Trophy Hunt

by C. J. Box

  But now he was literally grounded. He had called and left messages for her at the bar, but she hadn’t returned them. No doubt she had heard about the DUI. It had been in the Saddlestring Roundup, that one with the cattle mutilations in it. He had hoped that maybe with all of the hullabaloo about the dead cows she had missed the weekly police-blotter. Unfortunately, the police report was usually the only thing in the paper everybody read. And she was probably at the Stockman’s now, damn it, targeting another lone drinker. Giving him a couple of whiskeys on the house, like she had done with him. Then, when the bar closed at two, she would grab his hand and a fifth of Jim Beam and take him up the street to her apartment. It should have been him, Tuff thought. He leaned forward in his saddle and hit his horse between his ears so hard that his hand stung. The gelding crow-hopped, but Tuff was prepared for it and had a good hold on the saddle horn. The horse recovered and resumed slow-walking to the dark timber, exhibiting no malice toward its abusive rider. Which was another reason Tuff disliked horses. They were stupid.

  So, after a week of herding the cattle down from the mountains into the holding pens near the ranch, they had counted and come up with ten missing cows. Ever since the cattle mutilations had been reported on the Hawkins Place, Bud Longbrake had been acting paranoid. He ordered Tuff and Eduardo to ride the timber and see what they could find or spook out. Eduardo had found six strays the day before, prior to falling off of his horse. Tuff had found none. Bud had put the screws to Tuff, telling him that he wasn’t holding up his end.

  “I want those cows found, Tuff,” Bud had said, leaning over the breakfast table with his palms flat on the surface. “Dead or alive.”

  Tuff had said, Then go find ’em yourself, you pussy-whipped phony!

  No, he hadn’t said that. But he had thought that. And someday, when he retold the story in the Stockman’s Bar, that was how it would be recalled.

  Tuff wished he had more light, but the sun was now behind the mountains. He blamed the horse for delaying him. The gelding had a smooth ride, but was the damned slowest walking horse he had ever ridden. He could have walked up the draw faster his own self, he thought. And if he could have taken one of the ATVs, he would have been goddamned back by now and watching television in the bunkhouse with Eduardo.

  Shit.

  Tuff reached back on the saddle and unbuckled a saddlebag that was stiff with age. His fingers closed around the smooth, cool neck of a fifth of Jim Beam. He had his memories of Evelyn Wolters, and this brought them back. He cracked the top and drank straight from the bottle. It was harsh, but tongues of familiar fire spread through his chest and belly. Sometimes, he thought, his memories—and what he could do with them—were almost better than the real thing. But he needed that original foundation before he could embellish them to his liking.

  He rode up the mountain slowly. He stared in resentment at the back of the gelding’s head, settling on the bony protrusion between the horse’s ears. He fired mental curses at the spot, hoping some would soak through into the gelding’s brain. Not for the first time, he wondered what a fencing tool would do to the skull of a horse.

  He rode the fence line, just like the song. The reins were in his left hand and the bottle was in his right. It was turning into a cold night. There was a hint of moisture in the air—probably brought with the cloud cover—that accentuated the smell of dry, dust-covered sage leading up into sharp pine. He smelled his own breath. Not pretty.

  The gelding was breathing hard as he climbed a rocky hill toward a stand of aspen trees. Not that the horse was moving any faster—he had only one speed, which was similar to four-wheel drive low—and Tuff was just about ready to call it a night. With no stars or moon, he would not be able to see whether there were strays on this saddle slope or not. And damned if he would use his flashlight. He wasn’t that dedicated.

  He wished he could find the missing cows, though, to get Bud Longbrake off of his back.

  The aspens stood out from the dark timber that climbed up the mountain into the sky. The aspen leaves had turned already, and were in that stage between yellow-red and falling off. The aspens soaked up what little light there still was, making the stand look like a tan brushstroke on the huge, dark landscape.

  “Whoa.”

  Tuff stopped the gelding and got his bearings. He slid one boot out of the stirrup so he could twist in the saddle and look around. It was easy to get lost up here, he had learned. But he wasn’t. Far below were the crystal-clear blue lights of the ranch yard. Twenty-five miles farther, the lights of the town of Saddlestring shimmered in wavering rows.

