Seneca Wood
by Gary Clites

Chapter One

Wayne Zirk swung his leg in a full arc, catching the chicken just below its tail, lifting it high off the hard dirt pasture, and launching it up, up, up about seven feet off the ground. Best one yet. At the peak of its flight, the chicken came alive, squawking and flailing its useless wings around in a pointless attempt to generate genetically encoded but physically impossible flight. Instead, it came down hard, slapping face first into the earth. Frightened, in pain, but unbroken, the hen squawked and rose uncertainly on pencil-thin legs, stumbling away from the danger.

Wayne didn't know a thing about genetic encoding. Tall and skinny for his age, he'd stopped catching the school bus for the trip from Seneca Rocks to the high school in Franklin at fifteen, when he had been in the ninth grade. He'd never been able to understand half of what they were talking about, anyway. Living alone, he didn't do much about taking care of himself. He was always getting in trouble for beating the crap out of some kid who told him he smelled, but he didn't know what to do when it was the girls doing it. So he was happy when he quit going. The school sent letters to the trailer for most of a year before figuring out nobody was there to read them. Eventually, they tracked down his mother through her state check, living with some truck driver in Onego. When she came back to the trailer to ask him if he didn't want to go back and get an education, he told her he'd turned sixteen and they could all go fuck themselves. That'd been four years ago, and Wayne was doing just fine. His mother was screwing some insurance salesman in Petersburg now, but she kept paying the taxes and the light bill on the trailer. Wayne sold a little pot for pocket money, and mostly ate the stuff he shot while wandering through the woods around Seneca with the rifle his grandfather had left him.

Wayne loved shooting things--deer, squirrels, rabbits, whatever he could get into. He especially liked it if they weren't quite dead when he got to them so he could have some fun with 'em. It got him all excited inside to find a rabbit shot but alive, with maybe a leg broken. He would hold its head down and twist the leg around and feel it squirm and whimper, poke at the bullet hole with his finger, make it hurt, and then shove his finger in deeper. It made him shiver all the way down to his dick.

He didn't usually get a chance to fuck with the chickens, though. He'd never go on Frank Ashby's land if the old guy was around, but now everybody was talking that Ashby was filing for bankruptcy and the court was sellin' off the farm, and the place had looked deserted. There were a lot of chicken farms around the county, but Ashby's was the only one that was "free-range," meaning he didn't raise his chickens in little cages like the others. The ones in cages were no fun: they were half dead, banging their heads on the tin bars all day long. When you got one, you could kick it around all day, it'd just sit there. But these free ones were funny as hell. They screamed and squawked all over the place when you got after them. If you broke one's leg, it'd keep trying to run, flapping its wings and spinning around in a circle. Funny as shit!

Wayne grabbed one by the head and lifted it up over his shoulders. He spun it around hard and solid like his grandfather had taught him when he was little. The bird's neck snapped quickly, but it hung quivering in his hand for a few seconds. He took it to the backpack he used to carry game and stuck it, still shaking, on top of another one. Fried chicken for a couple of days at least.

Looking across the pasture, Wayne noticed the door on one of the long white chicken coops hanging open. He strolled slowly across the dirt and peeked in through the opening. The chickens inside were scratching and pawing in the dark, but nothing else showed. Wayne wasn't scared of the dark, but he didn't like the idea of walking into a building full of animals he couldn't see, so he reached around through the door trying to find a light switch on the wall.

He felt a piece of flat wire running down a two-by-four and followed it to a junction box. On the front, he found the light switch and flicked it on, then looked around. There were boxes full of nests on shelves up both walls, and the doors were set open to let the chickens loose. A bunch of flat, empty tables ran down the middle of the room. A few chickens milled around the place, rooting through bags and buckets for feed, but nothing looked like it would be worth anything. He saw a toolbox sitting open on a workbench down at the end and started down the aisle to take a look. He'd only gotten a few feet in, though, when he noticed a chicken pecking at a man's coat on the floor between two of the work tables. As he moved up closer, he saw that it was a hand lying palm up that the chicken was working on. "Who's there," he whispered. Hearing nothing back, he stepped on around the edge to take a look.

On the floor he saw a man lying face up and lookin' deader than the birds riding in his backpack. Half a dozen chickens were on him, pecking away at the pale skin, mostly working on the face. Wayne stepped up and shooed them off the body with the barrel of his gun. One big hen hopped around, pulling at the dead guy's eye socket, fighting to get into it. She planted her feet and pulled her neck one way and then the other, finally yanking a bloody string of meat loose from the hole and falling backward with her food. Wayne laughed hard as the bird stopped for a second to look up at him with a chunk of Frank Ashby's eyeball jammed tight in her beak, then turned, hopping off into a corner to try to make dinner out of it.

