The Bangtail Ghost

by Keith McCafferty

  “What are you talking about? I thought you Aussies were straight shooters.”

  “I’m sorry for being cryptic. Blame it on sobriety. If there was some Stoli in these Marys, I’d be confessing with tears in my eyes. But the end of the story hasn’t been written yet. I’ll tell you when I write it. If I’m the one who does. Maybe it won’t be me. Maybe it will be you.” He shrugged. “You must be thinking I’m a crazy bugger. Maybe when we get to know each other better. Hey,” he said, “here’s to being a mate.”

  They touched glasses. Sean said, “And here’s to the lion. May he rest in cougar heaven.”

  “Said like a goddamned pacifist,” Garrett said. “But you know”—his voice became reflective—“I admire them, the buggers, it’s their mountains more than mine, and it’s getting harder to hunt them in good conscience. I used to think that cherry-picking the older males was good wildlife management. But it just throws a wrench into the natural order and leaves a void. Sometimes that void gets filled by something it shouldn’t. Give me another year and I’ll be eating granola like all the rest of the ecos. I’m already drinking the Kool-Aid.” He laughed and drained the drink.

  It was strange enough. Sean had once hit the houndsman so hard that he’d broken the fifth metacarpal bone on the middle finger of his right hand. It was still misshapen, still throbbed in rainy weather, and yet in the echo of the shot that had bound them together, the men had become the most improbable of friends. Well, that was life, Sean thought. You couldn’t script it with a cleaver.

  “Stand you another,” Garrett said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Death in the Afternoon

  The Saturday before Mother’s Day, Sean accompanied Sam Meslik on the five-hour drive to the Flathead Reservation for a belated memorial for Clarice Kincaid. The late date, more than five months after the cremation in early December, had been chosen so that her father could attend. At the time of his daughter’s death, he had been in the county lockup for possession with intent and resisting arrest, which had been knocked down to possession and disturbing the peace, and he had been released with time served and a stint of rehab. So turned the revolving door of jurisprudence for Montana’s addicted.

  The ceremony was held in the St. Ignatius Mission under the soaring peaks of the Mission Mountains, still mantled with snow. It was a somber affair in a gorgeous edifice, the interior of the mission highlighted with more than fifty murals, a poor man’s Sistine Chapel.

  Whites and Indians alike parked their muddy boots at the door and chose different sides of the aisle. Sean counted thirty heads, not much in the way of expression on the faces. All had witnessed far too many deaths associated with drug use. After the ceremony, Sam introduced Sean to Clarice’s parents, the father narrow-faced with a balding head, wearing a Western snap shirt with frayed cuffs and a bolo tie. “My getting out of the clink” attire, he said, a joke that fell flat and no one laughed at but him.

  The mother was dark-haired with silver roots over an oval face, a once-attractive woman. But the lifeblood had drained out of her long ago, and her mouth pinched up in vertical wrinkles—a smoker’s mouth that had forgotten how to do much more than draw one down and then the next.

  Sean walked over to a table arranged with photos of the family during happier times, saw Clarice peering shyly from behind her mother’s skirts outside a freshly painted one-story rancher, saw her playing volleyball for Ronan High School, digging one out down on her knees, an Indian headdress sprouting from an orange R on her team jersey. In another photo, she wore a lavender dress as she posed with her prom date. Pretty then, a slip of a thing, with an unforced smile for the camera.

  You join teams with the dead, Martha had said. You wear their colors. Now Sean knew the colors.

  One person seemed to have stepped into the mission from a bygone era. He was thin to the point of being gaunt and was dressed in a Western shirt with piping and diamond snaps, a paisley silk scarf, and a tweed vest. He wore a pocket watch on a fob, the chain hanging just so. When he took off his black flat-brimmed Stetson, you could see where the band had rested on his forehead. Under his nostrils was a mustache that looked like two mice kissing, their long tails curled and waxed. A man who lived and breathed the old West, the one that never was.

  Sean thought to talk to him, no reason but curiosity, but the man quickly left the church after the ceremony, buttoning up a waxed cotton duster and squaring his hat. The last Sean saw of him, he was in a white pickup driving away. Arizona plates. Sean asked Clarice’s mother about him—he’d seen the two talking earlier.

