Читаем Back of Beyond полностью

Bull Mitchell roared and fired his.44 Magnum over the backs of the wolves. The concussion in the epic stillness was tremendous and Cody flinched and came back up with his ears ringing. The big slug slapped the surface of the water twenty feet out and all three wolves wheeled toward them on their back haunches.

Cody could look into their black eyes and see their long red teeth and pink-tinged snouts and he instinctively reached for his Sig Sauer. He’d bought bear spray the day before in Bozeman but it had been in the duffel with his carton of cigarettes so therefore he didn’t have any. He couldn’t get over how doglike they were, yet they weren’t dogs. They had the eyes of dogs and the fur of dogs, but they were wild, big, and menacing. The black one had yellow-rimmed eyes that seemed to burn in their sockets.

“Hold on,” Mitchell said. “Stand tall and tough. They want to protect their food but we’ve got to face ’em down and show no fear.”

To the wolves, Mitchell barked, “Get the hell into the woods where you belong. Now get…”

To emphasize his point, he ratcheted back the hammer on his Ruger and fired again, this time exploding a plume of swamp mud from a depression five feet in front of the wolves.

The black alpha male-Cody guessed he’d weigh 175 pounds-woofed and exhaled and loped away along the shoreline to the south. The silver female followed and Cody caught a glimpse of something long and blue that reminded him of sausage swinging from her jaws as she ran. The mottled wolf, likely also a male, Cody thought, followed her without conviction, as if he’d wanted to fight. He couldn’t believe how fast they ran or how powerful they looked, like ghosts with teeth.

“They might not have gone far,” Mitchell said, “so keep your eyes open.”

“My God,” Cody said, and lifted his hand. “Look at this. I was so scared my hand stopped shaking.”

Mitchell chuckled while he withdrew the empty brass cartridges out of the revolver and replaced them with fresh hollow-point shells.

“I’ll keep this out and cover us,” Mitchell said, chinning toward the shoreline where the wolves had been. “You might as well keep that little popgun of yours in your holster. It’ll just make ’em mad if they decide to come back.”

* * *

The first thing Cody noticed as they approached the shoreline was the smell. Mingling with the thin warm air and algae-tinged odor from the lake was a primal whiff of musk from the thick hides of the wolves and the dank metallic smell of viscera.

A tangle of partially submerged driftwood stretched from the shore into the lake for twenty feet. A scum of algae sucked in and out of the water-worn branches of the structure as if being inhaled and exhaled by the structure itself. There was a deep shadowed undercut beneath the driftwood.

The body was half in and half out of the water with the head on the beach, face to the side. Its legs were submerged in the water and pointed down toward the undercut at such an angle that the feet could hardly be seen in the murk. The body appeared to have no arms.

Male, thin, pale, middle-aged, the waterlogged skin alabaster white except for the jagged gaping holes between its ribs and between the legs. All the soft internal parts had been torn away and eaten by the wolves. The clothing on the victim-a lightweight long-sleeved shirt, baggy cargo pants, cowboy boots-had been flayed into ribbons by the teeth of the wolves. The dark sand beach was trampled with canine paw prints, some slowly filling with chocolate-milk-colored swirls of water. The deep indentations of their claws looked like small-caliber bullet holes in the sand.

“Oh man,” Mitchell said.

It wasn’t Justin. As soon as Cody was assured of that, he felt his cop blinders descending like the shield of a motorcycle helmet. The shield would help him disengage from making a personal connection with the dead body and treat it for what it was: meat whose soul and life spark had long since left it. The wolves had certainly understood that.

Cody turned the body over to find that the arms weren’t missing after all. The wrists had been bound with wire behind its back.

He bent down and found handholds beneath the arms and tried to pull the body fully out of the water but it wouldn’t budge. He frowned.

“Are you going to give me a hand?” Cody asked Mitchell.

“Nope,” the outfitter said. “This is your department.”

Cody looked up for clarification.