C. Box: Back of Beyond

“Yeah, you should ignore that,” Cody said.

* * *

He drove just under control, taking the switchbacks hard, crossing the faded double center line with each turn. There wasn’t a light bar on the Ford so he’d toggled on the switch that turned his headlights into strobes that flashed psychedelically on the wet canyon walls and pine trees. And froze two cow elk in their progress across the highway.

Cody cursed and swerved to the left, his tires dropping off the pavement into the muddy ditch, but he wasn’t fast enough. One of the elk inexplicably bounded in front of him and turned her head toward him and their eyes locked a split second before he hit her solidly in the shoulder with the right front fender of the truck. The impact made the Ford fishtail. If it weren’t for the front right tire still gripping the pavement, he would have hurtled left into the bank of trees. He jerked the wheel and the Ford bounced up out of the ditch.

He stopped in the middle of the highway, breathing hard, knowing if his brakes hadn’t bitten he would have gone straight off the edge of the mountain into Canyon Ferry Lake. Rain drummed on the roof. A single headlight pointed out into the dark, lighting only the rain that slashed through the beam. He checked his side mirrors. In the red glow of his taillights he could see the other elk bound up the canyon wall but the one he’d hit was down, its legs churning, head writhing.

“Shit!”

His boot eased off the brake and he began to roll forward again, making sure he could still go forward. The Ford went a few feet before it stopped again. He needed to assess the damage. And he couldn’t leave her suffering like that.

Chanting “Shit-shit-shit-shit-shit…” he got out and walked back along the wet asphalt in the rain and drew his Sig Sauer and shot her in the head. Her thrashing went manic until it stopped altogether. He couldn’t shed the afterimage of her eyes boring into him before he hit her, even when she closed them now. It took five minutes to pull her off the roadway. She was heavy, wet, and smelled of musk and hot blood.

He took a quick look at his bumper. His right headlight was out and thatches of elk hair were caught in the grille. There was a six-inch gap between the frame and the hood. He could smell the sharp odor of burning hair and meat on the hot surfaces of the motor. He had a couple of thousand dollars in damage and years of jokes from the county maintenance shop guys and fellow cops ahead of him. But the Ford still ran.

“Shit-shit-shit-shit-shit…”

For his next trick, he climbed into the cab of the Ford to locate a dead body in a burned-out cabin.

“Shit-shit-shit-shit-shit…”

A body that, in all probability, belonged to someone he knew and trusted and admired and who had kept him tethered to normalcy the past few months by a single fraying thread. And he could feel the thread unraveling.

The rain had turned to slush by the time Cody Hoyt drove through Vigilante Campground and continued up the sloppy road along Trout Creek. The patrol officer ahead of him was easy to follow because of the deep fresh troughs in the chocolate one-track. His single headlight seemed to light up and suspend the cold viscous rain in midair.

He could never enter the campground-which the U.S. Forest Service contracted with the L amp;C Sheriff’s Department to patrol-without remembering the keggers he used to attend there when he was growing up in junior and senior high. That’s when it started, he knew. When he learned that when he drank he could feel like a superman. His muscles and attitude swelled and his reticence and common sense stepped aside. He recalled a fight with baseball bats, remembered the hollow sickening sound his twenty-eight-inch maple bat made when it connected with Trevor McCamber’s forehead. Remembered the creamy white belly and thighs of Jenny Thompson under the blue-green glow of his dashboard lights … before that belly swelled with his son and he married Jenny in a drunken and hasty ceremony at a ranch outside of town. His best men had been Jack McGuane and Brian Winters, fellow seniors and best friends at Helena High. Brian thought the wedding was hilarious. Jack tried to pretend it wasn’t. Jack’s parents spent the ceremony shaking their heads and looking toward the road to see if Cody’s father and uncle Jeter would show. They didn’t.

After graduation from high school, Cody and Jenny moved from place to place until finally he was back in Montana without her or his boy.

* * *

Cody Hoyt drove under the towering knotty pine archway and over an ancient wooden bridge barely nosing above the foam and fury of Trout Creek filled with runoff. Around a wooded corner was the cabin, and suddenly there were lights in the pure darkness: the headlights of a patrol cruiser trained on the charred remains of the structure, and a single round Cyclopean eye of a departmental Maglite swinging his way and blinding him.

This was the crime scene, all right.

Cody pulled up next to the patrol SUV. Inside the next vehicle, illuminated by the interior lighting, were two citizens. A man in his forties and a woman who looked to be in her early twenties huddled in the backseat. They looked cold and tired, he thought. The man needed a shave. The woman needed a hot shower. He nodded at them through two sets of windows and they nodded back.

The patrol officer, Ryan Dougherty, appeared at his driver’s window, and tapped on the glass with the flashlight. In the process of doing it, he blinded Cody again.

Cody powered down the window, and said, “Would you quit shining that fucking thing into my eyes?”

“Oh, sorry.” The patrol officer, newer to the department than Cody, was blond and baby-faced with a trimmed bristly mustache that said, Here comes a cop! and eyes that had not seen enough. In fact, Cody thought, Dougherty looked flushed, despite the weather.

“What happened to your front end?” Dougherty asked.

“Hit an elk,” Cody said.

“On the way up?”

“Yeah.”

“Bull or cow?”

Cody hesitated. “Cow.”

Cody knew what Dougherty would say next. “Got a cow permit?” he said, grinning.

“Ha ha,” Cody said, deadpan.

“I bet you’ll be hearing that one a lot.”

“I bet I will,” Cody said, nodding toward the patrol vehicle. “Those two the hikers who found the cabin?”

“Yeah. I met them at the York Bar and they showed me the way up here. Here, I got their names.…” Dougherty dug inside his raincoat for the notebook in his breast pocket. He was in uniform: brown shirt, tan pockets, and epaulets. The reason the dopers called them “L amp;C County Fascists.”

“I don’t need their names,” Cody said. “Unless you think they did it.”

“Oh, no. Not at all.”

“Did they tromp all over the crime scene?”

“Just a little,” Dougherty said. “It’s hard to tell what they touched.”

Cody said, “Why don’t you ask them?”

“I can do that.”

“Good. Put one of them in this vehicle and interview them separately. Walk them through their movements when they first saw the cabin. Find out which direction they came down, and what they did inside. Find out what they touched and if they took anything. It’s amazing how many times citizens take souvenirs from a crime scene. If something sounds wrong or their stories don’t match, come get me.”

“Yes, sir,” Dougherty said. The flush was gone from his cheeks. Cody could tell he was beating himself up for taking their story at face value.

“I’m gonna go take a look,” Cody said.

“It’s wetter than hell,” Dougherty said. “The ash from the fire makes it all … soupy.”