3

Goose, I eventually remembered, was inside the house. Before heading out to pick up Rufus, I’d decided to leave him in because it looked like rain. The rain never materialized, but in its absence something worse did.

The dead man in my yard was young, somewhere in his twenties, I guessed, broad shouldered and thickly muscled. Best I could tell he had sandy-blond hair and surprisingly dark features. His eyes seemed too large for the rest of him, each frozen pupil fathomless and somehow haunted. His face revealed a strange tangle of emotion: revulsion, surprise, melancholy. Below that, there was a hole through his neck, and the blood—massive amounts of it—had drained off toward the ground along the underside of his left earlobe. As revolting as it was, I felt a small measure of relief because the wound made it pretty clear he’d been dead before I’d run over him.

I saw all this under the glare of the penlight I kept on my key chain, and when I couldn’t take looking at it anymore, I switched the light off and sat down in the grass, thankful for the comfort of darkness.

I wished I was drunk. Too drunk to care about this kid I didn’t know. That had certainly been the way of things for me lately, reaching for the bottle a little earlier each day and stumbling toward bed a little more recklessly every night. But the one night I needed to be three sheets to the wind, I was closer to sober than I’d been in a while.

I thought of Mary. She and I were still together, though the seeds of our dissolution had already been planted. We were doing the relationship “long distance” now because she’d decided to move out to Nevada to be with her brother and her five-year-old nephew who’d recently been diagnosed with leukemia. Her brother, Jeremy, had just gone through a terrible divorce, and it was absolutely the right thing for her to do. What’s more, it was absolutely the Mary thing for her to do. Still, I’d taken it hard, too hard. It wasn’t like it was the end of us, but somehow, in a way I couldn’t properly explain, it felt like it was just that. The end.

And now I had a dead man in my yard.

I flicked my penlight back on and went to retrieve my phone from the truck. I was running on instinct now, and every instinct I had was telling me to call the authorities. It wasn’t until I had my phone in hand that I realized I was about to make a huge mistake.

The problem with calling the authorities about the dead man in my yard was this: the newly elected sheriff of Coulee County didn’t like me much. Nope. That didn’t quite do it justice. The sheriff, Preston Argent, would probably relish nothing more than charging me with this murder. He wouldn’t be overly concerned about evidence—well, not any more concerned than he needed to be to plant it.

Not only had I lost to Argent in a hotly contested race for sheriff just four weeks earlier; he was also beholden to the one man who hated me more than anyone else. His name was Jeb Walsh, and he was a stain on this county that wouldn’t come out. Despite taking down the white supremacist organization Walsh ran last fall, I hadn’t been able to touch Walsh or Argent. Not only that, but Walsh was growing more powerful with each passing day as he raised more money and support for his House of Representatives bid in the fall. According to all the reports I’d seen, he was expected to win in a landslide. God help us all if they were right.

No, calling Sheriff Argent would be like presenting myself to him with my hands already cuffed. There was no way he wouldn’t see this as an opportunity to, at the very least, hassle me. More likely, he’d confer with Walsh, and they’d arrest my ass. Once that happened, I might sit in the jail until doomsday without a trial, bail, or representation. Argent and Walsh saw me as a thorn in their side, one of the few in the whole county. There was Rufus, of course, but as irritating as he could be, he was still somewhat of a pariah in this area. People tended to think he was just some crazy mountain man, which was true, of course, but what people missed about Rufus was how smart he was, not to mention how determined. Argent and Walsh hated Mary too, but she was in Nevada for the foreseeable future. Besides, they’d already tried to take advantage of her once, and it hadn’t gone very well for them.

Bottom line: Argent and Walsh would use this body against me. Even if they didn’t get a conviction, they’d make sure a prolonged court battle ruined my life and my reputation.

Even now, replaying it all in my mind, I’m pretty certain I would do the same thing all over again.

What I did was stand up, dust the dirt off my blue jeans, and head to the house. Goose was still inside and would be wanting out by now. I was glad it was relatively early in the evening, not yet ten thirty. I had plenty of time before daylight to figure this out. My first instinct was to call Mary, but I resisted. The last thing she needed was to be pulled into something like this. Her hands were full with her nephew and brother.

Next, I considered heading into the woods behind my house to look for the man I’d glimpsed on my property. Perhaps I could find him tonight and put an end to this nightmare. But something kept me from pursuing him. He’d be long gone by now, somewhere on the backside of the mountain where there were trees and caves and places no sane man would go at night.

I started to call Rufus but then hesitated. Calling him would only satisfy my need to confide in someone. He’d want to help, but I couldn’t see how a blind man would be useful to me right now, other than the advice he might offer. I was pretty sure I already knew what that advice was going to be, and there was no way I was calling the authorities. Like Mary, he would help, but it didn’t seem fair to inflict this on him just for the sake of my own deep-seated need to talk to someone.

That left Ronnie, who was still at Hays State Prison. He’d help me hide the body in a heartbeat if he could, but not having him around to help me in this moment felt like a relief. He’d already stuck his neck out for me once, and look where it had gotten him. There was no way I could ask him to get involved in this.

So, in reality, that left me. Yet, I was still sitting here, doing nothing. I needed to wake up. Get moving.

I sighed and went inside to grab a pair of latex gloves from under the sink. I needed to search his pockets. Maybe I’d find a wallet with some form of identification. Goose greeted me at the door, more subdued than usual, almost cautious. He could sense something was up. Maybe he could even smell the body. I knelt and patted him on the head, speaking to him in a soothing voice. He wagged his tail, licked my earlobe, and eased past me into the dark yard. He lifted a leg, pissing and sniffing the wind. When he finished, he lowered his nose to the ground and started toward the body, but I whistled at him sharply. He seemed relieved to come back inside the house with me.

Once I had the gloves on, I walked to the body and shined my penlight at his face, checking again to see if I recognized him. A sense of unreality washed over me, and for a brief second I believed I did recognize him. It was vague but undeniable, the way you might hear a snippet of a song you loved as a child and know it but not quite be able to remember all the words.

The moment passed, and the man’s face was unfamiliar again, a stranger. But a sliver of doubt had wormed its way into my subconscious, and I wondered at the likelihood of a stranger meeting his demise way up here in these mountains, just a couple dozen feet from my front door.