“Oh… Pete…,” said Katie, softly, her voice breaking.
“Katie,” said Dalton, gently, “we have to get out of here.”
12
The CIA Gulfstream came in low out of the rising sun, skimming down the western slopes of the Bighorns and racing across the stony plains of the eastern Bighorn Valley less than a thousand feet off the ground, the banshee howl of its jets shaking the windows and rattling the nerves of everyone in the high desert village of Greybull.
Watching this approach, the tower controller picked up his third coffee of the morning and said, “Fucking carrier pilot jet-jockey cowboy assholes” in a hoarse rasping voice.
Across the room, Fremont and Dalton, sitting in ladder-backs and watching the same jet, said nothing, but they nodded in silent agreement. Far, far away in the ultimate west, the Yellowstone Rockies had caught the rising sun a full hour before it reached the broad valley, and the two men had sat there, stunned, silent, weary beyond belief, staring in a dull, hypnotized daze as the first rays of the sun touched upon the snowy peaks of the Beartooth Range and they flashed out suddenly, a blazing diamond-sharp light, the pine fields on their eastern slopes glittering like a forest of silvery spears, while the broad sweeping valley below them lay covered in a pale violet shadow.
The air down on the plains was cold and sharp; the first bitter tendrils of winter hoarfrost had crept across the car windows during the night, and in the tower the overheated control room smelled of boiled coffee, cheap cigars, and the controller’s stale sweat, none of which bothered Fremont and Dalton in the slightest; they had spent most of the drive across the Bighorns trying to get the ruined face of Crucio Churriga, the smell, the sights, the sounds of Pete Kearney’s cabin, out of their clothes, their minds, their skins, with no success at all.
They had talked, briefly and without enthusiasm, about the drawings on the wall of Pete Kearney’s cabin and the one on the wall at the hospice in Butte.
Fremont confirmed Dalton’s intuition that the same drawing had been written across the kitchen wall right above Al Runciman’s flayed body in Mountain Home, and that the ATM records of Moot Gibson’s travels seemed to coincide with Runciman’s death, with the abomination at Pete Kearney’s cabin, with the mutilation of Crucio Churriga in Butte, and with the series of attempts on Fremont’s life.
A trail of tears.
And then there was Katie Horn.
She had seen them off, run them off, to be more precise, in the face of all their objections, their solicitude, all of which was firmly and at last vehemently rejected, and their final memory of her was as she walked across the empty street and climbed the stairs of Hanoi Jane’s in Dayton, moving like an old woman, her shoulders bowed, her crazed-porcelain skin waxy and pale, her face dull and tearstained.
She had turned just as she reached the screen door and stared back up at the long-shadowed slopes of the Bighorns, where a column of dense smoke was still rising up into the very last of the sunlight, up into the high wind off the plains, where it was caught and whipped away in a long delicate thread, stretching out into the west and finally disappearing over the dome of Granite Pass.
She stood there for a time, watching the blue smoke rising, and then, with a final listless wave to Fremont and Dalton, she went inside and closed the door. Dalton and Fremont had climbed into the Crown Victoria without a single word passing between them. In that same brooding inward silence they headed back up the mountain, staring at the smoke coming from high up in the hills as they went by the entrance to the gravel track, then looking blankly straight ahead as two state patrol cars and a volunteer fire truck came racing toward them in the oncoming lane a mile later, then, much faster, speeding away westward over the Bighorns on the Cloud Peak Highway, with the Flower Duet from Lakmé on the radio.
They cleared Granite Pass around midnight, stopping for dishwater coffee and circular wads of cold clay that the pimpled, chinless, pig-eyed clerk stubbornly insisted were country-fresh doughnuts, and then they descended the treacherous ridges and jagged red cliffs of Shell Canyon in the early-morning hours, rolling down out of the Bighorns and out onto the desert plateau that ran all the way west to the Yellowstones, finally reaching Greybull a full hour before sunup.
It was now past seven, and the company Gulfstream, carrying Delroy Suarez and Nicky Baum all the way from Topeka, was right on time. The plane flared up and touched down like a leaf on a pond, flaps lowered and jets howling loud enough to rattle the windows, and they got up, thanked the sullen controller for his hospitality — getting a prolonged parting belch for their trouble — and were standing on the windblown tarmac at the end of the runway when the jet rocked to a stop fifty feet away and the side door popped open. Two men came down the folding gangway, both of them short, muscular, one darkly Hispanic, with a shaved head, the other a pale, pink-looking man with bright-red cheeks and a bit of a beer belly, both men wearing leather jackets, cowboy jeans, and dusty combat boots, both men carrying long military-issue rifle cases.
They saw Dalton waiting by the tower, his hair flying in the crosswind, his cowboy range jacket pulled in tight, and Fremont next to him, looking pinched and wary, his red down vest buttoned up tight and his arms crossed against his chest. They came across to meet them, the Hispanic man grinning broadly.
“Micah Dalton, as I live and breathe,” he said, his lively black eyes bright with good humor, his lean face creasing up as he smiled.
“Delroy,” said Dalton, genuinely pleased to see him, and grinned as he shook the man’s hands. “Always a pleasure,” and, with a little less warmth, as he turned to Nicky Baum, whose closed unwelcoming face had changed into a hard, suspicious, cold-eyed glare as he got closer to Willard Fremont, “And you, Nicky. How’s the wife and kids?”
“Last time I saw them they were fine, Micah. Who’s this?”
Dalton did the honors. Fremont was ready to be judged and excluded by these new arrivals, who, by the hard flat look of them, were not that long out of Army Special Forces. He was also somewhat reluctant to give up Dalton’s exclusive attention. He tried his best to be civil, but it wasn’t until they were all safely stuffed into the Crown Vic and rolling west along a bumpy two-lane goat track passing itself off as Wyoming State Highway 14 that he relaxed enough to comply with Dalton’s request to fill the men in on what had happened back at Pete Kearney’s place on the far side of the Bighorns.
Fremont told it straight, sparing no details.
When he was finished, both men sat in the back and stared blankly at Fremont for a full thirty seconds. Finally, Nicky Baum, a beefy pink-skinned man with pale-brown eyes and, of the two men, the one with the most pronounced air of latent aggression, sighed theatrically, and said, “Micah, this old fart actually reliable?”
Fremont, who had been preparing himself for precisely this, turned around and faced the road, his thin, sharp face hardening into a remote, cold glare. Dalton shook his head and sighed.
“Nicky, Willard here has seen more operational time than both of you put together. He’s been working this part of the country for twenty years, and before that he was NSA in Guam, working under Jack Stallworth. While you were still hoping to make third-string safety for the Nittany Lions, Willard was out here in the wild keeping your pimply teenage butt safe from America’s enemies. You can either find your manners, Nicky, and speak to my friend with respect, or you can go right back to Kansas.”