BY JOEL TAGERT The steer had been flayed and dissected, its skin, organs and bones arranged upon the shrubland in a meticulous mandala with the animal’s heart at its center, a cloud of black flies fighting the Wyoming wind to claim their share of the bounty. Dick Gerlits stalked slowly around the circle — fifty feet from edge to edge — a scowl steadily cutting deeper into his leathered features. “What do you think, boss?” asked Hector. Gerlits took his time answering. “I think I’m gonna find the son of a bitch that did this and nail his fucking hide to my wall. If it’s the last thing I do in this life, I’m gonna find him.” “Well, watch out if you do,” said JJ. “Cause this son of a bitch has got a sharp knife.” “That supposed to be a joke?” “I ain’t laughing. But look at it. He knew what he was doing.” Gerlits nodded, eyes tracing the calligraphic loops of intestines, the runic ribs. “No blood.” “Huh. Must have drained it first. Then what, they take it with ’em? Do a little prom scene with it later?” This was his animal. Done on his land. “I’ll ask when I find him.” “But who?” said Hector, baffled. ∆ That was the million-dollar question. The sheriff’s office didn’t have shit to say about it, no surprise with that twit Dollard at the reins. Everybody had a theory, but none of them made much sense. JJ was convinced it was some druggies, out of their heads on meth. Hector told credulous stories of chupacabra. Dick’s wife, June, said it was Satanists up from Denver: she’d seen one the night before at the Flying J, a goat’s head tattooed on his neck, if you could believe it. Gerlits brooded on past wrongs and old enemies. But there were no leads, nothing concrete. Not even any tracks close to the scene. Half the people in town thought it was someone at the ranch, a notion Gerlits had entertained himself before finally crossing each of his half-dozen employees off the list. At week’s end he went online and spent three grand on eight networkconnected trail cameras. Recognizing that this wouldn’t be enough to capture even a small fraction of the twelve-hundred acre ranch, he placed four on fenceposts near the hill where they’d found the steer. The rest he situated at road entrances and turnoffs, reasoning that missing tire tracks aside, the bastards hadn’t walked out there. It was October before it happened again. ∆ Gerlits found the cow himself this time, half a mile west of where they’d discovered the dismantled steer, in the meadow just shy of where the cottonwoods rose near the Platte. Even before that grisly find he’d often driven around the ranch, keeping a watch on things, but since then he’d made a point of circling the roads morning and evening. So he found it with the rising sun still low, the air crisp but the wind faint, what June would call a blessing of a day. This time the perpetrator had set the bones in an equilateral triangle pointing directly north, the intestines winding in a filigree around the edges, the organs arrayed by shade — dark to light — in the interior, with the cow’s skull at the apex, the eyes, tongue and ears set in perfect symmetry on either side of the still-intact spinal cord, leading up to the brain in the opened bone casing. The fatty folds glistened in the golden dawn light. “Show-off,” Gerlits muttered. ∆ The time stamp on the video read 3:56 a.m. That alone was surprising; he’d assumed it would take all night to undertake such complex work. The cow ambled into frame, reading pretty small; the camera had a lot of pixels, but the animal was still too distant for good detail. Suddenly a cone of light flashed on: flashed on from above, like a streetlight, its source out of frame. The image flared as the camera tried to adjust, with only partial success. It would stay washed-out no matter how he played with it. Then the cow rose into the air: or at least, that was how it looked on his screen. It was kicking and bucking, clearly panicked, but it bucked in place, as though on a hoist (and maybe it was on a hoist). Its black shadow began to grow tangled and unreasonable, warping and stretching. Lines and shapes erupted from it, twisting and curving until they drifted to the wheatgrass below. Steadily the bulk of the cow diminished until there was nothing left. The light snapped off, and with the motion stilled, the camera shut off too. For hours Gerlits played and replayed the video, zooming in and out, altering filters and settings. When all that proved to offer few insights, he stared off at the shelves of his study, where he’d set some of the 9
12 Publizr Home