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  STAG PARTY

  Ben Rehder

  Copyright 2014 by Ben Rehder.

  Cover art © 2014 by Bijou Graphics & Design.

  Digital design by A Thirsty Mind Book Design

  All rights reserved.

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the author or publisher, except where permitted by law.

  For Tony and Amicia.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A lot of generous people contributed their expertise to help make this a better novel. I am very grateful to Tommy Blackwell, Jim Lindeman, John Grace, Amy Dole, Michelle Segovia, Jed Dunning, Martin Grantham, Phil Hughes, Becky Rehder, Helen Haught Fanick, Mary Summerall, Marsha Moyer, Stacia Hernstrom, and Linda Biel. All errors are my own.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Excerpt: Gone the Next

  About the Author

  Other Novels by Ben Rehder

  1

  Jasper Endicott didn’t intend to nap, but the warmth of the mid-afternoon sun caused him to doze with his crossbow cradled in his lap, and when he woke, the tree in which he was perched was surrounded by at least fifty white-tailed deer. Bucks, every last one. Not a doe in sight. Bucks in front of him. Bucks on either side. Bucks behind him.

  A few of the bucks were yearlings, with slender bodies and modest antlers. Most were fully grown bucks with swollen necks, sagging bellies, and massive racks. Jasper had never seen anything quite like this in his thirty-one years, which included thousands of hours sitting in a tree stand or in a wooden blind. Well, he had seen it once before, a few days earlier—the first time he had tested the scent. Based on those results alone, Jasper and his family’s business manager had made an offer to buy the scent from the old man who had created it.

  Still, though, Jasper was downright giddy to see it working so well a second time. Most of the deer around his stand were trotting in circles, noses low, desperately hoping to find the source of that aggravating aroma. Here and there, some of the larger bucks had paired up and were engaging in vigorous sparring matches, antlers clashing together, shoving with all the strength they could muster, like massive football linemen battling for turf.

  Bottom line: These were extremely belligerent deer.

  Jasper had planned to cull one of the lesser bucks this afternoon—adhering to smart game-management techniques that would benefit the herd as a whole—but he was too mesmerized by the spectacle unfolding around him to even think about hunting. He simply sat and gaped in awe.

  As he watched, more bucks arrived. Dozens more. They didn’t emerge tentatively from the brush, wary of danger, as deer usually did. Instead, they came bursting from the woods at full speed, caution to the wind, focused solely on finding the new buck that had invaded the area. Their brains weren’t sophisticated enough to understand they’d been tricked.

  Within the hour, by Jasper’s estimation, there were at least seventy bucks within a stone’s throw of his tree stand, on the west side of his family’s 4,000-acre South Texas ranch. More accurately, the bucks were within a stone’s throw of the cotton ball hanging from a limb just underneath Jasper’s feet. That was the sample given to him by the old man who had created the scent. A cotton ball sprayed lightly with the amazing deer scent, then put into a Ziploc bag for safekeeping.

  Jasper couldn’t help grinning.

  A product this powerful could provide a much-needed boost to the Endicott family’s flagging sales. Hell, this product could make every other deer scent on the market obsolete. It could cement the Endicott family’s reputation as the premier manufacturer of deer-hunting gear and related merchandise. It could secure a new contract for their reality TV series, which had been up in the air again ever since Walter Endicott’s off-hand remark about camel jockeys. Talk about bad PR. The media had jumped all over that one. Nobody had a sense of humor anymore.

  This scent could make up for that gaffe. This scent could change everything. Would change everything.

  The deer kept coming. It was crazy.

  And finally it occurred to Jasper that he had a problem. Namely, he was up a tree, alone, three hundred yards from his truck, and he was surrounded by large, aggressive, heavily-muscled deer. Deer that were pumped full of testosterone, because it was the peak of the breeding season—also known as the rut—and because the scent on the cotton ball had stoked their libidos to a red-hot fire.

  Jasper checked his cell phone. No bars. Typical on this side of the ranch. Which is why the Endicotts made a practice of carrying walkie-talkies when they were hunting, because you never knew when an emergency might pop up. Jasper pulled his walkie-talkie from his backpack, intending to ask the ranch foreman to come to his rescue. He pushed the power button. Nothing. Dead battery. Great.

  That didn’t leave Jasper with many options. Surely the deer would begin to disperse before too long. The scent would eventually evaporate, right?

  An hour passed. None of the bucks had left the area. One fight between two bucks became so violent, the smaller buck was severely injured. It collapsed in some tall grass with a bloody wound to its neck.

  Jasper began to accept the possibility that he could be out here all night. He hadn’t alerted anyone—not the foreman or anyone back home in central Texas—that he intended to hunt this afternoon. Stupid. Nobody would know he was stranded out here. By tomorrow morning, sure, someone would notice he was missing—but did he really want to spend the entire night in a tree? Especially considering that a front was supposed to blow through right after sundown, with a strong chance of thunderstorms and a thirty-degree drop in temperature. It was, after all, October.

