“We got a problem, Tom.”

This was Ralph Latarski (not his real name) on the direct line to the U. S. Marshals’ Office in Lawrence, Kansas. Tom Frere was Ralph’s agent in the witness protection program.

“You’re not supposed to contact me directly,” Tom said. “Why didn’t you go through Wilkins?”

“’Cause Wilkins is a bureaucrat,” Ralph said. “A bureaucrat’s the last thing I need right now.”

Tom didn’t have to push a button. The security system recorded all of his calls and archived them on the government’s cloud. It’s unlikely that anyone would ever listen to it, so here’s the gist of Ralph’s tale:

Some boys (names redacted by security) walking on the road past Ralph’s ranch near the town of Bobsled in Candle County, Arkansas, spotted a dead cow in Ralph’s pasture. They climbed through the fence and discovered something strange about the carcass; it had no eyeballs. The boys were too young to recall the county’s last round of cattle mutilations, but they’d heard the stories. The phenomenon first descended upon Candle County in the early 1970s. Since then, every decade or so, the gruesome specter returned to trouble the local ranchers.

Hoping to get their pictures in the newspaper, the boys reported their discovery to Simmons Drain, editor of The Bobsled Pioneer. Whenever a cattle mutilation outbreak occurred, Simmons gave his readers plenty of front-page stories about dead cows and panicky ranchers. Through the years, the mutilation reports all had one feature in common: the dead cows were missing eyeballs and occasionally genitals, always extracted with surgical precision. It seemed that everyone in the county had an opinion about who was to blame for the atrocities. Simmons favored secret government experiments and pushed that hypothesis in his editorials. A lot of folks disagreed, however, and pointed their fingers skyward, blaming beings from outer space.

Ralph liked being part of this rural community where everybody knew him, but they didn’t really know him. Thanks to the witness protection program, he had been a Candle County rancher for nearly a decade. Having grown up on a farm near Davenport, Iowa, raising cattle was something he knew about, so when the Justice Department offered him the ranch, he took it. The Ozark Mountains seemed like a safe place to hide from the dangerous criminal organization he’d wounded with his testimony. He lived alone and had grown accustomed to the social simplicities of small-town life.

Ralph was surprised when Simmons told him what the boys had found. The poor animal lay on its side, legs akimbo, rib cage protruding, neck slightly twisted so that the sightless face stared at the sky through hollow eye sockets. This was Ralph’s first cattle mutilation case, and he’d never looked closely at a dead cow’s eyes. He told Simmons he’d never studied the other end, either.

Simmons stood upwind, a couple of yards away, taking notes. He always wore a tie and a seersucker suit, except during Thanksgiving to New Year’s, when he replaced the tie with a Santa Claus bolo and wore the dark suit that he otherwise reserved for funerals.

Before Ralph hitched the carcass to his tractor to drag it to the place where he usually took his dead cows, Simmons called the local veterinarian to inspect the animal. Dr. Norman had examined the bovine victims during the previous mutilation outbreak. He told Simmons that the Latarski mutilation appeared to be “surgical in quality of execution.” Simmons took pictures of the cow with the vet kneeling beside the animal pointing at the empty eye sockets.

When Simmons ran the story with pictures the next day, another rancher, Semolina Blanchard, telephoned the Pioneer, and said she had closely examined the hind parts of her recently deceased Angus bull, a prodigious breeder named “Steak-maker.” She reported that, without doubt, someone with a surgeon’s skills had removed Steak-maker’s testicles. Mrs. Blanchard lent veracity to her story by saying that she noticed the missing testicles when she cut off Steak-maker’s penis to have it converted into a walking stick.

As the Bobsled story began to spread, the phenomenon became the lead item on regional television nightly news. Camera crews converged on Candle County to get footage of cows munching grass at twilight and record ranchers’ comments. Sound engineers enhanced the videos with canned Theremin warbles and excerpts from Pink Floyd’s “The Dark Side of the Moon.”

