“Are you feeling that way now?”
Dakota looked over and gave Gracie a long searching look. “How did you know that?”
“I watched you two earlier.”
“Sometimes I just can’t figure out what’s going on under his hat,” she said. “And this is one of those times.”
“Why do you think Mr. Glode left?”
Dakota sighed. “Mrs. Glode,” she said.
“Simple as that?”
“It’s a hell of a lot more complicated,” Dakota said. “I think the two of them were hoping they’d find something out here they didn’t find. There have been other couples on these trips looking for the same thing. So at least I can sort of understand that.”
“What else?” Gracie said.
“Wilson,” Dakota said.
“You mean you don’t know why he left, too?”
Dakota nodded. “I’m going to tell you something nobody knows,” she said. “I didn’t stay with Jed last night. We had a fight and I slept outside by the fire. At one point I had to get up to pee and I walked up above the tents into the trees. In the moonlight, I could see somebody lurking around. Kind of moving real slow and deliberate-walking back and forth from the tents to the lake. I sort of snuck down there and I saw it was Wilson. I don’t know what the hell he was doing, but he gave me the creeps. He was just out walking around.”
“Did you tell Jed?”
“Not yet. His head is too far up his butt to listen to anyone.”
“What do you think Wilson was doing?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. But it looked like he was planning something, or waiting for someone. Maybe it was Tristan Glode, but that doesn’t make much sense to me.”
Gracie thought about that.
“Maybe it was Wilson and Mr. Glode who had a fight?” she said.
“Maybe. But you’re the only one who said they heard anything.”
“Don’t you believe me?”
Dakota said, “Let me put it this way. I believe you think you heard something.”
Gracie said, “But why would they leave together after that? And what would they fight about? I mean, if it was Tony and Mr. Glode at least they’d have a reason.”
“I know. It beats me.”
“I didn’t hear an argument,” Gracie said.
Dakota shrugged. “I don’t know what the hell is going on, but something is. You look ahead of us at all those people on horses in this setting, and you think, what a perfect thing. But what you don’t know is what’s going on in everyone’s head, and what they might be thinking about everyone else.
“That,” she said, “is the reason I prefer horses.”
Jed had pulled his horse and mules off to the side of the trail to let his clients ride past. When Gracie and Dakota reached him, Jed said, “Dakota, you take lead for a while. I’ll tail up.”
Gracie saw that Dakota wanted to argue but clamped her mouth closed, pulled her hat tight, and urged her horse and mules on. Jed fell into place where Dakota had been but he didn’t stay there long.
He said, “So, you enjoying the trip so far?”
There was something disconcerting in the way he asked, she thought. Like he couldn’t wait to get past the formalities. Like he kind of enjoyed playing with her, enjoyed reeling her in with his soft voice.
“I guess.”
“What about your sister? She seems like maybe this isn’t her dream vacation.”
Gracie had to smile at that.
“Thought so,” he said.
“I wanted to ask you something,” he said. “I saw you talking away with Dakota. What on earth were you girls chatting about for so many miles?”
“Nothing in particular,” she lied.
“Really?” A hint of sarcasm.
“Girls do that,” she said. “We just talk about nothing for hours. You know, clothes, nails, shoes. Girly things. That’s just how we girls are.”
He chuckled. “You are a pistol,” he said. “Now really, what were you two talking about for so long?”
Gracie squirmed in her saddle. She wondered why it felt like it had gotten warm, like those car seat heaters did in her mother’s Volvo. She said, “I asked her how she liked her job. Since I like horses and all.”
“Ah,” Jed said. “And she told you what?”
“She said it was pretty good most of the time.”
“My name come up?”
“Of course,” Gracie said. “You’re her boss.”
Up until that moment, she hadn’t noticed the sheath knife on his belt that lay across the top of his thigh. She guessed it had always been there amidst the things he wore, but she’d just not focused on it before.
He said, “Females always talk too much.”
She didn’t know if he meant her or Dakota. Or both. He had looked away from her but there seemed to be a lot going on in his head.
“Are we going to find those two guys?” she asked.
“Oh,” he said, almost vacant, “we’ll find ’em.”
26
Bull Mitchell roared and fired his.44 Magnum over the backs of the wolves. The concussion in the epic stillness was tremendous and Cody flinched and came back up with his ears ringing. The big slug slapped the surface of the water twenty feet out and all three wolves wheeled toward them on their back haunches.
Cody could look into their black eyes and see their long red teeth and pink-tinged snouts and he instinctively reached for his Sig Sauer. He’d bought bear spray the day before in Bozeman but it had been in the duffel with his carton of cigarettes so therefore he didn’t have any. He couldn’t get over how doglike they were, yet they weren’t dogs. They had the eyes of dogs and the fur of dogs, but they were wild, big, and menacing. The black one had yellow-rimmed eyes that seemed to burn in their sockets.
“Hold on,” Mitchell said. “Stand tall and tough. They want to protect their food but we’ve got to face ’em down and show no fear.”
To the wolves, Mitchell barked, “Get the hell into the woods where you belong. Now get…”
To emphasize his point, he ratcheted back the hammer on his Ruger and fired again, this time exploding a plume of swamp mud from a depression five feet in front of the wolves.
The black alpha male-Cody guessed he’d weigh 175 pounds-woofed and exhaled and loped away along the shoreline to the south. The silver female followed and Cody caught a glimpse of something long and blue that reminded him of sausage swinging from her jaws as she ran. The mottled wolf, likely also a male, Cody thought, followed her without conviction, as if he’d wanted to fight. He couldn’t believe how fast they ran or how powerful they looked, like ghosts with teeth.
“They might not have gone far,” Mitchell said, “so keep your eyes open.”
“My God,” Cody said, and lifted his hand. “Look at this. I was so scared my hand stopped shaking.”
Mitchell chuckled while he withdrew the empty brass cartridges out of the revolver and replaced them with fresh hollow-point shells.
“I’ll keep this out and cover us,” Mitchell said, chinning toward the shoreline where the wolves had been. “You might as well keep that little popgun of yours in your holster. It’ll just make ’em mad if they decide to come back.”
The first thing Cody noticed as they approached the shoreline was the smell. Mingling with the thin warm air and algae-tinged odor from the lake was a primal whiff of musk from the thick hides of the wolves and the dank metallic smell of viscera.
A tangle of partially submerged driftwood stretched from the shore into the lake for twenty feet. A scum of algae sucked in and out of the water-worn branches of the structure as if being inhaled and exhaled by the structure itself. There was a deep shadowed undercut beneath the driftwood.