Dead Water by Victoria Houston Read Free Book Online

the awful thud in his stomach indicated.
    Osborne glanced at the clock on Lew’s dashboard. Holy cow, it wasn’t even eleven o’clock, and already he was feeling like he’d been taken apart and put back together. What a Tuesday.

six
“Fishing is a cruel sport … how would you like it if fish and angler were reversed?”
Robert Hughes
    Hot, still air and a dingy cloud hung over the old railroad tracks. Osborne felt sluggish as he pushed along behind Ray and Lew. They plodded, too, as if the thick air was holding them back.
    A recently logged forest stretched off ahead and behind them. The landscape was grim: a stripped slash punctuated with scraggly, dying spires of trees that hadn’t made the cut and jagged branches of birch and pine thrown about like a basket of broken pencils upended from a desk. A by-product of the paper mill economy, slash was exactly what Osborne always tried to avoid.
    Even though he knew that aspen and fern would soon take over and green it up again, he found the whole scenario depressing as hell. The mill had done its damage and would do it again in forty years. But right now, it was a red pine burial ground. Even wildlife avoided areas like this: No cover means no safety.
    The three of them were about a hundred yards from the skeleton of the old trestle when Ray waved a halt. Osborne and Lew paused, eyes fixed on Ray. He was looking up. Three turkey vultures circled overhead, their blackish wings raked back to expose ugly red heads.
    “Now those fellas,” said Ray, looking up at the vultures, “those fellas … hunt … with their noses.”
    “Which means …” Osborne tried to hurry him along. The long pauses combined with the humidity to make him not a little crabby. Ray ignored the question.
    “They never show up … until their meal … is … at least,” he turned around to Lew and Osborne and pointed up with both index fingers as if to frame his remark, “at least twelve hours old.”
    “Twelve hours,” said Lew.
    “At least.”
    Katydids trilled in the stillness. A bead of sweat trickled down Osborne’s right cheek. Ray moved forward about ten yards, then stopped to stare down to his left. The bank dropped away from the rail bed. The clear-cut below was identical to what they had passed earlier: stumps, piles of brush, mounds of dirt, and deep ruts in the sandy soil.
    “Those goombahs ever hear of selective cutting?” said Osborne to no one in particular. “Jeez, I hate to see this.”
    “Costs too much. That new wood jockey running the show in Rhinelander wants to save a few bucks,” said Ray. “We’re back to land rape.”
    “Eh, you pick your battles. It’s private land, no law against it,” said Lew, dismissing the issue. Both men nodded. They knew that she knew that paper mill taxes went a long way to cover the costs of Loon Lake’s new jail and offices for Lew and her crew.
    “See over there?” said Ray, pointing down at an angle. “I think we got something.” Sidestepping down the incline, he moved carefully over to where a barely discernible set of ruts had crushed a bed of brush and run up to the bank, where they ended in a patch of sand. Ray crouched over the sand. “I’d have Wausau take a mold of the tire tracks you see here,” he said. “Could be loggers, but why would they be driving off-road when the job is done? In fact …” He stood up and cocked his head to examine the ruts from the side. “Looks like an SUV to me.”
    “How so?” said Lew. “The configuration of the tires?”
    “That, and they’re too new to belong to a logger,” said Ray. “The tread is barely worn. Loggers work , doncha know.”
    Ray backed away from the ruts, his eyes scanning the ground. “Oh, oh … get a load of this. You got footprints, too. Funny … the soles are completely smooth. No tread, no pattern, but flat, not heeled like a street shoe. What do you make of that, Lew?”
    “You got me.”
    Lew and Osborne sideslipped down from the rail bed,