The tall man nodded sharply. “I’ll call.”
And he would, Dr. Randall thought, idly pressing the fold from the crisp twenties as his patient’s boots rang down the steps of the back staircase. For no matter how hard the man tried to convince himself he didn’t need counseling, he was smart enough to realize that the demons he was trying to exorcise had burrowed deep into the darkest parts of his soul and wouldn’t be released without the proper coaxing, the treatment he so abhorred.
Pride goeth before a fall, Randall thought as he slipped the bills into his own worn wallet. He’d seen it time and time again. This man, though he didn’t know it, was about to tumble.
“Dad-gum dog—where the hell did ya run off ta now?” Charley Perry said around a wad of chewing tobacco. He was tramping through the wilderness, high above the Columbia, through old-growth timber and little else as the first light of dawn splintered through the trees. Winter was chasing down the gorge, and his stupid, two-bit spaniel had taken off again. He considered leaving her out here—she’d probably find her way back to his cabin—but a bit of guilt nagged at him, and truth to tell, she was all he really had in the world. Tanzy had once been a helluva huntin’ dog, Charley mused, but like himself, she was half-deaf now and more than a little crippled with arthritis.
Squinting through the sparse brush, he whistled sharply, the sound piercing its way through the forest as branches rattled overhead. His gloved hands tightened over the barrel of his rifle, a Winchester that his daddy had bestowed upon him over half a century earlier when he’d returned from the war. He had newer weapons, a lot of them, but this one, like the tired old dog, was his favorite.
Damn, he thought, but he was gettin’ nostalgic in his old age.
“Tanzy?” he called, knowing that he was chasing off any chance of prey. Stupid bitch of a dog!
He stomped up a familiar trail, his gaze scanning the ground for signs of deer, or elk, or even a bear, though they’d already gone into their dens for the winter. There had been talk in town of a mountain lion that had been seen near the falls this summer, but Charley hadn’t come across any spoor that indicated the big cat was prowling these slopes. Charley didn’t really know what cougars did in the winter but he didn’t think they hibernated. Not that it mattered. Never, in all his seventy-two years of living in these mountains, had he ever seen one. He didn’t figure today would be his unlucky day.
His feet ached from the cold, even in his wool socks and hunting boots. The shrapnel still embedded in his hip pained him. Still he hunted, searching these woods as he had as a kid with his pa. He’d nailed his first buck up on Settler’s Bluff when he was fourteen. Hell, that was a long time ago.
A blast of wind hit him hard in his face and he swore. “Come on, Tanzy! Let’s go, girl!” It was time to drive his battered Ford truck into town, pick up a paper, and drink coffee at the Canyon Café with the few of his friends who were still alive and healthy enough to leave their wives for an hour or two. Later, he’d do the crossword puzzle and stoke the fire in his woodstove.
Where the hell was that mutt?
He whistled again and heard a whimper, then a bark.
At last! He turned and walked down a sharp gully where Tanzy was suddenly going ape-shit, her nose to the ground around a decaying log. “Whaddaya got, girl?” Charley asked, as he stepped over a bleached-out snag and into a scattering of brush. His boots snapped small twigs as he inched his way down to the dog, bracing himself for a squirrel or weasel to dart out from what appeared to be a hollow log. He sure as hell hoped it wasn’t a porcupine or skunk holed up in there.
A breeze stirred the branches overhead and he smelled it then—the rank odor of decaying flesh. Whatever was inside was already dead. No worry about it dashing out and scaring the bejeezus out of him.
Tanzy was barking her fool head off, jumping at the log and leaping back, the bristles of her spotted coat standing on end, her tail swatting the air.
“Okay, okay, just let me have a look-see,” Charley said, lowering himself on one knee and hearing it pop. He bent down and peered into the cavity of the log. “Can’t really tell.” But something was wedged inside and it smelled bad. Curiosity got the better of him, and he shifted the log a bit, allowing the wintry sunlight a chance to permeate the darkness. As he did, he got a good glimpse of what was inside.
A human skull stared back at him.
Charley’s blood turned to ice. He yelped and dropped the log.
It splintered against the forest floor.
The skull, with tiny, sharp teeth, strings of blond hair, and bits of rotting flesh attached to the bone, rolled into the pine needles and dry leaves.
/> “Jesus H. Christ!” he whispered, and it was a prayer. The wind seemed to pick up, shaking the snow from the trees, skittering across the back of his neck. Charley took a step back and sensed evil—from the darkest part of Lucifer’s heart—lurking in the gloom of this forest.
“Charley Perry’s a crackpot,” Sheriff Shane Carter groused as he poured himself a cup of coffee from the carafe that simmered for hours on end in the kitchen of the sheriff’s department. As soon as the last cup was poured from the glass pot, another was made.
“Yeah, but this time he’s claiming he found a human skull up near Catwalk Point. We can’t ignore that,” BJ Stevens said. She was a short woman, a little on the hippy side, with three men’s names. Billie Jo Stevens. She didn’t seem to mind.
“Send two men up there.”
“Already have. Donaldson and Montinello.”
“Charley claimed to have seen Bigfoot a couple of times before,” Carter reminded her as he headed through the break room toward his office near the rear of the Lewis County Courthouse. “And then there was the incident where he was certain a UFO had hovered over the Bridge of the Gods, remember that?”
“Okay, so he’s eccentric.”
“Nutcase,” Carter reminded her. “Full-blown.”
“Harmless.”
“Let’s just hope this is another one of his wild-goose chases.”