Dead Man’s Fancy Read Online Free Page A

almost serene expression, he looked little more than a boy who had laid down and fallen asleep with his eyes open. Or at least his right eye, for his face was tilted to the side. She was so focused on the face that for a moment she did not notice that his posture, his body bent backward, was caused by the bulk of what he was lying on top of. She felt the hairs lift at the back of her neck. A sharp pain pulsed behind her eyes. She shook her head to clear it. It was not a mound of snow, as she had first thought. The young man was draped over the eviscerated rib cage and front quarters of an elk carcass.
    Martha thought of the wolves she and Walt had heard earlier. But if the elk was a wolf kill, where were the tracks? And the man, had he died from head trauma or from spinal fracture when the horse bucked him and he fell onto the carcass? She swept the Carnivore light over his body, the LEDs reacting to a large stain of blood in the area of the groin. Though she could see no obvious sign of injury, the fabric under the waistband of the man’s jeans was tented up, as if a stick were protruding. Martha’s smile was sour. If Walt was here, he’d make a comment, say something about the man going out with a hard-on, dying happy. “Humpff.”
    She bent down, then jerked back up as her gorge rose. She swallowed bile, steeled herself and gingerly unsnapped the man’s jeans. She worked the zipper down and pulled the fabric over the protrusion. It looked like a sharpened stick had stabbed upward into the man’s back and punctured the lower abdomen, from which it protruded four or five inches. Martha touched the object with the back of her fingernail. Hard as bone.
    She turned her back on the body and drew out her radio.
    â€œWhat do you have, Martha?” Jason Kent’s voice had some gravel in it after relaying messages all night.
    â€œI found the wrangler. His horse wandered into camp and I backtracked him to where he got thrown. He’s dead.”
    Kent told her to stay where she was. He’d relay her coordinates to Harold, who was the searcher closest to her, up on the headwall.
    â€œSo you figure he died in the fall?”
    â€œThat was my first thought, but I don’t know, Jase. He has an elk antler sticking out of his gut.”
    â€œMaybe you better tell me about it.”
    â€œI’ll tell you about it. But right now I got to throw up.”
    She made it to the edge of the timber before heaving. She grabbed a handful of snow to wash her mouth out, found that her hands were trembling and sat down on a log that actually was a log. She felt empty inside, but the bad taste was gone, replaced by something else, not exactly a taste but more of an odor that exuded from her body. It was the odor of fear. She’d smelled it before when she found herself on a heartless breast of snow in wilderness, felt the dread gathering in the limbs of the trees. The scream that came from her lungs, she couldn’t believe she’d made it.
God help me
, she thought. But it was real. It had to be. For the wolves had heard. The first one answered from a long way off. The second was closer.

CHAPTER THREE
Reading the White Book
    W hen Martha saw a light flicker up the mountainside, she switched the beam of the tracking light on and off a few times. She waited until her signal was answered, then her eyes fell to the revolver in her lap. She fingered the latch to swing out the cylinder, removed one cartridge and replaced the cylinder so that the hammer rested over the empty chamber. She holstered the revolver.
    Harold was riding his paint. He dismounted and pulled his braid out from under the collar of his jacket. Martha made room for him on the log. She breathed in Harold’s odor that wasn’t sweat exactly, but dark and organic. Familiar. They had shared more than logs before, before Harold took back up with his ex-wife.
    â€œAren’t you going to tie off your horse?” she said