Page 45 of Hell and Gone
But he’d never seen so much spilled blood from a man that he could recognize the scent or the taste on his tongue.
“Who was killed?”
Everett pulled out a second driver’s license, burned more than the first. He rubbed at the front, squinted. He held it out to Lawrence. “Is that Aaron?”
He looked quickly. “Yeah. Yeah, that’s him.”
“These must be the remnants of their cell phones.” He held up the plastic he’d pulled out of the fire before the licenses. Parts and pieces of an iPhone and an Android. A case with a naked woman on it fingering herself. “Yeah, I saw Dell with that shit once.”
He walked away before the vomit rose. His boots crunched river rock and sand, the faint sound almost swallowing him whole. It was gorgeous down here, untouched country, pristine and perfect. And now haunted forever. He sighed and kicked a rock, hurtling it across the willow’s pool. He watched it hit the water, sink—
A bloody trail crawled out of the pool’s pebble bank on the far side, under the willow’s drooping branches.
“Everett!” he bellowed. “Get over here!”
Everett was by his side in a moment, pistol in hand. “What is it?”
Lawrence pointed. Everett cursed. He edged his way to the pool, the still waters trembling against the river rock. The water was a crystalline blue that lied about the pool’s depth. A hundred years of water cascading against rock, snow melt filling and emptying the pool, had created a hole almost twenty feet deep. Nothing lived in the pool to cloud the water. It was rocks all the way down.
And on the bottom, beneath the wavering light of the water, lay a pile of bodies.
“Well, that’s where they went.” Everett crouched by the water, trying to peer deeper, somehow part the waters and see what he couldn’t reach. “I can’t see their faces. They’re all on their bellies.”
Lawrence hovered over him. “I see… maybe eight bodies? Maybe more, if they’re stacked on top of each other?”
“We won’t know until we get divers out here to bring them up.”
“You really think divers are gonna come all the way out here?”
“To clear your name? To find the truth?” Everett’s gaze pierced him, stole his breath away. “I’ll make them come out here. I’ll bring them all the way from Helena, or further if I have to.”
Lawrence swallowed.
“Stay behind me,” Everett said. Moving swiftly, he circled the pool, ducking beneath the wispy willow branches, and followed the blood trail rising out of the pool. Someone had crawled out of the water, dragged themselves across the rocks.
It wasn’t hard to find who. The cowboy lay propped against the willow’s trunk, slouched on his side, one hand covering his belly and trying to hold in his guts. His lifeless eyes stared at the branches, and his mouth was slack, open like he’d been screaming in his last moments.
“I know him.” Lawrence heaved a sigh and stayed out of Everett’s way. “That’s Bart Conway.”
“And who is Bart Conway?” Everett lifted the dead man’s hand, checked his stomach wound. He’d taken a shot to the back, a rifle by the looks of it. Bloat had already set in. Rigor mortis had passed.
“Local no-good son of a bitch. He’s been thrown off every ranch in the county. He cowboys until he can’t hide the booze and the drugs he’s addicted to. Then he robs the ranch, the hands, and splits. He’s been in and out of jail for years. Last I heard, he was fired from the Flying Joker for the third time.”
“He the kind that would get into rustling?”
“To make a quick buck to buy his drugs? He’d do anything. He wasn’t a bad hand when he was sober. He could run a cuttin’ horse across a ridgeline and never slip.”
“Was he a leader? Or did he follow?”
“Bart?” Lawrence snorted. “He was a rat. He’d follow anyone who gave him a mean look, least until the addiction set in. Then it was all about gettin’ money for his next fix. But even then, he just started followin’ the druggies and the dealers.”
Everett stood and dusted his jeans. “Seems we’ve found our rustlers then.” He nodded to the willow pool.
“But why are they all dead? And where is the herd?”
“The herd is at Heart’s Rafter.”
Lawrence stared. “How do you figure?”
