The Bangtail Ghost

by Keith McCafferty

  “Where is he, Freckles?” Martha said to the mare.

  Aware that the horse could be skittish if she faced her head on, where her eyes couldn’t focus to see her clearly, Martha stayed to the left side of the mare’s head, saw her own reflection in the liquid amber eye, and led her to a pine tree. She took a full wrap around the trunk and used a bowline to secure the rope.

  “One of you fellas, how about getting some hay from the trailer and putting water into the bucket. This critter’s starved and parched both.”

  * * *

  • • •

  BACKTRACKING THE HORSE was easier than Sean had anticipated, given the elapsed time. It followed nearly step by step the game trail that Sean, Martha, and Sam Meslik had followed when tracking the cat to Clarice Kincaid’s body. No trace of that tragedy now, just a dank odor you couldn’t place and probably was imagined, and a wind that bit at you and made your hands cold. Sean lost the thread a few times where the ground had dried out, would have to guess and circle upward to cut the track again.

  The crest of the ridge was too hard to show horse tracks as more than intermittent U’s, but on the north slope the earth was softer and patches of old snow clung in the lees. Here Sean first saw the prints of the hound, where, probably casting for scent, it had strayed from the ridge. He used a stick to point the track out to Martha and she nodded. A few moments later they spotted the beast, first in stripes of color between the tree trunks, then clearly as he came to the edge of a clearing. He approached on unsteady legs, his ears back, teeth bared. But the belligerence was just show, and when Martha called to him, he came up slinking, a brindle pattern showing through the dark patches on his back, his red ears down, tail drooping. Just a cold, hungry, lonely dog smelling to high heaven, all the hound beaten out of him.

  “Good boy,” Martha said. “Where’s Buster?”

  After snuffing her hand, his nose wet and his body shivering under Martha’s touch, the dog cantered ahead up the ridge, and the next time they saw him, he was standing over a patch of blue that, on closer inspection, turned out to be house paint dried on a frayed jacket. Garrett was lying faceup, his open eyes skinned over and shrunk into their sockets, the beer-bottle scar white against the dark of his stubbled cheek. The body was lying at the center of what looked to have been a violent struggle. The earth was torn up and blood was splattered over a large radius, some as if sprayed by a hose. The blood had rusted to a dull bronze color, but was so copious that the stains on the grass were impossible to miss.

  Sean, turning his head from the carnage, spotted the rifle tilted against a tree trunk. It was the battered Marlin lever-action that Garrett had carried on the night that Sean had accompanied him on the trail of the tom. Sean ejected the round in the chamber and measured the exposed bullet against the circumference of his ring finger.

  “What are you doing?” Martha asked.

  “Checking the size. It’s about the same diameter of the slug that I found in the body of the guard dog. At the time I guessed it to be .45-caliber. This is a .45/70 slug. Same diameter. I’m going to guess if we pass them by ballistics they’ll come back as both being fired from this rifle.”

  “So you’re saying he killed the dogs? I don’t know the man as well as you do, but does that sound like something he’d do?”

  “No. Not unless it was self-defense. Or if he was protecting his own dog.”

  “So he shoots the guard dogs and then, what, stumbles over the dead body of the herder?”

  “The collies could have pointed out its location.”

  “How does he lose the thingy he wears around his neck, the cord with the claw?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Martha had taken her jacket off and now rolled up her sleeves. She took her time pulling on blue latex hospital gloves.

  “Here’s my question,” she said. “If Garrett came across the herder, and he was dead, why didn’t he call us? You’re the one saying how he’s become a Samaritan now, making amends. Why didn’t he call it in?”

  “He was just ‘Bustering around,’” Sean said. “Isn’t that what his ex told you? He’s a cowboy. He’d get around to it when he got around to it. Maybe he was on the cat’s trail. You know as well as me it’s a dead zone there to here. He couldn’t have called if he wanted to.”

