'Anything I can do to help, Gary, just let me know.'
'I appreciate your cooperation.'
I couldn't tell if he meant what he said any more than I did.
Stepping outside, he raised his head and sniffed the air, then turned his gaze to the heap of charred wood and dirt a hundred feet away.
'I thought I smelled something, coming in,' he said. 'What you been burning?'
I'd been nursing the faint hope that he'd assume it was slash or other debris and not say anything. Fat chance. I damned well couldn't accuse Kirk-that would give me another motive for revenge, this time in neon lights.
'Balcomb's lumber,' I said, shifting my shoulders uncomfortably.
For the first time, Gary showed surprise. 'Well, now, how the hell did that happen?'
I looked at the floor. 'I pounded down some drinks after I got home from jail, and I just blew up. Next thing I knew, I was scrambling to put the fire out.'
'You did it?'
'Yeah.'
Gary didn't like the sound of this, it was clear.
'How come you didn't tell me?' he said, hard-voiced now.
'I feel like an asshole about it.'
'We're not talking about your goddamn feelings, we're talking about withholding information.'
'I didn't think it figured in.'
'That been happening to you often?' he said. 'Blowing up and doing something stupid without even realizing it?'
'Come on, Gary, you know me better than that.'
'I used to think so. This worries me, Hugh. Drunk driving, trespassing-hell, those are the kind of things that could happen to anybody. But when a guy goes flat crazy and shoots himself in the dick, that makes an old cop nervous. Anything else you forgot to mention?'
I shook my head, squeezing my closed eyes between my thumb and forefinger.
'It was like you said-I had a world-class bad day. I handled it piss poor, and I'm sorry. Real sorry, because now I owe Balcomb another thirty-five hundred bucks on top of everything else.'
'I'm afraid you're going to be more sorry yet,' Gary said. 'I was just about to tell you your luck was changing. I went out to see Wesley Balcomb first thing after I talked to Reuben, in case Kirk might be around the ranch. He let me know he was dropping all charges against you, including the demand for restitution. Said he only took it so far because you seemed to have an attitude, and he wanted to, quote, 'impress upon you the seriousness of the matter.' Unquote.'
I sat down heavily in the doorway. 'I think I'm going to cry.'
'I don't blame you. I'll leave you to it in peace.'
The tires on Gary's cruiser glistened where the black tom had sprayed them, sending a telegram to cats at the next stops along the line. I watched him pull away, with my pulse hammering so hard I could feel it in my head.
All charges dropped. Now I was going to have to wrestle again with whether I'd been wrong about Balcomb, or this was another of his ploys.
But first I had some urgent problems to deal with-starting with hiding a body so it would never be found.
'Had a feeling I better find out how you were doing,' a gravelly voice said.
I lurched to my feet, swiveling toward it so fast my neck burned.
Madbird was standing beside the cabin's rear corner, looking like he'd just materialized there.
Neil McMahon – Lone Creek
'I got another feeling that ain't just coincidence,' Madbird said, jerking his head toward the fading dust cloud from Gary's car. He must have hiked in around the back of my property like I'd done last night. In the woods, Madbird was a ghost.
'I didn't tell him anything about you,' I said. 'But somebody might have seen us leave the bar together.'
'I can handle that. Kirk?'
I hesitated. I'd never in my life been so glad to see anybody as Madbird right now. But from this point on, anybody who helped me or even knew about Kirk was on felony turf.
'I've gotten you in too much trouble already,' I said.
Madbird acted like he hadn't heard me. He strolled over to the remains of the fire and paced around its perimeter, here and there nudging a clump of wood with his boot toe, each time releasing another cloud of charred dust to crawl up into my nostrils-little reminders that I wasn't the guy who'd started this trouble.
When he came full circle, he looked straight at me and gave me that grin.
'You can't go leaving me half jacked off,' he said. 'That'd hurt my feelings.'
I made the same walk around the fire, kicking at chunks and thinking. Some of the embers were still warm.
'All right, let's take another drive,' I said. 'Maybe I've got something to show you, but maybe things turn out like last night-it's not there. If you don't see it, you're out of this.'
We took his van again We wouldn't be trespassing this time, but my truck was the kind of vehicle that people might remember or even recognize.
Disposing of a corpse wasn't an easy thing to do, I had started to realize. Burying, burning, submerging, every method like that had some weak point that was vulnerable to discovery. Trying to increase the safety net required significant time and preparation. I didn't have a D-8 Cat and several thousand acres of private land handy, and Gary Varna was breathing down my neck.
I'd done my best to cover my tracks last night, starting by transferring the beer cans and pistol to Kirk's Jeep, then driving it half a mile farther along the lakeshore and dumping it over a cliff where the water was twenty feet deep. It made a pretty good splash. Sooner or later it would be found, but time and damage would be on my side.
I'd jogged back, shoveled up all the bloody earth I could find and thrown it in the lake, and scattered loose dirt and brush to make the site look undisturbed. It wouldn't fool search dogs, but unless he'd told someone exactly where he was going, there'd be no reason to look there.
Then I'd turned to Kirk. Especially in my frantic rush, I couldn't come up with anything smart. The single thing I most wanted to avoid was leaving a scent trail to my place that dogs might be able to follow, so I decided to take him in another direction. I had no choice but to carry him in my truck bed, but I wrapped him up good in a nylon tarp, and figured I'd slosh gasoline around the bed when I got home, as if it had spilled. Any scent that came through would be faint, and I could say he'd hopped in for a lift at the ranch a while back. Before I got inside the truck, I changed into spare clothes and boots and stuffed the old ones in a duffel. Later, I scrubbed myself as clean as I could in the shower, and took the final precaution of fishing through my dirty clothes for jeans and a gray T- shirt like the ones I'd been wearing earlier. I smeared them with ashes from the fire, as substitutes for the ones that were soaked with Kirk's blood.
Those I'd stashed temporarily along with his body, a couple of miles up an abandoned logging road the next gulch over. The area was national forest, empty of habitation and generally deserted. But hunting season would start soon, with sharp-eyed men scanning the brush closely, and there were occasional hikers with dogs. If I left him where he was now, critters would scatter body parts and bones, making discovery likely.
Digging a grave deep enough for security would take several hours; and in this kind of stillness, the sound of metal hitting stone could carry for a mile or more. If someone heard it-say, a forest ranger or game warden-they'd come to find out who was excavating on national forest land. Trying to take him someplace else left all the same problems and added the risks of transportation.
When Madbird and I got to the spot, I was still coming up empty.
We parked the van and I led him into the brush to where I'd carried my burden a few hours earlier. I knelt beside Kirk's head, loosened the tarp's folds, and pulled them out of the way.
Madbird gazed down at the pale face and slashed neck, raggedly streaked with congealed blood. Then he