  He turned back, looking at the aspens. He saw movement in the trees. Or was it a drunken illusion? Tuff wiped his eyes with his sleeve and looked again. This had happened before, him seeing things while he was drinking. But this time there was something authentic about it, something that made his chest clutch. Movement again. Something, or somebody, moved from one tree to another. The form was thicker than the tree trunks, but once hidden it seemed to meld into the darkness. He heard a twig snap, and his horse, who suddenly pricked his ears, confirmed the sound.

  He let his breath out slowly. Certainly, it was deer or elk. But game animals didn’t hide, they ran. Under him, his horse started wuffing, emitting a deep, staccato, coughing sound. He feared that sound—all horsemen feared that sound—because it meant trouble was imminent. His horse, his slow-moving, docile horse, was about to throw off hundreds of years of domesticity and become a wild animal again.

  Suddenly, the gelding crow-hopped, nearly unsaddling Tuff. His balance was goofy because of his position and the bourbon.

  “What in the hell is wrong with you?” he growled, taking an empty swing at the gelding’s ear with the flat of his hand.

  Unlike before, the horse didn’t shrug off his action. In fact, the horse began backpedaling down the slope in a panic.

  “Damn you, what’s the problem?” he shouted. The gelding was backtracking down the mountain much faster than he had walked up. Tuff tried to turn him, to face him away from whatever had spooked him in the aspens. Sloshing bourbon on his bare hand, Tuff tried to grasp the reins near the bit in the gelding’s mouth to jerk him around hard. The bourbon splashed out of the bottle and into the gelding’s eye, igniting the horse and making him explode into a wild, tight spin.

  Tuff clamped down with his thighs and held on. His hat flew off. He let the bottle drop—not something he wanted to do—and found himself knocked forward in the saddle, hugging the gelding’s neck. He had lost the reins, and several things flashed through his mind. With the reins down, the lunatic horse could inadvertently step on them as he spun and jerk both of them to the ground, breaking their necks. He thought of his broken bottle of Jim Beam. He imagined what he must look like, spiraling down a rocky slope in the dark, hugging the neck of a horse. He thought of how unbelievably strong and powerful a horse—a 1,000-pound animal—was when fully charged, like now.

  Even as he spun, faster and harder than he had ever spun before, even when he used to rodeo, he wondered what had made the horse spook. Bears could do it, he knew. The smell of a bear in the wrong circumstances could make even a good ranch mount go crazy. This horse is going to fall, Tuff thought, and I’m going to get hurt real bad.

  And then the horse tripped on something, recovered momentarily, then bucked. Tuff was thrown through the air—he could feel the actual moment of release when no part of his body was in contact with the saddle or the horse—and time seemed to literally slow down as he went airborne until it fast-forwarded as he flew face-first into a cold, sharp rock and heard a crunch in his ears like a door slamming shut.

  10

  JOE WAS UP AND SHOWERED when the telephone rang at 5:45 A.M. With a towel around his waist but still dripping, he padded down the dark hallway toward their bedroom to find Marybeth sitting bolt upright in bed, rubbing her eyes, with the receiver pressed against her ear. From across the room, he recognized the voice on the other end of the phone as that of Missy
Vankueran, Marybeth’s mother. He noted the high-pitched urgency in Missy’s voice.

  “Just a second,” Marybeth said to her mother, then clamped her palm over the speaker and looked up with wide eyes. “It’s my mother, Joe. They just found one of their hands dead on the ranch.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “They called the sheriff, but she’s wondering if you can go out there.”

  “Why me?”

  “I didn’t ask her,” Marybeth said, a hint of annoyance peeking through. “She’s very upset. She wants you there, I assume, because you’re family.”

  Joe had planned to get an early start. It was Saturday, and archery season was in full swing, and an early deer rifle season was opening in one of the areas in his district. Hunters would be out in force. The death of a ranch hand was the sheriff’s responsibility, or the county coroner’s.

  “She says he’s been mutilated, like those cows.”

