Bonegrinder by John Lutz Page A

if they’d never heard that one before, and a stooped old man with a weather-worn face limped around the corner of the shed. He had large, gnarled hands and wrists as thick as Holt’s ankles.
    “Pay ’em no never mind,” the old man said. “Brains like piss ants!”
    The three men laughed harder, and one of them kicked at the ground.
    “I need some oil,” Holt told the old man, “Thirty weight.”
    “I’m Dale Hollis,” the man said. “I’ll fetch it for you.”
    He unlocked the metal storage shed, went inside and returned with a can of thirty-weight Mobil oil.
    Holt paid him. “How far to Colver?” he asked.
    “’Bout thirteen miles,” one of the seated men said. “Blink an’ you’re past it, though.”
    “I won’t blink,” Holt said. He nodded to them and walked away, tossing the oil can from hand to hand.
    “Want that can spouted?” the old man asked behind him.
    “Thanks,” Holt said, “I’ll punch a hole in it with a screwdriver.”
    After pouring the oil into the Jeep’s engine, Holt arced the slippery empty can onto an overflowing barrel of trash. As he stood wiping his hands on a grease-stained red rag, he wondered what Colver would be like—a town that wasn’t on some of the area’s maps.
    Then he tossed the wadded rag onto the floor of the Jeep, climbed in behind the steering wheel and drove back out onto the dusty road.

FIFTEEN
    F ROM THE BORNE FARM Wintone drove to the lake and walked to where Claude had died.
    Wintone remembered setting down the cider jug at the water’s edge, but now the jug was gone. Shaking off an uneasy sensation whenever he turned his back to the lapping water, Wintone searched the brush but found nothing.
    He stood with his large fists on his hips, looking out at the opaque lake surface. Then he walked back to the patrol car and drove to Hooper’s Dock, where he borrowed a fourteen-foot wooden Jon boat with a five-horsepower outboard motor.
    Wintone used the sputtering motor to return across the lake surface to the scene of Borne’s death, then he closed the throttle and in silence used the oars to maneuver the flat-bottomed boat as close as he could to the bank. He moved the boat parallel to the bank, doing more poling with the oars than actual rowing, scraping bottom occasionally on underwater rises or stumps. With the glistening, empty expanse of lake at his back, Wintone concentrated on the wavering waterline along the bank, peering into the shadows of overhanging brush or decaying tree stumps. The sun glancing off the lake behind him seemed to draw the sweat from him, molding his tan uniform shirt to his broad back.
    The overgrown section of bank was a shadowed graveyard of floating debris. Wintone saw a faded brimmed cap adorned with barbed lures, a broken piece of styrofoam picnic cooler caught nearby in the weeds, a splintered oar. And ten minutes later he found Claude Borne’s cracked cider jug, half-concealed by an overhanging growth of vines and gently bobbing upside down with the crack above the waterline.
    Wintone got the boat in as close as he could and worked the jug over to him with an oar. What liquid was left inside was still thick and golden, mostly undiluted cider. The sheriff uncorked the jug and sniffed at its contents, then he tilted it with the crack away so he could wet a finger to touch to his tongue. Sweet cider, without a trace of alcohol.
    Wintone laid the glass jug carefully in the bottom of the boat, then worked with the oars, half-poling, half-rowing for some time until he was in water deep enough to put the motor down and use it. He felt the prop bite into the lake as the bow rose high.
    When he got back to Hooper’s Dock, he wrapped the jug in an old blanket and propped it at the right angle in the trunk of the patrol car, wedged against the spare tire so it couldn’t move. Then he drove back into Colver and went directly to Doc Amis’s.
    When Wintone entered the otherwise empty waiting room, Sarah was on the