“You are filth! Fucking fuckeroonie of filthy filth!” Honeycutt took a few steps toward him.
Calderon raised his hands, then brought his palms together. This, he decided, was no time for reason, it was a time for prayer. “Our heavenly father,” he began.
Honeycutt fired, twice.
Calderon heard the reports, felt the hot missiles penetrate his clothing and his sinner’s flesh, felt his insides as the bullets tore through. He fell to his knees, and opened his mouth to ask forgiveness, but the words would not come. And as he pitched forward, knowing he had reached the end; he knew also that soon he would meet his Lord or not, but even if not then at least the question that hovered at the edge of consciousness, always, for every believer, would soon be answered.
Honeycutt was still muttering, nonsense words, and Calderon felt himself being dragged out into the gravel of the parking lot. He didn’t feel the man’s hands on him, but he felt the small rocks as he scraped across them. He could hear the words but could not make them out. He could see Honeycutt, more clearly than ever, with a glow around him that might have come from the headlights but he thought not.
“The ravens,” he heard Honeycutt say, and he understood that. “And the wolves. They’ll get you here. No one will know a thing, Right Reverend Fuckeroonie Fuckbuggy, and you’ll never—”
And then the voice faded out again, the words whisked away by the wind that wafted snowflakes through the headlight beams, and Honeycutt dropped him there, and there he stayed.
29
The gathering at the Cup & Cow in the morning was smaller and more solemn than the one the night before. The people who showed up seemed to understand that they were heading out on what could easily be a suicide mission, and they were appropriately subdued. Morris Deeds paced the front of the room and a couple of his cops, Jones and Honeycutt, sat at a table close by. The snow had stopped for a while during the night, but it was falling again.
Alex and Robbie had a table at the side, close to the bakery counter, and though people stopped by to share a few words with Robbie, no one else sat with them. Alex was on his third cup of coffee for the day. He was tired, but it was a good tired. His relationship with Robbie was in a state of flux, new and uncertain, and since they had arrived in a public place, she had been strictly hands-off. He accepted that—she knew these people, lived with them, and once he was gone, back to L.A., she would still be here.
When Cale Conklin came in the front door, he looked around for a moment, then cut a straight path toward their table. Alex shoved out the chair opposite him with his foot. “Sit,” he said. “They’re serving, if you want coffee or breakfast.”
“Glass of water would be good,” Conklin said. He sat, and scooted the chair back in close. “Been on the phone since five.”
“With who?”
“Couple of colleagues I sent data from our necropsy to. They still have to get the tissue samples tested, but I was able to email photos and measurements and observations, and we had a conference call this morning.”
“Did you reach any conclusions?” Robbie asked.
Conklin lowered his voice, to the point that Alex could barely hear him across the table. “Just tentative ones. Until we have the tissue results, that’s the best we can do. And, honestly, I don’t even like to say what we decided out loud.”
“How bad can it be?” Alex asked.
“It can be pretty far out there. Look, I’m a scientist. And not one of those theoretical types. I’m a naturalist. I work with the real world. I observe and study and report. The work I do, it’s not as much about testing hypotheses as about recording and reporting on the world around us.”
Alex felt a familiar tingle of fear on the back of his neck. Conklin’s disclaimer sounded like the kind of thing he had told himself, thousands of times, when he started to accept that his nightmares actually had some connection to reality. “Granted,” he said. “Don’t worry about us, we’re not judging.”
“Okay.” Conklin reached over and took Alex’s untouched water glass, downing half of it. “Here’s the deal. Trust me, I know how impossible it sounds. Your wolves—at least, the specimen you guys brought in, and judging from the video, the others as well—they’re not normal gray wolves.”
Robbie smiled. “We kind of figured that.”
“Yeah, well, I doubt that you figured out just how not normal they are. I have a hard time saying this out loud. Even after a couple of hours on the phone with people who know this stuff far better than I do. But what it looks like is: these wolves are a hybrid. Gray wolf, plus something else. And what the something else is is what makes it so nuts.”
“You’re killing me here,” Alex said.
“Sorry. Okay, here it is. The wolves appear—emphasis on that, until we get some good DNA evidence—they appear to be a hybrid of the gray wolf and the dire wolf.”
“No way,” Robbie said. “That’s impossible.”
“That’s what I’m saying.”
“Fill me in,” Alex said. “What is that? A dire wolf?”
Conklin took another big swallow of water, then continued. “Dire wolf. Canis dirus. A carnivorous mammal at one time relatively common in North and South America. In fact, while the gray wolf is a European or Eurasian transplant, the dire wolf evolved here in North America.”
“Once common, you said?” Alex looked from Conklin to Robbie. She was nodding her head as Conklin answered.
“Oh yeah, once. For probably just under two million years. Right up until ten to fifteen thousand years ago, when they became extinct.”
“They’re extinct?”
“For a long time now.”
“They were huge, right?” Robbie asked.
“A lot bigger than the gray. The two coexisted in North America, for maybe a hundred thousand years. Eventually the gray succeeded, where the dire didn’t. But yeah, they were big. You can see it in the skulls, in the teeth. The dire had shorter legs, proportionate to its body size, than the gray. Short but sturdy.”
