“You can buy me a beer,” Bull said. “Come on, I know a place a few blocks down.”
In the gloom of the Crystal Bar, the kind of old dive Cody loved with its dim lighting and the midafternoon musical clicking of pool balls from a table in back, Bull said to the waitress, “I’ll have a PBR.”
Cody hesitated a moment, then ordered a tonic water. Angela asked for coffee.
Bull eyed him across the table for an uncomfortable length of time, then said, “You don’t like Pabst Blue Ribbon or are you an alky?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Because only alkies drink tonic water. It kind of reminds ’em of a real drink. Or so I’ve been told.”
“Guilty,” Cody said.
“Thought so,” Bull said. “You have that look about you. Believe me, in this country I see that look you got a lot.”
Cody looked to Angela for help. She shrugged back with a that’s-the-way-he-is kind of look.
“So,” Bull Mitchell said, “why are we here?”
Cody shot a quick glance to Angela, then told the entire story, leaving nothing out. Hank Winters, his binge, the coroner, his suspension. Bull listened wordlessly. Angela squirmed toward the end, getting more and more alarmed.
“So that’s the deal,” Cody said. “I need to find that pack trip as fast as I can but I don’t know the park well enough and I’ve got to keep quiet about it or I’ll lose my job at the very least. You’re the only guy I can think of who is familiar with Jed McCarthy and ‘Back of Beyond: the Ultimate Yellowstone Backcountry Adventure.’”
Bull scowled, “I didn’t name it that. That was Jed’s deal. He thinks he’s a wizard with words.”
“And women,” Angela added acidly.
Cody waited for more but it didn’t come and she obviously wished she’d said nothing by the way she shifted her weight in the booth.
To Bull, Cody said, “You’ve done it, this trip I’m talking about, right?”
“Dozens of times,” Bull said. “I blazed the trail in the first place after the park rangers at the time said there was no realistic way to take packhorses where I told them I wanted to go. So I had to prove them wrong. I goddamn invented that trip.”
Cody tried to keep himself low-key and persuasive when what he really wanted to do was get going. He said, “Can you tell me how to find them? Where they left from, which trail they took? Where they’d likely be right now as we’re talking?”
Bull nodded. “Pretty close. But what are you going to do? Hike after them?” he said with sarcasm.
“Dad,” Angela said with alarm, “he wants you to guide him.”
Cody kept quiet.
Bull said, “I don’t do that kind of stuff anymore. I haven’t in years.”
“I’ll pay you,” Cody said, trying not to let Angela’s glare penetrate him.
“How much?” Bull said, gesturing to the waitress for another beer. “Jed McCarthy charges more than two grand a head.”
“I’ll pay you four,” Cody said, thinking he had barely eighteen hundred dollars between his checking and savings accounts and he could maybe get another thousand if he got his pickup running and sold it. Maybe he could get a thousand from Jenny, who could dip into the bottomless coffers of His Richness…
Bull scratched his chin, thinking about it.
“Dad,” Angela said, “this is crazy. It could be really dangerous. You said yourself horse packing like that is a young man’s game-that’s why you sold the business, remember?”
“I sold it because I couldn’t take dealing with the Feds anymore,” Bull said, flashing a look at Cody to gauge his reaction.
Angela put her hand on her father’s arm. “Dad, if you find them you’re finding a potential killer. Think of Mom.”
He just looked at her. His voice dropped. “Your mother is all I think about and you should know that by now. Do you have any idea how much that facility she’s in costs? Thirty-five hundred a month. A month. I’m burning through the savings.”
Angela didn’t back down. “Dad-if you’d get some help…”
“I don’t want any goddamn help,” he said flatly. “I never asked for it and I don’t want it now.”
She said as an aside to Cody, “We’ve had this discussion many times before. There are federal programs my parents qualify for but he won’t take the money. In fact, he sends it back with mean notes attached. I’ve read some of them and they’d curl your hair.”
Bull nodded. “If everybody did that we wouldn’t be in the shithouse like we are now.”
She said, “And you won’t let me help you, either.”
“Nope,” he said. “Taking charity from my daughter is the last thing I’d ever do. Might as well just shoot me in the head and leave me there if it comes to that.”
Angela said to him, “But you wouldn’t have to be seriously thinking about going back to the park right now. Like I said, think of Mom.”
“Your mother,” Bull said to her, “she don’t know me from week to week, Angela.”
“Then think of me.”
Bull placed his own massive hand on top of hers.
Cody said, “Five thousand just for trying. And two thousand bonus for finding them.” He’d get His Richness to kick in more. “That’s more than two months of care.”
Angela shot him a look that was designed to freeze him into silence.
Bull took the second beer and drank half of it in two long pulls.
Angela said to Cody, “With all due respect, you should be talking to the park rangers, not my dad. It’s their job to do this kind of thing in Yellowstone. And if you didn’t get yourself in trouble, you could be doing this all legitimate.”
Bull said, “Talk to the bureaucrats? The time it would take you to lay this all out to the Park Service and for them to have meetings and come up with a budget… hell, you don’t have that kind of time. And I doubt any of ’em really know the backcountry well enough to find that trip. They’d probably have to hire me anyway, as much as they’d hate that.”
“Exactly,” Cody said.
Bull leaned forward and his daughter’s hand dropped away from his arm. He said to Cody, “It’ll take me some time to put everything together. I haven’t used any of my equipment for a while.”
Cody nodded.
Bull said, “And we need to go in and get back within a week. One week, because I can’t miss the storytime. You got me? I can’t miss it. And I’ll tag a three-thousand-dollar-a-day penalty on you if we do.”
“Okay,” Cody said, refusing to even consider the ramifications. He could tell by Bull Mitchell’s eyes that it was a deal kill should Cody balk or want to negotiate further.
“I don’t suppose Margaret will mind us taking some of Jed’s horses and panniers,” Bull said to himself.
“Dad, you can’t be really thinking about this,” Angela said. “Just do the smart thing-both of you-and call the park rangers.”
“They’ll fuck it up,” Bull said, growling. “We can’t risk lives while they screw around.”
Angela left the booth and stomped toward the bathroom.
“She’s upset,” Bull Mitchell said. “In her mind, I’ve been out of the game for a long time.”
Cody said, “What you do at the library, man. It’s, you know, pretty dedicated.”
Bull shook the compliment off. “Gotta do something. She was there for me for forty-five years and believe it or not, being with me ain’t a sweet picnic all the time.”
“Somehow,” Cody said, “I can believe that.”
Bull stifled a smile.
Cody said, “You knew my dad and my uncle Jeter, then?”
“Yeah,” Bull said, his face contorting as if he’d bitten into something sour. “I turned in your uncle for poaching elk in Yellowstone, and he threatened to kill me for it. I said, ‘Come on down to Bozeman, Jeter Hoyt.’ I think he was on his way when the judge sent him to Deer Lodge the first time. I’ve been kind of looking out for him ever since. Is he still around?”