He came to a stop at the birdbath and just stared. The heap before him was the remains of a large buck. He knew it was a deer only by the head, which had been twisted around several times on the neck, producing a corkscrew effect. The tongue lolled slackly from the frozen mouth, a bloodless tubule that seemed much longer than it should’ve been. The animal had been ripped apart. The antlers weren’t to be seen, just cracked knots where they’d been snapped off the skull. Its belly lay torn open, the rib cage pried apart, spilled entrails gleaming. He looked once more to the head; the visible eye looked back at him like a shiny black button.
Mutilated, he thought. He walked back toward the house in a hot daze. This wasn’t the work of a poacher or a predator. He sensed instead pure malice, as though the animal had been ripped apart for sport.
“What is it?” Melissa asked when he’d come back in.
“A deer. And you’re right, it is awful.”
“How did it get so…torn up?”
“Dogs, probably. It’s not uncommon for a pack of wild curs to do something like that.” Kurt sat down at the kitchen counter and yawned.
Melissa was gaping at him. “You’re not just gonna sit there and let that thing rot in the backyard, are you?”
He picked up the phone. “No, I’ll call the county. They’ll send someone out to take it away. In the meantime, you can fix my breakfast.”
Melissa’s eyes now shined with hilarity. “Don’t hold your breath. You can fix your own damn breakfast.”
“Nothing fancy. Orange juice, couple of strips of bacon, couple of eggs over hard.”
“Oh, is that all?”
“Hell, why not? Fry up some hash browns, too.”
Melissa put her hands on her hips and laughed openly at him. “You really think I’m gonna cook your breakfast.”
“I know you will, Melissa,” he said. He started to dial the county animal control office. “Because if you don’t, I’ll tell Uncle Roy you’ve been smoking. He’ll ground you till the end of the next school year.”
“You’re bluffing. You would never do that… Would you?”
Kurt grinned at her and brought the phone to his ear. Melissa stood aside, scowling, hesitant. Then she yanked open the refrigerator door and reached in for the eggs.
««—»»
“Still no word on Cody Drucker,” Bard was saying fatly from behind his desk. “Still no word on the Fitzwater girl. And still no word on Swaggert.”
It was 4:00 p.m. now, the beginning of Kurt’s shift. He’d relieved Higgins only to find Chief Bard still hanging around the station drinking coffee and faking paperwork.
Kurt slouched in his seat. “Last night somebody dug up Vicky Stokes’s dog.”
Bard stared at him. “Huh?”
“Two days ago Vicky’s old collie died. So she buried it in the backyard. The next morning she goes out back to put some clothes on the line, and there’s just a big hole in the ground. And the dead dog is gone. Sound familiar?”
Bard’s eyes swelled to rifts. “What the fuck is going on in this town, anyway? Who the fuck would steal a dead dog?”
“Who the fuck would steal a dead man? Who the fuck would steal a girl who can’t walk? Who the—”
“You think these things are related?”
“No, but I do think a lot of freaky stuff is happening in this town all at once.”
Bard cupped his chin in his hand, elbow on the desk. It made his face look lopsided.
“And another thing,” Kurt said. “This morning Uncle Roy’s kid found a dead deer in the woods behind our house. Wild dogs is my guess; it was torn to shreds. Anyway, I called animal control and had them take it away, and as the driver’s bagging the deer, he mentions that it’s the first time this season that animal control’s been through Tylersville.”
“So?”
“Two days ago 154 was heaped with all kinds of run-down animals. Coons, possums, rabbits.”
“Road pizza. Big deal.”
“Yeah, big deal, but this was two days ago. Yesterday I drive the Route and notice that most of the dead animals are gone. The road’s clean. But today the county tells me that no one’s been out yet to pick them up. Since when does the good fairy clean up animal carcasses?”
“It’s a mistake,” Bard said. “It has to be. The guy didn’t know what he was talking about, that’s all. You know those county public safety employees, they’re all one step off the drug train.”
Kurt nodded absently but said nothing.
Bard went home a few minutes later, leaving Kurt alone in the dim office. He remained there a while, stuck in the metal seat and staring at the window without seeing past the pane. It wasn’t lethargy, or fatigue from too little sleep. His awareness seemed altered, caught in a rare mode, and his eyes slowly widened then, because he thought he knew what was happening. It was that frozen, falling feeling, a sense of black foreshadow he’d known many times in the past. Most police officers acknowledged this at one time or another—a strange, inexplicable warning sign, the warning from the gut.
Later he found himself making town rounds beneath the same weighing dread. He felt locked up in the new patrol car, isolated as a man in an iron lung. His senses tuned in irrelevant impressions. He seemed to view the oncoming road from a low vantage point, for the first time noticing how long the hood of the car seemed to be, like a slalom of white ice. Familiar scenes and images now accosted him in a vaguely threatening way. The rushing squad car seemed to be dividing space, the scope of the road passing above and below and around the car. Trees on either side made the bends with the Route, unbroken in their course and dense as smoke. The outer trunks tilted inward, boughs burdened with new green life. Some of the older branches reached out over the road, as if trying to touch the trees on the other side, or trying to smother him. By now the sky was overrun with clouds; the bright vivid colors of the forest dulled in the spoiled light. Kurt waved to a couple of old men holding bagged bottles in front of the Liquor Mart, but they only gaped at him with stubbled, wizened faces, stickmen in tattered clothes.
Afternoon pressed on, the light graying in increments. He wasn’t aware of the time, he wasn’t aware of anything more complex than the scenes which faced him through the windshield. He thought about Vicky, but only for a moment, as if his sudden detachment forbade warm thoughts. Mentally he struggled to regain some sense of purpose, but his observations only made him more disgruntled. He remembered what the animal control man had told him, and he scanned both sides of the Route, hoping to see that he was mistaken. Come on, road pizza, he thought, flexing his vision. Come on let’s see some of that possum pie. But the road was clean.
His brain felt like a blob of lead, fighting to drag him down into the seat. The radio spat something that nicked at his failing attention. Had he received a call and missed it? He listened again. The dispatcher’s voice sounded irritated.
“Two-zero-seven, are you 10-8?”
“Ten-four,” he said into the hand mike. “Forgot to call in. Sorry.” Apologizing to a radio. What a day.
“Signal 5 with watchman at Belleau Wood entrance number 2.”
“Ten-four.” He put up the mike and glanced at the dash clock. It was just past eight now. He wondered what Glen would be doing at Belleau Wood two hours before his shift began.
Nighttime settled ponderously on the road. The power steering shimmied as he pulled a quick, clumsy U-turn, the new car handling like a barge. He evened out and accelerated north.