Bad Axe County Page 2

  “I couldn’t tell you.”

  “Why not?”

  “I couldn’t open it.”

  “Why couldn’t you open it?”

  “Why do you think, Angus? The big-ass lock and chain that Dad put on it.”

  So maybe he was right. All this time, he had never believed his dad would burn the body.

  * * *

  He left Jacksonville in the morning. He flew through Charlotte. By midafternoon he was in Chicago, unable to rent a car because his Wisconsin driver’s license had expired when he turned eighteen two years ago. He put himself on a bus from O’Hare bound for Madison, packed between college students going back to school after spring break. In Madison, the taxi driver’s mouth fell open. “A trip out there is gonna run you three or four hundred dollars, bro. You sure?”

  “Let’s go.”

  Halfway to the Bad Axe, late afternoon, Angus directed the driver off U.S. 14 onto a county highway that ran northwest through Crawford County toward the Mississippi River. He watched the landscape wrinkle into the steep bluffs and narrow hollows of his home. Past his window flowed the tiny hard-luck farms, the cinder-block taverns at the junctions, the dusty milk trucks on evening rounds, the Amish buggies clip-clopping on the shoulder, the gas stations pushing cheese curds and lottery tickets. By the time they crossed into Bad Axe County, a storm was on the way. The half-wild coulee cows told him so by their instinct to lie down.

  “So what brings you home?”

  Angus heard this question as the cab slowed through gusting winds for entry into the town of Farmstead, the Bad Axe County seat.

  “Get my life back,” he told the driver.

  He had to think what he meant.

  The life he wanted—it hadn’t ever really begun.

  2

  “Mommy?”

  Here were today’s numbers. If you counted back, she was thinking, present to past, today’s numbers were 11, 17, 20, 22, 53, and 4,290. You could also count them in the other direction, past to present. Or you could scramble them, which was more how she felt.

  “Mommy . . . you’re not paying attention.”

  “I’m sorry, sweetie. What?”

  “I said, what is a queen?”

  “You know what a queen is.”

  “I know, but what does it mean?”

  Her five-year-old, Ophelia, was asking. Whenever she could, Opie hung around to watch her mother get dressed. The process involved a lot for a little girl to take in. First, off came the ancient Seneca High Indians sweatpants and the faded Crawford County 4-H Horse Club sweatshirt. This revealed straps, scars, freckles, stretches—the truth about a thirty-ish mother of three. She met her daughter’s eyes in the mirror.

  “A queen is married to a king, for one thing.”

  “I know that. But who is she?”

  “It really depends on if she’s the one who is actually descended from the royal line—” Too complicated. “She is the wife of the king, and they are the bosses of the country.”

  “Oh.”

  Today, for the storm that was coming, she pulled on the silk long johns that Harley gave her for Christmas, which went on tight and wouldn’t bunch beneath the uniform. For private pretty, she put on pink socks, a birthday gift from her three-year-old twin boys. Next she put on brand-new boots, black tactical Reeboks, right out of the box. One hour ago, and twenty-two days since she had responded to the crime at Bishops Coulee, she had finally lit fire to the boots that had become blood stained inside that poor young couple’s house. Out the window over Opie’s head she could see smoke still rising from the barrel. She was trying.

  “Is a queen powerful?”

  “She can be. She probably tells the king to jump, and the king asks her how high. You know how it works in this house, with me and Daddy.”

  “Ha,” said Opie. She was protective of her daddy. “Ha, ha, very funny.”

  Next came the Kevlar vest, which squared her off in the front and made her look like a LEGO figure to the twins. But Opie was old enough to know what the vest meant. She was quiet until all the Velcro was snugged into place.

  “Is a queen pretty?”

  “You’d better tell the queen she’s pretty, or she’ll have your head chopped off.”

  “Ha, ha.”

  Now the long-sleeved uniform shirt, in hideous tan, with all its pockets and epaulets and patches and pins. She buttoned it up all the way. She liked a black bow tie.

  “But America’s Dairyland is not a real country, right?”

  Crap. How did she not see this coming?

