Neil McMahon - Hugh Davoren 02 Read online

  Very few things in the world pissed Madbird off like that did.

  I knew that he was torn about whether to intervene. He hadn’t, yet.

  “Okay, it’s ready,” Darcy said, stepping back from the pool table. “One of you guys break.”

  “Friday’s ladies’ night out here,” Madbird said.

  “It is? When did that start?”

  “New rule. Go ahead.”

  She lined up on the cue ball and broke with a crack I could feel in my teeth. The balls seethed around and careened off the rails; when they settled, the six had dropped into a corner pocket and three other solids were easy picks. She tapped in two of those and left the third blocking another corner, with the cue ball buried in a cluster.

  Madbird and I managed to sink a couple of stripes, but mostly we duffed around while she continued to clear the table.

  At the end of the workweek, concentrated effort was very low 8

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  on our priority list, and this spacious old lodge with its huge stone fireplace and vintage country jukebox was a good place to kick back. Split Rock was the kind of setup that had once been fairly common in the West—a main building that housed a restaurant-bar, and several smaller cabins that served as motel units. Like a lot of the others, it had been hand-built of logs soon after World War II, when tourism by automobile was becoming an industry. It stood facing the landmark for which it was named—a chunk of granite the size of a two-story house, cleft from the top almost to the bottom by a vertical V

  that looked hewn by a giant ax. Big plate glass windows gave expansive views of the still-pristine surrounding country, the foothills of the Elkhorn Range several miles south of Helena.

  Often, you could see elk foraging on the mountainsides.

  A sudden sound, like a spray of elevator music on acid, made my head jerk. It was the ring of Darcy’s cell phone. She dropped her pool cue on the table and flew to dig the phone out of her purse, then pressed it to her ear and walked a few steps away from Madbird and me, talking in a tone too low for us to hear, while her other hand smoothed her hair.

  This was the situation that Madbird had tweaked her about. Seth Fraker would drive here to pick her up, but instead of coming inside, he’d call as he was arriving and have her go out to meet him—the modern equivalent of honking the horn.

  Sure enough, headlights were turning from the highway into the Split Rock parking lot. There was enough daylight left for me to see the vehicle when it got close—Fraker’s huge new pickup truck with all the bells and whistles, including smoked windows.

  Darcy closed her phone, slipped it back into her purse, and turned to face us. The next couple of seconds were a strange, tense freeze where nothing happened, but it seemed like a lot of things could.

  Madbird and Darcy moved in the same instant. He started DEAD SILVER

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  walking around the table toward the parking lot. She scooped up a chunk of blue cue tip chalk and intercepted him. Her hand moved quick as a snake to smear a touch of it on his forehead. While I stared, she spun around and did the same to me. Just as abruptly, she broke into a brisk skipping dance, circling the pool table and both of us, chanting or singing under her breath.

  Then she was gone out the door, leaving him and me standing there, looking like refugees from Ash Wednesday.

  “What was that?” I said.

  Madbird gazed stonily after her as she hurried across the parking lot and disappeared behind the darkened windows of Seth Fraker’s big pickup.

  “She threw something at us,” he said. “Kind of a witchy trick, to get us off her case.”

  CHAPTER 2

  The next afternoon, Saturday, I spent banging around my cabin doing the chores that I let slide during the week. I was forever losing ground; it was like fighting a Hydra that grew back two heads for every one I lopped off. Besides the routine business of cleaning and laundry and such, new problems were endless—plumbing leaks, vehicle repairs, a garage roof caving under one too many snowstorms. Most often, I’d discover further wrinkles once I started trying to fix the original one; I’d end up driving to town for materials two or three times; and so on. By the time I got the situation under control, I’d have lost a couple more weekends, and the list kept on growing.

  But that was far outweighed by the payoff. I could never have imagined a greater gift than this property, left to me by my father: twenty acres of conifers in the Big Belt Mountains, an area that was steep, rugged, and thickly wooded, with only a few gravel roads that were dicey at the best of times. Humans were rare.

