The Bangtail Ghost

by Keith McCafferty

  Garrett snorted. “This isn’t India.”

  “No, but we’ll be in a media spotlight. If the ID of the killer can be confirmed in the field, then you’ll have the go-ahead to shoot to kill. As you were saying, Buster . . .”

  “What I was getting to is no track, no cat, so cutting trail’s got to be priority one. Last trail’s what, two days old? And it’s colder than a witch’s tit out, no offense to the lady in the room.” His smile for Martha was unreturned. He shrugged and went on. “Dogs can work a scent in cold weather, but only to a point. You get into the single digits, the moisture in the air that carries the scent particles freezes. It’s like burying the scent in cement. My dogs can work an old trail, but it would be awful slow going. And the cat could be out in front miles by now, be anywhere. But if we can use trails and roads to establish a perimeter and check the line for fresh tracks every day, then when a cat crosses, we’ll have a hot trail to work.”

  Martha nodded. “That’s a good idea, Buster. Once you establish your perimeter, I’ll call in some search-and-rescue guys with snow machines and skis to help you monitor it. But let’s get around the room before we talk specifics. I’m giving a statement to the press and this thing’s going to break wide open. We need to be on the same page.”

  She paused. “Speaking of being on the same page, I forgot to tell you that State Investigative Services has agreed to loan out Harold Little Feather on a part-time basis. Most of you know Harold, if not in person, then by reputation. Our department never had a better field man or tracker. He still has some mobility issues from an injury, so he’ll be working the digital trail with Carson to collate and analyze data culled from the mountain lion study Carson headed up. I’m told that in addition to GPS and radio telemetry data, there is hard copy, digital, even some game-trail photos. It’s probably too much to ask that the guilty cat is wearing a tracking collar, but if there’s a needle in the stack, I trust Harold will find it.”

  She glanced at her notes. “Let’s get down to the brass tacks of this situation with regard to cooperation and jurisdiction. Buster, you and Sean, Calvin, you, too—if you need a bathroom break, want to stretch your legs, go ahead. Be back in, say, twenty minutes. No need to bore you with the politics.” Her eyes went to Garrett, went to Sean. “Jail’s just around the corner, either of you gentlemen need a place to cool your heels.”

  “Won’t be any need,” Garrett said. He left the room and, after a few seconds, Sean followed. If he didn’t, what would it say about him?

  He found Garrett smoking a hand-rolled cigarette on the steps of the main entrance. Garrett was speaking with a tall, long-haired man who stood with his arms crossed and who presently broke away and took the stairs in two bounds, trailing an air of self-importance as thick as a vapor as he passed Sean. No nod, just a momentary acknowledgment of his existence with one pale-blue eye. Something about the cheek in profile. A sickly gray taupe color, like putty.

  “Who’s that?” Sean asked.

  “Frederick Blake. Called Drick. He’s a cat man, self-proclaimed whisperer. I worked with him on Carson’s study.” Garrett frowned, seeing Sean’s expression of surprise. “What, you think I can’t come within sight of a lion without feeding it a bullet? I was the houndsman for a lot of the captures. I’d have introduced you, but he’s picking up his sister at the airport and just has time to poke his head in and say hello and offer his services. If they’re wanted.”

  “Why wouldn’t they be wanted?”

  “He’s the kind of bloke who doesn’t play well with others. Ego as big as the outback. Knows his cats, though, I’ll give him that.” Garrett nodded. “Tell you what. You and me, let’s start over.” He extended his hand, and Sean, hesitating only a moment, stepped into the circle of the man’s powerful aura and shook it.

  They were about the same height, six-one, Garrett thicker, mostly where it counted. He had a face that reminded Sean of the heavyweight fighter Jack Dempsey, the Manassa Mauler, a cold face that had taken punishment and dished out even more. Sean had met Garrett while working a case for the county, and circumstances had indicated that Garrett might be involved. He hadn’t been, and had held a grudge against Sean for bringing him under scrutiny that, six months later, led to their fight in the Roadkill Saloon. They had not crossed paths in the time since.

