The Bangtail Ghost

by Keith McCafferty

  “Yeah.”

  Katie shook her head. “No, I mean that last word. ‘Jesus.’ She was calling out to God.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Clean Living

  Sean found Sam in his barn, which he warmed with a stone fireplace built as a first step into converting the structure into a house. Until that day arrived, Sam, Molly, and their two-year-old daughter lived upstairs over the fly shop, while the barn sheltered drift boats with Meslik’s RAINBOW SAM insignia and pink breast-cancer ribbons painted on the bows.

  “Kemosabe,” Sam said. He was wearing paint-spattered Crocs, cargo shorts, and a T-shirt that read THE TROUT ALSO RISES, the letters stretched across his plate-size pectorals. On his left cheek was a flesh-colored Band-Aid above the line of his beard.

  “I’m glad you showed up,” Sam said. He gestured toward a battered drift boat resting upside down on extra-wide sawhorses. “Picked it up at the Green Table,” he said.

  The Green Table was a hole-in-the-wall cabin in Virginia City, the ghost town that had been the state capital in the gold rush days, and remained the Hyalite County seat. Once a month, it was the setting for a poker game for an eclectic group, including lawyers, western reenactors wearing gun belts and sleeve garters, playhouse actresses in prostitute attire, and fishing guides like Sam, who provided illegal Cuban cigars smoked between sips of illegal moonshine while playing a friendly game of five-card just up the lane from the county courthouse.

  “You won this playing poker?”

  “Shh. I told Molly I picked it up at auction.”

  “Where is she?”

  “She’s in town, but she’s like a mule deer. Her ears can hear you from the next county over.”

  “Looks like firewood to me,” Sean said.

  “Yeah, I hear you. But it came with a pair of Sawyer oars—they’re worth more than the boat. Anyway, I always wanted a wood drift boat and was just getting ready to reinforce the bottom. But you have like a nanosecond after you mix the epoxy before it sets up, so it helps if you got two guys working at once to coat the hull.”

  “Why are you dressed like you’re going to a Jimmy Buffett concert?”

  “Because, one, I’m a Parrothead from way back, and, two, you get this goo on your clothes you might as well toss them in the fire. You in or you out?”

  Sean was in and stripped off his shirt. An hour later, he was sitting down on a lawn chair before the fireplace, accepting a beer Sam tossed him from a cooler. He pressed the can against his sweating forehead, waited a minute before popping the tab, caught the foam bubbling out, and took a long swallow.

  “So what brings you here?” Sam said. “Seems like you were getting around to asking me something and didn’t.”

  “Actually, when I was driving over, I was thinking about some advice you gave me last summer.”

  “What was that?”

  “You told me not to drive back to Katie Sparrow’s house on the pretext of business, that the first time I might escape with a peck on the cheek but if I did it again, my shoes were going to be at the foot of her bed and I’d be cheating on Martha. You said I should stay faithful and get bored like all the rest of us, meaning you and Molly.”

  “Yeah, so? I stand by it. It’s healthier than dipping your nib into two bottles of ink and dealing with stains that ain’t never coming out.”

  “You’re speaking from the position of monogamy yourself?”

  Sam crushed his beer can in his fist. “What the fuck are you trying to say?”

  “I’m saying Katie and I went back up to the trailer with a metal detector. We found something everybody else missed.”

  “What’s that have to do with me?”

  Sean waited.

  “If you’re asking me to guess, I won’t play that game.”

  “Then I’ll tell you. We found a motion detector camera hidden in a block of firewood that was tripped every time someone went into or came out of the trailer.”

  “Hunters looking for nooky.”

  “You said it.”

  “I suppose you’re going to say I’m one of them. Of course I am. I found where she got jumped by the cat. You ought to be looking for the guy I pulled out of the snow. He’s the last one seen her—alive, anyway.”

  “I found him,” Sean said.

  “What did the bastard say?”

  “That’s a different story. What I want to know is what happened before that guy came onto the scene. What you were doing there on Thanksgiving Day. Why you didn’t tell me about it when Martha and I met you up there.”

