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Barbara forced a smile. “Sounds good.”
“And anything else you need, you let me know. Think of me as your wing woman.” Rita gave a salute. Then she adjusted her snowsuit and sashayed out of the café.
Barbara gazed after her thoughtfully. Rita was only trying to do her best for the town, but Barbara knew when she was being warned off. Rita’s duty was to Deadhart, not to a cheechako like Barbara, whatever she might say.
I’d ask myself where my loyalties lie.
Which put Barbara in something of a predicament. She was now the only police officer in a town that didn’t like her and didn’t want her here. If Chief Nicholls was having surgery on his leg, he could be out of action for weeks. Barbara needed back-up. Someone she could trust, someone who knew the town but wasn’t tied to it. Someone who understood police investigations. And, just maybe, someone who understood the Colony.
She reached into her pocket and pulled out the scrap of paper she’d ripped off Nicholls’s jotter. She stared at it for a moment.
Then she picked up her phone.
22
Beau poured a large whiskey and sat down in his worn armchair, facing his trophies. The hair was fake but realistic, the embalming a skillful job. Still, even the best taxidermist could never get the eyes right. Eyes are the windows to the soul, so they say.
Beau lifted his drink. “But what if you ain’t got no soul?”
The glass eyes gazed blankly back at him.
“How would you know, old man?”
“Oh, I know. I know you are spawns of Satan. You walk in darkness, and it is the right of every God-fearing citizen to send you back to darkness for eternity.”
“You know nothing. You wear your ignorance as righteousness. But your zealotry has poisoned you.”
Beau rose and walked toward the trophies. “The only poison on this earth is your kind. I did what was right, to protect my family, to protect this town.”
“Are you sure, old man? Or are you protecting something else?”
“You won’t trap me with your riddles. I’m a hunter and I hunt vermin.”
“Then why do we haunt you? Why are you talking to us still?”
Beau rubbed at his eyes. “The hell I know.”
He threw back his drink. He wasn’t crazy. The Doc had told him that:
“You have a mass on your brain, Beau. Only a biopsy can tell whether it’s benign or not. I can arrange that for you.”
Dalton had left him a leaflet, listing symptoms to look out for. Headaches, blurred vision, dizziness, mood swings, hallucinations.
“You hear that?” Beau said to the trophies. “You’re not real. You’re just a mass. A tumor. ’Bout sums you up.”
That’s what the Colony had always been. A cancer growing on the town. Spreading, poisoning and killing. And the only way to deal with cancer was to cut it out. The whole damn lot. It didn’t matter which of those bloodsuckers had killed the Anderson boy; they all needed to pay. Should have done it last time. And they would have done if that fool, Tucker, hadn’t got in the way.
This time they needed to finish what they started.
Beau stood and walked back into the kitchen to pour another drink. He didn’t bother to put the light on, even though it was almost dark outside, but as he reached for the bottle the kitchen was suddenly lit up, bright as day. The security lights. Beau had strung them up on some trees years ago, and then, after bears and moose kept setting them off (and you sure as hell didn’t need a security light to tell you when a moose was in your yard) he’d unplugged them.
When the Colony returned, he’d plugged them back in.
Beau turned and squinted out of the window, hoping to see some critter scurrying away into the shadows.
His heart constricted.
A woman stood in his back yard.
