The Bangtail Ghost

by Keith McCafferty

  “I abandoned her,” he said. “I was only thinking of myself. I should have followed. I should have gone and got help. I should have done something. Instead, I just tried to get away and I couldn’t even do that right.” He told Sean about getting his truck stuck in the snowdrift and having to wait for another hunter to drive in and winch him out.

  “God help me,” he said.

  “No,” Sean said. “God help her.”

  “Do you think . . . Was it over quickly?”

  “No, Leonard. The woman you call Cheryl was breathing all the way to the top of the ridge. She left the skin of her fingers on branches, that’s how hard she clung to life.” Sean looked at him, let that sink in.

  “You heard her scream, didn’t you, Lenny?”

  “How did you know? I mean, I heard something, yes. I didn’t know what it was. I didn’t know if it was human. But how—?”

  “You could have at least shot your rifle into the air.”

  “I didn’t think of that. You have to understand—”

  “No, I don’t,” Sean said. “All I know is that you left her up there, and that you’re not telling me the truth, not all of it. Why don’t you try again, going back to buying her a drink. How much did she say it was going to cost you?”

  “She isn’t . . . she wasn’t.” Johnson took a big breath. As he let it out, his eyes swam away somewhere, and when they came back, his voice, when he spoke, was steady.

  “You can think about me however you want—it can’t be worse than what I think of myself. But it wasn’t like that. I mean, sure, she took money sometimes, but it wasn’t what you think.”

  “Then what was it? Pro bono? Or did you trade services, a ride back to the trailer in exchange for a BHB?”

  “A what?”

  “I think you know.”

  Sean made a show of switching on his phone and scrolling through the photos that he had taken of the hidden pages in the book.

  “The last entry, ah, here it is. ‘BHB.’ It says so right beside your name.” He paused before reading aloud, “‘November twenty-three—nine p.m.—Lenny—BHB.’ That’s you.” He pushed his phone across the desk. “You were the last person to see her alive.”

  Johnson blinked his eyes as his forefinger swiped the photos. “Where did you find this?” he finally said.

  Sean told him.

  “I didn’t know. I swear I never saw it.”

  “Leonard, I’m trying to help you out here, but if you want your part in this to remain confidential, you have to tell me everything.”

  Slowly, he nodded. “She told me about the prices. SP, that was a spike bull. It was shorthand for a hand job. BHB was a brush-head bull, oral sex. SP-Six meant a six-point bull, which was intercourse.”

  “How about IMP?” Sean said. “What was that? The whole ball of wax?”

  “IMP was short for imperial, like an imperial elk rack, a seven-point bull. That was all night, anything you wanted.”

  “Your entry reads ‘BHB.’ A blow job is a long way from making love with your soul mate, comparing her to a candle.”

  “That’s just . . . she had to write something down. She had to take some money in case she got checked up on. They weren’t going to believe she could have an honest relationship with no transaction. She had to protect herself or they’d think she was flying solo or overcharging and pocketing the difference.”

  “Protect herself from who? Who are ‘they’?”

  “The other woman, her friend who left her at the bar—she was in the life. That was the deal. The cost of the rent. If Cheryl stayed in the trailer, she had to turn a few tricks and pay a percentage to the friend, who had her own arrangement with the person who had the trailer.”

  “Like subletting an apartment?” Sean said.

  He shrugged. “I suppose you could look at it like that.”

  “Did she mention a woman named Jenny? Ginny Gin Jenny?”

  “No. Who’s that?”

  “They call her the Elk Camp Madam. A trailer or a wall tent at the end of an access road, that’s her MO.”

  “I never heard of any Elk Camp Madam. I don’t travel in the circles where someone like that would be brought up. Or didn’t. Now, my circle has been reduced to anyone who will have a drink with me.”

  Johnson had gone from righteous indignation to contrition to tears, and now self-pity, all in a few exhaled breaths.

  A silence played out in the room. Johnson’s eyes roamed the paintings on the walls. When he spoke, his voice was barely a whisper.

