Wellspring (Paskagankee, Book 3) by Allan Leverone

the man would climb out of the muddy
hole and come for Dan, and when he did, Dan knew the result would be worse than
bad. The result would be horrifying.
    Dan
took a deep breath to steady himself. It came out shuddery and paper-thin, like
an old man’s. He knew he was being ridiculous but couldn’t help himself. He
glanced back down at the bottom of the hole, half-convinced the body would be halfway
to the Cat, but it wasn’t. It was still unmoving, lying in the septic system
pit like a nearly naked guy taking a nap.
    He
reached for his cell phone and wondered when he would be able to finish this
job. It appeared suddenly quite obvious it would not be any time soon.

 
 
 
 
    2
    Sharon Dupont shut down her
cruiser and shrugged into her rain gear. She gazed glumly across the Ridge
Runner parking lot to where the back half of a gigantic yellow earthmoving
vehicle was visible beyond the building. Its corrugated iron tracks had sunk
into the mud halfway up their hubs, and she wondered briefly how in the world
Dan Melton was going to get his equipment out of there.
    Then
she sighed and stepped out of the vehicle. Sharon was intimately familiar with
the Ridge Runner, both from her days spent holding down a bar stool inside the
place before getting her shit—and her life—together, and from the
investigation last year into the strange case of former drinking buddy Earl
Manning’s disappearance.
    But her
familiarity with the place didn’t translate into any overwhelming desire to be here.
The Ridge Runner represented a time in her life Sharon would just as soon
forget. Just driving past the place never failed to bring her back to her lost
days before meeting Mike McMahon, when she was rudderless and adrift, alone and
doing her best to drink herself into an early grave, exactly as her father had
done.
    Meeting
Mike had changed all that, and while it wouldn’t be entirely accurate to say
she had never again thought about drinking, avoiding her old demons was a much
easier proposition now that she found herself in a stable relationship with the
older ex-cop.
    Sharon
crunched across the gravel lot past two pickup trucks parked nose-in to the
closed bar, like horses outside an old-West tavern. One of them she recognized
as Dan Melton’s vehicle, the other she assumed belonged to Bo Pellerin, owner
of the Ridge Runner. The men stood waiting for her at the corner of the
building, Pellerin currently involved in an animated, mostly one-sided
conversation with Melton that included hand waving, angry gestures, and the
occasional finger stabbed into Melton’s chest for emphasis.
    She
wondered how much more verbal abuse Melton would put up with before hauling off
and slugging Pellerin. From the look on his face, she guessed the answer was
not much. The last thing she wanted was to have to break up a fight between two
men who each outweighed her by eighty or more pounds, and she picked up her
pace.
    “Gentlemen,”
she said sharply, skidding to a stop in the wet scrub grass. Pellerin flinched
in surprise; he had been so involved in haranguing Melton that he hadn’t even
noticed her drive into the lot. “Someone reported the discovery of a body?”
    “That’d
be me,” Melton said, raising his hand in a little half-wave as if maybe Sharon
might need help determining who had spoken. “And it’s not just one body, exactly.
It’s more like…well…”
    Sharon
scratched her head. “Well, what? How many bodies did you find? Aren’t you
sure?”
    “Maybe
you should just take a look and see for yourself,” Melton said.
    Sharon
looked at him quizzically. “Okay,” she said. “Lead the way.”
    They
began walking along the side of the building in the direction of the
earthmover. “I still don’t know why you couldn’t have called me first,”
Pellerin said, apparently resuming the conversation that Sharon’s arrival had
interrupted. “Thanks to you, I’m going to be out of business even longer now.”
    Melton
stopped