The Bangtail Ghost

by Keith McCafferty

  He glanced up. Blake was twenty yards away, his back turned, his eyes on the ground. Sean almost called out, then caught himself. It was not so much that he didn’t want to share the find. Rather, he wanted time to process it without the distraction of another opinion. He could always tell Blake that he’d come back by himself the following day. He folded his hand around the pendant and put it away as Blake walked over. They called it a day, and Sean hiked out through the evening gloom with more questions than answers, the biggest one scratching at his chest under his breast pocket.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  A Man’s Brain, a Horse’s Hoof, and a Dog’s Nose

  On the third morning after the discovery of the remains of Cesar Rodriguez, Martha was sitting in her office chair, a half dozen paper airplanes on her desk folded from one-dollar bills, a grim set to her face, her hands laced behind her head.

  The past two days had been unproductive, as far as discovering the whereabouts of the cat deemed responsible. That a mountain lion was the guilty party was now a certainty. Saliva samples taken from the body were DNA-matched to the species, and precise measurements of the puncture wounds in the man’s throat and the back of the head showed the lion to be considerably smaller than the big tom Garrett and Sean had dispatched. A female, perhaps, or a younger male.

  Garrett had still not returned her phone calls, which bothered her, especially with Sean having found his pendant at the site of the herder’s death. What the hell has he been up to?

  Martha had contacted the Dusan brothers, who were of limited help, assuring her of what she already knew, that a trail a week or more old wasn’t worth following. Ike, the older brother, added that in the northern Rockies, cats were located by driving roads after a snowfall or coursing snow-packed trails by four-wheeler or snow machine, and only loosing the hounds when a fresh trail was cut. By mid-May, what you really needed were cold-nosed hounds that could trail over rock and rubble. He gave her a number with a Pecos, New Mexico, area code. Cecil Flowers, he assured her, had the best hounds in the Southwest. She’d called the number and left a message, which Flowers had returned that very morning.

  Hell, yes, his hounds could track over bare ground. Why, shit, he could train a Pekingese to tree a lion in two feet of snow. His voice had a rasp.

  Would he help?

  He named a figure.

  “We’re a small Montana county,” Martha countered, and suggested cutting the figure in half.

  “Hope your cat doesn’t kill anybody else,” he said, and hung up.

  She said “Fuck you” to the room and called him back. He had her over a barrel.

  He said he’d hit the road the next morning, and that it would take him three days. “I don’t put the pedal to the metal the way I done when I was eighty.”

  Eighty?

  He added that she needed to buy a bottle of perfume, Calvin Klein’s Obsession—none other would do. He said it was like catnip to a lion.

  “Great,” Martha said, after they disconnected. She wondered if the Dusan brothers were just getting back at her for their dog being killed the previous winter.

  * * *

  • • •

  MARTHA WAS ROLLING a dart in her fingers when the door opened. No knock, which meant it was Walter Hess, her undersheriff, who acted as if he owned the place.

  “Hold it right there.” Martha’s arm shot forward. The dart quivered. “Gotcha, you dirtbag.”

  The dart had pierced the eye of a bank robber whom optimistic parents had named Archibald Sterling III; he squinted at her from one of the wanted posters pinned to her office wall.

  “Jesus, Marth, you want to be careful with those things,” Hess said. “You could put an eye out.” He was bony and thin, with an Adam’s apple as nervous as a gopher in a badger dream.

  “Marth, I got a woman here says she won’t talk to anyone but you.”

  “Well, shoo her in, Walt. Shoo her in.”

  The woman who came through the door wore a Carhartt jacket frayed at the seams and jeans tucked into mud boots. She was an ash blonde with split ends and a center part, with comma-creased cheeks under wiry eyebrows and a thin nose. One of those windswept women who confront the world with arms crossed under a small bosom while looking out across the prairie. Everything about her dry and dusty but the sparkle of her eyes.

  Martha felt the hard clasp of calloused fingers.

