Cold Quiet Country Read Online Free PDF

said.
    I nudged the deer’s pecker with my aught-six barrel. “What you call that?”
    “The mother of all gizzies.”
    I drew my knife and sliced off his stink sacs, then split him from nads to sternum. Removed my coat, rolled my sleeves, and fished out his guts. You got to be careful not to split an intestine, and shit gets dicey around the anus. Puncture the bladder and you’ll marinate the choicest cuts in deer piss—and a buck has some of the stinkinest piss in the woods. I cut an oval around his asshole, cinched it through to the inside, and my elbow nudged Coates.
    “Excuse me,” he said.
    “What?”
    “Just seeing what he had for breakfast,” Coates said, digging in the pile for his stomach.
    I reached inside the buck’s chest cavity, split the diaphragm, and damned if his heart wasn’t still pounding. Spookiest thing ever.
    I told Coates.
    “Let me see.”
    He reached inside and his face lit up. “Still going, but alas, I’m too late to save him.”
    “Rip it out,” I said.
    Coates shook his head. Stood to the side while I yanked out the lungs and heart. Caught a tick on my arm, squashed it between my knife and a rock. Coates wandered a few feet and pissed against an oak. Knowing I’d have five minutes, I dug out the buck’s nuts, removed his pecker from the assembly, and hung his nads from a birch branch.
    “What in God’s name,” Coates said.
    I tied the deer’s hind feet together with a hemp line and started dragging, but the terrain was choppy and we hadn’t got any snow.
    Coates stood by the deer’s balls, looked from them to the guts and back, and finally said, “Some kind of Mafioso code?”
    I heaved to get the buck over a log and finally hoisted it over my shoulder. Crossed the stream like that.
    “You’re the goddamn wop,” I said.
    “I’m English,” he said.
    “Guess you got your hearing back.”
    Old Coates, rest in peace. His house is empty, two, three miles from here, and if I was on the lam with a blizzard on my tail, it’s where I’d go.
    The crick spills into Lake Wilbur, and along the flats, patches of beech attract turkey that sit and peck apart nuts. Farther, deer bed in the pine. Ponderosa limbs break all but the coldest winds. The still air feels ten degrees warmer than twenty yards away, under bare oak or maple. The branches hold the snow, and even today, the cover will only be a few inches. If I didn’t know there was an empty house waiting a short ways off, I’d head for the pine.
    I tramp to the Bronco. Sit half in, half out, and grab the radio handset. “Fenny, scare up Roy Cooper. I need his dogs. And don’t take any grief about the storm. There’s a girl missing.”
    Fay Haudesert stands by my door.
    “We’ll need something of your daughter’s for the blueticks to sniff,” I say.
    A car door slams and we turn. Snow and wind muffle sounds. It’s Deputy Odum, and Deputy Sager follows. Odum approaches like it’s caused him a moral crisis to have disobeyed me. Walks past Fay Haudesert and crosses into the barn. Stands, hands on hips. Sager dips his head at Fay. Odum says, “Lord.”
    “Missus Haudesert, go inside the house and bring me one of your daughter’s sweaters.” I step out and close the door.
    “Her name is Guinevere.”
    “I know her name is Guinevere.” I squeeze her shoulder. She’s a hard woman. I don’t know if it’s from throwing hay bales or whether she’s just one of those women. She plods into the Bronco’s tire tracks and slips along.
    I watch Odum.
    He kneels at Burt Haudesert; Sager faces away and unbuckles his drawers and re-tucks his shirt. Worse than a woman. Always pressed and shiny.
    “What the fuck you doing, Odum?”
    “Examining the crime scene.”
    “Did I tell you to come out here?”
    “Wanted to see things for myself.”
    “I wanted you deployable. If there’s any God at all, when you’re sheriff, you’ll hire a fuckin’ bushel of Odums, every one as ambitious as you.”
    He watches me silently.