Bad Axe County Read online

  “But why are we here?”

  “Because I need to talk to them.”

  “Why?”

  The boys chimed in. “Are they bad? Are you going to put handcuffs on them?”

  “I just need to ask a few questions. And speaking of questions, does anybody know why the old man never flushes his toilet?”

  “Why? Why? Why, Mommy?”

  “He just scares the poop out of it.”

  A cushion of giddiness enveloped her children. She enhanced it with a box of Cheddar-flavored Goldfish, put Opie in charge of that, and stuck the Dumbo DVD in the overhead player. She cracked the front-seat windows and put the child locks down. They would be OK. She was only here to talk. She would retreat from the first sign of danger. She had promised herself, promised Harley in her heart. But she touched the .38 in her jacket pocket as she shut the door.

  No one had appeared to greet her yet, not even a dog. She crossed the rust-stained mush of the road and began her wary approach toward the house. It had shed all of its paint and half of its shingles. Cardboard and blankets replaced broken window glass. The chimney had toppled. Heavy smoke spewed from a stovepipe punched through a sidewall. Cinder blocks served as steps to a porch that had buckled like a roller coaster. The sheriff glanced back—they were fine—before she climbed the cinder blocks and knocked.

  No answer. The door was unlocked. She pushed it open, took a gust of foul hot air, and faced catastrophic clutter—hoarding, nest fouling, complete breakdown.

  “Is anyone in here? Is everyone all right?”

  She stepped back to the porch, wanting better air, looking for signs of life in the junkyard. She saw only junk and went back to the doorway.

  “Is everybody OK in here?”

  She was overheated suddenly. Her lungs felt clogged. She widened the door, drew the .38, and stepped in. The tide of squalor parted three ways, one for access from a recliner to a flat-screen TV, another from the recliner to an overloaded woodstove, a cast-iron monster that cranked out oppressive heat. Any day now, she thought, the closest VFD would be hosing down a pile of smoking rubble. A third path led to a narrow hallway.

  “Does someone need help?”

  In the hallway, she opened a door. Facedown on the bed sprawled a girl in twisted, too-tight pajamas. One leg hung off the bed. One arm was bent beneath her torso. She looked like a smaller girl had been hurled down from the sky and now she lay there in this heat, bloating inside the pajamas. But she was breathing. Her back just barely rose and fell. Brandy, Yttri had said. Brandy Beavers was asleep.

  She retreated, opened the door to the next room. On the bed, curled, she saw hairless skin and bones in a diaper. This was Lyman Beavers—alive too, breath rasping—but he looked injured. Some kind of makeshift bandage for his head had been made from a stocking cap and napkins. She rolled him gently. His emaciated arm unfolded awkwardly and heavily from beneath him—she leaned to hear what he was muttering—and he lashed out, a dim wide flash as she jerked back from what looked like a machete. The heavy knife, jagged with corrosion, carried his arm back to the bed. He lay still, gasping. He had just missed her.

  From a safe distance in a dim corner of the room, she said, “This is Sheriff Kick, Mr. Beavers. Push that knife onto the floor.” Slowly, with great effort, he did. One eye was swollen shut, but the other regarded her acutely through a pinprick black pupil. His dry lips split: “Dairy Queen.”

  “That’s me.”

  “I thought you were gonna be the booger.”

  “I see.”

  But she didn’t. The booger? Booger farmer? Boog Lund?

  “It turns out the daughter gave away all my guns.”

  “I see.”

  “To the same punk boyfriend that’s been eating my pills. She does whatever this fella says, I guess. He sold my guns for more drugs. So the boy says, Angus.”

  “Mr. Beavers, what happened here?”

  “Hell if I know. Ask the boy.”

  “Where is your boy?”

  “Hell if I know.”

  After a struggle he managed to sit up on the side of the bed. The old mattress nearly poured him off, but he got his feet planted and grabbed the bedclothes and hung on. He processed the challenge of verticality for a long moment, working his whiskery gullet and blinking in her direction like a nestling ready to be fed. “The boy said no more today, but I do think I’ll have me a couple more of just them half pills.” He pointed to a dresser top like it was a mile away. There was a pill bottle on it. “You mind to make the reach?”

