Julia Spencer-Fleming - I Shall Not Want

She shook her head. "Did you see the guy who was hassling me? With three studs in his upper lip? He looked like he escaped from an S and M convention."

"Maybe Ms. Feliciano likes to hang out with rough trade."

"You sure the vehicle wasn't stolen?"

"It hasn't been reported. Maybe one of them was Feliciano's son?"

"God. Can you imagine? If my son ever gets anything other than his earlobe pierced-" She pictured the pumped-up SUV and the young men in their city clothes. "What were they doing up here, anyway? It's a little far for a ride in the country. And it's too early for people coming up to do Lake George."

"Hikers? White rafting? Bird-watchers?"

She opened her mouth to shoot him down, then noticed his grin.

"Mexicans and Jamaicans control the pot trade up through the North Country," he said. "Mexicans, for the most part. They bring it up out of the Caribbean and Central America, funnel it through New York City, and distribute it up here."

"You think maybe they were here on business?"

"What do you think?"

"I think we should flag the car. Send out its plate and description to area law enforcement."

"I think you're right, Officer Knox." He grinned again.

"What?"

"Who's The Man? You're The Man. Say it with me now. Who's The Man?"

She mumbled.

"I didn't hear you!"

"I'm The Man! Idiot." She shook her head and looked out the window. Her own reflection, limned by the computer lights, looked back at her. She thought it might be smiling.

Amado Esfuentes wiped the sweat from his forehead before tugging his work gloves back on. He reshouldered the spool of electrical cable he had set against the fence post. "Ready?" he asked Raul. Raul groaned as he picked up the buckets of porcelain conductors and screw plates.

"If this was barbed wire, we'd have been done by now," Raul said.

"If you worked as hard as you complain, we'd be done by now." Amado wished, as he had every day in the month since the accident, that his little brother was toiling beside him. Octavio worked more and talked less than any other man on the crew, and when he did have something to say, he didn't whine like Raul. But Octavio was in town, sweeping and polishing for a lady minister and answering to the name "Amado." Meanwhile, Amado was the McGeochs' foreman "Octavio," always partnering Raul because he couldn't, in good conscience, stick any of the others with the laziest guy on the farm.

"Cheer up." Amado let the electrical cable slip off the wooden spool as he walked over the uneven ground toward the next fence post. "We'll be finished and back before lunch," he said. "And this is better for the cows than barbed wire."

Raul gave a detailed suggestion of what Amado might like to do to the cows.

"Oh, I would," Amado said, "but I'm afraid I might hurt them, on account of being so large."

Raul roared with laughter. They reached the next post, and Amado clipped off the cable while Raul screwed an insulating plate into the wood and attached the conductor. Amado threaded the cable through, untwisted the wires, and fastened them around the conductors. Then he did the same thing in the opposite direction for the next length of cable.

Amado tied off the insulated black wire, and they picked up and moved down the line. This portion of the property was divided from the mountain by a swiftly churning stream that cut a hollow almost deep enough to call a gorge in places: an irresistible lure that would mean lost and trapped cows, in the best cases, and broken legs and drowned carcasses in the worst. Amado had no problem taking a little extra time and fencing it off nice and tight.

"Mark my words, they're going to have us back here next month, hauling in watering troughs and throwing hoses into that creek."

Amado, tugging the cable taut, grunted. "It splits, maybe a kilometer from here. One branch runs into the McGeochs' land. The cows can water from that."

Raul stared. "How do you know? We haven't worked this section before."

Amado knew because he had crossed this stream several times in the past weeks, headed up the mountain to meet with Isobel Christie in a high, sheltered meadow that straddled Christie and McGeoch land. Not that he was going to tell Raul that. "I followed the stream that runs past our bunkhouse one evening. I was curious."

Raul shaded his eyes against the strong rays of the morning sun as he followed the path of the water. "You're crazy. I wouldn't get off my bed if I weren't getting-" He took a step forward, then another.

"Hello there. Aren't you forgetting your buckets?"

"What's that?" Raul's voice sounded different. Amado holstered his wire cutters and walked over to where the other man stood, a scant foot away from the crumbling edge of the stream gully. Raul pointed. "There. You see that?"

Amado nodded. It was an odd shape, soft amid the sharp angles of rock and tree and spiky fern. Half hidden in a cluster of bushes and sucker vine. White and red against the brown and gray and green. He stooped, picked up a rock, and lobbed it as hard as he could toward the thing. A cloud of furious flies rose into the air. Something dead.

Raul's lips thinned. "A cow?"

"I don't think so." Amado stepped over the grassy edge, taking a moment to let his boot find a good firm hold in the gully's soil.

"What are you doing?"

"I'm going to take a look."

"Forget it! Whatever it is, it has nothing to do with us! Leave it alone!"

Amado ignored him, making his way down the steeply angled slope step by step, pausing when too much earth crumbled beneath his boots. He reached the water and walked downstream a few yards, until he reached a wide and shallow spot. He forded the stream the same way he descended into the wash, slowly and carefully.

Downstream and downwind, he could smell it. His nose wrinkled and he turned his head without meaning to, overwhelmed by the sour-sweet reek of corruption.

"You're crazy! You'll have the police out here! We'll have to hide in the woods again!"

Amado dipped his neckerchief in the water and held it close to his nostrils. It helped some. He hiked up to where the bushes were dug into the slope with knotted half-visible roots that looked like old men's fingers.

He saw the flat green leaves and the starburst clusters of tiny white flowers. He saw the pale birch saplings trembling in the mountain's exhalation. He saw the dead thing. He saw the bloat, and the burst skin, and the white bone and the gray brain. He saw the place where an animal had chewn off the cloth and started to-

He turned away. Closed his eyes and gritted his teeth against the acid rush of his stomach's contents. He retraced his steps downslope, recrossed the stream, and climbed the opposite side to the gully.

Raul just looked at him. He knew what it was. He had known since he first spotted it. His eyes pleaded with Amado to ignore what they had found. "Let's just go," he whispered. "Finish the fence. We don't have to have seen anything."

Amado shook his head. The…thing caught in the underbrush may have had a family. Had a girl. Had friends. Somewhere, someone was praying. Waiting and hoping and dreading.

"Let's go get the truck," Amado said. "We have to go back."

Clare attributed the sense that she was being watched to her general uneasiness. Standing in the McGeochs' barnyard, struggling to make light conversation with Russ Van Alstyne's sister, was not her idea of a fun way to spend a Friday morning. She kicked out her ankle-length skirt, surreptitiously checking to make sure she hadn't marked the black cotton with dust-or worse-from the barnyard. She had a Eucharist to celebrate at noon, and she didn't want to show up smelling like cow manure.

"So," Janet said. "I'm pleased Amado is working out for you. I mean, with his broken arm and all."