  “No hard feelings,” Garrett said. He fingered a pendant worn on a rawhide lanyard that peeked out from his chest hair.

  “The same,” Sean said. A few moments of uneasy silence passed. “What’s that you’re wearing?” he asked.

  Garrett tapped the pendant. “Lion’s claw. I wear it to remind myself to be a better man.” He shook his head. “Look, I was an asshole. Not just to you. A lot of people. Lost my wife. Damned near lost my boys. I’ve been sober three years, two months, and six days. Do the math and that’s about a month after our altercation. Made me take a hard look at myself. I should thank you, though”—he chuckled deep in his chest—“I do think you were a bit of an asshole yourself. Fair fight, but you took advantage of my inebriation. You and me, we have anger issues and hair triggers. I got help for mine. I’d advise you to do the same, if you haven’t.”

  “I had a period there when I just didn’t care,” Sean said.

  Garrett nodded. “I know the feeling. Also caring too much. Edge like a knife blade. I’d fall off one way or the other.” He chuckled again. “Said like a man who’s been in court-mandated therapy. So why am I seeing you here? Carson, the other honchos, I know why. You, I can’t figure.”

  “I tracked the cat where it dragged the woman away. Found the body, what was left of it anyway. Ettinger asked me to help out with the victim ID.”

  “That’s right, you’re a gumshoe. She’s a working girl, you ask me. One in Jenny’s stable, you can be sure of it. The madam, she’s the one can make your ID.” He rubbed his fingers together. “Ask Ettinger to front you a couple pineapples.”

  “Pineapples?”

  “Money, mate. Fifties. It’s Jenny’s first language. And her second.”

  “Do you know her?”

  He fingered the pendant. “In the biblical sense? No. A few of my clients have rewarded themselves after a hard day on a horse with a soft night in the saddle, if you catch my drift.”

  Garrett scribbled an address and a few lines of map on a sheet of cigarette rolling paper he fished from a shirt pocket. Then, before handing it over, he took a plastic bag from the same pocket and shook a few olive-colored buds into the palm of his hand.

  “Medicinal. Make you love your fellow man and screw your fellow woman. Make a human being of you. You have something to put this in? No? Then take the bag. I got more.”

  He put the marijuana back into the bag and tucked it into Sean’s breast pocket. “ ’Ave a go, mate.” He snapped the pocket over the bag. “I never gave this to you.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Lions in Ordinary Dress

  He’s a changed man,” Sean said. “Says he’s been in therapy. Wants to make amends for past transgressions and become a better person.”

  They were standing on the steps where Sean had talked to Buster Garrett an hour before.

  “That’s therapy talk, all right,” Martha said. “Let me tell you something, Sean. People don’t change. Once an asshole, always an asshole.”

  “That’s a bleak way of looking at the world.”

  “It’s Law Enforcement 101.”

  “He told me I ought to see the madam, Jenny. Gave me an address in the Jefferson Valley. I was thinking of heading over.”

  “The only thing that will accomplish is you’ll have two people lie to you in one day. It’s too late to knock on doors and it’s starting to snow, if you haven’t noticed. Stay home tonight. We can watch TV and do a puzzle, practice being a married couple. Save the madam for the morning.”

  “You make it sound so enticing.” Sean brought out the plasti
c bag.

  “Is that oregano? Or what I think it is?” Martha said.

  “Buster says it will improve our sex life.”

  “I don’t see how it can, not if I arrest you and throw you in a cell.” She held out a hand for Sean to turn over the contraband. She crushed the buds in her fist and they watched the dust blow away in the breeze. Five o’clock and change, and already dark enough to smear the outlines of the cars in the lot.

  “Meet you back at the house,” Martha said. “Don’t worry. Married people can have fun, even without THC.”

  “Is that a promise?”

