In the Barren Ground

by Loreth Anne White

  Tana swallowed.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe I thought I could keep her safe from herself. Or from the Angels, by making her mine …” His voice caught. He cleared his throat. “But there came that ultimate test, before I could ‘earn’ the trident and skulls, when the chapter leader took me to meet a member who’d two-timed him. Lara was with me. On the spot, he handed me his gun, told me to shoot the guy in the skull. I was a cop. I tried quick-talking my way around it. He didn’t give me half a chance. He took another gun from his holster, and blew Lara’s brains out all over me.”

  Wind gusted and the shed creaked. Crash’s eyes gleamed. His features were twisted into something tight, and Tana’s chest hurt.

  “What … what happened then?” she whispered.

  “He turned his weapon on me, and said, ‘What are you, a cop?’ I said, ‘Whoa, no fucking way. You want me to kill someone, I will.’ And I brought him that dead low-level dealer who’d been messing on his turf—the setup.”

  “But … Lara.”

  He scrubbed the stubble on his jaw. “Yeah. Lara. I actually loved her—I cared. And then I found out she’d been five months pregnant with our baby daughter.”

  Tana blanched. Her breathing became light. She lurched up from her stool and went to the tiny shed window that was plastered with snow. She stared blankly at the frosted panes. “That’s why,” she whispered. “That’s why you flipped at TwoDove’s place. That’s why you dumped the takeout soup on my desk and fled when you heard Addy and me talking. That’s why you came down on me, for being like Mindy when I was a kid.” She hesitated. “Because you know. You know what can go wrong. And does.”

  Silence.

  She turned. And the look on his face cracked her heart. It made her think of Jim. And how she wished Jim had spoken to her. How she’d told Jim she didn’t want his kid, not yet. And then it was too late and now she was carrying some asshole’s kid. And here was this man, this broken man, trying to save her where he’d not been able to save Lara and his own unborn child from being shot to death.

  When she spoke, her voice was thick. “What happened to that Devil’s Angels chapter leader?”

  “I killed him.”

  She held his eyes.

  “How?”

  “In that shootout. In the confusion. I shot him dead before I fled. The delay cost me. If I’d tried to get out right away, I might not have gotten shot in the head myself.”

  “And you were never charged.”

  “Justice can be gray.”

  “And what brought you here?”

  “Alan Sturmann-Taylor and his world-class hunting lodge.”

  A buzz started in Tana’s brain. “You think Sturmann-Taylor, the lodge owner, is behind the syndicate?” She watched Crash’s face, his eyes, trying to find signs of madness, obsession, instability.

  “I think he could be the syndicate, Tana. He bought that lodge just over five years ago, around the same time Harry Blundt found the kimberlite pipes beneath Ice Lake and laid claim to the area. And he started with his high-end renovations, hunting trips—flying in international clients, low key, to this remote and private location from around the world. Big businessmen. Connected people. Entertainment and drugs and toys for them. Then I read an industry article about Blundt hiring a man named Markus Van Bleek. I knew from the UC work I’d done that Van Bleek had managed security—basically private armies—for African diamond outfits, and that he was considered something of a shady, international hit man.”

  “And you came out here to check the links for yourself?”

  He gave a half shrug. “Those raw stones out of Africa will need another place to enter the system. This is something Van Bleek is capable of orchestrating, especially if he’s involved from ground-level planning in a brand new and potentially massive diamond op. I know,” he said, “I could be chasing shadows. I know what you’re thinking. You’re wondering if I am nuts—if the bullet and heroin have rewired my brain. Maybe they have. But sometimes, when you’ve been through hell, when you’ve made bad decisions about life and people, and you feel like shit, and you don’t know how to go on, you just mechanically do something because you know how to do it, and you do it, putting one foot in front of the other as a way of moving forward. It becomes something that gets you out of bed each day. So I kept looking. Maybe I’m still just that old dog who won’t give up on that scent.” He hesitated. “Yeah, maybe I am that conspiracy-theory dude hunkered in his room with papers all over his wall and red lines linking everything. But I think Sturmann-Taylor is the genuine article. And both Van Bleek and Blundt hunt with him, spend time at Tchliko. And one of his subsidiaries has put serious financing into WestMin.”