  “Tell her I’ll be there in half an hour.”

  Normally, he would have savored the fall morning as he hurled down the old two-lane state highway toward the turnoff for the Longbrake Ranch, Joe thought. The sun had just broken over the mountains and fused the valley with color. Lowland cottonwoods were bursting with red and yellow, and the moisture sparkled on the grass. It was clear and crisp and cloudless. Mule deer still fed in the meadows and had not yet retreated to their daytime shelter of the trees and draws.

  He slowed and turned off the blacktop onto a red dirt road made of crushed and packed gravel, where he passed under a massive log archway. Sun-bleached moose, deer, and elk antlers climbed up the logs and across the top beam. A weathered sign—LONGBRAKE RANCHES, SADDLESTRING, WYO.—hung from heavy chain attached to the beam. There were less than a dozen bullet holes in the sign, Joe noted, which meant that the sign had probably been hung just a year or two before. In Twelve Sleep County, older signs had many more holes in them.

  The gravel road paralleled a narrow, meandering spring creek with thick, grassy banks. The fact that deer, coyotes, and ducks didn’t flush from the creek as Joe drove told him that he wasn’t the first to drive up the road that morning.

  He thought: Missy must be wrong.

  Although he had no doubt that a ranch hand had been found, Joe had trouble believing the man had been mutilated as well. Missy was inclined to let her imagination run away with her, and was prone to high drama. Joe hoped like hell that this would be the case. If a human was actually killed and mutilated like the moose and the cattle had been, it would be a whole new, and horrific, development.

  The buildings that made up the headquarters of the Longbrake Ranch had an entirely different feel than the spartan and businesslike Hawkins Ranch. The main ranch house was a massive log structure with gabled upper-floor windows and a wide porch railed with knotty pine. It was a monument to the gentleman rancher Bud Longbrake aspired to be, as it had been the monument to his father and his grandfather before him. Guest cabins were tucked into the trees behind the home, and the bunkhouse which at one time housed a dozen cowboys.

  Joe felt a clutch in his stomach as he saw Missy Vankueran push a screened door open and emerge from the house. She waved him over.

  Despite the events of the morning, Joe noticed, Missy had managed to do her hair and apply the exquisite makeup that made her look thirty-five instead of her real sixty-one years. Her eyes shone from a porcelain mask featuring sharp, high cheekbones and a full, red mouth. She was slim and neat, and wore a flannel shirt covered with bucking horses, and a suede vest with Shoshone wild roses in beadwork on the lapels. She looked every bit the chic ranchwoman, Joe thought with grudging admiration.

  Maxine bounded up in her seat next to Joe and whined to be let out. That Maxine, Joe thought. She liked everybody.

  Joe told his dog to stay and got out. Missy met him near the front of his pickup. She was obviously distressed.

  “The horse Tuff was riding showed up around three in the morning,” she began, dispensing with greetings. “Bud looked outside and saw the horse near the corrals, with its saddle hanging upside down. He thought Tuff must have fallen off in the mountains, so he got in his truck and went to look for him. Bud came back down a couple of hours later and said he found Tuff’s body up there.”

  Missy gestured vaguely toward the mountains. The sun had risen enough that a yellow strip banded the snow-dusted tops of the peaks.

  “Did Bud say the body had been mutilated?”

  Missy paused and her eyes widened almost grotesquely. “Yes! He said it was awful.”

  “Is Bud up there now?”

  “Yes, he took the sheriff up there to the scene.”

  Joe nodded.

  “What does this all mean?” Missy asked.

  Joe was thinking the same thing. First moose, then cattle, now possibly a man.

  “I’m not sure,” he said. “If what Bud says is true then we really have a problem on our hands.”

  “No, not that,” Missy shook her head. “I meant in terms of Bud. We’re working on plans for the wedding, and I don’t want him to be distracted.”

  Joe looked at her and fought an urge to ask, Are you really Marybeth’s mother?

  Instead, he stepped back from her as if she were radioactive.

  “How far is the body?” he asked.

