Chuck Hogan - The Killing Moon - A Novel

Hess stepped past them out into the middle of the road. He looked west where it curved, disappearing into the treeline. “Where’s this go?”

No one else answered, and Maddox realized he was being addressed. “Access road. Runs the length of the forest, from the trailheads on the northeast side of town out to Aylesbury, I think. Near the state border. Ungated at either end.”

Hess looked the other way, back toward Black Falls. “Who drives it?”

“No one. Unless you’re looking to wreck your suspension. Teenagers run it on a dare sometimes.”

“Teenagers?”

“‘Hell Road,’ they call it. Every year, every graduating class. Rite of passage. The old haunted-forest thing.”

“What’s the legend?”

“Pequoig Indian spirits seeking revenge for a massacre out at the falls. That’s the classic version. Others say there was a boy who got lost out here and froze to death around the turn of the last century. People claim to hear him crying and calling out for help after the first snow.”

Hess nodded. “Nothing else?”

“You could probably find somebody who would talk up midnight masses and devil worship.”

Hess didn’t like the way Maddox phrased that. He passed another silent judgment on Maddox, then looked away, ignoring him. “Hell Road,” he said to Bryson.

Bryson shielded his eyes from the high sun. “A midnight stroll through the forest seems unlikely, though stranger things have happened. And that gunshot report, it’s still a big ‘if’ in my book. But the dogs place him here, no question. He could have met someone.” Bryson mimed his theory, intrigued by the possibility. “Shot them, took their car. Because he needed wheels, because he knew he was blowing town. He went after Frond maybe for some traveling cash.”

Hess said, “Forty dollars was still tucked inside the kitchen creamer.”

“So he failed.”

“Then what’s he doing for money? No ATM hits, no pings out in the real world.”

“Hiding. A wanted man.”

Hess closed one eye. “Okay, but if he had a gun, why didn’t he shoot Frond? Why tear him up like that?”

Bryson sputtered, out of gas.

Hess said, “What if he didn’t go anywhere at all?”

Bryson squinted. To Maddox, it seemed like Hess had left Bryson twisting. Like he had allowed him to fail here.

Hess said, “Maybe he was only trying to look disappeared. Maybe he walked out here, turned around, walked right back. Left the bike where he had dumped it, waded through stream water back toward town.” Hess chewed the inside of his cheek, watching the confounded dogs. “We know he was inside the witch’s house for some amount of time. Days, maybe.”

Bryson said, “You’re saying Sinclair’s still nearby?”

“We’ve got alerts out there. A guy with shaved eyebrows, that’s tough to miss.”

Bryson scanned the trees they had just walked out of. “Okay. Then where’s he hiding now?”

While Maddox was distracted by this back-and-forth, one of the unleashed dogs had cut back around its handler toward him. Maddox stiffened, the dog nudging his shin, starting a low-grade growl.

The handler heeled the dog with a German command, and it sat at eager attention, eyes fixed on Maddox, lips back and baring its teeth.

Maddox explained, “I was inside the apartment earlier.”

The handler said nothing. He took up the leash, wound it tightly around his hand, and eased the hungry dog away.

Maddox saw Hess standing closer to the shoulder now, watching him, his big arms pretzeled.

Ripsbaugh rimmed the fire pit in the Bobcat, dozing dirt onto the smoldering ash. Cinders lifted off in a huff of protest, flakes of leaf and yard bag flaring orange before dying black and drifting down like hell snow. Smoke rose from the pit, gray and thin.

The heat off the crater made things wavy, but the white jersey immediately attracted Ripsbaugh’s eye, as will any clean thing in a dump. Maddox coming toward him between lanes of landfill. Ripsbaugh made another smothering pass, covering up the carcass of a pillaging coyote he had snared with an illegal leg trap.

“Saw the smoke,” said Maddox, talking over the Bobcat engine. “I dropped the cones in the back of your truck.”

Ripsbaugh nodded and motioned Maddox aboard. Maddox gripped the outside of the cage as Ripsbaugh drove back up the rise to the equipment shack. Maddox stepped off as Ripsbaugh killed the ignition and climbed out, plucking his T-shirt away from his sweat-soaked sides. He swiped at his brow with his back-pocket rag, admiring the soot that rubbed off.

Maddox’s face and nose looked pinched, but to Ripsbaugh the stench of sun-baked garbage was second nature. Maddox said, “How do you stand burning in this heat?”

“Piles up otherwise. It don’t stop for summer.” He popped open the Igloo cooler just inside the door, offering Maddox a Coors, which he declined. “I earned this one,” said Ripsbaugh, cracking it open, exploding a spray of mist and a lazy spill of foam.

He drank down half, wincing under the high sun, then caught sight of a wing flapping over the top of a dirt hillock across the lane. He handed Maddox his beer and reached back inside the shed for his spade, mounting the rise in four long strides, blade raised.

Two massive turkey vultures spread their wings, lifting off slowly away from him, hauling their ugly bodies into the hot, heavy air.

Their meal was a dead possum, which Ripsbaugh scooped and flung down the other side. Maddox eyed the blood smear on the spade as Ripsbaugh returned, taking his beer, drinking another lick and starting up the dusty road toward the front gate. “They find anything?”

“Dogs scented a trail. Led out to the fire road through the Borderlands. Ended there.”

“It’s Dill they’re looking at?”

Maddox nodded. “What do you think?”

“I’m wondering who’s next if he doesn’t work out for them.” They walked a few more steps in silence. “It’s not what they done to me so much. The letters they found, the cut on my arm — I understand these things. But give me a fair shake. This guy Hess, the way he went about it. How he had it all decided. Sawed off my leg without waiting for the cancer test to come back first.”

“It’s not right, how they treated you.”

“I can take it. Being that I knew I was innocent, that made it all just strange. But what it did to Val. What it put her through. Once they come in that door, once they get inside your house, everything you ever said or did can and will be used against you. It was open season. And Val, she’s not that strong. She’s sick to death about anyone knowing her business, never mind the whole town.”

“You could sue.”

Ripsbaugh shook his head. “Not put her through that again.”

Maddox looked at him. “You’re a good man, Kane.”

“Naw,” he said, taking another pull on the can, then crushing it in his fist, tossing it near the door of the recycling shed. “No such thing.”

He felt Maddox looking him over, as though Maddox had decided something. “You said something to me once about wanting to help. If I were to ask you for a favor, even if it didn’t seem to make sense at the time, could you do it anyway, without saying anything to anyone else?”

Ripsbaugh hesitated with his hand on the gate latch. An unforeseen result of his persecution by Hess and the state police was that he had apparently gained some measure of Maddox’s trust.

Ripsbaugh asked him, point-blank, “Were you a cop before all this?”

Maddox’s face showed nothing as he stepped through the gate. “I’ll be in touch.”

After Dr. Bolt had to leave in such a hurry, Tracy sat with Rosalie in the first stall. The old cowshed closest to the house was where she and her mother stabled late-term pregnant llamas and their newborn crias. Dr. Bolt’s best estimate for Rosalie was two to three weeks, but given the llama’s gestation of nearly twelve months, she could deliver at any time. Restlessness and fidgeting would be the first signs of early labor.