  “Wyatt Bryce,” she told him. An old boyfriend of Clarice’s, before the only love interest she knew came with a syringe. She’d met him in Tombstone at a reenactment of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. He was playing the part of Billy Clanton, who died in a hail of gunfire in a shootout with the Earp brothers. Wyatt had picked Clarice up after the morning show, asking her to lunch and telling her not to worry—if she didn’t like him, well, he’d be catching a bullet in the heart at two o’clock and die once more at four. Death in the afternoon. Easy come, easy go.

  That’s what Clarice had liked about him, Mrs. Kincaid told Sean. He had that sense of humor. And the manners, just courteous as he could be. He was a catch, that’s what he was.

  “He gave me these.”

  Mrs. Kincaid opened her purse and extracted three letters that had her name on them, but no stamps or address. Wyatt had told her that Clarice wrote letters almost every day in the eighteen months they’d been together, but to his knowledge she had never sent any to anyone. He’d thought she might like to read excerpts from them at the memorial, but when the time came, she’d lost her nerve. She said that Wyatt had driven all day and night and then some, Tucson to Polson, Montana, and had given her the letters only a couple of hours ago.

  “It gives me some comfort,” she said. “It does. She said some nice things in these letters, and I’ll cherish them. But you tell me, why did she have to get on that stuff? Why couldn’t she have stayed with him and made babies, have a life? You tell me that? Why couldn’t she have stayed with him? He’d have married her, too, he even asked her. Why couldn’t she?” She clutched the letters tight to her chest. “Why?”

  Sean had no answer. He pressed her hand and walked out into the bright sunshine, where Sam was polishing off a paper plate of cold ham, potato salad, and deviled eggs. He heard Sean out, wiped at his mouth, shrugged.

  “Blast from the past, Kemosabe. Back when cooking was something you did to make food. Come on, get yourself some ham and let’s vamoose this joint. It’s depressing.”

  On the drive back, they stopped at the Blue River Station in Seeley Lake, an old-fashioned soda fountain, so that Sam could get a malt and play the half-broken, coin-operated tabletop baseball game. While he struck out and swore, Sean saw that he had a message on his phone from Martha, and stepped outside to punch the call back.

  “How far out are you?”

  “Ah . . . four hours,” Sean said. “What’s up, Martha?”

  “A sheepherder seems to have lost his sheep.”

  Waiting for her to elaborate, Sean heard a muffled whoop behind the shop’s heavy door—Sam, presumably, smacking one out of the park.

  Martha elaborated. A part-time Madison Valley resident who co-owned a house on the upper Madison River had heard shots in the night, thought little enough of it, this being Montana. Then, a few days later, he opened the door to find forty sheep in the yard. The man put the sheep together with the shots and called the county dispatch.

  “And this adds up to foul play somehow? When did it happen?”

  “The shots? Let me look at the printout. Ah, last Tuesday. Four days ago. The sheep showed up on the property yesterday. I got in touch with the managers of both ranches that the herder works for. Was told it was nothing to worry about, that the combined flock ran to seven hundred, including a hu
ndred and twenty Rambouillets that had a tendency to stray.”

  “We got the right cat, Martha, if that’s what you’re thinking. Broken fang and all.”

  “Not saying you didn’t. Not saying this has anything to do with cats. But I thought you might want to check it out, seeing that the call came from your pals’ clubhouse. One of your cronies.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me that in the first place?”

  “Because I’m telling you now.”

  “Which crony?”

  “Max Gallagher.”

  Gallagher was a crime novelist who sometimes used the Madison River Liars and Fly Tiers clubhouse as a writing retreat, usually in the “r” months.

  “Another thing,” Martha said. “One of the ranches this guy tended for is owned by Miriam Ross. The mother of the boy who went AWOL last fall. You know how I feel about coincidence.”

  “Then I’ll check it out.”

  “You want me to give him a heads-up?”

  “Gallagher? No, I’ll call from the road.”

  He told Martha he’d swing by the clubhouse after dropping Sam in Ennis, said good-bye, and put his head back inside the store.

