Avalanche: A Sheriff Bo Tully Mystery (Sheriff Bo Tully Mysteries) Read online

  ALSO BY PATRICK F. McMANUS

  The Blight Way: A Sheriff Bo Tully Mystery

  The Deer on a Bicycle

  Kid Camping from Aaaaiii! to Zip

  Never Cry “Arp!”

  Into the Twilight, Endlessly Grousing

  How I Got This Way

  The Good Samaritan Strikes Again

  Real Ponies Don’t Go Oink!

  The Night the Bear Ate Goombaw

  Whatchagot Stew

  Rubber Legs and White Tail-Hairs

  The Grasshopper Trap

  Never Sniff a Gift Fish

  They Shoot Canoes, Don’t They?

  A Fine and Pleasant Misery

  SIMON & SCHUSTER

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

  Copyright © 2007 by Patrick F. McManus

  All rights reserved,

  including the right of reproduction

  in whole or in part in any form.

  SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  McManus, Patrick F.

  Avalanche : a Sheriff Bo Tully mystery / Patrick F. McManus.

  p. cm.

  1. Rocky Mountains—Fiction. 2. Outdoor life—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3563.C38625A98 2007

  813'.54—dc22 2006051273

  ISBN-10: 1-4165-5411-4

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-5411-0

  Visit us on the World Wide Web:

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  AVALANCHE

  1

  HE STOOD AT THE WINDOW studiously watching the large fluffy snowflakes fill up his mother’s backyard. Rose, seating herself at the dining room table behind him, said, “Honey, I wish you’d do something besides stare at the snow. Maybe you need a hobby.”

  “Staring at snow is my hobby,” Blight County Sheriff Bo Tully replied. He was forty-two years old, with thick brown hair and a thick brown mustache, both beginning to show signs of gray. “In January anyway.”

  Rose set a flat carton on the table. “Come help me eat this pie. It’s from Crabbs. They make the best pie. Oh, not their coconut cream or their banana cream. They’re all right, but they don’t put enough coconut in their coconut cream. Maybe coconut is too expensive. They put something in their banana cream I don’t like. It’s probably to keep the bananas from turning brown.”

  Tully sighed. “You plan to eat the whole pie right now?”

  “Goodness no, not the whole pie. I offered you a piece, didn’t I?”

  “I guess,” he said. He walked over and sat down across the table from her. Her hair had been freshly done that day and appeared to have a silvery tint he hadn’t noticed before. Her bifocals had slid down onto the tip of her elegant nose. She peered sternly out over the top of them, her ash-blue eyes closing to mere slits.

  “I prefer you not wear your gun at the table,” she said.

  Tully sighed again. He took off his shoulder holster and hung it on the chair next to him. His mother frowned. He lowered the holster to the floor.

  “That’s better.”

  “So, what kind of pie is it, if not coconut or banana cream?”

  “Peach. Of course they use canned peaches this time of year, but sometimes in the summer they have fresh peach. It’s heavenly.”

  She cut a piece of pie, placed it on a saucer, and handed it to him.

  “Looks good,” he said. “You got any ice cream to go with it?”

  “In the freezer. I thought you were on a diet.”

  “I am. The pie-and-ice-cream diet. You want a scoop?”

  She handed him her plate. He went out to the kitchen and returned with a scoop of vanilla ice cream on each piece of pie.

  She said, “Have you seen the monster lately?”

  “Yeah, I saw Pap yesterday as a matter of fact. Stopped by his mansion on the hill. I’m sure you know he has a young and beautiful new housekeeper.”

  “Housekeeper my eye! Yes, I know all about Deedee. She’s a nice girl, actually. Why she has anything to do with that old man is a mystery to me.”

  “He’s rich, for one thing,” Tully said. “He used to be corrupt and rich but now I think he’s only rich. By the way, he seems to be shrinking.”

  “Good. Maybe he will get small enough a cat will eat him.”

  “I don’t think he will get that small, but he used to be about two inches shorter than I am. Now, I doubt he’s much over five ten, if that. You sure he’s my father?”

  “Pretty sure. Why do you ask?”

  “As far as I can tell, we don’t have a single thing in common, except for the surname.”

  “You should be thankful. When he was sheriff, which was practically forever, everyone in the whole county was scared to death of him. They probably still are. Blight County was wide open back then, with gambling and prostitution everywhere you looked, and Pap getting a cut of everything illegal and even some things that were legal. Drinking and dancing and carousing every night all night! It was wonderful! Oh, the fun we had in those days!” For a brief moment, a devil-may-care look flashed across her face.

  Tully still had childhood memories of his mother as a flashy young woman. He had heard old men talk about her as the most beautiful girl in all of Blight County.

  “Is that where he made all his money, getting a cut off the prostitution and gambling?”

  “Not all his money. He and that rascal buddy of his, Pinto Jack, sold their gold mine for a fortune, two fortunes in fact. They had this thin little vein of gold they’d been working and somehow persuaded a greenhorn from Pennsylvania that it would get bigger all the time. And it did! The greenhorn made a ton of money out of that mine. Pap was furious with Pinto, for talking him into selling. Pinto is lucky to still be alive.”