  “No. America’s Dairyland is an idea people use to sell cheese. And cheese is not a country either. Not even Swiss cheese. Hon, what is it? Is someone teasing you at school?”

  “No. Not teasing.”

  “No? OK, good.”

  “But is she bad?”

  “Is who bad, sweetie?”

  “The Dairy Queen?”

  She looked at her daughter. Her little chin trembled.

  “No, of course the Dairy Queen isn’t bad.”

  “Then why do they say ‘the f-word Dairy Queen’?”

  “Who said that?”

  “Mr. Kussmaul.”

  Ah, the school bus driver, a Gibbs man. She leaned into the bureau mirror—good skin, a sprinkle of freckles, intense green eyes—her face still a strong part of the Mighty Heidi package. She tucked her red-blond braids under the beige cow pie of a hat. She strapped on her duty belt and organized it: cuffs, Taser, OC spray, radio base, flashlight, baton, omni-tool, pistol. Finally, and today was day seventeen already, she pinned the gold badge over her shirt pocket: Heidi Kick, Interim Sheriff, Bad Axe County.

  “Mr. Kussmaul is just sad that Sheriff Gibbs died. He’s only had fifty-three days to get over it. And he’s never had a woman sheriff before. He’d feel better if your mommy stayed home and made easy-cheesy recipes.”

  “You shouldn’t f-word the sheriff.”

  “Right on, girl. Off with your head if you f-word Sheriff Dairy Queen.”

  “Ha, ha. Very funny. But why are you getting dressed?”

  “I have to work.”

  “Did another really bad thing happen?”

  “No, sweetie. It’s just because the weatherman says a storm is coming.”

  “Can I do the geese with you?”

  “Not today. I need to be alone with them.”

  “I know what that means.” Her daughter frowned. “It means somebody is teasing you.”

  “Just a little,” she admitted. “But Denise is teaching me how to be ready.”

  She touched Ophelia’s silky head, kissed her on the ear, and together they left the privacy of the bedroom into the world of twin little brothers.

  “Dylan, Taylor, Mommy’s leaving.”

  She gathered three hot little bodies into a group hug.

  “Bye, darlings. I love you. Be good for your daddy. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  3

  She was a day counter. For the first 6,407 days of her life, she hadn’t been, but then her life changed—life itself became visible to her—and since then she had counted, at least certain kinds of days.

  Today, as she had just told Opie, was fifty-three days since Ray Gibbs had died unexpectedly, and more evidence of Gibbs’s sloppiness and corruption had trickled in on almost every one of those fifty-three days, much of it also implicating his chief deputy, and now hers, Elvin “Boog” Lund.

  Today also made twenty days since she had cuffed Horst Zimmer for the bloody double murder at Bishops Coulee, and therefore twenty days that she had been privately fixated on the emptiness of Zimmer’s motivation: theft of an obsolete Xbox, a toaster oven, and a chainsaw. If she hadn’t caught Zimmer trying to sell his paltry loot off his tailgate in the parking lot of a tavern, her report might have reached a familiar and haunting conclusion, one she had been forced to accept 4,290 days ago: Nothing was stolen . . .

  One more count: today marked the eleventh day since she had come to understand how
unprofessionally she felt about it all. Instead of arresting a killer and becoming the interim sheriff, she secretly wished—and for eleven days she had vividly fantasized—that she had blown out Zimmer’s zombie brains.

  * * *

  But meanwhile there was the other today. Meanwhile there was the job to do, protect and serve, and therefore there was the matter of thinking clearly and reacting calmly. This meant she had to prepare for how men in the Bad Axe seemed to feel about her as the first female sheriff in Wisconsin. Teasing hardly described it.

  F-word Dairy Queen.

  Look out, geese.

  She scooped a beer pitcher full of cracked corn from the sack by the washing machine and headed past the burn barrel out to the pen. Aside from landing a great job back home in the coulees, the rest of her dream was to farm again, to milk cows, birth calves, cut hay. But she and Harley had three kids and two jobs, and her husband was a town kid and a baseball jock, not a farmer. That’s why after they had secured a lease on the old Pederson farm, they had agreed, in the same way that young couples try a puppy before a child, on a flock of sixteen geese.

