In the junkyard’s protected environs, the wind had lessened, and the snow was wetter so Geo’s tracks were easier to follow. I wondered why, if he was trying to make it back home, he had detoured here.
I made my way down the aisles of stacked vehicles and had just turned the corner at a ’52 Lincoln when I saw eyes looking at me from the gloom of dark and distance. I raised the Maglite into two pairs of bronze iridescence.
The mutt wolves had their teeth showing as they made their deliberate way toward me between the stacked automobiles. I had been the jolly fellow who had freed them from the depressing dump office and taken them home to be fed, but now I was an interloper that they’d found in their assigned territory.
I made my voice stern. “Easy. Easy Butch, easy Sundance . . .”
They showed no sign of stopping, and even though I despised the thought of shooting them, I couldn’t run. I hoped that maybe a warning shot would scare them off and reached down, unsnapping the safety strap from my Colt and fixing my hand around the grip.
At that movement, they froze.
My hand stayed on my sidearm, and I spoke between the snowflakes. “Well, you guys are smarter than I thought.” They didn’t advance, but they didn’t run, either. I stood there for a moment and then shone the flashlight back onto the prints that turned a corner ahead and continued off to the right.
I stepped forward, but they still didn’t move. “All right, let’s call this one a truce. You guys go your way, and I’ll go mine.” I resnapped the holster and made my way around the corner of the Lincoln. They continued to watch me.
I made a cursory cast of the beam back toward the two dogs, but they remained immobile. Then I noticed that there were two sets of prints in this aisle. The new set were different from the junkman’s, larger and with a more outdoor tread, an over-boot of some sort—probably Sorels. For comparative purposes, I placed my rubber-covered foot alongside—smaller than mine, probably a ten or an eleven.
I stayed to one side and followed both sets of tracks to another left. The snow was heavy now, but the wind had died. I looked up at the flakes that made me feel as though I were falling down and saw that some snow had been swiped away from one of the doors of an old, slope-backed, mostly intact Mercury Coupe.
The door hung open, and I could see one of Geo’s antiquated logger boots hanging from the sill, the extended length of untied cord laces drifting back and forth across the open window of the vehicle on which the Mercury rested.
I hustled through the odd lumps of snow-covered junk and parts, finally resting a hand on the door handle of a partially crushed ’47 Chevy that was at ground level.
Geo was slouched forward with a shoulder firmly planted against the steering wheel where the Mercury’s horn would’ve been if it had still had one. He wore the welder’s cap with the upturned flaps, the double troughs having now filled up with snow. The condensation of his breath had frozen his beard into a solid mass and thinned the blood in it so that it seemed transparent and pink. Thin icicles stuck out from his downturned face like porcupine spines.
I fed a fingertip into my teeth and pulled my glove off, wrapping my hand around the junkman’s wrist—the flesh was blue, cold. He looked down at me with the remainders of a faint smile, but it appeared that the glimmer of life was gone from the rime ice at his pupils.
It was also about then that I felt Sundance clamp his jaws into my right butt cheek.
6
“How’s your ass?”
I responded conversationally. “Fine, how’s yours?”
“Unperforated.”
David Nickerson, Isaac’s new resident, was on EMT duty and had just finished stitching up my posterior when Vic had barged in. I could feel the substantial breeze from the open door of the van and asked her to close it. She did and sat on the wheel-well hump I’d occupied only two days earlier. Vic had gotten Geo Stewart’s body loaded into Durant EMT van number one, and it would appear that we were maxing out the available emergency vehicles for the area on a frozen and very early Wednesday morning.
“You always provide us with the most pleasant environs for our work.”
“I try.”
“I guess I should congratulate you on finding an entirely new place on your body for scars.”
Nickerson straightened behind me. He had applied a large gauze patch over my wound, or at least that’s what it felt like under the dull ache of the local anesthetic with which he’d shot my right cheek. “That’s it.”
I pulled up my underwear and Carhartt overalls, the emergency pair I kept behind the seat of my truck. “You’re sure I’m not going to need any cosmetic work; that is my best side.”
He smiled, and I took a few seconds to study the future of practical medicine in my county. He was a handsome kid with enveloping brown eyes and a comfortable face, one that I was pretty sure I was going to see a lot of in the future. “You sure you’re old enough to be doing this stuff?”
The smile held, and he nodded as he put away the tools of his trade. “Diploma and everything.”
He departed, leaving the van to Vic and me.
I pulled the sleeves up and shrugged on the shoulders, then zipped the front of the insulated suit and straightened the collar. “Geo?”
“Still dead.” She turned her boot sideways, and we both watched as the collected snow slowly slid off. “It looks like the rural Rasputin finally ran out of lives. From a cursory examination, they say massive coronary, but they’ll know more once they get him back to the hospital.”
I thought about it. “Do you think the heart attack was due to the beating?”
She unzipped her duty jacket and studied me. “Difficult to say in all honesty but, if the man had stayed on the floor of the Dobbses’ kitchen or even made it to cover, he might not be dead.”
She took off her hat, ran a hand into her dark hair, and studied me. “Who the fuck knows why people do the things they do when they’re in that condition?” She paused. “Actually, you would probably know.”
I came around the gurney and started to sit but then thought better of it. “Well, there’s the disorientation of having been beaten with a pitching wedge, but it doesn’t look as though he was hurt that bad.” I sighed. “With the wind, it was tough going out there.”
“That and the man is seventy-two years old with a history of heart trouble in the family. Didn’t you say the son died of a heart attack?”
“Yep, but Isaac said Geo’s heart was strong and that he didn’t have the hereditary condition. He did have diabetes, though.” I thought about it some more. “Why did he veer off and go to the junkyard when he could’ve just gone home?”
She folded her arms. “You just said it. Maybe he got disoriented out there in the snow, or he was just looking for the nearest shelter.”
“A ’48 Mercury Coupe with no windows?”
It was quiet in the van. “I don’t know, maybe he thought he was going to the fucking drive-in.” Her head inclined as she continued to study me.
I was getting irritated and it wasn’t her fault, but she was the only one around to swipe at. “What’re you smiling about?”
“You.”
“Why me?”
She laughed. “You really don’t want to charge Ozzie Dobbs with aggravated assault, do you?”
“No, and I don’t want to have to hit him with a man-slaughter charge.” I put my hat back on and looked at her. “Did you find any keys on Geo?”
“What?”
“I’ve got a hunch I want to follow up on, but I need his keys.”
Her smile tempered a little. “A big ring of them. I took them because I thought we might need to lock things up.”
“What about the other set of boot tracks out there?”
She didn’t completely accept the change of subject but let it pass. “It was Duane. Says he was after the dogs, that they sometimes chase a rabbit and won’t come back, so he walked out there looking for them.”