The local frenzy over cattle mutilations amused Ralph, but he hardly gave the matter serious thought, until the incident at the Bobsled Git-n-Go Mart that triggered his desperate call to Tom Frere. Ralph was on Aisle 3 searching for his favorite breakfast cereal when Simmons appeared, clearly excited to see him.

“Ralph, I got a call from a New York producer at NBC. They heard about your cow mutilation.” A stock boy standing a few feet away stopped what he was doing and looked at the two men. Simmons lowered his voice. “Wanda Reindeer is bringing a production team to Bobsled in a couple of days to do a story on you. I’m sure you’ve seen her show, ‘Are You Laughing Yet?’” Although Ralph had only seen the show a couple of times, he knew that millions watched it every week. Simmons continued: “I gave them your contact information. Looks like you’re going to be famous.”

The f-word made Ralph’s stomach knot. He didn’t want fame. He feared fame the way Job feared God. If hit men were searching for him, and Ralph believed that they were, fame could get him killed. That’s when he went over Wilkins’s head and called Tom Frere.

“Calm down, Latarski,” Tom said, when Ralph had finished telling him about the mutilations and the coming of Wanda Reindeer. “How many times have I got to tell you to just sit tight and trust me? The U.S. government’s working for you.”

Ralph wanted to know what would be done.

“That’s not something I can address over the phone,” Tom said. “Don’t call me back. I’ll fix this and call you tomorrow.”

Ralph hung up the phone feeling a little better. Tom’s confidence gave him faith that the government would stop the interview. He imagined a couple of senior Justice Department officials in a backroom meeting with the head of NBC. After some gentle, but firm, persuasion from the G-men in trench coats and fedora hats, the word would pass down through the offices on soft voices. Wanda Reindeer’s plans would abruptly change, and she’d head off to Wyoming to video an albino antelope. Simmons would be disappointed, and the current excitement about the cattle mutilations would fade away just in time for girls’ basketball to consume Candle County like it did every winter.

Ralph didn’t hear from Tom the next day, but he did get a call from a pushy New Yorker named Martinez, who introduced himself as Wanda Reindeer’s “advance location producer.”

“Ralph, can I call you Ralph?” Martinez said, with an Al Pacino accent. “Good. I’m on my way to your place. You got any dead cows today?”

Ralph hung up and tried to call Tom. After several minutes on hold, a robotic recording told him the number he dialed had been disconnected. Then the line went dead. He was about to try Wilkins’s number when Martinez’s rental car pulled into his driveway.

Martinez was a short guy wearing a Ricky Ricardo toupee, Robin’s egg blue shirt with yellow polka dots, designer jeans, and red patent leather cowboy boots. His quick, jerky movements made Ralph a little nervous, and his eyes darted around the living room as if he was making sure the place wasn’t infested with rats or rattlesnakes. Apparently satisfied with the safety of his surroundings, he perched in Ralph’s recliner, chewing breath mints and squirting antihistamine up his nostrils.

“Wanda’s going to come at this from a UFO perspective,” Martinez said. “We’ll link it to a show she taped last month on that herd of sheep in New Mexico impregnated by aliens.” He fiddled with his phone and showed Ralph a picture of a sheep. “What caught our attention about your story was the evidence of surgical precision with your cow’s missing parts.” He handed Ralph a sheet of paper with the “Are You Laughing Yet?” logo, a stylized sketch of a friendly hyena. “Here are some of Wanda’s talking points.”

The first question: “What was your dead cow’s name?” Ralph was too preoccupied with his own thoughts to read the rest. Did the Justice Department let him down? If he refused the interview without a good reason, Wanda’s people might smell a bigger story and blow his cover. Since he couldn’t come up with a safe and compelling argument for dodging the interview, he figured that he had two long shots. He was about to try the first one when he realized that Martinez had asked him a question – something about his wardrobe.

Ralph was wearing what he wore every day: faded John Deere ball cap, Tuf Nut overalls, flannel shirt, and Red Wing work boots.

Martinez hauled himself up to the front edge of the recliner to repeat his question. “Do you have rubber hip boots? Wanda especially mentioned rubber hip boots. What about a straw hat? If not, her wardrobe people will bring some farmer clothes for you.”