  As she swung open the pen door the creatures rushed her with one collective squawk, snowy white feathers ruffling, bright orange beaks and feet flashing in the scrum. She held the corn behind her back. Since she had become a target in the Bad Axe, she and the geese had worked out a routine.

  “Attention, please.”

  Sixteen pairs of black beady eyes looked up, less shoving and nipping, orderly for geese.

  “OK . . . let’s see . . . so why is going to Subway for a sandwich like seeing a prostitute?”

  She rattled the pitcher of corn. They were all ears.

  “You pay a stranger to do your wife’s job.”

  This raised a mostly dissatisfied goosey murmur. Queen Gertrude nipped Cordelia. Squash Blossom tried to flap an end run behind the sheriff to the corn. She raised the pitcher higher. “Not good enough? Remember you’re just practice cows, so don’t get cocky. Do any of you smart-asses know why you should never lie to a woman who has both PMS and GPS?”

  They waited for it.

  “Because that woman is a bitch . . . and she will find you.”

  There was a bit more raucous honking, for sure. But that certain synergy had yet to occur. She got the jokes from Denise Halverson, her night-shift dispatcher, and she tried to remember a better one. Denise was a genius. She always predicted the next encounter with the male mind, and with a joke she inoculated accordingly.

  Above the pen, the sky churned. Lightning rippled beyond the hogback ridge that nestled the farm. She counted nine seconds before thunder grumbled over the hollow. So, OK, then. The vaccine she required had to be raunchy, sexist—and about the weather. She had one. She faced the geese and lowered her voice. “Darlin’ . . .”

  She imagined taking a shot of Rumple Minze to facilitate a hiccup and a slur.

  “I’m no weatherman . . . but darlin’ . . .”

  She released a drunken eyeball to glide across the waiting birds.

  “But . . . hic! . . . you can expect about six inches tonight.”

  It was probably the eyeball and the hiccups, but the geese went nuts for this one, squawking and honking and nipping at her. As she threw the corn, she realized the awful joke had worked. Her brain felt cleansed and cooled, ready to reimmerse in the male world of the Bad Axe County Sheriff’s Department.

  Now go, she told herself, wondering where her husband was. Hold that and go.

  * * *

  “I’m rolling,” she told Harley when she found him waiting in the Pedersons’ defunct milking parlor, which they used as a garage. “Sorry. I don’t have time to talk.”

  He looked handsome in a pool of antique-yellow barn light. That didn’t stop her from feeling bothered that he held an aluminum baseball bat he had taken from his pickup, which was parked alongside her Charger and loaded with bat bags and milk crates full of baseballs. It was a blurry number of days since anything had been easy between them.

  “I saw you burned your boots,” he began.

  “Sure did.”

  “I’m glad. Because I’ve been thinking . . .”

  He ran his fingers along the barrel of the bat, touching smears made by groundouts, pop-ups, squibs, every kind of mishit.

  “I know what you think.”

  “You do?”

  “I know what you want.”

  He smiled at her. “Aside from dry ground, and at least one guy who can throw strikes, what is it that I want?”

  “You want me to tell the county board I can’t do this. You want me to say that Boog Lund waited his turn, he was Gibbs’s chief deputy, he’s got thirty years of experience, he deserves it. I’ve had enough, I want out, and I won’t run in the election. In Harley-speak,” she said, and this annoyed her lately, “if I can’t hit the ball square, don’t swing. And after Bishops Coulee, you think I can’t even see the ball.”

  Here it came.

  “Hon, it’s good you finally burned your boots. But as for hitting square, you’re the sheriff of Bad Axe County, which is more than enough to worry about, but then I hear that you were down in Crawford County last week, and I hear that you were—”

  “Do you hear that?” she interrupted, pointing toward distant thunder. “That is snow, sleet, and freezing rain, headed our way. I’ve got three deputies, my whole crew, and no overtime budget. Do you really need to psychoanalyze me right now?”

  She rounded the bed of his pickup. As she pulled her door open, her radio squawked. She reached in, hit TALK. “Go ahead.”

