Season of the Wolf

by Jeffrey J. Mariotte

  “It’s in the trunk.”

  “Get some pictures. We’ll never take wolves to court, but if we end up needing to bring in state wildlife officials or anything, it’d be good to be able to show them what we’re up against.”

  “Yessir, Chief.” Honeycutt idolized him in a way that Deeds had always found a little disconcerting. Although the kid looked like a rat drowned in toilet water, he had the raw makings of a decent cop. But he was a brown-noser of the highest order and sometimes he seemed just a bit off-kilter. When he had described the night’s activities, he had spoken at a rapid-fire clip, and his fingers were drumming on the steering wheel the whole time. Drug testing was part of the department’s regular procedure, and Deeds wondered if perhaps he oughtn’t move up Howie’s next specimen collection.

  Then again, Howie had worked most of the day yesterday, volunteering on the search party and the retrieval of Mike’s body. Then he’d had a few hours to sleep before starting his night shift. Chances were he was simply exhausted, and like Morris himself, anxious about coming out to a house where they knew they would find a horrible scene.

  Howie almost tripped getting out of the cruiser, but he caught himself and went back to the trunk. Deeds didn’t wait for him. Watching where he stepped, so he didn’t trample any of Mrs. Morgenstern’s parts or get blood on his shoes unnecessarily, he walked past the foot and the other bloody, meaty bit lying in the grass. Pawprints were everywhere in the dirt around the yard, and bloody ones tracked down the stairs from the porch.

  The worst was what waited on the porch. Deborah’s face was barely recognizable. The wolves had ripped off her left ear and part of that cheek and jaw. The whole piece was torn off just above her breasts, and as Bill Tyler had described, one shoulder and arm were attached to the ragged neck, with a little bit of spine protruding from it.

  Morris’s stomach turned against itself. He couldn’t decide if he was sorrier that he’d only had coffee for breakfast, or that he’d only had time for one cup. He knew he had to go inside the house, to check on Marie, but his feet were glued to the top step and they didn’t want to budge.

  Just inside the door he saw a wide swath of blood. He forced himself onto the porch, giving Marie’s upper portion as wide a berth as he could. As he approached the door the stink reached him, and bile rose into his throat with a burning sensation. He looked back and saw Howie keeping his distance, photographing the carnage on the lawn. “Get in closer!” he called.

  Howie gave him a look he couldn’t quite read, but he stepped onto the grass. Morris figured if the kid could overcome his distaste, he had to do the same. He stepped into the house, avoiding the smeared blood on the hardwood floor. Inside, the smell was worse, slaughterhouse thick. Big flies walked in the smear. He took another few steps inside and found the rest of Deborah, or most of her, hidden at first by a couch. Her legs were spread and the other arm was there, still attached to her torso. She had been opened up in the middle, though. Organs were missing and her intestines trailed from the gap like sausage dangling from a butcher’s display.

  He looked away, toward the staircase. “Marie!” he called. His voice snagged in his throat. He cleared it and shouted louder. “Marie, it’s Chief Deeds! Morris Deeds! You up there?”

  Nobody answered.

  He swore again and raced up the stairs. Although daylight streamed in through the downstairs windows, he noticed that the staircase light was on. He checked the master bedroom first, found bedcovers that were pulled back, but no evidence of a struggle or any wolf tracks. He checked the other rooms upstairs. Nothing.

  He hurried back down. The wolf tracks were all over the place down here—they had walked in blood, then investigated the kitchen, dining nook, and bathroom. He looked behind everything, called out Marie’s name again and again.

  Finally, Honeycutt came to the door. “What’s up, Chief?”

  “She’s not here,” Deeds said. “Damn it, Marie Hackett’s not here!”

  16

  Alex woke in the morning feeling sore from his long hike the day before, but otherwise surprisingly well rested. The Durbins had brought some more furnishings, including clocks and TVs, so the room felt a little more like a motel and less like an abandoned warehouse. When he awoke, glowing red numbers on his bedside clock showed 08:23, and he was astonished to learn he had slept so late. His night had been without dreams, or if he’d had them they weren’t the kind that wrecked his sleep and remained with him into the day.