Wayne touched the body with his toe, then kicked at it a few times to make sure the old man was really dead. Certain, he crouched down, putting his face just a few inches above Ashby's to get a good look at what the birds had done to him. Aside from the missing eyeball, there were little bloody holes dug into a dozen spots around the face. He laughed more, poking his finger into the large one dug out of the man's stubbly cheek. "See there, Frank," Wayne said, grinning. "That's what happens to ya when you don't feed your chickens regular. They come and get ya."

Laughing his ass off, Wayne raised himself back up to his six-foot height and looked around to try to figure out what'd happened. To Frank's left, in a mess of straw and chicken shit, he saw the gun. He reached down and grabbed it up, weighing the black revolver in the palm of his hand. It felt nice and expensive. He held it up to the light and spotted the S&W logo cut in the steel above the trigger. A Smith and Wesson .38; a nice, expensive goddamn gun, better than anything he'd ever had. He pointed it around at the chickens a few times before dropping it in the pocket of his jacket and crouching again to see where old Frank'd shot himself. Looking around the head, he found a clean hole cutting through the hair and the skin over the body's left ear. He was amazed by how little blood had splashed out.

He stood up, taking one more look around the place before getting away from the body. But as he stood there staring at the chicken poking Frank's eyeball around on the ground, a thought popped into his head: something about a reward for finding a body. He tried to remember. It had been on some TV show: that America's Most Wanted, maybe. Someplace where they told you all about how people killed people and raped 'em. He remembered something about how a teenager found some dead body, and when he told the cops, he got some reward, like five hundred or a thousand dollars. But it wasn't just finding one that did it. He leaned back on the table, shifted it a little with his weight, and looked up at the ceiling trying to remember. He pictured the boy talking to the policemen and leading them down through deep weeds. Then he remembered: the body had been floating, all blown up and rotten on the top of the water. He remembered them saying that somebody gave you a reward for finding a body floating in the water.

Hell, yes. He looked down at Frank sprawled out across the chicken shit and the dirt, then looked out through a dirty window at the man's busted farm. Everybody knew the Ashby place sat right in a bend in the North Fork River. Hell, the place flooded most every spring and Frank had to herd all his chickens onto trucks and haul 'em on up the property to the pens he had on high ground. Wayne figured the water couldn't be more than half a mile out from the house.

Scrag Lynch barreled down Route 68 listening to the body in the trunk smacking against the back wall of the Lincoln Town Car in perfect harmony to Hank Williams' "Your Cheatin' Heart." Scrag didn't mind corpses, and over eight years of working in the hills of West Virginia, he'd even gotten to like country music, especially the classics like Hank and Patsy Cline. But the sound of a Grant County health inspector slapping skin, gore, and blood over the brand-new burgundy carpeting of the Lincoln's luggage compartment was eating at him mile after mile.

The thumping was caused by seams cut in the road surface in preparation for yet another repaving of the state's main east-west artery. It would be federally funded as part of a constant effort to create jobs for the state's population and to keep West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd, chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, signing off on similar projects in other districts across the nation. That same drive to attract jobs to the state, any jobs at any pay, had been responsible for Scrag's forced relocation from Baltimore, where he knew the territory, the restaurants, and the action, to the Mountain State, where the territory seemed to be nothing but white and yellow trailers and frame shacks topped with satellite dishes; where a hot restaurant was a diner offering breakfast twenty-four hours a day; and where there was no action at all as far as he could tell.

Scrag gripped the wheel tighter in his beefy fingers as the Lincoln bounced over a particularly wide groove in the pavement making the Greatest Hits disk skip, and bouncing the body in the trunk high in the air and slamming it down with a thud. Scrag cursed. Being head of security for Happy Cluckers didn't mean he'd signed on to get his upholstery ruined. The job was bullshit. His real spot was as chief enforcer for the company's supposed owner, Victor Bane, and through him for the operation's real juice, a mob-connected trucking, smuggling, and protection outfit centered in Baltimore. For about the thousandth time in recent months, he cursed the bastard he worked for at the poultry plant and turned his mind to getting the hell out of West Virginia and back to civilization.