  No need to do anything just yet. It was still early. So Jasper waited another hour. Then another. It appeared that not a single deer had left the area. Some of them even seemed to be glaring at him in his tree stand.

  By seven o’clock, with the sun dropping below the horizon and clouds moving in, Jasper was starting to lose his patience. He was thrilled that the scent was so powerful, but the novelty of the situation was wearing off, and he was starting to think about supper and a cold beer. He wanted to get down.

  So he made a decision.

  He began to descend from his tree st
and. Slowly. Down the ladder, one rung at a time. Giving the deer time to recognize him as a human, obviously a threat, and run away.

  But they didn’t run. They stood and stared. One particularly large buck near the base of the tree stamped a front hoof on the ground—a display intended to show dominance, to claim the territory.

  Now Jasper was five feet above the ground. He held the ladder with one hand and waved his crossbow back and forth with the other. Normally, that much motion would make a deer run. Not this time.

  So Jasper shouted at them.

  “Hey, deer! Hey! Go on!”

  The nearest bucks didn’t even flinch.

  “Get out of there! Scat!”

  Nothing.

  Okay, fine. The deer didn’t have to run. They could stay right were they were. Jasper would simply march right through the herd like he was the king daddy of the woods—the biggest, baddest, toughest buck around. They wouldn’t challenge him.

  He stepped down to the next rung. And the next. And then down to the ground. Now the bucks were clearly agitated, twitchy, wondering how to react to his presence. The nearest bucks were less than 15 feet away.

  Jasper held the crossbow out to his side and spread his free arm in the other direction, intending to look as large as possible. Intimidation was key.

  But the deer didn’t move. In fact, the closest buck—a real monster that had to weigh more than two hundred pounds—laid his ears back flat on his skull. He stomped his hoof and his eyes narrowed to slits. He let loose with a deep, guttural grunt. And he took a few steps forward.

  This was not good.

  Now Jasper was genuinely concerned.

  The big deer moved even closer, and several of the other deer began to step toward him, too. It reminded Jasper of a pack of wolves encircling their prey.

  Now he was seriously rattled. Not thinking straight. And he made a grave mistake. He should have simply turned and climbed back up the ladder. Problem solved, for the time being. But, instead, he panicked.

  And he ran.

  For the first twenty yards, he was still carrying the crossbow, but he finally had the presence of mind to realize it was slowing him down, so he dropped it.

  Didn’t matter. He could hear a thundering herd behind him.

  He’d made it less than fifty yards when he was knocked forward to the ground by a sharp and powerful blow deep into his lower back.

  The first of many.

  2

  “You sure about this, Red?” Billy Don Craddock asked from the passenger side of Red O’Brien’s old Ford truck as they proceeded north on Highway 281. The windows were down, with a nice breeze coming in, and each man cradled a Keystone tallboy between his thighs.

  Red thought about Billy Don’s question.

  No, he wasn’t sure of it. The truth was, Red had never been more uncertain of anything in his life. He was about to commit $25,000 to a business partnership that might or might not pay off, and it made him anxious. Unsettled. On edge. A bundle of nerves. He had butterflies turning somersaults in his belly. He would describe the uneasy feeling as trepidation, if he were familiar with that particular word and knew what it meant.

  “Hell, yeah, I’m sure of it,” Red replied, because appearing wishy-washy was for pussies.

  “Glad to hear it,” Billy Don said, “because pardon my French, but that’s a shit ton of money. Hate to see you throw it away.”

  Red came this close to asking for Billy Don’s opinion—did he really think Red was throwing the money away?—but he caught himself just in time. Good thing, too, because what would a three-hundred-pound redneck without an education know about venture capitalism?

  Admittedly, Red didn’t have much of an education himself—he hadn’t completed high school—but he did plenty of reading on a wide variety of topics, including business. For instance, last year, when one local businessman sold a fireworks stand on the outskirts of Blanco, Red stole a copy of the Blanco County News from the rack and read at least half the article describing the sale. The stand was selling for four thousand bucks, according to unnamed sources. Good to know. That right there was real-world, hands-on knowledge. You didn’t get that sort of education sitting in a high school classroom.

  “Ain’t nothing to worry about,” Red said. “That’s what the contract’s for. To tip things in my favor. That’s what you hire a lawyer for.”

  “A lawyer?” Billy Don said, being sarcastic. “Virgil ain’t no lawyer. He’s a bookie.”

  “He went to law school for awhile.”

  “A thousand years ago,” Billy Don said. “And it was some sort of mail-order deal. Not even a real school. Plus, he didn’t complete the course. He told you all that right up front.”

  “Not like the legal system’s that complicated,” Red said. “Besides, even if Virgil’s just a bookie, so what? He’s managed to stay out of trouble for about thirty years, and that makes him pretty savvy in my book. He knows the law.”

