Hell's Cold Furies

By Charles Bechtel

Some days you eat the bear, some days the bear eats you.

That’s what other people might think, but Nolan sees something in the half-eaten corpse lying on an outcrop to a Montana mountain that says differently. And what it says is, “Nolan, you’ve gotten yourself in some kind of mess... again.”

Follow Drew Nolan as he tries to figure out three things:
1) Who’s the dead guy, and why is he dead?
2) Who are these mysterious women that seem to be in the middle of the muddle?
3) How the Hell did I ever get involved in something that is none of my business?

Things haven’t been going well for Drew. He’s down in the dumps, no boat, no girl, no livelihood, no sense enough to stay out of Montana and off a horse.

So what’s Nolan do to make a change? He visits a Dude Ranch in Montana, saddles up and rides out... to a mountain pass where a corpse lies waiting.

Oh yeah, he brings Wiley with him, and together they slide down a mountain of trouble.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Charles Bechtel
• Release date: May 13, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301616602

Charles Bechtel

Born:Spring Lake, North Carolina, April, 1953, fourth day, five minutes past midnight (thus late for my parents’ anniversary, which sets a standard for all such events from then on.)Educated:a long while back, when colleges offered to improve human beings attending their classes, not dedicate themselves to the function of making a person employable. Ahh, the good old days.Undergraduate degree: In English from a State college in Glassboro, NJ, that changed its name to Rowan University when Mr. Rowan gave it a huge wad of cash.Master degree:In English from Temple University in 1996, which is where I got to learn exactly what I needed to know from David H. Bradley, the author of a fine book, “The Chaneysville Incident” *among others) which I recommend reading. Otherwise, graduate school for writers is a waste of time and money.Marriage:I married to the finest woman on Earth, by accounts of many others more than myself: Manuela.I married once before, but for practice. It lasted a mere sixteen months.Manuela brought with her two wonderful young ladies, Elizabeth (Baby Beth) and Manuela (Meme), who each in turn delivered into my life young ladies of inestimable worth: Sky (b. 2003) Lucy (b. 2007) and Mia (b. 2008.) Though I give to each huge chunks of my heart, doing so has increased that heart’s size.Work History:Let’s say I worked, and have enjoyed no occupation more than Educator. My students put their trust in me; I put my faith in them. Pretty much always works out.What I do for fun:Everything. If it is not fun, I quickly stop doing it. (see Work, above)Writing Philosophy:Make sense by appealing to the senses.

Book preview

Prologue

He watches her unknot a scarf, the pale hair a fitting crown. He sighs, if more was only possible. But, married a half-century and ethically moored in the prior two, he has not said in a decade what any woman wishes to hear. Even to conceive this thought about her comeliness feels as though something must break from rust.

Twice she glances sidelong to where he stands, uncertainty in her eyes. She doubts I would help? Does she despise me for being to whom she must come? Or perhaps she believes that no help may be of help?

She had asked to see him, a desperate need crippling her voice. And here she stands, again deciding.

He knows that when she asks he will say Yes, of course, anything, anything you need. Though it has been a century since a woman came to ask Protect me, help me, save me, he is still a man, not capable of saying no. Men do not say no. What is the use of a hill of coins, if a little can’t be granted to a woman in want?

He tells his man Stephen to take her coat and the scarf. Then, alone with her, he asks, ‘May I have him bring tea? Coffee?’ She shakes her regal head. A miserable day, cold from spring rain. And she has come through it, come to him. ‘Brandy? Something to warm you?’

Again she shakes her head, No, though with a timid, restrained smile.

She knows restraint; she is the model of temperance, a woman of candor.

Then she says, ‘Perhaps a little wine.’

It is where they may, can, start.

They sit apart, alone, undisturbed. They sit together in a room where no disturbance is allowed. There is time in the room for waiting, for patience. He must be patient. He is patient. They sip wine.

‘I want your help,’ she says at last. He nods. He knows. I know, I know. He must not let show that any knowledge of her need precedes her. His superior position would then render hers inferior. It is too late. Is it too late?

She looks down, rolls her wine about the glass.

‘How?’ he asks. See, I don’t know everything. Yet. His apologetic smile is genuine, but they both know it is also foreign. It fades to troubled, gets dismissed.

She does not look at him. ‘There’s men, four men, three. I’ve found one. I want to find the, the other three who…’ and then she does look at him, full of face, equal. She has the strength to ask, and he is too weak to refuse.

