Authors: Nevada Barr
Nerves were quiet. No ringing or crashing in her ears; she could hear the water striking the spider’s skin. Her hands did not shake, and the sweat had dried on her face. Mind still and blank and clean, she aimed for center mass and squeezed off two neat rounds. The bullets cut so cleanly through the plastic they didn’t even disturb the curtain.
The spider grunted.
Denise had expected a scream of pain, or death. She hadn’t ever been shot. Probably what you’d feel first was the bullets punching you, like fists or a ball bat. It might be a while before the pain set in.
There was a loud wet thud. The spider falling down or back against the wall. The curtain pushed out as if he grasped at it for support. Denise pulled the trigger again. A hole appeared in the middle of a bright yellow fish.
Silence, roaring after the gunshots, filled the small space.
It was done. Denise lowered the gun.
The curtain exploded out. Kurt Duffy crashed into her with the force of a freight train. Air was knocked from her lungs. Plastic covered her face. Her spine cracked against the footboard of the bed. Kurt’s weight threatened to snap her in two. Plastic, and a naked wet man, trapped her legs. Her arms were forced up over her head, her face smashed against his chest.
The only thought she could muster was that she should have brought the .357, something with stopping power. In the movies a .22 was the gun of choice for executions. The long bullets could spin, maximize brain damage. This was supposed to be an execution. She’d overlooked the fact that the man she was going to shoot wouldn’t be on his knees with his back to her, the muzzle of her pistol pressed up against his skull.
Air rushed back into her lungs. The Smith and Wesson was still in her hand. She couldn’t fire down at such a sharp angle without danger of losing the gun. She brought the grip down hard, not knowing what part of him she hit, only that the shock felt good up her arm.
He was grunting and pushing into her like a hog in rut. Disgust lent her strength. Bringing her right knee up into his groin with all the force she could muster, she simultaneously chopped down hard on his head with both elbows.
A beefy thigh took the brunt of the knee, but the pain of the elbows distracted him. Like a snake from under a boot, she coiled from beneath him, slid the rest of the way off the bed to land on hands and knees. Water and blood slicked the floor.
Blood was good. It had to be his. The more the merrier.
He should be dead. “You should be dead,” she hissed.
Rearing up from the mess of the curtain, naked, hair on his chest and back and arms, streaming water, blood seeping from his shoulder, chest, and side, he growled.
Like a bear or a mad dog.
Like a monster in a horror movie.
Like a hog bent on eating long pig for lunch.
Like a bull ready to gore, his head swaying from side to side, he pushed himself up until he was kneeling. More hair blackened his groin and legs, his penis a pale worm in the matted nest. He was huge. On his knees he reached nearly to Denise’s shoulder. His arms and legs were corded and muscled from a lifetime of working against the sea.
Three holes decorated his body: shoulder, left side of his belly, and, the last, nearly invisible in the hair on the right side of his chest. All were seeping blood. Seeping, for Christ’s sake! They should be gushing. Great gouts of blood should be pouring out. Blood frothed on his lips. One had hit a lung. The big bastard could live to be ninety with those three bullets in him.
“Die, God damn you,” Denise gasped. A paw the size of an oven mitt came up from the monster’s side. “Die,” she cried as she skittered sideways out of his reach. The corner of the bedpost banged her shoulder. The .22 flew from her hand and slid under the dressing table in front of which she and Paulette had so recently sat marveling at their twin features.
This was wrong; things weren’t supposed to be this way. Spiders weren’t supposed to be this hard to kill. “God damn it!” Denise threw herself flat and groped under the dresser after the pistol. Her fingers touched the barrel. A beefy paw curled around her ankle. A bellow of rage; spittle and blood spattered the floor. In the faint glow of the bathroom light the blood was startlingly beautiful, rubies cast upon the ground. Another bestial roar, and Denise was yanked backward like a rag doll in the hands of a psychotic toddler.
Hunching her shoulders and ducking her head, Denise rolled onto her side, stared into the bloodshot eyes of the spider, and kicked out with the force of thighs and butt. One foot connected with his hairy gut above the navel. She was rewarded with a woof! as the air was knocked out of him. Again she kicked, aiming higher, aiming for the bullet that had collapsed his right lung. Again she made a solid hit. He fell back on butt and heels, clutching at his chest as if he could force the lung to take in air. The next kick landed on the wound in his side. Screaming, he tried to sidle backward, escape her blows. The plastic shower curtain tangled between his feet and knees, and he fell back onto the plank flooring.
