The Bangtail Ghost Read online

  ALSO BY KEITH MCCAFFERTY

  The Royal Wulff Murders

  The Gray Ghost Murders

  Dead Man’s Fancy

  Crazy Mountain Kiss

  Buffalo Jump Blues

  Cold Hearted River

  A Death in Eden

  VIKING

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2020 by Keith McCafferty

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: McCafferty, Keith, author.

  Title: The bangtail ghost : a Sean Stranahan mystery / Keith McCafferty.

  Description: First edition. | [New York] : Viking, [2020]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020011854 (print) | LCCN 2020011855 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525562054 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525562061 (ebook)

  Subjects: GSAFD: Mystery fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3613.C334 B36 2020 (print) | LCC PS3613.C334 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020011854

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020011855

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover design: Matt Vee

  Cover images: (eyes) Andy Smith / Getty Images; (background) Bill Diodato / Corbis / Getty Images

  pid_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0

  For Kathryn Court and Dominick Abel

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Also by Keith McCafferty

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Part One: Blood in the Track

  Chapter One: Fallen Star

  Chapter Two: The Fire in Her Eyes

  Chapter Three: At One with Eagles

  Chapter Four: Rocket Girl

  Chapter Five: Little Black Book

  Chapter Six: Wearing Her Colors

  Chapter Seven: Preempting the Blues

  Chapter Eight: A Three-Pipe Problem

  Chapter Nine: Love on the Cusp of Nowhere

  Chapter Ten: Hard Day on a Horse, Soft Night in the Saddle

  Chapter Eleven: Lions in Ordinary Dress

  Chapter Twelve: Tatiana

  Chapter Thirteen: The Woman with Coffin Eyes

  Chapter Fourteen: The Shepherd and the Meadow Maggot

  Chapter Fifteen: A Blessing from Heaven

  Chapter Sixteen: The Spy in the Woodpile

  Chapter Seventeen: Clean Living

  Chapter Eighteen: Chasing the Echo

  Chapter Nineteen: The Bright Carpet

  Chapter Twenty: Confessions in a Virgin Mary

  Chapter Twenty-One: Death in the Afternoon

  Chapter Twenty-Two: Night of the Nagual

  Part Two: The Bangtail Ghost

  Chapter Twenty-Three: Sinew and Bone

  Chapter Twenty-Four: The Good Shepherd

  Chapter Twenty-Five: A Man’s Brain, a Horse’s Hoof, and a Dog’s Nose

  Chapter Twenty-Six: Eyes in the Sky

  Chapter Twenty-Seven: The Magic Wand

  Chapter Twenty-Eight: The War Room

  Chapter Twenty-Nine: The Making of a Man-eater

  Chapter Thirty: A Body to Die For

  Chapter Thirty-One: West with the Light

  Chapter Thirty-Two: Secrets of the Heart

  Chapter Thirty-Three: A Soft Spot to Fall

  Chapter Thirty-Four: The Language of Love

  Chapter Thirty-Five: Monster by a Different Name

  Chapter Thirty-Six: Zahara

  Chapter Thirty-Seven: The Ninth Life

  Chapter Thirty-Eight: Catnip and Roses

  Chapter Thirty-Nine: They That Believeth

  Chapter Forty: The Lovely Dark

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  A few years ago, I was asked to sign books at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Great Falls, Montana. I was subjected to the mandatory rigmarole of being fingerprinted and photographed, and then was directed to follow an escort car to the commissary, where I was greeted by the first of several enormous banners advertising my visit. I was assured that many people were looking forward to meeting me and would be lining up to buy books. I practiced my signature and waited. I bled a little more ink onto a piece of paper and waited some more.

  The customers never materialized. In fact, almost no one came through the doors in two hours. Finally I was informed that a mountain lion had been spotted on the base and a “Remain in Place” order handed down to all personnel and nonmilitary guests. I was escorted back to my car by armed guards, then led to a back gate because the main entrance was closed. After I left, the entire base went into lockdown. Here was a facility with enough firepower to bring down a small European nation and, if you include the ordnance in the missile silos in the surrounding area, start World War III. All brought to a dead halt by what was probably a just a badly frightened cat.

  I have been drawn to cats since childhood—to the point of traveling halfway around the world to fulfill a dream of seeing tigers in the wild—and so I was naturally rooting for the mountain lion spotted at the air force base. Alas, paranoia ruled, and the poor lion, which I was told had been hiding in a culvert pipe, was found and executed the following day. The incident made me think about humankind’s primal, if often misguided, fear and superstition with regard to large carnivores, the so-called monsters of God that have the audacity to remind us of our place in nature’s hierarchy by occasionally indulging in a meal of human flesh. I wondered how a community would react in a similar situation if the cat in question was thought to have killed human beings. And so from this kernel of thought a story grew: The Bangtail Ghost.

  The word ghost is the appropriate, in fact almost inevitable choice to describe mountain lions, which are almost never seen and yet are known by more names—including catamount, cougar, painter, panther, and puma, the scientifically correct name—than any other animal on earth.

