But the blood remained.

He said, “Chief, look, there are at least four or five guys up there, all with guns, and you want to take care of it by ourselves?”

They came to the Mast Road intersection and the chief slid the cruiser to a stop, and then made a hard left turn. The blue strobe lights lit up the intersection.

“Chief? Don’t we need backup?”

The chief gave him a quick look, his face tight, as they roared up the narrow country road. “Jay, look, I’m trying to drive the goddamn cruiser, so will you please shut up?”

Jay grabbed the armrest as the cruiser made another tight curve and he thought, That’s it, I’m going back to bad dreams in a big department. Better than being held hostage to a small department with a chief who has a hero complex. This night’s probably the most excitement he’s had all year, and he has to make the most of it by playing Super Chief. No doubt the old geezer imagined his picture and an approving story on the front page of next week’s Crawford Chronicle.

The road was narrow blacktop, with no yellow line down the middle, not much of a shoulder on either side. There were no streetlights, few houses, and every now and then, the cruiser’s headlights would catch the quick gleam of an animal’s eyes glowing by the side of the road.

The chief switched on the side spotlight, and Jay wondered what he was looking for. He was going to ask, but no, screw it, this was the chief’s show.

They passed a car on a straight portion of the road, a late-model Ford Taurus with New York plates. Jay turned in his seat to look at the car as the cruiser flew by.

“Chief, we just passed that car. It had New York plates.”

“Yeah,” the chief said.

“Well, don’t you want to check it?”

“Nope.”

Fine, he thought.

Another car was pulled to the side, a Volkswagen with Vermont plates. Nothing. Jay squirmed in his seat. What in hell was going on?

Then, a pickup truck, coming from the opposite direction. The chief swore under his breath and slammed on the brakes. The cruiser skidded to a stop and the chief swung the steering wheel about and made a sloppy U-turn, almost losing the cruiser’s rear wheels in a drainage ditch. The chief slapped a switch on the console and the siren screamed into life, and they bore up fast on the pickup truck, which quickly pulled over to the side. There seemed to be three men sitting in the cab.

The chief snapped open his holster, took out his flashlight, and turned to Jay. “Just play along, Jay, you’ll see what’s up soon enough.”

Jay nodded and joined the chief outside. The air was dramatically cooler. He had his hand on his service pistol-a Glock 10mm-and found himself drawing it out and keeping it close to his leg as he walked up to the truck. In the rear window of the cab was a gun rack, with three hunting rifles stretched across. So that’s why the chief stopped them, he thought, walking up to the right side of the truck and switching on his own flashlight. But how could the chief have known the truck had a gun rack when it was heading towards us?

The chief walked up to the driver’s side of the cab and started talking to the guys inside. He played his flashlight across the interior of the cab. Jay stayed at the rear, towards the right, keeping an eye on the two passengers. All three looked to be in their late twenties, early thirties. The truck was a black Ford, dented and dirty, with oversized tires and a tarpaulin pulled over the truck bed. He stepped closer to the rear of the truck to check the license plate, and he-

Froze.

Blood was dripping from the truck bed, through the bottom of the tailgate.

“Chief!” he yelled, stepping back, pistol held up high, and pulling the tarpaulin off with his other hand, looked down in shock at the jumble of bodies, the brown eyes, their limbs stiff and protruding.

When the arrest and the bookings were completed, Jay and the chief went to Dino’s Diner, where the chief had his usual four-scrambled-eggs-and-sausage breakfast, but where Jay made do with a cup of coffee and a couple of slices of toast. The memory of what he had seen a few hours ago was still fresh in his mind, like an open wound.

Deer.

Dead deer.

All those shots, all those lights, all this fuss, over dead deer…

The chief looked over, chewing, and said, “You see, Jay, those guys from Albion were up there every Saturday night, jacking deer.” The chief swallowed, sawed off another piece of sausage. It was five-thirty in the morning and the diner was crowded with mill workers, farmers, and lumber truckers. The only women were the two waitresses, a mother-and-daughter team who both had tattoos on their arms.

“Jacking?” he asked.

“Yeah. Fish and Game are going to have a talk with them soon, just you wait and see. It’s illegal as hell, and besides, they were doing it out of season. They get in the woods at night, at a place where they know deer tend to congregate, and then they hit ‘em with lights. A strong flashlight is good enough, and the deer freeze and stand still, every time the light hits ‘em. They’ll stand there long enough so even a grandpa with palsy in his hands can shoot ‘em, which is why it’s against the law.”

Jay took a bite from his toast and picked up his coffee cup, and then quickly put it down.

“Hold it,” he said. “You knew right then, back at the house, you knew what was going on, didn’t you?”

“Hunh?”

“When you asked Mrs. Tate if the deer were still coming to her apple orchard, you were checking to see if deer were around, right? And no wonder she didn’t hear any shooting. She was stone deaf. You knew right then we were dealing with illegal hunters.”

The chief winked at him and ate another piece of sausage. “Let’s just say I had a suspicion… a pretty good one.”

“So why didn’t you tell me anything?”

“Well…” The chief chewed some more, swallowed. “Jay, something you should learn is to try to keep your feet on the ground a bit, especially around here. I mean, look at you and Mrs. Tate. You both take a little blood, some lights, and one of you has aliens landing up there and the other has drug dealers involved in ritual executions. I just took the same info, kept my feet on the ground, and worked with it.”

“How come you didn’t stop that first car, the one with the New York license plates?”

The chief shrugged. “Only one person in it. We saw more than one light. And the rear of the car was riding too high. If there were two or three deer in the trunk, it’d be riding low. You’re talking a few hundred pounds. No, I knew I was looking for a pickup truck or an SUV, and I just stopped the first truck we saw.”

Jay finished his coffee and the chief mopped up the last of his eggs with a piece of toast. After their waitress-the daughter-dropped off their check, Jay said, “That simple, then. It was that simple. But those lights, Chief, you must admit they were scary at first.”

The chief was silent for a bit, and then he said slowly, “Funny thing about those lights. How many did you see?”

“About ten or eleven.”

“Yeah, that’s about right. And those three boys were by themselves. That’s it. Even if they were carrying a flashlight in each hand, that only adds up to six. Where do you think those extra lights came from?”

Jay rubbed at his tired eyes, feeling the weariness sinking into his bones. The inside of the diner was getting lighter as the sun crawled its way up from the horizon.

“I give up, Chief. Where did those extra lights come from?”

The chief winked again, his face worn but happy-looking. “I don’t know. One of the older boys, he said that those lights flew right over their heads as they were coming over the crest of the ridge, and then disappeared. They didn’t make any sound. They weren’t in any particular shape. They were just there.”