  “She wrote that on Friday. Just two more days, she told me. The hunting season would be over then and her truck would be fixed and she’d have made enough money to drive back to Arizona. She’d put the life behind her. Or at least try to.”

  He raised his eyes to Sean.

  “She said it was an apt metaphor, hooking, that she felt like a fish on a hook. She would run out the line, and sometimes it was like she could escape to the sea and be away from her problems. But the hook was always in her mouth, and just when she thought she was free, she’d be reeled back to reality. Story of her life.”

  His shoulders fell and he shook his head.

  “You ask me to give you her name . . . but what happened to her, it was fate.”

  Sean glanced up from Johnson. Though it was midafternoon, long shadows were already darkening the snow on the windowsills of his studio. Soon it would be time to meet Martha at the task-force gathering.

  “Do me a favor, Leonard,” he said. “Take off your shirt.”

  “What the—?”

  “Just do it. If you don’t want what we’ve talked about to get back to your wife, you have to cooperate. It’s either take it off for me or you can follow me to Law and Justice and do it in front of the deputy.”

  “No. I mean, okay.” He shrugged out of his corduroy jacket and removed his shirt. His body was pale and rubbery-looking, the hairs of his chest thin and scraggly.

  “There. Are you satisfied?” he said.

  “Turn around.”

  “What is it you’re looking for?”

  “Just turn around.”

  He turned around. Sean saw no indication that his body had been raked with fingernails, fake or otherwise. He nodded and told the man to get dressed.

  “I don’t want anybody to call me at home. Not on the landline.”

  “I understand. Give me your cell number. If the sheriff wants to talk to you, she’ll call it.”

  “Will she, do you think?”

  “That depends on how much of the story she thinks you left out.”

  “I took off my goddamned shirt. What the hell can I have to hide?”

  “You know the answer to that better than I do. Go home now, Lenny. Don’t leave the county.”

  “I won’t.” He hesitated. “All that stuff you said about me, what I was and how I was in trouble. How did you know?”

  I got almost all of it from your daughter, Sean could have said, but didn’t. “I can’t give away all my secrets of deduction,” he said.

  “Then tell me one thing. How did you know I played the violin? Everyone knows my children are pianists, they figure I must be, too, that’s where it comes from. But violin?”

  “I shook your right hand. Your fingertips were smooth. But when you handled the clay pipe, I noticed the calluses on the fingertip pads on your left hand. That told me you played a string instrument, and that the calluses were from pressing the strings against the fingerboard.”

  “But why not a guitar or mandolin? Why viola or violin?”

  “First, they are classical instruments, and you conduct classical music. But the answer is in your face, what you see in the mirror. The right side of your face is developed more than the left. It has a more pronounced musculature. That’s because the right side of your face has to partia
lly support the left side, which is supported by the chin rest of the instrument. It’s an inequality in workload, and more noticeable in musicians who started playing when they were young and the facial bones had not fully formed.”

  Johnson looked at Sean incredulously. Then he nodded, the answer obvious. “You must have played the violin,” he said.

  “Never touched one. But my sister played, and she didn’t like that her face was becoming lopsided. Vanity, pure and simple. So she quit and took up the cello.”

  “But you said I probably played violin. Why not viola? They’re bigger, heavier, the asymmetry in the face should be even more pronounced.”

  “That’s easy. You had dreams of becoming a great musician, and the violin is a dreamer’s instrument. Nobody begins a musical career with aspirations to be the world’s greatest violist.”

  Johnson started to speak, and stopped. Then shook his head. “And look where dreaming got me,” he said.

  After he had gathered himself and his footsteps in the hall rang into echoes, Sean picked up the clay pipe. It had been white originally, but the client who gave it to him had bought it used, and red-hot coals had blackened the bowl. Sean hadn’t smoked the pipe since the previous summer, while fishing at night above the bungalow belonging to the Madison River Liars and Fly Tiers Club. The dregs of his long cut were in a foil wrapper in his fishing vest, which was back at Martha’s.