Buying the Lincoln, $43,000 of city-style luxury, had been a first step in committing himself to that job. Some day soon he would drive the son of a bitch right down Pratt Street in Baltimore to the boss' offices in the Harbor District and turn Bane over for skimming cash from Happy Cluckers. As a reward, he'd demand a place in management and a job in the city. So far the plan was going nowhere. He knew Bane was getting rich off the operation, but since the whole company had been set up to launder mob money, it was pretty hard to find a paper trail. The whole place was designed to operate with multiple books, fake records, offshore money transfers, and so on. How do you show a guy's keeping two sets of books when he's supposed to be keeping three? Scrag was committed to his goal, but he was damned if he could come up with proof that Bane was dirty for a mob boss who was paying him to be as dirty as possible.

The body bashing its brains out all over his $43,000 upholstery was part of a chain of events that was giving him hope. Running a crooked chicken plant with mob money did require the occasional hit, but the number of jobs was way up lately. Last month, an EPA guy had had a really nasty accident involving a chain saw, and now Ray Kimble, the state health inspector in Petersburg, who'd always been willing to sign off on Happy Cluckers for a few extra bucks in his retirement account, was screwing the hell out of the carpet in Scrag's trunk. Bane had hooked himself up with some pansy real estate guy over in the Mon National Forest on a new project, and the thing was, Scrag hadn't heard one word over the telephone between Bane and Baltimore about all the new action. If Scrag had it right, it was something Baltimore wasn't gonna hear about. So he'd started keeping records of everything he saw and did for Bane. If it did turn out that Baltimore wasn't putting up the money, they might be real interested in finding out they were ponying up for it in the background.

Scrag smiled at the thought, pulling into the left lane to pass a logging truck piled with pine heading for one of the state's smelly pulp and paper factories. As "Ramblin' Man" pounded on through the car's six Dolby speakers, he cranked it up to drown out the sound of Kimble's brains splattering all over the trunk and started to sing along.

Wayne kicked away at a few chickens coming back for more supper and pushed Frank's arms down toward his sides. They didn't want to come down from up over his head, so Wayne put his weight down on the shoulders until he heard something crack inside the old guy's body. With the arms down, Wayne reached up under the dead man, lifted him mostly off the ground, and dragged him out through the door into the sunlight. He started out through the dirt, but noticed he was leaving a trail where Frank's boots were dragging through the dust. "Shit," he said, and dropped the body, going back to erase the marks by kicking them away. Then he flipped the old guy over face down in the dust and pulled him up until he was face-to-face with the empty eye-socket. He bent down fast and pulled Frank up over his right shoulder.

He bounced the old man along, even managing to kick an old hen squawking across the yard. "Hey Frank," he said, "this here free-range shit is sure more hu-mane if you ask me."

Scrag had taken a circuitous route on his way to Cheat Lake: northeast up through West Virginia and well into Maryland, then catching 68-West toward Morgantown. He cruised over the rough tar and chip surface along the edge of the lake. The dump was only a few miles away, down a dead-end road almost no one used anymore. At one time, it had been the main route into Morgantown, but it had been abandoned many years ago in favor of the more direct Route 40 and then the four-lane Route 68, which now bridged the lake with spans rising a hundred feet above the water's surface. The old road had been allowed to go to pot, kept open only for a couple of rich families who owned cabins in the backwaters of the lake. These days it rolled several miles back along the water, dead-ending at an ancient bridge to a small island out in the lake.

The island was the best part. It was used as a hangout by motorcycle gangs from West Virginia and Pittsburgh, their presence pretty much guaranteeing that no one else would ever go near the place. He had seen the biker's parties more than once. Everyone loaded with beer and meth, the pot floating around freely, they swam naked near an old railway trestle on the other side of the island, and then, from what he could tell, everybody fucked everybody else until they all passed out in a heap in some tents.

Scrag had found the place years ago, and Bane loved the layout, sent him back job after job. The old bridge had wooden planks laid across it and no sides left at all. If a guy caused any trouble, you met him somewhere, knocked him off, drove him in his car out to the bridge, and shoved the fucker off, straight to the bottom. Scrag figured the lake must be pretty deep there, because over the years they had dumped a dealership full of cars and bodies off that bridge. He also figured bodies didn't last long in the black backwater, the place lousy with turtles. The times he'd dumped a body without a car around it, in that second or two when the guy bobbed back up before the clothes soaked and the chains pulled it down, the turtles rose up like a pack and chased the corpse under, just fighting to get at it. The spot was also handy for slot machines, guns, and the occasional barrel of toxic waste. It was a sweet setup. The bikers didn't bother anyone who didn't bother them and scared people away, and if the cops ever found anything, they'd surely blame it on them, not a chicken plant out in the country. Who's afraid of a fucking chicken company?