  “What will you do if you find proof?”

  He pushed to his feet, turned up the bar heater. “The original plan was to hear him confess, and then kill him. Payback. For Lara. Our kid.”

  She stared up at him, cleared her throat. “And the plan now?”

  “Not sure.”

  “You wanted to die—you wanted to wait long enough just to find him, force him to confess, then commit a kind of suicide.”

  “Astute.”

  She thought again of Jim. Of his easy smile. How he lived on the edge in order to feel—how he needed the rush of EMT work, being a medevac paramedic. Like Crash with his UC work. But it cost him. She thought of how he’d hidden his depression, and what a black dog it could be. Addiction. Self-medication. Her feelings for this man standing in his shed in front of her, naked in a sense, were suddenly complex. He’d just demonstrated his absolute trust in her. He’d put everything into her hands, even telling her, a cop, that he’d murdered a man out of revenge, and had been planning to do so again. She believed him. She got him. And she needed to stay away from him.

  “And now?” she said.

  “And now that you know, Constable, what are you going to do about it?”

  She sucked air deep into her lungs and sat silent, listening to snow thud from the roof. “I’m going to let you show me Damien’s hide.”

  CHAPTER 30

  Crash cut his snowmobile engine. Up ahead, through a dense copse, a low cabin was covered almost to the roof in soft piles of snow, and the flakes were still falling. Faint yellow light sliced through boarded-up windows. All around, snow plopped and thudded off trees as the weight of it on boughs grew too heavy. And as the snow released, branches bounced back in glee, arms waving in the lengthening shadows. It felt as though the trees were alive, moving, shifting. The late-afternoon twilight was low, an eerie blue.

  They’d crossed the river, and traveled for almost half an hour into boreal forest before Crash had slowed and turned down into a hidden valley.

  He’d made Tana wear a different jacket, one without her RCMP logo and stripes. And he’d insisted on her leaving her RCMP snowmobile behind at his house.

  “Wait here,” he said, as he strapped on his snowshoes. He started into the woods, circumventing the main and obvious trail that led through the trees into the copse. He’d told her that the snow hid a trap that had been dug deep into the ground on the main trail, and covered with branches.

  Through binoculars Tana watched him disappearing into the shadowy forest. And as Crash vanished, a sense of the vast, lonely wilderness pressed down on her, a silent weight, a sentient presence.

  She checked her watch. It would be full dark soon.

  A few minutes later Crash came into view again. He’d reached the cabin. The door opened and light spilled out. A silhouetted figure stood in the doorway. She refocused her scopes. Damien. He had a long gun. Other figures moved behind him, inside. They’d been watching, waiting. They’d known it was Crash coming.

  She had mixed feelings about not interrogating the teens herself, but Crash had said he’d get more out of them without her present. She’d weigh whatever information he retrieved, and decide her own course of action from there. The fact he was a trained cop had shifted perspective in her mind. And this was better t
han doing nothing about those kids.

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” she’d said to him.

  “Do what?”

  “Help me. With my job.” Considering your rogue cover in town, your wildcat investigation into Sturmann-Taylor …

  He’d looked her deep in the eyes, and smiled. “Are you sure you want me to help, considering it’s your job?” Then he’d chuckled and said with that grin of his that hid everything that was broken inside, “Besides, I’m not going in there and announcing that I was a police officer. I’m going in to ask them if they hurt your dogs, and if they cut off the town’s communications, because even us ‘bad guys’ have lines that are not crossed. I want to drive that home. They’ll listen—they’ll talk if they think it’ll cost their booze and dope shipments. But only if I go in alone. Now, give me that bag with the taxidermy tool—I want to ask what they know about that, and if they took my buck’s eyes.”

