Bad Axe County Read online

  “Sorry, no extra boots in your locker. And I didn’t see any, um . . .”

  He meant underclothes. “They’re in my desk drawer.”

  “Didn’t check there. You gonna be OK, boss?”

  “I’m already fine. Thanks.”

  Deputy Yttri was a bodybuilder, thick and tall, a pure Norwegian blond, his hair cut short and spiked with gel, perfect teeth beneath a perfect little mustache. He was single and a gentleman, and behind his back Denise swooned and called him Olaf the Handsome.

  He waited in the hallway until she limped out in the dry uniform, carrying her wet clothes in a hospital sack. Her boots felt soggy and cold. Her nurse, just catching up, was alarmed.

  “Sheriff, I’m sorry, you’re not ready—”

  “I’m fine. Thanks for everything.”

  She waved Yttri forward. “Clausen Meats,” she told him.

  Olaf the Handsome exchanged looks with the nurse and then he appraised her almost tenderly, like she was Sleeping Beauty just come awake, making her weirdly aware of being nude beneath the uniform.

  “I thought you were cleared to go,” he explained. “The thing at Clausen’s was just a routine burglary. Nothing was stolen. They just want a report for the insurance claim. No big deal. I can get it later.”

  Nothing was stolen. She wobbled. He caught her by the elbow. “How about I help you get back in that bed?”

  “How about you just take orders?”

  She found a smile to soften it. Olaf the Handsome smiled back.

  “Whatever you say, boss.”

  “Thanks for everything,” she told the nurse again.

  * * *

  Beyond the outside doors, they had to check their steps to avoid a grubby silver Subaru angling erratically out of the ER bay with its passenger door open. Having apparently dropped someone off, the car spurted on a pair of backfires into visitor parking.

  Yttri’s cruiser was in the other direction. They stopped to watch. A tall and rough-looking young blond woman slammed the driver’s door, rounded the Subaru, and kicked the passenger door shut, then stormed back toward the ER entrance. She blew past them, fuming hoarsely into a cell phone.

  “Irregular heartbeat? Burns on his nut sack? When he’s supposed to be home watching Garthy? And somehow he lost that precious dumbass car of his? You tell me!”

  “New plan,” the sheriff told Yttri. “There’s a girl I need to meet. You find out who she brought here and get Denise to run the plate on that car.”

  As smoothly and calmly as she could manage to move, she followed the woman back inside the hospital.

  27

  The blond young woman had disappeared somewhere, but through the half-open door of a triage room, the sheriff glimpsed the passenger she had delivered. Could she be this lucky? She was looking at a wasted young man wearing dirty jeans, a gray hoodie, and rubber barn boots with a yellow stripe around the top. He sprawled in a wheelchair taking questions from the same ER doctor who had treated her last fall for a thumb out of its socket, an Indian woman, polite and reserved, Dr. Patel.

  “Nah, I did it to my own damn self. I just need some pain meds and I’m outa here.”

  A nurse got in front of Sheriff Kick with a questioning look. The sheriff said, “Crime suspect. Likely high on meth.”

  “OK.” The nurse glanced at her clipboard. “We’ve got Brock Anthony Pabst, twenty-five, no insurance, no permanent address. For occupation I think what he wrote is ‘packs meat’? Complains of irregular heartbeat and a burn in his groin.”

  It could be him. Seeking pain meds, of course. Olaf the Handsome appeared beside her. “Sheriff, a woman named Tianna Ek owns that car. She’s twenty-three. Address on the river in Blackhawk Locks.” He nodded toward the patient. “Denise had his name already. Hospital intake called it in. They live together. They both have priors. You want to hear?”

  “Hang on.”

  “Where are you burned?” Dr. Patel was asking Brock Pabst in her calm and lilting voice.

  “I told you. My freaking nards, lady. It hurts, man, I’m telling you. I need meds.”

  “I’m sorry, I’ve never heard of nards.”

  “I’m in pain here. You don’t speak English?”

  “No better than the queen, I am afraid. What are ‘freaking nards’?”