Scrag pulled the car off the road a quarter mile from the bridge, just out of sight around a blind corner. This wasn't a bridge job. That stuff you did at night, preferably in the early morning after your average biker had passed out from the booze, drugs, and blowjobs. This was a quick disposal to get rid of a body before anyone noticed its owner was missing. The spot Scrag had chosen was deep enough for that purpose. He scanned the island across from him to make sure that no bikers were screwing or shitting near the edge, then looked back down the river to check for idiot water skiers. Nothing. He popped the trunk, grabbed the body under the shoulders, and heaved it over the lip of the trunk and onto the clay berm.

This was the moment when he was most exposed, so he tried not to think about the mess inside the burgundy trunk. Blood, hair, and brains stuck just like he expected all over the walls and the carpet. At least he had chosen a color that wouldn't show blood. He reached down and hefted the body up against him to move it to the edge of the water. Kimble had been a skinny little bastard, but now, wreathed in enough chains to drag it and hold it down, his corpse made for a heavy package. He lifted it up with his back, propping it in a standing position to cross the road and drag it quickly out into the lake. Then he heard the engine flying at him down the road, with no time to move before it was on him.

A brown West Virginia State Police car, its blue lights flashing, tore around the corner and past him in a blaze of light, color, and dust. He heard the whoosh as it blew past followed by the sound of leaves and sticks clattering around in its wake. He stood there, frozen and propping up a bloodied and chained corpse, as a second car whooshed by, tossing more dust and debris all over him in the calm, dry air. Next, two tow trucks swirled bigger clouds of dust up as their spinning yellow lights blew past. One more whoosh from another brown state police car was followed by the white and blue flash of a Morgantown police car, the Christmas tree on top all lit up.

Through it all, Scrag stood there like some weird statue, holding the broken, chained body high in front of him. He couldn't move or even breathe as the line of emergency vehicles shot past. As the last car, the blue and white out of its jurisdiction, ran over a white tennis shoe that had fallen off the dead guy's foot, he felt himself suffocating in the cloud of dust and waited to be gunned down on the side of the road. No one started shooting. The sound from the parade of vehicles quickly receded into the distance, and the body broke from his grip and tumbled in a heap onto the dirt as Scrag doubled over, coughing and choking for air. No one was coming to kill him. As soon as his heart had slowed to a manageable rate, he raised himself up, grabbed the body, and hefted the torso up over the edge of the trunk, tossing the legs in after it. He didn't even bother to close the lid before stumbling up the road to look around the corner.

Creeping against the bank of a hill to see around the bend toward the bridge, he watched as a police team directed a tow truck hauling a rusted 1989 Chevy Celebrity out of the water. Two scuba divers stood in the lake near the car, while a larger group stood up on the bridge watching them. A bunch of reporters, backed by two television news vans, were interviewing the divers on the bridge. Scrag recognized the Celebrity as having belonged to a loser EPA guy out of Charleston who had actually intended to report the environmental conditions at the Happy Cluckers plant, despite having been offered a bucketful of unmarked cash with more to follow. As Scrag looked at the dead guy's ragged skeleton waving out through the car's open window, it occurred to him that doing so much business in one spot might not have been such a great idea after all.

Woodrow Garrett kicked a perfectly rounded creek stone into the water in a vain attempt to control his temper with the county cops: guys without the education or training to qualify for the state police, but who still wanted a job carrying a gun and strutting around in a uniform, even if it meant getting paid roughly the same as the garbage crews who worked in the valley. That was fine, but what Wood and most everyone in the county knew was that these guys always seemed to have a hell of a lot more money than your average garbage man. Delbert Skinner and Bob Wiley were famous for it: stopping out-of-state cars, writing up bullshit tickets, and then offering to take care of things right at the car if the cash was right. And everyone knew that if you needed something done in a law enforcement capacity, Del and Bob would take care of it for the right price. That's what Wood guessed this was about: lieutenants Skinner and Wiley kept showing up at his place to question him about whatever bullshit crimes they came up with in the county, because their pockets were full of Randall Pratt's money and Randall wanted him off the land. This was a beauty falling in their laps. They were letting Frank Ashby float at the edge of the stream, saying they didn't want to screw up the crime scene until the coroner got there; the coroner in this case being a twenty-eight-year-old surgeon just out of medical school desperate enough to get started in the business to cut up the occasional body for the cops on the side.