  Her phone jumped in her pocket: Yttri.

  She headed for the porch to take the call, and hit the open air with a gasp. “What’s up?”

  “The trout aren’t biting.”

  “What?”

  “I’m on Faulkner’s farm. There are two secondary barns way back in here, at the end of a tractor road. I’ve never seen them from the river.”

  She closed the front door and came down the cinder-block steps. She could see the kids were still fine in the van. The voice of Olaf the Handsome felt good in her ear.

  “Sure, they have illegal parties at the main barn on the property. The evidence from last night is all over the place. It looks like Peter’s Potties out of Zion even catered a shitpot for the event and they haven’t picked it up yet. But these barns back here are another reason that Gibbs and the Ease Inn crowd have been keeping Faulkner’s taxes paid up.”

  She took a deep breath of faintly rusty air.

  “Go ahead.”

  “One barn is full of heavy equipment, farm stuff and otherwise, all brand-new. The other barn is crammed with building materials. I’m looking in the window at spools of copper wire worth a bundle. It’s gotta all be stolen. There are ruts back here made by big trucks. Somebody’s been shipping this stuff in and out.”

  “OK.”

  From the scramble of her thoughts, she tried to assemble a sensible, sherifflike directive. Yttri beat her to it.

  “How about I see if I can get into the barn with the equipment and get some serial numbers? Then we can find out if this stuff is really stolen. If it is, we’ll get a warrant.”

  “OK. Yeah. Sure.” She caught him before he hung up. “Hey, Olaf?” She had surprised herself, calling him Olaf. Him too, it seemed.

  “Yes . . . Heidi?”

  “Any chance that Angus Beavers isn’t playing baseball anymore?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What kind of kid was he?”

  “I remember quiet,” Yttri said. “Big kid, good player, really, really quiet. Um . . . so is everything OK with you? You’re still at home, taking it easy?”

  “Yeah. Sure.”

  “You get the Walt Beavers pictures?”

  “Got ’em. Thanks.”

  She dropped the phone back into her pocket. She gazed over Beavers Salvage. The beast that ate a hundred family farms—that’s what she was looking at. But the longer she looked, the less monolithic the view became. Individual bits of wreckage began to stand out. Amid it all, a hundred yards out, breaking visually from a stack of crushed cars behind it, there was Brock Pabst’s GTO.

  * * *

  The girl was still facedown on the bed. She was hot to the touch. She stiffened.

  “Brandy, this is Sheriff Heidi Kick. I need to talk to you.”

  “I didn’t do nothing,” she muttered into her arm. “What’d I do?”

  “Brock Pabst told me you helped him beat up your uncle. Then he said someone stole his car. But I see it outside. You want to tell me what really happened?”

  “I didn’t do nothing.”

  “Your uncle Walt is badly hurt. He might die. That would be murder. After that, Brock crashed his car into a sheriff’s car and knocked it into the river. That’s attempted murder of an officer. This is serious, Brandy. I know you were involved, but I don’t think any of it was your idea. You need to tell me what happened.”

  Her body stiffened even more. Then she burst. “Tianna. That bitch. She
started it.”

  “Started what?”

  “She’s such a bitch to Brock. He just needs to have some fun now and then. She takes all his money too. For their kid supposedly. Then she parties. Like he’s supposed to stay home.”

  “I see. So because of Tianna, you and Brock went to a party last night? Is that right? In Faulkner’s barn?”

  The sheriff took the girl’s hot silence as a yes.

  “Entry was a hundred bucks. That’s a lot of money to party with a bunch of old men. Doesn’t sound like fun to me. Or did Brock take you there to make money?”

  Another silent yes. So they were another pair—Brock Pabst and Brandy Beavers—like the pair from the library.

  “Do you remember, at the party, was there a girl about your age with long black hair, wearing boots and a skirt?”

  Silent yes again.

  “Do you know who she left the party with?”

  “I saw her get into a van.”

  A van. Good. “A dark blue van?”

  “A white one.”