  If I hadn’t had this place to come back to during a bad time in my life—the collapse of my marriage and career in California, more or less simultaneously—I wasn’t sure I’d have gotten through. Keeping it cobbled together was sort of like living with somebody who drove you nuts, but who you loved DEAD SILVER

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  and couldn’t stand to be without. You did whatever it took to make things work.

  I’d been thinking about the incident with Madbird and Darcy yesterday at Split Rock. He hadn’t been headed outside to brace Seth Fraker—just to get a look at him, invite him in for a drink, size him up. But I understood Darcy’s concern, too.

  Madbird already didn’t like what he knew about Fraker; in all probability, he’d like him even less if they met, and that would be clear. Darcy was well aware of it, and in her view, she had nothing to gain and a lot to lose if it happened.

  As for the “something” she’d thrown at us, paying any attention to it was silly. But I had come to suspect that there were cracks in the rational fabric of the universe, and such a “something” might just slip through once in a while and rattle cages.

  In other words, I’d gotten more superstitious instead of more levelheaded. There were a lot of factors involved, including that my nature and lifestyle tended toward the solitary. Then, too, the more I knew about the fairer sex, the more mysterious they became. That wasn’t to say I’d bought into Darcy’s gesture in any serious way. It just made me a trifle uneasy.

  The supply of stove wood that I kept in the cabin was low, so I walked outside through the wet spring snow to stock up.

  When I got to the woodshed, my half-feral black tomcat—I’d never named him; I just thought of him as the other guy, which was probably how he thought of me—was crouched on a stack of split fir, staring intently toward the tree line, twenty-five or thirty yards away. I glimpsed the shape of an animal just inside there. It was good-sized, with the deep brown color of a mule deer. I hadn’t seen any of them for a while, and I was vaguely interested that they were coming back.

  But instantly, the real situation clicked into focus. This thing was sitting upright, which deer didn’t do. It was built like a Rottweiler, with powerful shoulders, a heavy round head, and bone-crushing jaws.

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  This wasn’t any muley. This was a big cat—the reason the deer hadn’t been around lately.

  I wasn’t entirely surprised. I’d been seeing its tracks for the past couple of weeks, and assumed it was a cougar; this part of Montana had always been their turf. At a guess, he was a young male who’d been driven off by his elders and hadn’t yet staked out his own claim. But there were some factors that didn’t fit. Cougars usually kept moving around a large area, and they usually stayed well away from humans. I’d only ever glimpsed them in the backcountry, where I’d roamed a lot as a kid. In the past several years, since I’d been living in the cabin fulltime, I’d hardly seen a trace.

  But this guy had been hanging around for a while, and he’d been coming within the boundaries of my property. Right now I was looking into his eyes, staring straight back at me.

  He must have heard me coming out of the cabin, and he hadn’t budged an inch. No doubt he was hungry, too. Deer were the main staple of a cougar’s diet. He must have been eking out a meager living on small critters.

  Shy though cougars traditionally were, attacks on pe
ople were becoming more common. Probably they were getting used to us and losing their fear. They’d taken down several joggers around the West, and here in Montana not long ago, a pair of them had stalked a group of schoolchildren on an outing.

  Courageous teachers had gotten the kids to safety, but the cats hadn’t even made any attempt at stealth.

  I wasn’t too worried, but I admit I suddenly found myself thinking about what I’d do if he came my way. The woodshed was just an open-fronted lean-to; the closest place that offered protection was the cabin, and I wasn’t at all sure I could make it there ahead of him. My pulse rate started edging upward. But while I was trying to decide whether to stand my ground, or slowly work my way toward safety, or just flat-out run for it, he tipped forward from his haunches onto all fours and paced unhurriedly away.

