CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The Houndsman

“Hey, Irish. It’s for you.”

Stranahan faced his cards down on the fly-tying table and reached for the receiver that Jonathon Smither extended.

“It’s a woman,” Smither said, and raised his eyebrows. “Calling this late at night? Booty call. Got to be a booty call.”

He pulled the phone back just out of Sean’s reach and grinned, a big wolf grin.

“Tell her to come on down,” Robin Hurt Cowdry said, his voice slurred. “I’ll bet her for her clothes. If it’s that barista of yours, there shouldn’t be too many layers to peel.”

Sean hadn’t spoken to Martinique since they had buried the cat in the countryside. She’d been melancholy and they’d parted with no definite plans. Maybe it was her. He found that he wanted it to be her. He wrenched the receiver from Smither’s hand.

“Hello.”

“Your friends have loud voices.” It was Martha Ettinger.

“We were just playing poker.”

“Are you sober enough to drive?”

“Right now?”

“Right now.”

“Sure.”

“Do any of your buddies have a gun? I know you don’t.”

Sean repeated the question to the table, everyone gathered there but Polly Sorenson, who had gone to bed after losing a Silver Doctor salmon fly, the equivalent of a high-dollar chip had they been playing for money instead of intricately tied feathers.

“I’m always packing,” Smither said. He looked at the surprised faces at the table. “Somebody’s got to protect you assholes from the natives.” Were they all so old they didn’t remember that he’d brought a shotgun last year to hunt pheasants? It was in the eaves.

•   •   •

Stranahan drove the last five miles with the running lights, the mountains bulking in the foredistance, erasing constellations as he drew closer. He wiped the sweat from his palms as the engine ticked down at the trailhead. Ettinger had been brusque on the phone, sketched the details in thirty seconds, the possibility of another killing, the fact that he could beat her to the trailhead by forty minutes and she wanted him there to take note of any vehicle leaving the scene. The shotgun was a precaution. Under no circumstances was he to play hero by trying to detain anyone from driving away. She said she’d meet him there and hung up before Stranahan could tell her that he’d been hiking the trail himself only a few hours before.

He switched on his headlamp and jotted down the plate numbers of the two vehicles in the campground and those at the turnaround, the same Dodge pickup and Volvo wagon that had been there when he had driven out that afternoon. Returning to his rig, he slipped the Beretta over and under from the mutton-lined leather case, jointed the barrels onto the action, and dropped a couple shells into the chambers. He walked up the trail a few hundred yards to the first creek crossing, which consisted of a single log hewn flat on top, and edged back into the trees. He sat down on soft duff under the branches of a spruce, wrapped his hands around the barrels of the shotgun, and listened to the silence settle about him. He was close enough to the trail to get at least a vague impression of face and stature, should anyone pass by in the dark.

The night was chill, and after twenty minutes he started to shiver. He stood up to get his blood moving and heard a faint yelp—a dog? He sat down out of sight of the trail and waited.

And got nervous. Had it been a dog? If it was, it would scent him and investigate, likely as not followed by its master. He tried to think of excuses for being found there. A twisted ankle? No, he was too close to the parking lot. It would be tough to explain his presence, even if he ditched the shotgun. He could retreat farther from the trail, but that meant giving up any chance of seeing the hiker clearly enough to identify him later.

He heard the yelp again. Now he was sure it was a dog. Making up his mind to leave, he took the trail at a trot and arrived at the turnaround five minutes later with a plan. Opening the hood of the Land Cruiser, he used a box-end wrench to loosen the cable nuts on the battery terminals, hefted the battery out, and replaced it with a half-dead battery that he’d been hauling around in the back of the rig, meaning to get it charged up at the Exxon station. He tightened the nuts to secure the cables to the posts of the old battery, covered the good battery with his sleeping bag, and got behind the wheel.

He didn’t wait long. When the flashlight beam bobbed into sight and swept over the vehicles at the trailhead, Sean cranked the ignition without putting his foot on the accelerator. The motor ground away without catching. He tried again—urr, urr, urrrrr—and climbed out to peer under the hood. The skin on his back crawled as the light swept over him from behind, illuminating the engine block.

He turned around, said, “Must have left the dome light on. I keep trying it every hour, trying not to run it down any more than it is. If you could give me a jump I’d be obliged. I’ve been here ’bout half the night.” Falling into the drawl that came so naturally in barbed-wire country.

He tilted his head so that his headlamp flashed on the face of the man who approached him. The face was canyoned with shadows where the light glanced across at right angles. It was a lived-in face, skeptical, the eyes unfriendly slits under a felt Stetson. The man’s cheek muscles flexed, pulling up the corners of a mustache gone to seed, the kind he’d once heard a woman call a “molest-stache.”

“You picked a bad place to run out of juice. A fella could wait here a while, all right. Shit, let me get this pack off my back. And take the goddamned light off my face.” The voice was as hard as the expression.

Sean said, “Sorry,” and watched the man’s back as he walked to the pickup. He was followed by a hound with a triangle silhouette, its deep chest tapering to a belly no thicker than an Irishman’s wallet. The stout, short-barreled bolt gun strapped on one side of the man’s backpack shone dully in the lambency.

Just stay calm, he told himself. Knowing, for reasons he had never understood, that the admonition wasn’t necessary. He had always managed to keep his heart in his chest when the world around him began to spin. As a reaction to potential danger, it wasn’t exactly the same as absence of fear, nor was it courage. Courage, in Stranahan’s book, required an active summoning of will in a situation where the natural response was flight. Sean’s composure was innate and required no summoning. Percy McGill, the retired Boston police detective who had headed investigations for Sean’s grandfather’s law firm, had witnessed the character trait on several occasions. “Most guys”—he’d jabbed a finger at Sean’s chest—“it takes them years on the beat to grow your kind of nerve. But by then they have the experience you don’t. Nerve without experience, that buys a man his tombstone.”

Sean heard the engine start up. The truck idled down, coming to stop a few feet from the Cruiser’s front bumper. The man brushed aside Sean’s offer of help and hooked up the cables. “No offense, but I don’t know you from Adam. I seen a battery explode once. Took a man’s face off, half of it, per’ near. You just turn the key when I gun the engine.”

Where the hell was Ettinger?

Sean turned the key and the engine coughed and caught.

“So who am I thanking?” he said.

The man threw the cables into the back of the pickup and stood by the open driver’s side door, the dog at his feet.

“I gotta hit it,” he said. “My hound here, he took after a lion and I spent half the goddamn night running him down, trying to get to him before a wolf did. I caught up to him down at the crick, I come this close to putting a bullet in his head. And this dog, this is a dog never done a wrong thing in his life before.”

Sean reached down to pat the dog’s head. His arm was trapped in a vise grip halfway through the movement.

“Son, don’t you never put your hand to a lion hound lest you have a mind to lose it. Judge here, he’s a Walker dog and got a mild temperament, but if this was my ridgeback, my kill dog, Bear—Bear’d take that hand right off’n you.”

The man whistled the hound into the cab and climbed in behind it.

“I heard a couple shots earlier,” Sean said. He hadn’t, but Ettinger had told him about the 911 call. “Was that you?”

“You’re full of questions, aren’t you? But yeah, I emptied a couple trying to pull Judge off the track.” He touched the brim of his hat. “I hope you learned a lesson tonight,” he said.