KnockOut

phone rang. “Merriweather here. What’s up?”
    “Ethan, this is Chip Iverson, Titus Hitch ranger district.”
    Ethan had known Chip for two years. The man sounded like he’d had his brains shot out of his head. No, he sounded like he was in shock. Ethan slowed his voice. “Chip, talk to me. Tell me what’s going on.”
    Ethan heard the rock-solid Chip draw in breaths, knew he was trying to get himself together, and Ethan felt his own heart kick up, felt the jump in adrenaline.
    “Sheriff—Ethan, we’ve got a bad thing here.” Chip’s breathing broke off and Ethan heard him gagging, then vomiting.
    Ethan waited. He heard Chip gasping for breath, heard a man say something behind him, heard him chug down some water, spit it on. Finally Chip came back on the line. “Ethan, it’s a dead man, he’s been savaged by a bear, but it’s not right, just not right. Please come fast.”
    Ethan drove his Rubicon as far as he could into the wilderness on the fire road, Big Louie in the passenger seat, his head out the window. Then he and Big Louie ran the quarter mile to the southern fork of the Sweet Onion River.
    It had taken fifteen minutes, and every one of those minutes, Ethan was thinking, A man savaged by a bear? How was that possible? There was plenty of game, no reason for a bear to seek human prey. It didn’t make sense. It happened rarely, but sometimes some brain-dead idiot would bait a black bear, just to see what happened.
    “I don’t think so, Big Louie,” Ethan said, petting his head as they neared the sound of muted voices. “I don’t believe in coincidences, way too convenient. It’s Blessed, Big Louie, I know it.”
    Everyone in uniform within fifty miles was looking for Blessed Backman. Ethan had spoken personally to as many of them as he could and had given out the facts he had, that Blessed had tried to kidnap a young girl and had shot at several police officers. He also told them Backman was a powerful hypnotist, so you couldn’t look him in his face, told them the safest course was to shoot him on sight. If some of them doubted that, they didn’t say so. He knew they would use deadly force, and whatever the legal rules, he knew it was righteous. It was the only way to bring the man down.
    Big Louie began to whine, low in his throat. He pressed against Ethan’s leg. The four people, rangers all, stood in the water reeds that grew wild beside the Sweet Onion River, two of them actually in the water up to their ankles.
    Big Louie whimpered.
    Chip Iverson called out, misery in his voice and in his eyes, “Over here, Sheriff. We haven’t touched anything.”
    The four rangers moved aside for him. Ethan looked down at the devastated remains of a man who’d probably been alive and laughing twelve hours before. His body was sprawled beneath a huge willow tree. He indeed looked like he’d been savaged by a bear.
    Big Louie backed away, then stopped, threw back his head, and yowled. One of the rangers went onto her knees and hugged him to her, and spoke to him, tried to calm him.
    Ethan swallowed the bile that rose in his throat, accepted the handkerchief a ranger handed him, and tied it around his face against the overpowering stench. He went down on his haunches and forced himself to study the man’s face, what was left of it.
    Chip was right. This man had been torn apart. One of his eyes was gone—ripped out by teeth or claws—and his other eye stared up at Ethan, sightless, filled with black blood. His throat was torn open, his chest flattened, his entrails ripped out. His clothes were shredded.
    “This isn’t right,” he said aloud, twisting back to look up at the four faces. “You can see for yourself—tracks, claw marks, a bear for certain, but here’s the thing. A bear ripped him apart, but why would he do that without devouring him? There are no major parts of him missing.”
    Four voices, hollow, terrified, sickened, agreed this wasn’t right. A moment later Ethan saw the tangled threads of a skinny rope beneath one of the man’s mangled wrists. A rope? No animal he knew of could tie a man’s wrist, except the two-legged variety. Blessed, he thought again. Of course it was Blessed.
    Ethan looked at the man’s feet and nearly dry-heaved. The man’s feet and lower legs were mangled nearly beyond recognition. The rest of him was bad, nearly unendurable, but not like his feet and lower legs. Thing was, they weren’t feet any longer, but gore and bone, the ankles