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  That was when I saw his short black-striped tail, and realized he wasn’t a mountain lion—he was a bobcat. The scenario started making more sense. They tended to find a home territory and stay there, and they seemed to have learned fast that we humans had our uses, such as providing livestock and pets for meals.

  “You better watch it,” I told the black tom. “You’d be an appetizer to him.”

  He kept staring with his wide green eyes, claws dug into a chunk of fir and tail switching in agitation as his mega-cousin leisurely moved out of sight, pausing every several yards to sniff the air and look around.

  When the bobcat was gone, I completed my mission of carrying a few armloads of wood to the cabin. The tom jumped off his perch and followed me back and forth, butting against my ankles—wanting a drink of beer. I was ready for one myself. I dug into the forty-year-old Kelvinator and found a bottle of Moretti left over from a six-pack I’d splurged on a couple of weekends ago. I poured a splash into a saucer for the cat and worked on the rest myself, thinking about how to handle this.

  On the one hand, I was relieved. I’d never heard of a bobcat attacking anyone. On the other hand, he was a really big bobcat. While I knew that wild animals and fish always grew with the telling, I also knew what I’d seen. I even wondered if a cross with a mountain lion was genetically possible.

  Besides his size, his coloration, brown and mostly solid, was more cougarlike; bobcats tended to be tawnier, with leopard-like black spots. And yet, there was no mistaking that tail.

  I didn’t want to shoot him—on the contrary, I was glad that creatures like him were out there, and I wanted to keep him there. I was just nervous that he’d eat my pet—the tom was extremely canny, but everybody made mistakes—and maybe even me. When the snow melted and the ground dried, he might head 14

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  into the backcountry in search of more satisfying game, but that wouldn’t happen for several weeks. And then again, he might not. I considered contacting the Fish and Wildlife Department, but that was a can of worms—strangers stomping around my place, and me losing any say in the matter.

  I started leaning toward the notion that the best thing for everybody concerned would be to give him a good scare—let him know that he’d better stay away from human beings. But that was easier thought than done.

  I’d start carrying a pistol when I went outside, I decided—one that threw big slugs and made a lot of noise. If I met the bobcat with a burst of explosions and chunks showering out of the trees around him, that might get the message across.

  The weapon would also be a comfort when I came home after dark and walked from my truck to the cabin, just in case he was bold and hungry enough to take on something bigger than a bunny.

  I finished the beer and went back to puttering, while the tom curled up on the bed to sleep off his adrenaline and beer.

  I stacked the firewood beside the stove and started scrubbing out the blue enamel roasting pan I’d had soaking in the sink—waiting until a decent hour before I headed downtown for a Saturday evening tour of the bars, and maybe hooking up with a lady friend who wasn’t interested in anything long-term, at least with me, but occasionally enjoyed the kind of company that was gone in the morning.

  When the phone rang, it brought me a routine touch of angst. I wasn’t crazy about telephones—another of my regressive traits. I used mine mainly for work and other necessities, rarely for chatting, and it seemed to me that unexpected calls usually meant either hassles or outright bad news. But the news would come anyway, and answering was the only way to get rid of asshole solicitors who’d otherwise keep tormenting you forever, so I picked up and grumbled hello.

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  At first I was sure I’d guessed right—it was some kind of a pitch. The caller was a woman whose voice I didn’t recognize, asking for Hugh Davoren. But she sounded pleasant, slightly uncertain, and she even pronounced my last name right, to just about rhyme with “tavern.” I tried to sound a little less brusque.

  “Speaking,” I said.

  “This is Renee Callister. Do you remember me?”

  That caught me by surprise. I hadn’t seen Renee or heard anything about her since I was a teenager. Ordinarily, I’d have stumbled over a name from that long ago. But I’d been thinking about her family because her father, Professor John Callister, had passed away earlier this week.

  After all this time, it seemed unlikely that she was just calling me out of the blue. I guessed that her reason had something to do with her father’s death, which added a poignant element.

