It was actually a beautiful meadow covered with dry grass waving gently in the wind. Garrett had begun giving directions to Hardy.
“Here’s the letter. It’s addressed to your sheriff. The other one with the stamp is for my sister. Will you mail it for me?” he asked. Hardy nodded and put the letters in the pocket of his fleece vest.
Mesa took off her seat belt to lean forward, and get the wind on her face. She tried to plead with Garrett one last time. “I don’t understand this,” she yelled to him. “You know the FBI will come after you. You’re pulling the same stunt Austin did after he killed your father.”
Garrett responded with a grumble. “I guess that’s what the papers will say. You can tell them it wasn’t intentional. I just can’t go back to my old life. I used to think that the day I killed Lowell Austin, I would be free. I thought getting revenge would fix whatever had felt broken in me since the day my dad died. But nothing’s changed, not yet anyway. Now, all that seems to feel tolerable is this. Space, lots and lots of it.” And he gestured toward the mountains.
“I don’t know how far I’ll get with these maps,” he said and then reached inside his jacket pocket and showed her a worn gold compass case, “but I have this. It belonged to my dad. I’ll have a lot of time alone to think about what to do. Maybe that’s what I need. Who knows, I might turn myself in someday. If I do, I’ll look you up.”
He pulled off his headphones, opened the door, and stepped out onto the hard pack. Hardy pulled the passenger seat forward so that Garrett could reach the backpack and coat in back. With the engine still idling, as soon as Garrett pulled the gear out and closed the door, the plane began a slow turn back the way it came.
“We have just enough fuel to get back to Butte,” Hardy said. “Hopefully, we can beat the weather,” he said, looking at the fast-moving clouds. “Buckle yourself back in.”
They had reached the bottom of the meadow, and Hardy turned the plane again so they could take off into the wind. As they began their takeoff, Mesa looked out her window. Garrett Birch had mounted the pack on his back and was walking toward the reservoir.
If he maximized his survival skills and stuck to the backcountry, he might actually make it through Montana’s five hundred mile, amorphous border into Canada. Making minimal contact in Montana’s small towns, the mentally deteriorating Unabomber had lived at the edge of the national forest, avoiding authorities for decades. And Garrett wasn’t crazy.
As they flew by, Garrett lifted a hand and waved, as if they were good neighbors. A ray of sunlight hit the window and a tear welled up in the corner of Mesa’s eye. She told herself it was the intense brightness and that’s all it was.
Chapter 23
Chance leaned on the corner of the desk in the pilot’s lounge, drinking coffee and checking the sky between sips. Deep gray, storm clouds filled the sky to the south and the wind had picked up. The rest of the valley was overcast, but the clouds were high. It was nearly six o’clock.
The FBI and Solheim had returned to the police station. One of Hennessey’s guys, who had taken a statement from Chance, had just left. Suddenly aware of the silence, an unfamiliar feeling of loneliness engulfed him.
Twenty minutes before, the radio had crackled, and Chance had jumped out of his skin. It was a local freight plane out of Billings calling in its approach. But for a moment, Chance thought it was Hardy.
He couldn’t explain why, but he had this feeling they were coming back. As soon as the detective left, Chance had called Adrienne and told her everything. He could hear the worry in her voice, but she had reassured him. “Stay there,” she said. “The radio is their first line of communication. Your voice will mean a lot.” And so she had given him the go-ahead he needed to maintain the watch.
Tyler came in through the hangar. Dressed in Carhartt coveralls permeated with the smell of airplane fuel, he had been refueling one of the helicopters when the police arrived. He walked over to Chance, handing him a pair of binoculars. “Hardy may be a player most of the time, but he would never let anything happen to your sister. You know that, right?”
Chance sighed and agreed, putting the glasses to his eyes. Hardy wasn’t dumb. If anything, he had a frustrated intellect that had never found an outlet. When he felt like he was being taken advantage of, that was what usually led to his recklessness. Like stealing someone’s plane. “I know it. He’ll be there for her when she needs him.”
Then the radio began to crackle, and they both jumped a foot. “Mayday, Mayday. This is Cessna 734 Zulu Tango inbound through Gunsight.”
Chance whirled the binoculars to the north end of the valley at a spot in the mountains that resembled the vee-shaped notch on a gun barrel. Coming over Gunsight was a natural way to line up with the Butte Airport, which rested smack in the middle of Summit Valley.
