Stealing Faces - Michael Prescott [117]
Shepherd noted the slip. He was unsurprised. No doubt Anson McMillan had stayed in touch with Kaylie for years. After her escape from Hawk Ridge, she would have needed cash, a fair amount of cash, to obtain transportation and lodging and a false identity. Someone had to funnel the money to her. Since she had no family of her own to turn to, Anson and Regina would have been her only hope.
“Anyway,” Anson went on, “Justin proposed to her after six months’ courting. They got married, both of them nineteen. Rented a house not far from here. We helped out with the rent money. Things were fine.”
He paused, perhaps savoring the last good memories he had.
Then quietly he added, “Not long after he wed Kaylie, Justin got some new friends. Guys he’d met at the hardware store. They persuaded him to buy a rifle and take up hunting.”
“You and Regina didn’t object?”
“ Regina did. I held my tongue. The sport’s not for me, it’s true. I can’t see what pleasure a man can take in blowing some dumb animal’s brains out. But there are those who like it, and I’ve known plenty of them, and mostly they’re fine. Mostly. There are a few, though, who maybe like it too much. Like it in an unhealthy way.”
“Justin’s friends were like that?”
“No, not at all. Far as I know, they were decent fellows. Couple of them were Justin’s age, and the others were older. They all were married, raising families, holding down honest jobs. They could go in for their weekend adventures and come back Sunday night ready for the next day’s nine-to-five.”
“Then what was the problem?” Shepherd asked, already knowing the answer.
McMillan tossed back another gulp of root beer, and then the answer rushed out of him in a spill of words.
“Problem was Justin himself. He got a taste of hunting wild game, and it was like he was a starving man who’d gotten hold of a bone. The more he gnawed at it, hungrier he got, till he couldn’t ever get his fill. Justin took to hunting in a way that wasn’t natural, or maybe it would be fairer to say—wasn’t civilized. It was more than sport to him. It was something ugly, born of the same wildness that had made him start fires and heist the neighbors’ jalopies. He’d pushed it down, covered it over, tried to stamp it out, but some things you can’t hold down forever. They come out in a new disguise, and worse than before. Not wildness anymore. Sickness.”
Shepherd let a moment pass. A fly traced lazy loops around his head, drawn by the root beer’s sugary scent. He brushed it away.
“Sickness is a strong word, Anson,” he said quietly.
“Then you tell me what to call it when a man starts drinking blood.”
Shepherd blinked. “Say that again.”
“He’d heard some hocus-pocus nonsense about how you could absorb the strength and courage of the animal you killed by drinking its blood. Heart blood, the richest kind. He came back from the woods one night with a gutted bobcat slung over his shoulder and his mouth stained bright red. Kaylie told me that one.”
“So Kaylie saw it? Not you?”
“She saw it, right. And she saw other things too. She told me. Sometimes she cried when she talked about it. Justin had put up gun racks in the garage, and he’d hide away in there, seated in a folding chair, polishing the goddamned things, babying them like they were living creatures, while all around him were relics of the animals he’d killed—antlers of a mule deer, skull of a bobcat, hide of a javelina. He had this tape of Indian chants, which he played on a cassette player, the volume so high it would make your ears bleed, Kaylie said. And sometimes at night he would sit there stark naked, with candles lit, and take blood he’d saved from the hunt, blood in jars, and smear it on himself like war paint....”
A shudder moved through him and escaped his body as a sigh. He looked toward