  She said he’d find out, and after he did and Martha had snuffed out the candles in the deer-antler candelabra on the nightstand, Sean found his mind returning to his conversation with Garrett, and to the man he had referred to as a cat whisperer.

  “You awake, Martha?”

  She exhaled a sigh. “Trying not to be.”

  “What do you know about Drick Blake?”

  “The biologist?”

  “Yeah, he was talking to Garrett earlier. He said Blake was going to offer you his services.”

  Martha sat up in the bed. “I’m lighting just one candle, and that’s for five minutes only.”

  “I’m listening,” Sean said.

  “His father was South African, some kind of game ranger, so the son was brought up in the bush. How he traded zebras for elk and wound up here, I don’t have any idea. Half of a brother-and-sister act. They live up the Wise River, some nowhere drainage. Beavertail, something like that. He worked on Carson’s lion project, strictly independent contractor. Used to be on the FWP payroll, but you know how it is in a bureaucracy: You go off cowboying by yourself, you don’t get invited back.”

  “How do you know him?”

  “I don’t. I’m telling you what Carson told me. Or warned me.”

  “What was that?”

  “He said not to involve Blake too closely, that he’d try to take over the search and create friction.”

  “How does he support himself?”

  “Donation to donation, grant to grant, according to Carson. His sister makes nature documentaries of his work and promotes them at film festivals. Carson said she had a feature at Sundance, strolled around town with a lynx on a leash. Got a little too chummy once and has claw marks on her face to prove it. Turned people’s heads. But her reputation is she has that effect on men, scars or no scars. They solicit money from celebrities, environmental organizations, whoever she can rub up against until the money falls out of the pockets. There’s a website where they sell DVDs. Neither married. No children. The two of them out there in the woods all by their lonesome. Teeny bit weird.” She held her thumb and middle finger an inch apart.

  “Are you saying they’re incestuous?”

  “Sean, I don’t know. I’m just repeating what I was told. ‘Weird’ was the operative word.”

  “Did you accept his offer of help?”

  “Blake? I told him thank you, we’ll contact you, if and when.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Nothing. He left before I called the task force back to order.”

  “Why didn’t I see him go out?”

  “Probably he went out a different door.” She snuffed out the candle. “Not your circus, Sean, not your monkeys.”

  Maybe, Sean thought, as he looked past Martha’s form to the stars in the window. But they ought to be somebody’s monkeys.

  * * *

  • • •

  AS MONTANA ROAD TRIPS GO, the drive from Bridger to Wise River, including thirty miles of washboard gravel with one undistinguished rise of land called the Unnecessary Hill, is on the stepping-back-in-time side—two ghost towns, another that might as well be, more jackrabbits than cattle, more rattlesnakes than people.

  Where the road cut through the canyon of the Big Hole River, Sean turned into a pullout to let Choti go about her business. He’d collected the little sheltie and left before Martha was awake, had scribbled a note and placed it on the five-hundred-year-old Ponderosa pine stump desk. The note hadn’t mentioned the Blakes. When he’d got behind the wheel, his intention was to visit the elk-camp madam, then return to the valley. But what he’d heard of the couple intrigued him, and he’d driven as far as the Beartrap Canyon before deciding that, as he was in neighborhood, very broadly speaking—southwest Montana being quite a large neighborhood to anyone except Montanans—he might as well make a detour.

  The madam, he rationalized, would be the more nocturnal of the animals he was pursuing, and he’d still have plenty of time to swing by Silver Star, where the madam hung her petticoat, as Garrett had put it, on the drive back.

  Sean punched in Martha’s number. No reception. His eyes drank in the mist over the river. To the east a horizon the color of a pearl choker was fastened tightly to the peaks. He thought about making a few casts—the Big Hole was one of his favorite trout streams—then thought better of it. You tell yourself you’ll make five casts, and five later, you say five more. Sean had fallen victim to this sort of tomfoolery as often as anyone.

  Reaching Wise River, he finally picked up a bar and left Martha a message. “I’m practicing to be a married man,” he told the dog, who opened one eye.