  The Durbins had also restored continental breakfast service in the lobby. The meal consisted of a dozen doughnuts and a few Danishes brought in from the Cup & Cow, along with two pots of coffee, one French roast and one hazelnut, a third pot of hot water, and an assortment of Twinings teas. Alex had the French roast while Ellen squealed in delight at the Irish breakfast tea. Peter sat quietly in one of the big leather chairs that had been taken out of wraps, fingers wrapped around a china mug. He was slow to engage in the mornings, Alex had found. Earlier in his life, Alex had been a big fan of sleeping, too, but when the dreams started to come, that had changed.

  This morning, he had a particular agenda in mind, so after a shower, breakfast, and brief conversation in the lobby—with everyone but Peter—he drove into downtown.

  Driscoll’s Outfitters was not the kind of shop where he would feel at home. The front window was half-covered with fliers detailing the complex schedule of Colorado’s various hunting seasons and license requirements, advertising groups looking for participants on wilderness trips, and people looking to buy or sell hunting, fishing, and camping gear. Arranged behind those, in haphazard fashion, were a hunting bow and a quiver of arrows, a pair of snowshoes, and a stuffed and mounted bobcat, all of it dust-caked and looking to be about a hundred years old.

  He pushed open the glass-and-steel door and caused a sensor inside to bong twice when he passed through. Inside, the place smelled musty, as if a roof leak or plumbing disaster had not been adequately dealt with. Above shelving and wall-rack units holding maps and backpacks, tents and guns and fishing rods and other equipment Alex couldn’t name, the walls were lined with mounted animal heads. Driscoll, or perhaps, Alex reasoned, friends, family, and customers, had brought down black bear, elk, moose, bighorn sheep, and mountain lion, along with smaller game like rabbits and some sort of wild pig. Taxidermied birds perched on shelves and display cases.

  There was nobody in sight, but an open door at the back of the long, narrow space revealed a lighted back room. From here, it appeared even more cluttered than the store. Alex heard somebody moving about. He was about to call out when he heard a feminine voice say, “Be right there!”

  “Okay,” he said. He waited another minute, and then a woman emerged from the back carrying several boxes of boots. His attention fixated on the logo on the boxes, it took him a few seconds to realize that she was the pretty blonde he had encountered at the search party’s gathering point. The one, he recalled, in front of whom he had embarrassed himself so utterly that he hoped he would never run into her again.

  “Decided you wanted a closer look at the habits of the great unwashed?” she said. She was smiling when she said it, so that was something.

  “Look, I’m sorry for what I said yesterday. I didn’t mean it the way it sounded. I was trying to be funny, and it didn’t come out that way.”

  “Not really.”

  “I’m looking for Robbie Driscoll,” he said. “He was recommended as a guide.”

  “Best there is.” She put the boxes down on a table next to a display of hiking and hunting boots and extended a hand. “I’m Robbie.”

  Alex went from moderately embarrassed to deeply chagrined and, he guessed, red-faced. He took her hand, shook it, and held on while he said, “You must think I’m a total idiot.”

  “I don’t know you well enough for that,” Robbie Driscoll said. “So just a partial idiot, for now. Anyway, I know it throws folks sometimes. But Roberta is just so girly, don’t you think? Obviously my parents
didn’t know me when they named me.”

  He released her, shaking his head sadly. “I’m not normally so socially awkward,” he assured her. “Honestly, some people actively seek out my company.”

  “I’m sure that’s true. Some people seek out all sorts of punishment. It’s a thing.”

  “I guess I deserved that.” He realized that he had committed yet another faux pas. “By the way, my name is Alex Converse. And, while I’m at least partially an idiot, I really did come looking for you because I was told you were the guide I needed.”

  “Let’s talk, then. What are you after?”

  “Oh…I’m not hunting, if that’s what you mean.”

  “That’s usually what people need guides for, around here.”

  “I’m making a movie,” he explained. “A documentary.”

  “Heard about that.”

