Blood Trail - C. J. Box [50]
“Once the animal is down, after it’s been shot, the first thing you do is take your knife out and slit its throat, right? So it will bleed out into the ground. Many times, the animal isn’t even dead yet. Then you turn it on its back and slit it up the middle, right? So you can reach inside and pull its guts out into a pile, right?”
There were several gasps, and at least one girl put her face in her hands. Another plugged her ears with her fingers. Sheridan kept her hand up, glaring back at Moore.
“When that’s all done and you’re covered with blood and your hands stink of guts, you cut the head off the innocent animal and take it to a taxidermist. Then you proudly put it up on the wall as your trophy, as proof of what a big man you are.”
He turned his eyes directly on Sheridan. “Or in your case, what a big girl you are. So tell me, how did it make you feel?”
“You’re asking me?” Sheridan said. She noticed that the woman was looking at her as well, with a surprising nod of sympathy. In fact, the woman turned from Sheridan and glared at her husband.
“I’m asking you,” Moore said. “Did you like it? Did you like taking the life of an innocent animal? Did it please you in some way?”
Sheridan’s face was burning, and her throat ached.
“Klamath,” the woman whispered, “leave her alone.”
“Did you like the warm blood on your hands?” he goaded.
“I’ve never killed anything,” Sheridan said.
Moore was perplexed. “Then why did you raise your hand?”
“I just wanted to show I oppose you,” she said, her voice firm. “I’m an apprentice falconer. I’ve watched falcons hunt. They don’t just kill the sick and weak, so I know you’re lying. Plus, I see a big difference between hunting animals and killing a man. And I think you’re an asshole and you should stop trying to intimidate us.”
“Sheridan!” Mrs. Whaling gasped.
Sheridan thought she detected a slight smile in the woman’s eyes.
The bell rang, saving the day.
Jason Kiner whooped. Jarrod Haynes said, “This is why I love that girl.”
Klamath Moore stepped back to let the classroom empty, but Sheridan could feel his eyes burning through her. She kept her head down and clutched her books to her chest. She could hear Mrs. Whaling apologizing to Klamath Moore’s back about Sheridan’s language.
As she passed the woman, Sheridan felt a hand on her arm. She looked over to see the woman’s large dark eyes on her. Then the woman reached up and stroked Sheridan’s cheek with the back of her fingers, the same way she’d stroked her sleeping baby.
Sheridan didn’t jerk back, but was shocked by the intimacy of the gesture.
“You’re the daughter of the game warden, aren’t you?”
Sheridan nodded her head.
“You’re terribly misguided, but I hope your father knows what a brave daughter he has,” she said, and looked at Sheridan with a sudden sadness that, for some reason, made Sheridan want to cry for the second time that morning.
14
JOE SAT ALONE in the middle of a row of red molded plastic chairs in the hallway of the Saddlestring Hospital near the secure doorway to ICU. On the other side of the doors, surgeons worked to save Robey Hersig’s life. Joe rubbed at the stubble on his chin and covered his eyes with his hand and tried to get a few minutes of sleep. When he drifted off, though, violent recollections of the night before came rushing back as if his mind had just been waiting for the opportunity to try to expel them from his memory by force. Like the thought of Chris Urman and him carrying Buck Lothar’s dead body through the dark forest, while Urman moaned with shame and guilt. Then Lothar’s body slipping at times through their hands to crumple into a pile on the forest floor until they fashioned a travois of two stout lodgepoles and secured the body so they could drag and carry it through the brush. Or Joe’s growing comprehension as they struggled through the black, unforgiving timber that he and Lothar had been tracking not the killer but Urman the entire night while the killer slipped around