Excerpt from Dead Man's Bay

Barney Pearson had been a game warden for thirty-three years. A game warden's salary wouldn't go far, not even in Lafayette County, but Barney loved the work. He'd seen some bad things in his years in the woods, mostly cruelty with regard to animals. A buck might be left to rot, his antlers taken for some city slicker's trophy. But mostly there was just greed, folks who treated the woods like a footlocker. Some fellah with a car worth more than Barney's house might try to get away with about twice as many quail or bass as the state allowed. Barney was used to that kind of meanness. Beat the hell out of the days when he guarded a chain gang. Pearson still had a memento from that year. His wedding-ring finger wouldn't support a ring; it was shot off below the knuckle. That nub still ached now and then, especially in these first, chilly days of the hunting season.

Barney could feel the nub now as he poled a johnboat through the Sand Pond, but that minor ache couldn't take away the thrill which came with seeing the ponds filled again and running. A tell-tale V overhead told the game warden that ducks would find the place and feast. Barney was so fixed on the game above he almost missed the barrel which peeked over a shallow-draft boat near the shore.

"H'LO," Barney called out his challenge loud and clear. It was easy to go to sleep out here, man stuck in the cold, waiting for game, and Barney had no intention of startling a hunter dozing with a twelve-gauge.

"State Warden," Barney called again over to the boat. But he was close enough now to see there was no hunter. Just a Browning automatic propped pretty sloppily along the flatboat's gunwale.

"Not a safe way to secure a weapon," Barney reproached the air.

That's when he saw the bandanna. It floated a scarlet lily pad ten, maybe twelve feet offshore. Barney tested the water's depth with his pole. Knee-deep here. Probably no more than waist deep or so over the whole pond. Be hard for a man to drown out here but not impossible. Barney'd seen it before.

He waded out, tugged at the scarlet choker with a meaty forearm. It wouldn't come.

"What the hell?" Barney could haul a twelve-point buck over his shoulder with a single hand. An ice cube seemed suddenly to settle in the warden's stomach. He seized the bandanna again with a ham-sized fist, gave a yank—

"God from Zion!"

A corpse bobbed from the pond's sandy bottom. Agonized eyes stared from a skull flayed like an onion. But even that wasn't what emptied the game warden's guts.

"JESUS GOD," Barney let the thing go.

The corpse floated full-bodied to reveal a final insult. A duck stared stupid and sightless from what used to be a human face. It was a mallard that gagged the victim, even in death, its long neck rammed like a faucet down Miles Beynon's throat.

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