  While Brock Pabst squirmed irately under the doctor’s placid gaze, the sheriff looked him over more carefully. A beard no better than mildew darkened his face. Where it showed, his skin was gaunt and scabby. Crude tattoos stained his hands and neck. Paranoia bugged his bloodshot eyes. Was this her zombie? The timing was right, the injury was so right it was poetic, and this was the only ER within range . . .

  “I just about had my damn ball sack off burned off.”

  “I see,” said Dr. Patel. “So let’s have a look.”

  “Shit. If you don’t mind, lady, I’ll wait for the doctor.”

  “I am the doctor, Mr. Pabst. Please draw down your pants and your underpants and let me have a look.”

  As she noticed the sheriff, Dr. Patel showed the faintest hint of amusement. Pabst muttered, “Fuck,” as the doctor closed the door.

  “You want to hear the priors now, Sheriff?” asked Yttri.

  “OK, hit me.”

  “His and hers. Ladies first. Tianna Ek, shoplifting, breaking and entering, resisting arrest, and good old child endangerment. And for the gentleman, three DUIs, felony assault, possession of marijuana and methamphetamine with intent to deliver. Also, vehicle theft. Looks like at some point he tried to steal and sell a tractor.”

  “Lovely. Thank you.”

  A toilet flush roared from inside the women’s lavatory and the door banged open. Tianna Ek was six feet tall, with robust and potentially beautiful genes, but self-abuse had made her egg shaped, stick limbed, and ugly, and she was dressed like a twelve-year-old trying to defy her mother, white tube top and white shorts, both grimy. She snapped obliviously along in her flip-flops, then did a double take. Now she saw the cops. She seemed about to run for it. Then some other function of her bad brain kicked in and she headed recklessly toward Sheriff Kick and Yttri, gripping an iPhone and bringing along a gust of menthol cigarettes and intimate body odor.

  “Brock’s OK, right?”

  “You must be Tianna.”

  “It was my night out,” she wheezed. “Then he calls and says it’s no big deal but he needs me to come home and bring him to the ER. I’m, like, if it’s no big deal, why can’t you drive yourself? He goes, ‘I don’t have my car.’ I go, What the hell happened to your car? And then I’m like, You burned what? How did that happen, if you’re supposed be home with Garthy? Asshole won’t tell me. He’ll probably hog the meds too. But he’s OK, Brock’s OK, right?”

  “How about you find us some coffee?” the sheriff suggested to Yttri.

  When her deputy had complied, she looked into the girl’s agitated blue eyes. Her face was dramatically made up, almost like a stage actor’s. Beneath the foundation and blush, one of her cheeks was deeply pocked. The ruby lipstick wasn’t hiding a downwarp in the right corner of her mouth. “Wait!” she blurted. She grabbed the tube top and looked down her cleavage. “Fuck! My smokes!”

  “You’re Tianna Ek?”

  “Uh . . . maybe?”

  She bared eroding teeth in an absent smile that was still saying fuck I lost my smokes. “I didn’t do nothing, I don’t even know what happened, so I don’t have to say my name, right?”

  “You said you were out, Tianna. Anyplace in particular?”

  “Here and there.”

  “Here and There? Is that the name of a tavern I haven’t heard of yet?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But then you’re still out at six thirty in the morning? In hot pants?”

  That pushed Tianna Ek’s eject button and she stormed toward the exit. Following, the sheriff decided this was not the same young woman who had delivered the attacker—Brock Pabst, if it was him—to Coach Beavers’s place in Dog Hollow. T
hat girl was smaller and younger.

  “So where was Brock last night?”

  “Home.”

  “All night? Because it was your night out?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So you live with him? And you two have a child?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How do you know Brock was home all night?”

  She sped up. “You can’t hassle me.”

  The sheriff suddenly felt as tired as she was. It had to be whiplash making her spine feel as stiff as a piece of lumber. Her throbbing arm weighed two hundred pounds.

  “I’m just asking questions.”

  “Brock said, ‘Take me to the ER.’ That’s all I did.”

  The sheriff struggled to keep up. Outside, a maintenance guy threw salt on the pavement. On the highway, a county snowplow barreled along, throwing up a wave of filthy slush. The driver blew his horn two blasts.

  “Get away from me.”

  “You understand that you’re talking to the sheriff, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, right.”

