Antler Dust (The Allison Coil Mystery Series Book 1) Read online

  Antler Dust

  An Allison Coil Mystery

  Mark Stevens

  Copyright 2011 by Mark Stevens

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying, or in any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher.

  Published by Third Line Press

  Denver, Colorado

  First Edition

  Cover and Interior Design: Nick Zelinger, NZ Graphics

  E-Book by e-book-design.com.

  Dedication

  For Jody, my creative cowgirl

  One

  Allison Coil stroked the soft neck of the massive bull elk. The skin was still warm to the touch. She felt the smooth fur on the animal’s head, looked at the crimson dot on its skull that leaked

  blood, then pressed her index finger against the spot where death had found an opening.

  Death in a flying cylinder, she thought.

  “This is the point in the process where none of us really knows what to do next,” said Vic, one of the three hunters who had led Allison to the site of the kill. They had returned to camp for their quartering tools when she showed up, making the rounds to check on all of her clients.

  “He was still struggling when we got here,” said another member of the trio. “We were forced to finish him off.”

  The three young men were appropriately respectful of the dead elk. Too many hunters treated animals as little more than bull’s-eye targets.

  “Is this your first kill?” she said.

  “First kill, first shot, first day,” said Vic, the man bearing the least amount of gear and hunting stuff—jeans, boots and a blaze-orange vest over a heavy winter jacket. “Beginner’s luck all the way.”

  “How did it make you feel?” she said.

  “Feel? I don’t know. It all happened so quickly.”

  Allison stood up. The four of them were gathered in a grassy clearing a half-mile from their camp outside the main bowl of Ripplecreek Canyon.

  “Good lung shot,” she said. “Too bad he didn’t die instantly.” Allison had guided these men into the wilderness three days earlier. She was a rarity in the Rocky Mountains, a female guide in macho land. Her job was to escort hunters on horseback into the high country, to help them set up tents and prepare for the hunt. This group was a welcome break from the greenhorns who tried to pretend that they had never worn a silk tie, drunk a three-martini lunch, or driven an SUV with a cell phone sprouting from one ear. This group had an earthy, genuine feel. She remembered taking note of Vic’s good looks on the day she had loaded them in. She took another moment now to study him again: trim sandy-blond beard, a surfer-like shock of blond hair, square shoulders, strong hips and a solid demeanor.

  “If I hadn’t come back today to check on you boys, which one of you would have taken this puppy apart?” she said.

  “I was going to wing it,” said Vic.

  “So ... do you want a hands-on lesson, or do you want to watch me have fun by myself?” Allison said.

  “A lesson, please,” said Vic. “You might not be around to hold my hand the next time I bring down an elk.”

  “You’ve taken your kill for this season, mister,” Allison said. “If you learn how to do this right, you can hold one of your buddies’ hands.” She looked over at the two other men, who took a small step away from each other, laughing.

  Allison showed Vic where to make an incision in the white belly—a straight line from anus to heart—and how to avoid puncturing the intestines. She used a small handsaw to cut through the pelvis and splay the rib cage back. The hunters peered warily at the guts open to the wide sky. Like a doctor in an outdoor operating theater, Allison admired the animal’s clean, shiny innards. White intestines, beet-red liver, pale-pink lungs—nature’s color-coded diagram. She cut the corrugated esophagus, a windpipe like a vacuum cleaner tube, from the animal’s throat. The discard pile grew as the animal was parted out. Vic took over as they emptied the viscera from the elk’s cavity.

  “We admire your guts,” said one of the others. “So to speak.” “I don’t know why they call it field dressing,” said Allison.

  “Seems like the opposite to me. Think how much work it would take to put this elk back together, if it was possible to reassemble a dead animal. Say, for instance, if it was a kit you might buy in a hobby shop.”

  “An odd thought,” said Vic. “But I think I know what you mean.” “A surgeon could stitch it all back together, but the pieces wouldn’t be alive. You couldn’t kick-start the heart or refuel the brain.”

  She was getting curious looks from her audience as she worked the saw around the ribs.

  “If you see enough of these, it’s a question you might start asking yourself,” she said. She had been pondering survival and odds and body parts and death within hours of the jetliner crash. Prior to that day, death was just a word repeated on the nightly news.

  Vic was the only one who was eager to reach in and scrape. Allison wondered why the others could come all this way, spend all this money on a guided hunt and avoid an opportunity to study the inside of an elk.

  She helped fill water jugs in the nearby creek. They washed out the carcass and cut off the legs. She showed Vic how to scalp the antlers and leave enough of the nubs to show evidence that the kill was male, in case the boy-men were stopped on the way home by a forest ranger.

  They quartered the animal and strapped the hindquarters to Bear, her Appaloosa. Back at camp, Vic helped hoist the pieces up with rope into a tree so the meat dangled from a branch well off the ground. Dangling meat attracted all kinds of wild creatures— raccoons, mountain lions and flies. Allison peppered the meat to discourage the flies.

  As they worked side by side to complete this last step, Allison decided that Vic fit all of the criteria that she looked for in a man. He stirred her up, no question about it. She wondered exactly which organ fluttered inside her chest at such moments. It was a heart-lung combination that went light and limp and left her a bit breathless.

