Bad Moon Rising: A Bad Axe County Novel

PROLOGUE

AUGUST 7, 2019

LA CROSSE, WISCONSIN

Jump.

Chickenshit.

Jump off now.

He obeys. When the freight slows just enough, he cinches his backpack tight and, from the deck of the intermodal car—knowing himself as Sammy Squirrel since he hopped out at a rail yard in Portland with a backpack of essentials—launches into the scorch of high noon and lands badly, pitching onto his palms and knees and skidding down the railway berm with the slung weight of the pack driving his face into sharp rocks.

He crawls into weeds, tasting grit and blood. He shucks the pack, topples over, closes his eyes, and grins up. The train hammers east and disappears. Sun flares scrawl Cassie’s name inside his lids.

That’s right. Cassie. Do it for her.

He rises and barefoots away into the heavy Midwest heat, crossing sinkholes, fallen fences, blown trash, guided toward a distant intersection, Texaco, Flying J, Arby’s, Black Jack’s Casino, Adult Video Warehouse, China Buffet. ALL YOU CAN EAT CRAB LEGS. In the Willamette Valley, a herd of sheep pushed down a fence and killed themselves on green alfalfa. They ate until they exploded.

This is how people are.

The human race.

Cassie wants you to stop them.

The intersection growls and gusts. Sammy Squirrel crosses unaware against the DON’T WALK sign, grubby as a bugbear from the roads and rails. Drivers brake and stare. His fresh abrasions gleam, his curly blond hair explodes in crusts and tangles, his dirty T-shirt and cargo shorts hang like shedding skin. When the honking and the glassed-in obscenities begin, the voice commands, Stop them Use the rock. He flinches and walks faster. He flicks up two pairs of two fingers, peace signs, then forms two hands in the shape of a heart. The grin is fixed. It never leaves his sooty, sunburned face.

He tours Arby’s looking for a plug-in, finally spies one beneath a table where a wiry man in western wear works ketchup-dipped fries past sleek blond muttonchops. His hat reads EAT THE WHALES. His shirt reads BUILD THE WALL. Under the table, this man’s tooled boots are shiny.

Stop him. Use the spike.

The hell you want?

Peace, Sammy Squirrel’s fingers promise.

Love, his hands frame.

You come one step closer, Helter Skelter, I’ll snap your filthy neck.

When the shiny boots have gone, he sloughs his backpack with a puff of railroad smut, crawls beneath the table, and plugs in his phone charger. As his battery gathers from zero, he watches large people angrily overeat piles of meat. When he learned about the exploding sheep he was watching news on the recreation ward TV. This is how people are, the voice told him that night. This is why Cassie died Get a knife. Get a gun. Get a bomb and stop them.

He broke his window. Chickenshit. He jumped and hurt himself landing. He ran and hid. He slept in doorways in Portland for a week, lost his shoes to a drunken man with a knife, ate from the Voodoo Doughnut’s dumpster, got the name Sammy Squirrel for climbing through trees along the Springwater, began to start and tremble when the voice caught up—That man! With the suit and briefcase! Stop him! Push him into traffic!—then met a homeless dude who showed him how to jump a freight and found himself huddled on steel mesh, his fingers locked through it, escaping, he hoped, on a car racketing high across the chalk-blue churn of the Columbia River.

The voice had followed him.

If you’re going to be such a chickenshit, just jump.

He waits and waits for the battery. At six percent, he gets on the Arby’s Wi-Fi and text messages his mother.

Hope all is good

Seven percent becomes eight percent on the cracked and dusty Samsung.

Cuz I’m doing good too

Becomes nine percent. His empty stomach snarls.

Don’t worry

A droopy girl about his age in an Arby’s uniform comes out to watch him peel a french fry off the floor. He shows her peace fingers, love hands. While she blushes, he fits the french fry through his rigid grin and chews it.

Becomes eleven percent.

Love to everyone

Drains back to eight percent.

He is staring across the intersection toward Black Jack’s Casino when the Arby’s girl comes back. This time she wears latex gloves and holds a spray bottle.

Sir, I’m sorry, but you have to leave.

The phone pings: Where are you?

The Arby’s girl goes away, looking over her shoulder. He taps fast on his phone surface.

