Read Online Crazy Mountain Kiss by Keith McCafferty - Free Book Online

the upper left corner—February 14. There was a woman’s indistinct voice. Ettinger tapped the volume key.
    â€œGo sit down,” the woman was saying. A man appeared, shirtless, and sat down on the edge of the bed, which squeaked under his weight. His face was obscured by a Venetian carnival mask, a devil face with red-and-black ram’s horns. He was thin and looked tall, with a slight potbelly and chest hair distinguished by a whitish skunk stripe along the sternum. The hair on his head was combed straight back.
    The video shook as the woman pulled the camera backwards. The frame settled. Now most of the bed was in view, as well as the chinked walls behind it.
    â€œStop it there,” Stranahan said.
    Ettinger gave him a quizzical look.
    â€œSee that knot in the log? It’s shaped like a heart.”
    â€œI know what you’re getting at,” Martha said. She paused the video.
    They got up from the table and went into the bunkroom. There was a knot in the cabin’s north wall identical to the one in the video. The bedframe in the video must have been one of the rusty steel frames stacked against the west wall. Stranahan’s eyes ran up to the mattresses, which were suspended in loops of rope from J-hooks screwed into the ceiling beam, to keep mice out of the ticking.
    â€œWhat are we looking at, Martha?”
    The question was rhetorical and they sat back down and Martha resumed the video. In a few moments, the man was joined by a unmasked woman whose slightly bulging eyes made the rest of her face look narrow. A horse’s tail of dark curly hair cascaded to her waist. She reached out of the frame to find what looked like a joint and took a hit, then placed the joint into the slit in the mouth of the mask. The man exhaled, a cloud of smoke rising from the sides of the mask, as if the devil was breathing fire. In a matter-of-fact manner, the woman removed her clothes, showing tufts of hair under her arms as she pulled up her gauzy top, and fished the man’s penis out of his shorts. She performed oral sex in a lazy manner, like a cat washing itself, and lifted her eyes to look into the camera. “Welcome to the Mile and a Half High Club,” she said.
    They made love, or rather had sex, in half a dozen positions. At first the woman would glance over at the camera and seemed to be putting on an act. Then for a while there was just the sound of the springs squeaking and the woman’s moaning. She moaned for a long time, dragging her hair back and forth across the man’s chest. When the man clasped the woman’s buttocks, his right shoulder revealed an ink-blue tattoo the size of a silver dollar. Some kind of face, Stranahan thought, with words in a scroll banner. The resolution was too poor to reveal details. Finally the woman collapsed on top of him. The microphone picked up the sound of their breathing. The woman sat up and reached to turn off the camera. Rings glinted from all herfingers. “Put that in your pipe and smoke it,” she said. And then to the man: “Talk about sleeping with the devil. Wow, huh?” The screen went blank.
    Ettinger’s face was crimson.
    â€œI think I need a cigarette,” Stranahan said.
    â€œShut up.”
    â€œMartha, come on, I mean you got to be able to see the humorous—”
    â€œI said shut up.” She ejected the card and checked to make sure she’d properly copied the file onto the hard drive. She fast-forwarded through the video to the twelve-minute mark, when the couple shifted positions for the last time, the woman climbing on top, then leaning over to reach out of the frame, toward the floor. “Happy Valentine’s Day,” the woman said, pulling a Santa hat over her head and tucking her hair behind her ears.

CHAPTER SEVEN
A Patient Wolf
    B y the time Ettinger reunited Stranahan with his dog and dropped them at the tipi, the evening had all but died. He checked the fluid levels in