Bad Axe County Page 9

  “Sure, darlin’, a bone-handled antique Colt .45? And a box of Whiz-Bang .22 shells?”

  She could hear his voice oozing contempt like it was yesterday.

  “I do believe I was offered those exact same items from one of them drugged-up punks. I gave him cash and that little .38 you got there.”

  “Who was he? Someone who worked for my dad, right?”

  “Well, let me see if I can recall . . .”

  Mertz had given her Dalton Rockwell, who the previous fall had hayed at Cress Springs Farm. No more than two hours later, she had found Rockwell exactly where Mertz said he would be, dealing out of a tavern in Lansing, Iowa. She had walked him into snow-swept corn stubble and put that little shit-rocket .38 to the back of his skull. She had felt blissful. Her suffering was over. Done deal . . .

  * * *

  She startled when someone rapped on the Charger’s window. A pink glove wiped snow away, and a woman’s smiling face appeared. She put the window down.

  “Sheriff, hi!”

  Beside the cruiser, sheltering their faces from the storm, stood the high school girls volleyball coach and her husband. She could not recall their names. They looked plenty tipsy from the fund-raiser that had ended hours ago. The husband moved to block a wet gust, and his wife, Harley’s colleague at the high school, said, “We just saw you and I said to Dan we just have to say hello, Dan said maybe she’s busy, I said of course she’s busy but we just have to stop and tell her what a wonderful job she’s doing because it’s not easy and we know that, oh gosh, Dan knows that, Dan works for the county too—don’t you, Dan?”

  Dan tried to say so, but his wife interrupted. “We’re sorry you missed the fund-raiser. Just a hoot. A hoot! The girls on the team really look up to you and they were so disappointed you couldn’t be there. But of course, we all understand, you’re so busy doing such a wonderful job. But you’re not running in the special election, we heard. We sure hope she changes her mind, don’t we, Dan?”

  She wasn’t sure how long she sat there, not hearing all the good things they said about her, all the reasons she should run against Boog Lund in July. She could just vaguely recall them toddling off into the storm.

  Because her execution of Dalton Rockwell had not been a done deal. In that snow-swept Iowa cornfield—she was blind on booze and weed, Rockwell was too—he had thrashed and she had missed him, point-blank, twice, and those were all the shells she had. Rockwell had sworn he was in jail when her mom and dad were killed, and that had turned out to be true. He had been in the Crawford County lockup that entire July, and for guess what. For beating up and robbing Cecil Mertz.

  One week later she had checked herself into a rehab clinic in Missouri and begun her long struggle back toward acceptance . . . nothing was stolen . . . and survival . . . life in forward gear . . . into college, law enforcement, marriage, kids . . . purpose and love dissolve grief . . . and finally back to the coulees, under the illusion, obviously, that the past was behind her.

  Pulling away from the Ease Inn, she called Denise. “On my way to Walt Beavers’s place,” she said. “I need his version of what happened at the library. Maybe he can confirm the vehicle, and maybe he’ll tell me why he ran away.”

  “Save it for tomorrow, maybe?”

  Denise waited for a reply. The sheriff pushed her Charger up to speed, thinking of the black-haired girl, feeling her. Who knew better than she did that for a lost girl there might be no tomorrow?

  “No, I’m fine.”

  “You sound kinda shaky, my queen. Sleaze abides. Scum never stops scumming. Let’s be better safe than sorry.”

  As the Charger spun along into the blizzard, she couldn’t feel if she was moving forward, backward, or both.

  “Heidi, did we lose you?”

  19

  Pepper Greengrass can’t see what she is looking at, because everything has gone black. But she wishes someone else could see how this awful little man drives really slow while he’s chattering away in his awful little accent. Would someone please look?

  Because there is a girl riding into stormy darkness and he is chitchatting about her clothing size. Pepper can’t talk except to tell herself that everything smells like the Armor All wipes she uses to clean inside her stepdad’s cab and his sleeper, to wipe the sticky trail that Felton Henry leaves on everything, sticky, sticky, Pepper can’t pull one thought apart from another. Bad men all talk to her at once.

  Don’t waste them. Those cost money. And get that backpack out of here.

  I didn’t bring it. He brought it.