“Losing altitude, running on fumes.” Hardy was talking fast. “Tyler, are you there? I’m in trouble. We may not make the airport. Rustle up the fire brigade.”
Chance reached the radio first, grabbing and almost dropping the hand mike. “Advise on passengers.”
“Just me and Mesa in good shape so far. The engine is starting to sputter. Christ, I’m gonna have to bring her down right now.”
* * *
Hardy had come due west across the East Ridge, trying to conserve fuel, crossing at Elk Park. The winds had begun to buffet them as they followed Interstate 15 back into Butte. Mesa had done her best to focus on the terrain ahead, trying not to panic. She’d said her ABC’s backwards each time her anxiety began to overwhelm her, a trick a therapist at Damascus had taught her. She began to think she was home free when she saw the lights of the city through the pass.
They had just flown over the top of the massive open mining pit, a surreal view. From the air, the giant blue and white shovels and the haul trucks filled with molybdenum ore looked like a child’s toys left in an enormous sandbox.
Then she heard Hardy radioing the airport. The sound of Chance’s voice on the other end brought a sense of relief. They would soon be on the ground safe.
And then the engine began to sputter. Another cough and then, just like that, nothing but a deafening silence. For a moment, Mesa thought the plane was standing still.
Then she realized the engine had stalled. They were going to drop from the sky. She felt her lungs turn to stone. She couldn’t breathe. She wanted to tear off her seat belt and run—run as far and as fast as she could. She began reaching around the cabin, her arms flailing until she realized there was no place to go.
Then she heard Hardy’s voice. Maybe he had been talking all the time, but in her panic, she had heard nothing. Without the roar of the engine now, the sound of his voice pulled her in.
“I’m coming in dead-stick” she heard Hardy say. He sounded amazingly calm.
“Roger that,” Chance said. “Bring her down easy.” Then to Tyler, “Call the Fire Department.”
Mesa could not bear to look at the ground. She closed her eyes and thought of Chance, tall and strong, coming to get her, even though his voice sounded like it was coming through a tin can a long way away. She could feel the plane banking to the right like the hawks she always watched at the cemetery when she went to visit her mother’s grave.
She heard Hardy’s voice again. “We’re coming down on Continental,” he said quietly.
If Hardy could be so calm, then maybe they wouldn’t die. And so she found herself bargaining for life. She closed her eyes tighter and prayed. “Dear God, please don’t let me die. If I get out of this plane alive, I swear, I swear I won’t—I’ll never leave Butte again.”
She could see the chain-linked fence of the mine’s property bordered by Continental Drive, a four-lane street that circled the east side of the city. The plane was gliding silently down, the terraced edges of the mine pit beneath.
On the north end of Continental sat a section of empty property, almost as big as a city block, opened up when houses had been demolished as part of the Ana
conda Company’s pit mine operation. If they could avoid traffic, which would surely try to avoid them, maybe they had a chance, even if they missed the road.
Mesa could hear Hardy muttering to himself, “Easy baby, easy.” It sounded almost sexual. “Come on, come on,” he coaxed. “You can do—oh…shit!”
A scream stuck in Mesa’s throat, dry as trail dust, and she buried her head in her hands.
Chapter 24
When the Cessna hit the ground, they bounced so hard Mesa felt her teeth puncture her bottom lip, quickly followed by the salty warm taste of blood. She welcomed the pain, a distraction from the disaster unfolding before her. The plane bounced again and then swirled and skidded. In the awful silence, the one sound she heard clearly was Hardy pumping like a thirsty man on the foot controls.
She kept waiting for the final impact, but it never came. When the plane finally stopped and Mesa opened her eyes, they were nose up, the Belmont head frame at the intersection of Continental and Mercury Street in front of them, its decorative red lights illuminating just at that moment.
She could not tell how much time had passed. But later she would say that the length of the flight from Elk Park pass to a safe landing was her definition of eternity.
Hardy did not move for some time. She could hear sirens in the distance. “Hardy,” she said. “Are you all right?”
“He said, ‘There’s always an easy way and a hard way.’ That’s all he said.”
“That’s all who said?” Mesa asked, wondering if Hardy was in shock.
“Austin. I was complaining about a headwind being so strong. That’s what he said. That’s when Garrett killed him.”