Quicker than she’d thought possible, Denise was on her feet. She caught up the bottom end of the plastic curtain and fell with it on top of the struggling man. He bucked, trying to throw her. Digging a thumb into the bullet hole in his shoulder, Denise rode him until pain and blood loss slowed his thrashing. Straddling him, knees on his upper arms, she shoved the plastic over his face, cramming what she could into his mouth as he screamed and fought for breath. Hands spread like starfish, pressing down on the plastic, Denise growled, “Die. Die, God damn you. Die. For God’s sake, fucking die!”
Finally he grew still. Denise did not let up. Three minutes. She thought she remembered that from emergency medical training. Three minutes without air was enough. No. Couldn’t be. She knew divers who could hold their breath three minutes.
Lights slashed across the room. Headlights from a car.
“Shit.” Heart and lungs fought for ascendance, both in her throat.
A horn honked.
Denise rolled off Duffy, then stood, her legs shaking, knees wanting to fold. No time for feeling around. With one great heave she toppled the dressing table. Seven years of bad luck shattered around her feet. The Smith and Wesson was against the wall. She grabbed it up.
“Duff! Hey, Duff!” Pounding at the front door loud as a battering ram.
As the front door banged open, Denise was running through the kitchen.
She kept running into the black woods.
“This is Anna Pigeon, district ranger from Rocky. We go back a long time,” Peter said, introducing Anna.
“Yes, I know. The acting chief.” Denise’s voice had the flat amiability of old enmity. Was it a not-so-subtle reminder that she and Peter shared old stories, old times, old friends? Anna wondered. Peter used to live with a woman named Denise. This had to be her.
“Denise Castle,” the ranger introduced herself before Peter could.
Anna nodded. Gray-green circles, eerily matched to the Park Service uniform, puffed beneath Castle’s eyes, and her skin had the desiccated look of someone who’s just come off a three-day bender.
“There was a murder in Otter Creek last night,” Peter went on. “The state has this one—not on federal land—but we should go to show the colors, see if we can lend a hand. Anna will go with you. Anna is an aficionado of bullet-riddled bodies.”
Anna was not amused. The people she’d killed west of the Fox River had needed killing.
“Not exactly,” she replied dryly. “Although they do seem rather fond of me.”
“She’s only acting chief,” Denise said, ignoring the exchange. “I doubt she wants to look at a corpse.”
“Beats paperwork,” Anna said.
To Peter, Denise said, “I don’t need help on this.”
“Anna’s your boss,” Peter reminded her coolly. “Anna?”
Despite herself, Anna was interested. When someone else saw to the dirty work, a murder could be quite entertaining. Rather like turning over stones or poking around tide pools, digging around a murder turned up all sorts of interesting flora and fauna.
“Who knows,” Anna said to Denise. “I’ve never been the chief ranger before. I might turn out to be helpful.”
Denise’s smile was on the watery side, as if she’d had to dredge it up from secret depths to meet the social norm. Then she said, “I’m retiring.”
“Today?” Peter sounded confused.
The statement appeared to be as great a surprise to Denise as it was to Peter. She gasped a tiny gasp, then gusted it out on a laugh. “Soon,” she said. The wavering smile firmed with what looked like smugness.
“Hop in,” she said to Anna as she opened the door to her Crown Vic. “We might as well get this dog-and-pony show over with.”
Anna slid into the passenger side of the patrol car, then buckled her seat belt. There was a reassuring sameness to Park Service vehicles, equipment, housing, even war stories. Six degrees of separation did not apply in the NPS. After a certain number of years, often there was scarcely one degree left. Everyone knew—or knew of—everyone, and had an opinion about them. Park people were like a hugely extended cantankerous family, complete with black sheep and heirs apparent. Some rangers felt claustrophobic in such an intrinsically small world. Anna felt at home.
Seldom did she get to ride shotgun. Rangers didn’t work in pairs. She leaned back in the seat as Denise pulled out of the headquarters parking lot. It was a treat to relax and look at the scenery, enjoy the park tourist-style. A park existed for every mood, and Anna was a woman of many moods.
“What did Pete tell you about the murder?” Denise asked.