  Stop lying.

  He brought it from the Dells.

  Those are my cigarettes.

  No, he took your cigarettes away from me the first time I met him at the truck stop.

  Stop lying. You’re a woman now. You like it.

  Someone, tell Pepper that someone pissed Pepper’s skirt but that the miniman stripping her says it’s OK because we’re at Walmart now. You like it. Women like it. Thirteen is a woman. Look it up.

  Pepper can only shake and wish for someone to please watch him skate on his rubber overshoes across the parking lot and stuff her wet clothes down the throat of the trash barrel by the doors. Someone, listen to his radio, the teeny-tiny polka. Someone, smell his window glass and the ice slipping down it. Because she can’t hear or smell or breathe or blink or snap her rubber band. Through the doorway of his sleeper cab she sees herself under Felton Henry, rolled, pinned, entered.

  God made this. It doesn’t hurt you. Stop lying.

  Someone, tell Pepper to see what he went into Walmart to get. It’s a pink woman’s training suit, and a blue-checkered apron, and a Realtree camo jacket and matching hat, and a yellow squash and a zucchini, and a jump rope with wooden grips, and a plastic deer with its legs banded to its back, and a roll of wide silver tape, and a bottle of vodka so big it has a handle . . .

  His headlights are tubes of sleet-sparkle through darkness. His voice is singsong polka into a phone, into another girl. Can she do it? With his new girl? Now? Tonight? A hundred?

  Someone, tell Pepper to answer the phone. Pepper Pauline Greengrass, answer the phone. Tell Pepper she feels freezing cold. Answer the phone Pay Dale. Save for Amtrak. But this is not Pepper because Pepper is blacked out this whole time and shivering so hard that her bones might shatter from the explosions, over and over, as each instant blows away the one that came before.

  20

  Coach Walt Beavers’s truck was in his short shank of a driveway. The sheriff fishtailed off the glazed gravel road and parked beside him. The Charger’s tail stuck out, but she doubted anyone would come past. The path around Beavers’s scabby little Datsun was crimped by neglected thrusts of buckthorn that snatched at her uniform. Beyond, the old man’s yard was the typical coulees wasteland of damaged goods and abandoned ideas, failure and loss accented by north-blown snowdrifts. She kept her head down to navigate around the tilted basin of a rusted charcoal grill where Beavers must have once thought to plant flowers. She made it to the door of his decomposing mobile home and knocked.

  Waiting, she felt the desolate beauty. In her two years as a Bad Axe County deputy, she had been dispatched to Dog Hollow just once, assigned to investigate smoke rising where it shouldn’t rise. Thrashing through a meadow thick with wildflowers taller than her head, she had discovered a meth kitchen in an army tent concealed in a swamp, no one there. Thrashing back, she had startled something large. Stumbling with her weapon drawn onto matted grass where deer had bedded down, she had been slow to understand that she was not about to be ambushed.

  She knocked once more on Coach Beavers’s door. This time she noticed a single dark key in the knob. The hood of his truck was free of ice. He had come home recently. Beyond his truck, the restless blue flicker against the Charger’s windshield meant that her onboard computer searched in vain for a signal.

  She turned the knob, pushed inside, and met fetid air, then two long-haired cats that blossomed like pale ghosts and rubbe
d around her boots.

  “Coach?” she called out. “This is Sheriff Kick. I need to talk to you.”

  This was not like Bishops Coulee. The house was not on fire. There was no blood in the snow. But she kept entering. Call it a welfare check. Call it suspicious circumstances, the key in the door. She shined her flashlight around the squalid living room. The woodstove was open, no fire. But no ransacking, no sign of violence. Maybe he was passed out on his bed.

  “Coach Beavers?” She rapped the butt of her flashlight on the stovepipe chimney. “Is everything OK? It’s Sheriff Kick.”

  She found a light switch. His power was out. Her boot rattled something and she jumped back and put her light on a space heater. But no bloody boot prints like she had followed at Bishops Coulee, no gore-smeared walls half consumed by fire. Maybe he was passed out in a house with no heat. Hard-drinking coulee dwellers died like this every winter, Popsicles before they were found.