Ralph fired his first long shot. “I’d like to step aside and let Semolina Blanchard have this interview?”

Martinez slid off the recliner and tangled himself in the extended footrest. “The lady with the bull penis walking stick?” He broke into a laugh. “Now, you’re trying to get me fired, aren’t you?”

Ralph cast his suggestion as an altruistic gesture. “She has a more interesting mutilation case, don’t you think?” he said. “Her dead bull even had a name. Maybe you ought to talk to Wanda about it.”

“Out of the question, Ralph,” Martinez said. “That woman’s a nut. She’s liable to say anything.” He gave his nose a squirt with the spray. “Simmons told me about her. Do you want the rest of the country to think you’re all a bunch of idiots down here?”

“The show is called ‘Are You Laughing Yet?’” Ralph said.

“Sure,” Martinez said. “But Wanda wants her viewers to laugh at her jokes, not laugh at you.”

Ralph concealed his anxiety by asking a couple of questions about the interview format and then casually fired his last long shot. “Can I do the interview without being on camera?”

“What’s going on with you, man?” Martinez peered at Ralph over the rims of his sunglasses. “This is television,” he said. He scrutinized Ralph’s face. “If you’re worried about how you look, don’t. Wanda has her own makeup team.”

Ralph said, “It’s not that. I have my reasons for not wanting to be videoed.” He hoped Martinez wouldn’t try to delve into his “reasons.”

“Look,” Martinez said, “I can’t call Wanda’s office and tell them our subject won’t appear on camera.” He walked over to the window and gazed out at the pastoral landscape. “I might as well tell you,” he said, turning to face Ralph. “Simmons has already emailed your headshot to Wanda’s office.” He felt his shirt pocket for his antihistamine spray. “The show’s teaser with your picture launched on Facebook and Twitter last night.”

Ralph felt a loosening in his bowel. Fame had come upon him. Fame was Martinez and a blundering Simmons. Fame was a cat named Wanda that the U.S. Marshals couldn’t walk back. The only option now was relocation. Ralph needed a new identity and a new life. He recalled that Tom had mentioned relocation in their early negotiations. The Justice Department must have a backup plan for this sort of contingency.

Martinez tapped his phone a few times and showed Ralph his image on the two social media outlets. The picture was a recent one, taken when the Candle County Ranchers Association elected him sergeant at arms. Staring at his smiling face, he regretted for the first time his refusal of the Justice Department’s offer of plastic surgery. God, why hadn’t he at least had the foresight to grow a beard? It was too late. Gangsters charged with his execution must already be on their way to Candle County.

As soon as Martinez left, Ralph tried to reach Wilkins. The long chain of recorded choices led him to a message requesting that he leave a voicemail. The line went dead before he could speak.

Ralph considered jerking his phone line out of the wall and hurling the sorry contraption into the yard when Simmons called. He sounded worried. “Martinez phoned me when he left your place. I don’t blame him for being jumpy.” He paused to light a cigarette. Ralph heard the Zippo lighter cap’s hollow, metal click. “This interview’ll be good for Bobsled and Candle County. It’s not the time to be camera shy.”

Ralph shut his eyes. Camera shy. Simmons couldn’t have imagined what was at stake. Over the years, ruthless hit men lurking in the hills around Bobsled had haunted Ralph’s worst nightmares. His mental image of a camouflaged bounty hunter stalking his ranch was now more vivid than ever.

“I reassured the little guy,” Simmons said. “Told him you’d be fine. I also told him I’d like for Wanda to explore the angle of secret government experiments. A lot of my readers want to hear more about that,” he said, “especially with the election coming up.”

He paused as if waiting for a remark, but Ralph was dumbstruck. He needed to disappear from Candle County, and Simmons wanted to promote his government conspiracy idea.