  With one exception, the scene was eerily similiar to the scene on the Hawkins Ranch. Just below an aspen grove and before the slope darkened with heavy pine, the two Sheriff’s Department vehicles were there again, as well as a ranch pickup, no doubt driven by Bud Longbrake. The addition to the group was the lone four-wheel-drive ambulance from the Twelve Sleep County Hospital.

  As he approached in his pickup, he could see a small crowd of men bending over something in knee-high sagebrush. Bud Longbrake, in a gray, wide-brimmed Stetson, looked up and waved to Joe. Barnum straightened up and glowered. Deputy McLanahan and two EMTs made up the rest of the group. One of the EMTs, a squat bruiser with a whisp of tawny facial hair, looked pale and distressed. While Joe pulled up next to the Longbrake truck and swung out, he saw the EMT turn quickly and retch into the brush behind him. The other EMT walked over to his colleague and led him away by the arm, apparently for some air.

  “Joe,” Longbrake said.

  “Bud.”

  “Missy call you?”

  “Yup.”

  “She all right?”

  Joe paused for a beat. “Fine,” he said.

  Barnum snorted and exchanged glances with McLanahan.

  “What do we have?” Joe asked, stepping through the sagebrush. The ground was spongy and soft, except for the football-sized fists of granite that punched through it on the slope.

  When he saw what the men were standing over, Joe stopped abruptly. Although he had seen hundreds of harvested game animals as well as the moose and cattle, he was not prepared for what was left of Tuff Montegue. The body lay on its back, legs askew. One arm was thrown out away from the body, as if caught making a sweeping gesture. For a moment, Joe thought that the other arm was missing, but then he realized it was actually broken and pinned beneath the trunk. Tuff was disemboweled; his blue-gray entrails blooming out of a foot-long hole in his abdomen like some kind of sea plant in the corral. His Wranglers had been pulled down to mid-thigh—Tuff had bone-white skin—and his genitals had been cut out, leaving a maroon-and-black oval. Huge chunks of clothing and flesh had been ripped from Tuff’s thighs.

  Tuff’s face was gone. It had been removed from his jawbone to his high forehead. All that was left were obscenely grinning teeth, wide-open eyes the size of Ping-Pong balls, a shiny, white wishbone protrusion where his nose had been, and a mass of drying blood and muscle. There was also the smell; a light but potent stew of sweet-smelling sage, spilled blood, exposed entrails, and the half-digested breakfast of the squat EMT. Joe gagged and tried to swallow.

  He turned away, closing his eyes tightly and trying to breathe steadily. He heard Barnum snort behind him.

  “Something the matter, Joe?�
�� Barnum asked.

  Then, damn it, Joe could no longer fight the wave of nausea and he threw up his morning coffee onto the soft ground.

  Joe was there for most of the morning, keeping his distance as the hillside was photographed, measured, and tied off with yellow crime-scene tape wrapped around hastily driven T-posts. Additional deputies had arrived from Saddlestring, as well as a Wyoming highway patrolman who had heard the chatter on his radio.

  Sheriff Barnum seemed more distressed than Joe had ever seen him, barking orders at his underlings and marching up and down the hillside with no apparent intent. Several times, he climbed into his Blazer and slammed the door to work the radio channels.

  Bud Longbrake stood near Joe, leaning against the grille of his pickup. Longbrake was a large man, with wide shoulders, silver hair, and thick ears that stuck out almost at right angles from his temples. His face was weathered, his eyes sharp blue, his expression inscrutable. He wore a starched, white cowboy shirt and a silver belt buckle the size of a softball that celebrated an ancient rodeo win. Longbrake watched the procedures carefully but dispassionately, as if trying to guess the conclusions of the investigators before they announced them.

  “I ain’t never seen a body in that shape before,” Longbrake told Joe after nearly an hour of silence.

  “Nope.”

  “I’ve seen calves hamstrung and gutted by coyotes while they were still alive, and I’ve seen a damn wolf eat the private parts out of a calf elk while the elk bawled for his mama, but I never seen a man like that.”

  Joe nodded, agreeing. The EMTs were trying to slide Tuff’s body into a body bag without any of his parts detaching. Joe looked away.