"You didn't notice anything happenin' down here by the river this morning at all, Garrett?" That was Wiley, the one who did most of the talking. He stood skinny in his brown uniform and tried to look menacing behind the ninety-dollar Ray-Bans. "Didn't hear nothin' or see nothin' down here?"

"Not a thing," Wood replied, launching a small, brown pebble out over the water.

"Strange that your neighbor, Frank here, managed to get killed in the water on your property, huh? You didn't see him roaming around at all?"

"I haven't seen Frank Ashby for about a week," Wood said, trying to look Wiley in the eyes through the black glasses. "We got along fine, but we never socialized much. I try to keep out of other people's business as much as possible."

The sunglasses stared straight at him. "He owed a lot of people money, we know. He owed you anything? Or was you interested in anything of his since he was gonna sell out the farm? His place runs all the way back from the road right down your property line."

"Nobody owes me anything," Wood said. "I don't want anything off of anybody. If Frank Ashby wants to let Randall Pratt put him out of business and take over his farm, it's no skin off my nose."

Now Wiley smiled. "What you bringin' up Mr. Pratt for, then? You think you know something about him? You figure we ought to go up there and question Mr. Pratt about this, do ya?"

"That's not any of my business, either," Wood replied, turning back toward the river and kicking through the gravel for a likely target.

"That's good," Wiley said, turning himself to look toward the body smacking up and down in the current, held to shore by an arm jammed into the rocks. "'Cause I don't know why we'd talk to him. Young Wayne here found Frank dead on your property, and you're the one 'at's got a record with the police over in Maryland for violent crime. What's that you went in for over there before you came back home? Trying to kill some truck driver or something?"

Wood had been through this routine before. He kicked again at the gravel and turned to look at that kid, Wayne Zirk, who stood grinning over where the county guys had parked their car. "You know damn well what I was in for: assault on a guard and arson of a trucking company building. I never tried to kill anybody, and I haven't started here." Wood could see Wayne sniggering at the fix he was in.

"Yeah, that was it," Wiley nodded, pretending to remember the sordid details. "'Course, just 'cause that guard came out alive don't mean you wasn't trying to knock 'im off. Depends on the way you think about it."

Wood stuffed his hands in his pockets instead of punching the skinny bastard right in the mouth. Skinner stepped up next to his partner by the water, pretending to examine the body for a moment before turning to look at Wood. "One thing, though, Garrett? If you didn't have anything to do with Frank here getting killed, how you figger he ended up stuck here on your property? Frank's place is on downriver from here, ain't it?"

That, of course, was what they kept grinning about. "I don't have a clue," he said. "Maybe he went for a walk up the river. No one really cares when people walk the river on their property. Maybe he was fishing up there. Then again, maybe someone killed him and planted the body here so it'd show up on my property." He turned around to look solidly at Wayne. "Maybe you should ask that yahoo about it."

Wayne's grin melted away and his brow furrowed a little at the argument turning to him. He stood up off the car and stuck his chest out. "What? Look, I just found the guy there, okay? Found him floatin' in the water. I just want the credit for findin' him. I didn't have anything to do with killin' him." He choked a little on the words, but managed to stand up straight.

Wiley and Skinner turned away from the kid at the sound of the ambulance bouncing slowly down the old logging road toward their crime scene. "Nobody said you killed him," Wiley spat, starting up the track to officially guide the emergency vehicle toward the body.

"That's right," Wayne shouted back. "And I should get a reward for finding a body in the water. You have to," he ordered. "I seen it on TV."

Skinner looked hard at Wayne, while Wiley waved the ambulance down to the edge of the North Fork. What looked like a teenage boy in a doctor's coat jumped from the passenger side and almost skipped down to the body. He immediately dropped down beside it and lifted a limp arm, trying to check for a pulse. He held the wrist for a moment, then lifted the arm and swung it around at several odd angles before dropping it back in its original position.

"I can tell you he's definitely dead," Wiley said, grinning at his partner. "When we got here, there were quite a few turtles tryin' to eat on him. But we chased 'em off."

The young doctor turned and looked at him for a moment before returning to examine the body. "Thanks," he said. He moved to lift up the other arm and seemed surprised that he could twist it around in the same way. "You fellows take any pictures here yet," he asked.

"Yeah," said Skinner. "Did that first thing; before we went up to get Garrett there. This's his land. We took about half a dozen pictures with one of them digitals we keep in the glove box."