  “We’ll be shooting in various locales around the world, but we’re starting here. I need to get out into the woods and look for some locations. Places where the bark beetle infestation is really bad, where it’s decimated the pines.”

  “So it’s a feel-good movie,” she said. The smile hadn’t left her eyes since she had first started tormenting him, but her delivery was dry, deadpan.

  “Maybe not so much. But I think it’s worth doing, or I wouldn’t be sinking my own money into it.”

  “Heard you have a lot of it.”

  “I guess word travels fast in a small town.”

  “You know us barbarians. Nothing to do but gossip.”

  “Are you ever going to let me live that down? And I never called anybody barbarians. That was you.”

  “Probably not. And yes, I admit that. And I don’t know.”

  “Don’t know about what?”

  She raised her hands, palms up. “About being your guide. There’s a lot going on in town. I’m not currently engaged, but depending on what happens over the next few hours, that could change. I don’t know how much you’ve heard about it.”

  “Since Mike Hackett? Nothing, really.”

  “Apparently there have been other wolf attacks. Closer to town.”

  “Which means it would be an exceptionally bad idea for me to try to find my way around without a guide.”

  “A guide, a posse. Maybe a tank.”

  “I’ve got none of the above,” he admitted. Despite his initial failure to connect with this woman, and what seemed like nothing whatsoever in common with her, he couldn’t help finding her fascinating. A faint scar he hadn’t noticed before ran down the left side of her face, from the corner of that eye to midway down her cheek. She was dressed in a slate-gray, ribbed turtleneck sweater and faded jeans, both tight enough to outline her impressive physique: strong, broad-shouldered, but curvy. She was not the least bit unfeminine. In fact, there could have been no disguising that femininity, even at a hundred yards on a dark night. He found that fascinating, too. “But I do have money, and I’d love to hire you to take me out into the woods, find me some places I can use in the film. And I need to do a little scientific research while I’m out there, so I’ll need somebody watching my back.”

  She moved behind the sales counter and took a loose-leaf notebook from a shelf. Paging through it, she said, “Business is looking a bit thin on the ground for the next little while, and I do have bills. The roof is leaking and my Jeep hasn’t been serviced since I don’t know when. I’m thinking there’s going to be a wolf-hunting party put together, and they’ll want me on it. But that could take a while. How much time would you need?”

  “I guess that depends on how far we have to go to find what I’m looking for. Based on what I saw yesterday, I’d guess not very far.”

  “If you’re looking for where the trees are the color of rust stains on a bathtub, then no. You need to get a little elevation from here, but it won’t take long to get up there.”

  “So how about it?”

  She gave a sigh that he couldn’t read. He hoped it was resignation. “I guess it’ll take some time for anybody in an official capacity to make a decision. We can head up for the morning, if you want. But if I get an emergency call we’ll have to come back.”

  “Deal,” Alex said.

  “Don’t you want to know my rates?”

  “I guess, if you think it’s important.”

  “I don’t do this for free.”

  “I’m not asking you to. I’m just saying I’ll pay whatever’s fair.”

  Robbie chuckled. “Yeah, I know. Crazy rich guy, right?”

  “If that’s what the gossip says.”

  “Should I write a number down on a slip of paper and hand it to you discreetly? Or just say it out loud?”

  “Out loud,” Alex said, “is fine.”

  * * *

  Alden Stewart sat with Chief Deeds in the town hall’s conference room. He had been in conference rooms in real cities that could hold twenty or thirty people, but this one started to feel crowded with five or six. There was a speakerphone on the table, a device that looked more like a kid’s toy spaceship than a telephone, though, and when the door was closed the occupants had privacy and an absolute lack of outside distractions.

  On the other end of the call was Doug Wolters, of the Colorado Division of Wildlife. “And you’re sure it’s wolves?” he was saying. “I mean, I saw those pictures you e-mailed. The damage to the victims is certainly extreme, and the tracks are canine for sure. But there aren’t any wolves in your part of the state.”

  “There weren’t,” Deeds said. “But there are now. Gloria Trbovich saw one.”

  “And what’s her expertise?” Wolters asked.