  “Nice to meet you, Ms.—”

  “Just Hazel is fine.”

  “Hazel, how can I be of service?”

  “My husband’s missing.”

  “I know.” A beat of silence. “Ms. Garrett—Hazel—I’ve been trying to reach you for three days. Also your ex-husband.”

  “I know. I got your calls. I just figured he’d come back and then he’d be mad I called and said he was missing. That’s Buster—he’s his own man. Going out for days at a time, never saying where, no word till I hear the truck coming up. You learn to live with it. You have to.”

  “I thought you were divorced. He’s still in the house?”

  “We never signed the papers, easier all around. He’s turned the corner on a lot of things, Buster has. Keeps wanting to move back in. Says we can be friends without benefits till I decide. He’s been hanging round a couple months now, sober as a church mouse. But I don’t know, I just don’t know. He’s still thinking about some other woman—you can see his mind goes to her, wistful-like. Could be worse things. Used to be worse. I don’t know and I don’t ask.”

  “Ms. Garrett—”

  “Hazel.”

  “Hazel. What’s happened?”

  “He woke me up. It was the middle of the night and I thought it must be news about my mom—she’s going to pass any day.”

  “He called you?”

  “No, he drove up from that place where Arnie Arnold’s been pasturing his horses. Let himself in the door. He’s really close with my sister—we grate against each other, my sis and me. Nancy’s likely as not to call him than me if there was bad news.”

  Martha made a stab at following the thread of that logic and gave up.

  “Anyway,” the woman continued, “I got crossways with him, said he shouldn’t do such a thing. Why I could of shot him for an intruder. He said it was an emergency, that he knew about the cat. I said, You shot the cat. He says he did, but it was the other one, that there was another and he had to stop it before it killed somebody else. He knew where it was, how to track it down. He come to the house because of Boon—he’s my dog when he isn’t hollering on the mountain. Got a little redbone in him, give him that even temperament. Not as much hound as some, but that’s a good thing. The rest of the pack, he keeps out at Arnie’s.”

  “So he came from this Arnie’s place with his horse and his hounds, all but this Boon. Is that right?”

  “No, just the horse. Boon was the only hound he was taking. Buster, long as it was daylight out, he liked running cats with only one dog. You got to stay closer to the dog, but there’s less confusion. Trade-off is the risk.”

  “What night was this, Hazel?”

  “It was a week Sunday, about midnight.”

  Martha trapped her lower lip with teeth, her mind doing the arithmetic. Sunday was two days prior to Max Gallagher hearing the shots. She, like Sean, had originally assumed that the shots were fired by the herder, to drive away or kill his attacker. The window for his death was fixed within a couple days by forensic science, as well as by the gunshots.

  But if the shots had not been fired by the herder, but instead by someone defending himself from the guard dogs, then the date was more uncertain. It was possible that Garrett had been in the vicinity of the herder’s camp while the herder was still alive, or up to a few days after his death. The pendant all but confirmed that he was there at some point. Why, though? That was the catch.

  She asked Hazel to describe Garret
t’s trailer and his truck and jotted the information on a sticky note.

  “All right, then what happened?”

  “He took old Boon and left. Wasn’t in the house but fifteen minutes. But that’s always been his way. ‘Bustering around’ is what I call it.”

  “Hazel, I really do wish that you had reported this earlier.”

  “I know. I shoulda. But you don’t know him like I do. I call him in missing, and he isn’t really missing, then he takes it out on me. Or used to. He’s better about things like that than he used to be.”

  “Did he have a satellite phone or a cell phone, maybe a locator beacon? A way to get in touch if he got into trouble?”

  “Just his phone. He says people use technology like a crutch. Makes you think you can go where you can’t. ‘A man’s brain, a horse’s hoof, and a dog’s nose, you got that you’re good to go.’ Something he liked to say.”

  “Hazel, I want you to listen to me. I’m going to show you something and I’ll tell you right up front that it wasn’t found on his body, and I’m not saying that he’s come to any harm. But it concerns me, and I’m hoping you might be able to shed a little light we can use to find him.”

