Bone Dry

Jack was in the middle of gutting a doe, so he had a knife in his hands. It looked to me like he was thinkin’ of using it. But I stepped between them and it cooled off real quick. Bert said that he shouldn’t have lost his temper, and then he just left. Most of the guys seemed to side with Jack and had a few things to say about Bert after he took off.”

“When did this happen?”

“Middle of last season.”

“Anything else happen since then?”

“Not that I know of.”

Marlin knew a deputy would want to cover all this ground with Lester again, maybe in front of a tape recorder, but it was good to get everything down on paper now. Marlin asked several more questions, but nothing of relevance came up.

“Lester, do me a favor. I’m gonna take a quick look around for a minute. I need you to just wait in your truck, grab some coffee. We don’t want to make more footprints around the body than we need to.”

“Sure, John. No problem.”

Marlin followed the same path toward the body that he had originally taken, careful to watch for footprints, tire tracks, or any other type of evidence. He saw none.

Standing over the corpse, Marlin tried to re-create the shooting in his mind. He could picture Gammel climbing down the ladder from his blind, taking a few steps in the haze of twilight, then-Boom!  — a high-powered slug rips through his chest.

Television viewers often think that a body is thrown back violently when a person is shot with a rifle, but this is rarely the case. Depending on where the victim is hit, the bullet often passes through quickly and cleanly, hardly swaying the victim at all. Deer hunters can attest to this, as whitetails rarely ever fall when struck through the lungs, but instead race off in a frenzied sprint until the oxygen is depleted from their system.

Marlin could envision Gammel dropping the rifle, clutching at his chest, then falling to the ground in a heap, his heart a shredded, useless clump of muscle.

Looking beyond the corpse toward the blind, Marlin could see the spray of Gammel’s blood and small bits of tissue from the exit wound. Marlin carefully stepped around the body and sighted back down these lines of blood. He found himself staring down a long, alleylike opening through the heavily wooded area. The alley dead-ended at a clump of cedars just across the fenceline.

Rather than walking directly down the natural alley, Marlin worked his way through the dense surrounding cedars until he came to the barbed-wire fence. He eased his way over the wire and approached the massive cedar tree at the end of the alley. Once again, he was careful to watch for shoeprints, shell casings, or any other signs of recent activity.

Marlin knew that in such a heavily treed area, a bullet could not have traveled far in a parallel path to the ground. Of course, the bullet might have been a stray, coming from a great distance in a large arc. They’d know if that was a possibility later, when the body was in the hands of the medical examiner, Lem Tucker. But Marlin had a hunch the bullet had traveled right down the alley, which was, in essence, a perfect shooting lane for a hunter. Regardless of what was being hunted.

Marlin peered through the low-hanging limbs of the bush-like cedar and noticed a partially broken, inch-thick limb dangling downward. Looking more closely, Marlin saw several smaller limbs and twigs on the ground a few inches below the tree’s lower branches.

At this point, Marlin donned a pair of latex gloves from his jacket. He gingerly reached underneath the branches and grabbed one of the fallen twigs. It appeared to be cleanly cut-as with a small set of hand snippers. In a month or so, these cuttings would turn brown and be easily visible. But for now, they were hardly noticeable, blending in with the rest of the tree. Marlin never would have seen them if he hadn’t first spotted the broken branch.

Marlin had cut and snapped his share of cedar branches before. Actually, you couldn’t really snap them because they were too resilient. You just bent them until they gave way and stayed where you wanted them. Or you brought along a pair of snippers. In any case, Marlin could think of only one reason he had ever bent or cut cedar limbs. To create a “window” through the limbs-so he could get a better shot. Hill Country hunters commonly used cedars as makeshift blinds because the trees provided such good concealment.

Marlin looked past the canopy of the tree to the base of the trunk. There, he saw a recently disturbed area of soil. Marlin could see exactly where the man had sat, the impression of his butt, the troughs where his heels had scraped through the cedar mulch.

Then Marlin spotted a dark brown stain on the ground a foot or so from where the man had reclined. Marlin recognized this as the remnants of a puddle of tobacco spit.

Marlin gingerly made his way behind the cedar tree and peered through the canopy, giving himself the same view as the man who had used this little hideaway. Looking through the small window the man had created, Marlin couldn’t see much. But he could sure as hell see the ladder to Bert Gammel’s deer blind.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Sal Mameli was enjoying a leisurely afternoon, sipping a scotch, thumbing through the local newspaper. He noticed an article about some tree-hugger causing all kinds of trouble with local hunters, throwing coffee on the game warden and shit like that. Reading further, he saw that she was calling for a halt to cedar- cutting. Just great, he thought. First he had Emmett Slaton to deal with-hopefully, Vinnie was on top of that situation-and now he had a crazy broad bad mouthing his business.

Sal tossed the paper aside and gulped the last of his scotch. Up to now, he had been enjoying his time alone in an empty house. Vinnie was off doing something, and Angela had thrown something into a Crock-Pot for dinner, then gone shopping with Maria, the housekeeper.

Maria.

Now, there was a broad that was starting to give Sal the willies. More and more, she reminded Sal of his mother’s aunt Sofia-and that was not a good thing. Thinking about Aunt Sofia gave Sal a tremor.

She had died when Sal was only ten, maybe eleven years old, but he still had sharp memories of her. She was a Gypsy. Not just a woman who liked to dress in scarves, skirts, and funky jewelry, but an honest-to-fuck Gypsy. She had powers, this woman, and everybody in the village knew it.

Sal remembered a time, sitting on the front porch of their ramshackle home, maybe two years before his family immigrated to America. A neighbor walked by, the father of a large family that lived down the hill. He and Aunt Sofia didn’t get along too good, always exchanging sneers, maybe a rough word here and there. Sal had no idea what had started the bad blood.

On this particular day, the man had two goats with him, herding them along the country road, taking them to market in town. The man saw Sofia and muttered, “Fattucchiera,” under his breath. “Witch”-that’s what it meant. Sofia said nothing, and the man continued down the lane, not looking back. But then Aunt Sofia raised her left hand, pointing in the man’s direction, her eyes fluttering in their sockets, and she chanted something Sal didn’t understand.

The goats dropped dead. Fell like stones, the both of them. Sal wouldn’t have believed it if he hadn’t seen it.

Another time, a beautiful young woman in town had tried to seduce Sal’s father, a virile, good-looking man. Sal’s mother heard about it and, in tears, complained to Aunt Sofia. The old Gypsy just held her tight, shushed her, told her that the woman would get what was coming to her.

The next day, Sal saw the young woman in town. Her face was covered in warts-large, scaly warts-from the top of her forehead to the collar of her blouse. The rumor was that the warts continued down her chest onto her breasts. People pointed and whispered, and the young woman skulked away in shame and embarrassment.

There were dozens of episodes like this, occurrences that ultimately caused the villagers to shrink away in fear whenever they saw Aunt Sofia.

And now there was Maria.