The doctor nodded, then reached under the body to flip it over for a better look. The corpse resisted for a moment before lifting up and flipping onto its back with a splash. As the face came around, a snapping turtle whose teeth were buried deep in the body's right cheek came with it, hanging on for a few seconds before falling back and taking a two-inch chunk of flesh down with it. The doctor lurched from the torn and chewed face, turning ashen as he shoved himself back onto the gravel bank. Wiley and Skinner grinned at each other. "Reckon we missed that one, eh, Bob?" said Wiley, sniggering a little to his partner.

The doctor looked up at them, aware that he was the butt of the joke. "Well..." he started, then coughed a few times. "You guys got any idea what happened to him?"

"Kinda' thought that was your job, Doc," smiled Wiley.

"Uh-huh," he said, keeping his distance from the body. "Looks like maybe he drowned upstream somewhere and floated down here before he got trapped by the current." He moved to look straight down over the body without getting too near it.

"That so?" asked the sunglasses, sounding disappointed.

The doctor nodded slightly as Wayne stepped up into the circle. "No, sir," Wayne said, a little more sheepishly than anyone was used to. "I looked him over and he had a big hole--looked like a bullet hole--over his ear there."

"That so?" said Wiley, suddenly happy again.

The doctor gulped a little, lowering himself with the police officers to look more closely at the area. He poked at the hole with a pen from his breast pocket, then rose, trying to wipe it clean on the white jacket. "It could be a bullet hole," he said. Wiley turned to grin at Wood standing behind them. "But it's hard to tell. Something's been eating on that area while the body's been in the water. We'll have to see what the autopsy turns up. If it was a bullet, we'll find a hole in the skull."

Wiley turned again to look at Wood. "But if he was shot, you'd have to figure somebody shot him and threw the body down the riverbank here, eh?"

The doctor turned toward the policemen and straightened himself in an attempt to sound professional and precise. "Well," he began, "it's true he might have been murdered. Then again, if that is a bullet hole, it's in a spot commonly struck during suicide attempts." He cleared his throat a little and paused to give his diagnosis gravity. "But whatever the cause of death, I can tell you with near certainty that it didn't happen here."

Wiley's grin faded. "And just how did you arrive at that?"

"Simple," the doctor said, bending to grab Frank Ashby's dead hand. "Look," he held the arm up and let it flop at an unnatural angle away from the body. "Both of the victim's arms are broken. Plus, the condition of the body indicates that he's only been in the water a short time--otherwise he'd be bloated and more waterlogged. The clothes and the hands are pretty beaten up, though. That could only have happened if the body was getting bashed around in some way." Wood listened intently, enjoying the lecture almost as much as the kid doctor. "If we'd found it on land somewhere, I'd guess he'd been killed somewhere else then moved. In the water, it almost always means the victim died and was knocked around floating downstream in heavy currents; all those rocks and branches in a fast river like this'll do that. I don't see any way he could have died here. I'd look upstream for a likely spot if I were you." The kid in the white jacket smiled at them as he went to tell the EMTs to load the body.

Wood moved up next to Wiley. "That do it for you, Bob?" he asked. "Okay if I go now?"

Wiley turned directly into him, placing the sunglasses about six inches from Wood's face. "I guess it looks that way," he said. "But we do like to keep an eye on the jailbirds in the county. We better not run into any more trouble around here, or I won't worry about what some doctor thinks he knows."

"That's fine, Bob," Wood smiled. "Try not to fuck up my property too much while you're cleaning this mess up, ya hear?" He turned, trying to saunter leisurely up the track. Behind him, Wood could hear Wiley growling angrily at the crew lowering the gurney down to receive the bobbing body.

"What the hell was that you were saying about a reward?" Del asked, looking across Bob at Wayne as the ambulance disappeared up the dusty track.

"I seen it on TV," Wayne replied, moving up closer to them. "They pay a reward for any body you find floating in the water. Five hundred or a thousand dollars."

Del slapped Bob on the shoulder. "You hear this shit," he laughed. "That's the Coast Guard gives those rewards. That's out in the coastal waters, out in the ocean from boat wrecks and stuff. You think the U.S. Coast Guard's gonna come sailing up the North Fork River and pay you for finding a chicken farmer's body with his head stuck in a tree?" He laughed harder, almost falling backward into the water.

Wayne looked down and kicked at the rocks. "I only thought maybe 'cause I saw it on television."

Del and Bob laughed as the kid's face grew red.