Don’t worry I’m good

Him.

A security guard with a black beard lumbers ahead of the girl with the spray bottle.

Him, right there.

Hey. The guard’s approaching steps rip the sticky floor. Hey, you. You were told to leave.

His hands jump. Peace! Love!

Out.

Ping: You are not safe

Ping: You need your medications

Ping: Please tell us where you are

He sees his own grin in the cracked phone. Five percent. He has no idea where he is. Over him the security guy snatches the girl’s spray bottle and seethes. Leave now. Then the bottle is cut loose, chemical blasts against the side of his face, down his chest, over his hands protecting his phone. When the spray stops, his face burns, his fingers drip.

Don’t pretend you don’t hear me, asshole.

It’s not that. He doesn’t speak anymore. Back when, as it started, he had been feeling unlike himself already, angry and exhausted, nothing to say. But then came the October dawn when he had awakened to pounding and screaming on his mom’s back door. He had opened it to see his neighbor and his almost-girlfriend Cassie with her black bubbled skin and behind her the hillside on fire and the entire sky full of smoke. Her horses! Her horses! He hadn’t known how to help her—called 911 and stood there shaking while she screamed. After Cassie’s funeral, he had begun stealing things and failing school. He had obeyed a nagging voice and let a different neighbor’s horses go. He had walked through Best Buy unplugging everything. He had climbed the water tower with spray paint and written DON’T LOOK UP HERE THE PROBLEM IS IN YOUR HEAD. Next, he had lit his mom’s garage on fire, destroyed her car and her boyfriend’s motorcycle. They call it back-burn, the voice had whispered to him, over and over. Little fires stop big ones. He remembers woofing single words of explanation to his mom—all the family he had—while she cried and slapped his face for grinning. I don’t know you! she had wailed, erasing his name.

Another spray in the face. Out.

Sammy Squirrel aligns his hands so that the letters on his knuckles can be read clearly. Back when, one afternoon after she showed him how to ride a horse, Cassie had inked the letters upside down, skipping one knuckle: I AM NICE. Cuz lately maybe sometimes you scare people, she had said.

The guard’s angry swipe rips the charger cord from the phone. Its plug with a tail of broken cord slings across the floor and disappears beneath a different table.

Get out.

Peace!

Get a job, jerkoff.

Love!

Then he is outside under the searing sun, clutching his draining phone and ruined charger. His backpack lands with a thump at his feet. The guard points toward the intersection.

All the way to the end of the property. The sidewalk.

Beneath the roar of accelerating traffic his phone vibrates in his hand.

At three percent: We love you!

He glances back at Arby’s. The guard sustains his menacing glare-and-point. The girl sprays down the open door, chasing dribbles with a cloth. Sullen diners cram trash and waddle out.

Stop them. For Cassie. Stop them.

He zips open his backpack, reaches under his wadded bedspread, past the sharp granite chunk and the railroad spike he has collected, under the cafeteria fork and the jagged broken highway reflector, to reach the only weapon he believes Cassie would want him to use.

Chickenshit.

He kneels in the path of customers on the blistering sidewalk. He opens a plastic case the size of a book.

Loser.

Get a knife, get a gun, get a bomb.

His grin grinds. His wild blond mop falls forward. In a flurry of elbows he draws in colored chalk with all his might.

Thurs, Aug 8, 4:56 AM

To: Dairy Queen ([email protected])

From: Oppo ([email protected])

Subject: Opposition Research

To answer your questions:

Someone who cannot support you publicly (per county ordinance against political activity on the job).

Because you need to fight back.

With research.

Blackbox is a secure encrypted email host.

Kim Maybee’s suicide was a homicide.

So do you want my help?

CHAPTER 1

Cut several fresh (bright green) dandelion leaves and put them in a clean glass or plastic container. Do not use a metal container.

Make sure that the leaves, once cut, do not come in contact with sunlight.

Urinate on the leaves until they are completely submerged.

After 10 minutes, check for red bumps on the leaves.

They say that we hear music in the womb.

We hear voices.

We are designed this way.

The wet tympanic membranes, the yielding ossicles, the soft hard-wiring to the brain, these are created to convey to the womb the sweet vibrations of enveloping love. And so, swaddled in supportive sound, we grow.