She tells him a story. What she says stabs him through, breaks every flake of rust from the iron shield behind which he keeps his heart.

Yes. He will say. He does not nod as she speaks, he does not smile, does not interrupt nor interject. Each detail settles on him like a manacle. He cannot speak, does what she wants him to do: he listens.

And when she has wrapped the scarf again around her head, and slipped into her coat, he touches her sleeve. That is all. His touch says Yes, because, O, if more was only possible...

He thinks he has pulled her from a floe of ice breaking beneath her feet. Proof: she lets gratitude shine in her eyes. She smiles. He nods, and takes his fingers from her sleeve.

Either he may have forgotten how often he’d said What are you willing to do to get what you want? or never noticed that she had listened to him when he said it, and given it some thought.

In every case, with nothing more to lose, she always decides:

Anything

One

‘Damn, now that’s dead.’ I had to agree with the boy. Nobody could look deader. We stared down at a pair of legs turned toes down, part of a torso, and a lot of nasty. Below where the body lay tumbled, caught in a bush, was a chewed-off arm. I could see some fingers were missing. Still had the wristwatch, though.

‘You think maybe mountain lion? A bear?’

‘Buzzards,’ my friend said, pointing up while looking down.

‘Yeah.’ I again had to agree. Partly because a half dozen still circled overhead, and mostly because I had no friggin’ clue what else lives on mountains in Montana.

He’d only been discovered because I had climbed down from my perch on a horse called Booger to piss over the cliff. Had I crossed over to the other side of the trail and pissed up the cliff face, the remains of the person who’d gone splat below us would have continued to be buzzard food. His existence would have been lost as a footnote to some history I never would have taken an interest in reading.

Funny how the insignificant choices we make, such as when and where we elect to pee, can turn out to have such consequential consequences.

Oh, by we, I meant myself and a sho ‘nuff cowboy companion astonishingly named Boone Stark. The day I overheard someone call after him I thought to myself, That name ought to come with a hat. And, sho ‘nuff, it did. And it was a white hat, too.

Draw your own conclusions.

No more sense describing Boone Stark than those parts of the dead man on the outcrop below us. Pull down any poster for a Saturday afternoon Western, there you’ll find him, from his shit-covered big heeled boots to his sweat-stained Stetson, already as bandy legged as a flamingo and verbal as a phone pole.

I’d followed behind his horse for half a day up a mountain of the northeast Yellowstone, clinging harder to the pommel on my saddle than I ever did to my you know what at my first porno. Somewhere behind us, my friend and first mate Wiley sat astride a big Morgan that his size had turned into a donkey. I could only imagine his mood.

The wind kept snatching every curse word from my mouth, a high wind that I felt was determined, along with Booger, to send me into that Valley of Death which had edged the bridle path half as wide as a strip of bacon.

If there was one thing I knew, looking down at the carcass strewn on the outcrop, it was that Wiley was sure to ignore it in favor of turning my attention to the sheer stupidity of two watermen taking a vacation at a Montana dude ranch.

I’m a charter boat captain. I ride boats. Water is flat. No cliffs, no thousand foot plunges, no hard smacky rocks to inflict pain, no farting murderous livestock. The highest point on your average boat is thirty feet. Drop, it’s maybe ten feet to a deck. You will survive. Or maybe you strike water. Worst to happen, besides you get wet, is that you have to sit on a metal table while some doc plasters your arm.

Slip from a horse whose sense of fun includes chucking you through a quarter mile of air just to see if you’ll bounce means you wind up on a metal table doing an Out of Body Look Down over your very ripped-up hide and 206 shattered bones. I had a real fear of that, and hoped the pommel I gripped could delay my horse’s fun until the next rider.

Being atop a horse up a mountain meant I was at the bottom to almost a year of such dad gum fun. Yeehah.

And now. another dead guy.

‘Orter fetch up what’s left,’ Boone drawled. Boone drawled everything, so I’m going to have difficulty substituting colorful verbs about the man’s manner of speaking.

‘No. We don’t touch it. Just we take some pictures.’

He eyed me like I’d just confessed to liking little boys.

‘It’s procedure. A crime scene.’

‘Hell, Mr. Nolan, feller fell off. Ain’t a crime scene.’

‘We don’t know that. Assume the worst, hope for the best. Clues in things might tell what the Hell a dead half-chewed body is doing on a path you take city boys up for life-ending pleasure.’ I may have been out of my element as a cowpoke, but I was in my element at a crime scene, and I already had my suspicions.

