Gun Shy (9 page)

“I didn’t ask to see it,” I snapped back at him. “I just asked if you had one.”

At that point the bespectacled man stepped forward, still wheezing, and held out three pieces of creased paper. I recognized the seal of the fish and game commissionand brushed the papers away. “Because if you
did
have licenses,” I went on hotly, “any of you, I was going to petition my state representative for a change in the law—one that does not allow for the issuing of hunting licenses to complete idiots!”

Cisco, always eager to cheer me on, punctuated my sentiment with a bark from the window. The stranger glanced at him and smiled, and then surprised me by extending his hand to me. I recognized, from my last trip to the Asheville Mall, the scent of Ralph Lauren’s Polo for Men. “Miles Young, Miss Stockton. This is Jack Crane, my architect, and George Williams, my attorney. Reese Pickens told me you were a pistol. Good to see the old coot didn’t lie about one thing.”

It took me far too long to put all of this together. I just stood there, glaring at him, ignoring his hand until he shrugged and dropped it.

“I own this mountain,” he explained. “I’m your new neighbor.”

I felt a chill go through me, synchronized with a sinking sensation in the pit of my stomach, as all the signs I should have previously read came together into one incontrovertible conclusion. The powerful-looking, overdressed, mildly handsome—in a sleazy kind of way—completely inept woodsman with spiky hair and buffed nails was the man who was single-handedly responsible for desecrating a mountain landscape that had remained unchanged for thousands of years; for destroying the habitats of uncounted wildlife; for threatening the watershed; for bringing petrochemicals and smog and, worse yet, the idle rich into our pristine little corner of wilderness, leaving it desolate and forever altered.

The thing is, until I actually stood there staring at him—whitened teeth, flawless pores and all—I don’t think I entirely believed any of it was real. He gave it a name, a face, a presence. Until now the future had seemed to be a mere threat. Suddenly it was an inevitability.

I said, unaccountably and with all the contempt I could muster, “No real hunter would wear cologne. You smell like a department store.”

He grinned. “Thank you. And as you might have guessed, this isn’t a real hunting trip. We’re more or less just getting the lay of the land. And of course”—the tip of his head, the deepening of his smile, seemed more of an insult than a courtesy—“meeting the neighbors.”

I looked at him for another moment, and as I stood there even the bright autumn sunlight seemed to grow cold and brittle. Then I said simply, “No, Mr. Young. You’re not my neighbor. Neighbors bring you soup when you’re sick and call when you’ve got troubles and fix your fence posts without being asked. You’re just a greedy stranger trying to make money off of something you don’t understand and can never be a part of.”

I walked around my car and opened the driver’s door. “You’re shooting too close to my house,” I told him flatly. “You do it again and I’ll have the sheriff out here, I don’t care how many lawyers you’ve got sweeping up after you.”

There was an odd look in his eye as he watched me get behind the wheel, as though he were not so much angry as intrigued. He said, “Oh, don’t worry, Miss Stockton. The hunting party is over. Tomorrow we bring in the bulldozers.”

I slammed the door, started the engine and threw it into reverse. They had to scramble to get out of the way, and I came close enough to clipping the side of the Range Rover that the architect actually swore at me. Cisco barked at him indignantly, and that arrogant SOB Young actually grinned and raised his hand in a wave. I left him in a cloud of dust and didn’t look back.

“Well, damn, sweetie,” Buck said, tapping a nail into the piece of plywood that covered the hole in my window, “I hope I’m not going to have to go beat this guy up. This is a clean shirt.”

Buck is one of the mildest men I know. He’s a lot like my uncle in that way, and I’m not saying that mildness is not an excellent characteristic in a law officer. But sometimes it’s so annoying I just want to pinch him.

“He grinned at Cisco,” I muttered, scowling.

“Well, now, that’s grounds for hanging in my book.” Buck reached down and scratched my golden retriever’s ears, and Cisco grinned back up at him.

