The Royal Wulff Murders (12 page)

He nodded.

Sam handed Stranahan his empty drink cup. “I’m going to see if I can’t get one of them mattress threshers to let me rub her fur the wrong way.” He glanced sidelong at one of the bandanna girls who had paraded the paintings and, winking, disappeared into the crowd.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

J
osie’s was a Main Street café famous for its down-home breakfasts and an anatomically correct, full-size fiberglass replica of a palomino stallion. Mounted on an electronic pedestal that pirouetted above the door of the redbrick building, the horse was both a Bridger landmark and an initiation rite for the Delta Sigma fraternity of the branch college. Each fall, students of the freshman pledge class stole into town in the night, hastily erected a ladder, and—keeping a sharp lookout for police—sent one person up the steps to paint the horse’s pendant masculinity the university colors, blue and gold.

Stranahan was staring at the belly of the beast when a vintage Volkswagen Bug rattled to the curb. Rainbow Sam opened the passenger door and began to climb out, a three-step process for a man his size. He was dressed in the same clothes he’d worn to the banquet. His shirttails hung over his belt and his face looked baggy and haggard.

“Thanks, baby,” he said.

Stranahan recognized the woman behind the steering wheel as one of the bandanna girls—minus, at this early hour, her trout-patterned kerchief.

“Thanks, Darcy,” she corrected him.

“I know your name, baby,” Sam said.

“I want to hear you say it,” she said. “Come here,” she said, reaching over and pinching his cheek. She pulled him back into the car.

“Thank you, Darcy McGill,” Stranahan heard Sam say.

“McCall,” she said sharply, then relented. “I guess that’s close enough.” She released her grip. “Poor baby,” she said, accessing the damage she had done to his cheek, which had turned as red as a cherry. Leaning forward, she impulsively kissed it. Stranahan could see dark roots at the part in her blond hair.

“I’ll see you,” Sam said as he shut the door.

“Yes, you will.”

“Women,” Sam said to Stranahan, and clasped a hand on his shoulder.

Josie’s Café was vintage Main Street Montana. Battered oak floor, upholstered art deco chairs, waitresses who’d heard every story since Genesis, the smells of grease and flapjacks, and, on the knotty pine walls, bucolic black-and-white landscape panels of grazing cattle. In back of the counter, elk heads flanked the scabby shoulder mount of a Shiras bull moose. There was a jackalope above an empty table against the wall. Stranahan and Sam sat down under the fork-horn rabbit, cobbled together from the head of a mounted jackrabbit and a pair of small deer antlers.

The waitress, a heavyset woman who had a silver streak in a head of coarse black hair and an echoing stripe through her left eyebrow, smiled at Sam as she pulled a pencil from behind her ear.

“Honey, you don’t look so hot,” she said.

“Pam, I had a bad dream last night,” Sam said. “I dreamed you and me got hitched and I woke up all sweating and commenced to screaming.”

She shook her head. “That’s so lame I’m going to forgive you,” she said. “So what’ll it be?”

Sam ordered a Mexican omelet with a short stack on the side.

“Hard day’s night, a man’s gotta eat,” he said.

Stranahan ordered the number one—two eggs scrambled, toast and jam.

They made fishing talk until the dishes came, Sean picking Sam’s
brain about whirling disease, about which he knew little more than that it had struck in the 1990s and wiped out 90 percent of the rainbow trout population in the upper Madison River. The night’s keynote speaker had indeed been a bore, talking in scholar-speak about invasive species in general rather than the malady itself.

Sam shifted his bulk in his chair.

“Not my favorite breakfast topic,” he said, “but it’s your basic parasite/host thing. There’s this spore—
Myxobolus cerebralis.
In part of the life cycle it’s carried in a little worm about yea big”—he held his thumb and forefinger a half inch apart—“called a tubifex. The spore bores its way into the bones of baby trout and upsets the equilibrium. The trout swims like a cat chasing his tail, and I don’t have to tell you that’s like ringing a dinner bell to a bigger fish. Bottom line is that once the trout gets WD, he’s a goner. If a fish doesn’t get him, a kingfisher or an osprey will.”

Stranahan interrupted, “So then, when the trout dies, it releases the parasite back into the water. That means if a bird poops in another river or a fisherman cleans his trout in a different river than he caught it in, it can release the spores and spread the disease.”

