The Dinosaur Hunter(68)
I sat down on one of the picnic tables out in the grass and admired the moon glittering on the lake until Edith, of all people, came over. “Have you seen Ted?” she asked.
“You mean since we beat him up?”
“I’m sorry you fellows did that. It was between him and me.”
Intoxicated as I was, I was still prepared to set her straight. “Any time a man hits a woman, it’s no longer between him and her.”
She shrugged. “Well, maybe he had the right, Mike, I don’t know.”
“I’m telling you, Edith. No man ever has the right to hit a woman.”
“If you say so.”
“I say so. Do you want to have sex?”
She laughed. “I love you, you big jerk.”
“No, you don’t. But I appreciate the thought.”
She gave me a hug, then went off somewhere. My next visitor was Jeanette. “Have you seen Ted Brescoe?”
“Not since I helped the others beat him up.”
“Well, he’s missing.”
“How can you tell?”
“Don’t be an idiot, Mike.” She peered at me. “Well, I do believe you’re drunk.”
“How can you tell?”
Jeanette went away. I kept hitting the gin and admiring the moon. Sam Haxby came over. “Mike, tell Edith I don’t know where Ted is. She thinks I did something with him.”
“Where is she?”
“Over there.”
“What did you do with him?”
“Nothing, I swear.”
“Have her come over here and I’ll tell her.”
She never came over and, anyway, I was feeling pretty sleepy. Then Ray asked me if I was ready to go home. At the time, I was lying on the picnic table looking up at the stars and the satellites go over. OK, I was unconscious but I woke up long enough to consider Ray’s question and suggested that perhaps he should go away and leave me the hell alone. Later, he came back to tell me he was going back to town but he was leaving me Bob to drive in after I’d sobered up. He also told me everybody had given up looking for Ted and, even though his truck was still in the parking area, the consensus of opinion was he’d caught a ride into town with somebody because he was too drunk to drive.
“Who would give Ted a ride?” I asked and then faded to dark.
Morning comes early in summertime Montana, which I think I’ve already mentioned, I woke to shouts out on the water. I sat up. Well, I actually rolled off the table and threw up, almost the same thing. I pulled myself back aboard the bench and listened to the shouting. Finally, I managed to squint enough to see there was a bass boat out there and they were yelling something about something being in the water. I looked around to see a more responsible person than myself and saw no one at all. So I staggered down to the dock. Pretty soon, the bass boat came roaring in. It contained two Canadians identified by their ball caps emblazoned with Calgary Stampede logos. Another clue was their T-shirts which heralded, no lie, Canadians Do It More Often And Find It More Appealing.
Anyway, one of them said, “There’s a body in the water out there.”
I absorbed that and said, “Describe it to me.”
“I think it’s a man,” the other one said.
“Well, that narrows it down,” I said.
“It does?”
Actually, it did because I knew exactly who it was. “Take me out there,” I said, tiredly.
I climbed aboard their boat with shaky legs, then tried to gulp in as much fresh air as I could while they were taking me out to the body. When we got there, I held my head and kept my eyes closed against the glare of the sun richocheting off the lake. “Pull the damn thing in,” I said.
The Canadian fishermen were thinking by then they’d asked the wrong person to help them. One of them said, “Are you somebody, like, official?”
“Yeah,” I responded, still holding my throbbing head, “I’m the law. Haul him in.”
They hauled the body in. It wasn’t easy from the sound of it. A lot of grunting and then I heard them get the thing in which flopped like a big dead fish on the deck. I wanted to look at it but I didn’t, fearful I might toss my cookies on top of it, which probably wouldn’t have been considered professional by my fishermen who were convinced I was the “law.”
“Take his pulse,” I said.
They did and the report came back there wasn’t one. Then one of them said, “He has his throat cut.”
“Ear to ear,” the other one said.
“Looks like somebody whopped him on the head, too.”
That explained the no pulse thing. “Back to shore,” I ordered and we sped back to shore and I crawled off the boat. By then, the owner of the marina, a man named Earl Williams, and his two adult sons were down there.