“Why?”
Eric coughed again, then righted himself. “I’m really sick, man. And they’re through with me.”
Joe felt his scalp twitch. “Who is through with you?”
Eric tried to gesture skyward, but his arm wouldn’t work. “They are. I thought there would be some kind of payoff, but they just used me. No one told me the other side would send something after me.”
Behind Eric was a dark wall of Rocky Mountain junipers. Joe thought he saw movement in the lower branches, but decided it must have been the cold wind. The wind did strange things in draws like this.
“Tell me,” Joe said. “We know about Stuart Tanner and Tuff Montegue. But why did you kill your brother?”
Eric’s face twisted painfully. “It was Bob. Bob did that. I guess Cam tried to get away, and Bob whacked him on the head. Then Bob figured he’d mutilate him to make it look like the others. I wasn’t in the room when it happened.”
“You were carving on Deena in the other room at the time, I guess,” Joe said.
“Who cares about any of this?” Eric said. “You got me. So shoot, you bastard. Give me some peace. Or I’ll come over there and start cutting on you.”
“What made Tuff Montegue’s horse throw him?”
Eric twitched. “Bob said it was just dumb luck. Bob said he must have spooked the horse as he moved from tree to tree.”
“Why the animals?” Joe asked, gripping the shotgun tighter. “Why did you mutilate the animals?”
Eric shook his head. “I didn’t hurt any animals. Except for that stupid horse on that ranch, and I messed that up.”
“What?” Joe asked, perplexed.
“I know who did it, though,” Eric said, coughing. His eyes shined. He took a clumsy step toward Joe now, and raised the scalpel. “They did it.”
Again, Joe saw a shiver in the junipers. This time, he knew it wasn’t the wind. It was something huge, something big-bodied.
“They’re gone now,” Eric said, wincing but still lurching forward. “But they’ll be back. And if you think I’m scary . . .”
The grizzly bear, the one Joe had once been chasing, the one Nate had made his obsession, blasted out of the junipers and hit Eric Logue in the back with such primal force and fury that it left Joe gasping for breath. The bear had waited, and Eric Logue had finally come.
Joe watched as the grizzly dragged Eric’s wildly thrashing body into the shadows.
Sheridan still dreamed vividly, and one dream in particular stayed with her, subtly growing in meaning until she would later look back on it as the end of something. In that dream, one of many that took place the night after Eric Logue attacked Nate Romanowski, the roiling black clouds were back. This time, though, the tendrils of smoke or mist leached from the ground and low brush and rose upward, as if being withdrawn. The black horse-head snouts of the thunderheads rolled back, eventually clearing the top of the Bighorn Mountain, leaving big, blue sky.
She believed there had been a battle. The battle took place in plain sight, in front of everyone, but few could see or sense it. She wanted to believe that the battle was between good forces, with the bear as the agent, and evil, embodied by some other kind of beings who had recruited Eric Logue and Nurse Bob. Perhaps the good forces had engaged her dad and Nate as temporary foot soldiers as well. But she would never know that.
It was remarkable to Sheridan how little the incidents—the cattle, wildlife, and human mutilations—were talked about. It was as if everyone in the Twelve Sleep Valley collectively wished that nothing had happened. But they had. Men had died. Maxine would forever be changed from seeing something that had scared her white. A family, the Logues, was destroyed.
Even when the e-mail came to her father from someone named Deena, who had written to him from somewhere in South America where more mutilations had subsequently occurred, her father didn’t want to discuss it. Sheridan wouldn’t have even known about the e-mail if she hadn’t heard Nate try and broach the subject with her dad.
“Too many holes in the earth,” Nate had said. “Maybe something was released into the atmosphere that drew in a force like putrid meat draws in flies.”
Her dad had said, “Or maybe not,” in that dismissive way he had, and changed the subject. When Nate tried to steer him back, her dad told Nate, “I don’t want to talk about something we’ll never have the knowledge to understand.” Then: “Nate, I hate woo-woo crap.”
Nate said, “I know you do,” and smiled, the edges of his new scar twisting his mouth slightly.
She was with her dad later that fall when he slowed his pickup on the bridge to call out to Not Ike Easter, who was fishing in the river. Not Ike hollered back, laughing. Sheridan asked her dad what Not Ike had said.
“He said he’s caught three fish.” Then he smiled as if he were content, as if things had finally returned to normal.