  Tianna Ek paused alongside her garbage-bagged window. She said, “You mean the so-called sheriff.”

  “So-called? Is there something else to call me?”

  The girl’s iPhone chirped. Her thumbs pecked the phone. When she opened the car door something moved on the backseat. A boy toddler sat up beneath the blankets. His mommy shoved the phone into her too-tight shorts. “Twitter?” she answered the sheriff with snotty emphasis. “You really want to know what people call you?” She slammed the door.

  The sheriff watched the Subaru putter feebly through the parking lot, then catch a clean burst of gas and squirt onto the highway. Yttri had found her with coffee. She fought a dizzy spell, came back to focus.

  “Clausen Meats,” she reminded him.

  28

  No actual Clausens were on-site at Clausen Meats, just the clerk who discovered the break-in, plus a manager who had come in early to deal with it. The sheriff felt relieved. She detested Coach Pinky Clausen, his son, Scotty Clausen, and all things Clausen. She wouldn’t even eat Clausen meat. She didn’t know them really. Hearing stories from Harley was enough.

  The manager, a middle-aged woman named Brenda Nordstrom, led her and Yttri inside the retail area. Instantly they were crowded by shelves of jams and mustards, racks of packaged beef jerky, coolers of cheese and butchered meats. Polka music played. At the rear of the store, behind a glass half wall for everybody’s viewing pleasure, three butchers in bloody white jackets hacked and sawed meat. She recognized Ron Yanske, son of a neighbor on Pederson Road. He saluted her with a gore-smeared glove.

  “So,” began Brenda Nordstrom, “aside from the broken front-door glass, which you saw, this is where the damage is.”

  She pointed out a few minor divots in the stainless steel around the freezer door, which locked with a keypad.

  “And that’s it. If you come into the office, we can look at the security footage.”

  Right away the sheriff saw that the Clausen Meats burglar was not same guy who had hit her with the bat. He was not Brock Pabst, if Pabst was the one. Sure, a hoodie, but this guy was bigger, with none of the meth head in his body language. He rushed in indecisively, more like a sober person committing a crime without a lot of experience. After he put the blunt end of an ax through the front door, he carried a large blue duffel bag to the freezer door. He stood there a few long seconds. Something wasn’t right. Then he dropped the bag and hurried out.

  “That bag looks heavy,” Yttri said.

  The sheriff asked Brenda Nordstrom, “Your alarm system was on?”

  “No. We always turn it off with a storm coming because thunder and lightning tends to trigger it. I’m guessing that this gentleman knew that. Maybe he’s worked for us in the past, or he knows someone who did.”

  Now on the computer screen the burglar returned with a pry bar that did him no good on the door, which was flush to the wall. Thwarted, he began to panic. With the elbow of his sweatshirt he tried to rub away the pry-bar marks he had left in the steel. “Brand-new freezer,” Brenda Nordstrom remarked. “Up until two years ago we had old-school meat lockers that we rented out to anybody. Too much wasted energy. Too much liability, some of the weird stuff people were keeping in here.”

  Of course he couldn’t make the marks go away. He hoisted his bag, staggered as it slung too far around his back, and then hurried off the screen. “Wait for it,” said Brenda Nordstrom. Ten seconds later, he came back in a third time, now without the bag. He lurched around the retail space, finally grabbed a handful of beef sticks from a display on the counter, and then he was gone.

  “We didn’t even notice those were missing until we looked at the recording,” said Clausen’s manager. “All that work for a half dozen beef sticks. Hard times, I guess. The economy and whatnot. I kind of feel sorry for the guy, leaving with a snack when what he wanted was a side of beef. But we do need to report to our insurance carrier.”

  The sheriff felt Olaf the Handsome looking at her. She met his fathomless gray eyes, followed them. Through the glass half wall where the butchers worked, meat was everywhere, from sides to cuts. A tub of turkey carcasses sat right under the window. And the door in and out was a two-way swinger with heavy rubber flaps, no lock of any kind.

  The sheriff asked, “Is it cold in there?”

  “Oh, yes. State code is thirty-six degrees.”

  She fought through a shiver. “Will they get all that meat processed and packed by the end of the day?”

