“That’s sweet. But it doesn’t make up for the fact that you were never going to ask me for help.”
“I made the call, didn’t I?”
“Finally.”
“Better late than never.”
“Not always.” She went away for a while. “I’ve got to get some sleep. You weren’t the only one who had a dramatic night. I busted a guy who’d been beating his girlfriend’s son with a belt. And for once, the woman didn’t even make excuses for the scumbag. Domestic violence cases are always so frustrating. This one feels different. I actually have hope.”
“It sounds like you made a difference.”
“Time will tell, I guess. If I were you, that’s what I’d focus on today, making a difference. You can’t help the Cronks, but maybe there’s someone else you can help. We all need a friend in our corner.”
She meant the rogue wolf, but she meant more than that.
36
As I drove north up the valley, I reflected on what my uncle had told me about my mother. I had so many things to occupy my mind, between the Peggs, the Cronks, and Dani. Yet it was Denis’s words that echoed inside my skull: “Your mom was a selfish, spoiled person when she was a baby, and she was a selfish, spoiled person the day she died.”
That assessment was false in all kinds of ways.
But I couldn’t dismiss it.
Denis had been right about me, as well. Six years earlier, I might well have beaten him up for insulting me, just as my father would have done. But I liked to believe that I was a different person now.
Not until I had met Dani—a sane, stable woman who wanted a normal life—had I finally made the connection between the fucked-up example that my parents had set for me in childhood and my subsequent romantic failures. I hadn’t believed men and women were destined to live happily ever after. Marriage in my mind was like sharing a cell with someone who started out as your best friend but who, over time, transformed into your mortal enemy. Was it any wonder I had sought a life of self-sufficiency despite knowing that such an existence would be lonely and miserable?
All of the counterexamples I had seen of loving, long-term partnerships—Ora and Charley Stevens, Aimee and Billy Cronk—had failed to disabuse me of my self-damaging beliefs. And my own misadventures with Stacey couldn’t have helped.
When I reached Avon, I turned down the dirt road to the grassy strip of the Lindbergh Airport. There were no hangars, no landing lights, no control tower, just an open field with a couple of dripping wind socks and no one watching. With all the fog, I felt it was a safe place for me to conduct my scientific experiment.
I had noticed a stack of wet, moldering hay bales there on my prior visit: a poor backstop for a sliding plane. I removed an L.L. Bean fishing catalog I’d tossed in my back seat and brought it with me across the wet field. I slid the catalog under the baling wire to create an improvised target.
Then I screwed the broadheads onto the three Spider-Bite X2 bolts and snapped two of the arrows into the quiver on the underside of the mechanical bow. I slid my boot toe into the cocking stirrup, gripped the bowstring with both hands, and straightened up, pulling the length of waxed polyester until I heard a catch. The draw didn’t take much strength—most crossbows and bows I had drawn strained muscles I didn’t know I possessed. I fitted a bolt into the slight groove until the fletching was secured beneath the retention spring.
Then I paced off ten yards. I aimed, fired, and nailed the center of the catalog. The bolt penetrated the paper and the hay all the way to the fletching.
I paced off another ten yards and repeated the process. This time the bolt caught the upper corner of my target.
Ten more yards and the broadhead missed the catalog by a foot.
I’d been winging it thus far, trying to get a feel for the weapon. I hadn’t been steadying myself and bracing my elbow as I might have in a genuine hunting situation where I was attempting to kill a big animal from a place of ambush.
I retrieved my three bolts—all fortunately intact—and paced out to fifty yards. While the Blood Eagle Tactical wasn’t a toy by any means, I estimated its effective range to be as abbreviated as that of a BB gun.
I knelt on my right knee in the grass and braced my left elbow on my left kneecap. Without a log or branch to steady my aim, it was the best I could do. I breathed in and let out half a breath. Then I fired at my target. I reloaded and fired again. A minute later, I repeated the action for the third and final time.
I was a fair shot—not the best in the Warden Service, but not the worst either—and I had missed the hay bale, not to mention the target, by a country mile with every volley.
My experiment had proven two things. The first was that this particular bow was capable of being drawn and fired by a person lacking upper-body strength. The second was that, unless the shooter was a world-class bowman, he or she had to have been quite close to Shadow when firing the fateful bolt.
I secured the three sharp-pointed arrows in the attached quiver and set the unloaded contraption on the back seat of my vehicle.
Afterward, I headed off to the only grocery store in a fifty-mile radius. Dani’s offhand remark about Dr. Holman’s feeding Shadow an entire ham had helped me realize something I hadn’t properly considered. From the start, I had assumed that the wolf had been drawn close to the shooter by the use of bait. Most serious predator hunters obtained their meat scraps through unconventional means: either by using deer or
