Here Lies a Wicked Man – Snippet 15

CHAPTER 15

“You’re dating?” Bradley sounded intrigued as he smeared iodine on Booker’s lip, apparently more interested in his father’s love life than how he got the split lip.

“Sort of a friendship thing.” Having heard the boy’s assessment of Lauren’s violinist, Booker didn’t see any gain in saying he hoped his relationship with Roxanna would be more than friends. 

Capping the bottle, Bradley stared out the car window. Booker started the engine. They rode in silence for the long moment it took to circle a block, turn into the square, and park at the Gilded Trout.

“Did mom tell you about Rachel?”

Booker looked at him. “I don’t recall her mentioning the name. Rachel’s a friend of yours?”

“A girl I’ve been hanging with.” He popped the door open and jumped out, heading straight for the sporting goods store as if to ward off any further discussion.

Sixteen. Booker remembered being the same age when his first heart-thumping infatuation caught him unaware. He wondered if this Rachel might be connected to the crack found in Bradley’s drawer. Parenting was like wading barefoot through crab infested water. You never knew when they’d ignore you or when they’d pinch.

At the Gilded Trout, a string of brass bullet casings hanging from the inside doorknob clattered their entrance. The store smelled of machine oil and leather. Somewhere, an enthusiastic air-conditioner hummed. The cool air alone would entice a person to browse.

Spiner kept it well stocked, Booker noticed. Racks of neatly carded merchandise hung above shelves filled with boxes and bins. In the narrow aisles, posters floating near the ceiling on invisible wires advertised various brand names. Behind the counter, locked cases held guns, fine knives, and other expensive items.

“Optimum,” Bradley said, glancing around.

Booker wondered if Spiner would inherit the entire business now that Fowler was dead, or if he’d have to share the proceeds with the family. Most partnerships included buyout agreements and substantial insurance coverage. Partners had been known to kill for less.

He steered Bradley toward the fishing tackle. The boy homed in on a fiberglass rod sporting a Pinnacle Deadbolt reel. Booker opened a tackle box and began filling it with lures.

“Fake worms?” Bradley scooped up a simulated meathead.

“Bass love ‘em.”

“Must be pretty dumb fish.” With a grin, he wiggled the lure before tossing it into the tackle box.

“Voracious, is more like it. They kill off every other life form in the lake. Plastic worms start to look pretty good, I guess.” Secretly, it heartened Booker to see Bradley get a kick out of gearing up. Like father, like son. For any activity he enjoyed, Booker couldn’t resist buying equipment. Lauren had called it toy collecting.

Gary Spiner, wearing another safari shirt, army green, and sporting a pocket protector filled with pens, looked up from the checkout counter. His jaw stubble had lengthened some. August had to be a mean month for starting a beard. Booker’d gotten the urge himself during one of the coldest, bleakest days of the past winter. At least twenty times he’d come close to shaving it before the chin hair felt natural to him.

The beard made Spiner’s bald head more glaringly naked. Fingering his own whiskers, Booker wondered if growing facial hair was a common practice among men of a certain age. Facing major life changes, usually upsetting and often uncertain, a man needed to feel in control of something. Beard growing fit the bill.

Spiner opened his mouth, to make a caustic comment, judging by the look in his eye. Then, his gaze shifting to Bradley, he closed his mouth and started again. “Can I help you?”

“My son and I are putting together a bass kit.” He almost felt sorry for Spiner. No merchant wanted to turn away business, but neither did he want to truck with a rival. And there was no doubt that Spiner knew Booker intended to cut in on his time with the best-looking innkeeper in Texas.

“Lures on aisle three, rods and reels on six.”

Exactly where Booker had been browsing. Spying a rack of archery equipment, he stopped to check it out.

“Look at this neat stuff,” he told Bradley, picking up a three-fingered leather glove, with the palm and most of the back gone. Beneath the bin, a handwritten sign boasted, “Best shooting glove I’ve ever used.” The card was signed “Gary Spiner, Archery Club President.”

“You’re into archery?” Bradley made it sound weird. Or antiquated.

“Locally, it’s popular.”

His son pointed his new fishing rod at a far corner. “Think I’ll check out the biker gear.”

Now why would the Gilded Trout carry motorcycle accessories? Booker guessed it made sense to be versatile in a small town, but as his son sauntered away toward a dangerous new interest, a gurgle of bile blazed in Booker’s stomach. If Brad Senior were in front of him right now, he’d wring the man’s neck. What had his father been thinking, giving the boy a Harley?

Realizing he had a death grip on the tackle box, Booker looked down at the overflowing contents. Lame goods compared to 700 pounds of roaring metal. Was he trying to buy back his son’s affection? Maybe. But if he and Bradley had spent the past four years together, the boy would already have all the fishing gear he needed.