  “She doesn’t have any,” Alden said. “But she saw it. So did her boy. And then her husband, who’s a good cop and was armed and ready, was torn to shreds. It wasn’t dogs that did that.”

  “Chances are it wasn’t,” Wolters said.

  “Well, we say it was wolves, Doug,” Deeds said. “This is an emergency, and we’re going to throw ourselves a wolf-hunting party. I don’t care what Colorado law is, when we find those bastards we’re going to kill ‘em.”

  “Don’t let’s get carried away, guys,” Wolters said quickly. “I’ve been in touch with U.S. Fish and Wildlife, and we’re sending a joint team up to see what you have going on. In the meantime, if you guys start shooting wolves, then sportsmen in Montana and Wyoming and Idaho are going to get all worked up about their wolf limits.”

  “Sorry, but I don’t see that as my problem,” Deeds said. “The wolves around here right now are my problem, and I’m not going to sit on my ass while the government plays with itself.”

  Alden knew that people who settled in rural communities, including mountain ones, often did so because they didn’t want to be in more high-density areas. Bigger, more crowded places required cooperation and contact and, often, more direct intervention by government. He was well aware of the anti-government sentiment of many of Silver Gap’s residents, including, perhaps ironically, quite a few of those employed by the local government. Including the police chief, who sat across the table from him. Chief Deeds didn’t believe the state government did much that was helpful or useful, and he tended to think of the federal government as vaguely sinister at best and a potential enemy at worst. Morris’s response to almost any crisis was to determine whether there was any action he could take, action that as often as not would involve physical violence toward somebody. The town kept him around largely because the payouts they’d had to make to settle various civil suits were minimal compared to the lean, efficient way he ran the department. Anyway, Morris Deeds knew everybody’s secrets, and he had proven to be tight-lipped.

  Alden didn’t much like the man, but he had to work with him and he tried to keep the relationship civil. He also didn’t agree with Morris’s socio-political views. Government, he believed, comprised a lot of people who did their jobs to the best of their abilities. When it worked, they made people’s lives more secure and sometimes better. Government couldn’t do everything
, and there were some problems about which it could do nothing and shouldn’t try. But it was not, by its nature, a malevolent force.

  At this moment, however, he leaned more toward Morris’s immediate-action plan than the government’s wait-for-us approach.

  “We’re doing our best,” Wolters said. “If you can hold off a little while, that’d be great. If not, then I guess we’ll deal with it as it comes up.”

  “That works,” Morris said.

  “Thanks for your help, Mr. Wolters,” Alden said. “Keep us posted.”

  “Will do,” Wolters said. He ended the connection and the phone buzzed until Alden pushed the off button.

  Morris fixed him with a steady gaze. “We can’t wait for them, Alden. Those things are killing our people.”

  “Trust me, Chief. I’m aware. I just wanted him to understand the urgency.”

  The police chief sat there for another few seconds, seemingly gathering his thoughts. When he pushed his chair back and rose, something hanging off his nylon belt banged into the table. “Sorry,” he said. “It’s a little tight in here.”

  “I know.” What Morris meant was, government can’t even build a functional conference room. To which Alden Stewart’s unspoken response was, not without a sufficient tax base.

  Which meant they couldn’t let the taxpayers be eaten by wild animals.

  Before Morris reached the door, there was a double knock, and then it swung inward. Frank Trippi stood there. He was a tall, stocky guy with small hands and feet and a gentle manner surprising in what appeared to be a big grizzly bear of a man. His curly hair and the short beard clinging to all of his chins had gone mostly gray over the years he had been Silver Gap’s postmaster. And the sole post office employee, for that matter. Sometimes Morris joked that if Frank ever went postal, he would just quietly commit suicide. He was at least partly right—everything Frank Trippi did was done quietly. His voice was deep, resonating from someplace inside his large bulk, but he rarely raised it above a level that would have met the approval of any librarian in the land. In addition to his post office duties, he was Silver Gap’s snowplow driver, a task for which he earned time-and-a-half but saved the town having to hire an independent operator. This year, he had not yet had occasion to pull the plow from its barn, though November was only a couple of weeks away.