  Unspoken between them lurked the more sinister question: Was this gang of guys capable of behaving like a pack of blood-thirsty wolves … could they have ritualistically slashed and beaten Apodaca and Sanjit, leaving their remains for scavengers?

  As the cabin door closed with Crash inside, Tana panned her scopes across the building to study the shadows that moved in the gaps between the boarded-up windows. She’d play it step by step, see what he returned with. But she had to admit, it was a relief to feel part of a team after struggling on her own out here. Her other growing feelings for Crash were trickier. More dangerous.

  The door opened suddenly. Crash came out. There was a moment of more discussion between him and the guys, then he began to make his way back through the trees. He popped out of the shadows a few minutes later, breathing heavily from the exertion of tramping through the deep drifts.

  “What did they say?” she said.

  “They don’t know who cut the cables, or poisoned your dogs.”

  She eyed him in the waning light. “Is it the truth?”

  “I think so.” He removed his snowshoes. “They want to keep their liquor flowing. I made it clear that I’m only helping you with this because lines were crossed with the dogs and telcom sabotage. I made it clear I need those lines open for my business, and theirs.”

  “You sure? About the Wolverine Falls guys, too?”

  “I’ve been reading bad guys, con artists, tricksters for years, Tana. I’ve needed to make split-second life decisions depending on my read, my gut. I wouldn’t have survived deep UC if I didn’t have a quick tell on people.”

  She thought of how quickly he’d seen through her anger around Mindy, how he’d read her own past.

  “But would you have a read on a sociopath?” she said. “Would you be able to tell if these guys were psychologically capable of murder as a group, perhaps?”

  “I don’t think that’s what we’re dealing with here—yeah, Damien and his gang are low-level, social animals. But they’re all about making a few bucks, and generally rebelling. I’m not reading any signs of ritualistic behavior, or blood lust, or any need for extreme violence for the sake of it.”

  “What about the eyeball, and the tool?”

  He secured his snowshoes to the back of the machine. Light was fading fast and snow was coming down heavier again.

  “Only one of the guys—a hunter from Wolverine Falls—knew what the tool is for. He’s also a friend of Jamie’s, and he said he’s seen several like it in a shed on TwoDove’s land—said it’s used to scrape and poke out brains from small animals and birds.”

  “We need to go back to TwoDove’s ranch. Those kids were top of my list for the vandalism and poisonings. If they didn’t do this—”

  “Then someone else did,” he said. “And the question becomes, why? Why you? Why your dogs? Why the eye and that particular tool on your station door? And was the satcom sabotage designed to cut you—the lone cop—off specifically? What other enemies have you made out here, Tana?”

  She dusted snow off her brow, turned, looked into the bleak woods. “And it’s your buck, in your garage, that is missing eyes.” She met his gaze in the haunting light. “How vindictive is Mindy? She’s made no secret she hates me, and likes you. The deer eyes are a link between you and me. Could she have done this—be trying to say something?”

  “I don’t think so. I’ll talk to her.” He mounted the machine in front of Tana. “I don’t know what to do with her. There’s a special course designed to help kids finish school and get jobs that she wants to take, starting in Yellowknife in January, but until then, she just needs a roof over her head. But while she might meddle with deer eyes, she’s not going to have the wherewithal, or motive, to go cutting satcom cables.”

  “You sure?” Tana tucked herself tightly in behind Crash, wrapping her legs around him.

  “And she loves dogs. I don’t see her poisoning pets.”

  He fired the engine. Blue smoke coughed into the dusk as the machine rumbled to life beneath them.

  He drove fast, trying to outrun the dwindling light, his headlights dancing and glancing off the snowy landscape as they crashed through the soft drifts. Tana hugged her arms firmly around him for balance as they lurched and swayed through the forest. She liked the feeling of him against her body. It was just the humanness of the connection, she told herself. Warmth. Strength. In an otherwise lonely environment.