  Sam shook his head. “Not what you think, buddy.”

  “Then what? You met her outside the trailer. You followed her inside. You were there for a while. Seventy minutes, to be exact.”

  “I was having a cup of coffee.”

  “How much did you pay her for it? And why did she do this to you?” Sean reached across the space that separated them. With one deft movement, he tore the Band-Aid off the big man’s cheek, revealing two deep gouges that hadn’t yet healed. “You left your DNA underneath her fingernails, Sam.”

  “The body didn’t have fingers. Cat ate them. You told me that yourself.”

  “There were two fake fingernails found at the site, painted black, just like the polish found in the trailer.”

  Sam put his hand to his cheek. “You ripped the fucking scabs off,” he said. He shook his head again. “This isn’t your business.”

  “The hell it isn’t. You can’t just sit on something like this and think it isn’t going to come out. Who was the woman who raked your face?”

  “Molly would kill me.”

  “You should have thought of that before you got filmed going into a hooker’s trailer.”

  Sam shook his head once more, then closed his eyes. He breathed in and exhaled, his breath stirring strands of hair that had fallen across his face. He wiped the sweat from his forehead. “Let’s get out of this oven,” he said.

  Sean followed him out into the chill air. Below the bluff, the Madison River slept in sluggish coils, the drawn-down gravel bars clotted with patches of old snow. Sean watched the steam expand from Sam’s body, making his visage ghostly.

  “I was trying to do the right thing,” he said.

  “Sam, it’s me. I’m your best friend. You hooking up with someone like that, it isn’t the end of the world. My job is to identify the victim, not tell everyone who she was seeing.”

  Sam nodded, as if coming to a decision.

  “Want to show you something,” he said.

  Sam’s fly tying nook in his fly shack was a cubicle a little larger than a phone booth. It was built back into a wall under the steps that climbed to the second floor. The corkboard behind the tying bench was studded with photos held in position with pushpins. They were fishing pictures, clients or Sam cradling trout, holding them so that their gills were still underwater. Sam didn’t allow hero shots, where the clients held a trout clear of the surface, stressing the breathing apparatus. The one clear violation of policy was a fading photo showing Sam not long after his army discharge following the first Gulf War.

  Sean had never seen Sam with short hair, though he still managed to look disreputable in a skull-and-crossbones T-shirt. He was holding one end of a stringer of crappies that reached at least six feet to the far end, where a girl wearing bib overalls struggled with both hands to hold her end of the stringer clear of the ground. Behind them spread a vast body of water washed of its color.

  “Tongue River Reservoir,” Sam said. “You count ’em up, there’s fifty crappy on that stringer and another fifty in the cooler already filleted.”

  Sean focused on the girl, who looked to be nine or ten and had fair hair done in braids.

  “That’s my mom’s kid sister’s kid. My aunt was forty when she had her, blamed it on Elvis. A guy in a bar was playing g
uitar and singing ‘Only Fools Rush In,’ and next thing she was laying on a blanket on the bank of the Flathead with her heels in the air. She goes home, mosquito bites on top of mosquito bites, and, as she tells it, one of the bumps continued to grow. Bit of a situation ’cause, you know, she was married at the time.”

  “Are you saying this is—?”

  “Yeah. The woman who got ate was my niece. Clarice Kincaid. She’s the bump.”

  Sam took the photo from Sean’s hand and pinned it back into place. “Like I said, it’s not what you think.”

  “What the hell was she doing hooking out of that trailer?”

  “I’ll tell you, but first you gotta know that she really wasn’t hooking so much, not to hear her side of it. She’d been one of Ginny Gin Jenny’s girls back in the day, and she still had connections, but she wasn’t a lifer. She just picked up money the old-fashioned way when times got tough.”

  “You believe that?”

  “Doesn’t really matter. She was blood. The way she told it to me, she’d got clean at a rehab facility and wanted to make amends with the family, drove all the way up from Arizona, emptied her pockets just for the gas. Didn’t turn out to be the reception she hoped for. She had a history of rifling medicine cabinets and lifting twenties from purses and some of the folks weren’t too keen to see her.”