  “Humpff.” Martha knelt beside the body. She tugged at the maroon silk scarf wrapped twice around Garrett’s neck and knotted at the front, cowboy-style. The tag ends were saturated with blood and too tightly knotted to remove. She pulled the scarf down and dabbed at the congealed blood on the throat with a blue finger.

  “Lion?” Byrne said.

  Martha had almost forgotten he was there.

  “Looks like a cat, all right. I can see the puncture wounds.”

  “How many?” Sean said.

  “At least seven. It might have changed the position of the bite once or twice.” She started unbuttoning Garrett’s coat. A few minutes later she sat back on her heels.

  “Well?” Sean said.

  “His shirt’s shredded and there’re deep lacerations across his chest and belly. But no sign any of him was eaten.”

  “Maybe the dog drove it away.”

  “Maybe. Fly’s unbuttoned.”

  “That could explain how he was attacked.”

  “How so?” Martha looked at him.

  “He dismounted to take a whiz. Most men, even if nobody’s around, they turn their back and pee into a tree well or against a tree trunk. Like marking territory. It’s a vulnerable position. If the cat was following him, sees him get off the horse, walk a few yards away, turn his back, that would be the time to pounce. And the lead rope dragging like we found it. That’s could be a sign he got off the horse, too.”

  Martha grunted her skepticism. “I wish Harold was here. He might be able to make sense of this puzzle. I don’t think we’re fitting the pieces together, or we’re missing something.” She turned to Sean. “No offense.”

  “None taken.”

  Silence.

  “I have a thought,” Sean said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  The Magic Wand

  After the helicopter had silvered off into the sky, Martha fished the lunch she’d brought for them and they sat down upwind of the body. Sean’s idea had been to reach out to Harold Little Feather on Martha’s satellite phone. If he took the call and said his leg was okay to hike, which he did, then Byrne would chopper up the twenty miles to Harold’s sister’s place in Pony and collect him. They could be back inside of an hour and set down at a wide spot in the ridge.

  “Things are going to go pear-shaped on us,” Martha said. She wiped crumbs from the corners of her mouth. “Like the herder wasn’t enough. Now we have two deaths in a week. It will be open carry on the streets. The press will be circling like those vultures that led you to the guard dogs. Guess who they’ll have for breakfast?” She tapped her breastbone.

  Sean shook his head.

  “What, Sean? You think this is going to go away? It isn’t going to go away.”

  “No. I’m not thinking about the fallout. I’m thinking about Buster.”

  “How he turned his life around? You ask me, he was just talking a good game.”

  “No. Something he said.”

  Sean looked up. He could hear and then feel the thump thump thump of the rotors before he saw the helicopter cresting the ridge. It hovered down, the nearby trees flattening in the wind. Sean and Martha put their hands on their hats.

  No smile, no handshakes, Harold being Harold, a little more of him than before, with weight having settled around his middle.

  “You’re looking well, Harold,” Martha said. And knew as she said it that it was the wrong thing to say.

  “Bullshit. I look gone to seed. My son, he says give me a few more months and he’ll have a BFI for a dad. Big Fucking Indian.
”

  “The ankle still bothering you?”

  “Part of the problem. Hard to stay in shape if you can’t walk without a stick.” He tapped his stick against the ground. “Most of it’s the job, now that I’ve run out my string as an undercover. First time in my life I rode a desk. Going to be the last.”

  “You’re quitting?”

  “Thinking about it. Let’s see what we got.”

  Martha was familiar with Harold’s methods and made sure they followed in single file and stayed twenty feet back. Harold dipped out of sight after cresting the ridge and Martha held up a hand. A couple of minutes and she heard Harold’s birdlike whistle, beckoning them forward. He was bent over the body.

  “I see you unbuttoned him,” Harold said.

  “I pulled some layers aside to see his throat and chest,” Martha said. “His fly was undone. Sean thinks the cat attacked him while he was taking a whiz.”