  “Pap hasn’t mellowed much.” Absently, Tully picked up the linen napkin beside his plate and wiped pie and ice cream from his mustache.

  His mother cut the point off her second piece of pie, placed a dab of ice cream on it, and forked it into her mouth. A dreamy expression came over her face. “Perfect,” she said.

  Even in her sixties and a little plump, his mother was still beautiful.

  “You always were a pie person,” he said.

  “One of my many vices.”

  Tully licked his fork clean and pointed it at two watercolors on the wall across from him. “I like what you did with the paintings.”

  “Yes, well, it cost me a fortune to get them properly mounted and framed. They’re very expensive museum mounts. My son painted them, you know, so I had to go first-class. Why he wastes his time being sheriff I have no idea.”

  “The main reason is I sell only about four or five paintings a year, and I like to eat at least every other day.”

  “I can remember when you and Ginger built your log cabin out on the eighty. You both figured the place would be self-sustaining, and you could spend your lives being starving artists, you a painter and she a potter.”

  “I remember.”

  “What’s it been, almost ten years since she died? I remember how she used to follow you around when you went out hunting those little birds.”

  “Quail,” Tully said. He remembered, too. Ginger hated hunting but she went along anyway, just to
be with him. She would hold the dead birds and pet them before putting them in the game bag. Sometimes she would get tears in her eyes. He would think to himself, she doesn’t have to come. He liked that she did, but she didn’t have to, just to be with him in the hills and fields that both of them loved. Well, maybe she did have to come.

  His mother was silent now, concentrating on her pie. Tugging on a soggy corner of his mustache, Tully watched her, Katherine Rose McCarthy Tully O’Hare Tully Casey. One of the last three husbands was dead, with Tim Casey maybe still alive but whereabouts unknown. Had his whereabouts been known, he too probably would be dead. He was one of those persons Pap said deserved killing. Pap would have been happy to oblige, if he had ever found him. Maybe he had found him, Tully thought. That would certainly explain Tim’s disappearance.

  “How come you married the old man twice?”

  “I was crazy,” she said.

  One of the things Tully liked most about his mother was her talent for focusing totally on a single thing in a single instant, in this case the piece of pie she was eating, each bite of peach achieving its own individual identity. For this single moment, her world was peach pie. Tully could eat two Big Macs, one after the other, with no recognition of the fact before, during, or after the operation itself. Perhaps, he thought, that explained the ten pounds he had gained since his last Atkins. He stared down at his pie plate. The pie and ice cream were magically gone. Man, I’ve got to stop doing this.

  Rose looked up from her plate. “So, are you taking the night off, Bo? You should. You look tired.”

  “Nope, I’ve got to get over to the office and shake up the troops.”

  “I know you think you can never replace Ginger, but you should start seeing other women.”

  “I do see other women.”

  “I mean women who aren’t already married!”

  “Yeah, that can be a problem, married women. It’s just they can’t help themselves. They love me. I don’t sleep with them, though. I hope you know that.”

  “Oh yes, I know that. I did hear about that pretty medical examiner you took on a camping trip up on the West Branch. She isn’t married.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it!”

  “I thought it was foolish the first time I heard about it. Taking a woman camping in a tent in November!”

  “I said I don’t want to talk about it!”

  The phone rang. Rose got up and answered it. “Oh, yes, dear… No, no he isn’t. Could I give him a message, if I see him?… Really! My goodness!”

  “Is that Daisy? Let me speak to her.”

  Rose shook her head and turned away. “Yes yes, dear, I’ll tell him… Who was it?…And she doesn’t know how or where?…Just disappeared like that? I’ll tell him, dear, if he stops by…You’re welcome, dear.”

  Tully was on his feet now, headed for the phone, his hand reaching.

  Rose hung up.

  Tully’s eyes closed and his chin sagged down onto his chest. “What?”

  “That was your perky little secretary.”

  “I know. What else?”

  “It seems Mike Wilson has gone missing up at the West Branch Lodge.”

  Tully slipped back into his shoulder harness, then put on his three-quarter-length black leather coat and his gray Stetson. “Now that you got all the information out of Daisy, Ma, maybe you’d like to go find Wilson.”

  “I probably could. But not until I finish this pie.”

  2

  TULLY GOT BACK TO THE department well after five. Both the day shift and night shift deputies were either in chairs or sitting on the desks arranged in rows around the briefing room. They were waiting for him. Tully would have felt more secure in his authority if all the deputies had snapped to attention when he entered. Instead, they didn’t even interrupt their various conversations.

  As usual, his undersheriff, Herb Eliot, was perched on the edge of Daisy’s desk, chatting with her. He wouldn’t have minded so much if Daisy hadn’t been in the middle of a divorce. He doubted Herb stood a chance with her, but it still irritated him to see Herb always hovering in her vicinity.