See, I have this thing. I can spot what’s wrong with this picture in no time. And something said, there’s something wrong with this picture. Or pitcher, as Boone would say.

‘Best thing you can do is leave me here, and Wiley, if he ever gets here, and go get help. Find whoever has legal jurisdiction over this mountain and bring ‘em. Not like he’s going anywhere.’

What a scene it was. The man lay sprawled about twenty feet below on an outcrop of rock. Had he missed that, his body would have fallen a good two hundred more, and I’d have never seen him. But there he was, or most of him.

The face, chewed up as his was, was a man’s. The close-cropped hair had a military look. His footwear seemed the type better used to fool other flatfeet into thinking you were more into hiking than for any practical shoving into stirrups. And there was the big face of the wristwatch.

As for the ground he fell from, felt I’d need an Indian guide to sort out all the footprints — it was a hiking and riding path over the mountains after all.

What I saw was, or rather didn’t see, was no tent, no backpack, no cookware, no food. And no plastic water bottle, although that could have spun in a sweet, slow tumble into the valley. I looked around me. Nothing.

Pitcher all wrong.

‘Go on, Boone. I got this. Go find somebody who’ll give a damn about a dead dude on their mountain.’

What the Hell was it about me this year? Two vacations, two dead bodies fall my way. I needed to stay home more. Quieter.

I shot a number of pictures, thinking to myself how it wouldn’t be easy for even the CSI magicians on television to determine Cause of Death. The cliff face above the pass didn’t seem to offer any reason why he’d have climbed up, fallen and then bounced his ass onto that ledge, although it was a possibility. I shot pics of the rocky hillside, just in case.

It had been a half day’s slow ride on horseback from the dude ranch, and a long hike on foot. We’d passed no loose horse on our way up, or other riders, and his shoe patterns ended where he’d fallen. His trek had come from the west. We came from the East, in more ways than one. Those boot prints, furthermore, covered most of the horse tracks, which seemed to say no horse had drifted off after the man fell and died. But at a crime scene, seemed has no place. Couldn’t rule it out though. Weird thing about his prints. They didn’t lead directly to the ledge, but wobbled around, meandered, like he wasn’t sure which way he wanted to go. And there was only straight ahead, or straight back from wherever he’d come from, unless of course he wanted to walk off the edge.

His weren’t the only tracks marring the hoof prints. Couldn’t say he’d died alone, but I got the feeling from the several smaller prints that at least one other person had been by after the last horse passed through. Seemed likely that Small Foot had been with him.

Do all cowboys ride with rope? Boone had crossed to his ride while I stared down at the dead man, pondering. I’ve had to rappel down to crime scenes before, even hiked myself up a thirty foot mast, but to dangle over several hundred feet of knife-edged mountain on a lasso tied to a fidgety quarter horse was not my idea of proper gear. Didn’t seem to bother Boone. Disregarding my advice that he go for help, he was over the edge and down the drop like Spiderman.

Oh, Drew, where are your balls?

They were in my throat, but I made it.

Frozen in every limb and twitching at every nerve, I knew that I really wanted to flip him over. If he hadn’t fallen, and death was from some applied trauma, something, meaning somebody, had to have knocked him out and thrown him down.

I commented again about bears or mountain lions, but he shook his head. ‘Doubtin’. Bear’d mess him better. Lion’a drug him off. And ‘sides, you see any pugs either one, back up ‘ere?’

My request to explain pugs caused a face. City folk. I knew he thunk it. But he had a point. He also had a point showing a clear set of bird prints in the little patch of dirt by the man’s missing shoulder. ‘Buzzards, ain’t a doubt.’

‘Go back and get help, Boone. And really, bring somebody with jurisdiction over these mountains. And a ladder. I intend to sit right here, but not for God damned ever.’

Without a word, Spiderman went back up. I squatted over the dead man. I hadn’t noticed that Boone had retracted his web behind him, leaving me stuck on the cliff. Wasn’t until I heard him call down, ‘Hey, Mr. Nolan, y’all wait ’til I gitcher some right kinda rope.’

Like I had a choice? I merely let the long string of bad words tumble from my mouth like a landslide of hot rocks. Wouldn’t have mattered if I hurled boulders. Boone was gone.

What else to do but study, sit, commune with Mother Nature, except piss and moan about what I couldn’t change. I’d gotten really good at that last thing, recently.

Dude, it got really quiet on that ledge. Spend a few hours in Nature with a dead man, you’ll see.

