Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(20)

There. Three sharp barks. Followed by yammering. Coyotes. This sort of thing happens often enough—the coyotes seeming to outnumber people in Central Oregon—that he isn’t concerned so much as he is annoyed. Beyond the barn stands a whitewashed coop fenced in by chicken wire that runs three feet into the ground to keep the coyotes from digging their way in after prowling near for a sniff. He imagines coyotes, like gray phantoms, circling the enclosure, and the chickens clucking in a panic, nervously fluttering their wings, filling the coop with a cloud of thrown feathers.

He could take a rifle out on the porch, fire three rounds into the sky. Or stamp down the steps and into the night to pursue any that linger near the coop, the barn. But he has had a long day—leading cattle down the chute, punching them with a vaccination gun—and up until a moment ago he was half-asleep in his La-Z-Boy, sipping a tumbler of bourbon, watching Fox News.

The last thing he wants to do is pull on his boots, zip up his jacket, head into the cold that made his nose run and his hands numb all day. He hired on a gang of Mexicans to help. To usher the cattle from the holding pen to the chute, to tighten the sidebars, to thrust the vaccine into the cows’ rumps—Scourguard 3KC to boost immunity before calving, Ivomec Plus for liver flukes, intestinal worms. The men’s faces were reddened from the weather when they waved their arms and clapped their hands and zapped the cows with electric prods—the cows snorting and trotting away from them, kicking up clods of dirt, stacking up at the far end of the lot.

That’s all there is anymore for help—Mexicans. Used to be, he kept a hired man who lived on-site in a trailer. Then, ten years ago, when he hit sixty, when he decided to run for city council, he sold four hundred acres and as many head of cattle. His driveway is still flanked by pine columns with the Bar J brand chiseled into them, but as a hobby he keeps only a small herd on his twenty acres. When he needs help—with shots, with calving, with bucking alfalfa—he advertises in the classifieds, and the only ones who call have those drawn-out vowels, those sentences like songs he has trouble deciphering. “I don’t understand. Slower this time,” he often hears himself saying.

The window has fogged over again. He lets the curtain swing shut. He flips on a tableside lamp, and then another, not liking how dark the living room suddenly feels, the pine paneling soaking up the light. He falls back into his recliner and pulls over his lap a stars-and-stripes blanket. He sips at his bourbon until the ice cubes rattle against his teeth and his face feels flushed. On television he half tunes in to the familiar footage of the planes and then the goddamn president giving another goddamn speech instead of doing something.

Walt knows what he’d do. Right after the attacks, he brought to the city council an emergency proposal that would make public every registered lycan. Put it in the papers, he’d said. Put it on the Internet. Put it on their IDs, for God’s sake. That was the real no-brainer, something that had been discussed for years without success, a slot on the driver’s license, right next to blue eyes and brown hair: lycan.

We need to know who we’re up against, he’d said. It was a bluff, completely illegal. He knew the needle-dick mayor would try to shame him. But he felt he needed to say what everybody else was too chickenshit to admit: humans and animals don’t mix and it was time to build some fences between the two, go back to the old ways. The Oregonian ran a condemning piece about Walt alongside the worst photo in world history, him with his mouth open, a gaping black hole to match his shadowy pocketed eyes.

There comes a high-pitched bawling from outside. The noise a cow makes when dehorned or branded, when their black muzzles lift to the sky and their eyes bulge and roll back in their heads. Walt feels seized by it and goes utterly still as though waiting for the pain that caused the sound to arrive.

Then it dies out. Walt utters a long string of curses and with some effort kicks down the leg rest and stands up, nearly tripping in the tangle of his blanket. He kicks it away and scrambles for the remote on the end table. He punches the power button. The image of the newscast falls into darkness. He can see himself reflected on the screen, standing and holding out the remote like a drawn pistol. His eyes are crinkled and buried in the folds of his face. His nose is like the head of a hammer. His hair is buzzed down to a silver brush. He might be old, but he can still do some damage. You bet.

He drops the remote on the chair and heads to the kitchen. He could never find anybody worth marrying—that’s what he said whenever asked what’s kept him single all these years—but his home has no piles of rank laundry, no empty beer bottles lined up on the counter or stacks of dirty dishes moldering in the sink. The world is too messy; he wants his life clean. A place for everything and everything in its place: that was another thing he said.

So he knows exactly where to find what he’s looking for, in this case a handgun. He keeps weapons throughout the house—a .22, three revolvers, even his father’s World War II bayonet—the nearest handgun hidden behind the cereal in the cupboard, a loaded S&W .357. He thumbs off the safety and snaps the lock on the door and swings it open. The noise comes rushing out of the night to greet him. Coyotes babbling. Hens squawking. Horses and cattle shrieking.

In his surprise he brings the handgun to his ear. He hesitates a moment, one foot out the door, the other anchoring him to the kitchen. Then he casts off his surprise and joins the din by screaming, not a curse, but a garbled cry of anger. He stomps down the steps and along the path that leads to the barn, the ground biting his bare feet. In his hurry he has forgotten his boots and jacket. His breath clouds from his mouth—he is panting—but otherwise he feels oblivious to the cold. Warm even, with two tumblers of bourbon sloshing inside him.