Read Online Poachers Road by John Brady - Free Book Online Page B

what three months? You go for a walk with this fellow. Then, Jesus, you come back down to the farmhouse, with your face as white as a sheet with your news.”
    “With puke on my shoes, don’t forget.”
    Gebhart let his eyes wander to the hills behind Felix.
    “Who cares,” he murmured.
    “Can I ask you something?”
    Gebhart blew out smoke and nodded.
    “Did you set me up with that big lug, going for walkies, holding hands? So you could get a laugh?”
    “You think I would do that to you?”
    “I’m asking you. I heard stuff like that in training.”
    “You want to know? I looked out the window and I thought: there’s a good day’s work being done. It was kind of nice, actually.”
    “Nice?”
    “You were trying to get the kid out and about again. That’s good.”
    The voice on the walkie-talkie was very clear now.
    “Whoa,” said Gebhart. “That was fast. They’re close.”
    He waved Felix off using his walkie-talkie and began to give sparing directions.
    Felix didn’t want to look back to where the bodies lay. The woods seemed to be blanketed with an extra quiet now. He heard birds only occasionally, and far off. The clouds must have come lower. Sure enough, the crest of one mountain to the south was cut off. That sick feeling had left him, as had the swarming thoughts, but he could hear his own pulse. He realized he was glad of the cigarette smoke around him. Maybe there was a smell coming from the bodies that he hadn’t noticed himself, but Gebi had. He watched as Gebhart smoked, and nodded, and said “yes” almost too often, his thumb stroking near the button on his walkie-talkie.

EIGHT
    W HEN F ELIX AWOKE, HE HEARD G IULIANA’S BREATHING. T HERE was a faint lisp at the beginning of each breath in, and now he felt it on his shoulder. The room came out of the darkness, and brought the shapes he knew and expected, the corners and bulks, the lines, light and dark. Felix let his eyes run along them many times and he listened to her breathing. Well, he had slept awhile anyway.
    He had to think a minute to remember the big-shot detective’s name from the Kriminaldienst: S not Schmidt. It had two syllables. It was a real Austrian name: Speckbauer. Horst? Yes Horst.
    How hard could it be to come up with a normal Austrian name like this, he wondered. It wouldn’t be that hard, unless your brain was scrambled by hours of interviewing, plodding, talking, writing, remembering, sorting out.
    Speckbauer was a heavily moustached Oberstleutnant with hair running to grey.The rest of him was running to fat under the expensive suit that Gebi whispered they liked to wear. “They”:
    Speckbauer and others, one a detective Engel who stood around a lot of the time, saying little, taking lots of digital shots and using a minicam.
    Gebi had said he’d seen Speckbauer before somewhere, but he couldn’t remember where. It certainly wasn’t on a visit to HQ down in Strassgangerstrasse, in a western suburb of Graz. It might have been a piece in the Gazette . He looked like a proper Bananenbiegers, Gebi had muttered. When Felix asked him later what exactly a banana bender was, or did, Gebhart only waved the question away.
    Speckbauer had a quiet tone like he was attending a funeral.
    Was there a weariness there, Felix had wondered, because he knew from long practice there were procedural questions he had to go through, but expected little from them? There were odd ones that Felix thought about afterwards: Did Hansi use any word except sleep? Can Hansi tell time? Did he make any other gestures? Did he point at places?
    Felix had counted five police cars at one time, along with the wagon, and a big Mercedes commercial van that had two windows high up on one side. It was like a survey crew, with the markings and the tape and the screen they put up around the bodies. A generator had been started and flood lamps brought into the woods. Flashes went off every now and then. A movie set? A lot of guys in suits standing around,