Брайан Гарфилд - Suspended Sentences

“Then why are you still doing it?”

I said, “It’s the only thing I know how to do well.”

He gave me an up-from-under look as if to catch me off guard. “You seem awfully low-key. Do you do it well?”

“Usually.”

“What have you found out so far?”

“Need to know, Sam?”

“No, I’m just curious. What can you possibly have learned from me, for instance?”

I glanced toward his rifle rack. “For one thing you haven’t got a Springfield .30-’06 over there.”

“You’re acting as though it’s a murder case. As if I’m a suspect.”

“Everybody is,” I said. “What did you think of Charlie Cord?”

“Obnoxious.” He didn’t hesitate.

“That’s the word most people use.”

“Well, he liked to kill. You know?”

“You’re a hunters’ guide. You must see that all the time.”

“Not really. I’m a hunter myself but I’m no killer. Not the way Cord was.”

“I’m not sure what you mean by that.”

“Sometimes I’ll track a brown bear through those peaks two-three days and finally we’ll stand face to face and I’ll aim my rifle at him, and that’s that. I hunt bears — to prove a point to myself, I guess — but I’ve never killed one.”

“You mean you don’t pull the trigger?”

“What would I do with a dead bear? I’m not a trophy collector and I don’t like the taste of bear meat.”

“But Charlie—”

“He’d kill anything that moved. For fun.”

“You must get a lot of clients like him.”

“Not many. You’d be surprised. Most hunters have some dignity. And we’re still carnivores, aren’t we? Biologically there’s nothing dishonorable about that. You can’t condemn hunters if you eat meat yourself. But I’m talking about hunters. They eat what they kill. They make use of it. They don’t just kill it for the fun of killing and leave it there to rot. You want another drink?”

“Not especially, thanks. Tell me, Sam, why’d you take up this line of work?”

“I like to think of myself as a pioneer mountain-man type. It’s clean, you know. It keeps me outdoors.”

“Clean,” I said, “except when you have to go out with somebody like Charlie Cord.”

“Aeah.” He met my eyes and smiled. “Except then. Look, is this getting us anywhere?”

“Maybe. What was Charlie after? Specifically, what kind of game?”

“He said he wanted a bobcat and a mule deer buck.”

“But?”

“He kept asking me about Rocky Mountain goats.”

“They’re a protected species, aren’t they?”

“What’s left of them, yes.”

“But he wanted one.”

“One or a dozen. I think if he’d seen any goats he’d have killed them, yes.”

“How was he with a rifle?”

“Good. Not spectacular, but good enough.”

“Is it customary for the guide to stay in camp while the client goes out hunting?”

“Some hunters want you right with them all the time. But it wasn’t unusual. He was just scouting around. He said he didn’t want to waste his time sitting around watching me set up tents.”

I unfolded my county map. “Show me where it happened.”

He put his finger on it. “About there.”

“Near Goat Peak.” I folded it and put it in my pocket. “Anybody live up in that area?”

“It’s National Forest. You can’t own property up there.”

“Sometimes you tan lease it. Do you mind answering my question?”

For the first time Mallory looked uncomfortable. It was subtle — I wouldn’t have noticed it if I hadn’t been waiting for it. A knotted muscle rippled briefly along his jaw; that was all. He said, “There’s a sourdough who lives in a lean-to up there. Been searching for years — for the mother lode, I guess.”

“What’s his name?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Come on, Sam.”

He pretended to be thinking, exercising his memory. Then he snapped his fingers. “Collins, that’s it. Hugh Collins.”

“I don’t suppose he’s got a phone.”

Mallory laughed. “Up there?”

“I’d like to talk to him.”

“What for?”

“He lives on Goat Peak. He may have seen someone.”

“I doubt it. He lives on the far side of the peak.”

“Can you take me up there? I’ll pay for it.”

“Waste of money.”

“I want to talk to him,” I said gently. “It’ll go a little faster if you’d be willing to guide me.”

“Suit yourself. We can leave in the morning.”

“Make it ten o’clock. I’ve got something to do first.”

You didn’t put two jacketed .30-caliber bullets into a space smaller than a handspan at 400 yards without knowing what you were doing. That was what had stirred up my suspicions at first; it had been followed by improbabilities and too many coincidences.

The town didn’t have a library or a newspaper. I had to get the information by phone from Denver. It took more than an hour and I was a few minutes late meeting Mallory. He had an old Dodge Power Wagon — four-wheel-drive, winch, jerrycans, and canteens. A real wilderness rig. When I was a kid in the Southwest I’d known uranium prospectors who’d go out in Power Wagons and live out of them for months at a stretch and that was long before the fad for truck-mounted camper outfits.

We rolled out of town and Mallory put the truck up a steep dirt road through the pines. “Find out anything?” he asked.

I watched him while I spoke. “Seventeen hunters have died in this county in the past six years. Eleven of them in the vicinity of Goat Peak. Nine killed by 30-’06 bullets. Jacketed.”

“Not surprising. That’s what a lot of hunters carry. And Goat Peak’s where most of the hunters go to set up their base camps.” But he said it in a tight-lipped way.

I glanced at the carbine he had clipped to the inside of the door panel by his left knee. “What’s that, a .30–30?”

“Right. Saddle gun. For varmints.”

“Tell me about Hugh Collins.”

“Nice old guy. A gentleman. You’ll see for yourself.”

I said, “You didn’t like it much in ’Nam, did you?”

“Did anybody?”

“Some did. We had to arrest some of them. The ones who learned to enjoy killing. Got so they’d kill anybody — our side or theirs or just neutral.”

“Fragging?”

“Those. And others. Some of them just got bloodthirsty. Psychotic. They couldn’t stop killing — didn’t want to.”

He said, “We had one of those in my outfit. One of the other guys fragged him — threw a grenade down his blankets while he was asleep. We never found out which guy did it but we figured he probably saved all our lives.” He glanced at me. “It wasn’t me.”

“No. You never got into that bag, did you?”

Mallory said, “Too scared. And in the end I supposed I developed a respect for life. No, I never got to liking war.”

“That wasn’t war,” I said.

“Shook you up, did it?”

“It was a long time before I got pulled back together. I had to have a lot of help.”

He gave me a quick look and his eyes went back to the steep rutted road. “Shrinks? Psychiatrists?”

“Yes. And friends,” I said. I opened up to him because it might inspire him to share confidences. “Mostly it was the interrogations that did it to me. The ones we arrested. The way they could talk about committing grisly murders — and laugh about it. I couldn’t take it after a while. It was too grotesque. Terrifying. The bizarre became the commonplace. One day I just started screaming, so they sent me home.”

“Rough,” Mallory remarked.

I watched his profile. “Charlie Cord liked to frag animals, didn’t he, Sam?”

“You could put it that way,” he replied, giving nothing away.