John Sandford - Field of Prey

And it all went fine.

They did it twice, stopped for a beer, and then did it again, and stopped for another beer, and Layton was beginning to regret that he hadn’t stolen five rubbers, when Ginger said, demurely, “I kinda got to go outside.”

“What?”

“You know. .”

She had to pee. Layton finally got the message and Ginger disappeared into the dark, with the flashlight. She was back two minutes later.

“Boy, something smells really bad out there.”

“Yeah?” He didn’t care. She didn’t care much either, especially as she’d reminded him about the flashlight.

So they messed around with the flashlight for a while, and Ginger said, “You’re really large,” which made him feel pretty good, although he’d measured himself several dozen times and it always came out at six and one-quarter inches, which numerous Internet sources said was almost exactly average.

Anyway, the fourth condom got used and stuffed in the sack the beer had come in, and Layton began to see the limits of endurance even for an eighteen-year-old-he probably wouldn’t have needed the fifth one. They lay naked in each other’s arms and drank the fifth and sixth beers and Ginger burped and said, “We probably ought to get back and establish our alibis,” and Layton said, “Yeah, but. . I kinda got to go outside.”

Ginger laughed and said, “I wondered about that. You must have a bladder like an oil drum.”

“I’m going,” he said. He took the flashlight and moved off into the trees, wearing nothing but his Nike Airs, found a spot, and as he was taking the leak, smelled the smell: and Ginger was right. Something really stank.

It was impossible to grow up in the countryside and not know the odor of summertime roadkill, and that’s what it was. Something big was dead and rotting, and close by.

He finished and went back to the car and found Ginger in her underpants, and getting into her jean shorts. “I want to go out and look around for a minute,” he said. In the back of his mind he noticed his own sexual coolness. Even though her breasts were right there, and as attractive and pink and perky as they’d been fifteen minutes ago, he could have played chess, if he’d known how to play chess. “There’s something dead out there.”

“That’s the stink I told you about.”

“Not an ordinary stink,” Layton said. “Whatever it is, is big.”

She stopped dressing: “You mean. . like a body?”

“Like something. Man, it really stinks.”

When they were dressed, and with Ginger holding onto the back of Layton’s belt, they walked into the woods-as if neither one of them had ever seen a Halloween movie-following the light of the flash. As they got deeper in, the smell seemed to fade. “Wrong way,” Layton said.

They turned back and Ginger said, “Hope the light holds out.”

“It’s fine,” Layton said. Fresh batteries: Layton had been ready .

They walked back toward the area where the house had been, and the smell grew stronger, until Ginger bent and gagged. “God. . what is it?”

Whatever it was, they couldn’t find it. Layton marched back and forth over the old farmstead, shining the light into the underbrush and even up into the trees. They found nothing.

“Don’t ghosts smell?” Ginger said. “I saw it on one of those British ghost-hunter shows, that sometimes ghosts make a bad smell.”

Every hair on Layton’s neck stood up: “Let’s get out of here,” he said.

They started walking back to the car, but by the time they got back, they were running. They jumped in, slammed the doors, clicked the locks, backed out of the parking place, and blasted off down the gravel road, not slowing until they got to the highway. The bag with the used condoms and the empty beer cans went into an overgrown ditch, and fifteen minutes later, they were headed down the hill into the welcoming lights of Red Wing.

Layton lay in bed that night and thought about it all-mostly the sex, but also about Ginger’s best friend, Lauren, and what a wicked threesome that would be, and about that awful odor. Ginger called him the next morning to say it had been the most wonderful night of her life; and he told her that it had been the most wonderful night of his.

The night had been wonderful, but not quite perfect. There’d been that smell.

Layton’s best friend’s older brother was a Goodhue County deputy named Randy Lipsky, who was only six or eight years older than Layton. If not quite a friend, he was something more than an acquaintance.

Layton got up late, shaved, ate some Cheerios, and still not sure if he was doing the right thing, called the sheriff’s office and asked if Lipsky was around. He was.

“I need to talk to you for a minute, if I could run over there,” Layton said.

So he went over to the law enforcement center, found Lipsky, and they walked around the block.

Layton said, “Just between you and me.”

“Depending on what it is,” Lipsky said. “I’m a cop.”

“Well, I didn’t do anything,” Layton said.

“What is it?” Lipsky asked.

“Last night, my girlfriend and I went up to this old farm place, out in the country, and parked for a while.”

“Ginger?”

“Uh-huh.”

“She’s pretty hot. You nail her?”

“Hey. . But, yeah, as a matter of fact.” He was so cool about it that ice cubes could have rolled out of his ears.

“Anyway. .”

“Anyway, there’s something dead up there. Something big. I never smelled anything like it. I thought it was a cow or a pig. The weird thing is, we couldn’t find anything, and there aren’t any dairies or pig farms around there. We could smell it, like it was right there : like we were standing on it. It made Ginger throw up it was so strong. I was thinking last night, what if we couldn’t find it because. . somebody buried something?”

“You mean. .” Lipsky stopped and looked at Layton. Layton was a jock, but not an idiot.

“Yeah. I thought I should ask,” Layton said. “Now you can tell me I’m a whiny little girl, and we can forget about it.”

Lipsky said: “I’ll tell you something, Layton: ninety-five percent it’s nothing. Probably somebody shot a buck out of season, and you were smelling the gut dump. Those can be pretty hard to see in the dark, once they go gray. But, five percent, we gotta go look.”

Lipsky went to get a patrol car and Layton called Ginger and told her what he’d done. “Well, God, don’t mention me,” she said.

“If it’s something, I’ll probably have to,” he said.

“Well, if it’s something. . sure. I worried about it, too, last night,” she said. “Like you were saying, it smelled big. What if it’s a dead body?”

“I’ll call you when we get back,” Layton said.

Thedrive in the daytime was even faster than the drive the night before, out into the countryside and the hot July sun. Layton pointed Lipsky into the abandoned farm lot and Lipsky said, “What a great place to park.”

“Yeah, it’d be okay, if it didn’t stink so bad,” Layton said. “Over here.”

He led the way back where the old house had been, and the smell was like a wall. They hit it and Lipsky’s face crinkled and he said, “Jesus Christ on a crutch.”

“I told you,” Layton said.

“Where’s it coming from?” Lipsky asked.

They quartered the area, kicking through the underbrush, and eventually always came back to the yard where the house had been, and finally Lipsky pointed to the edge of the clearing and said, “Go over and pull out that old fence post, and bring it back here.”

The fence post was a rusting length of steel still attached to a single strand of barbed wire. Layton wrenched it loose, pulled the barbed wire off, and carried it back to Lipsky. Lipsky was walking around a patch of fescue grass twenty feet across, a distracted look on his face.