  Leslie Patten, a wildlife author of my acquaintance, undertook a five-year journey to try to catch a glimpse of a mountain lion, hiking thousands of miles in the mountains of Wyoming. Ghost Walker, the journal of her quest, is among the best-researched books on mountain lions I’ve read. Yet she has never seen a lion in the wild. I know houndsmen who have treed hundreds of big cats but have never seen a single one without the aid of their dogs. To have seen seven lions without the benefit of a cold nose to pick up the scent, as I have, is a blessing, I am convinced, bestowed upon me by the cats themselves. That is, if you can call being growled at from a distance of ten feet a blessing. One of those seven lions you will meet in the opening chapter of this book. The story is quite an accurate description of the encounter, with one unnerving difference: There were two sets of jade-green eyes reflecting the light of my headlamp that night, not one.

  One more ghost among the shadows of the night.

  PART ON
E

  BLOOD IN THE TRACK

  CHAPTER ONE

  Fallen Star

  To Sean Stranahan, the light that glimmered on and off looked like a star that had fallen to Earth and was slowly, haltingly, but inexorably climbing the mountainside to reclaim its position in heaven. It was there, and it wasn’t, and then there it was again, each time a little higher. When the star quit moving, it had nearly reached the black sharpness that defined the ridgeline a half mile to the west, and simply pulsed, like a heartbeat. That was where the national forest ended and the wilderness began, where the starry night ended and clouds rode the moon.

  Sean watched the light flicker out. A hunter, he thought. Or perhaps it really was a star, playing hide-and-seek with the horizon. Eyes played tricks at night. He adjusted the hip belt of his backpack and began to whistle a Hank Williams tune that Martha sometimes played on her harmonica. It was Martha who had shot the cow elk that he was lugging out of the mountains. Fifty pounds of boned-out elk quarter. Second load of the day. Winter meat. Spring and summer, too. She’d have come with him if Petal, her Appaloosa mare, hadn’t stepped on her foot the day before.

  Sean stopped whistling. He’d heard something, a drawn-out scream that seemed to float down from the ridge where he had seen the lights. The scream sounded human, as if someone were in mortal agony or lamenting a dead child. Yet Sean knew that ears, like eyes, were unreliable witnesses, and he told himself it could be anything. Maybe the sound was made by friction, two trees that tilted against each other, rubbing shoulders in the wind. He’d heard trees make eerie sounds before.

  But here there was no wind, not even a breath of breeze to stir the big flakes of snow that fell straight down, like in a fairy tale, and that Sean could taste on his lips. His first impulse was to try to rescue whoever was screaming. But the canyon that separated him from the ridge was steeply walled, with masses of deadfall interrupted by sheer cliffs, and to try to hike down there at night was asking for a broken leg, or worse.

  It was probably nothing anyway.

  Sean started back down the trail, no longer whistling, his senses heightened, his pace a little faster than it should have been. He had gone perhaps a quarter of a mile when a scent invaded his nostrils, a heavy, putrid odor trapped under the low canopy of the pines. It smelled the way an elk’s gut pile smells after six days in the sun. He stood still, his heart beating under the binoculars that hung down his chest. Maybe it wasn’t a kill. Maybe it was a bear, whose odor is not much better. Instinctively, Sean’s hand moved to the trigger of his pepper spray.

  The growl started low in the throat and rose, then fell and rose again. This was no bear. Nor was it wind. Sean strained his eyes, but all was darkness. Then a shadow moved, a ghostlike visage that was a shade lighter than the night. Sean saw just enough of a shape to think it was a cat. It was crouched a few yards away, the fat scythe of its tail flipping from one side to the other. In a bound the animal was on the hillside above him. Another growl, then silence.

  Sean had a moment when he seemed to float away, seeing his predicament as if from above. He was remembering a night earlier in the autumn when he was hiking out of the Gallatin Range and two German shepherds came running at him, growling as if possessed by demons. Too exhausted to be afraid, Sean had wheeled on a heel and shouted, “Get out of here!” The dogs abruptly turned tail. He tried the command now, the words the same but his voice unable to convey the requisite note of authority. Sean smiled in spite of himself. Then the growling started again, the smile was gone, and he was back on Earth.

  Sean had been saving the battery of his headlamp, but now he switched it on and swept the beam up the slope. The eyes that reflected back at him burned with green fire. Sean felt the hairs on his neck tickle against his jacket collar. For a few moments he seemed not to breathe. Then the eyes were gone.

  He turned his head to cast the light, catching the eyes again, piercing in their intensity. Sean began to walk down the trail, the cat—for he could think of nothing else it could be—prowling the hillside above him, following abreast, growling. After the initial shock, the reflective eyes had a curiously calming effect, for they gave away the animal’s position.

