Back of Beyond

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.”

The unburned part of the cabin was between Cody and the visitors, so he couldn’t see them. A shaft of light sliced through the air-a flashlight being turned on-then quickly descended out of view. They were looking for something in the black muck.

He thought, I have you now, you scumbags.

“This is sick,” she said. “I wished I knew what we were looking for.”

“Probably nothing,” he said. “It might be the sheriff’s idea of a stupid trick to make him look like he’s doing something. He may drag this out past the election, is my guess.”

The back of the cabin was suddenly in front of him. Cody reached out with his left hand and touched the rounded logs. All he’d need to do was slip along the lengths of the logs until it opened up on the burned section, and they’d be there in the open.

Then he realized he’d left his shotgun back where he’d passed out. Hesitating, he considered feeling his way back to retrieve it. But he’d gotten this far in silence without slipping or stepping on a dead branch to reveal himself. Doing it twice more without making a sound was unlikely at best. He cursed himself and reached up and pinched his cheek so hard he winced. But it helped wake him up. Then he reached down and slowly unsnapped the plastic restraint on his holster and drew his Sig Sauer. As always, there was no safety to worry about and one in the chamber so there’d be no need to rack the slide.

He’d had Trijicon self-luminous sights put on his weapon back in Denver, and he raised it and fitted the front green dot between the twin dots of the back sight. Although he’d never fired at anyone at night on the job, he’d put in hours at the range. He knew if he squeezed the trigger when the three dots were horizontal he should be able to hit what he was pointing at. His only issue was whether or not he’d take out the both of them without warning, or identify himself first. Of course, however it went, in his after-action report he’d say he ordered them to freeze and they didn’t, so he had no choice.

Kill the man first, he thought. A double-tap into the thickest part of his torso as fast as he could squeeze the trigger, then swing on the woman and do the same. Then, if necessary, killshots to the head.

Could he kill a woman? The idea sickened him. “There,” the man said, his voice rising. “Right there. Look.”

Had they found it? he wondered.

He saw the pool of their flashlight before he saw them. There was a glint of gold in the muck of the floor.

“It looks like a coin,” she said.

“Yes, it does,” he said, distressed. “I don’t know how I could have missed it.”

Because, Cody thought, I put it there two hours ago. Gold- foil-wrapped chocolate coins went for $1.89 at Walgreens these days.

And he cleared the edge of the logs and barked, “FREEZE, YOU FUCKERS!”

She screamed and threw her flashlight into the air with the same motion that she covered her mouth.

He blinded Cody with his light but before he did Cody saw a hand reach down and grip a pistol and raise it and there was a star-shaped explosion of fire tinged with blue and a deafening crack. And something white-hot and angry slapped the side of his face.

And that’s when Cody shot the county coroner. Double-tap, two loud snaps and two yellow-green tongues of flame. Skeeter went down like a puppet with its strings clipped.

Cody lowered his weapon, the sharp smell of gunpowder and his own blood biting at his nose, and said, “Oh, shit.”

Carrie Lowry didn’t stop screaming until her sobs and admonitions took over.

6

Cody sat back in an uncomfortable chair across from Sheriff Tubman in his cramped little office. The door was closed, and had been for an hour. There had been no eight thirty briefing that morning. Undersheriff Bodean perched on the corner of Tubman’s desk, looking almost straight down at him. On the credenza behind the sheriff was his hat, brim-down, and the morning’s Independent Record with EYEWITNESS ACCOUNT: CORONER SHOT BY SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT blaring across all four columns of the front page. Cody thought, Carrie got that big story I promised her after all.

“You really ought to put your hat crown-down when you’re not wearing it,” Cody said. “You’ll ruin the brim that way.”

Tubman closed his eyes, to keep from exploding, Cody guessed.

“How you can joke at a time like this is beyond me,” Bodean said, shaking his head.

“Really,” Cody said, “it’ll flatten the brim. Trust me on this.”

“Look at my phone,” Tubman said. “All the lights are blinking. Everybody wants a statement and they’re willing to stay on hold until they get it.”

“Sorry,” Cody said.

“Yes,” Tubman said, “you are.”

Bodean cleared his throat and stuck his chin out. “In case you don’t know the procedure, Detective Hoyt, this is an officer-involved shooting, so give me your badge and your gun.”

Cody shifted in his chair and unclipped the badge and slid it across the desk to Tubman. He pulled his Sig Sauer and handed it grip-first to Bodean. “Careful,” he said, “it’s loaded.”

Bodean walked the weapon over and put it gingerly on top of a metal filing cabinet. He said, “You are officially on administrative leave with pay. We’ve got a call in to the state to send an outside team to investigate the incident. They’re likely to be here tomorrow, so stay in touch with us at all times.”

Cody nodded.

“Don’t go anywhere for seventy-two hours. That’s when we’ll take your statement and based on what the state criminal investigation team says, you might be placed under arrest.”

Even though he knew it could happen, Cody felt a chill crawl through his scalp.

Said Bodean, “It’s my duty to advise you to keep your mouth shut until you give your official statement. At that time, you should be aware that under Garrity versus New Jersey, you may be disciplined if you refuse to answer questions about your conduct on the job. You have no Fifth Amendment rights as a cop. In the meantime, the only person you should talk to is a peer counselor we’ll assign. Do you understand what I just said?”

“Yeah, but I don’t mind talking. And if you send a social worker to my place I’ll mace him,” Cody growled. “It went down exactly like Carrie Lowry wrote in the paper. Skeeter drew first and fired after I told him to freeze. I shot him in self-defense.”

Tubman continued to shake his head, as if he were watching his career slink away.

Bodean said, “She wrote that you didn’t identify yourself.”