I sat cross-legged on the floor beside Hero’s crate, lightly stroking the Lab’s blocky head while he dozed. His wounds had been cleaned and, as Maude had predicted, were barely more than scratches. She had immediately given him a dose of Rescue Remedy—a holistic blend of flower essences in a strong alcohol base that almost every dog trainer has used at one time or another to soothe a stressed dog (although I personally think its effects may have more to do with the alcohol than the flowers)—and now that the gunfire had stopped, he was resting comfortably.

“Poor old fellow,” Buck observed, positioning another nail. “It’s a wonder he didn’t slice open an artery.”

“I’ll keep him locked in his crate from now on when I’m not with him,” I said. “I’ve got a call in to that guy at Coastal Assistance Dogs, but looks like he would have told me if the dog was noise sensitive. I mean that’s always the first thing I mention to people when I’m placing a rescue dog in a new home, if they have a problem like that.”

“I can’t imagine that any reputable agency would pair a woman in a wheelchair with a service dog who jumps through windows when he hears a loud noise.”

“Me either.” I sighed, untangling a tiny knot from the fine fur behind Hero’s ear. “I suspect this is a recent development.” I looked up at him. “So do you know anything more about what she was doing here or”—a slight, respectful hesitation—“how she died?”

He drove the nail home with two hammer blows. “The body has been turned over to the state medical examiner. We expect him to confirm what you—or rather, what the service dog people—told us. And if Mickey White was paralyzed on her right side, the cause of death was obviously not suicide.”

“And the husband . . .”

“Leo White,” Buck confirmed. “Definitely a person of interest. She was also survived by a father in Chattanooga. The Mount Pleasant police are working with us, trying to get some information on what might have become of the husband. They confirm, by the way, that she owned a silver PT Cruiser.”

“So it
was
them who stopped at the Feed and Seed for dog food.”

“Jeff can’t confirm the wife was in the car,” Buck pointed out. “He only talked to the husband.”

I stroked the velvety line along the Labrador’s nose. “It just seems so strange to me. A service dog’s job is to be at his handler’s side twenty-four, seven. How did Hero get locked outside the bedroom while the killer— well, did what he did?”

“Another thing that points to the husband. Seems to me that if you lived with a dog like that, and you knew that his job was to serve and, well, protect, your victim, the first thing you would do is make sure he couldn’t do his job.”

“I suppose.”

Cisco came over to me and nudged his head under my arm, a rather blatant attempt to divert my attention away from the Lab and onto a more deserving dog—such as himself. I patted his head absently with my free hand.

Buck drove home the final nail and stepped back from the project. “That ought to keep the wind out till T.J. gets over here this afternoon with a new windowpane. Tell him to caulk and paint those nail holes too, will you? I used finishing nails so they wouldn’t scar the wood.”

“I’ll tell you something else that bothers me,” I said. I elbowed Cisco away as he started to become a pest. “No wheelchair, no harness for the service dog, not even a water bowl. I mean, what did he do, carry her inside, lock the dog out of the bedroom, shoot her and drive away? And if that was his plan, why did he let the dog in the house in the first place? Why not just dump the service dog on the side of the road as he was making his getaway? And why stop for dog food?”

Buck said, “Murder is a crime of passion, sweetheart. And crimes of passion don’t always have to make sense.”

“Then why did he just happen to bring a handgun on vacation with him?”

“Nobody ‘just happens’ to bring a handgun anywhere.”

“Exactly.”

“But last I checked, we didn’t have any information on the gun, it being the weekend and all. And of course we didn’t know we were looking at a murder until a couple of hours ago.”

Cisco trotted across the room, dug a tennis ball out from under an easy chair and returned to me with it, tail wagging madly.

I said, “No luck locating the car, I guess.”

“Five hundred miles of road in this county alone,” Buck pointed out, “not to mention trails, paths and drive-ways that lead nowhere. It might take a while.”

Cisco dropped the ball at my feet and, when I ignored him, he nudged my arm insistently with his nose. I ignored that too. You never want to get into the habit of letting your dog tell you what to do, even if all he wants you to do is play ball.

“He probably left the car in a parking lot somewhere across the state line and stole another one,” I observed.

“You should have been a cop.” Buck scooped up the ball and bounced it across the room for Cisco to chase.