So here’s what I contemplated: if his death wasn’t from applied trauma, then that left sickness as the cause. I thought, possible. Maybe heart attack from overexertion? But what was he doing up there on foot? That watch and the expense of those useless boots meant to say Look at me, I’m a fancy man. They surely didn’t say at all that he was a tree hugging nature boy out embracing Mother Earth who’d slipped taking a piss in the same toilet I had elected to use. No gear, no tent. Weird.

If he had had a heart attack, probably nobody’d be able to figure that out. Wasn’t much left in his chest cavity. Buzzards have a reputation for thorough cleaning.

By the desiccation of tissue he seemed to have been dead for days, but with the wind and exposure to the summer sun, even Montana’s, seemed seemed worthless as a conclusion.

Might be he just had a bad day.

Maybe being a former cop made me feel that it was my crime scene, though I knew it wasn’t. The county’s men would take care of Mr. Dead Guy, but most of the crimes they probably got to see were tourists getting lost in the mountains, smashups by drunk cowboys in pickemup trucks, and maybe — once in a career — a domestic where the one shooting a gun was still holding a gun.

My nose said the man was not local, a flat-footed greenhorn city boy tourist like me. That said if it was a crime, and it really felt like it, it was a city crime. It begged for city forensic procedures.

I crouched down to see what I could see, and smell what I could smell. Touch, however, was out of the question.

I can’t say there’s been too many times in my life when I got my head down really close to another man’s crotch, and there was only one time in my life that Wiley caught me doing exactly that. This was the time.

I’d heard Wiley coming up the pass, but didn’t give him a thought, being so enthusiastically embroiled in a mystery. Why I had my head down between the man’s thighs to look where I shouldn’t be looking? Because I am thorough, and because most of what had been his crotch was gone, and because a little glint of sunlight on metal said I should.

‘Damn Hell, Cap’n? That ain’t natchal, not even for you.’

I rocked back on my heels and looked up at the sorry face of my first mate, who’d belly crawled to the edge to peer over. I served him up what you might call a smile with a little FU on the side.

I had seen the man’s Levis had been torn up, shredded. What should have constituted his reproductive organs looked more like dropped spaghetti. I heard animals go for the softer spots first. That’s just wrong, somehow.

Anyway, when I had been looking, something caught my eye. Disregarding Wiley’s appraisal of my character and actions, I returned to my inspection, then whipped out my rigging knife and snapped the marlin spike into place. I then dug into the fetid mess where the man’s thighs had once came together. Out popped a shiny pebble.

‘Shot,’ I said, holding up the bullet. ‘Right in his boys.’

‘Dayum,’ Wiley whispered.

Dayum was right. Lead shot into the man’s privates definitely elevated my characterization of his demise to Crime, and quickly narrowed down for me a motive to Passion, most likely Reprisal.

There are several forms of reprisal crimes. Revenge and self-protection, like the Bobbitt defense, are the most common. It’s easy to jump to the conclusion the man died for how he had employed those privates, but I’ve learned not to jump to easy conclusions. I really learned that over the past year.

Could have just been a badly aimed shot, or an accidental ricochet from some fool shooting at a squirrel.

But then there were the Lacks, and the Lacks said otherwise. There was the lack of a gun, certainly, a lack of hiking or camping equipment, not even a damn camera, let alone a cell phone. And there was the lack of a suitable environ — the man was a city dandy out on a duck hunt? No — and then there was the lack of reportage. Nobody I then knew of knew anything, said anything about anyone missing. Meant he’d come from wherever he’d come from alone, no company? To do what? Come up there on a Montana mountainside to shoot himself in his balls? If it had been an accidental discharge by companion, a hundred and one times out of a hundred the shooter’s guilt overrides the fright at what he’s done and he reports it.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: one thing I do really well is spot what’s wrong with the picture. Of the aforementioned clues anyone might have noticed, there was one oddity most would miss. No faded rectangle on his back pocket.

Even though it’s really bad on a man’s back to carry a wallet in the hip pocket, about 99% of men do. It’s natural, like scratching your balls, when you still have them. Mr. Levi puts a pocket over your butt cheek, you use it. As fewer than ten men in a hundred are left-handed, the right pocket will show that wear pattern. His didn’t show on right or left. That meant he either kept it in his front pocket, or in his shirt pocket. That’s where I keep mine.

