C. Box - Nowhere to Run

Joe felt his mouth go dry.

“Nothin’,” McLanahan said. “Not a single goddamn thing to corroborate your tall tale.”

Joe shook his head. He remembered describing the saddle slope where he’d found the arrow, his ride with Caleb to their camp, and the location of Terri Wade’s cabin. Although it had been dark when he found the cabin and escaped from it, he vividly recalled the cut-back where it was and the distance from the creek.

“That’s impossible,” Joe said. “They couldn’t locate anything ?”

McLanahan said, “Nope.”

“My horses and my tack?”

“Nope. Oh,” McLanahan said, raising a knobby finger, “let me take that back. They did find your campsite by some lake on the way up. All that proves is that you did go up there into those mountains, but as far as I know, that hasn’t been in dispute.”

Joe shook his head. “I don’t understand.”

“Neither do they, except maybe you’re completely full of shit on this whole deal.” He lowered his eyelids. “I always say if you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging.”

Joe looked away. “It makes no sense. I mean, I can see how it might be hard to find that little pup-tent camp of the brothers. It was deep in the timber and there wasn’t a good trail to it. I might not be able to find it myself right away. But on top they should have found the remains of my horses, and where that cabin was burned down.”

“Provided those things exist somewhere other than your imagination,” McLanahan said. He raised a large hand with his fingers out and used his other index finger to count out and bend the fingers down one-by-one. “No brothers. No burned-down cabin. No crazy woman. No long-lost girl runner. No damned wolves. No. ” McLanahan stared at his fist in mock puzzlement, then said, “I plumb ran out of fingers. We got more lies here than I got fingers to count on.”

Sollis stifled a smile.

Said McLanahan, twisting the knife, “And no one can find your missing person named Terri Wade. As you can imagine, there are three or four women with that name around the country, but all of them are accounted for. But your gal-she doesn’t exist. And you know in this day and age, people can’t simply disappear without leaving a record.”

Joe said, “That’s the name she gave me. It’s not like I saw any ID. She could have been lying.”

“A lot of that going around,” McLanahan said, and Sollis chuckled.

“They must be in the wrong drainage,” Joe said, ignoring them both. “It’s easy to get lost up there. I couldn’t give coordinates because they took my GPS. ”

“No GPS!” McLanahan said. “I forgot about that. And no satellite phone, either. No nothing.”

“I’m not lying,” Joe said.

“I’m sure you’re convinced of that. Fabulists become convinced of their own stories.”

“Why would I make up a story?” Joe said. “Look around you, McLanahan. We’re in a hospital. These injuries are real. Do you think I wanted to be here?”

“It ain’t so bad,” he said. “I seen some of the nurses.”

“I need to talk to Sheriff Baird,” Joe said. “I need to hear this from him myself.”

“Feel free. He should be down into town tomorrow or the next day. I’m sure he’d love to talk with you, too. This search they just been on wiped out most of his discretionary budget for the rest of the year, payin’ all those men to go up that mountain to find a whole lot of nothing. Yes, Baird is a pretty crabby man right now.”

Joe wasn’t sure what to say. The news had taken the wind out of him.

“Well,” McLanahan said as way-all , sitting up in his chair and slapping his thighs, “I best be getting back to the office. I just wanted to make sure you heard the happy news straight from the horse’s mouth. In case the governor called or some reporter. If I was you, I’d claim chemical dependence and say you were checking into rehab. That seems to work pretty well for celebrity types such as yourself.”

McLanahan stood and clamped on his hat. His eyes sparkled. Joe realized how much McLanahan hated him for closing cases in the sheriff’s jurisdiction without involving his department. He remembered how angry the sheriff had been when Governor Rulon asked him to get out of the way two years before. He’d harbored his bitterness and could now unleash it.

“Look,” Joe said, “I’ll talk with Baird and the DCI when I can and try to figure out where they went wrong up there. It doesn’t make any sense, unless the Grim Brothers were able to wipe out all the evidence. I wouldn’t put it past them.”

“Yeah,” McLanahan said, smiling contemptuously beneath his mustache, “according to your statement they seem larger than life itself! Like supermen of the mountains. You shoot ’em in the face and in the chest and they still keep coming, like. mountain zombies !”

Which made Sollis laugh out loud.

“What are you saying?” Joe asked. “That I put myself in here for some reason and made it all up?”

McLanahan raised his hand and formed a pistol with his fist and fired it at Joe. “Bingo,” he said.

Joe shook his head, stunned.

“Do you remember a deputy I had once named Hayder?” the sheriff asked. At the sound of the name, Sollis rolled his eyes. Joe said nothing.

“Well, Ol’ Hayder was in his cruiser one night up on Bighorn Road. Somebody had reported high school kids drag racing up and down that road, so dispatch sent him up there to find out what was going on. He hid his unit in a bunch of trees and waited, hour after hour, for some of them speed demons to show up so he could make an arrest and get out of my doghouse. But he got real bored, because there was nothin’ happening, so he started fiddling around with his Taser. I don’t know what the hell he was thinkin’, but somehow he shot himself with it. Right in the neck!”

Sollis went, “Ha-ha-ha,” and wiped at the nonexistent tears in his eyes, even though he’d likely heard the story a dozen times.

McLanahan continued, “Well, if you’ve ever been hit by a Taser, you know what it can do to your bodily functions when that current goes through you, and Ol’ Hayder soiled his pants. He threw the door open and rolled around on the ground outside the car with muscle spasms. When he finally recovered, he was too damned embarrassed to tell anyone at the department what had happened, so he made up a crazy story about being jumped by three bikers who he claimed ambushed him and got his Taser out of his belt and used it on him while he bravely fought them off. He even named a couple of lowlifes in town we’d been after for a while as the assailants, and we had them arrested. Hayder almost got away with it, too, except one of those drag-racing kids had seen the whole thing and videoed it with his cell phone camera. It seems the speed demons knew all about Hayder in those trees, so they were gonna sneak up on him and slash his tires or some other kind of damned kid prank. The kid who took the video got picked up for careless driving a few days later and told Sollis here he’d show him something if we’d throw away the ticket. He got his phone out and we watched it and busted a gut. Ol’ Hayder didn’t show up for work the next day, and we ain’t seen him since.”

Joe said nothing.

“So what I’m sayin’,” McLanahan finished as he paused at the door, “is I can see a scenario where maybe you was intoxicated on liquor or your own ego and you dropped your shotgun. It went off, peppering your shoulder and neck. Your horses reared and dumped you and you injured your leg. I’m thinkin’ maybe you landed on a downed log and a sharp branch stuck through your thigh. Then the horses ran off and left you there with nothin’ at all. So being the big-shot celebrity you are in the middle of nowhere, you didn’t want to tell the governor what happened, so you made up one hell of a good story.”