  Sean snapped the safety off the pepper spray. He could trigger a blast in the direction of the eyes, but why take the chance of provoking an attack? Besides, he’d bought the spray when he first moved to Montana. It was years out of date, the canister dented, and as it had ridden in the glove compartment of his ’76 Land Cruiser summer and winter, the contents had been subjected to temperatures that ranged from ninety-five degrees to minus forty. It might not work at all. It was only after one mile became two, with the cat still following, that Sean’s unease turned to fear. The near-continuous growling had diminished. The eyes fired back at him less often when he swept his light. No odor, nor had there been since it had begun to follow. Now all was silence, all was darkness.

  And it could have been anywhere.

  Sean had reached the toe of the ridge, where a creek ran with snowmelt. On his way in that afternoon, he had forded the creek farther up, where it was narrow and three logs spanned it. But now, in trying to keep to open ground, Sean had strayed from the trail. To reach the Forest Service road where he’d parked his rig, he’d have to wade the stream. Tentatively, he took a step onto the pane of ice near the bank. His boot broke through and he felt the ice of the water as it rushed over his boot top. He took another step. Now the water was flooding over the tops of both boots. One more step, using a stick he’d found on the bank as a wading staff. The stick slipped on anchor ice covering submerged rocks and Sean half fell, then, attempting to regain his balance, abruptly sat down in the stream.

  The shock of immersion disoriented him. He knew he looked vulnerable and struggled to his feet. Where is the cat? He slogged to the far bank, his boots heavy, sloshing water, his legs staggering under the weight of the pack. Don’t panic, he told himself. Where is the damned cat?

  Sean began to walk, twisting his neck this way and that, the light on his hat flaring up into the trees. He hadn’t heard the animal or seen its shape since before reaching the creek. After what might have been twenty minutes—it seemed much longer—he saw the Land Cruiser bulking against the pines. Sean fished his keys from his pocket. His fingers were numb from cold and he fumbled the key ring into the snow. He shrugged the heavy pack off and knelt down and dug with both hands, his heart jackhammering in his chest. There. The keys glinted. He unlocked the door and hefted his pack inside, then climbed into the cab. He turned the key and listened to the motor cough, then just sat there, his body shaking. As the adrenaline rush slowly subsided, he told himself that he hadn’t really been that afraid, only alert.

  It was a clarification he would repeat to Martha, after he hung the quarter of venison in her barn and they were sitting down to a late-night leftovers dinner. Got some exercise, that was all, he told her. Exciting, I’ll give it that. My fault really. Should have settled for hauling one quarter out and gone back in tomorrow. Taking the last load out in the dark, not a good idea. Too many things that go bump in the night up there. The cat? Never really saw it clearly. More like a ghost than an animal. The scream, that was the weird thing.

  “Where was your rifle all this time?”

  “In the rig. I was hauling meat, not hunting.”

  “You could have dropped your backpack. That might have distracted it.”

  “I thought about it, but it would make me look smaller without it. And I thought if it attacked, the pack would protect my back and the back of my neck. Anyway, I had so much adrenaline flushing through my system that I hardly felt the weight.”

  “Interesting,” Martha said. “Go on.”

  He told her about falling into the stream. “That’s why I’m shaking.”

  Martha nodded. “I can see you’re shaking.” Then, under her breath, “Men.”

  “What?”

  “I
s it so hard to admit you were afraid? It’s just me, Martha. We live together now. We’ll be married in a few months. We don’t keep things from each other. I’ve been down that road. It ends in divorce.”

  “He cheated on you.”

  “That’s not what I’m talking about. You know, I take the badge off when I’m home. You can talk to me a little. I can’t divine what you’re thinking.” She kissed him. “Go clean up.”

  “I’ll do the dishes first. You’re still hobbling.”

  “It looks bad, but I don’t think anything’s broken. Could be worse. I love you, you know. Even if you were afraid.” And she smiled and he smiled, and they fell back into their easy ways.

  The cold inside of Sean ached, and was still there after a hot shower an hour later. Martha was sitting up in the bed when he came out of the bathroom. She had lit a candle. Sean saw a tumbler of amber liquor on the nightstand. The two dogs and both cats were on the far side of the door.

  “Is that the whiskey from Willie’s Distillery?”

  “It is. I know only one way better to warm you up.”

  “Being?”

  “We’ll get to it. But first, tell me honestly, you were afraid up there, right? I would be.”

  “What would I have been afraid of?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe a mountain lion that looked like a ghost. Or the other way around. Something along those lines.”

  “All I ever really saw were its shadow and its eyes. Anyway, a mountain lion hasn’t killed anyone in Montana in years.”

  “Nonetheless.”

  “Okay. A little, I suppose. How afraid do you want me to have been?”

  “Be serious. You weren’t afraid up there in the dark, just you and whatever? Maybe just a little bit?”

  “I was scared.”

  “You’re not just saying that to get a sip of whiskey?”

  “Maybe.”

  “How scared were you, really?” She held out the glass to him, pulled it back as he reached for it, then pushed it forward again. Sean took the glass and swallowed, the fire of the liquor spreading through his body.