  “You’re talking about your family in Polson?”

  Sam nodded. “Her folks live on the rez. They aren’t Salish but then most of the people who live there have about as much Indian blood as a mosquito in a Swedish bathhouse. Anyway, to hear her tell it, she bummed some money and was heading back to Tucson when her truck broke down on the Norris Hill. She wasn’t planning on seeing me, but she knows I’m a fishing guide on the Madison, so the next thing I get a phone call and end up towing her into town. The tranny’s grinding and you know as well as I do that’s a death sentence, but I tell her I’ll ante up for a rebuild, like a couple thou. Tell her she can stay with us and pay me back when she’s got it. Molly, let’s just say she was against the idea. That’s putting it mildly because, you know, it’s two grand we’re saying adios to and she knows the stories.”

  “When did this happen?”

  “Week ago Tuesday. In she comes, dragging a suitcase, and first night she nearly burns the shop down smoking a cigarette and falling asleep. Molly’s furious, boots her out into the snow in no uncertain terms. Rightfully so, too. She takes it out on me.” He tapped the wound. “I give her some money for a couple nights in a motel until the truck’s fixed, tell her to keep her legs closed and stay out of trouble. Two nights later I’m in the Silver Dollar and hear a guy talking about getting his ashes hauled in a trailer up Johnny Gulch. I do the math and drive up there Thursday, and sure enough. That’s the seventy minutes you were talking about. Clarice tells me she knows the girl who was hooking out of the trailer, who said she needed a couple days off for a family emergency and handed her the key to crash. Old friends in the trade. I reminded her the truck would be ready in just a couple days and she doesn’t have to put out because I’ll stake her the expenses for her trip. She says her friend will be back on the weekend and will bring her into town to my place. I say, ‘I’ll pick you up,’ but she’s sticking to her guns. This is Thanksgiving Day, and I brought her some yard bird, some stuffing and gravy. Weekend comes and I don’t hear from her, figure she’s just lying low like she promised me or her friend is late showing up. Finally I drive up to hunt the last day, and that’s when I find the blood in the snow and call you. I’m thinking it’s her friend, you know, that she’s the victim. Wishful thinking, I know.”

  “When did you realize it was her?”

  “Not till I saw the body. I remembered the bathrobe. She had it at my place.”

  “Why the hell didn’t you tell me?”

  “I was going to. But her having no face to speak of, no hands, I thought maybe she wouldn’t be identified and nobody had to be the wiser. I was trying to protect her. She was a good kid, good in her heart, just weak and got herself with the wrong people. I didn’t want her name out there as a hooker, or her just remembered as a meal for a mountain lion.”

  “Did you call her parents?”

  “No, man. I didn’t have the cojones. Will you do that for me?”

  “I’ll make sure it’s done.”

  “You won’t ask anyone to ID the body, will you? I mean, I wouldn’t want her folks to go through that nightmare.”

  “They’ll take a DNA sample from someone in the family and match it up.” Sean remembered his visit to the crime lab. “Did your niece have breast implants, Sam?”

  “Why?”

  “The victim did. The cat removed one and set it aside when it was eating the body.”

  Sam nodded, then looked away. “She hugged you, it was like pressing your chest to a pair of traffic cones.”

  Sean had one more question, but hesitated before speaking. Finally he said, “Why didn’t you follow the drag? Don’t get me wrong. Calling us was the right thing to do. But I know you.”

  “Are you asking was I afraid?”

  “The reason I’m asking is because I know that fear wouldn’t have held you back. It had to be something else.”

  Sam nodded. “That something else weighs twenty-six pounds, and I want to stick around to see her grow up. Used to be I went from the river to the bar to a night in the saddle with anyone who’d have me. Wake up God knows where. Lucky to be alive and no one to care that I was. But my days of following blood in the snow, they’re over, at least if it’s human blood.”

  “I hear you,” Sean said.