  Harold nodded. “Most wouldn’t think of it, but a man’s member is subject to rigor mortis no different than a finger or a thumb. Couple hours after death, he’s got himself a hard-on a porn queen couldn’t shake the starch out of.”

  “Too much information,” Martha said.

  “Tell me how you got here.”

  Martha did, starting with the conversation with Garrett’s ex-wife and her decision to get some eyes in the sky.

  “So finding him, the truck, I mean, you’re saying it was luck, no solid reason to search this particular drainage?”

  “Luck and Joshua offering his services. It was a blanket search. We were checking out all the gated roads and access points, starting on this side of the range.”

  “This is where the tom with the broken tooth claimed the life of that hooker.”

  “That’s right. The kill site’s another quarter mile west along the ridge.”

  “So to be clear. Two lions, two victims, same place, six months apart. Then, separately or related, you have the herder, apparently also killed by a lion. You see what I’m getting at?”

  “I know,” Martha said. “It’s a lot of coincidence.”

  “It’s a lot of lions,” Harold said. “Too many by one.” He threaded his braid through the back of a discolored ball cap that read TROUT TAILS BAR AND GRILL.

  “Okay, then. I’m going to backtrack to where the horse came out onto the ridge and take it where it goes. I’d appreciate it if you walked back down to the helicopter and waited there.”

  He was gone, his stick tapping in front of him.

  “How long do you think he’ll be?” Byrne asked.

  “Harold’s Harold,” Martha said. “He was tracking this guy back when I was a boot, a hunter who shot his partner ’cause he suspected an affair with the wife. Anyway, you could only get to the place where it went down by boat. He says, ‘I’ll be a few minutes.’ I had time to catch a trout, build a fire, and eat it before he came back.”

  Harold was back when Martha was on her fourth story about him.

  “Two horses, two riders,” Harold said. And glanced at Sean, who shouldn’t have missed something that obvious, despite poor tracking conditions.

  “Damn,” Sean said.

  “It happens,” Harold said. “You’re looking for a bent blade of grass and miss the moose track.”

  “Are you saying he came up here with someone, or someone followed him up here?” Martha said.

  “Together.”

  “You’re sure about that.”

  “There are places where one horse track stepped onto the track of the other, and other places where it’s opposite. That tells me they were here at the same time.”

  “The only truck trailer at the trailhead is Garrett’s. Do you think they drove in together—it’s a two-staller—or the other rider came and went in his own rig?”

  “I didn’t have time to go back. Or the leg for it.” He tapped the stick.

  “We’ll check on the way out,” Sean said. “What’s that sticking out of your pack?”

  “Something my dad would have called a what-is-it. You grow up on the rez, you find a lot of what-is-its.” He drew a metal contraption out of his day pack. It consisted of four aluminum crossbars that vaguely resembled the skeleton of a kite. There was an extendable antenna attached to an electronic instrument panel the size of a cellphone. Harold said he’d found it on the ground along the trail that the second horse had taken when it was returning to the trailhead. His guess was that it had been tied onto a pannier and fallen off or been scraped off the horse’s back by a tree limb. He recognized that it was a radio receiver, one designed to pick up VHF signals sent from a transmitting collar. Two of the aluminum bars were bent and the metal surface carried brown stains that Harold brought his nose to and identified as blood.

  “I guess we know what he was looking for with that,” Martha said.

  Harold had removed his jacket and scratched at the tattoos of wolverine tracks that encircled the lower biceps of his left arm. “Thing is,” he said, “transmitting collars—I’m talking about VHF, not GPS—only have a range of two or three miles. Garrett would still have to have known where to start looking.”

  “Maybe it was the second rider who knew,” Martha said. “Buster’s ex said he was excited, that he took off in the middle of the night. What would cause him to do that? I’m thinking that he got a call from the other guy who was up here. They met at the trailhead. Then the shit hit the fan and the lion killed Garrett. The other guy flees the scene, trailers his horse, takes off down the road. He was never here. Except that he was. Harold, how far did you get with the data I told Carson Taylor to give you? The lion study stuff. That would have collaring information, right? This cat could have been in the study.”

