Trophy Hunt (19 page)

A
N HOUR AND A HALF AWAY
, after calling Marybeth to tell her that he’d be getting home later than usual, Joe drove up the two-track on the Longbrake Ranch toward the treeline where Tuff Montegue was killed. He wanted to retrace the route of Tuff Montegue, to be there in the same place and at the same time of night that the coroner suggested Tuff was killed.

There was a crisp fall chill in the air. The beginning of dusk had dropped the temperature a quick twenty degrees. The chill, along with the last of the fall colors in the aspen pockets that veined through the dark timber, seemed to heighten his senses. Sounds seemed sharper; his vision extended; even the dry, sharp smell of the sage seemed to have more of a bite. Maybe it was because just prior to darkness the wind usually stopped, and it was the stillness that brought everything out.

He was placing himself right square in the middle of it, using himself as bait. Marybeth wouldn’t approve.

The grass around the murder scene was still flattened by all of the vehicles that had been up there, so it was easy to find. He stopped and killed the engine. Maxine eyed him desperately, her excitement barely contained.

“Yup, we’re going to get out,” he told her, “but you’re sticking close to me.”

With that, she began to tremble. Dogs were so easy to please, Joe thought.

Pulling on his jacket, he swung out of his pickup and drew his twelve-gauge Wingmaster pump shotgun from its scabbard behind the seat, loaded it with double-ought buckshot, and filled a jacket pocket with more shells. He pulled on a pair of thin buckskin gloves, clamped his Stetson on tight, and walked the perimeter of the crime scene. It had been cleaned up, he was glad to note. No cigarette butts or Coke cans in the grass. Maxine worked the area as well, nose to the ground, drinking in the literal cornucopia of smells—wildlife scat, blood, maybe the bear, a dozen Sheriff’s Department people, the ME, the coroner, anything else that clung to the grass.

He turned and faced east, studying the shadowed tree-line above him, wondering what it was that Tuff and his horse had seen that caused the problem. Walking very slowly and stopping often, as if he were hunting elk, he moved up the slope. He had learned that moving too quickly dulled too many senses in the wilderness. If his breathing became labored, all he could hear was himself. By walking a hundred yards and then stopping, he could see more, hear more. As the light filtered out, his eyes adjusted to the darkness. The sky was brilliant and close with swirls of stars. A quarter moon turned the grass and sagebrush dark blue. Maxine stayed on his heels.

For an hour, he moved slowly up the mountain until the first few of the trees were behind him and the forest loomed in front.

It wasn’t so much that Joe could see something in the trees as sense it. It was a hint, a barely perceptible hint, of the pressure he had felt at much greater volume when he found the moose.

Maxine moved up in front of him and set up on point. The hair on her back was raised, and she was sniffing the air.

He reached down and ran his fingers down her neck to calm her, but
she was rigid. Her eyes were wild, her ears up and alert. “Stay,” he whispered to her. “Stay, girl.” She was staring into the dark trees the way she would if they were bird hunting and she had found pheasants in the cover. But he could see nothing.

Suddenly, the dog exploded with purpose. She launched herself into the trees ahead—Joe missed when he grabbed for her collar—and she barked with a manic, deep-throated, houndlike howl that sounded so loud in the stillness that it even scared him. He had never seen his mild-mannered Labrador act so crazy.

“Maxine!” he yelled. No point in proceeding quietly now. “MAXINE! Get back here! MAXINE!”

He glimpsed her in the shadows, her tail and hind legs illuminated by a dull shaft of moonlight. And then she was gone.

He chased her through the trees listening for her barking. It sounded like she had veered left, then right. She sounded so
mean,
he thought. And he thought he heard something else. Footfalls? Somebody running? He couldn’t be sure.

He whistled for her, and kept shouting as her barking grew more and more distant. He unholstered his Mag-Lite and bathed the area in front of him with its beam, then sharpened it into focus and shot it up into the trees in the general direction of where she had run. He couldn’t pick up her track.

“Oh, no,” he moaned aloud. In the seven years he had had his dog, she had never run away from him.

He wondered whether she was stupid enough to have taken off after the grizzly bear.

Her barking was now so faint, he could barely hear it. It came from farther to the right in the forest, much deeper into the timber.

While she was still in earshot, he hoped, he fired two blasts from the shotgun into the sky. The flame from the muzzle strobed orange on the tree trunks near him.

Then he waited. Yelled. Whistled. Fired two more blasts and reloaded the shotgun with shells from his pocket. Nothing. It was now completely silent again.

“Shit, Maxine.”

There was no way he could track her in the dark and find her. He couldn’t even be sure she was to the right, the way sounds bounced around in the mountains. Very reluctantly, he began to work his way back the way he had come, stopping periodically hoping to hear her bark. Joe knew that if she managed to emerge from whatever forces had turned her into the hellhound she had become, she would know to return to the pickup. In normal circumstances, he would have given her a day or so before getting worried. But these weren’t normal circumstances. He pictured her mutilated body and it made him shudder.

J
oe sat in his pickup with his windows rolled down and his headlights on. Every few minutes, he honked the horn. Maxine would know the sound, recognize it as him. He scanned the slope and timber, hoping desperately to see her.

It pained him to think that Maxine had possibly charged at something in an effort to save him. Why else would she have become so ferocious, so single-minded? It wasn’t for her own sake, he thought. She wasn’t the kind of dog to embrace a confrontation or want to fight.

“Damn it all,” he said and fought the urge to pound the steering wheel.

He kept looking over at the passenger seat, thinking that’s where she should be. He thought that he’d probably spent more hours with Maxine than with Marybeth or the girls. Maxine was a part of him.

He tried not to get maudlin. Leaning on the horn, he let the sound of it express what he felt.

