Ridley Pearson - Killer View

“You get over here, it’s like another world,” Brandon said.

“My father used to hunt here.”

“You don’t hunt,” Brandon said, as if it had just occurred to him.

“No.”

Brandon tracked a handheld GPS, the topo map unrolled on his lap, his actions awkward due to the sling. He cross-checked the map with the device, occasionally glancing over to the right, where he imagined the first of Mark Aker’s three pinholed locations.

“You think I’m nuts coming here,” Walt said.

“Did I say anything?”

“It’s all we’ve got to go on: three pinholes in a map.”

“Maybe it’s enough,” Brandon said.

Walt gripped the wheel more firmly. The tension he was feeling had nothing to do with the snow floor he was driving on.

“There was a time I wanted her back,” Walt said.

Brandon took the opportunity to check the GPS and then to look out the window for the umpteenth time.

“If I fire you, I look resentful. Maybe you sue me.”

Brandon reached for the door handle. “I could walk home from here; it’s only a couple hundred miles.”

“It’s the girls I’m thinking about,” Walt said. “First and foremost, it’s the girls.”

“Shit,” Brandon whispered. “Can we stop this?”

“You want to fuck my wife, that’s your business. Your risk. But you’re fucking me along with her, and you should have thought about that.” He glanced over at Brandon.

“You think I didn’t?”

“Ketchum has an opening for a deputy. Bellevue, maybe.”

The suggestion hung inside the car as it raced up the empty two-lane road. Walt felt insignificant and small.

“My guess is,” Brandon said too loudly, acting as if the recent exchange had not happened, “we’re not going to get in there because the road won’t be plowed.”

“It’ll be plowed,” Walt said. He answered Brandon ’s puzzled expression. “Mark visited here. He called on a client. And, in this valley, it’s either cattle or sheep. They’ll keep the road open in winter in order to feed. The satellite map had four or five pivots clustered out there. That’s a ranch, for sure.” Walt having said that, an interruption in the plowed bank appeared a quarter mile ahead. He slowed the Cherokee.

“She complains, I’ll bet,” Walt said. “About your trailer being so small, about your work hours.”

“Is that why you asked me along, Sheriff? Make sure I log in a lot of OT?”

“Yup.”

Brandon winced. He hadn’t expected the truth.

He was squirming inside, right where Walt wanted him.

“Did you notify the Lemhi sheriff?” Brandon asked.

“I might have forgotten,” Walt said.

“Because?”

“Lemhi’s a different kind of county. You can’t throw a stick without hitting someone’s nephew or cousin. It’s too cozy. I don’t want to give him a chance to rehearse anything.”

“What would he rehearse?”

“How would I know?”

“Then why say that?”

“Something got Randy killed. Maybe it was the poaching, but I’m not so sure. I think it was the coat he was wearing: Mark’s coat. And now that Mark’s been abducted, and we’ve found the same date-rape cocktail in Randy’s blood, I’m guessing Randy’s death was some kind of misfire. So it’s all on Mark and whatever he was hiding up in his cabin, which means one or all of these ranches are involved.”

“No shit.”

“What gets a vet in trouble? One thing keeps coming to me: mad cow. That’s something any rancher, and especially these good old boys out here, would make damn sure to keep quiet.”

Brandon was no longer paying attention to his GPS. He was leaning in his seat toward Walt, hanging on his every word.

“So what they’d be rehearsing,” Walt said, “is some piece of fiction to provide cover for Mark coming out here, and tracking their ranches, and sticking goddamn pushpins in a map to mark their homesteads, something that has nothing to do with whatever was the original reason they called him out here in the first place.”

“Mad cow.”

“It’s got to be something along those lines. Something big. Something that makes the truth too expensive.”

“So why go to the trouble of abducting him? These old boys are plenty used to the rifle. I don’t see them getting all sentimental.”

“Who knows? Could be they wanted to establish if he’d told anyone. How far along he was in his findings. Could still be their plan to kill him. He could be dead right now.”

He wished he could take back what he’d just said. Saying such things gave them weight. He drove through an open gate in a wire fence and bounced the Cherokee across a cattle guard. Thing rattled to beat hell. A pair of steel grain sheds rose from the snow like gray hats to his left. He drove past a hundred-acre field that was probably knee-high with alfalfa in the summer. Black veins of meandering cow trails cut through the deep snow. A herd of seventy or eighty Angus was wedged tightly into the field’s southwest corner, their backs to the wind.

Walt directed the Cherokee toward the granaries, two wood barns, and a two-story gray clapboard house with white trim. He studied the cows for signs of illness but didn’t know what he was looking for: they all looked mad to him.

In the field directly ahead, sheep fretted, dancing nervously back and forth, as Walt’s Cherokee drew closer. White on white, broken by black legs and black heads. Puppets on unseen strings.

“The thing I’d never get used to about living on a farm like this,” Brandon said, sniffing the air, “is the stink.”

“It’s usually not so bad in winter,” Walt said. “I’ve got to admit: that’s funky.” It was a horrid, bitter smell. Sour and permeating. It only hit them now, as they drove close to the buildings.

“A smell like that,” Brandon said, “no wonder they called a vet.”

LON BERNIE MET THE CHEROKEE WITH FOUR DOGS AT HIS side. In his late fifties, with a florid complexion and soft gray eyes, he wore dirty canvas coveralls, a smudged cowboy hat, and large rubber-coated gloves. His nose carried a curved scar the size of a thumbnail, as pink as Pepto-Bismol. A front tooth had been chipped in a bull-riding championship when Bernie was nineteen. He still wore the belt with the oversized silver buckle to dances at the Grange Hall on Saturday nights, after a steak at the Loading Chute.

“I see a sheriff’s car coming, I expect it to be Ned,” the rancher said, tugging off his glove and offering his calloused hand to both men. His voice sounded like a gearbox with broken parts. “You’re a long way from home.”

“Couple questions, is all, if you’ve got the time,” Walt said.

Brandon banged his boots together, already cold. Windchill was pushing the mercury into the single digits. “Ain’t got nothing but time, this time of year.”

Lon Bernie looked out over Walt’s head-the man was a giant- surveying his animals. He reminded Walt of Hoss Cartwright. Walt sensed in him a cautiousness, a reluctance. It felt for a moment as if the rancher might be considering inviting them inside or to follow him on his chores. Something flickered in his gray eyes as Lon Bernie sucked some air through his top teeth.

“Be my guest,” he said.

Walt shot a quick glance over at Brandon. His deputy stopped banging his boots together.

“Mark Aker, Sun Valley Animal Center, did some work for you recently.”

Lon Bernie’s gray eyes iced over. There was no change in his otherwise-pleasant expression. A fog fled his mouth on each exhale. Lon Bernie: a steam engine climbing the hill.

“Had a cow down with the bloat,” the rancher said. He didn’t seem to feel the cold. Walt was freezing. “Mel Hickenbottom was busy up to Challis. He’s usually the one I’d call. This Aker fellow stepped in. You can’t wait too long with the bloat.”