Dark Tiger

by William G. Tapply

  “I figured they’d have somebody to back up Curtis,” said Calhoun. “This place is totally dependent on air transportation.”

  “Marty was saying they’re hoping to hire a replacement as soon as possible,” said Harry. “They need somebody full-time, and Ben was saying he had no heart for flying airplanes of any kind.”

  “After what happened to Curtis,” said Jack, “it’s hard to blame him.”

  “Never mind after Iraq,” said Calhoun.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  By the time Calhoun eased his canoe alongside the dock, the Twin Otter with the triple-L logo on its fuselage was already tied up there, and Ben and Robert Dunlap and the redheaded kid who drove the golf cart were unloading supplies from the plane and stacking them in the wagon that was hitched to the cart.

  Robert held the gunwale of Calhoun’s canoe against the dock, steadying it for Jack, who climbed out. “How was the fishing?” Robert said.

  Harry grinned. “Excellent.”

  “My dad got a four-pound squaretail on a dry fly,” said Jack.

  Robert smiled. “That’s great.” He looked at Harry. “Did you keep it for the taxidermist?”

  Harry shook his head. “Put him back for somebody else to catch. Like Lee Wulff said, a big fish is too precious to be caught only once.”

  “Well,” said Robert, “that’s admirable. You got photos, at least, I hope.” He held down a hand to old Harry, who used it to help himself scramble out of the canoe.

  “Thanks,” said Harry. “Yes, we got some photos. We found a piece of Curtis Swenson’s shirt down in Muddy Pond.”

  Robert’s smile turned into a frown. “A piece of his shirt, huh?”

  “One of his Hawaiian shirts, all bright colors and flowers. Hey, Stoney. Show that piece of shirt to Robert.”

  Calhoun had climbed out of the canoe. He went over to Robert and handed him the scrap of Curtis Swenson’s aloha shirt.

  Robert looked at it and nodded. “This is Curtis’s, all right. It’s the one he was wearing when . . .” He waved his hand in the air. “Look how the edge got burned. Where’d you say you found it?”

  “Down in Muddy,” Calhoun said. “It was stuck on a bush that was trailing in the water.”

  “Why don’t you let me hang on to it,” said Robert. “The sheriff might want it for evidence.”

  “Evidence of what?” said Calhoun.

  “Of what happened yesterday,” Robert said. “Of Curtis getting blown up in the Cessna. Of the fact that he’s dead, I suppose.”

  “Keep it, then,” Calhoun said. “We looked all over down there in Muddy but didn’t see any dead bodies. I’m not sure you can call a man dead until you’ve got his body.”

  Robert shrugged. “We’ll probably never find him. That doesn’t make him alive.” He folded up the ragged scrap of cloth and stuffed it into his shirt pocket. He glanced at Ben and the redheaded kid, then turned to Calhoun. “I better get back to unloading the plane.”

  “Need some help?” said Calhoun.

  Robert shook his head “We got it. Thanks.”

  “I see we got ourselves a new pilot, huh?”

  Ben looked up. “I hoped I’d never have to fly a plane again,” he said. “Far as I’m concerned, the sooner we get someone to take Curtis’s place the better. But, yeah, meanwhile, process of elimination, looks like it’s me.”

  “You don’t like to fly?”

  “What’s to like? A chance to die?”

  “You were in Iraq, I heard.”

  Ben shook his head. “I don’t feel like talking about that, if you don’t mind.” He turned and went over to the plane and stepped through the doorway into the cargo hold.

  Jack Vandercamp came over and shook Calhoun’s hand. “It was a great day,” said Jack. “You available tomorrow?”

  “I’m scheduled to be guiding,” said Calhoun. “You want me again, tell Marty. I’d enjoy it.”

  Harry patted Calhoun on the shoulder, and the father and son turned and headed up to the lodge.

  Calhoun lifted the cooler out of the canoe and lugged it up to the kitchen. Then he came back and paddled the canoe over to the boathouse, where he unloaded the fishing gear and the cooking equipment. He put the cooking stuff away, then hauled the canoe up on the dock, hosed it out, eased it back into the water, and refilled the gas can from the pump. All the chores that guides do that the sports don’t see and probably never think about, although at least today he didn’t have to clean any dead fish.