  Sam gave him a pointy-toothed grin. “I got my swing back, Kemosabe. Top of the seventh and I’m up by two.”

  “Game’s over,” Sean said.

  Over, he thought, or starting again?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Night of the Nagual

  With his bloodshot eyes and Colgate smile, his shirt unbuttoned to show a cowlick of chest hair as black as a hitter’s heart, Max Gallagher looked like Clark Gable halfway into a bottle of tequila, or Satan gone to seed.

  He waved from the porch as Sean’s Land Cruiser growled up in second gear.

  “Painter man, fishing guide, gumshoe, thief,” Gallagher said by way of greeting. His voice was thick.

  “Guilty on three counts,” Sean said. “Not sure what I stole, though.”

  “Neither am I, but I’m a scribbler and ‘thief’ fits the meter. Come on in. If you’d got here this morning, you’d have had to straddle sheep to get to the door, but they went back up into the hills. You shouldn’t have much trouble finding them. But those shots were like four days ago. If they meant anything else except old Cesar scaring away some coyotes that got too chummy, then he’s beyond succor now. Forgive the archaic word. I’m writing—my vocabulary tends to expand.”

  They went inside and Gallagher poured coffee. “You want it black or with a happy ending, I forget.”

  “Black. Tell me about this herder. How did you meet him?”

  “Last summer I got into the habit of taking a hike in the afternoon to clear my head. He had his sheep up Bobcat Creek and was living out of a wagon like you’d have seen on the Oregon Trail. Hitch it up with a horse and pull it to new pasture every couple weeks or so.”

  “Does he speak English? Martha said he was from Peru.”

  “Not so much. But I used to write pilots in Español and do some series work for Mexican TV, still my fallback. Cesar, the old man’s alone with his dogs about eight months of the year, only moves the herd back to the low country dead of winter. Once the ewes are sheared and the lambing’s done, it’s back to the hills.”

  “Does he have a family?”

  “Wife and three kids. Sends all his money home. Makes twelve hundred a month on a three-year visa. Said in Peru he’d be lucky to make a hundred a month for the same work. He wants to become a dentist, of all things, and him with like six teeth missing. I call him an old man but he’s not more than forty, I would think. The life he leads ages you quick.”

  “Tell me about it, his life.”

  “Well, the work’s twenty-four/seven. He spends days with the herd, keeping the sheep together, he sleeps nights in a wall tent, grabs the gun when the dogs growl, drives away anything with teeth.”

  “I thought you said he lived in a wagon.”

  “A wagon after the mud dries out. Somebody from the ranch brought the tent up on a four-wheeler.”

  “Does he have a horse?”

  “No horse. He’s on foot.”

  “What else should I know?”

  “The dogs are the main thing. He’s got four border collies—they work the sheep and spend the night by the tent. They might give you a little lip, but that’s all. But he’s got two akbash guard dogs that are with the herd round the clock. They wear spiked collars to protect them from wolves and they’ll take your hand off if you try to pet one, or, God forbid, touch one of the sheep. Major league gringo deterrent.”

  He nodded to himself.

  “One more thing about the sheep, they’re all white except for six. Those six are black. They’re the markers. You count all six, then the herd is together. You see that one or two are missing, that means the herd is broken and it’s time to round them up. That’s another thing worries me. There was one black sheep in the yard. Cesar was vigilant. He took his job seriously. He would have seen one was missing and gone looking for the strays.”

  “Did he say anything about seeing a lion?”

  “Thought you’d ask that, and no. But he had an interesting take on them. His family’s from Lake Titicaca—that’s in the Andes. But he has an uncle who grew up on the Amazon River who would visit and talk about naguals, you know, shape-shifters. Everybody had an animal they could change into, which one depending on the day of their birth. Cesar was born on the day of the puma, so, growing up, he identified with them. He even had the head of a puma tattooed on his chest. He never really tried to become one because you have to make a pact with the devil to change form. The irony was that as a sheepherder he was at war with the cats. His heart was conflicted.”

  “You know a lot about him.”