“Lobsterman shot sometime last night. Possibly a domestic. State and local police notified last night. The park, this morning. Concurrent jurisdiction. That’s about it. No particulars.”
“Ever heard of the lobster wars?” Denise asked.
“Sounds like a bad science fiction movie,” Anna replied.
“It’s serious business in these parts. Kind of like range wars in the Old West. Lobstermen are rough customers.”
Anna had never known a lobsterman, but she’d worked with shrimpers out in the Dry Tortugas. Very rough customers.
“Do you think another lobsterman killed him? For lobster rustling?”
“Probably. Who cares? Otter Creek isn’t on park land. The state guys, or the sheriff, whoever caught this one, probably cleared it last night. Duffy’s—the lobsterman’s name was Kurt Duffy—bowling pal found the body. May have been some bad blood there.” Denise spoke in a bored monotone, her face a mask of indifference.
Anna watched her in the sideview mirror. Law enforcement rangers were never indifferent to murder. Parks were inconvenient places to deal drugs, host gang wars, or run prostitution rings. They were bucolic places filled with potato salad–eating people whose greatest crime was feeding the chipmunks. Most rangers never worked a single murder in an entire career. Wicked as it was—or sounded to outsiders—when a nice juicy murder did come along, the dilemma wasn’t getting rangers to work the case but keeping them from trampling each other to get in on it.
“My guess is it’s a lobster-war thing,” Denise said as she conned the big Crown Vic along the narrow road. She was a skilled driver. She worked the mirrors with her eyes, and her hands loved the steering wheel. The only other person Anna had noticed driving with that kind of innate concentration was an ex-NASCAR racer who’d taught her defensive driving. Really good drivers tended to drive fast. Yet Denise was poking along ten miles under the speed limit. Apparently she was not only bored by the prospect of a murder investigation but didn’t want to reach the scene any time in the foreseeable future.
“We had a guy shot for robbing his neighbor’s traps—Will Whitman,” Denise went on with a bit more enthusiasm, warming to her subject. “Whitman’s son was implicated along with his dad for poaching lobsters, but he’s gone AWOL. It’s probably what saved his life. These guys are the Hatfields and McCoys, Earps and Clantons—you name it, feuds go back four or five generations. There’s a range war going on under the waters around here that makes Texas in the ranchers-and-farmers phase look tame.”
“Did they catch the man who shot this Will Whitman?” Anna asked to be asking something.
“Sure. No problem. They threw him in jail, but he’s out now. Shooting a man for robbing your traps in Maine is akin to the ‘stand your ground’ law in Florida.”
“Whitman. Any relation to John Whitman?” John Whitman was the taxi man ferrying Heath and company around.
“John is—was—Will’s father. When John retired, Will got his patch. Then there was the shooting. Since John’s grandson ran off, the lobstermen have been haggling over who should get his territory.”
“Any relation to Duffy?”
Denise started as if Anna had poked her with a pin, then settled. “Kurt Duffy? Probably. Everybody is somebody’s cousin around here.” On that she closed her mouth into a firm line that suggested the conversation was finished.
Anna let the subject drop. “Any news on the package sent to Heath Jarrod?” she asked.
“That’s a strange story,” Denise answered, seemingly more comfortable talking of drugs than of murder. “We field-tested a couple of the foil packs. Black tar from Mexico, the cheapest, nastiest sort. The rest we sent to the lab. If they all contain heroin there should be about three grams total. Dime bags, cut with something. I doubt the whole amount is worth more than a few hundred dollars.”
Anna didn’t know a lot about heroin. In the parks, other than visitors taking a tab of acid, munching a mushroom for the visuals, or smoking a little dope, drugs were urban problems. “Doesn’t the stuff come in bulk?” she asked. “Then the dealer makes it up into packages?”
“I’d think so,” Denise said. “I suppose there’s people for that if you’re willing to pay. Here we are.”
As soon as they crested the gentle rise in the road, it became obvious where in Otter Creek the murder had taken place. Four cars—two police and one sheriff’s and Artie’s Crown Vic—were parked around a shiny blue pickup in front of a small cottage, little more than a square of weathered wood bisected by a door with a tiny pointed roof over the porch to keep the snow off the step. Two windows flanked the front door, both blinded by pull-down shades brown and curling with age. Yellow police tape crisscrossed the door. The front was not graveled, per se. It was simply stony soil that had suffered the sudden stops of too many tires.