  What did the space in her chest cavity do the rest of the time? What did she look like inside? How close had an ambulance crew come to learning that after the plane wreck? There were other bodies floating in the water for them to study that day, ejected and discarded. What the medics did see was her superficial exterior. She was short and slender, a hundred and ten pounds after a big meal. She had cropped, functional, straight brown hair that was easily covered, quickly cleaned and more manageable than it had been during her city days Back East, when a stylist took care of the externals. Her face was narrow and small, with warm brown eyes, a solid nose, high cheekbones and bright white teeth, the product of a milk-fed youth combined with strong Midwestern genes.

  As Allison cleaned her knife with a jug of water and paper towels, Vic sidled over and started asking questions, making his move. She could read him like spoor. He asked how long she had been a guide, how long she had lived in Colorado, asked if all the “guy stuff ” and macho posturing bothered her. These were questions that he did not really want answered, she knew. She had heard it all before, but what woman hadn’t? Anthropologists had a phrase for it: mating ritual.

  Vic told her about the three of them, even though she had not asked. They were co-workers from an advertising firm. Of all things, Allison thought. She had a career in advertising when she had lived Back East, prior to the accident. Vic quizzed her about how her life was currently set up, how long she had been out of the city. She replied with vague answers, not g
iving any indication that she was nailed down to a relationship, because she wasn’t. Not officially.

  Bear was hitched to a nearby tree. Allison tightened his cinch and breast collar. The long haul back from this spot in the wilderness meant it would be difficult to reach home before nightfall. She would probably end up riding in the dark, which made her wary, because the air smelled like it was gaining weight. Snow for sure. Blizzards and horse rides in the dark never concerned her when she lived where the mountains were brick, the open plains were asphalt and she traveled in birds made of fragile steel.

  Back near their tent, the man-boys were evaluating how best to slice elk steaks for dinner. “The question is how a woman like you ended up here?” said Vic as she showed them how to extract the back strap, the best meat on the carcass.

  “Why is that the question?”

  “Okay, it’s one question.” He cut the slice free with a steady hand and she showed him how to bind the rest with twine.

  Vic reminded Allison of an old college girlfriend whose blunt questions were delivered with earnest eyes that demanded sincere answers, whether the subject was the meaning of life or missing socks.

  “The answer is that I needed a break from the world of big machines, big highways, big buildings and big news.”

  “In other words, all the intensity got you down,” Vic stated. “Yeah, I suppose. I used to be in your line of work, as a matter of fact.”

  “No kidding?”

  “Griffin & Good,” she said, knowing it would prompt a response.

  “One of the biggest agencies there is.”

  “They thought I knew what made for great slogans. Toothpaste, amusement parks, grocery store chains, toilet paper. Tag lines were my thing, little words trying to mean a lot.”

  “You’re a long way from that world. What happened? Did you run out of steam?”

  He was sitting cross-legged on the ground, no longer working. His brown eyes bore through her, but his questions did not feel invasive.

  “I needed to touch things again, real things,” Allison said.

  No, that wasn’t it. Besides, it sounded corny. Everything is real. The answer had to do with stoplights. Or voice mail. Or email. Or twenty-dollar hotel breakfasts.

  “It seemed like I was part of the clutter—TV, billboards, radio, whatever,” she said.

  She found herself sitting next to him on the cool ground. The raw tenderloin rested on a piece of tin foil at her feet. It was red and supple. It looked very much alive. As she gazed at the meat, Vic put an arm around her.

  “Can you hang out tonight?”

  Vic was smooth. The offer was simple. He was clearly playing off their spark.

  “Nope, I’m due back,” she said.

  “Are you, may I ask, involved with someone right now?”

  The thought of a quiet, groping roll in a tent, a loving siesta, a one-night stand on a mountaintop, had its appealing aspects. But Allison knew it wouldn’t work.

  “You can ask and the answer is—well, yes,” she said. “And that goes with one of the other things I don’t miss. Big confusion. Out here, it seems the only things that get messed up, are the things you want to go wrong. The rules are your own.”

  “I can respect that.” His hand moved gently away.

  “Thanks,” she said. “Not that you don’t seem to be a complete sweetheart. Truly.”

  She thought she heard him smile.

  The moment passed.

  She went back to being a professional guide. She packed up Bear and her powerful black mule, Eli. Vic and his buddies started building a fire and discussed meal preparations. Allison mounted her horse and turned to survey the camp one more time before heading Bear toward home. Vic held up his hand in a way that she interpreted as a combination wave and smile that said “maybe another time.”

  Allison pointed Bear straight up through the scrub oak and the main trail that would take her down through the Ripplecreek Canyon and bring her home.

  ****

  Dean Applegate lay prone in the snow. The distant ridge that he had been relying on for bearings had vanished in low clouds an hour ago, about the same time he had popped open a can of cold beef stew and called it breakfast. Through a pair of binoculars, Applegate panned the facing hillside as carefully as the master had taught him. The twin lenses delivered a jittery view of the landscape, a phenomenon he had never seen discussed in hunting magazines. But at least he was going through the motions, doing what he had read and what he had been shown by other sportsmen.