  “Guy like Cesar, five thousand miles from home, he finds someone speaks his language, he’s got a lot to say. Cesar is very spiritual. We talked some deep shit. He refused to believe his spirit animal could threaten his life, so he wasn’t worried, even though he knew about the woman being killed. But he had his dogs to protect him, and he put a lot of store in them. Between the dogs and Jesus, he had his ass covered. I’m thinking about putting him in my next book. Hey, you know, I’ll go up there with you if you want me to. I know the country and I won’t get in the way.”

  He has the look of a man who wants to be talked out of it, Sean thought.

  Sean smiled. “Best if I go alone. I can get up there and back by dark if I hurry. Just give me a starting point. If I come across any lions, I’ll ask if they speak Spanish.”

  “You joke, but that shape-shifting shit, Cesar took it for real.”

  * * *

  • • •

  FORTY MINUTES AFTER PARKING the rig at a Forest Service trailhead a quarter mile from the clubhouse, Sean found the greater part of the herd. They were in rolling, semi-open country beyond the national forest boundary, three black sheep in a sea of white, but no dogs, which gave him his first inkling that something could be wrong. He walked into the herd, the sheep parting for him. As they moved, the ground underneath was obscured by a spreading carpet of wool. Ahead, Sean could see where the sheep stopped and the land picked up again. He found himself backtracking on a funneling trail, where thin snow cover and mud had been chewed up by thousands of hooves. Sean followed a beaten arrow of earth over a low ridge and across a swale. The wall tent was pitched in a stand of aspens, the leaves long gone to ground, the gray trunks scarred where elk had eaten the bark.

  Sean moved cautiously forward, speaking in a low voice so as not to alarm the dogs, if in fact they were within hearing. The tent flap had a series of ties, untied, and was like a door to an empty room. You knew nobody was home before you reached for the knob. Not much furnishing—a cot, a table, a sheepherder’s stove, cold to the touch. A gas lantern, a Jesus in a picture frame. A short-wave radio. A Bible. The bones of a meager existence.

/>   All the snow at this elevation had melted. Plenty of tracks—dog, man, sheep—all a muddy mess. He began to walk in circles around the tent, each larger than the last, and had made four circles when he came upon a deeply worn trail. Turning onto the trail, he came to a latrine that consisted of a folding shovel and a roll of toilet paper on a branch stub. A few yards away was a muddy depression threaded by a six-inch creek. Sean followed it a few yards and found what he was looking for and at the same time dreading to see. Pugmarks. Not a bobcat’s. They were too big. They were lion tracks, not as large as the tracks of the big tom that had killed Kincaid, but lion tracks all the same. Nearby on the ground was a scoped rifle. Sean turned it in his hands. It was a .270 Weatherby Vanguard with a four-round magazine. The magazine was full, with a live round in the chamber. The safety was in the “on” position.

  Gallagher had told Sean that he’d heard five shots spaced irregularly over the course of a minute or so. It was about an hour after dark and he’d been free-associating at the typewriter, drinking a Cognac and hoping for lightning to strike, literarily speaking. Sean had asked him what he’d done after hearing the shots and Gallagher said he’d shut the window and poured another brandy.

  Assuming the rifle was fully loaded when he took it to the latrine, the sheepherder had apparently fired all the rounds, then had time to reload before the cat was upon him. This struck Sean as odd. If you empty your rifle and the teeth keep coming, you jam one cartridge into the chamber and shoot. You don’t take the time to reload the magazine. And you certainly don’t put the safety back on. He looked around for empties but didn’t find any. Also odd.

  Don’t draw conclusions, he told himself. Follow the evidence at hand.

  The evidence at hand consisted of a dozen or so lion tracks. Sean tried to follow them, but they were indistinct and days old, and the trail petered out where the tracks left the creek bottom and crossed open ground, where they had been degraded by the elements. Unable to follow them for more than a few yards, Sean returned to the latrine. Lots of boot prints here, but only one line of human tracks continued on toward the forest wall. Sean had taken no more than a few steps on this trail before he heard a low growl. He froze. He heard the growl again, this time picked up by a chorus. Colors flashed between tree trunks, then the collies were on him, three false-charging, their lips pulled back, their teeth exposed, while the fourth, staying back, worried a mound of tan material.