  Fishing guides say eight hours on the water means twelve hours of work.

  Calhoun liked guiding well enough, when he could take out companionable folks like Harry and Jack Vandercamp. But it was hard and often unrewarding work, and when you added the man-hours and expenses to the aggravation, the pay was piss-poor at best.

  He was just finishing up his post-trip guide chores in the boathouse when another canoe glided in. Franklin Redbird was in the stern.

  Calhoun held Franklin’s canoe alongside while the Indian guide climbed out. “Thanks, Stoney,” he said. He reached in, opened his cooler, and took out a big landlocked salmon. “My sports decided to get this fellow mounted.”

  “That’s a five-pounder, I’d guess,” said Calhoun. “Good fish.”

  “Five pounds four ounces, actually. A real nice fish.” Franklin shook his head. “I’d rather know he was still swimming up there in Big Hairy Lake.” He looked at Calhoun. “If one of your clients wanted to get a fish mounted, would you know what to do?”

  Calhoun grinned. “I bet you’re gonna show me.”

  Franklin shrugged. “If you want.”

  Calhoun nodded. “Sure.”

  Franklin took the fish over to a restaurant-sized freezer in the corner of the boathouse. Beside the freezer was a big carton box, from which he took a coffin-shaped foam container. It looked to be about three feet long, a foot wide, and maybe eight inches deep. He opened it and showed Calhoun that it was about half filled with foam packing peanuts. “You clean your fish soon as you kill it, of course,” Franklin said. “Guts and gills. Then you just stick it in one of these. You put in a card with the sport’s name and address, your name, and the dimensions of the fish—length, girth, weight—seal it with duct tape, and stick it in the freezer. Curtis Swenson”—Franklin hesitated—“somebody packs it in dry ice, flies it down to the UPS office in Greenville, and from there it goes to the taxidermist in Pittsburgh. Fellow down there does a good job, I understand.”

  “I’ve never been a big fan of stuffed fish,” said Calhoun. “Seems to me a good photograph does the job and lets a fish live.”

  Franklin shrugged. “I’m with you, Stoney.”

  Calhoun watched Franklin pack the salmon in the foam box. Then he said good-bye, whistled up Ralph, and picked up all his fishing gear, and the two of them headed back to his cabin. He still had a little more than an hour before dinner. Time for a Coke and maybe a quick nap.

  When he opened the door to the screen porch, he saw that Robin was sitting there in one of the rocking chairs. She was wearing a pair of blue running shorts and a pink sleeveless tank top, and she was reading a paperback book.

  She looked up, put the book on the table on its open pages, and gave him a big smile. “You’re back,” she said. “How was it?”

  Calhoun stacked the fishing gear in the corner of the porch, then turned to Robin. “Am I supposed to yell, ‘Honey, I’m home’?”

  She frowned. “Huh?” She hesitated. “Oh, I get it. I guess I just assumed you wouldn’t mind if I was here. It feels like a safe, comfortable place to me. Isn’t that okay?”

  “You don’t live here,” he said.

  “I know. I’m sorry if I . . .”

  He shook his head. “We ain’t a couple.”

  “Sure,” she said. “I understand. Sorry. My mistake. I should’ve got it when you kicked me out last night.” She stood up. “Thanks for letting me hang out when you weren’t here, anyway. Now I’ll get out of your hair.” She heade
d for the door.

  “Hang on,” Calhoun said. “Where are you going?”

  She stopped. “What makes the difference? Somewhere else. Give you some privacy.”

  “Sit down,” he said. “Have a Coke. Let’s talk about it.”

  She looked at him for a minute, then came back and sat in the rocker. “I’m sorry if I made stupid assumptions,” she said. “I know we’re not a couple, and I understand that you don’t want me to spend the night, but we’re friends. I felt like I could depend on you to be there for me. I didn’t think you’d mind if I hid out down here in your cabin. I actually thought you’d be happy to see me when you got back from guiding.” She shook her head. “I guess I don’t know you very well.”