What could go wrong?

Bad Axe County Sheriff Heidi Kick rolled and gasped beneath her sticky sheets.

What could go wrong?

Seriously?

She lurched up, still three-quarters asleep. Moonlight glistened on her forehead. Night sounds grated at the screen.

It was all too obvious what could go wrong.

We could hear all the wrong things. Anger. Stupidity. The subtracting silence of despair. The pitiless gnashing of time, the thunderous indifference of nature. Surely, along with Mozart and Mommy, we also hear the insanity of the whip-poor-will, the ghoulish wailing of coyotes, the death scream when the owl hits the rabbit.

Or gunshots.

Yes, she had heard a gunshot. Because now she heard another.

From where? Inside herself? Outside?

Two hard cracks echoed across the landscape mapped inside her sheriff’s brain, four hundred square miles of farm and forest, ridge and coulee.

Somewhere. Anywhere.

She fell back upon the bed. As her dream resumed, the gunshots echoed. Womb became dirt became a tomb. The Bad Axe soil she had tried to cultivate—her de-thistled pasture, her expanding vegetable and flower gardens, her new acres of alfalfa—poured over her like rain.

Hot. Dry. Black. Rain.

Heavy.

Sheriff Kick groaned and lurched up again, desperate to fully awaken. She wrested over her head and flung away her sweaty T-shirt: BARN HAIR, DON’T CARE. Red-blond strands stuck across her mouth as she pitched onto her side and groped emptily for Harley. Help me! But her husband the baseball hero was a hundred miles away representing the Bad Axe Rattlers at a Midwest League all-star event. He had won the home-run derby last night. Today was the game. Opie, help me! But her oldest child, the family’s wise one, was away at summer camp.

Ten-double-zero! Ten-double-zero! Officer down! All units respond!

The sheriff could not wake up.

Shovel by shovel, the dirt massed upon her. She arched under the weight. She clenched her sheets, drove her hip bones up. Her mouth gaped.

Unngh!

She contracted every muscle, exploded upward. Contracted and exploded, sucked air, spit dirt, kicked, clawed.

At last she breached.

Gasped for air.

Cried in jerks and gulps like a baby.

Caught her breath.

Turned on the little rawhide lamp beside her bed.

There it was. Before sleep, she had found her diary from high school, the summer she had turned sixteen, and she had found the page where she had written down the recipe.

Cut several fresh (bright green) dandelion leaves and put them in a clean glass or plastic container…

No, she whispered, touching the clasp on the diary. I can’t be. I’m careful. And we hardly ever even…

But she was seventeen days late.

The recipe for lassies, her Grandma Heinz had advised her, who don’t dare go to the drugstore or the doctor.

At dawn she endured a stinging bladder as she searched the pantry for an empty Mason jar. When she found one, a pint that once contained strawberry-rhubarb jam, she dropped her cell phone into her robe pocket and hurried outside.

As she started barefoot across the dew-drenched yard, the nightmare clung to her. She tasted dirt. Her body felt sore all over. Her gut retained a sickish tickle of dread. And the dream’s special effects seemed to have warped her waking world. The normally clean breath of dawn smelled like kerosene and fish. Birdsong jangled and the sunrise hissed, dissolving shadows with a crackle. She recalled how seven years ago when she carried her twin boys, vanilla ice cream had tasted like socks.

I can’t be. Please just let me be sick.

Overnight, two familiar signs—KICK HER OUT and BARRY HER—had appeared on her yard. The election was still three months away, but Barry Rickreiner had been trolling her and spreading rumors since around the Fourth of July. She wondered now, who was Oppo? What did Oppo mean: Kim Maybee’s suicide was a homicide? Should she fight back with counter-rumors? Maybe. But as much as she loathed Rickreiner, this didn’t feel right. Her strategy had been to start campaigning on the first of September, at which time she meant to take the high road. Meanwhile, the heat wave had claimed all her attention.

Hurry, Heidi, before you piss down your leg.

She hastened around the corner of the old farmhouse. So as not to cast a shadow, she sneaked beneath the curtained window of the guest room, where the kids’ Grammy Belle Kick slept whenever Harley was gone overnight. Belle had seemed hostile lately, suspicious, as if believing some new gossip.