“You got it. But it can also be transmitted by mud, ’cause that’s where the worms live. A fisherman can be a carrier, or a boat. Fish one river, drive an hour, step into another wearing the same wading boots, instant infection.”

“I thought the whole point of the parasite/host relationship was that the parasite doesn’t kill its host.”

Sam grunted. “In the natural order of things, it doesn’t.”

He explained that whirling disease was native to Germany, where the parasite infected the indigenous brown trout, which had developed a resistance to the disease. The Western rivers where whirling disease was a concern—and there were 150 in Montana alone—were primarily rainbow or cutthroat trout fisheries. The American species were much more vulnerable.

“So
then, what’s this I hear about recovery in the Madison River?”

“Mostly bullshit. The people who are saying this figure that because the rainbow population has rebounded to about 60 percent of what it was in the old days, the fish are developing a natural resistance to the disease. But the biologists I’ve talked to think that the rainbow trout stocked in Hebgen and Harrison reservoirs have worked their way into the river system, inflating the numbers of healthy fish. This strain of rainbow trout we’re catching today is different than the one we were catching twenty years ago. They run smaller and they don’t like to feed on the surface as much. The upside is that they seem to have a little more natural resistance to WD than the original strain. But I stress the word ‘little.’ If somebody ever develops a rainbow that shows resistance
and
feeds on the surface
and
grows long as your fucking arm, I’d pull my pants down for him along with most of the other fishermen I know.”

Their breakfasts arrived and they ate in comfortable silence, sipping ranch coffee so weakly flavored that Stranahan wondered if the beans had percolated or simply been steamed in the vicinity of the pot. When the waitress walked over to offer a second cup, Sam nodded toward Stranahan.

“So, Pam,” he said, “I caught my friend here gawkin’ at the Rocky Mountain oysters hanging off your horse. Does he look
Brokeback Mountain
to you, I’m starting to wonder?”

Pam looked Stranahan up and down. “Nah, I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. Josie’d let me, I’d take a saber saw and make a eunuch of that critter. A woman goes to work at five in the morning, she shouldn’t get flashed by a two-foot candy cane unless she wants to.”

“I’m tellin’ ya,” Sam said, “after Darcy last night I’m scared to see what color mine is.”

Pam frowned. “I thought I saw her Bug out front. You,” she rapped Sam on the back of his head with her pencil, “you treat Darcy right; that girl’s had a rough time of it. She needs a good turn after that Dolan fella. I’ll
take it personal if she comes calling and you’re the subject of our discussion.”

“Who’s Dolan?” Stranahan said when she had gone.

Sam shrugged his shoulders. “Asshole out of Roundup. Left her at the altar, Memorial Day last. Her whole family in the Disciples of Christ and everybody’s looking at their watches. The father, old-time Swede rancher, finds Dolan at the Crystal Bar brooding over a beer. Gives him a chance to be a man. Dolan seems to be thinking it over when the old man says the hell, he’s scum anyway, and beats the shit out of him. Pool-cued his ass.”

“You like to live dangerously?”

“No, but my pecker doesn’t know from that.”

Sam noticed Stranahan glance at his watch.

“Don’t worry, Bud,” he said. “The damsels don’t get going till ten most mornings. We’ll be fishing in plenty of time.”

S
tranahan drove Sam to the south edge of town, where a wood-tie bridge crossed Bridger Creek. A dilapidated trailer sat on a cement block under a canopy of ancient cottonwoods. As the Land Cruiser pulled to a stop, an Airedale as big as a deer bounded over and put its paws up on Stranahan’s shoulders, stretching to lick his face.

“Down, Killer,” Sam barked. The monster obediently dropped to the ground.

Stranahan transferred his gear into the camper shell on the back of Sam’s pickup, which sported a “Whoa Dude! There is a speed limit in Montana” bumper sticker, referring to the state’s infamous “reasonable and prudent” speed law. He climbed into the cab.

“Now we’re livin’,” Sam said, and gunned the engine to life.

As they drove up the Madison Valley, Sam pointed out the logjam where his client had hooked the body. Barely visible from the road, it was a rare stretch of the river that was banked by conifers. Sam pulled over at a turnout and let the motor idle.

“Secluded,” Stranahan offered.

“Convenient. That’s the word that comes to my mind,” Sam said.

“You really think somebody killed him?”

“Ah, I don’t know. Coulda drowned. Coulda
been
drowned. But here’s the peculiar thing. Guy’s wearing an inflatable wader belt, the kind that you pull the cord and a CO
₂
cartridge inflates it? You figure he’s got a bug up his ass about drowning.”