Simmons continued. “I told Martinez that the ‘surgical precision’ thing proves we aren’t dealing with Martians.” Ralph had read this argument in Simmons’s last two editorials. “Beings from outer space don’t need surgery, for Christ sakes. Hell, spacemen can just take cow eyeballs if they want ‘em. They sure as hell don’t need to cut ‘em out. They might not even have hands.”

Ralph was still thinking about the skulking hit men and only halfway listening to what Simmons was saying.

“That leaves us with the government, right?” Simmons said. “Government’s got Navy Seals. They’ve got silent helicopters and night-vision goggles.” The Zippo snapped again. “Ralph, can I count on you to bring up this possibility while you’re on camera with Wanda?”

Ralph, not paying attention, said, “Mmh?” Simmons was happy to repeat most of what he’d just said and finished up by saying that Martinez was hoping for another dead cow.

That evening, Ralph sent Wilkins and Tom an email that came back “undeliverable.” About 7 p.m., he noticed a snow-white, stretch limousine parked down the road near the spot where the boys found the dead cow. He walked out to investigate and saw “Paul and Jesus Radio Church Congregation” emblazoned on the limo’s side. Some early stars winked through the passing clouds. A cool October breeze carried the odor of cow dung. Crows barked in the distance. Nearby, a lone figure leaned against a fence post with his head bowed. The man must have climbed the fence, because he was standing in the pasture.

Although Ralph had never seen Brother Myron Wolf in person, he knew his image from his posters at the Git-n-Go. In the nighttime gloom, Ralph recognized the silhouetted lantern jaw, hawk nose, and domed forehead. The pompadour hairstyle put the preacher’s overall height at more than six feet. When he looked at Ralph, his eyes gleamed like jewels in a pagan statue.

“Hello, Mr. Latarski,” Brother Wolf said in his deep, coffin-rattling voice.

Ralph leaned on an adjacent post and nodded.

Brother Wolf produced a comb and ran it through his hair. “I’ve been praying about your interview with Wanda Reindeer,” he said.

“Huh?” Ralph said.

Brother Wolf went on. “I requested a meeting with Miss Reindeer. Her people never returned my calls.” Somewhere off in the pasture, a cow mooed. “We must make sure that Miss Reindeer’s viewers learn the real cause, the root cause, of these mutilations.”

“I take it you don’t think it’s Martians or government scientists?” Ralph said.

Brother Wolf stepped away from the fence and began almost unperceptively to rock back and forth. “Oh Lord,” he said. “Spacemen, gov’ment, hit don’t matter, hit don’t matter.” He repeated that line twice more and then said, “They’re all the paw of the lion.”

Ralph could detect a slight change in the cadence of Brother Wolf’s voice, like you could tap your foot to it.

“Yes, sir,” Brother Wolf said, steadily raising the volume of his speech. Ralph heard the sound of a church organ emanate from the limousine. “There’s a lion walkin’ these hills,” he said, modulating his volume upward to stretch the word “hills.”

The organ accompanied the preacher’s sentence with a bluesy arpeggio.

Brother Wolf’s voice got louder. “In my dreams,” he sang.

The organ stabbed a shrill chord on the syncopated beat.

Brother Wolf repeated, “in my dreams,” his voice now becoming operatic in volume.

Another syncopated organ stab, the throaty pedal bass rumbling under the instrument’s highest notes.

The next time Brother Wolf sang, “dreams,” he lifted his right knee and hopped into the air.

The organ stab struck louder and harsher.

“In my dreams,” Brother Wolf wailed. He kicked up his right leg again and hopped.

The organ increased its volume and rhythmic intensity. Brother Wolf’s one-leg hops segued into an improvised, frenetic dance of leaps and slides, his right hand jabbing into the air, and his left hand forming a fist, pumping his side in time with the music. His polyester suit shimmered in the starlight. Ralph was worried that the preacher might slip on a cow pile, but Brother Wolf’s feet seemed to have divine guidance.