  * * *

  • • •

  MARTHA WAS IN THE BARN, checking Petal’s shoes, when she heard the Land Cruiser come up the drive.

  “You can cut me a check in the morning,” Sean said.

  “You ID’d her?” She turned down her mouth, arched her eyebrows. “I’m listening.”

  Sean told her everything, including his opinion that there had been two cats present near the kill that night.

  At the mention of Sam’s name—“Why am I not surprised?”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Chasing the Echo

  One week into the New Year, with the skeletons of Christmas trees littering the alleys of the valley and with the cat suspected of killing Clarice Kincaid still at large, an elk hunter who had drawn a shoulder-season tag in the foothills of the Madison Range found a ewe bighorn sheep that had been killed by a mountain lion.

  Like everyone else who had read the stories in the Bridger Mountain Star, the hunter knew that the lion suspected of killing the hooker had a broken canine tooth. Where that fourth tooth should have penetrated, the throat of the ewe was only bruised, and in the instant that the hunter registered the significance of that, he became the hunted. Or so he felt. Walking as fast as he could, he retraced his steps to the ranch headquarters, where he had parked his truck, and arrived sweating through his wool coat and out of breath.

  The property was owned by a film actor named Joshua Byrne, a decorated marine pilot who had served in the Afghan War and who volunteered his services, and those of his custom-fitted Bell 407 helicopter, for search-and-rescue operations in Hyalite and the surrounding counties. Martha had met him when he’d lived in Cody, Wyoming—the Madison ranch reflected his rise at the box office—and it was Byrne himself who called to inform her of the discovery and to offer his help.

  By then it was four-thirty, practically twilight that far north and too late to see anything but gloom from a vantage afforded by a rotor. Martha thanked Byrne and said she’d call the next morning if the cat wasn’t accounted for by then. Buster Garrett had assured her at the task-force meeting that his hounds would run any cat any day, anywhere, and, taking him at his word, she called and found him home, and game. He said he could be at the ranch in an hour and a half and had one request, that she provide him
with a good man who could keep up and wouldn’t get in the way. It was hard enough by day for one houndsman to follow his dogs in rough country. After dark it was a nightmare. Sean was sitting beside Martha at the farmhouse, and as she had the call on speakerphone, he heard the request and pointed to his chest.

  He was at the ranch by the allotted time, and Byrne had no sooner shoved a mug of coffee in his hand than Garrett arrived, bringing the scent of his hounds in with him, and with no time for pleasantries. He waved off Byrne’s offer to accompany them, and Sean, in an attempt to mollify what could have been taken as an insult, told the actor that he could help them better by getting a few hours of rest, in case he was needed to pilot his helicopter in the morning.

  By the time they backtracked the hunter to the dead ewe, it was closing on seven p.m. While Sean shone his headlamp to confirm that there were only three wounds in the throat, Garrett turned the tracking over to the pack consisting of three Walker/Plott crosses he’d introduced to Sean as Boon, Sam, and General Compson, the latter wearing a GPS collar so they could locate him if the pack ran out of hearing. The fourth dog was a big Rhodesian ridgeback with scars on his face and his right ear a stub. Garrett called him Bear and said he was his kill dog. The names rang faint bells in Sean’s head as the dogs worried the snow with their muzzles. Garrett explained that because the cat’s odor dissipated slowly, the dogs could initially be confused, as likely to work a fresh trail backward as forward. They stood out of the way as the dogs corrected their mistakes and made more, two of the Walkers snuffing the snow, the other running his nose up under the pine boughs to search for scent particles trapped by the canopy.

  General Compson struck first, but the bawl ended on a note of inquiry. He wasn’t quite sure. But another minute later he was, and soon all the dogs were giving tongue. Garrett gave Sean a Lucifer grin. His battle-scarred Marlin lever-action, wrapped in camouflage tape, was slung from his shoulder.

  The scent trail led the hounds behind a heavily timbered knob, where their voices became fainter, and a half hour after their striking the trail, the hounds were out of song. A few minutes passed and the song came back. Garrett fiddled with the GPS receiver.