Nevertheless, they had plenty for tomorrow. He closed the lid, set the box down, and tried on the glove. It fit. Under a wicked looking arrow point, a card read, “This broadhead took down the Wyoming moose mounted on the back wall. Chuck Fowler.”

Sure enough, a moose head occupied the center point of a row of hunting trophies. A comical looking creature, the moose. Booker had only seen them in zoos, and on that old TV show, Northern Exposure. He supposed they could be fierce, and certainly, they were big enough to do a man damage, but shooting one—wouldn’t it be like killing Bullwinkle?

A man-eating crocodile, now that would be an impressive trophy. Beneath the dead animals were framed photographs of archers decked out in their gear. A glass cabinet encased several very long unstrung bows, a half-dozen graduated arrows, and an assortment of leather accessories. A narrow plastic sign read: KYUDO YUMI. What did that mean?

“Thought you wanted bass equipment,” Spiner said, striding up beside Booker.

“Couldn’t help stopping to read these comments. I see you’re president of the Archery Club. Quite an honor.”

Spiner’s chest puffed out. “Your name’s Krane, isn’t it?”

Booker nodded.

“Saw you at Roxanna’s last night.” Spiner let that hang. “You’re a bowman?”

“Not yet.” Booker wasn’t keen on hunting, but he enjoyed a game of skill. Golf was all right, but he liked pool better. The shots were shorter. So were the games. Not nearly as much walking. He didn’t yet know about archery. “What does this club do, exactly?”

Wariness in Spiner’s deep-set eyes ebbed a bit as he caught scent of a big sale. “We meet once a month. Usually, a speaker comes out, talks about equipment, technique, good hunting locations. Guests can come in three times before they have to join.”

“I suppose everybody in the club’s a bow hunter.”

“People come out for hunting, but some just enjoy the competition.”

“Competition? Like shooting matches?”

“Games, field contests, tournaments. See,” he pointed to a rack of junior-size bows, “archery’s a family sport, like bowling.”

“I’ve never seen anybody kill a deer with a bowling ball.”

Spiner laughed. “Hey, that’s a good one.”

Life lesson number one in winning over the enemy: sneak up on him with a weak joke. He plucked a book titled Archery Basics off the shelf and flipped through the pages.

Photographs showed people from six to ninety having a good time plunking arrows into targets.

“I guess even a city guy like me can learn to shoot a bow.”

“Anybody can. Come out back. I’ll show you.”

They went through a door Booker had thought led to a storeroom. At the far right, circular targets were set up on hay bales. Painted stripes divided the floor into three lanes, and across from the targets a rack of bows and arrows hung on the wall. Signs above the racks read: Montana Longbow, Kodiak Recurve, Ultra Force Compound.

“We rent the lanes out, see, for target practice. Keep a few bows back here for demonstration. Come on over. Let’s see if we can find one to fit you.” Spiner lifted a Recurve from the rack and shoved it into Booker’s hands. “Fifty-pound, five-and-a-half-foot.”

“Doesn’t feel like any fifty pounds.”

“Not weight, draw force. Grip it here, see, where it’s shaped to fit your hand. Right there below center.”

Booker’s palm slipped comfortably around the bow grip. Suddenly he was nine years old, Geronimo’s scout, raiding the enemy camp.

“Come in here, now, with your arrow,” Spiner said, indicating a cutaway on the bow. “Pull the string to full draw and see if you can hold it for a ten count.”

The arrow seemed incredibly long. Booker fitted it to the string the way Spiner showed him and pulled. That part was easy enough. While Booker counted to ten, Spiner marked the arrow where it crossed the bow’s outer edge.

“Thirty-two inches. A long draw, but about right for a tall guy like you.”

Booker relaxed the string. Using the mark he made as a measure, Spiner selected a handful of arrows from the rack.

“This bow will do to get the feel of it,” he said. “But when you buy, you’ll want to come in five pounds heavier. See, the back and shoulder muscles strengthen up real quick.” He handed Booker an arrow. “Come on over to the lane. Shoot a couple.”

“What’s that one with all the hardware?” Booker asked. “It looks complicated.”

“Compound bow. Shoots like any other, but you get fifty percent more speed, and the pulley system allows the weight to relax at full draw.”

“Meaning what?”

“You can come in at draw point and hold longer. Hunters like that.”

“That’d been Chuck Fowler’s choice, then,” Booker guessed.

“Chuck? He used a compound or a recurve, depending on the occasion. Try this center lane here.”

Booker stood at right angles to the target, with one foot on the black lane line, as he’d seen in Archery Basics. Fifty percent more speed than what? He pictured a razor-sharp arrow traveling as fast as a bullet.