  Martha opened a desk drawer and withdrew the lion claw pendant that Sean had found. She felt, rather than heard, the intake of Hazel Garrett’s breath.

  “Where did you get that? It’s his . . . I guess you could call it a good luck charm. He’s been wearing it, I don’t know, a few years, since around the time of the change.”

  “What do you mean by that, ‘the change’?”

  “Since he become more bearable. They say a man can’t change, but I seen it in him, like a ray of light, it is.”

  “An investigator found it near where the sheepherder was killed by the lion. Do you have any idea how it could have got there? Did Buster know the sheepherder?”

  She shook her head. “He knew lots of people—running hounds you get to—but he never said anything about knowing a sheepherder.”

  Martha nodded. “Okay, what kind of horse does Buster ride?”

  “Roan quarter-horse mare. Calls her Freckles ’cause of her spots.”

  “Where did he say he was going?”

  “He didn’t. I asked him and all he says is it’s about the lion and don’t worry, and then he says do I know where his will is. I say it’s under the copper liner on the dry sink where he put it, and he says, I just wanted to make sure you know. Like this was good-bye. I can read between the lines, you got to if you marry a man who spends more words on his dogs than he does on you. Anyway, it made me worry. That’s why I came here.”

  “You did the right thing, Hazel.”

  Martha caught Walt’s eye. “Get Karl Radcliffe.” She mouthed the words. Radcliffe was the pilot who worked most closely with the department, and it was his Piper Cub that was on call for search and rescue. Walt nodded and left the room, and Martha turned back to her visitor.

  “Does Buster have an office?”

  Hazel Garrett said yes, he had a room in the house that he’d kept even during the worst of their time together.

  Martha told her to go home and wait, that either she or one of her deputies would drop by to have a gander at the room, and please don’t change anything in the meantime.

  The hairs at the edge of her sparse mustache shifted as Hazel seemed to search for words.

  Finally: “He’s dead, isn’t he?”

  Martha shook her head. “We don’t know that.”

  “You feel the silence different when somebody goes.” Hazel gathered herself and stood, and Martha felt the pressure of the calloused hand and then she left. A minute later Walt stuck his head in the door. Karl’s airplane was being serviced. It wouldn’t be available until tomorrow.

  Martha said “Fiddle-de-dee” and punched in the cell number Joshua Byrne had given her. While it rang, she sent a second airplane past Walt’s ear and out into the hall.

  Byrne picked up. Without preamble Martha asked if his offer to help stood. He said yes and she asked how long it would take to file a flight plan. Byrne asked what was up and she gave him the bones. No, he said, a flight plan wasn’t required, not unless he planned to fly under instrument rules. That wouldn’t happen unless there was dense cloud cover, which wasn’t predicted.

  She told him to pick her up at the helicopter pad that law enforcement shared with the hospital. And that there would be a second spotter, Sean Stranahan.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Eyes in the Sky

  The Bell 407 was custom-fitted with searchlights and infrared detection, with its rear seating area configured to accept a stretcher when three of the passenger seats were removed. Sean and Martha sat side by side on forward-facing seats to scan the country to the right and left, Martha wearing a headset to communicate with Byrne in the cockpit. If she wanted to talk to Sean, they’d use hand signals. The plan was to grid-search the slopes of the southern Gravellys first, starting at the wall tent, which should be easily visible.

  If the grid search didn’t strike pay dirt in the form of a man with a hound, dead or alive, they’d start combing the mid-elevation access roads where Garrett might have parked. Byrne said they had fuel for three hours. If they didn’t find Garrett’s rig, a three-quarter-ton Dodge Ram with a two-toned silver and white two-horse trailer, then they’d have to refuel at the Big Sky Airport outside Ennis.

  “My damned bird,” as he’d called it while hoisting their gear into the cargo hold. “She costs six hundred dollars an hour to fly.” A not-so-subtle reminder of his largess.