  “What kind of lawyer accepts beer and venison jerky as payment?” Billy Don muttered.

  Red reached the heart of Johnson City and turned west on Highway 290. After two miles, he turned north on Towhead Valley Road, then west on Klett Ranch Road. The old man Red was going to see lived back in the woods in an old cabin along the Pedernales River. In fact, he’d told Red he’d been born inside that very cabin, and he hadn’t been any farther than fifteen miles from that spot in 102 years.

  “You’ve never even been to Austin or San Antonio?” Red had said, thinking the old man must be stretching the truth. Or maybe he was senile.

  “Got no use for a big city,” the old man had said.

  At the time, Red had to wonder how the old man knew he didn’t like big cities if he’d never been to one. Strange. Red wasn’t fond of big cities either, but he’d actually been to several, so he felt qualified to give an opinion. In fact, the more he thought about it, the more it worried him that the old man would make that kind of snap judgment. Would that make him a bad business partner?

  Now Red found himself driving slower than he needed to. Just puttering along, really. This was a big decision he was about to make. He was getting cold feet. Why rush things? There was still time to change his mind and invest the money in silver, which would put him in a solid position to avoid economic uncertainty, as the AM radio ads said. The stock market wasn’t an option, because Red had learned from Scott Adams, the famous cartoonist, that the market is routinely manipulated by billionaire investors doing something called colluding, which was just a high-dollar word for working together. Some people might say that sounded like a wacky conspiracy theory, but Red figured if you can’t trust the creator of Dilbert for solid financial advice, who can you trust?

  “You know,” Red said, “if you’d told me two weeks ago how hard it is to spend 25 thousand dollars, I woulda said you’re nuts.”

  Billy Don grunted.

  Both men were $25,000 richer than they had been a few weeks earlier, which meant Red’s net worth was now nearly $26,000. They’d earned the money by way of a hunting contest. A local rich guy had placed a $50,000 bounty on a particular wild pig, because the rich guy’s son had died when he’d hit one with his motorcycle. The bounty was the rich guy’s way of making sure a lot of wild pigs were killed, and it damn sure worked. Hunters came from all over and declared war on feral pigs. Red and Billy Don had managed to get their hands on the pig with the prize-winning tattoo in its ear. But having all that money turned out to be a greater source of stress than Red would have ever guessed.

  He continued, saying, “I mean, sure, I could spend it on all kinds of crap—stupid stuff—but I’m talking about spending it wisely. Investing it. Even when you got all kinds of good ideas, it’s hard to choose the right one.”

  “Like a day spa for construction workers?” Billy Don said. Mocking him.

  “It was just an idea,” Red said. “Think about how rough our hands get with blisters and calluses and whatnot. Think about getting your hands worked on by so
me babe in a low-cut T-shirt.”

  “Rapping telegrams?” Billy Don said.

  “Like singing telegrams, yeah, but rapping. Why not? I don’t care for rap myself, but a lot of people like that shit.”

  “Bottled water for dogs?” Billy Don said.

  “It woulda been beef-flavored!” Red said. “People spoil their pets rotten. Hey, here’s an idea: Why don’t you stop being so critical? You didn’t come up with any brilliant ideas yourself.”

  “Didn’t have to,” Billy Don said. “My money’ll be gone real soon.”

  Which was true, because Billy Don was getting married soon—to Betty Jean Farley. Red was the best man, naturally, despite the fact that Betty Jean wasn’t Red’s biggest fan. She tended to refer to him as a “brain-dead redneck” or “a step down from trailer trash.” Red could never understand why he deserved such animosity, because the worst he’d ever done was make a few vague cracks about Betty Jean’s weight—the kind where he could act like he meant something else, but she knew what he really meant, and he knew she knew. Besides, it was obvious to anyone with eyes that she was a large woman. Very large. Red sometimes wondered if Betty Jean had accepted Billy Don’s proposal simply so she’d have a huge man to stand next to all the time. She’d look smaller that way. Of course, Red hadn’t voiced that suspicion to Billy Don or to Betty Jean, because he didn’t want to get knocked through a wall.

  “You could always back out,” Red said as he rounded the last grove of cedar trees before the road dead-ended at the old man’s remote cabin.

  Red was only semi-joking, but he looked over to see what Billy Don’s reaction would be. Would the big man show any hint that canceling the wedding was starting to look like an attractive option?

  What Red saw instead was that Billy Don’s eyes were big and his jaw was hanging open. So Red returned his attention to the road—and straight ahead to the old man’s cabin.

  Red tapped the brake and came to a stop.

  “Jesus,” he said.

  The cabin was surrounded by white-tailed bucks. Dozens of them.

  The previous time Red had come out, there were eight or ten deer hanging around, which was impressive, but the old man had said he was tinkering with an even more potent formula. Obviously it was working.