Jack walked around the carcass. The pig had died sometime during the winter, but Dolph had only just discovered it deep in the undergrowth of Half Pea Hollow. Not much was left: most of the bones, some leathery strips of skin, and of course, the massive skull. The rest had been processed by nature’s garbage disposals.
“Been dead about a while,” Dolph said.
“Not enough left to tell what killed it,” Bronwyn observed.
“Look closer,” Dolph said. “Check out the skull.”
Jack knelt and turned the huge cranium. There was a round hole, obviously from a bullet. “Somebody shot it in the head.”
“Yeah, but that’s not the interesting part. Look closer.”
Jack gave him an annoyed look, then bent close to the skull. “We’re not in a biology lab. You could just tell me.”
“Where’s the fun in that?” Dolph said. He caught Bronwyn’s amusement, and winked.
“Hell, I can see it from here,” Max said. “There’s new bone tissue around the edge of the hole.”
“It had started to heal?” Jack said.
“Bingo,” said Dolph.
“So somebody shot it in the head and it didn’t die?” Jack asked.
“At least not right away,” Max said.
“At least it can’t hurt anyone else,” Jack said. He turned to face his team. “Thank you, folks, for staying so motivated on this. I’ll sleep easier, knowing that this monster, at least, is gone.”
“Not exactly a win for WHOMP,” Bronwyn said.
“Not a loss, either,” Max said. “It’s a draw, like Vietnam.”
“What do you know about Vietnam?” Dolph said sharply.
“Hey, I wasn’t trying to offend anyone. Sorry.”
“Don’t make jokes about what you don’t know.”
“Wonder where it came from originally?” Bronwyn said, trying to change the subject. As a veteran of the Gulf War, she knew that nothing good came from bringing up military conflicts. “I mean, it can’t just have magically appeared, can it? Obviously it crossed paths with someone else.”
Jack turned to Bronwyn. By now he understood that she, like Bliss, carried pure Tufa blood, along with everything that implied. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I still think that a pig like this couldn’t grow that large in the wild. But anything’s possible.”
“It didn’t start out in the wild,” Max said. “See its bottom incisors? The way they’re spread out? You only see that in pigs raised domestically.”
“He’s right,” Dolph said. He tossed something small through the air to Jack. “Found this with the bones.”
Jack caught it and looked at it. The implications ran through his mind like lightning. He pocketed it and said, “Well, that helps.”
* * *
Jack rang the doorbell at the old farm. The house was run-down, in need of both a new roof and a paint job. In that way, it looked like many other farms trying to eke out a living in the mountains, using the few nearby acres of relatively flat land to grow corn, squash, or beans. There was an equally decrepit barn, with a small corral and a pen for pigs. Only one pig, small and mottled, nosed around in it.
Heavy steps approached, and then the inner door opened. A bearded, bleary-eyed man of around fifty looked out through the screen. He wore old coveralls and heavy boots. He looked at Jack, and at Trooper Alvin Darwin standing beside his car. “Yeah?”
“Mr. Dale Bolander?”
“Who’re you?”
“I’m Jack Cates, with the state wildlife office. I’d like to talk to you about Bruce.”
“Who is it?” a woman’s voice called.
“Vacuum cleaner salesman,” the man answered.
Jack’s voice turned hard. “This is official law enforcement business, Mrs. Bolander,” he said, loud enough for the woman to hear. “I’d like to ask you and your husband some questions.”
“She don’t know nothing,” the man said. “And I don’t know no one named Bruce.” He started to shut the door.
“Then I’ll have my friend back there go round us up a warrant.” He looked back at Darwin, who touched his hat to show he’d heard everything. “Is that what you want?”
The man opened the door again, but didn’t invite Jack inside. Instead, still speaking through the screen, he said, “So what makes you think I know this ‘Bruce’?”
Jack held up the ear tag Dolph found with the hog’s remains. An identification number was stamped into it above a bar code, and the word BRUCE had been written on a piece of duct tape on the other side. “Apparently Bruce is running around with your address on his ear.”
He saw the fear in the big man’s eyes. “I don’t know—”
“Look, we know you raised him, and we know you must’ve sold him. How big was Bruce when you did that?”
He looked down, scratched under his beard, and said, “Right at a thousand pounds.”
Jack nodded. “And who did you sell him to?”
“That fella over at Fast Creek Farms. Runs them, what do you call ’em, pickled hunts?”
“Canned hunts.”
“Yeah, that’s it.”
“You ever been there?”
“Naw, I can’t afford that fancy shit. I just sold the man a pig.”
Jack asked a few more questions, but he already had the information he needed. He walked back to Darwin’s car. “You get what you need?” the trooper asked him.
“Yep. Got another stop to make. You up for it?”
“Hell, you couldn’t keep me away with a rabid polecat,” Darwin said.
* * *
“It’s all legal,” Freddy Bourgeois said with a smile so smug, it took all Jack’s self-control not to punch it through the back of his head. “I’ve got all the paperwork on file. I’ll get my lawyers to send you copies if it’ll help you sleep better.”
“It’s not legal when one of your animals gets out and kills people,” Darwin said.