Dramatic double gasps for breath punctuated the singsong preaching that accompanied the gyrations:

Ole Devil he’s trying to get close to me Lord (HEH heh)

Close, as pig is to poke

Ole Devil he’s trying to get close to me Lord (HEH heh)

Close, as fire is to smoke

Ole Devil he’s trying to get close to me Lord (HEH heh)

Close, as water is to ice

Ole Devil he’s trying to get close to me Lord (HEH heh)

Close, as white is to rice

Brother Wolf repeated these lines with some minor variations while the howling organ rocked the pasture.

Ralph stood speechless.

The herd bawled.

Then, with a rolling decrescendo dragging down the organ’s keyboard from its highest notes to its lowest bass drone, Brother Wolf stopped dancing and stood with arms wobbling, head shaking, eyes rolling, jowls quivering, and pompadour long since disheveled.

Ralph feared that the man was having a seizure.

At last, Brother Wolf collapsed against the fence and commenced to cry like a baby.

Ralph said, “Brother, can I help?”

Brother Wolf’s body leaped as if electrocuted. He reached over the fence with both hands and grabbed Ralph’s shoulders. “Brother Latarski,” he whispered, eyes wide and burning, “you’re the answer to my prayers.”

Ralph tried to back away, but Brother Wolf had an iron grip. His breath smelled like gin and pork-n-beans.

“When you talk to that woman from New York,” he said, with a hoarse growl, “you’ll tell her what’s going on ain’t nothing from outer space.” (The organ stabbed a chord.) “You’ll tell her what’s going on ain’t no gov’ment ‘spear mint.” (The organ stabbed a higher chord.) “You’ll tell her what’s going on is the Devil going on.” (A higher organ stab crashed and held in a long quavering chord.) “It’s the Devil-l-l-l going on.” With that, Brother Wolf released Ralph and bounded over the fence with the ease and grace of a deer.

The organ began playing something slow, a hymn Ralph recognized, but couldn’t name. Brother Wolf stepped to the limo, and a back door opened. The organ music got louder, and Ralph saw three beautiful women dressed in gowns and furs blinking in the interior light.

Before he got in, Brother Wolf said, “That surgical precision I read about in the newspaper, that’s how I know this is the Devil’s work.” A moment later, the limo sped away down the country road.

That night, Ralph tried again to reach Tom and Wilkins. This time, both calls got no farther than a terse recording: “This is not a working number. Please hang up and dial again.”

He struggled to think clearly. Would the Justice Department abandon him? That seemed doubtful; his testimony had been too critical. Then he had a thought that shook his soul. What if Martinez works for the Justice Department? The idea seemed outlandish, but Tom had assured him of government protection. Didn’t the little New Yorker appear the very next day? If Martinez was planning to save him, to whisk him away to some safe haven, he was damn well cutting things close. Wanda was set to arrive tomorrow afternoon. Once she and her crew got hold of him, he couldn’t disappear.

The Martinez scenario was one of a hundred crazy angles that rattled Ralph’s mind that night. He finally fell asleep in his recliner sometime before dawn. Traumatic dreams jerked him helplessly from one hopeless situation into another. The faceless killer in camouflage was never far away. In the last dream, his phone rang incessantly until he wrenched open his eyes.

Bright sunlight hammered the room. Sweat soaked his clothes. Remembering his dilemma, he had a fleeting hope that the call had come from Tom. That hope evaporated when he heard the recorded sound of Simmons’s voice: “Meet me and Martinez at the pasture. He needs to get some pictures of the spot where they found the dead cow.”

Ralph’s suspicion about Martinez melted with the light of day. As the morning wore on, he dismissed the notion as nothing more than midnight desperation. For one thing, he couldn’t help but notice how Simmons and Martinez teased and eyed each other the way lovers sometimes do. He concluded that they had become more than just acquaintances.

When Ralph described Myron Wolf’s twilight visit, Simmons said, “This round of cattle mutilations has been a godsend for that son of a bitch.” He winked, and added, “Pun intended.”

Martinez giggled.

“You know he calls his listeners his ‘suckling pigs’?” Simmons said. He paused to take a photograph of Martinez. “Well, his suckling pigs have been drifting down the dial to Brother Rooster Woods’s broadcast out of Springdale.”