  He brought the pipe stem to his lips and lit wishful tobacco with a conjured coal from an imaginary fireplace. Johnson had painted a picture of stolen love between two broken human beings that was worthy of a Hallmark card. But it was not the whole picture, he was sure of it.

  Maybe it was going to be a three-pipe problem, after all.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Hard Day on a Horse, Soft Night in the Saddle

  By the time Sean climbed the steps to the Trophy Room—an inside joke, the only “trophy” on the wall being a jackalope with forked antlers and rabbit ears—the conference was under way. Or rather chairs were taken, coffee poured, doughnuts picked over. Sean knew most present—Carson Taylor, the Fish, Wildlife and Parks biologist who had spearheaded mountain lion studies in both Montana and the Andes Mountains of Patagonia; Calvin Barr, a government trapper who had captured most of the wolves for the species reintroduction into the Rockies twenty-five years ago; Judy McGregor; two deputies representing adjacent counties; and Buster Garrett.

  “Buster,” Sean said.

  Garrett, a lumberjack of a man wearing pegged wool trousers and a flannel shirt with suspenders that read WEYERHAEUSER, inclined his head. “Sean.”

  Sean could see the C-scar on his left cheek, made, he’d heard, by a broken beer bottle in a barroom brawl. Garrett called it his Budweiser kiss and wore it like a badge of honor.

  The houndsman smiled, his eyes crinkling up in an expression of self-amusement. He tapped his chest, pointed at Sean. “You and me.” Mouthed the word “after.”

  Great, Sean thought. Just what I need.

  “Gentlemen.” It was Martha. “I thank you all for coming on such short notice. The purpose of this meeting is to assemble a task force to deal with what looks like a mountain lion in our region that has turned man-eater. I’m talking about the woman who was killed north of Specimen Ridge in the Gravelly Range late Saturday. As most of you have no doubt heard, the scent trail of a lion was picked up near the site of the kill and run by hounds belonging to Ike and Jed Dusan. They reported that the lion was cornered on a cliff face and killed one of the dogs. Its whereabouts are unknown, but until we find another trail for hounds to follow, consider us to be the dog pack, so to speak. So let’s get our noses to the trail. Carson, you led the WHART team that recovered the body—what’s your take on this?”

  Taylor, a compact, muscular man with smiling eyes and a manner of confidence extending to his smallest gestures, scratched the FW&P emblem above his left breast pocket. Like most biologists, he had worn many hats since donning the khakis. Sean had first met him when he was taking a creel census and remembered a mustache, a toothpick, and a smile. The hair and the smile were gone, but the toothpick remained, and he spoke around it.

  “I won’t bore you with statistics. Suffice it to say that aggressive human encounters attributed to pumas, forgive me for using the scientific nomenclature, have doubled in recent years, although fatalities remain very rare. In the past year we’ve had two deaths attributed to lion, neither in Montana. One was a bicyclist in rural Washington State, the other a woman hiker in the Mount Hood National Forest in Oregon. In addition, we’ve had some near misses, including, this summer, an attack at a campground in Glacier Park. Lion took a sleeping girl out of a tent and started to drag her away. Father beat it off with the lid of a Dutch oven. The fatalities are significant in that both bodies were consumed. Now I wouldn’t label the recent increases in aggression and instances of man-eating epidemic, but they are concerning. You want my opinion, Martha, I’ll give it. But it will cost you that last jelly doughnut.”

  Taylor placed the doughnut on his paper plate. “Anybody gets a hankering to reach for that is going to have to beat me to the draw.” He slapped his right hip where his holstered handgun rested. He smiled, worked the toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other.

  “My o-pin-ion”—he stretched out the word—“is that human encroachment on habitat is primarily to blame for the majority of confrontations. Second homes, vacation residences, road building, and to some extent timber harvest. Also, we’re pushing into more remote habitat—call it the lion’s stronghold—for purely recreational purposes. Used to be this was all Jack London country, silent and brooding nine months of the year. You had your horse riding and your hunting and that was about it. Now you got bicycles, backpackers, ice climbers, skiers, ATV riders, motorcyclists, people collecting shed elk antlers, what have you. It’s become a playground. This spike in human activity, combined with habitat loss, pushes the cats into proximity with humans, where their natural fear of us may erode over time. They see us every day, they look at our kids, some no bigger than a fawn deer, their bellies are hungry, and where they used to see danger they see opportunity.”

