Page 44 of Hell and Gone
Everett crouched immediately, covering behind a boulder with his pistol in his hands. Lawrence ducked behind a tree trunk, trying to peek almost as soon as he was down. Everett motioned for him to stay low.
This wasn’t Lawrence’s expertise. This was Everett’s area. Lawrence was a cowboy, not a soldier. Not a lawman. He wasn’t an investigator and didn’t have the mind for this. Or for hunting men. He stayed down.
Silence crawled over them, the same stillness, the same unnatural emptiness from above. There was no reaction to Lawrence’s slip.
Everett crept around his boulder first, peering past an elder tree as he crouched low.
A buzzard screamed and took to the sky, clipping Everett’s head. He ducked and whirled, watching the bird climb out of the ravine.
Lawrence’s gut tightened. The last time he’d seen buzzards, they’d been circling over Carson’s body. If they were here now…
He joined Everett at the elder tree. Everett’s shoulders had gone tense, his spine rigid. He could read the tension in Everett’s body after spending so many hours pressed against him.
He didn’t look to the gulch, not yet. His eyes were fixed on Everett.
“I didn’t expect this,” Everett breathed.
Ahead of them, on the pebbled banks of the still waters beside the willow, lay the remains of a rustler camp: a burned-out fire pit, a lean-to shelter built against the ravine’s wall. Sleeping bags tangled on a tarp. Lanterns burned out. Nearby, branding irons rested on the pool’s edge, freshly cleaned after being used.
And blood. A whole mess of blood.
It coated the rocks, the pebbles leading to the willow’s pool. Water lapped gently at the rocky shore, pulling strings of crimson with each burble and wave.
Blood dripped down the ravine walls, large splotches of it, as if men’s bodies had exploded backwards and coated the stone. More filled the gaps between the rocks on the ground, small rivers of gore spreading over the dust.
“Where are the bodies?”
Everett stared at him. Lawrence couldn’t read that look, that hollow-eyed expression.
He followed Everett over the boulder and down into the carnage.
“Careful where you walk,” Everett called. His voice was strange, hoarse and thready. “Stay out of the blood.”
“Kinda hard to do that, isn’t it? It’s everywhere.”
He mimicked Everett, stepping from high boulder to high boulder. Everett headed for the camp, for the ransacked remnants, the disarray. Lawrence went straight for the brands. There was space, near the water, where he could stand on rocks free of blood. Kneeling, he peered at the brand, flipping it in his mind. “Fuck.”
“What is it?”
“They’re rebrandin’ all the stock they stole. Layin’ a new iron over the original brands. We won’t be able to tell which belongs to which ranch unless we skin ‘em and look at the brand from the inside.”
Everett stared at Lawrence as he knelt over the fire pit.
“You can tell a reworked brand from the inside of a hide. It scars different from the original. But, you gotta slaughter the animal to get to it.” He sighed. “They’re using a Box 88 brand. They can lay that over a Lazy Twenty-Two or the Crazy A that Howell uses. They can even get it over Heart’s Rafter if they’re crafty.” He cursed again, pushing to his feet and walking away from the brand. He was liable to throw the damn thing in the pool, and if he did that, Everett would be pissed. Surely that brand was evidence. “What you got over there?”
Everett sifted through the ashes of the fire pit, raking with his bare hands. Colored bits of plastic popped out of the ash, twisted and burned. He plucked them out, laid them aside.
Red bordered plastic appeared on his next sweep. The shape of a credit card, or at least part of it. Fire had eaten away at the bottom corner. But the rest was intact, enough to read. Everett flipped it around and held it out. “This is Dell Richards’ driver’s license.”
It was Dell all right. The same beady eyes, the samefuck the worldattitude. His license photo looked like a mug shot. He’d probably had tons of practice getting his photo taken by the state. Just looking at his face made Lawrence want to lash out. But he swallowed it back, unclenched his fists. “What’s it mean?” he grunted. “The license in the fire?”
Everett was silent. He kept sweeping the ash, searching.
“Everett? What’s this mean? What’s all this blood? This don’t look like they slaughtered any cattle down here!” The copper, the heavy taste of the blood, choked his throat. It hung in the ravine, a thickness that coated his skin, slipped up his nose and into his lungs, his belly. Swirled inside him until he felt sick.
“This isn’t animal blood,” Everett said. “It’s human. I recognize the smell.”
Lawrence swallowed hard. He’d lived his whole live in the Crazies, had been a part of the life and death of a thousand different animals. It was the cowboy way, living on the range.
