Читаем Back of Beyond полностью

Calling Jenny, his ex-wife, waking her and making her angry, asking to talk to his son Justin to tell him he could borrow anything he wanted to borrow and to stay away from alcohol and parties, but Justin wasn’t there. He was already gone, with Jenny’s new rich fiance, on a goddamned male bonding adventure in the wilderness. Jenny calling him an asshole which made him laugh because he’d been called that so many times that night that it just might be true, and her slamming down the phone and refusing to pick up when he called her number three more times until he passed out in his lounge chair with the receiver stuck to his hand by congealing blood;

Waking up covered in stiff brown blood, his pants, shirt, and hands caked with it, dried flakes spackling his hand like cracks in a dry lake bed. Swirls of it in the shower, rich and red and revolting. Kicking at the pink swirls and flakes with bare feet, trying to get them to go down the drain;

Swallowing six ibuprofens to blunt the savage pounding in his head, throwing them up in the kitchen sink, taking six more, finally drinking a beer and a raw egg for breakfast which eased him back into the slipstream and stopped his hands from shaking and made it possible for him to brush his teeth and shave without mutilating himself;

Showing up for the eight thirty staff briefing with the town cops from across the hall, Undersheriff Bodean outlining the circumstances of the death of Hank Winters, sleeping through it with his eyes wide open until the sheriff stormed into the room waving the morning’s Independent Record, cursing Carrie Lowry and especially that damned Skeeter, who must have been the one who fed her full of lies about the accident being a murder and a lead left at the crime scene that would identify the killer, ordering all of his cops to boycott the local paper until they apologized and ran a front-page retraction;

Feeling Larry’s absolutely chilling glare from across the room while Tubman ranted;

Cutting out early after the briefing because he couldn’t concentrate and he needed a beer, taking his notes and camera with him;

Spending the afternoon at the Windbag and the Jester, seeing his old friends, laughing at their stories and telling some of his own, feeling like it was a family reunion of sorts for the men and women who drank in the daylight, his people!;

Taking the Ford back up the mountain as dusk came, shotgun in the rack and pistol in his holster, hoping to avoid hitting another elk, hoping against hope that whoever did this to Hank would read the paper and be puzzled as hell and return to the scene to try and retrieve whatever it was the cops found;

Knowing it was nuttier than hell but somehow made complete sense;

Parking the vehicle on a road a half mile from Hank’s place so it couldn’t be seen and hiking through the dark forest still dripping with rain from the storm that afternoon, carrying the shotgun, packing his pistol, and swinging a six-pack of beer by the plastic holder.

* * *

He didn’t know how long he’d been passed out when the sound of a motor woke him up. Cody moaned and opened his eyes. His head throbbed. He found himself sitting on the damp ground, leaning back against a tree trunk. The cold wet had soaked through his jeans and underwear, and his butt was freezing.

Since it took a few moments to figure out where he was and why he was there, the sound of the tires on gravel and the motor confused him. Then he realized his plan had worked, that the killer had returned to the scene.

He stood up and the waves of dizziness and nausea nearly buckled his knees. He kept his head down, waiting it out, trying to listen to what was going on through the roaring. He heard a man’s voice say, “Here it is,” and he thought: There’s more than one of them.

Unless the guy was talking to himself, which was doubtful.

“Here?” A woman’s voice.

“There, on that frame that was once a couch. His body was there.”

Cody took a deep breath of cold mountain air and it cleared the clouds from his mind a little. The night and his situation started to come into focus. He wished he’d been lucid when they drove up so that he could have seen them before they got out of their car. But that moment had passed.

He left the three full beers and the empty bottle of bourbon in the grass, and took a step toward the back of the cabin. His legs were rubbery, and he lurched to the side, about to fall. Luckily, the trees were close together and his shoulder thumped into a trunk and kept him upright. He inhaled and held the cold air in his lungs, hoping it would sober him up.

“So what are we looking for?” the woman asked.

“I really don’t know,” the man said. “Whatever was left. If anything.”