The Sundstroms' tools and equipment filled the shop, leaving only enough room for the stolen Firebird in the far bay that Slidell had expected at any moment. Overhead was a bank of fluorescent lights. Slidell was carried around a portable tool stand toward a drill press, a Sears Craftsman, with the motor housing and belt safety guard six feet above the floor on a column. A half-inch auger bit was in the chuck.
Nikolai Trusov had moved with the swiftness and skill of a man who had spent twenty years as a soldier. He had been almost out of the car before the first gasoline landed on the seat, and the flaming fuel had caught only a small patch of his trailing arm. He had dragged the nylon sports bag containing his rifle after him.
Trusov dropped Slidell, knocked off his cap and grabbed a fistful of his hair. Slidell shrieked as the Russian moved Slidell's head onto the press table below the auger bit. He held Slidell's head, right ear down against the table, and flicked on the engine switch. The drill press whirled. With his free hand, Trusov gripped the pilot-wheel feed and spun it. The drill's mounting collar and chuck brought the auger down.
Boyd Slidell saw it out of the corner of his eye. The giant's hand pinned Slidell's cheek and chin and temple painfully onto the table. The auger descended, whirling evilly, growing in Slidell's sight, coming down for him.
The auger's cutting edge bit into the hair of Slidell's right temple, twisting off the hair and spinning it around the shaft like spaghetti on a fork. The thief wailed, his eyes showing white all around. The bit dipped into skin. Blood rose on the auger's corkscrew blade, then fell away to soak Slidell's hair. Skin twirled up. Then came bits of gray matter, twisted up from the auger's point. Slidell screeched again. Brain worked its way out on the bit's blade. Slidell abruptly slumped, his limbs loose and his head pinned by the auger to the rigid table. His dead eyes were open. His tongue flopped out.
The Russian continued to turn the pilot-wheel feed, bringing the bit down all the way to the receiving hole in the table. Then he locked the tension knob which kept the auger in the down position. A gob of brain and bone had built up around the bit. Blood from the puncture dribbled down Slidell's face and across the table to drip to the floor.
Owen Gray would surely learn of this, of the terrible consequences of a meeting with the Russian. Trusov smiled and looked at the station's west wall, as if he could see through the wall and across the continent. He may have cared more about the drill press's effect on Gray than he did on the hapless victim pegged to the table.
Trusov glanced at his arm, at the slight burn above his wrist. He would have to get a new shirt. He turned away from the body and the drill press, slapping his hands together as if to rid them of dust.
He walked through the office and out to the service island, stepped around the blazing car, picked up his sports bag near a gas pump, and continued west into the night. He looked back at the garage, shook his head, and said to himself, "Crazy Americans."
Hobart is up the valley from Ketchum about as far as an ore team can travel without collapsing in the harnesses, which is why the first white man settled there in 1891, hoping to make his fortune watering and feeding mules. The town is on the Big Wood River at the confluence of Black Bear Creek. The town has 205 people or 212 people, depending on whether one drives in from the north or south. The Green River Ordinance is enforced either direction.
Only a handful of businesses remain, and one of them is the Right to Keep and Bear Arms Saloon, shortened to the Right Saloon by its patrons. At the turn of the century the building had been a bank, and the structure was ornamented along the roof line with embrasures resembling archers' loopholes. An Olympia Beer neon sign glowed in the window to the right of the door.
Owen Gray entered the saloon, and by instinct he stepped to one side until his eyes adjusted to the darkness. The stitches in his leg felt as if they were clawing at him. The saloon's east wall was dominated by a backbar of beveled mirrors and fluted walnut columns and topped by elaborate moldings. The backbar had been carved in New Orleans and brought up the Columbia and Snake rivers on a barge. On one of the backbar's shelves was a stuffed badger, its teeth bared and a claw raised. On another shelf were a cobra and a mongoose, the snake's coils wrapped tightly around the mongoose, and the mongoose's teeth sunk into the snake's neck, one of those taxidermal horrors sailors brought back from the Philippines at the end of World War Two. Trophies hung from the walls — the heads of buffalo, moose, bighorn sheep, and a mule deer. The trophies made the saloon seem crowded, even though the room was empty. The place smelled of cold cigarettes.
He steered around several tables, heading for the pay phone in the hallway to the rest rooms. The bartender emerged from the hallway wiping his hands on his apron. His plump face first registered curiosity at a stranger having found the tavern, then surprise and pleasure.
The bartender stuck out his hand. "I'll be damned, Owen. It's you. Welcome home."
Gray tried not to wince as the bartender vigorously squeezed and pumped his hand. Blisters on his palm and fingers from the axe handle were red and leaking. Gray exchanged a few words with the bartender, a friend of his father's named Ray Miller. The bartender's weak chin was lost under his damp and wagging lower lip. His porcine eyes sparkled as he spoke. He had known Gray all Gray's life.
Miller said, "I hope you're in the Tooths for a happier reason than last time, Owen."
"A little R and R is all," Gray replied. "I stopped phone service out at the place when Dad died, Ray. I need to use yours."
Miller thumbed the pay phone behind him. "Let me post you to a beer when you're done."
Figuring the Right Saloon was not making any profit when its patrons chatted on the phone, Ray Miller had placed the phone only four feet off the floor and had shortened the cable to the handset so that a conversation of more than four minutes resulted in neck and back pain, usually requiring a beer to assuage. Gray punched in his calling card number, and a few moments later Pete Coates was on the line.
When Gray was a boy, telephone connections from the Saw-tooths to the outside world were scratchy. He was still tempted to yell into the phone during any long-distance call. But satellites and fiber optics had come to the mountains. Coates sounded like he was next door.
The detective asked, "How you doing?"
"Better."
"Anna Renthal asked about you. Wants to know when you'll be back."
"Frank Luca gave me as much time off as I need," Gray said. "I don't know when I'll be back."
"Can I be blunt?"
"Anything else and I'd be startled," Gray replied.
"You didn't go back to Idaho to kill yourself, did you? Commit suicide like you tried in Vietnam?"
"No."
"Is that a promise?"
"I'm stronger now."
"Where are your kids?" Coates asked.
"I'd trust you with my life, Pete, but the fewer people who know where the twins and John are, the better I'll feel."
"But they aren't near you, are they? Now that we know what Trusov is capable of, it'd be too dangerous for your kids."
"They're safe." The children were with Jeff Moon and his wife in Ketchum, dropped off on the drive from the Boise airport. His eyes closed, Gray pinched the bridge of his nose. "I thought we had him, Pete."
"It was a slam dunk, looked like to me."
"Maybe your first reaction was right, that the police and FBI should have just swarmed the building."