“Like the one we found,” Alex said.
“Right. The dire wolf is a prime example of North America megafauna, the big animals that lived during the Pleistocene but died out around ten thousand years back. They’ve been studied extensively—for one thing, the La Brea tar pits held a lot of specimens, in relatively whole skeletons, for us to look at. That’s why we’re pretty convinced of our theory, even before we have DNA to back it up. We know what the dire looked like, we know what gray wolves look like, and we can extrapolate what a hybrid would look like. And that would be the one sitting in Doctor Steinhilber’s freezer.”
“But…I’m not following. If the dire wolf is extinct, then how did it crossbreed with gray wolves? The ones we’re talking about are clearly still alive.”
“That’s something else we’re not sure about,” Conklin said. “My colleagues are working on that question while they wait for the tissue samples to be analyzed. They’ll get back to me as soon as they have something.”
“This is a little hard to swallow, Cale,” Robbie said. “I mean, if you say it’s so, then I believe you. But I don’t know that you should spread it around until you have that confirmation. Bad enough that these folks think they’re after some sort of wolves gone mad. But if they find out they’re, I don’t know, superwolves? That’s going to make things that much tougher.”
“Yeah, I’m with you,” Conklin said. “I was planning to go up today, with the search party, but I think I’ll stay here instead. I’ve got a couple of theories I want to check out, and it’ll mean spending a lot of time with my laptop and a pencil and paper.”
“That’s fine,” Robbie said. “I mean, it would be great to have you with us. But it sounds like you have more important work to do.”
“That’s what I think,” Conklin said. The words were barely out of his mouth when Morris Deeds called for the room’s attention.
“I expect we’re all here that’s coming,” he said. “From the looks of the street
, there’s enough vehicles that everybody could take their own and we’d still have some left over. I don’t want anybody driving alone, though. Let’s buddy up, two to four to a truck. Four-wheel-drive only. The state DOW has decided they don’t want any part of this, so it’s just us. Anybody got a problem with any of it, now’s the time to walk.”
He let that sit in the air for a minute. Nobody budged. “All right then,” he said. “Let’s go find us a wolf den.”
* * *
Once again, Chief Deeds insisted that Robbie ride with him, and she insisted that Alex be included. Honeycutt drove, and the backseat was a little crowded with Jones in there, too. They were barely out of town when Deeds took a call on his cell phone. He mostly listened for a couple of minutes, then ended the call. “Well, shit,” he said. “That’s not a good way to start the day.”
“What’s up, Chief?” Honeycutt asked.
“Reverend Calderon’s dead.”
“What?” Robbie said.
“He is?” Honeycutt asked.
“That’s what I said, goddamnit! Charles Durbin went out to the church this morning, said he wanted Calderon to call some of the congregation in, get a bigger search party going. When he got there, Calderon’s office door was wide open but nobody was around. He looked inside, then saw blood in the parking lot. He followed the trail and found Calderon’s body at the edge of the woods. Some animal got to him, don’t know yet if it was wolves or what. He called Norman—that’s Doctor Steinhilber, Mr. Converse—who took a look and said that maybe wolves or something munched on him postmortem, but there are a couple of bullets in him, too. That’s when they called Althea. Ortega’s on his way over there.”
“This town,” Honeycutt said. “No killings for I don’t know how long, and then all of a sudden. Women vanishing, people getting eaten up. Man alive.”
That final comment seemed the height of inappropriateness to Alex, but he was a guest in a police vehicle, and so held his tongue. They rode back out to the site of the slaughter mostly in silence, with Honeycutt making a few conversational overtures that quickly petered out. Nobody, save him, was in the mood for chatter. Robbie’s thigh pressed against Alex’s, but that might have had more to do with the full backseat than her intentions. Her hands stayed on her own lap.
At the site, people piled from the vehicles and spread out, looking for tracks. They were everywhere, of course, wolf and human alike, a chaotic mess of them overlapping each other. Alex remembered that from yesterday. But the snow had fallen for long hours since then, obscuring everything. Alex couldn’t look at the canyon without remembering the way it had looked and smelled, but now, even though the abandoned trucks had been left in place, the snow covering it all lent the scene an illusion of virginal innocence it didn’t deserve.
He stood back and let the practiced trackers do their thing. In a little while, someone waved the others over. Robbie got there first, and when she confirmed that the man had discovered something useful, they began the laborious challenge of tracking the animals through the snow while others followed in the vehicles. Honeycutt had a hard time getting the police department Tahoe—its cargo area loaded with guns, boxes of ammo, and crates of dynamite—through the thicker drifts and up over hidden rocks and dips.
Fortunately for Alex’s sanity and the health of those doing the legwork, the wolves beat a relatively direct path, always rising toward the tree line. The pines at the higher elevation were mostly dead, their branches bare and hung with snow, red-brown needles showing only occasionally through the white.
They were just approaching the tree line when they found the rendezvous site.