  “It would be a long shot. But no, I didn’t get very far. Once the big tomcat was killed, all that was back-burnered. I’ve been sitting on it for the last three months. I only started opening the boxes when I heard about the sheepherder. We’re talking a lot of information. If you want, you could give me a hand. See if there’s a needle in the haystack.”

  “All right,” Martha said. “I’m up for a needle hunt. You want us to come to your sister’s?”

  He did. They set the date for the next morning, and after zipping the unpleasant cargo inside a plastic bag and loading it into the belly of the Bell, Harold climbed aboard. Byrne would drop him off back in Pony before turning east toward Bridger and the county morgue. That left Sean and Martha alone on the mountain. The plan was to drive Garrett’s rig back to his widow’s place, then have a deputy drive them home after they had had a talk with Hazel, as their vehicles were at Martha’s. The snag, that Garrett’s truck was locked, was a loss of a minute. Sean found the key where half the hunters in Montana placed it, under the right front tire. The other half placed it under the left rear tire. He also found the tire treads made by a second vehicle, one also hauling a horse trailer, so that mystery was solved. Martha took photos of the tread should they be able to match it to a truck and trailer rig later on. It shouldn’t be hard. The tires on the trailer were mismatched.

  “Who’s going to tell her?” Sean asked. “Maybe it should be me. I’m the one knew him.”

  “It won’t make any difference,” Martha said. “She’ll know soon as she sees the critters.”

  * * *

  • • •

  MARTHA WAS RIGHT. Hazel Garrett opened the door wearing a housecoat with Shetland ponies on it, her face a stone wall that broke into pieces as her eyes went from Martha to the hound on the porch and the horse trailer beyond. She bent down and wrapped up the dog in her arms, speaking through tears.

  “I knew he was never coming back. You just get a feeling. How come when you get a bad feeling it’s always true, but when you get a good feeling something comes along that lets the air right out of you? How come God lets that happen?”

  She seemed to be speaking to the do
g, but he had no better answer to the question than Sean or Martha, and while Martha comforted the woman as best she could in her living room, Sean rifled cupboards in the kitchen to make tea.

  “To go like that,” she said after she had composed herself. “You’re sure it was a cat?”

  “It looks like it,” Martha said.

  “Are they going to want me to identify the body?”

  “If you will. We’ll have the scar and his dental and DNA, so it isn’t absolutely necessary.”

  “I will. You live with animals like I have, you see a lot of death. Is his face . . . ?” Her voice trailed away.

  “It’s recognizable. I won’t kid you. There were wounds.”

  “Did it . . . like the others. Eat him?”

  “It doesn’t look like it.”

  “We wasn’t under the same roof sometimes, but I loved him. He ended up the sweet man I first met.”

  She’d begun to cry again and wiped at her eyes with the back of a hand. “But to go like that,” she said.

  “Mrs. Garrett?” Sean said.

  It took her a few moments to find his eyes. He handed her a cup of tea. She stared at it like it held a secret.

  “What kind of system did Buster have for documenting his hunts?” Martha asked. “Computer files? Maybe an appointment book?”

  “He’s got his phone, is all. He’s got the Gmail on it, but he don’t hardly check it. But he has his journals. They got all his tax stuff in them.”

  “May we see them?”

  “They’re in his place. I suppose there’s no harm.”

  * * *

  • • •

  HIS PLACE WAS DOWN the hall, first door on the left. It was a man cave, dark with shuttered windows, heavy on the Y chromosome. Sean took in an oval rug, a heavy plush chair decorated with upholstery tacks, an oak desk with a desk chair on rollers. On the unpolished surface of the desk was a cast-bronze ashtray in the shape of a cougar’s paw print. There were two steel file drawers that Martha rifled through and revealed nothing of interest. There was a caved-in napping couch that had seen a lot of napping.