  Here was news. The girl had left with someone else. It was time to go through all the pictures that Buddy Smithback took, looking for a white van. The sheriff looped back.

  “Did you know that Brock went to your uncle’s house to hurt him?” She waited. “When you don’t answer me, Brandy, I’m thinking you mean yes.”

  “No!”

  “That’s good. I wouldn’t think so. Brock said your uncle was not supposed to talk about something. Do you know what that was?”

  “No!”

  “Would you look at something for me?”

  The girl withdrew the arm that blocked her face. She had cried beneath it. The sheriff scrolled and then extended her phone, showing the photograph of the blue butterfly barrette and the mustard crock on her uncle Walt’s shelf. The girl sat up to see better.

  “Is that your barrette? Or could it belong to someone you know?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Do you know what’s in the mustard crock?”

  “Mustard?”

  “OK, do you see the calendar page? Do you recognize that date? I guess you would have been twelve. There was a Rattlers game. They lost badly.”

  The girl slumped. “No.”

  The sheriff scrolled back and zoomed in on the barrette. “Do you have any idea why your uncle Walt would have that on his shelf?”

  She shook her head. All of this was beyond her.

  “It looks like you and your dad both got hurt. Can you tell me who did that?”

  Fear welled in her eyes. “No.”

  “You don’t know? Or you can’t tell me?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The sheriff gave Brandy Beavers some space and returned to her dad’s room, wanting to ask the same questions of him. But the air felt different, fresher. The bed was empty. The room had a door to the outside. Beyond was a million tons of junk, and into it somewhere Lyman Beavers had disappeared.

  As she emerged a second time from the house, her eyes went straight to the Kick family minivan: three little faces, watching with wide eyes as a man who was not Lyman Beavers, who was young and healthy, hurried away across the road. She cut him off heading for the junkyard.

  “And you must be Angus.”

  The young man stared at her through deep fatigue. His forehead was white, as was the imprint of sunglasses on his sun-scorched face, the same look Harley rocked April through October. This was Angus Beavers.

  “What were you doing at my car?” she asked.

  “I said hello.”

  “What?”

  She glanced back. The doors were locked. The kids gawked, ripped from Dumbo. But they were fine. She returned her attention to Angus Beavers. He was looking up. The sky had clouded. A new breeze squeaked the junk behind him. His hands drew into anxious fists.

  “You’re the new sheriff. Right?”

  She glanced back at the van. How would he know that? Had he spoken to the kids? Had his dad found him and told him? She gave herself a moment to see him. Angus Beavers looked fidgety and exhausted. He looked haunted.

  “When exactly did you come back to the Bad Axe?”

  Before he could answer, she heard a smack and shriek. Again she turned to look at the Kickmobile. Dylan had broken the tension by smashing a Goldfish against the glass. Taylor found it hilarious. Another orange explosion. Opie scolded both of them. Dylan wiped his orange hand in her hair. His big sister lost it, began to slap.

  “You stay here,” she ordered Angus Beavers. “You stay right here.”

  But by the time she had restored order in the Kickmobile, Angus Beavers, like his dad, had vanished into the junkyard.

  38

  So that Harley wouldn’t notice she had burned half a tank of gas, so that he wouldn’t notice the mud from Lost Hollow Road, so that he wouldn’t ask where she had gone with the kids and bring up her list of her dad’s old farmhands again . . .

  She decided to fill the tank and wash the van. This was small-town life in a nutshell, she noted in grim bemusement as she turned into the Ease Inn and coasted between the gas pumps. Your neighbor held illegal gun shows and took graft and peddled tits and ass and pulled bomb threats and fenced stolen property and implied bad shit about your husband—but unless you wanted to drive twenty miles out of your way, you still had to buy your gas and your car wash from Ladonna Weeks.

  Actually it was Ladonna’s brother, Dermit, flinging salt at the entry to the tavern, who watched her park the mud-spattered Kickmobile and pop her gas flap. This was motherhood in a small town too. Her kids had perked up—the truck stop, yay!—squawking from the backseat could they please-please-please go inside the mini-mart and get corn dogs and dip them in barbecue sauce and play the deer-hunting video game?