Problem was he was face down in the dirt, and there was no way I could fetch it out without shifting the body. Training said, ‘Don’t do it, Drew.’ Curiosity on the other hand? Sure it kills cats, but what harm could it bring to an ex-Philly cop turned charter boat captain turned countrified and counterfeit cowboy dude, rider of horses, sitter of cliff faces over a several hundred foot drop?

Turns out, a lot.

Before I get to the troubles, I must get to the wallet.

Wiley’d not desisted from a running commentary, complete with unanswerable questions while I sat on my haunches considering whether or not to flip over the body. He hung over me with disturbed attention toward the dead man, showing no squeamishness but a fair amount of opinion regarding this most unwelcome circumstance.

His expression must have turned into disgusted alarm when I reached my hand under the man’s hip. I wanted to see if the wallet was indeed in that front pocket. It wasn’t.

For the second time, Wiley barked, ‘Damn Hell, Cap’n?’

‘No wallet here,’ I said, tapping the man’s butt. ‘Maybe here.’ I touched my own breast pocket. He nodded. ‘I got to get under.’

‘He ain’t got no shoulder that side.’

‘Well Hell, Wiles, I’ve seen you elbow deep in the stinking guts of a shark. What’s the diff?’

He had plenty of reasons diff, but I ignored him. Sure enough, the wallet was there. I hesitated before dipping my fingers pickpocket style to draw it out. Training versus curiosity. I needed more training.

What my fingers touched felt slimmer, and more familiar, than a billfold. The surface had a series of tell-tale impression that made me think, but not say, Uh oh.

I knew that series. A badge behind the leather.

I let go and stood up.

‘Damn, Wiles, this guy was some kind of an officer. He’s carrying a badge.’

‘Shoot, Cap, you mean police?’

‘Hell, he could be a dog catcher, all I can tell.’

‘You gunna check?’

Of course I was gunna check.

I went back to it, and soon the squashed leather telltale was in my hands, open, and talking to me. He wasn’t a pooch picker upper. He was indeed a cop. And not just any cop from any city. He was a Philly cop. A Fifteenth District police sergeant.

I did say I’d once been a Philly cop, right? Lying face down on a rock outcrop was one of my brothers. They say blood that once ran Blue always runs Blue.

‘A cop, Wiles. Same city as me.’

‘Half a chance you knowed ‘im?’

Name on the card read Sgt. Stanislaus Golaszewski. ‘No.’ I worked the badge back into his breast pocket.

Fifteenth District is a troubled section of Philadelphia, though not the worst. It had been Poles and Italians, some Russians, Lithuanians, and maybe even Estonians for most of my life. That his name was Golaszewski didn’t surprise me, though it did say something.

The district was always ethnically diverse before the white flight from the cities, and for the most part it stayed tranquil. I had no idea anymore what world refugees filled its houses these days, but the name said here was someone who’d stayed with his neighborhood. As a sergeant, most likely, he kept a lid on the streets so that all would remain tranquil, that the business of the Neighborhood would go on smoothly. Under the forces of inevitable change, especially the rolling in of those who worked the drug and prostitution trades, if he had been successful it was because he had been a tough son of a bitch, an old school hardnose. If he hadn’t, he’d been part of the problem.

Possibly being a hardnose got him shot in the balls on a Montana mountainside.

I was done, but Boone’s stranding me on that ledge forced me to keep babysitting. ‘Wiles?’ I looked up at him. ‘Why didn’t you go back with the cowboy?’

‘Wouldn’ta been right.’

‘Well, thanks.’

‘Okay, Cap’n.’

There’s not too much that two fellows can do while watching over a body on a mountainside except stare at the body, glare at each other, or lean back and gaze into the wavering blue-filtered distance. I knew Boone would move pretty quickly without having to guide two tenderfooters, but how quickly someone or ones might clamber with him back up the mountain in the latter part of the day was beyond our ability to guess. We were in for a whole lot of staring at the many tits of Mother Nature. We certainly didn’t feel the time and place had come for us to take up a much needed heart to heart with each other.

And why much needed?

Wiley’d been my first mate way too long, and not having much chatter about other than fish, we both understood that the only other topic would have to include his pissed-off complaints about me losing our boat.

My fortunes of the recent past, starting when together we watched the Paradise Found sail off into a Caribbean night to a watery death, were too well known to him to warrant more discussion, and besides, we never discussed much of what happened that night once we set the woman who’d come between us on the cracked tarmac of a tiny island airport. Why start conversatin’ on a mountainside?

After noting the fineness of our two horses, guesses at when Boone’d be back and who he’d be dragging up the mountain with him, sharing our regrets about having not brought more