The three men stood on the porch of Bourgeois’s beautiful ranch house that looked out over his immaculate lawn. Flower beds marked the corners of the long drive, and a mailbox in the shape of cartoon revolver stood watch. Two enormous pickup trucks, each recently washed and shining, were parked near the house. The view, from halfway up the slope of a mountain, was spectacular. Like Bruce’s former owner, Bourgeois had not invited Jack inside.
“That’s not possible,” Bourgeois said. “You’ve got the wrong hog.”
“How do you figure that?” Jack said.
“Well, the hog I bought from ole Dale was killed before any of those attacks.”
“Yeah? When?”
“Oh, last year sometime. I’d have to look it up.”
“I’d appreciate it if you’d do that,” Darwin said.
“Who killed it?” Jack asked.
“A twelve-year-old boy from Cookeville. Birthday present from his daddy. It shoulda been in all the papers, but the boy got all upset afterwards, and the daddy wouldn’t let me publicize it. He didn’t even want the meat. But word got around; when that kind of thing happens, it always does. I sorta count on it,” he added with a chuckle.
“What did you do with it, then, after it was killed?”
“We just buried it.”
“You didn’t have it butchered?” Darwin asked.
He laughed as smugly as he smiled. “Good Lord knows I got enough pork in the freezer to do me till doomsday.”
“Show us,” Jack said.
“Show you my freezer?”
“No, show us where you buried it.”
He gestured down at his polo shirt and pressed khakis. “Mr. Cates, Officer Darwin, I ain’t dressed to go traipsing around the woods today. I got clients coming, and—”
“Show us, or we’ll come back with a warrant, and we’ll make a bigger mess than you, or your lawyers, probably want,” Darwin said, and imitated his smug smile.
“Is that a threat, Officer? You’re standing on my porch, threatenin’ me?”
Jack recalled the cave where he’d recovered Adam Procure’s remains. He’d had about enough of this smug bastard, and said, “Mr. Bourgeois, for the slightest provocation, I’d beat you senseless on your porch.”
“And I won’t see a thing,” Darwin added.
Bourgeois saw that they meant it. “Excuse me while I get some boots on, then.”
“You do that.”
Bourgeois had them climb into one of the big trucks. He drove them out to the spot where the hog was buried, at the far edge of his property, behind a stand of pine trees and near the perimeter fence. They startled a herd of “wild” pigs on the way, scattering them from the rutted path.
“How many pigs have you got?” Jack asked.
“Not sure. Changes depending on how many hunts we have.”
“Any ever get out?”
“Of course not,” he said with the diffidence of a practiced liar.
The burial site looked legitimate; the ground had clearly been dug up and refilled in a size appropriate for a pig as large as the one they’d found. They got out and looked around.
“Why’d you bury it way out here?” Darwin asked.
“This is where that boy killed it. It’s too big to drag to my dump or anything, and I didn’t want it to attract coyotes or bears.”
“What did he use?” Jack said.
“The boy that killed it? One of them Smith and Wessons with a laser sight on it.”
“A handgun? How many times did he hit it?”
“Nine or ten.”
Jack’s rage must’ve shown on his face, because Bourgeois backed up. “Hey, now, he was just a kid, can’t blame him if he ain’t much of a marksman.”
“And there was nobody with him?” Darwin asked.
“Sure, his pappy, a guide—”
“Not you?”
“I don’t generally go out on the hunts.”
“Why didn’t someone finish the damn thing off?” Jack demanded.
“The pappy wanted the boy to do it.”
“So you let that pig run around hurt and bleeding for how long, exactly?”
“A few hours. Like I said, I wasn’t here.”
Jack walked around the grave, then stopped. “What happened over here?”
Bourgeois and Darwin joined him. “I don’t know. It looks like—”
“I know what it looks like. Do you have a backhoe?”
“Yes, why?”
“We’re going to open this grave.”
“What, now?”
“Yes, now. Either you do it, or we do it. And we’ll be a lot messier than you, and it’ll take us a long, long time.”
It took the better part of the morning to get the backhoe out to the location and then dig up the grave. Jack wasn’t surprised at what he found: an empty hole. But clearly something had been buried there once, even if it wasn’t there now.
“Well, if that don’t beat all,” Bourgeois said as he climbed out of the backhoe cab. He seemed genuinely puzzled. “Where the hell is it?”
Jack had spotted the disturbed dirt at the back of the grave, where earth had been pushed aside before falling back into a secondary hole. That had completed the puzzle: the giant pig had not been dead after all when they buried it, only stunned, wounded, and weakened. And after catching its breath, it dug itself out and escaped.
Bourgeois and two of his workers looked on in dumb surprise. “So you assholes buried it alive,” Darwin said.
Bourgeois looked up. “There’s no need for that sort of language.”
“And it got loose, despite your state-of-the-art technology,” Jack said, rattling the loose fence. “And two people died.”
“I don’t know what you—”
“You might want to get them lawyers you’re so fond of mentioning on the phone,” Darwin said. “I expect they’ve got some billable hours in their future.”
The smugness finally drained from Bourgeois’s face, which didn’t satisfy Jack nearly so much as putting his fist in the middle of it would have. But he’d settle for it.
