“You haven’t asked about your dog,” Yates said.
Hammes shot him a glare. “The doctors told me he was all right. He’s okay, right? That’s what they said. They said it was a graze to his leg. They said he’d have a limp and—”
“—He’s fine,” Rachette said.
Hammes closed his eyes and leaned back. His chest rose and fell fast. The machine beeped once, but otherwise did nothing out of the ordinary as Hammes continued to relax.
“I was going to pick Dex up and bring him up to Eagle for the rest of the month,” he said. “Work was going well and I was going to stay up there. That’s why I came home that morning.”
“You never told your parole officer about the new job,” Rachette said.
“I was going to, if things went well. But the cops came over and shot me in the stomach.”
“I’m not feeling any sympathy for you, Hammy,” Rachette said. “In fact, I’m holding back from punching you in the stomach right now.”
Yates put his hand on his shoulder. Rachette took a step back.
Hammes shook his head, closing his eyes. “I’m not going back to jail.”
“I’m sorry to say you’re wrong on that count,” Rachette said.
Hammes said nothing, keeping his eyes closed. After a few seconds he opened them and said, “Something isn’t right, though.”
“What?” Yates asked.
“I said something isn’t right.”
“What isn’t right?”
“The steak bone.”
“What steak bone?”
“When I came home, Dex had diarrhea.”
“Yeah,” Rachette said. “We noticed.”
“There was a T-bone steak bone that Dex was chewing on. I asked the neighbor across the street if he fed it to him. He said no. I was pissed off, but I believed him. That guy doesn't lie. Not really in his DNA. Especially since I gave him specific instructions not to do that or I would rip his arms off. Dex has a meat protein allergy. It could kill him. Put him into anaphylactic shock.”
"Okay," Rachette said.
"Okay," Hammes repeated. "So, somebody planted that gun in my woodpile.”
“If anyone was trying to get near my house, Dex would have chewed off that person’s nuts. He was outside the whole time I was gone. But you give him a steak? That would keep him occupied.”
Rachette had to admit it made sense, and he’d been thinking along the same lines. That's why the gun was shoved into the woodpile. If it was actually Hammes's gun, why wouldn't it have been inside? Why in the woodpile outside? Or, like he’d said before, why not in a lake or a river? It was too sloppy and stupid.
The machine beeped again, and the nurse returned. “Excuse me,” she said, pushing past Rachette. “I have to get to the machine.”
“No problem,” Rachette said. “We were just leaving anyway.”
Chapter 31
Wolf's cell phone vibrated as he drove into the aspen-tree covered clearing on the near side of the pass leading to Dredge.
The cell service vortex, he had dubbed it in his mind, because passing through this section on the way to Dredge always injected his phone with the service needed to download whatever Wolf had missed in the thirty minutes of dead zone on the outskirts of Rocky Points.
He pulled to the side of the road and saw he had a new text message and voicemail from Rachette.
Give me a call when you can. I left a voicemail.
He clicked the voicemail button and Rachette’s voice blared through the speakers.
“Sir, we were just at the hospital and finally got a chance to talk to Hammes. I wanted to talk to you about something he said. Remember how the dog had the shits when we were there talking to his neighbor?”
Wolf turned down the volume and listened to Rachette’s explanation about Rick Hammes finding that a T-Bone steak had been fed to the dog, flaring up a reaction from a meat protein allergy.
“That gives us probable cause to look into everyone’s financials,” Rachette said. “We find who bought that T-Bone, that’s gotta be our killer.”
Wolf zoned out, thinking of the way the neighbor had been talking about how Hammes had been yelling at him about the steak. Wolf had dismissed his ramblings at the time. He pulled up Cain’s text message again, and the picture on screen.
He studied the numbers and letters on the spreadsheet this time. The letters STK jumped out at him from a spreadsheet cell underneath a column labeled product. A number filled the next cell, the column labeled Price. The column name to the left said Customer, but if there was any name associated with the transaction, it was concealed by the blur of light.
“… so give me a ring when you can and we’ll talk about it.” Rachette finished his voicemail and hung up.
Wolf called Cain again, realizing she still hadn’t called him back. It rang six times, then went to voicemail.
He pressed her voicemail message again. As her voice came out of his speakers, he cranked it up, her voice filling the cab.
“Sir, it's Deputy Cain. I’m at Lonnie’s Market in Dredge, and I think I just figured something out. Please give me a call—”
Again her words cut off, but what came out of the speakers at full volume sounded much different this time. He suddenly realized there had been no digital distortion after all. With sickening clarity he heard a thump, accompanied by a sharp yelp of pain, followed by a long drawl of unintelligible noise. It was the sound of a body shutting down, completely taken over by unconscious reflexes.
He shook his head, wondering if he was hearing things with an overactive imagination.
She wasn’t answering her phone. He listened again, but he was already convinced. He had already pressed the gas pedal to the floor.
Chapter 32
Piper’s head slammed hard against something and her eyes fluttered open. Her nose whistled with a spastic sucking in of air, then crackled with mucus as she exhaled.
She tried to open her mouth to take a breath and found it stuck shut. She tried to bring her hand up
