The Blight Way (9 page)

When Tully got back to the Last Hope Road, one of the state troopers had left. He told the other one he could leave, too, that the situation was just about cleaned up. He drove the Explorer under the crime-scene tape, through the creek and down the road to the clearing. A Blight City ambulance was backed up to the Jeep. He pulled the Explorer over into the brush so that the ambulance could get by. The bodies were still in the same position as when he had left. The ambulance driver and his assistant were out of their vehicle, both of them smoking cigarettes. He wondered vaguely how much they paid ambulance personnel these days, that they could afford to smoke. Susan walked out around the Jeep, blowing some strands of hair out of her face. She was stripping off a pair of bloody latex gloves.

“I called in the ambulance,” she said. “I'd like to get the bodies back to the morgue as soon as possible.”

“That's fine,” he said. “My Crime Scene Investigation
Unit is on its way, but he won't need the bodies.”

“I discovered Pap's pretty good with a camera,” she said. “He's photographed everything, including the spots back in the trees where the ambushers waited. They had some heavy firepower, automatics of some kind.”

“Automatics don't seem like something our local boys would have lying around.”

“Hard to tell what boys have lying around these days,” she said. “I went through the victims' pockets and billfolds. They both have L.A. addresses and lots of cash. The two in the front seat both had guns still in their holsters. Holt, the chap over the fence, probably had a gun, too, but we can't find it. He didn't have a holster, not one we've found, anyway.”

Tully walked around the car and back to Susan. “The thing I can't figure is how the guy on the fence made it out of the back seat. The two shooters in the trees could have sprayed the whole length of the car with automatic weapons fire in a couple of seconds.”

“The back seat was riddled with bullets, too,” Susan said.

“Right. And so Holt should have been killed right here at the car. How did he avoid getting hit in the car?”

“I see what you mean,” Susan said. “The back seat area is shot to pieces. It doesn't look as if anyone could have survived that.”

Susan walked over and started talking to the ambulance guys. Pap came out of the woods.

“I was right,” the old man said. “As usual.”

“How so?” Tully asked.

“There's an old skid trail back in there a hundred yards or so. The shooters drove some ATVs in on it and parked them there. Then they walked through the woods and set up the ambush.”

“Were you able to tell how many?”

“Kind of. There were three pretty good-size ATVs, all of them four-wheelers. Each of them could carry two people if they were on pretty good terms with each other, so there couldn't have been more than six people all together, maybe as few as three.”

“Shoe tracks?”

“None I could find,” Pap said. “Looked like they drug something around to erase any tracks. I walked down the trail a ways and picked up the tracks of the ATVs.”

“Folks drive ATVs all over this country,” Tully said. “Could be anybody riding them around here.”

“Except for one thing,” Pap said, taking out the makings from his jacket pocket. He carefully rolled himself a cigarette.

“And that thing is?” Tully said irritably.

“I found a splash of blood.”

“And what did you conclude from that?”

“If the fence guy did in fact shoot one of the ambushers or someone else standing back in the woods, as we think he did, they would have had to wrap the dead guy up in a poncho or a tarp or something to keep him from leaving a bloody trail all the way over to the ATVs. They've got the dead guy tied onto one of the ATVs, and as they're riding out the tarp slips and spills some blood. The other shooters stop and try to cover the
blood with dirt, but it's dark and they don't do a good job. So you can see the blood is on top of the track they came in on and that one of the ATVs went over some of it on the way out. So we can be pretty sure it ain't blood from a deer or something.”

“Maybe it wasn't a mistake bringing you along,” Tully said.

“Well, I'm enjoying my birthday.”

Susan came over with the ambulance driver. “If we're finished with the bodies, the guys can get them to the morgue.”

“If you're done with them.”

“I've done everything I can here. I'm going to head in, too. See if I can get the autopsies started.”

Tully didn't like the image of this beautiful woman performing autopsies. “Where's Buck?” he said.

“I've got him out looking for the gun you think Holt may have dropped or thrown away.”

The ambulance attendants were loading one of the bodies onto a stretcher.

“I'll call the office and get someone to send a tow truck out and we'll get this car impounded where we can check it out.”

“Good idea,” Susan said, walking over to him. “You know, this would be a really nice spot in the woods if it didn't have blood all over it.”

The ambulance pulled out.

“It's getting better already,” Tully said. “Speaking of blood, Pap found a patch of it over on a skid trail the ambushers apparently drove their ATVs in on. It's almost sure to be human, but would you check it for us?
See if it's at least the same type as the blood over in the woods. Later we'll see if the state crime lab can match the DNA.”

“Sure. Then I'll probably take off. See you back in town.”

“Yes, you will,” Tully said.

She gave him her nice smile. Probably already in love with me, Tully thought.

Buck walked back into the clearing. Tully asked him if he had found anything. Buck shook his head. “Getting on toward supper,” he said. “You mind if I head back in?”

“Yes, I mind,” Tully said. “I need you here. Go get some coffee if you want.”

Buck seemed pleased. It was nice to be needed.

Tully said to Susan, “Now that we've got the bodies out of here, I'm going over the berm and walk up the road to see if I can find anything that might bring our dead friends out here for the little ambush. You want to go along?”

Susan thought for a moment, massaging her lower back with her hands. “Sure. Let me do that patch of blood Pap found, and I'll be ready to go. By the way, I'm pretty sure the victims in the car died at three thirty-eight this morning.”

“Wow, three thirty-eight. Your science is that accurate now?”