The sheriff ducked under her clothesline, gave wide berth to the soggy septic drain field, and arrived upon the shady ground beneath the honeysuckle thicket.

Cut several fresh dandelion leaves…

Several meant how many? She preferred exact numbers.

She packed nine bright-green leaves, serrated, oozing latex, into the jar. She was ready to cut her bladder loose when she felt the buzz of her phone.

Sorry, Denise, she blurted into it. Family stuff. I gotta call you right back.

Her dispatcher and friend Denise Halverson said, I think we need you now, Heidi.

I can’t—

She couldn’t even finish the sentence. She dropped to a squat, tossed her phone upon the wet lawn, reached beneath her robe, and aimed the jar against herself. Wow. Better.

OK, go ahead.

Denise spoke distantly from the grass.

Do you remember that priest from La Crosse who told us homeless men are being picked off the street and never coming back? He was calling the counties a few weeks ago to put us on alert?

She remembered appreciating the passionate good intentions of the call, but it had left her with questions. The priest had said that five men had disappeared—under suspicious circumstances, he was certain—from the streets of the nearest big city. But wasn’t the simplest explanation that transients tended to be transient? And why was he so convinced that there was foul play involved?

Yes, I remember. He thinks someone’s offering them farm work. Denise, what happened?

A milk truck driver scared some turkey vultures off a body in the ditch on Liberty Hill Road. Deputy Luck just got there. It looks like a homicide. It looks like the victim might have been homeless.

The jar grew warm and heavy in her hand. She heard the gunshot echoes from her dream.

Sheriff? Are you there?

Let me guess, she said. Shot twice with a small-bore rifle, probably a .22.

The phone went silent for moment.

And the body’s caked in dirt.

What’s going on, Heidi?

Am I right?

Heidi, what the hell is going on?

She pulled the jar away and finished into the grass. She raised her face toward the house and saw Grammy Belle staring back at her. The guest room curtain fell closed. She dumped the jar.

I’m on my way, she said.

CHAPTER 2

Leroy Fanta, having heard the call on his bedside scanner and beaten the sheriff to the scene, was lighting his first smoke of the day when he saw Heidi Kick’s brown-on-tan Charger crest into the already brutal morning sun on Liberty Hill Road.

At the sight of his favorite sheriff, Fanta felt pride—and then, beneath his ribs, a hot gob of loss.

Come November, it looked as if Heidi Kick would be gone.

He could visualize the headline he would write:

Challenger’s Attacks Take Down First Female Sheriff

Except the Bad Axe Broadcaster did not print news anymore. It no longer needed headlines, nor an editor to write them. After a century in service, the Broadcaster was no longer even a newspaper. It had become the Happy Valley Shopper after Babette Rickreiner had sucked it into her empire, and as of last week, after forty-three years as editor-in-chief, Fanta had become unemployed.

He should turn his scanner off, maybe. But here he was. Sheriff Kick’s new rookie, Deputy Lyndsey Luck, had blocked the road with three orange cones. Fanta hustled in his old-man shamble to move them. His favorite sheriff steered past with a nod and parked behind the milk truck. Then she stayed inside the Charger, talking on her cell phone.

Now fully into his first sweat of another tropical day in the Bad Axe, Fanta energized himself with a pull on his Winston and limped toward Deputy Luck and the milk truck driver where they stood on the bridge over Hink’s Creek. His joints hurt, every goddamn one of them. His fingertips prickled. His pig valve felt sticky as it flapped. His hip locked, and he had to tack left to go straight. He hadn’t seen a dead body in a while, he told himself, other than his own in the mirror. What Babette Rickreiner had done to the Broadcaster had crushed him. He felt like a ghost as he joined the deputy and her witness.

Where?

Deputy Luck aimed a stolid nod at the bend in the road across from the milk truck, where the ditch bristled with wild parsnip.

He? Or she?

The deceased is an adult male, reported the deputy in her just-out-of-school manner. Caucasian, between twenty and forty years of age.

I just seen a glimpse, the driver jumped in to explain. Fanta looked at an eager kid with a peach-fuzz beard and thirty pounds of extra fat. "I was keeping