  “I don’t know me very well, either,” said Calhoun. “I apologize for myself. Maybe I overreacted. I tend to do that sometimes. It just felt a little . . . I don’t know, domestic, you might say, having you waiting here for me to get home from work.”

  “That was you, not me.”

  “Yeah, I guess you’re right,” he said. “Let’s start over, okay?”

  Robin looked at him for a minute, then nodded. “Okay.” She sat down, picked up her book, pretended to read for a minute, then looked up at him with a big fake smile of happy surprise on her face. “Oh, hi, Stoney,” she said brightly. “Welcome home.”

  He went over to her and squeezed her shoulder. “Hi, honey. Did you have a nice day?”

  “Oh, excellent,” said Robin. “I vacuumed the whole house, and wait’ll you see what I’ve got in the oven.”

  Calhoun laughed. “You’ve been watching way too much television. You want a Coke?”

  “Sure. Thanks.”

  When Calhoun returned to the porch with a Coke for each of them, Robin said, “So are you gonna tell her about me?”

  “Kate?” he said.

  She nodded.

  “Tell her what?”

  Robin smiled. “How I’ve been chasing after you. Flirting with you. Coming to your cabin without being invited.”

  “June said she thought you had a crush on me,” he said.

  Robin rolled her eyes. “June would say something like that. I’m sorry, Stoney. I know you don’t need this.”

  “She mentioned how you lost your father.”

  She nodded. “Right. I get it. She thinks I’ve got a daddy thing for you. Is that it?”

  He shrugged. “I am twice your age.”

  “So, okay, I think you’re pretty hot,” she said, “and, yeah, I’d sleep with you in a heartbeat.” She smiled. “You knew that, right?”

  He shook his head. He knew he was naive about such things.

  “Well,” she said. “I said it out loud, in case you didn’t. You gonna tell that to Kate?”

  “I tell Kate everything.”

  “Everything? Really?”

  “Yes.”

  Robin smiled. “How extraordinarily old-fashioned.”

  Calhoun shrugged. “I love Kate, and even if she’s mad at me and not talking to me, and even though I’m here and she’s there, it doesn’t change anything. Do you understand?”

  Robin was looking at him with a soft little smile playing around her mouth. She nodded. “Sure I understand,” she said. “You’re actually a man of principle. I’ve read about men like you, mostly in trashy novels. Never believed I’d run into a real one, though.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Calhoun was sitting in one of the comfortable rocking chairs on his screen porch that evening after dinner. The lights were turned off, and he held a mug of coffee in his hands. He was watching the sun descend behind the treeline across the lake, waiting for darkness to fill up the forest. A couple of loons were out there on the water laughing at each other, and from the woods behind the cabin came the hoot-hoot of a barred owl. Ralph was snoozing on the floor beside him. The poor dog had tuckered himself out with all that fishing.

  Calhoun was thinking about McNulty and Millie Gautier, dead of botulism poisoning, then shot in the head, and Elaine Hoffman, murdered in her bed with Calhoun’s own Colt Woodsman .22 pistol, and now Curtis Swenson, blown up in his Cessna in what was supposed to look like an accident but almost certainly was also a murder.

  Too many dead bodies and not enough clues.

  He’d been here for five days, and in that short amount of time, two people had been killed, and since Curtis Swenson turned out to be a victim rather than the villain, Calhoun hadn’t come close to figuring out who was doing it or why. He guessed Mr. Brescia wouldn’t be very happy with his progress.

  Again he remembered what Sheriff Dickman liked to say about conducting an investigation. Sometimes it’s like partridge hunting, he’d say. You never know where a bird might be hiding, so you’ve got to go through the woods shaking every bush and kicking every clump of grass. You might shake a hundred bushes and kick a hundred clumps of grass and find nothing, but you can’t lose faith. It almost always gets boring, but you’ve got to keep doing it. Just keep kicking and shaking, and eventually something will fly out.

  Time to get shaking and kicking, Calhoun thought.

  When the sun had sunk all the way behind the trees across the lake, Calhoun went back inside. He put his mug in the sink, slipped on his dark blue windbreaker, and put a small flashlight in his pocket. Then he went out onto the porch. “I’ll be back in a while,” he told Ralph. “You guard the place. Bite intruders on the ass.”