“So what’s so unusual about that?”

“He didn’t pull the cord,” Sam said. “Makes a man think that maybe someone else pulled the waders on him after he was dead.”

“Did you tell the sheriff this?”

“She’d have to’ve been blind not to see for herself.”

They drove in silence until turning onto the 87 cutoff.

Sam grunted, “Poor bastard seemed like a good kid, too, the kind never says a bad word to his mother.” He shook his head. “But hell with it. Let dead dogs lie. Let’s catch some trout.”

“Ten pounds, you say?” Stranahan said, shifting mental gears and remembering the size of the fish Sam had told him about in Henry’s Lake. “I’ve never even seen a trout that big.”

Sam shrugged his shoulders. “Good clean living, it can happen.”

“W
hat we’re looking for,” Sam explained after Stranahan had bought a one-day Idaho license at Staley Springs and they had pulled to the side of the road by a grove of aspens, “are lanes of open water through the weeds.” He indicated a point of land that fingered into the gray lake. “There’s a ten-foot hole shaped like a T off this shoreline. We’re going to work our flies through lanes in the hole.”

Stranahan began slipping fins over his wading shoes while Sam rummaged under the camper shell through his gear. “Here, I want you to take this rod. It’s a six-weight.”

He held up a hand as Stranahan began to protest that his four-weight was heavy enough. “Hey, I just might know more about this
than you do, okay? You hook one of those cuttbows in the soup, you got to reef on him.”

Stranahan accepted the rod without further protest. At a glance he knew it was made by Winston, a Cadillac among rod makers with a factory in Twin Bridges, Montana. The reel seat was hand-turned German nickel silver, the rod blank looked lit from within, finished in a glowing forest green. Just ahead of the sweat-darkened cork grip, a few wraps of black electrical tape obscured the rod blank, where the maker’s name and model number would be painted in white ink. The reel held a smoke-tinged, intermediate density line that would sink slowly through the water column.

Stranahan said, “What’s with the tape?”

“Just covering up a nick in the graphite,” Sam replied. “Here,” he said, “use one of these.” He handed Stranahan a slim fly with monofilament stubs to resemble eyes and a sparse marabou tail. “You gotta shake your rod tip on the strip, that’s the secret. No, let me.” Sam took the fly from Stranahan’s fingers. “You need to use a loop knot with this fly, it’ll free up the action.” He tied the damsel nymph to the tippet with flying fingers, then raised the fly to his lips and bit off the tippet end extending from the knot.

“So that’s how you got the grooves in your teeth,” Stranahan said.

“A few more years and I’ll look like one of those natives that file them into fangs.” Sam harrumphed, handed over the fly, and, walking backward, they both eased their donut-shaped tubes into the water.

It was like sliding back into the womb. Stranahan immediately felt a soothing peace envelope him. Lazily, he kicked with the flippers, keeping a parallel course to Sam’s. Looking toward the bank he saw a flicker of color as a male bluebird disappeared into a birdhouse tacked to a fence post. How had he managed to fish all these years and never think of float-tubing before this?

His reverie was broken by the crack of a rifle. Another shot rang out, echoing through the canyons of the Gravelly Range to the north.
Stranahan paid it little attention. He been in the Rockies long enough to dismiss distant shots as part of the soundtrack.

He heard a rasping noise and turned his head. Sam was pulling line from his reel and lengthening his false casts.

“How deep do we fish?” Stranahan asked.

“Right off the bottom if you can find a lane through the weeds. My advice is to count down. Fish out a dozen casts at a five count, then try ’em with a ten count.”

Stranahan’s first casts were awkward. He had to learn to keep the back cast high to avoid slapping the water behind him. But soon he settled into a rhythm that matched Sam’s. The chitchat petered out and they fished seriously, working out the hole and then moving down the shoreline to the east.

A
fter an hour without a strike, Stranahan replaced the damsel nymph with a tan-and-black leech fly, made a cast, counted to five, and was into a fish. He felt a thrumming strength as the rod bent into the cork. It was as if he’d laid his fingers against the base of a power pole. Stranahan dropped the rod tip and watched the core of backing on the reel grow thinner and thinner. Three hundred feet out, the fish porpoised, its back rolling out of the water like an otter turning over. Then it dug deep. He had never hooked a trout with such implacable power and felt his hands trembling as the fish’s runs shortened.