  Tully glanced over to the far corner of the room. As expected, young Byron Proctor, his Crime Scene Investigations unit, was hunched over his computer, hard at work. Ah, if only the rest of his men were so dedicated. At least they were all better looking, substantially so. On a scale of homely, Byron was a ten. He had both the posture and complexion of a clam, large, crooked teeth that projected outward beneath a wispy mustache, and stiff brown hair that seem to sit on his head like a mound of dried hay. He was seriously tattooed and probably pierced. Tully didn’t even want to know about the piercings. Most people, startled by Byron’s extreme looks, tried to ignore his appearance. Tully, on the other hand, called him Lurch. He was Lurch’s hero. Lurch was also the most brilliant person Tully had ever known. Perhaps most startling of all, Lurch even had a girlfriend, and not just any girlfriend but one of astonishing beauty. The girl, Tully surmised, had to be one of those rare human beings with a deep appreciation for brilliance.

  “Okay, listen up!” Tully shouted, stomping the snow off his alligator-skin cowboy boots.

  The roar of conversation slowly faded and the deputies turned to face him, few bothering to conceal their boredom.

  “I have to make a phone call and I don’t want anyone to leave until I’m done with it. Understand?”

  There were a few nods. Tully walked back to his glass-enclosed cubicle. Daisy followed him. She was thirty years old with short black hair, brown eyes, and a compact figure packed enticingly in a short black skirt and white blouse. Everything about her seemed cloaked in an aura of pure efficiency, from the perfectly applied cosmetics to the click-click-click of her high heels on thetile floor. Tully knew she was madly in love with him, but he tried never to let on. Maybe after the divorce, he thought. Maybe.

  “I’m afraid, Daisy, that my mother didn’t give me all the details about our missing person.”

  “She asks questions,” Daisy said, defensively. “I don’t want to be rude and not answer them. I doubt she’ll tell anyone.”

  Tully stood at the window watching the snow come down. “Ma is gossip central in this town.” He looked at the parking area, which contained a section fenced eight feet high with chain link topped with coils of concertina wire. “Daisy, first thing tomorrow, get some of the prisoners to clean the snow out of the Playpen. They can use the exercise.” The Playpen was the prisoners’ exercise yard. “Anyway, fill me in on Wilson.”

  Daisy glanced at her notepad. “Blanche Wilson telephoned a little after four from the West Branch Lodge. She said her husband, Michael, has been missing for the last two days. He stormed out of the lodge yesterday morning and nobody has seen him since. None of the cars are missing, so she thought maybe he had gone to the ‘Pout House.’”

  “The Pout House?”

  “She said that’s a cabin they have about a mile upriver from the lodge. I guess when one or the other of them gets mad, he or she can go up there to pout. Anyway, she sent one of the lodge’s employees up to the Pout House to look for him, and he wasn’t there.”

  “So, where else could he have gone?”

  “I guess that’s the problem. She couldn’t think of any other place. They have some cabins back up on the mountain, but she didn’t think he would have gone to any of them, particularly with this snow. I told her you’d call when you got in.”

  “I’ll do that,” Tully said, tugging at the corner of his mustache. “The West Branch Lodge is a pretty classy place. Costs a bundle to stay there.”

  “Yeah, I don’t think Blight City folk hang out there much. Mostly Californians, who come up for a wilderness adventure, except with all the comforts of home. And then some. I hear they have an indoor pool fed from a natural hot spring.”

  “They do. My wife and I spent a weekend there once. Pretty nice. It was a freebie. Pap had done some favor for Blanche Wilson’s father and as part of the payoff, he had
Carson throw in a weekend for me and Ginger. Pap was pretty fond of Ginger.”

  “I guess about everyone was.”

  Tully focused for a second on Daisy. She seemed uncomfortable with the mention of his wife. “That was a long time ago,” he told her.

  Daisy nodded. “Here’s the number.”

  She shoved her pad across the desk to Tully. He dialed.

  A woman answered the phone. “West Branch Lodge, Lois Getty speaking. May I help you?”

  “This is Sheriff Bo Tully, returning Mrs. Wilson’s phone call.”

  “One moment.” He heard her whisper, “Sheriff Tully.”

  Another woman took the phone. The voice was soft and cultured, unlike the voices in most of Blight County, which seemed more suited for yelling at dogs. “This is Mrs. Wilson. Thank you so much for calling, Sheriff.”

  “Mrs. Wilson, the message I got is that your husband is missing.”

  “Yes and I’ve been worried sick. Sometimes he loses his temper and storms off and goes skiing or snowshoeing, but it’s not like Mike to be gone this long. Sometimes he takes a car and is gone for a couple of weeks but no cars are missing. If he doesn’t take a car that means he’s on the lodge property someplace. I’m sure something has happened to him. It’s very cold up here, with lots of snow and more all the time. I don’t think he could survive long if he is injured and out in the open.”

  “How long has he been missing?”

  “This is the second day. He got upset yesterday about seven in the morning. He put on his coat and hat and left. I figured he’d gone up to the Pout House. That’s a little cabin we have upriver. Occasionally one or the other of us will go up there and stay if we get mad at something, or just to get away from the lodge for a while, particularly if we’re upset with each other. But this morning I sent Grady Brister up to the cabin to check on him. Grady’s kind of our handyman. He said there was no sign of Mike.”

  “Anywhere else he could have gone?”