  Professor Callister had once been a prominent figure in Montana, a highly respected wildlife biologist and defender of wilderness. But his life was ruined when his young second wife was murdered, along with the lover she was in bed with at the time. Uglier still, Callister was the chief suspect. He was never formally charged, but the murder went unsolved and he was never cleared, either. He’d spent his last several years in a nursing home, after a series of strokes left him incapacitated and, eventually, comatose.

  That was the legacy his daughter, Renee, had inherited.

  CHAPTER 3

  “Good God, Renee,” I said, regretting my grumpy hello. “Seems like light-years.”

  “A lot of ordinary years, for sure. I think the last time I saw you, you were about to leave for college, and your family had a backyard barbecue party.”

  My recollection wasn’t that clear, but I trusted hers. She was several years younger than me, so she must have been about ten then. She’d be in her early thirties now.

  I hadn’t really grown up with Renee. Besides the age difference, our only point of contact was that our parents were acquainted, and that had ended when her folks got divorced and she’d moved to Seattle with her mother. My recollections of her were sketchy, mostly just images of a skinny, dark-haired girl. But she was sweet, solemn, and gentle in a way that wasn’t just childish shyness—it was her nature.

  “I’m here in Helena, for Daddy’s funeral,” she said.

  “I saw the notice. I’m sorry.” The sentiment was trite, but I meant it.

  “It’s a mercy, really. I don’t think he’d been aware toward the end, except maybe of pain.” She sounded a little shaky, which was understandable. Mercy or not, losing a parent was losing a parent.

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  “Is there something I can do?” I said.

  She made a slight sighing sound, like she was frustrated.

  “I hate to admit it, Hugh, but that’s why I called. I feel guilty, barging in on you and asking for help right off. But there’s so much going on, I’m overwhelmed.”

  “I know that feeling. And believe me, you’re not barging in on anything.”

  “I was hoping you’d still be a nice guy,” she murmured.

  Still? I thought. I couldn’t recall ever being anything of the kind to her, but it was good to hear her say it.

  “Daddy never sold our old house, and I couldn’t bring myself to do it while he was alive,” she said. “But I want to now, and it needs some work. I heard that’s what you’re doing thes
e days.”

  I grimaced; I was probably going to have to let her down.

  “I am, Renee, but I’m committed to another job for the next couple months,” I said. “Are you talking something major?”

  “It’s hard to describe. But no, I don’t think it would take long.”

  Homeowners rarely thought otherwise.

  “Well, how about if I swing by and look it over?” I said.

  “I could give you an idea of what you might need done.”

  “Really? You’re sure it wouldn’t be too much trouble?” I could hear the relief in her voice.

  “I was heading that direction anyway,” I said, which wasn’t strictly true. But I was glad for an excuse to abandon my chores, and my curiosity had awakened about her, her father, and the situation. “Call it an hour or so?”

  “Perfect.”

  I was just starting to move the phone from my ear to its cradle when I heard her say, “Hugh?” in that same anxious tone as before.

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  “Yeah?”

  There came a pause that seemed longer than it was.

  “Thanks. See you soon,” she exhaled, and ended the connection.

  I had a feeling that wasn’t what she’d started out to say.

  I hadn’t forgotten my encounter with Mr. Bobcat. Before I left the cabin, I got out the loudest, most powerful pistol I owned: a .45-caliber government-issue Colt 1911 that my father had brought back from the Korean War. It had seen a lot of use; the bluing was worn and the action was limber, well broken in. I knew he’d been in a fair amount of combat, but he’d said very little about all that; I didn’t know if he’d ever killed anyone with it, or if it had even been his. Still, I had a feeling that the usage hadn’t all been on the firing range. I didn’t shoot it often—a couple of times a year, for the hell of it—and I’d cleaned it not long ago. I checked to make sure the clip was loaded, the chamber was empty, and the safety was on, and carried it out to my pickup truck, a ’68 GMC that was yet another of the valuable gifts that my old man had passed on to me.