  Her day-shift dispatcher, Deputy Rinehart Rog, said: “Sheriff, Red Wing has freezing rain. Weather Service has issued flash-flood warnings. If it’s snow and ice, we’re going to see lines down and power out. Looks like it’ll be on top of us in about half an hour. Your crew meeting starts in nineteen minutes.”

  “Thanks, Rhino.”

  As she turned back to her husband, she felt a telltale tightening in her chest.

  “I’m fine.”

  “I’m not psychoanalyzing. I just get worried when someone tells me that you were down in Crawford County demanding to see the case file on your parents—”

  “I was requesting. I’ve been meaning to do it for a long time. There is no reason that file should be sealed. I’m fine.”

  “But, Heidi, then I heard you were making the rounds of those sleazy taverns down around Soldiers Grove, asking about one of your dad’s farmhands from twelve years ago, some dirtball with a rap sheet, sure, but no record up here in the Bad Axe.”

  Her mind walled up. She began to back the cruiser out, using the last crack in the rising window to say, “Good-bye. I love you. I’m fine.”

  * * *

  But it was day eleven for the truth that her loving husband was just now sensing. As she processed the depravity of the Bishops Coulee crime, her past life and her present life had become scrambled. She was seeing zombie killers everywhere.

  She could feel it happening now as she reached the outskirts of Farmstead and waited for traffic to pass through the highway intersection. Speeding toward the intersection through the storm-jaded twilight was a busted-up dark blue panel van, doing about sixty against the limit of forty-five.

  She leaned forward and squinted to focus. Piece-of-shit vehicle with dealer plates, zombie strike one. Doesn’t even notice her and slow down, zombie strike two. Behind the cracked windshield, his tattooed neck and shaved head, his jabbing finger and angry ranting mouth, his victim on the passenger seat just a big-eyed girl, zombie strikes three, four, and five. Then he blew through the town’s one and only traffic light, solid red.

  Six strikes and you’re dead. She closed her eyes. She mashed the gas and yanked the Charger onto the highway, chased him down and ripped him from his van, knelt on his neck and put her service pistol to his skull—you sick-brain bastard, so many of you out there hurting people and killing people, one of you took two of mine—and pulled the trigger.

&nbs
p; It would have felt so good.

  She turned the other way and headed for her meeting.

  4

  “Hey . . . I think I’ve been here before.”

  The girl in the passenger seat, Pepper Greengrass, blurts these words in surprise as the van blows through the red light. Dale Hill, the driver, an ex-con supporting his gambling habit by working Pepper and two other underage girls out of a motel in a resort town two hours to the east, snarls back, “Tell me why I care.”

  “I think my big brother played baseball here.”

  The Wisconsin Dells, where they just came from, is surrounded by the level sands of central Wisconsin. Over the rugged terrain of the Bad Axe, Dale Hill’s driving style has nearly killed them several times, though Pepper Greengrass, only sixteen, has hardly noticed.

  “Yeah. I’m pretty sure I’ve been here. For one of Bennie’s baseball games.”

  “I said tell me why I care.”

  She puts her knee-high black boots up on his dashboard.

  “Bennie played shortstop for the Wisconsin Dells Scenics. I was eleven years old.”

  “Boots,” Dale Hill orders. “The fuck off.”

  Pepper lowers her boots and watches a sign go by: FARMSTEAD, WISCONSIN / POP. 2,364 / HOME OF THE BLACKHAWKS. She watches another sign: BAD AXE COUNTY LIBRARY over a free–Wi-Fi icon and an arrow pointing down a side street.

  She remembers something about rattlesnakes, though, not Blackhawks. So maybe this isn’t the place. She watches the town go by: three taverns, a yarn shop, a diner, a Kwik Trip gas station where a Greyhound tilts at the curb, spewing exhaust into a sky bunched and ready to storm. Then, through empty storefronts, she gets a glimpse of a scoreboard and stadium lights.

  “Look! There’s the baseball diamond!”

  She gets Dale’s trademark snort of compressed dog breath.

  “See it? That’s the field, down in there, with bluffs around it.”

  “What I’m looking for is the place where I sign your ass up. The Ease Inn.”