  “Oh, I’ll bet you make that much just drawing a smile,” Martha said.

  Byrne drew his smile.

  What had seemed like a plan from ground level was put into perspective as the helicopter climbed and flew west along the toes of the Gallatin and Madison ranges, then veered south over the Madison Valley. It was just so much more country from the air than it was from the highway, with an extensive road-and-trail system that was confusing, even though both Martha and Sean could refer to a topo map on a monitor suspended from the cockpit ceiling for orientation. They found the wall tent, and Byrne began flying the grid they’d mapped in advance. Big, open slopes here, the new grasses overlaid with puzzle pieces of old snow. Martha felt giddy in spite of the seriousness of the mission. Below her spread an American Serengeti, a vast, undulating landscape with groups of deer and antelope and scattered elk herds. A grizzly sow reacted to the helicopter’s whir by rearing on her hind legs and swatting at the air with a massive paw. She ambled away into the trees, followed by her three cubs. A person could live a lifetime here, Martha thought, and never see his own backyard. You needed wings to appreciate the gift nature had given you.

  Three miles south of the tent, Martha spotted the sheep. She remembered Ava Ann Rawlings describing the Halloween costume worn by Hunter Ross on the night of his disappearance. “A meadow maggot,” she’d called him. Rice on green grass. Here there were hundreds of them. Martha pointed out the obvious and Sean nodded.

  An hour later and Martha’s headset crackled.

  “You want to heli on up to Ennis?”

  “At least as far as Johnny Gulch Road, farther north if we’re still good on fuel.”

  “Plenty in the tank.”

  “Find me a roan quarter horse with spots and I’ll give you a kiss you can feel in your back pocket.”

  The muted roar of the rotors, then, from the cockpit: “That’s a tall order, Sheriff. I get kissed by beautiful women for a living.”

  “Not by one who packs a Ruger Blackhawk on her hip.”

  Another pause, then the crackle: “In that case, buckle your safety strap.”

  Martha caught Sean looking at her.

  “I’m going to kiss a movie star and there’s nothing you can do about it,” she said.

  Sean tapped his right ear. “I can’t
hear you,” he shouted.

  Martha just smiled.

  * * *

  • • •

  SEAN SPOTTED THE GLINT FIRST, the sun reflecting off the aluminum coachwork of the Airstream. He gestured to Martha and she spoke briefly into her headset. Byrne canted the helicopter so that she could see out her side. She was mildly surprised that the Forest Service hadn’t hauled the trailer away yet, as it was squatting on their land. But then, it had been girdled with crime scene tape, which sort of made it the county’s business, too, and so easy enough to pass the buck. Anyway, at the end of the access road was a truck and trailer outfit that fit the description. And standing beside it was a horse. A gray-blue horse.

  “Can you set us down?”

  A brief crackle and “Will do.” And he did, though it took a few passes for Byrne to find an opening in the trees big enough to touch down the skids.

  After the rotors stilled, they hauled the day packs out and buckled them on.

  “How about that kiss?” Byrne said.

  “Not until we verify the horse.”

  “What kiss?” Sean said.

  “The one I’m going to plant on Joshua when I see freckles on that roan.”

  It took fifteen minutes to hike from the landing site up to the trailhead where they’d seen the horse. It was Garrett’s roan, all right, and the wet smack Martha laid on Byrne’s mouth lasted a few beats longer than she’d anticipated. Her cheeks flushed, she looked at Sean and shrugged.

  “Deal with it,” she said.

  The roan nickered at their approach, then came forward with her ears up. She was saddled, reins dangling, rifle scabbard empty, a braided lead rope snapped to her halter and dragging on the ground. Apparently, Garrett had been leading the horse when whatever happened, happened. And then, riderless, the horse did what horses do, went back to where she had come from. Martha peered into the stalls in the trailer. A couple of hay bales, a feed bag, a wheelbarrow with a plastic bladder half full of water and a bucket to bleed it into.