  With the cats around her ankles, the sheriff followed her light beam down the trailer’s narrow hallway. Beavers was not in his bed. No one had struggled for their life and been dragged out. She checked the bathroom, occupied by a bad smell only. No one was here. In the hall she lifted his receiver. The ice had downed his phone line too.

  Back in the living room, she scanned with her beam for anything significant. She was drawn to a shelf behind the woodstove: a framed newspaper clipping. She came closer. There was a shrine here, a record of loss. Even as a recent transplant to the Bad Axe, she knew that years ago Walt Beavers had chased the walleye bite too close to a rolling dam on the Mississippi and lost his only child, his little girl, in a drowning accident.

  So here was a shrine to tiny, goggle-eyed Hannah Beavers, maybe a second grader in the school portrait by Kling Kountry Kamera. Around the portrait, her grieving father had displayed other memorabilia, including a charm ring and what had first caught her attention, a 4-H Rabbit Club photo clipped from the Broadcaster, framed and labeled in pen 3/25/1984. Combined under a paper clip were other articles that the sheriff presumed mentioned or pictured Hannah Beavers. Maybe he pillaged library archives with a penknife? But this was long ago. The book he shut was 2012. She moved her flashlight beam. Adjacent to the shrine were several Rattlers trophies. Attracted to dates now, she studied them. The Rattlers went back sixty-some years, but this collection of trophies began in 2012. That must have been when then-manager Pinky Clausen made Walt Beavers first-base coach. The twins were born that summer.

  She moved her beam back across the shrine to Hannah Beavers. Opposite the Rattlers trophies, Beavers had positioned what looked like a mustard crock. She picked it up. Yes, it was a small ceramic mustard crock with a swing-top stopper. She unclipped the stopper and got a strong whiff of ashes. She shined her light inside: black ashes, chunky, almost char. His daughter’s remains?

  The sheriff leaned in, blowing dust off what she assumed were more vestiges of Beavers’s deceased daughter. Beside the crock was a blue plastic barrette in the shape of a butterfly. Under the barrette was a page torn from a refillable desk calendar, the kind that flipped one day at a time. A birthday, or a death day, she figured. She moved the barrette aside, glanced at the date, then placed the barrette back onto its dust shadow.

  Wait. Hannah Beavers had died in the eighties sometime.

  She looked again. Her double take was correct. The date on the calendar page was August 12, 2012, the same day as the Rattlers-Dells game at issue in the library, when Beavers had closed the book of Broadcasters and run out. She took cell phone pictures of the mustard crock, the barrette, and the calendar page. She opened the crock again. Her mom and dad had been cremated. This did not look like those ashes.

  She called out once more to be sure. “Coach?”

  Outside, she shined her light onto the floor of his pickup: not there. She heard a moan. She panned her light around the wider bottomland where the rusty double-wide trailer sat at a tilt. She heard the moan again. Touching the weapon at her hip, she made a slow and treacherous tour around the off-balance structure, baby-stepping through an obstacle course of snow-hidden junk, hearing moans all the way around.

  She found a place to look between the cinder blocks that raised the trailer on the driveway side. She shined under and saw a grease-gray little head, turned away.

  “Coach Beavers, it’s Sheriff Kick. What are you doing under there?”

  He groaned and rolled over into the flashlight beam. She winced. His head was grossly swollen in several spots, like someone had shoved eggs under his skin. One of his arms flopped toward her at a horrific angle. His lips were ash colored.

  “What happened, Coach? Who did this?”

  His eyes stared blankly.

  21

  Angus struck with the ax, struck, struck in fear and rage, scooped shattered chunks of frozen fish from the freezer and hurled them aside on the dirt floor of the Quonset shed, struck again, and again, and—

  He reeled back, soaked in livid sweat that chilled him to the bone. The ax fell from his fist. His chest heaved. His back screamed. His hands shook. He staggered amid the mayhem of frozen pike and walleye that lay about the freezer, tails and heads, eyes looking everywhere.

  There she was.

  He took several gulping breaths and forced himself forward, leaned over. Down the beam of his headlamp, encased in heavy rime, curled and shrunken and discolored, looking like a very old woman . . . there she was.