“No. One of the bullets hit the driver's watch. Stopped it at three thirty-eight.”

Chapter 13

Tully and Susan climbed over the berm and started up the road. “So Pap was right,” he said. “That was human blood.”

“He was right. I bet he was fun to grow up with.”

Tully glanced at her to see if she was kidding. She apparently wasn't. “Oh yeah, he was a delight,” he said.

“You mean he wasn't?”

“I never even knew he was my father until I was about ten. All I knew, he was the sheriff and just about everybody in town was afraid of him. We kids in particular. ‘You eat those Brussels sprouts or I'll call the sheriff,' parents would say. Those Brussels sprouts would vanish as if by magic.”

“Good heavens, he doesn't seem like the kind of man anyone would be afraid of.”

“I guess that's part of his MO.”

“Are you the kind of sheriff people are afraid of?”

Tully kicked a rock up the road. “Me? Naw, I'm a pussycat.”

“I bet.”

The road was steep and winding, and Tully paused often to look around at the scenery. Each pause caused him to take a little longer to catch his breath. Susan seemed unbothered by the climb. Probably a jogger, Tully thought. Just his luck. “Hey, huckleberry brush!” he exclaimed on the third switchback. He would have to remember this for the following summer.

They came to a tiny spring running out of the bank above the road.

“You want a drink?” Tully said, dipping a finger in the stream. “It's ice-cold water.”

“You've got to be kidding! Don't tell me you would actually drink from that! You could get giardiasis!”

“Giardiasis? Around here we call that beaver fever.”

“Why am I not surprised?”

“Of course I'm kidding about taking a drink from this. Sure, maybe if I was dying of thirst.” Tully was dying of thirst. “By the way, the road is kind of muddy here. Like me to carry you across?”

“Somebody else has waded across, I think I probably can, too. The mud is about half an inch deep!”

“Thought it was worth a try,” Tully said.

Susan laughed.

Off in the distance, they could see the Blight River meandering along between its borders of cottonwoods. Several small lakes were visible in the distance. They could see the town of Famine, a cluster of miniature
buildings neatly arranged along tiny streets. Famine looked a lot better from a distance than it did up close. Susan, on the other hand, looked pretty darn good up close. He was pretty sure she would look even better the closer he got.

“It's so beautiful,” she said, peering out at the valley.

“Yeah, Idaho is a beautiful state. But Blight County itself is a corrupt little place.”

“Corrupt?”

“Only in the good sense. Most of the politicians can be bought, but they don't charge much. Even the poor can afford a politician or two. It's very democratic that way.”

They came to a road cut into the canyon wall. It led down to Vern Littlefield's dam. The reservoir behind the dam stretched back up the canyon and around a bend. A high, padlocked gate prevented them from walking down the road. The dam and an adjacent building were enclosed by a Cyclone fence with coils of razor wire along the top.

“Vern apparently maintains his dam by driving over the mountain between here and the ranch,” Tully said. “According to his wife, Cindy, he's got a security system that lets him know if anybody is fooling around the dam.”

“It's a pretty modest little dam,” Susan said.

“Yeah, but I've always wanted my own little dam.”

Susan smiled.

Rounding a craggy corner, they came to the Last Hope Mine. It had been a much larger operation than Tully had imagined. Tailings from the mine filled the
entire upper half of a gully and had been bulldozed flat on top. Most of the buildings, roofed with rusted corrugated steel, were still intact. A large, open, timber-framed structure held several huge tubs that Tully thought probably had contained acid baths to separate the gold from rock. A dozen small cabins were situated in a flat area that had been dozed out of the mountain-side, residences, apparently, for the workers and their families.

“The Last Hope was quite a mine,” Tully said. “I didn't expect anything like this.”

“Anything in particular you're looking for?” Susan said.

“Maybe it's just that I've always wanted my own little gold mine.”

“With your own little dam and your own little gold mine you'd be all set,” Susan said, clearly trying not to laugh.

“That's about the way I figure it,” Tully said.

“What exactly do you have in mind for your gold mine?”

“Oh, something small enough that I could work it myself. I saw this bit on television once about an old guy, he must have been ninety-something, and he had this vein of gold he worked with just a pick. He'd whack out a few rocks and put them in a sack and carry them back to his cabin. He'd built this rock crusher out of some pipe and other stuff and he'd pound the rock down into a powder and then take his gold pan and wash out the gold. I said to myself, ‘Perfect!'”

“It doesn't sound like a great life to me, living up in
the mountains all alone and pounding rocks all day.”

“I was afraid of that,” Tully said. He and Susan walked over to the mine entrance. The explosion that closed it had brought down tons of rock. A few timbers protruded from the pile of rubble.

“Nobody's going to get in there,” Tully said. “Unfortunately, the owners of a lot of mines in these mountains simply walked off and left them. Some kids found one a few years ago that still had boxes of old dynamite stacked inside. It was so old the sticks were sweating nitroglycerin. The kids had twenty-two-caliber rifles with them, and if they had fired one shot into that stack of dynamite, we'd have been lucky to find so much as a hair from any one of them. Somehow, one of them must have had a lick of sense, and they ended up reporting the mine back to us. We blew it up. It was quite a bit of fun, actually, but the blast shook practically every window in the county.”

Susan shook her head, whether it was in disbelief or simple amusement Tully couldn't tell.

“I imagine the miners who lived in these cabins had a pretty rough time of it,” Tully said. “Particularly in the winter.”

“They had a terrific view, though.”

“It's nice,” Tully said.