  He sat back and pushed his chair an inch away from the table. “I understand this may not help a lot in the present situation.”

  Martha bit her lip, another in an ever-changing litany of thinking gestures. “If you had to profile this cat, what would you say?”

  “Well, as a rule, most lion/human confrontations that occur in semi-developed areas involve immature male cats that have been pushed into fringe habitat by larger toms. Confrontations in the backcountry often involve females. But to carry that poor woman a quarter mile or so up the side of a steep ridge? That’s a tremendous feat of strength. I’d have to say an adult tom.”

  “What’s the biggest cat you know of?” Martha asked.

  “We’ve had a couple weighed on meat scales at one seventy-five, one eighty. I’ve seen photos on the internet of a cat supposed to be two forty, but a wide angle can exaggerate the size of the subject.”

  “As any fisherman knows,” Sean said.

  That brought a few smiles.

  “How about you, Calvin?”

  Heads turned to the salt-and-pepper-haired trapper. Unlike Taylor, who had long ago traded the trail for the desk, Barr looked like he’d spent his life outdoors. He had the lined face from the elements, the thick, crablike hands and knuckly fingers that came from hard work, along with the bowed legs of someone who had sat in a saddle since childhood.

  “I’ve seen a few big-uns. Over two hundred? Maybe one.” He scratched at the thinning wool of his hair. “Lion, he’ll eat what he kills, where he kills it. Maybe drag it a few yards into cover first, scrape some sticks over it when he’s finished his meal. But to carry it up that ridge, all that way? You ask me, you’re talking about learned behavior. Cat’s shaped by his experience. Maybe he was shot at and woun
ded the first time he was run by hounds, so he won’t tree no more. Or maybe he was driven away from a kill by a wolf pack and learned to carry his kills a ways first, eat in peace. You see more of that now with lobos in the country.”

  His eyebrows crawled. “Something you might want to consider is sending drones up with cameras. That’s new technology to me, but I know that Wildlife Services uses them to locate coyote packs for aerial gunning.”

  “Sounds like a good idea. I’ll take it under advisement. Buster, that leaves you.” Martha looked pointedly at the houndsman. “What do you make of this situation?”

  Garrett made a show of scratching the stubble on his neck. “All this talk about sex and size is beside the point. Cat’s out there. I got dogs that will run it. I mean no offense, mate, and I respect your opinion, but if we find a track, my dogs will bark ‘treed’ inside six hours, you can bet your firstborn on it. You can put it on the scales and see if it’s got balls after I shoot it out of the tree.”

  It was common knowledge that Garrett had grown up in Australia, at least among those in hunting circles, and not only because he wore a cap with a Tasmanian Devil on it. Still, Sean was surprised to hear the accent. That hadn’t registered before, although, when he thought about it, except for one brief meeting, his only conversation with the man had been exchanged in fists.

  Garrett appeared to be reading his thoughts. “I go Down Under to see the folks,” he said, “I start chewing words. Aussie English is like a cancer—it keeps coming out of remission. Guaranteed to lower your IQ by fifteen points.”

  He scratched at the blue-black stubble on his cheeks. The nap of hair looked hard enough to strike a match on.

  Martha cleared her throat.

  “Before we get any further along, I want to put it out there that the goal is to take this cat, or any other mountain lion that falls within our net, alive. Let forensic evidence identify the guilty party. To this end, Carson has brought along several tranquilizing guns. After the meeting, he’ll instruct anyone who needs a refresher course on their use and provide armed darts and antidote. We aren’t in the business of killing innocent cats, and we’re going to be in the public eye until this is sorted out. In India, when a tiger turns man-eater, my understanding is it has a team of defense lawyers take its case to court to make sure no harm comes to it.”