The Same Place (The Lamb and the Lion #2) - Gregory Ashe Page 0,57
tell him he could cry if it would help—he knew that many times Jem had done so, out of the sheer rage and helplessness and embarrassment and frustration he felt as he struggled with reading and writing, but always out of sight, always when he thought Tean wouldn’t find out. Instead, he passed the phone back and said, “Let’s work on one of them together.”
Jem shook his head, but he unlocked his phone and set it where they could both look at it, and they started from the beginning.
It was slow going, made slower by the fact that the angrier Jem got, the more he tried to bottle up his anger, and the more energy he spent on controlling his rage, the less he could spend on focusing. They limped through a short article that the Deseret News had run in 2005. It didn’t add much to the portrait that Leroy and Caleb had painted of Joy, but it did confirm many important points: Joy had a long history as an environmental activist, and although the paper shied away from the term ecoterrorist, it mentioned several violent incidents in which Joy had been implicated. She and Zalie—described euphemistically as a close friend in the paper—had links to groups responsible for destroying agricultural equipment with explosives, tearing down fencing in order to herd cattle away from ranches, and trying to blow up a bioengineering lab at Brigham Young University. The article’s main focus, though, was the death of a delivery truck driver who had worked for a poultry farm outside of Ogden. The article didn’t say that Joy and Zalie had caused the explosion that had destroyed the delivery truck and killed the driver, but it came right up to the line, laying out their history and establishing their connection with times, dates, and locations, all to suggest their responsibility.
When they finished, Jem ran his arm over his forehead and said, “Ok. Beer now. Lots of beer. And then burgers. And fries.”
“You did really well.”
Jem rolled his eyes. “Burgers, Tean. I need lots of protein after that shitshow.”
“When we get back to Salt Lake—”
“Now, Tean. I need to drown my humiliation. Maybe I should go straight to whiskey.”
“Let me call Mrs. Wish and see if she can walk Scipio.”
Mrs. Wish still hadn’t forgiven Tean for suggesting that Senator George H. Moses had eaten one of her kittens, and she spoke in clipped, pseudo-polite tones, but she agreed to make sure Scipio got a walk and dinner. When Tean disconnected, he saw that he had missed several messages from Miguel. He checked them and saw that they were links to various YouTube videos.
They were all variations on a theme: John Sievers, the big man with the military hair cut whom Tean had spotted in the pictures in Joy’s condo, killing and skinning and then, sometimes, gutting and quartering coyotes. Miguel had been right: Sievers clearly enjoyed what he was doing, and although he talked through each process as though he were instructing the viewer, Tean didn’t have any trouble spotting the perverse amount of pleasure Sievers took in the acts.
“It’s like porn,” Jem said. “Hunter porn.”
And he was right, Tean realized. There was something gratuitous about Sievers’s performance. Something about the relish he took in the most savage parts of the videos. When he peeled the hide away from muscle and bone in long, savage jerks, he was grinning, micro-droplets of blood beading on his nose and cheeks and lips.
The last video, though, was unlike the others. Sievers was ranting about Joy—that dyke, he called her—building himself up into a hysterical rage. The camera wasn’t quite at the right angle, but Tean could glimpse something, what he thought was a coyote, struggling on the ground. Its leg was caught in a trap, he guessed, and heat and prickling sickness washed through him.
“And this is what I’ll do to that dyke if she comes on my property again,” Sievers screamed, and then he grabbed something off camera and spun toward the coyote. The action was blurred and messy, but Tean could make out a hatchet in Sievers’s hand, and he heard two pained howls as Sievers hacked at the trapped coyote. Then the coyote was dead, but blood continued to fountain up as Sievers hacked at the dead animal. And hacked. And hacked.
18
“They have to have a McDonald’s,” Jem said. “Look, down that street. I think I see one.”
Tean looked, but too late. “Dang,” he said. “Missed it.”