I grabbed the thumb-worn paperback and glanced at him. “Saizarbitoria’s idea of a joke, I suppose, or maybe he thought I was going to get bored and have some reading time.”
He lifted the weapon onto the saddle of the machine. “You said they had a rifle?”
I zipped the tactical jacket and put on my hat. “Armalite. 223 with an infragreen scope, but it’s the short barrel, maybe sixteen inches.”
“Dangerous up close, but not so good at distance with that carbine model.” He admired the rifle in the leather sheath. “We call this ‘evening the playing field.’ ”
I turned my head and looked at him.
“I’ve got all kinds of handguns and carbines, but nothing that’ll reach out and touch with the impact of this one-besides, I thought it might be a sentimental favorite.”
I looked at the weapon and felt the rush of heat at the remembrance of how things had turned out with a weapon very much like this one almost two years ago. “Favorite, but certainly not sentimental.” I carefully lifted the. 45-70 from the case, sliding the leather cover away. “The three in the stock holder?”
He sighed. “I don’t even have extra ammo-just brought it up here on a lark as decoration. I never thought I’d be shooting it. You’ve only got the three.”
I nodded, feeling the accustomed weight close to eight pounds. I liked the accuracy of the drop-block weapons, the simplicity and smooth action of fewer moving parts. “Well, this gives me an edge over that short-barreled. 223.”
“If you hit him, he’ll know he’s been hit.” He leaned over and slipped open the butt of a plastic rifle scabbard mounted on the other side of the vehicle. “This is padded and should absorb a lot of the vibration and shock should you hit something.”
“Omar, it’s a museum piece, worth a lot of…”
“Take it.”
I didn’t move, giving him the opportunity to change his mind, and then reached across and carefully placed the Sharps in the boot, and his eyes stayed on the encased weapon. I watched him for a long moment and could pretty much guess what was running through his mind, over and over and over again. “Your first?”
“Yeah.” His eyes came up to mine but then returned to the scabbard. “Does it get easier?”
“Not really.” I cleared my throat and stood there trying to think of the words that would make it in some way better. “He was a bad guy with a lot of notches; he would’ve killed you, raped and killed her, and then who knows how many more he would’ve killed.” He nodded, dealing with the sickness that overtakes your soul when you take a life-the sick/scared before, and the sick/sad afterward. “It’s amazing, isn’t it, what human beings can become.”
When I came back from my own sicknesses he was looking at me. “You gave me some advice, now let me give you some.” His eyes went back to the scabbard. “You better become a misanthrope, too… Kill ’em, kill ’em all. Kill ’em fast.” His hand went to the rifle scabbard. “And from far away.”
The handle grips were heated, and the motor warmth of the big Arctic Cat that Omar had loaned me floated up against the trunk of my body before being whipped away at speeds approaching forty miles an hour. The ATV was capable of going a lot faster, but I wasn’t. Fortunately, Omar had remembered to loan me a pair of antifogging goggles or my eyes would’ve been frozen to my eyelids.
Even with the blowing snow and the four hours that had passed, the tracks of the Thiokol were evident, at least until I arrived at West Tensleep Lake. It was only when I got to the fork in the road that I slowed the Cat to see which direction in the parking loop they’d taken. The wide tracks continued on the high road, which was what I’d expected, figuring the cover story that Raynaud had planted was indeed false. The snow had reached levels where no regular wheeled vehicle could go, and even trying on horseback would’ve been nothing but a slog.
Then the tracks simply disappeared.
I pulled up to the two bathroom structures buried in the snow and overlooking the pull-through parking area. Nothing there.
There were no vehicles in the place, and no tracks whatsoever.
Where could the damn thing have gone? It wasn’t as if it a were svelte mode of transportation.
Listening to the idling motor of the ATV, and watching the trees sway with the wind, I sat there thinking about the last time that I’d been this high; about how things had not gone well, and I’d had to haul two men from Lost Twin Lakes in a blizzard. That had been difficult, but it wasn’t the memory that held me still at the moment.
I’d seen and heard things all those months ago-things I’d never seen or heard before yet which continued to haunt me.
I cut the motor and listened more carefully.
There was the noise of the wind, like something colossal moving past me, something important-so imperative in fact that it could not pause for me. It was the cleaning sound that the wind made in the high mountain country, scrubbing the landscape in an attempt to make it fresh.
I thought about the dream of the boy in the truck, the trees moving-and how the dream didn’t seem to be mine. Maybe our greatest fears were made clear this high, so close to the cold emptiness of the unprotected skies. Perhaps the voices were of the mountains themselves, whispering in our ears just how inconsequential and transient we really are.
The snow continually fell, and the canvas unrelentingly washed itself clean.
I saw some movement to my right, a different kind of movement surging against the insistence of the wind. I stared at the copse of trees by the sign that marked the entrance to the Lost Twin trailhead. My eyes through the goggles stayed steady, but I couldn’t see anything more, just the movement of the limbs and branches.
Something else moved to my left, and I whirled in time to see a shape dart back into the trees where the ridge dropped off into the open, white expanse of the lake.
I quietly dismounted the Cat and stepped onto the surface of the snow, which crunched like cornflakes under the Vibram soles of my Sorels. I thought of the Sharps fastened to the side of the Arctic Cat, but instead slipped the glove from my right hand and unsnapped the safety strap from my. 45, drawing it from the holster and moving toward the small ridge.
I was not seeing any green dots.
I kept looking at the grove of trees to the right but could catch sight of nothing more. By the time I got to the top, I could make out where the wind had struck the rise, lifted its load, and then dropped the snow, flake by flake, in a drift as sharp as the edge of a strop razor.
It was then that something made a noise very close to me. I stood there for a moment and looked around. It was muted and almost like music. I looked down at the ground, but it wasn’t coming from there, it was coming from my coat. I remembered that I had put Saizarbitoria’s cell phone in the inside pocket of the high-tech jacket. I unzipped and pulled out the device, took it from the plastic bag, and looked at the number on the display-Wyoming, but not one I recognized. I flipped it open and used Vic’s patented greeting: “What fresh hell is this?”
There was some fumbling on the other end, and then a strange voice spoke. “What the fuck does that mean, man?”
Great-just what I needed was a wrong number eating up my battery.
“Hey, Sheriff, is that you?”
I stared at the phone and then returned it to my ear. “Hector?”
“Yeah, it’s me; hey, how you doin’?”
“Hector, where are you?”
He laughed. “Where the hell do you think I am? Locked to a water pipe, right where you left me.”
“How did you…?”
“I got a credit card that some tonto left out of the cash register and activated it for some long-distance charges. I’m bad, I’m nationwide. I called my family back in Houston, and then I called my buds down in…”
“How did you get this number?”
“I got it when you gave it to your secretary.”