* * *
“Oh my God, Jack, that’s awful,” Bliss said as she snuggled against him. They were in his small, sparse bedroom this time, and he’d just told her about the events at the hunting farm. When he’d opened his front door and seen her standing there, he found he suddenly wanted to do something other than talk. And so did she.
“Happens more and more,” he said. “Somebody puts up a fence, stocks their land with a bunch of game, and charges people to come in and hunt it. Some even guarantee results. It’s not illegal, but…”
“That’s not hunting,” Bliss said. “It’s just killing.”
“I agree.”
“What will happen to him?”
“Some sort of fine, unless they decide to charge him with being an accessory to those two kids’ deaths. But given how lawyered-up he claims to be, probably just a slap on the wrist.”
“I’m sorry. After all the work and time you’ve put in, I know that must be a disappointment.”
“More people get away than get caught—that’s in the nature of the job.”
“And yet you keep doing it.”
“Somebody has to.”
“It doesn’t have to be you.”
He turned and looked at her. She was so beautiful to him at the moment, all words stuck in his throat. He just wanted to look at her, to drink in her hair and her lips and the little crow’s-feet at the corners of her eyes.
“At least,” she continued, “you and Alvin seemed to have reached a truce.”
“I understand him better now that I know … some of the things I know.” He kissed her and said, “I’m tired of shoptalk.”
“What would you like to talk about, then?”
“I’m really tired of talk, period.”
This time she kissed him, and pulled him on top of her. And they didn’t talk again for quite a while.
* * *
After Jack fell asleep, Bliss lay awake staring at the ceiling. The wild hog was dead; it turned out to be a mere animal after all. And yet, what had prompted it to dig itself out of its grave and come all the way to Half Pea Hollow in the first place? Instinct? Or the urgings of a certain six-fingered haint searching for a way to cause still more trouble for the people who’d celebrated his passing?
If Mandalay couldn’t say, then there was certainly no way for Bliss to tell. She hoped it was exactly as Jack said it was, and that the discovery of its carcass signaled the end of the story. But what if it wasn’t?
They could only wait. And watch.
* * *
Janet lay next to Ginny as well. They’d grown up this way, snuggling into each other’s bed since they were children. Janet blew softly on a harmonica as Ginny expertly rolled a joint.
“Are you blowing the blues for Piggly-Wiggly?” Ginny asked after she licked the paper.
“No,” Janet said, and tapped the harmonica on her palm. “I wrote his obituary for the Raven’s Caw. He can rest in peace now.”
“Then what is it?” She lit the joint, took a drag, then said, “You’re not still obsessing over that night, are you?”
“How can I not? The night winds whispered to me, Ginny. In an actual voice. And then I saw the world like Mandalay does.”
“That only happened because Mandalay was there.” She handed the joint to Janet.
“How do you know?”
“Has it happened again?”
Janet tucked the end of the joint into the far left hole and drew in her breath. It made a D note. She held it for a moment, then let it out, a faint C note accompanying the smoke. “Well … no.”
“There you go. You got a special gift that night, Janet, but it was a onetime thing. Accept it and move the fuck on.”
Janet turned to look at her with mock outrage. “‘Move the fuck on’? That’s your advice.”
“Best advice you’ll ever get,” Ginny said smugly.
Janet put the joint in the ashtray on her nightstand, then jumped on Ginny and began tickling her. They both screamed and laughed until they fell off the bed, and were still laughing when Janet’s mother stuck her head in to ask what all the racket was about, and why they were burning sage again.
* * *
Renny Procure—she’d had no trouble getting the marriage annulled—stood at the foot of Duncan’s grave. It was in the small Gowen plot, behind a weed-choked wrought iron fence at the end of a short trail behind his grandparents’ house.
She still wore a sling, although the physical therapy had restored almost all her movement in her arm. Her belly was now huge, and she was due in less than a month.
“This would’ve been our wedding day, if I hadn’t chickened out that night,” she said to the grave. “Right about now, I would’ve been lumbering my fat ass down the aisle. You’d have been waiting for me in a cheap rented tux, with my brother as your best man. Oh, wait. You’d already killed him by the time you proposed.”
She didn’t cry. She had no tears left. And even her rage had muted to a kind of constant noise in the back of her mind. She walked around the grave and kicked at the new marble headstone. “I just wanted you to know that your son will never even know your name. As soon as he’s born, I’m moving to Asheville. Yeah, I know all about what happens to Tufa who leave, but I’m willing to take that chance, for his sake. I don’t want him hearing stories about how funny and sweet and kind you were. I don’t want his friends telling him about how their parents said you died trying to save me, and him. Because none of that balances out what you did.”
She kicked the headstone harder, and winced at the pain in her foot. The wind began to blow through the trees, and her eyes scanned the shadows, looking for a human shape. But she saw nothing.
“By the way, I heard that Miss Azure saw your haint being chased by the ghost of that giant pig. I hope that’s true. I hope it’s true, and that the pig never catches you, just chases you until fucking doomsday. Because that’s what you deserve, you son of a bitch.”
She spat on the grave, then walked back down the trail to her car.