  How long had it been since someone’d held her in their arms? Loved her? Tenderly, with empathy, and compassion, and care? Not just fucked her. The pain of loss was suddenly acute, unbearable. She missed Jim like a hole in her heart. It was making her vulnerable. She needed to put some distance between herself and Crash, because she couldn’t resort to her old coping mechanisms. She did not need new problems. Not now—not with her baby, this new job, this fresh start she was striving for. And Crash was the definition of “problem.” Tana knew guys like him, who lived on the edge just to feel alive. She knew his kind too well.

  And they were bad for her.

  … you’ve got another life to think about now …

  Mindy lugged her old suitcase through the snow, tears streaming down her face. She’d packed all her shit and was moving out of Crash’s place, heading for town but unsure where to go once she got there. She had no money for the motel. She couldn’t bear the idea of returning to the old shed by the river. She walked in the middle of the road because it had been sort of plowed. Bob, who did the maintenance in town, mounted blades on his truck at the beginning of each winter. He tried to keep up with the heavy dumps of snow in the early season, maintaining a rough track between town and the airstrip, and up along the river on the road that led past Crow TwoDove’s ranch toward the Wolverine Falls settlement.

  Headlights and the sound of a truck grinding through snow came up behind her.

  She hurriedly moved out of the road and into the drifts on the side.

  A dark-gray vehicle drew up alongside her, and stopped, engine running, exhaust fumes chugging into the twilight. The passenger window wound down. An interior light went on.

  “Where are you going?” said a man’s voice.

  Mindy peered inside the truck. It was that man she’d seen in the diner from time to time. The one with the accent. He worked at the WestMin camp.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “To town. Maybe.”

  “I know you,” he said. “You’re the young lady who comes into the diner. You live with that pilot—O’Halloran.”

  “I moved out.”

  “You got a place to stay?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Why don’t you hop in?” He leaned over, opened the passenger door for her. “My name’s Markus. I’m heading up to Wolverine Falls. Got a friend with a house there. He’s got plenty of room for another.” He smiled. It was a warm smile. But Mindy hesitated. She glanced up and down the road. It would be fully dark soon, and getting colder.

  She started to put her bag into the front of the truck cab, and Markus moved aside a book that lay on the seat. It looked
like a horror novel with the image of a wolf-man with a head like a skull and horns, and long teeth dripping with blood. She wavered again, suddenly unsure. Markus had dark stains on his pants and black dirt under his nails.

  “What’s that book?” she said.

  “Friend of mine wrote it. I brought him my copy to sign the other day. I think you saw him at the diner? Balding guy, round face.”

  She remembered now. She had seen the round guy in the diner, the night Tana’s dogs had been poisoned. She started to climb in. As she did, headlights illuminated them. Another truck was coming up the road.

  It pulled up alongside, and the window came down. It was Heather.

  “Hey Mindy, Markus,” she said. “Where are you guys going?”

  “Giving her a ride, a place to stay for the night,” Markus said.

  Heather studied him for a long moment, her eyes narrowing, then she said, “Mindy, why don’t you come with me? I’ve got an extra bed.” She got out of her truck, came around, and took Mindy’s suitcase. “Here, let me take that.”

  Heather hefted it out of Markus’s truck and hauled it around to her own. She dumped it into the snow-filled bed of her vehicle, and opened the passenger door for Mindy.

  “Thanks,” Heather said to Markus with a fake smile. “I’ve got it.”

  He eyed her, something going dark in his face, then he gave Heather a small salute, and wound up his window. He drove on.

  “You okay?” Heather said once they were inside her warm truck cab. Heather was pretty. Her eyes super blue in this cold, hair like gold. Snow sparkled on her fur ruff. Mindy was jealous of Heather, because she knew she’d slept with Crash. But it was just fucking, because they weren’t having a relationship or anything. She’d watched them once, going at it in that barn last summer, after the Festival of Light where everyone had too much to drink under the midnight sun.

  Mindy started to cry again.