He sat up with a start when something light colored and low to the ground moved just beyond his headlights. Grabbing for the spotlight, he thumbed the switch, the beam bathing the acreage in front of him with white light, seeing something doglike . . . only to discover that it was a damned coyote. The coyote stopped for a moment, eyes reflecting red, then moved down the mountain.

Again, Joe cursed. And the curse released something that started in the
back of his throat like a hard, hot lump and burst forward, and he sat there in the dark and he cried.

T
he cell phone on the dashboard burred at 10
P
.
M
., and Joe could see from the display that it was Marybeth. He had avoided calling her.

“So, are you coming home tonight?” she asked, an edge of irritation in her voice.

“Yes, I’m just about to leave. I’ll be home in forty-five minutes.”

She obviously picked up on the tone of his voice, the solemnity: “Joe, are you all right? Is something wrong?”

“Maxine ran away,” he said, telling her in as few words as possible what happened.

For several moments, neither spoke.

“I don’t want to tell the girls,” Marybeth said.

“We’ll have to.”

“Okay, but in the morning. Otherwise, they’ll cry all night long.”

Joe nodded, knowing she couldn’t see the gesture.

“Oh,
Joe,
” she said, in a way that made him feel guilty for once again bringing pain into their family.

“I’m sorry, honey,” he said.

A
s Joe drove down the mountain, he kept honking. He wondered if Bud Longbrake could hear him down at the ranch, and figured that he probably could. He called Bud from his cell phone, told him why he was making so much noise, asked Bud to keep an eye out for his dog.

“Your dog?” Bud said, genuine sympathy in his voice. “Damn, I’m sorry, Joe.”

“Yeah, me too.”

“When my first wife left me I didn’t feel nearly as bad as when my dog died.”

Joe didn’t dare respond to that one.

A
quarter of a mile from where he would turn onto the highway, Joe looked into his rearview mirror and saw something in his taillights. “YES!” he shouted, and slammed on his brakes.

Maxine was exhausted, her head hung low, her tongue lolled out of the side of her mouth like a fat, red necktie. She literally collapsed in the road.

Joe walked back and picked her up, seventy-five pounds of dog, and buried his face in her coat as he took her to his truck. He saw no obvious wounds on her, although she was shaking. He lay her on her seat, and she looked at him with her deep, brown eyes. Filling a bowl with water from his water bottle he tried to get her to drink, but she was too tired.

As he wheeled on to the highway with giddy relief, he called Marybeth, and she burst into tears at the news. He called Bud, and said not to worry about the dog. After punching off, Joe told Maxine, “Don’t ever, ever do that again, or I’ll shoot you like the dog you are.” He meant the first part but not the second. She didn’t hear him because she was sleeping, her head where it always was when he drove, on his lap.

As he pulled into his driveway, he glanced up to see Marybeth at the window pulling the shade aside. The porch light lit up the cab of the truck, and he looked down to see if Maxine was awake. He didn’t really want to have to carry her again.

That was when he noticed something wrong. Her coat seemed lighter than it should.

He snapped on the dome light and simply stared. Whatever she had seen or experienced had scared her so badly that her coat was turning
white.

“Okay,” Joe said aloud. “Enough is enough. Now I’m starting to get mad.”

S
heridan and Lucy were still up, even though it was past their bedtime, because Marybeth wanted them to tell Joe what had happened earlier on the Logue property. As Joe entered the house and hung his jacket on
the rack in the mudroom, he saw two guilty-looking girls in their pajamas standing near the stair landing. Marybeth was behind them in the kitchen, wiping her hands on a towel.

“Tell him, girls,” Marybeth said to them.

Sheridan sighed and took the lead. “Dad, we screwed up this afternoon and we’re sorry for it. We went out to that shack on the Logue place . . .”

He leaned against the doorframe of his office and listened to Sheridan tell him how they had deceived their mother and how they snuck up to the old shack. She described the contents inside the shack; the bedroll, books, stove, the long line of gleaming silverware on a dark cloth, then the appearance of “Bob” who called her a bitch. Lucy twisted the bottom of her pajama top in her fingers while her sister spoke, betraying her guilt.

“He called Sherry a
bitch
!” she repeated unnecessarily.

“But he didn’t follow you,” Joe said, wary.

Both girls shook their heads.

“You’re sure?”

Sheridan nodded. “We checked behind us when we were running. I saw him go back into the shack.”

Joe asked Marybeth, “Did you call the sheriff?”

“No, I wasn’t sure if you would want him involved. We still can, though.”

“Cam Logue needs to call Barnum,” Joe said. “I don’t know why he didn’t the first time the girls saw this guy.”

“I think he was just some homeless guy,” Sheridan said. “I feel bad about bothering him, now. I feel sorry for a grown man who has to live like that.”

Marybeth shot Joe a look. She was admonishing him to hold the line, to reinforce the talking to she had given the girls earlier in the evening. She knew Joe well enough that she feared he would soften. She was right, he thought. He tried to keep his expression stern and fixed.

“Girls, it’s past your bedtime now,” Marybeth said. “Kiss your dad goodnight and get into bed. We’ll discuss your punishment later.”

Relieved to be done with it, both girls approached Joe. It was then that
Sheridan froze, looking around Joe toward the figure in the mudroom. “What’s wrong with Maxine?”

“She’s exhausted, girls,” Joe said. “I thought for a while tonight I lost her.”

Sheridan stepped around Joe and turned on the light switch in the mudroom.

“She’s white!” she howled.

“What happened to her? Did she fall into some paint?” Lucy asked.

Joe said, “No. I think she got really scared. I’ve heard of it happening sometimes to animals. They get so scared that their hair turns white.”

“Is she okay?” Sheridan asked, bending over the dog and patting her white fur.