“Which bow do you use?” he asked Spiner, aligning the new arrow as he’d done before. The flights were white and yellow plastic, he noticed, rather than feathers.

“Compound. Faster, more stable, more accurate. Now start off a little high as you draw, then sight down on the bull’s-eye.”

Booker drew the string back, sighted down, and released it. The arrow shot off to the right, between the targets. The string smacked Booker’s forearm.

“Hellfire, Spiner! That took off a layer of skin.” He looked up to find the store owner swallowing a satisfied grin.

“Hurt like a sonofabitch, didn’t it? Sorry. I’ll get you a bracer.”

The man didn’t look a bit remorseful. Enjoying a spot of revenge for Roxanna, Booker figured.

With a leather arm guard strapped on, and one of those three-fingered gloves on his string hand, Booker stepped up to the shooting mark again. This time, Spiner showed him how to crook his fingers around the bow, holding the back of the hand straight and aligning the draw arm with the arrow. After a few minutes of practice, aiming high to allow for gravity, as Spiner showed him, Booker managed to hit the target. He could see how a person could get hooked. A man liked to test himself.

A half-hour later, Spiner’s checkout counter was piled high: a Shakespeare Yukon recurve, a dozen matched-weight wooden arrows with plastic vanes, which he could afford to break or lose while he was learning, quiver glove, arm guard and a copy of Archery Basics. He dropped an Archery Club brochure on top of the pile.

“Dad!” The tip of a fiberglass rod quivered above a row of shelves. “You gotta see this!”

Bradley rounded the aisle, and Booker suppressed a gulp: black leather jacket, matching boots.

“Quantum boss, right? Just like granddad’s.”

Yes, they were, except Brad Krane’s jacket still had his old gang insignia on the back. “A mite warm out there for leather, don’t you think?”

“Not going sixty miles an hour on the highway,” Bradley said. “Not in the South Dakota Mountains.”

The enthusiasm on Bradley’s face dissolved all Booker’s resistance.

“Pile ‘em on the counter, son.”

As soon as Spiner scanned the price tags into the cash register, Bradley scooped up the boots. “I’ll wear these home.”

He took off across the store, undoubtedly to find a place to sit down and change shoes. Booker hoped he hadn’t just made a big mistake, not saying how he really felt about the motorcycle. But he remembered being a rebellious teenager, his parents’ disapproval making him want a thing all the more. That’s what made it so hard to talk about this crack business. He couldn’t pretend to condone using drugs, yet if he vociferously voiced his opinion, as he was inclined to do, Bradley might pull a disappearing act as he’d done with his mother. Then where would they be? Maybe he should order one of those pamphlets he’d heard about on television, How to Talk to Your Kids about Drugs.

While Spiner rang up the total, Booker studied the trophy wall. Deer, antelope, elk, even a Rocky Mountain goat. Antlers, mostly, but a few trophies included the entire head, stuffed and glass-eyed. Chuck Fowler’s name was engraved at the bottom of several. A brass plate under a Whitetail deer read, “Aaron Fowler, age 12.” A twin to it read, “Jeremy Fowler, age 11.”

Other names appeared that Booker didn’t recognize. He looked for Spiner’s name, but didn’t find it. Littlehawk had scored a wild boar.

Somewhere in the back of his mind floated a picture of himself and Roxanna practicing together. In her dance routine, she’d used a recurve bow, like his.

A display of arrow points hung beside a row of various fletching samples.

“Which point would a person use for target shooting in the woods?” Booker asked.

Spiner glanced at them. “Those are broadheads, for hunting. Most people use field points to practice, until they draw close on hunting season. Then the last couple weeks, see, they come in with whichever point they plan to use for game. To get the balance right.”

“The sheriff said Fowler was target shooting in the woods the day he died. Which one of these would he use? The one that killed the moose?”

“Chuck? Target shooting? That’s a good one.”

“What do you mean?”

Spiner laughed, shaking his head as if this was the weirdest tale he’d ever heard. He had wide yellow teeth, and the way his lips parted around them looked strangely obscene.

“First of all, Chuck was a natural. Didn’t think he needed to practice, except in contests and tournaments. Second, he sure as hell wouldn’t practice in the August heat, when bow season doesn’t open ‘til October. And third, if Chuck did decide to shoot targets, that mean sonofabitch would round up a pack of stray dogs to practice on.”

“He’d shoot at live dogs?” Booker regarded the fiendish-looking point, with its four razor-sharp blades. He felt a little sick.

Spiner handed Booker his receipt and credit card.

“Oh, yeah. Fowler would’ve used hunting points, and he wouldn’t miss.”

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