It was just below a ridge. There was a hollow there, a kind of depression in the earth ringed by boulders, somewhat protected from the elements by the trees and rocks surrounding it. A stream ran through it, half-frozen but still trickling, and a few pines yet lived. The snow was beaten down and discolored by the presence of many animals and mottled with pine needles. Set into the hillside were a series of openings, with diameters anywhere from eighteen inches to three-and-a-half feet. Trails cut this way and that from the openings. There were no wolves here, at least none visible from outside. That fact made Alex nervous, and he kept looking behind them, scanning the near distances.
They had reached it on foot, parking below the ridge, about twenty yards downhill. Almost everybody carried a gun. “That’s got to be the place,” Deeds said.
Robbie agreed. “Looks like it to me.”
“Coast looks pretty clear, too.”
“No way to know what’s inside those holes,” Alex pointed out.
“There’s one way,” Honeycutt said. “One sure way.”
“Somebody’s got to go in there,” Deeds said. “Plant the dynamite.”
“I’ll do it, Chief,” Honeycutt said eagerly. “Glad to.”
“It’s got to be me,” Alex muttered.
“What?” Deeds said. “You say something, Mr. Converse?”
“It’s got to be me,” he said, louder this time.
“I hate to say it,” Robbie said, “but he’s right.”
“He is?”
“I have experience,” Alex said.
“With dynamite?”
“With dynamite and tunnels,” Alex said.
“Alex,” Robbie said, “these are not going to be like mine shafts, you know. No support beams, no lights. Not big enough to stand up, much less turn around in.”
“I know that.”
“What kind of experience are you talking about?” Deeds wanted to know.
“Coal mining.”
“I thought you made movies.”
“I come from a coal family. I’ve spent time in the mines. I’ve planted charges. I know how to do it, how far apart to set them, how to attach the blasting caps and feed out the fuse. You got anybody else on this hill who’s done more of it and more recently than me, we can talk. But I know I can do it safely and get out.”
Deeds raised his voice. “Anybody here work in the mines?”
One man raised his hand, the one who had said in the restaurant that he had put in eight years there. “What’d you do?” Deeds asked him.
“Accountant.”
“Never mind.” He looked at Alex. “Guess you’re it.”
“You sure about this, Alex?” Robbie asked.
He was afraid his voice would quake, betraying the panic bubbling just beneath the surface. “Hell, no. But I don’t see any better options, do you?”
“We don’t even know for sure if this will work.”
“We don’t know that it won’t. I guess we ought to try.”
“Look, Robbie,” Deeds said. “The man says he can do it. Let’s let him do it. Honeycutt, Jones, bring up that dynamite and stuff!”
The two officers hustled back to the vehicle. Alex had checked everything out earlier. They had about twenty-five sticks of dynamite. It had been kept cool and dry, and there was no nitroglycerin seepage, which was a good sign. He hadn’t tested the blasting caps, but they looked well cared for as well. There was a good length of fuse, and a detonator, though a truck battery would have done the trick in a pinch.
He wasn’t worried about his materials. He was worried about himself. Would he be able to do it? He hadn’t been underground since that last day at the mines, bringing out the bodies. He had never been inside what he assumed the dens would look like. As Robbie had pointed out, these would not be professionally excavated shafts, but natural caves and animal tunnels. He might have to squeeze through them on his belly, then back out the same way, knowing that there were blasting caps attached to the dynamite and having no control over who on the outside might be holding the fuse to the detonator.
The cops carried two crates back up to the ridgeline. One held the dynamite and the other the blasting caps, in their own separate container, and the fuse and detonator. Alex gave the chief and everybody else watching a quick lesson in how it worked, and he stressed that the fuse should not be allowed anywhere n
ear the detonator until he was back out of the den and everybody had moved well away from the area. “This hillside is going to go up in the air and come down again,” he said. “We don’t have time for me to take a lot of care with how I plant the stuff, so I won’t have a lot of control over what direction it’s going. Everybody’s going to have to move back a good distance, and get under cover if you can. And nobody uses the detonator but me. Is that understood?”
Deeds didn’t like being ordered around, but he nodded his head. Alex told the cops to put the crate with the dynamite down near one of the larger entrances, and to put the blasting caps and fuse with it. He handed the detonator to the chief, who traded him a Maglite for it, and he started down the slope. Someone grabbed his arm. He turned, startled, and Robbie was there, pressing a pistol into his free hand. “You don’t know what’s in those holes,” she said. “And nobody can be in there to watch your back.”
“If there’s a bunch of wolves in there, I’ll be back momentarily.”
“I bet. Still, use this if you have to.”
“Thanks,” he said.
“And, Alex.”
“Yeah?”
She leaned into him, brought her face near, and planted her lips on his. She held them there for a long time, her hands pressing against his back, holding him against her body. When she broke the kiss, she said, “Come back soon. I thought of some more things I want to try.”
There were good natured whoops and hollers from the assembled people, most of them men. Alex was sure he was blushing. He took another step down the hill, then stopped again and picked up a fallen branch, snapping off a section about two feet long. “Chief, your men have to turn their radios off. Anybody else who’s got one, get it off. Radio signals can set off blasting caps.”
“We just rode all the way up here with the caps in the back and the radio in the Tahoe on, plus our personal radios,” Deeds said.
Season of the Wolf Page 18
