Ridley Pearson - Killer View

“Point taken.”

“Are you trying to get me killed in the line of duty?”

Walt didn’t dignify that.

“It’s midnight, Sheriff. Couldn’t we have-”

Walt cut him off. “If we’d come by day, all we’d have accomplished was to tip him off to our interest in his burn pit. He’d have snuffed it, buried it, and it would have froze solid, leaving us waiting ’til April or May to dig for evidence.” Walt tugged on Brandon ’s sheriff’s coat, pulling him lower as they drew closer to the gate. “It has to be now, when we can get a good look at whatever’s in there. We owe that to Mark.”

When the wind shifted, the putrid smell hit them both at the same moment.

“Damn,” Brandon said.

They turned onto the property, staying low. The burn pit was on the far side of the ranch, requiring them to pass the farmhouse and the outbuildings to reach it. Walt assumed there would be dogs-there were always dogs on ranches-but that wild game was more likely to wake dogs than humans, and so the trick was to move quickly and keep to shadows.

It was bitterly cold, somewhere in the teens. Each light breeze penetrated and burned their faces. Ducking, they hurried through the dry, crunching snow. As barking erupted from inside the farmhouse, to their right, they ran across the plowed driveway and ducked into the deep snow behind a hay swather. If Lon Bernie was awakened by the barking, he might think he had a shot at poaching an elk or deer from his bedroom window.

They waited. Brandon began to shiver, though didn’t say a thing.

Finally, the dogs stopped their noise. Walt held Brandon there another few minutes-long minutes-knowing that Bernie could be moving window to window in hopes of spotting some trespassing game. Then they stood, returned to the plowed driveway, and moved together toward the far side of a toolshed. From there, around a granary, and, from the granary, around the far side of the main barn. Here, Walt picked up tractor tracks-dualies-two tracks of double tires, each pair four feet wide, running parallel to the barn and disappearing like train tracks into the dark. He and Brandon followed these away from the glow of the mercury lamp, out into an artificial dusk, and finally into the coal black night, clouds having moved in to mask the moon, the hideous smell growing stronger with every step. They never dared use their flashlights for fear of being spotted. At times, they stopped, awaiting a cloud to pass by the moon, the surrounding dark so intense, the silence so complete, that, had it not been for his heartbeat in his ears and the stinging cold in his toes, Walt might have thought he’d died.

It took forever to reach the burn pit. Nearly an hour had passed since they’d left the Cherokee by the side of the road. Finally, the tractor tire tracks gave way to a wide disturbance in the velvet field of snow just as the stink from the pit achieved epic proportions. The pit appeared before them as a square black shadow amid the white glaze of snowfall. Slash had been pushed into a pile on the left side, a tangle of dead limbs and detritus stacked well over ten feet high. The pit itself had been dug crudely into the brown earth some years before, a catchall of burnable waste, which to a rancher meant anything from plastic pesticide containers and fertilizer bags to household paper trash and spent gearbox oil. Walt kneeled and, cupping his flashlight to mute its light, aimed a diffused beam down into the pit.

Brandon projectile-vomited down into the pit, staggered, and stepped away. Normally he was a man of a strong constitution, but his reaction reflected the horror there: an assortment of limbs, bodies, and heads of dozens of sheep, all blackened, the burned skin peeling back in leaflike flakes, the scabbed, unmoving eyes bulging or missing, having exploded from the heat. Fuel had been poured over everything and lit, further discoloring the skin and patches of wool, and leaving a mass of twisting limbs and burgeoning flesh, ripped open by the gases of decomposition to expose frozen pink tears in the carbon wasteland of dead animal.

The smell was of everything bad in the world: excrement, burned hair, lost life.

Walt dug around in his day pack, withdrew the Gamma-Scout and a Dell laptop that was part of his office’s mobile command center.

“Jesus,” Brandon said, pulling himself together. “Sorry about the hurl, Sheriff.”

“It ain’t pretty,” Walt said.

“And then some.”

“Get rope ready.”

Brandon slipped his day pack off. “You’re not thinking what I think you’re thinking.”

“Stop thinking so much.”

“You can’t be serious.”

Walt had the Gamma-Scout plugged into the laptop; the laptop powering up. “The cord isn’t near long enough.”

“Sheriff…”

“I’ve got to go down there. Look for a decent hold. Try that fence post.”

“Sheriff…”

“You don’t burn your hoof stock. You sell its meat. The only reason you wouldn’t sell the meat is if the meat is contaminated. Wholesale slaughter like this? Come on! It’s the only explanation. But we’ve got to prove something’s going on. And you’ve got one good arm, Tommy. You can’t go down in there and you can’t pull me out. So get that rope tied off. And do it quickly,” he said calmly. He lifted his chin, indicating the distant ranch. “We may have company.”

Brandon spun around. A flickering light appeared in flashes between the outbuildings. A powerful flashlight.

“Probably the dogs barking,” Walt said. “When a guy like Lon Bernie’s got something to hide, he sleeps a lot lighter.”

“Turn that laptop around so the screen faces away,” Brandon said.

Walt did so. His gloves were off, his fingers stinging. He doubted the screen would show at such a great distance given that they were surrounded by higher walls of moved snow, but it was a worthy precaution. A rancher out at midnight was not yet cause for alarm. It could be anything from a sick animal that needed checking to a freeze patrol- making sure all the heaters were working prior to turning in. Even if Lon Bernie’s guilt had gotten the better of him, there would be no reason to look beyond the barns and outbuildings. A vision flashed in Walt’s imagination: the twin chevrons of the massive tire treads that the tractor had imprinted in the snow. He and Brandon had followed the tracks out here, no doubt leaving a trail of boot prints.

“We should keep going,” he encouraged.

“Rope’s tied off.”

There was no way for Walt to climb down the rope with the laptop in hand, so he put it back into the day pack but without fully closing the screen so it would remain running. Then he lowered himself down the dirt wall and into a piece of semifrozen hell. Brandon trained the light down on him. Walt arrived at a muddy layer in the corner of the pit where the pile of carcasses left a gap. Despite the freezing temperature, the smell wafting up from the decomposing carcasses was as bad as anything he’d ever experienced. He zipped his coat up over his face so that only his eyes showed, one-armed the day pack around to where he could dig the laptop out, and, balancing the laptop on his left forearm like a waiter would a tray, handled the Gamma-Scout with his right hand. He trained the Geiger counter on the nearest bloated carcass. Its digital readout fell well within the range of the acceptable amounts of radiation. He’d expected to see a much higher reading.

Gagging from the odor, he aimed the Gamma-Scout up the carcass toward the rotting, burned head. The bloat had cracked open the animal’s blackened skin with expansion, and this is where the meter’s numbers edged up slightly-the frozen, exposed flesh.

Water, Walt thought.

“Sheriff! We got company!” Brandon called down into the pit, his hand cupped so tightly over his mouth and nose that Walt barely understood him. “An ATV, maybe. Two small headlights.”