Simmons pulled Martinez’s arm to keep him from stepping in a pile of cow shit.

“Before we found your dead cow,” Simmons said, “I heard that Brother Myron was about to lose Lucy Ann Foods, his biggest sponsor. Now that the Devil’s chasing cows all over Candle County, Brother Wolf’s got his pigs back.”

Martinez took some pictures of the scene with his phone and texted them to Wanda’s office. “Wanda was really hoping to have a dead cow for the piece.” He looked at Ralph’s cattle grazing at the far end of the field. “How much would you charge to have one of them turn up dead?”

Still groggy from his long night, Ralph considered the proposition for a moment too long.

“Had you going, Ralph,” Martinez chuckled, giving Simmons a sideways grin. He squirted his nose and was about to say something else when Ralph pointed at Martinez’s footprint in a nearby cow pile.

“Welcome to cattle ranching,” Ralph said.

Martinez spewed a barrage of profanity and strutted around in circles scratching his boot soles like a banty hen on the yellow fescue grass. Simmons laughed and cheered him on. When the cussing subsided, Martinez steadied himself on Simmons’s arm and examined the bottoms of both boots.

Before they puttered off to make arrangements for Wanda’s crew at the Pioneer Motel, Martinez mentioned a conversation he had with a gentleman at the motel bar last evening. “When he found out that I was with Wanda’s show, he said he’d seen the teaser on Facebook. He seemed quite interested in you, Ralph.” Martinez giggled and looked at Simmons.

Ralph swallowed and asked Martinez to describe the man.

“Tough-looking guy wearing a dark gray suit. He was the kind of palooka who’d be more at home on my turf than down here,” he said.

Ralph watched their car drive off toward Bobsled. A pair of crows yacked in a sycamore tree down the road. He wasn’t wearing camouflage, but the man Martinez described could only be a hit man.

Walking back to his house, Ralph topped a rise in the field and saw a black SUV parked in his driveway. How long had it been there? The explanation for it was probably a simple one. He just couldn’t come up with anything except Martinez’s “palooka.” The guy was probably creeping through his house at that moment with a drawn revolver.

Ralph dropped flat on the ground, concealed by the pasture grass. He was sure the hit man hadn’t seen him with Martinez and Simmons; the topography of the field would have blocked his view. Slowly he backed away from the house and looked around for an escape route. A hundred yards to his left, a shallow drainage ditch snaked across the pasture toward the distant tree line. He’d walked those woods a couple of times and found an old farm trail across the ridge that led down to Highway 334. He knew he didn’t have much time. When the hit man found the house empty and discovered Ralph’s pickup truck parked in the garage, he would come searching.

Ralph crawled toward the ravine as fast as he could, scraping his knees and elbows. At close quarters, the field was rockier than it looked. The sun was hot. Grit and grass seed stuck to his face and itched his neck. A couple of steers moved aside warily as their owner belly squirmed between them. Buzzing flies alerted him to cakes of manure.

The drainage gully wasn’t deep, but at least it was dry. Ralph slithered down between its banks and crabbed his way toward the trees. Ten minutes later, he reached the fence and the edge of the forest. The ravine passed under the barbed wire, and he kept to it until he was among the trees. Cautiously, he raised himself enough to peer back across the field. His field, by God, and this was the last time he would see it.

From his vantage point, he could see almost the entire pasture. Some of his cattle grazed near the spot where the damned cow that started this whole calamity had died. How long ago had that been? Of the palooka, there was no sign. Once Ralph was among the oaks and thicket, he stood and moved quickly to put some distance between himself and his pursuer.

Searching for the wagon trail that would lead him to the highway, Ralph came upon a little opening in the forest. He’d been hearing the harsh cawing of crows for some time, and in the clearing, he saw what the birds were talking about. Several crows nipped and pecked at the fresh carcass of a deer. Ralph figured that the poor creature, probably wounded by a hunter, had stumbled here to die.

He skirted the grisly scene and paused to watch the crows at work. It was remarkable, he thought, how they removed the animal’s eyes and genitals with surgical precision.