All three stood there baking in the enmity and the sun. Then BARRY HER seized the day. “So, hell, Ma, I guess we oughta hit the Ease Inn and get a bloody, then go put some signs around. We just got the new one: WHY ARE YOU KICKING YOURSELF? I mean, instead of just standing here getting swamp crotch.”

Again he nearly looked at the sheriff. His mother one-upped his crudity.

“Might as well,” Babette agreed, “since we hauled our stinking cornholes all this way.”

The sheriff stared at the sides of their averted heads.

“Don’t drive drunk on my roads,” she said.

She felt a drip of sweat roll straight down her spine.

“And while you’re out, come take the signs off my property. Try that stunt again and your stinking cornholes are going to catch a trespassing charge.”

On her way out of town, she passed Farmers’ Buy-Direct and then played eye-tag with the other Rickreiner properties, gaudy and grasping, disruptive trash in the still-quaint Bad Axe: Cash America… Supercuts… Dollar Heaven… Liquor City…

CHAPTER 4

The K-9 on loan from the Vernon County Sheriff’s Department, a female German shepherd named Duffy, had found the missing twelve-pack of beer. Or at least half of it.

That summarized the news.

The sheriff’s own deputies had found nothing of note along the roadside. Denise had repurposed one to a domestic disturbance call and sent the other three back on welfare checks. But the dog had found six Busch Lights.

“One empty at a time,” explained the dog’s handler, Vernon County Deputy K. Christiansen. She seemed to be a Lyndsey Luck type, a new hire, trying hard.

The sheriff felt the heat pulse against her. Both the dog and her handler were flocked with burrs and looked about to collapse. As Duffy panted, her gray-spotted pink tongue hung egregiously out the side of her mouth. Her ribs heaved unnaturally, and she stared fixedly at her cage inside the Vernon County SUV cruiser.

“Somebody got a pretty good load on,” Deputy Christiansen surmised. She panted too, pointing with a fistful of wire flags across a meadow toward Liberty Hill, several hundred yards in the distance.

“Blue-and-silver cans. Like connect-the-dots. Going that way.”

The sheriff looked “that way” and tried to see any kind of trail. But the meadow was wall-to-wall with head-high late summer weeds. Cicadas droned across the distance. Turkey vultures floated over it.

“I flagged the beer cans,” Deputy Christiansen said. “Duffy picked up a clear trail between them. But funny thing, she couldn’t find the victim’s scent, as far as I could tell. She went straight from beer can to beer can, but she wasn’t happy, like she thought she was doing it wrong.”

Changing her voice, she spoke to the dog.

“You just couldn’t smell him anywhere, could you? But you were such a good girl! You tried so hard! Such a good hot girl!”