  He opened the door and stepped outside. He stood there on the path in front of his cabin for a few minutes while his eyes adjusted to the darkness, and then the ambient light from the moonless sky showed the way along the pathway past the boathouse to the dock where the Twin Otter was parked.

  He cut into the woods alongside the path and found a place where he could lean his back against a pine tree and obscure his silhouette. There was a screen of shrubbery between the tree and the path. It was thick enough to cover him in the darkness but sparse enough to give him an unobstructed view of the path from the lodge down to the dock, and he could see the float plane clearly.

  He made a cushion of pine needles and sat on them with his back against the trunk of the pine, and almost instantly that old déjà vu feeling came over him again, and he knew he’d spent many nights sitting on outdoor stakeouts in his unremembered life. He felt his senses grow more acute, and the sensations were all familiar—the organic scent of darkness, the wet feel of the night air brushing his skin, the buzzing sounds of the forest, the flickering play of pale light and purple shadows in the underbrush.

  Calhoun wore no watch, and almost instantly his sense of time became distorted. He understood that five minutes sitting quietly in the darkness could seem like an hour, and five hours could seem like fifteen minutes. He hadn’t decided on a time limit for himself. He’d stay for as long as he could remain awake and alert, and he’d see what, if anything, happened.

  He remembered the night when he and Ralph were sitting on the end of the dock and somebody sneaked into the Twin Otter, shone his flashlight around inside, and emerged a short time later carrying something. At the time he thought the man was Curtis Swenson. He had no idea what the man took from the plane. It looked like a small suitcase.

  Now he wished he’d followed that man.

  According to Millie Gautier’s father, McNulty had been a man on a mission. He’d had something with him when he went to St. Cecelia, and he intended to take it to Augusta—so he could deliver it to Mr. Brescia, Calhoun guessed.

  Now McNulty was dead.

  So Calhoun was going to watch the float plane. This was the bush he was shaking, the clump of grass he was kicking.

  Even though he was, sitting on a cushion of pine needles, the ground under his butt was damp and chilly. The tree trunk was rough against his shoulder blades. His legs, stretched out in front of him, became stiff and achey. He wished he’d brought some coffee or a Coke with him.

  The moon had risen over the lake, making wavy reflections on the water and illuminating the ar
ea around the dock. Calhoun was confident he’d be able to identify anybody who came to the plane.

  He yawned. He had another day of guiding coming up. Harry and Jack Vandercamp again. Good guys. Undemanding. They loved fishing. Easy clients.

  He thought about Kate, who wasn’t talking to him. She’d told Adrian that she wouldn’t speak with him on the telephone if he called.

  Didn’t matter. He loved her anyway. Couldn’t help it.

  Then there was Robin. He didn’t know what to do about her. He felt bad for her, but she made him uncomfortable. She had a crush on him, June Dunlap said, and Calhoun supposed it was true.

  Judging by the progress the moon had made in its arc across the sky since he’d been sitting there, he guessed it had been about three hours. He stretched out his legs, flexed his arms, rolled his head on his shoulders.

  When he’d seen the shadowy figure go into the plane, it had been right after dark. That didn’t mean that another time it wouldn’t be much later. It could be anytime. Or it might never happen again. Calhoun didn’t intend to spend the whole night sitting against the trunk of that pine tree.

  His thoughts kept flipping back to Kate. He hoped things were all right with her. He wondered how Walter was doing, and how business was at the shop, and if Adrian was working out. He was remembering the last time he’d slept with Kate, the slick feel of her skin against his, when the deer slipped past him in the darkness. It had been moving so quietly that Calhoun was unaware of it until it materialized out of the shadows right beside him—so close that he could’ve reached out and touched it. He could smell her musty wild scent. He held his breath. The deer—it was a small doe—paused and lifted her head and sniffed the air, then proceeded through the screen of shrubbery and onto the path. Calhoun watched her amble down to the lake, step into the water, bend her long neck, and drink. Then she turned and glided through the undergrowth back into the woods.