  “Oh, gosh, no. They couldn’t. They don’t need to. It’ll keep.”

  “So there was meat in there this morning? When this happened?”

  The manager realized what she was saying. “Oh. Gosh. Always. So why didn’t he take some? Well, that is really strange, then, isn’t it?”

  * * *

  When they were back on the highway and heading for Farmstead, Olaf the Handsome said to her, “You’re right. He wasn’t stealing meat. You want me to follow up?”

  “I’ll let you know.”

  He looked across at her and smiled. He drove his Tahoe clocked at fifty-five. The highway was clear of snow and ice already, glowingly black. His tires hissed through meltwater. The sun-struck icy landscape made her brain hurt. She felt both hot and cold at the same time, and had to close her eyes.

  The text tone on the new phone startled her awake: Can you come home? The kids and I need to see you.

  29

  Angus Beavers shivered in a bright early sun that he wished would stop shining on the rattling, exhaust-spewing Beavers Salvage truck.

  It was a sight. It was all colors, a Frankenstein concoction of different body parts with its box made of barn planks bolted to angle irons, its open-air back window rimmed with teeth of broken glass, its coulee-trash cargo rolling and skidding on curves: the bucketless frame of a wheelbarrow, the blade of an Amish plow, the rusty iron gizzard of a thresher—and the inside-out blue gear bag with a girl’s thawing body inside.

  Hoping to stay mostly out of sight after the disaster at Clausen Meats, Angus had taken the long, long, long way home. But on this final stretch, to get around the tower of rock that was Battle Bluff, he had to come down the Great River Road through De Soto and Ferryville and back into Bad Axe County on County B, and take that to Lost Hollow Road.

  How did he mess up so badly? Clausen Meats had remodeled, put a new freezer in, stopped renting closet-size meat lockers like the old days. Scotty Clausen didn’t keep stuff there anymore. He hadn’t known that.

  Now he could feel another mistake coming as he piloted the scrap truck between the melting snow-clung bluffs and the long funnels of brown water pouring through the gaps in the rolling dam at Blackhawk Locks. Ahead: a stoppage on the highway, orange cones out, the cherries on a sheriff’s cruiser throwing pale sparks in the overwhelming sunlight. There was traffic behind him. Angus had no place to turn around.

  The highway had been shrunk to one lane to make room for something
that was happening at the Pool 9 fishing pier, where a barge fifty yards offshore supported a crane that was dropping a cable into the current. A smaller shore-side crane had just backed off a flatbed truck. Angus came close enough to see who was directing traffic. He jerked his foot off the gas. It was Chief Deputy Boog Lund. His Tahoe cruiser blocked the southbound lane.

  The Beavers Salvage truck decelerated sharply, crap skidding in the box. A heavy horn blew, a semi in his mirror, just about crushing him. At his window, southbound traffic, released by Lund’s command, accelerated into the bottleneck. Angus was stuck.

  Then Boog Lund saw the truck. Angus looked away. A diver’s head broke the surface, his fist in a neoprene glove giving a signal: We are hooked up. The smaller crane rooted along the downstream bank, getting into position. This was how they pulled out a vehicle.

  “Well, heck-all-golly, Hotshot.”

  Lund was at his window. Angus couldn’t inhale.

  “Ain’t it baseball season? You’re supposed to be where, Florida?”

  “My dad’s sick.”

  “Your dad’s been sick awhile, Hotshot. You might say all his life.”

  Lund walked around the truck, looking in the box. Angus ground his teeth, watching in his dirty mirrors. Gibbs’s chief crony came back to the window.

  “How about I see your driver’s license and vehicle registration?”

  “I don’t—I was just—my dad’s sick—”

  “You hear OK?”

  “I don’t have a—I’m not sure the truck’s actually . . .”

  “Pull over.”

  Lund lumbered into his stream of southbound traffic and stopped it so Angus could pull through the bottleneck across the highway and into the little gravel turnout beside the truck that brought the crane. He made hand motions: Stay there. After he got traffic streaming past himself again, he stood at his car door talking on the radio, looking over at Angus, the Beavers Salvage truck, the gear bag in the box, the whole bad picture.