

  “Elray had a dream?” Eddie Waco asked.