  From down Ripplecreek Canyon, he could hear a distant clatter, the cacophony orchestrated by animal rights protesters to frighten off the elk and deer. The noise of those meddling buzzards blended in a staccato clamor, fading in and out. The clouds were sinking and the racket bounced at him from different directions.

  There. Something moved.

  The plodding shape was near the bottom of the slope where he was perched.

  It was moving toward him.

  The creature was at least a hundred yards away, so Applegate could not tell for sure whether it was elk or deer. It’s moving too slowly. It might be wounded. It might be an outcast or an orphan, but that didn’t matter.

  I am an assassin. No pity.

  He tried to remember all the things a good hunter would do at this moment, with prey in his sights. The list came slowly: check the wind, stay low, watch your step. But all of that was garbled with one notion: Shoot.

  The animal turned to give him a good butt view. Slowly it turned back and continued to move steadily, relentlessly, as if it were the one doing the stalking. But Applegate didn’t think he had been spotted. Camouflage was key. Applegate felt at one with the scenery. He was dressed to kill from cap to boot. His face was caked in olive and black greasepaint. The tree-and-leaf pattern on his parka, pants, gloves, rifle, socks, backpack, binoculars and sunglasses all matched. The pattern was known as ambush and that was his theme: surprise and destroy.

  Applegate imagined how his friends’ faces would look when he came back with the trophy. He knew they didn’t think much of him as a hunter, but their opinion of him would be transformed on the spot. There was no doubt.

  He aimed and waited. The animal poked its nose around a large tree.

  Deer.

  Applegate swatted away creeping doubts. Wild animals never looked very big at a distance, but the animal in his sights was too small to be an elk.

  He squeezed the trigger and the world exploded.

  The brown shape dropped.

  Rifle still up around his shoulder, Applegate stumbled down the slope, through the scrub and thorny bushes, ready to fire again if the animal decided to get up and limp off.

  He knew his kill would be no match in size for whatever George Grumley might bring down today. A whale underwater turns into a minnow once it’s in the boat, he thought. But at least this small animal was something to show for his hunt.

  It was dead, a clean shot. The brown heap did not budge. From where Applegate stood, the animal was bisected by the thin trunk of an aspen sapling flecked in quaking gold leaves.

  Applegate kept the butt of the rifle tucked into his shoulder and cocked his eye square down the barrel as he stepped to the side of the aspen, a bit hesitant, fearful even, to invade the space where an animal had just died. Alas, it was more a yearling than a prize buck.

  He did not recognize it. What the hell was it? The fur was smooth, much too smooth for a wild animal. For a moment, he flashed on the idea that it was a new species, a strange hybrid. This would be a second feather in his cap, a curiosity to show the men back at camp. He had not only proven his ability to kill, he might have discovered a new form of wildlife. He couldn’t see the head. Maybe it was tucked underneath the body. Maybe the animal had broken its neck in the fall.

  He stepped around to the side of the baby aspen and squatted slowly. His knees cracked unceremoniously. He hated the way his knees cracked when he squatted near the fire back at camp, like the pop of burnin
g sap. He could always hear the muted chuckling of the other hunters.

  A hand poked out from the fur where there should have been a hoof. There were fingernails, too, clean and white. Four fingers. There was no need to look for a thumb.

  It all stared up at him, human as guilt.

  ****

  Rocky Carnivitas heard a muffled pop off in the distance. It gave him reason to smile. The echo of the rifle shot was like a satisfying growl that resonated deep in the woods. He waited for another, but it didn’t come. The shot was either a one-bullet drop, with no need for a finishing shot, or a miss. From the sound, he calculated the shot was at least a mile away, down Ripplecreek. You could never be too sure, given the echoes and funny way mountains absorbed sounds, kicked them around. He hoped the bullet had found its mark, hoped a hunter would soon be dragging a carcass down to his truck so all the granola-crunching protesters would gape at the corpse, get angry and make more of a stupid fuss than they were already generating. Maybe the evidence that their protest had not worked would make them give up and go home. And get haircuts.

  Rocky crouched next to a smooth boulder high up in Ripplecreek Canyon. He was a few hundred yards above timberline where the taller trees in the forest gave way to irregular clumps of scrubby bushes scattered among vast, open stretches of loose rock. At his feet, a big bull elk lay on the ground, alive but unconscious. The huge animal took furtive breaths as Rocky gingerly slipped the collar and GPS unit around its neck. He worked carefully to avoid bumping the valuable rack. These were trophy antlers destined to one day hang on the wall of a hunter’s den. Some fat cat would pay ten Gs or more to stand in the woods and kill the elk later. The animal was probably wondering if it was dying. The collar, as thin as a shoelace but made of leather, snapped together.

  Rocky patted the elk on its chest as if it were a puppy dog.

  The air over the upper bowl of Ripplecreek tasted wet. He was lucky to be doing this work during the morning’s relative calm. He had hiked far enough up the valley that the mayhem from the protesters was no longer a factor. None of them would venture this high, especially with the sky turning into a snow-sopped sponge. There was a storm coming. The damned hippies had better have skis.