  He made himself continue. His dad had wrapped her in a black garbage sack that shredded as he reached in and peeled it away. There she was, like a very old gray-skinned little woman, yet somehow also still the same exact blond girl that he had found sprawled in his uncle Walt’s truck bed that hot August morning . . . staring at him wide-eyed . . . nothing on her but her torn pink panties, her gold necklace, and her two blue hair clips in butterfly shapes.

  Only one blue butterfly clung to her frozen hair now. One of her pinkie toes had broken off with the sack as Angus tore it away. A walleye fin was stuck to her neck, behind her ear. Freezer burn had charred the soft parts of her bare thighs. His ax blade had hit her in the shoulder, cut through ice crystals into bone. He staggered away. He went to his knees outside.

  When he had finished retching, he went inside the house, emptied out his baseball gear bag, and headed back for the body.

  22

  “Who did this to you?”

  The sheriff had crawled half her body under the trailer. He seemed conscious, but Walt Beavers couldn’t answer. It was hard to judge the extent of his injuries. She decided that hypothermia was about to kill him, no matter what else.

  She crawled out and went inside. She tore the blankets off his bed in a storm of cat hair and balled them up. She pushed the wad ahead as she squirmed between the cinder blocks and crawled deep beneath the trailer, holding her face just above the rubble of mud-stuck trash. Beavers had kicked booze bottles under here. She batted a pint out of the way. While she was gone he had rolled onto one side, his back to her, and now she saw he wore his Rattlers jacket. The snake stared right at her, the timber rattler coiled around the baseball, beneath BEAVERS and the numeral 0. She covered the shivering man with his blankets.

  “Hang in there, Coach. Let’s get you warmed up. I’m going to call for help. You’re going to be OK. Can you tell me what happened?”

  He could not.

  “Can you give me a name?”

  He could not. She elbowed out, wet and muddy now, teeth chattering. She sat inside the Charger, taking fast and shallow breaths. Her radio had no signal at all. Her cell phone had only a wavering hint of reception.

  “Denise, I need an ambulance at Walt Beavers’s place. He’s badly hurt. Somebody attacked him and he escaped under his trailer. I think Zion VFD can get here quickest.”

  Denise’s response was faint and broken.

  “Did you get that? Yes? No?”

  She left the Charger in a weird blur of fear and isolation. As she approached the mobile home again, she though
t she could hear Coach Beavers saying something—or calling her. She crawled back under his trailer to get closer. He was still and silent beneath the blankets. So it was something else she had heard. She waited. Soon enough she heard a mutter, then a squishing sound. She stopped breathing to listen. There it was again, someone stepping through the icy slush. She twisted and saw a pair of rubber barn boots creep past.

  “Who’s there?”

  Whoever it was, he froze. Then he backed away through the slush.

  “This is the sheriff! Stop! Stay right where you are!”

  She began to elbow away from Beavers, paddling backward through the trash and muck and booze bottles. As her legs emerged, something glanced across her right boot. She rolled over, pulled back. He had hit her with something. Her ankle stung from the blow.

  “Get on the ground!”

  The command tore out of her. She was working her body around, planning to come out headfirst with her weapon drawn.

  “Get down now!”

  “Ha. Dairy Queen?”

  The voice, somewhere to her left, was reedy and slurred, intense with derision. “Stupid old stumble-fuck won’t tell you nothing now.”

  “Get down.”

  “I’ll get down with you all right. Come on, let’s get down.”

  As she crawled from beneath the trailer, Ruger first, she saw a descending blur and drew her head back just in time. The chopping blow struck her right upper arm, the weapon thick and hard, bruising her to the bone.

  She crawled backward, deeper beneath the trailer, gasping from the pain. She could barely grip the pistol as the rubber boots danced away into the headlights of her cruiser. Where had he come from? Who was he? She had to get a look at him. She inched forward, lowered her head to the mud, and looked up. She saw a scrawny man in filthy jeans and a baggy hooded sweatshirt. The hood was cinched around his face. He snorted, spat from the black hole. Mucus hung on the hood strings. “Baggy old coonfucker don’t have shit to say to nobody now.” He paced away and muttered to himself. Then, as if he had suddenly remembered what he was doing, he surged back in, spraying icy slop under the trailer. “You wanna get down? Come on, bring it!”