I grimaced at him. “If I were a cop, I certainly would have given Mr. Miles Young more than a piece of my mind this morning.”

Cisco skidded to a stop at Buck’s feet with the tennis ball in his mouth. Buck pried the ball from his teeth and tossed it again. “I’ll talk to him if you want me to, but you know as well as I do that there’s no law against a man hunting on his own land during hunting season.”

“I just feel sorry for this guy,” I said, rubbing Hero’s ears. “I’m not even going to be able to keep him until the end of the week if this keeps up—not to mention what it’s doing to the kennel dogs. Of course, Young did say his hunting party was over. Said he was bringing in bulldozers, like that was going to scare me.”

Buck frowned, the soggy tennis ball poised for another toss. “What did Sonny say?”

The big Lab stretched out his forelegs and sighed in his sleep, and I rested a hand on his head. “She said the poor thing was too traumatized to remember anything. Not surprising, since he’s practically too traumatized to eat.”

Buck gave me a puzzled look. Cisco sat expectantly in front of him, eyes fixed upon the tennis ball, tail swishing along the floor. He said, “I meant about the bulldozers.”

“Oh.” I should mention that Sonny, in addition to being a dog lover and possible pet psychic, is a world-class environmental attorney who was spearheading the efforts of the Save the Mountains group to stop the developmentof Hawk Mountain. Or at least that was the goal. As Sonny had recently explained to me, these things are rarely ever
stopped
. The most one can hope for is that they can be managed.

“She said they’ve come to a maximum-density agreement, whatever that means, and a promise for an ecofriendly golf course,” I replied glumly. “Whoopee.”

“Well, that’s something. At least they’re willing to talk.” He tossed the ball again and Cisco scrambled.

“What kind of man wears Polo to go deer hunting anyway?”

Buck looked confused. “Polo? You mean the shirt?”

“No, the cologne. He probably scared away every deer in the county smelling like that.”

An odd look. “You noticed how he smelled?”

“Couldn’t help it. Don’t throw the ball in the house, Buck. You’re going to break a lamp.”

“I think I’d better go to work.”

“Yeah, me too.” I got to my feet. “Maude had to run into town for kennel cleaner and nobody’s minding the phone in the office. Thanks for fixing the window.”

He brushed my hair with a kiss. “See you for dinner?”

“Are you cooking?”

“What happened to my leftovers?”

I shrugged defensively. “You snooze, you lose around here. Besides, nothing is good the second day.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“There might be some cake left,” I suggested as he headed for the door.

“Something tells me I’d better pick it up on the way out if I want any.”

“Good plan,” I agreed. “Call me about dinner.”

I gently closed and latched the gate on Hero’s kennel and slapped my thigh for Cisco, who was gazing rather disconsolately toward the door by which Buck had just left. “Come on, boy,” I said. “Let’s go to work.”

According to the machine’s blinking LED reader, there were three messages waiting for me when I reached the kennel office. The first one was nothing but static. The second one was a hang up. The third one began, “Maudie,
darling
, thank heavens, these phones are just the
worst
! Got your message, love, dying to talk. The number here is—”

And a dial tone.

I punched replay, and at that moment the phone rang.

“Dog Daze,” I answered.

The voice, and the words, were such an exact match for the ones I had heard on the answering machine that I blinked in confusion, looking from the answering machine to the telephone, before I could focus on the fact that it was a live person who was speaking.

“Maudie, darling, thank goodness! These phones are just the pits! It’s Letty, darling, calling all the way from Crete, can you believe it? What in the world is going on back there? First I get all these messages from the Hanover County Sheriff’s Department, and then you call, and—oh, my dear, are you all right? Talk to me!”

Letty. Crete. I made the connection this time a lot more quickly than I had done with Miles Young and the hunting party on the mountain. “Mrs. Cranston, this is Raine Stockton.”

“Oh, no! Do I have the wrong number?”

“No,” I assured her quickly, “I’m Maude’s business partner. She’s not here right now, but I know what she was calling you about—”

“Do I know you, dear? Are you related to that Judge Stockton from up around there?”