“No. But I wish you’d told me about this before I ordered a caffeinated drink with dinner.” I take the flashlight, grab the toilet paper, and head back outside in the direction he mentioned. There, on the other side of the cabin in all its smelly, ramshackle glory, is the outhouse.
I walk over and open the door, shining the flashlight inside. “Great,” I mutter as I look at the bench with two holes cut into it side by side. “A high-class outhouse.” I step inside and shine the light down into one of the holes. Just a few inches below the seat is a tower of spiderwebs with a half dozen little spiders in it and one gigantic one that I swear is as big as the burger I ate for dinner. I shine the light into the second hole, relieved to see that this one doesn’t have an arachnid condo built inside.
I don’t think I’ve ever peed so fast in my entire life, and when I’m done, I use the flashlight to examine my crotch and the inside of my pants before I pull them back up, just to make sure nothing has tried to move in and homestead either spot.
Back inside, I’m delighted to see that the fire is now a roaring, crackling source of heat and reassurance. I return the toilet paper to the shelf and walk over to the fireplace, turning my back to it to warm up.
“Glad to see you didn’t fall in,” Hurley says.
“Or become some giant spider’s bitch,” I toss back. “Have you looked down those holes out there? It’s the New York City of Spidervilles. And I’m pretty sure I saw a red hourglass on the belly of one of the residents.” I shudder at the memory and edge a little closer to the fire.
“I use them for target practice,” Hurley says with a grin.
With nature’s call out of the way, my mind takes in the rest of the room. There’s a couch facing the fireplace, a card table with two folding chairs, a utility sink in what I’m guessing is supposed to be the kitchen—though I notice it has no faucets—and a number of built-in shelves and cabinets.
After taking note of what is here, I then notice what isn’t: a bed.
“Where are we going to sleep?” I ask Hurley, who is loading logs into a woodstove beside the sink.
“The couch is a sleeper sofa. This place isn’t designed for winter living so we’ll have to tend to the fire through the night if we want to stay warm. Want to go fetch some more wood?”
Not particularly, but I suppose I need to pull my weight. Reluctantly I grab the wood carrier and the flashlight, and leave the warmth of the fire to head outside. When I get to the woodpile I lay the carrier out on the ground and start stacking logs into it one at a time while I contemplate the night’s sleeping arrangements. Two people, one bed . . . it doesn’t take a genius to do the math. Normally I’d be excited over the prospect of sharing a bed with Hurley, but with Izzy’s revelations about the new working arrangements and the whole no fraternizing rule, things have gotten much more complicated. I wonder if Hurley has heard about the budget cuts and the proposed changes, and if he has, what he thinks about it.
A few logs later, I hear movement in the trees off to my left. I freeze, listening, and hear it again . . . footsteps crunching on the carpet of dead and fallen leaves. I shine the flashlight in the general direction of the noise but the woods are so thick all I can see is an endless expanse of tree trunks.
I consider hollering out and asking who’s there, but it seems too much like those scenes you see in a horror movie just before the next horrendous murder. Then I realize that the flashlight marks my location like a bull’s-eye. Quickly I turn it off and stand there, still holding a log and hoping it’s enough of a weapon, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the moonlit darkness.
For a moment everything is quiet, but then I hear the footsteps again, moving even closer. As my eyes adapt to the nighttime light, I abandon my post and do a fast gimp back toward the cabin’s entrance.
“Hurley, there’s someone out there,” I say, trying to swallow down my panic. “I heard footsteps in the woods and they were coming this way.”
Hurley drops the log he was positioning in the woodstove, takes the flashlight from me, and then heads outside, taking his gun from his holster. I hover just inside the doorway, unsure if I should go out there with him. My instinct is to stay inside behind the security of the walls, but I feel an obligation to keep an eye on Hurley. Realizing I’ll be about as useful as teats on a bull, I wield my log like a one-handed batter anyway, hoping Hurley will shoot whoever’s out there before I have to use it.
He disappears behind the cabin and I wait, listening for any sounds of a skirmish, or for a shot to ring out. Instead, I hear Hurley call out my name.
Chapter 37
“Mattie, come here.”
Reluctantly I step outside and make my way along the side wall of the cabin to the back. Hurley is standing there next to my abandoned wood carrier, shining a flashlight into the trees. “Look,” he says, gesturing in the direction of the light. “There’s your culprit.”
It takes me a moment to see what he wants me to because at first all I can see are trees. Then something moves and my eyes focus on a deer—a magnificent-looking buck sporting an eight-point rack. He stands there, staring into the beam of Hurley’s flashlight, making no attempt to run off.
“Wow,” I say. “He’s beautiful.”
“That he is, and he’s also probably scared out of his mind since we’re smack in the middle of deer hunting season.”
We stand there having our stare-down for a minute or two more before Hurley lowers the flashlight and focuses it on the log carrier. He returns his gun to its holster and then bends down to pick up a log. “I’ll take the carrier in but let’s load your arms up, too,” he says, holding the log out.
I extend my arms and Hurley stacks five logs onto them before I tell him, “I think that’s my limit.” As he grabs the carrier and we both turn to head back inside, we hear the sound of crashing branches behind us as the buck dashes off deeper into the woods.
We make three more trips to the woodpile before Hurley deems our inside stock sufficient. I stir up the fire in the fireplace and toss another couple of logs onto it while Hurley finishes setting up the woodstove. Once he’s done, he lights the wood inside it and then pours water from one of the gallon bottles we bought at the store into a saucepan that’s so dented it looks like it’s been used as a baseball bat.
“What are you doing?” I ask him.
“Heating up some water for hot cocoa,” he says. Among the provisions we bought is a box of instant cocoa mix and he takes two envelopes out of it, stashing the rest in one of the overhead cupboards. In a different cupboard he finds a couple of mugs, which he examines and wipes with the tail of his shirt before emptying the contents of the envelopes into them. There is something oddly sexy about this little slice of domesticity and with the night’s sleeping arrangement still an elephant in the room, I decide to talk about it.
“So, Hurley, did you hear about the restructuring that’s coming because of budget cuts?”
“I’ve heard rumors,” he says, staring into the pot on the stove as if he has Superman’s X-ray vision and can make it heat faster. “But nothing definitive. Why? Have you heard something?”
“I have.” I then proceed to tell him about the police corruption suspicions and the recent problems that have occurred with evidence collection. “According to Izzy, the solution for now is to increase oversight of the investigative and evidentiary process by creating a tighter working alliance between the police departments, the evidence labs, and our office.”
“Meaning what exactly?”