  When he’d first consulted the map, no tributary named Beavertail Creek leapt out at him. But a Swallowtail Creek flowed into the Wise River from the West Pioneer Mountains. That was close enough, Sean thought.

  He found the turnoff, crossed the river on a wing-and-a-prayer bridge, and locked in the hubs. He followed yellowed tire tracks, a heavy tread that was smeared by at least one cycle of freezing and unfreezing. Three miles in third gear brought him to a NO TRESPASSING sign riddled with bullet holes. The tread marks continued beyond a locked gate and up a rise, where a pigtail of smoke curled through the pines. This was recluse country, where meth cooked on one burner of the stove, venison stew on another, and the shotgun was loaded with double-ought buck. Sean parked, skirted the gate, and began to climb without having formulated a plan, his “no-plan planning,” as Martha called it, the kind, she had told him more than once and with a raised finger for emphasis, that got a person killed.

  A yurt came into sight. Parked in front was a Land Rover, its hood cold. Sean stepped up onto the plank decking past two south-facing solar panels. He rapped on a door with a center knob. While he waited, his eyes searched along a line of Tibetan prayer flags hanging from the branches of an aspen sapling, their patchy colors winking.

  “Around back,” a voice called, “but I’d advise you to leash your dog by the door. You’ll find one hanging from a nail.” A masculine voice that carried. “Tatiana doesn’t much care for dogs.”

  Tatiana?

  Sean found the leash. “You heard the man,” he said, as the little sheltie began showing signs of unease. It was never a good sign when Choti wagged her tail to the left. Whatever she could smell was nothing she wanted a part of.

  The man Sean remembered from the steps of Law and Justice was sitting in a galvanized stock tank with his body concealed by steaming water. Underneath the tank, squatting on cinder blocks on the deck, was a sawn-off steel drum, where a fire had burned down to the embers.

  Like many self-absorbed people, Blake had selfish eyes that seemed in no hurry to acknowledge Sean’s presence. Sean used the moment to take in the man’s appearance. Dark-blond hair fell in loose curls past his shoulders. He was lantern-jawed and had a long, gray, creased face with ruddy patches that had either seen a lot of weather or weathered a lot of liquor, or both. Sean glanced down. A trail of wet footprints—the left foot leaving fainter stains than the right—led from the tub to the back door of the yurt. Someone had gone inside only moments before his arrival. Someone who limped.

  Sean introduced himself, mentioning that he was part of the task force Sheriff Ettinger put together to hunt down the mountain lion.
“We met,” he reminded Blake. “Briefly.”

  “If you call a nod meeting. But yes, we did. I apologize for not introducing myself, but I had to pick up my sister at the airport and was running late. You’re the fellow who took Buster Garrett down a notch.”

  “It’s not something I’m proud of.”

  “He can be an asshole. He was one of the houndsmen on the mountain lion project. We were in on some of the early captures.”

  “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”

  “Why didn’t you contact me through the website? There’s a link that includes the landline here. Scarlett and I are not recluses, regardless of what you may hear.”

  “I like to speak in person when I can.”

  Blake paused, a word on his lips, then nodded. “So do I. We’ll go inside. If you’ll just hand me that robe . . .” He indicated a white terry-cloth robe draped on the rail of the deck. Sean picked it up, noting the embroidered lion’s head on the lapel and cursive lettering that read EST. 1931, THE IMPERIAL, NEW DELHI.

  He heard a sloshing of water as Blake stepped out of the tub. His physique was hard and angular, with ropy muscles stretching across his frame and whorls of body hair on his pectoral muscles and sprouting across his shoulders. An arrow of dense hair searched downward from his sternum to the forest that cloaked his genitals. The hair on his forearms and legs, thin but very long, was plastered to his skin. Sean recalled Martha’s comment about monkeys. He hadn’t thought to take it literally.

  “It’s not polite to stare,” Blake said, shrugging into the robe.

  Sean thought he saw coins of amusement dancing in his eyes and looked away.