  Her head throbbed as she ran gas. Why again did she think it so great to raise children here? She pushed YES for car wash.

  “OK,” she said into the van. “I’m giving Opie five dollars. I’m going to wash the van, and then I’m coming to get you.”

  She idled in line for the car wash, scrolling through the photos of heavy equipment that Olaf the Handsome had attached to a text. She zeroed in on the serial-number tag from a Caterpillar front-end loader. She had worked a stolen-tractor case last year, a new Kubota that had disappeared from John Franklin’s farm in Buck Grove Township, and she still had hotline contacts at the National Insurance Crime Bureau and the National Equipment Register. A minute later, Dave from the NICB was telling her that the front-end loader had been reported stolen from a U.S. Silica equipment yard in Williston, North Dakota, only three days ago.

  “Where are you calling from again, Sheriff?”

  “Bad Axe County, Wisconsin.”

  “And you’ve recovered the property?”

  “Not yet. We know where it is.”

  “I’m looking at a map,” Dave said, tapping keys. “You’re on U.S. Highway 14.”

  “It passes through us, yes.”

  “That’s the route folks are taking from Chicago and beyond out to the fracking fields when they want to stay off the interstate. They take U.S. 14 all the way to Pierre and then sneak north through the Indian reservation, or vice versa. All kinds of contraband move along there. Kind of a Silk Road, you might say. You’ve got a truck stop?”

  “I’m at it right now.”

  “Right. I’m seeing it. The Ease Inn. Proprietors Dermit and Ladonna Weeks. Rhubarb pie is on special in the restaurant today. Diesel is $2.45 a gallon. Happy hour is three to six, half-price rail drinks and domestic beers, free popcorn, and today’s discounted appetizer is deep-fried cheese curds with a choice of horseradish, barbecue, or nacho cheese dipping sauce.”

  “You nailed it, Dave. You might as well be here.”

  “You guys dip cheese in cheese sauce?”

  “Only deep-fried cheese.”

  “Sure. That makes sense.”

  She had been watching a tractor-trailer pull past the diesel pumps and into the rest area
. The trailer was nondescript and sooty. The tractor was red, with lettering too small to read from afar. It had tricked-out exhaust stacks and a black silhouette naked lady decal on the sleeper cab. The driver hitched down and went inside the tavern.

  “So, Dave?”

  “Yes?”

  “Highway 14. You said all types of contraband . . . including human?”

  He paused. Then he was tapping again. “I only track equipment, Sheriff. But if you’ve got an issue with that kind of trafficking, let me give you a number.”

  * * *

  When the Kickmobile was washed, she parked it in front of the mini-mart. Goddamn it, Ladonna was in there, talking to the cashier. As she left the van she caught herself thinking that the girl behind the mini-mart register, Holly Hefty, a recent high school graduate, pretty and smart, ought to be somewhere better than the Bad Axe, doing something better than working for Ladonna Weeks. Yet she wanted to raise her own daughter here?

  Of course Ladonna saw her coming. Of course Harley’s ex-skank pretended she didn’t, pretended to be too busy bossing Holly Hefty, who expressed her chagrin with a tight little wave. As the sheriff headed for the video game machine in the back, she slipped into an old rant. Sure, Ladonna was long legged, heavy chested, and darkly pretty, but at the rate she drank and smoked, her window on good looks was closing fast. Ladonna knew it, and she compensated with raunchiness. Men loved the way she talked dirty, and they behaved as if each drink purchase added frequent-flier points and someday they would earn enough to take her beyond the mini-mart into one of the Ease Inn’s dank motel rooms. Harley said he hadn’t even talked to Ladonna in years. But given who the woman was, that was a tough one to believe.

  “Hello, Ladonna.”

  “Oh. Didn’t see you there. What’s up, Dairy Queen? You keeping my Harley Kick-Ass happy? You taking care of his needs?”

  The sheriff swallowed a snarl that returned as a bolt of acid up her throat.

  “I hope you know,” she said, “that a bomb threat can go federal in a heartbeat these days. A bomb threat makes you a terrorist.”

  She had meant to walk on by. Keep moving, she now ordered herself.