* * *
Tyler held the binoculars, so he had gotten the best view of Hardy’s emergency landing, at least the beginning of it. Once the plane was out of sight, Chance had wrestled with what to do. He knew a stalled engine didn’t kill pilots. Panic did. He wanted to stay in contact with Hardy on the radio, but the urge to get to the plane was overwhelming.
After what seemed like time without end, they heard Hardy who sounded half in shock on the radio with his gallows humor. “Cessna 734 Zulu Tango requests instructions for taxiing.”
They ran to Chance’s Land Rover and then did some low level flying themselves. They covered the six miles from the airport to the Belmont mine in less than ten minutes, honking their way through three traffic lights.
By the time the Land Rover pulled up, a fireman was helping Mesa out of the plane. Chance ran to her and they hugged and cried and laughed. Chance even hugged Hardy before he had to limp off with Sheriff Solheim, who had taken him into custody.
Chance and Tyler surveyed the landing site with sullied admiration. Once again, Hardy, the sketchy bastard, had succeeded where probably no one else could.
The plane had hit the road and then skidded into the adjacent, vacant field, one wing shearing off a recently planted chokecherry sapling. But Hardy had masterfully kept the plane from sliding farther into the grassland, where a heap of rusty mining equipment could have stopped them cold and hard. Instead, he managed to turn the plane back up the hill where it careened ninety degrees when the left landing gear hit a ditch. In the end, the plane had not even been damaged.
“Surviving two crash landings in one week,” Tyler said. “That’s some kind of record, don’t you think?”
“Mesa’s back in one piece,” Chance said. “That’s the only kind of flying I care about.”
* * *
The storm broke as Chance drove Mesa to St. James. While she spent the next two hours getting the once-over in the ER, sixty-mile-an-hour winds, hammering rain, and marble-sized hail downed trees and utility lines all over Butte, and created minor flooding in the very part of Continental Drive where Hardy had landed the plane. Chance could not bring him himself to think what Hardy would have done with that plane if the storm had hit an hour earlier.
Other than her swollen lip, and bruises on her shoulder and across her chest from the seat belt, Mesa was unharmed. Chance had taken her home to Nan, where he stayed with her well into the evening. Adrienne had warned him to watch for signs of shock. Nan had taken all the excitement with relative calm, making a pot of tea with plenty of milk and sugar and insisting that Mesa drink several cups.
Despite Nana’s faith in the recuperative powers of milky tea, Chance spiked the last cup with brandy. Mesa had gone to bed and slept, without so much as a whimper, let alone a nightmare, until well past the departure time for her flight to Portland on Friday morning.
Once she was fully awake, she had called Derek. Prepared for a barrage of questions, he was in a meeting with the publisher and could not be interrupted. She left a rambling message on his voice mail. He would be upset, but she knew Pacifica would have no trouble finding other candidates.
Afterward she called Irita, who had already gotten the scoop the night before from Chance. “He damn well knew better than to let me hear it from anybody else,” she said, then paused for a minute and said in a tentative voice, “Does this mean you’re taking your first, official sick day?”
Mesa smiled and winced as her sore lip cracked. “I guess so. And Irita, about the Portland job,” Mesa said. “I deep-sixed that whole plan, okay?”
“Whatever you say, boss” Irita said. “Guess I better dust off Erin’s story and your photo for the editorial page this week.”
“Right. And that Portland conversation?” Mesa said. “We never had it, so not a word, to Chance or my grandmother, ever, okay?”
“I’m going to my grave with it,” Irita said. “You take ’er easy and I’ll see you on Monday.”
This time Mesa had the feeling Irita would keep her word.
But instead of going into the office on Monday, Mesa paid Kathy DiNunzio another visit. She wanted to hand-deliver Garrett’s letter, which Hardy had given her just before he had been taken into police custody.
Kathy opened the letter, and Mesa turned to go. But Kathy, her eyes filled with tears, asked her to stay. Mesa made coffee, and they spent most of the morning talking about Garrett and Mesa’s last conversation.
In the letter, Garrett wrote that he didn’t want his sister to think that he blamed her in any way for bringing Lowell Austin to Butte. He knew they both had their reasons for doing what they had done, even though neither might ever understand. The important thing was that she know he still loved her, and that he promised she and the kids would hear from him again one day.
Mesa had begun writing a story about Austin and Donovan Birch. She had spent most of Friday afternoon reading the file of faded news clippings Kathy had given her. It was through one of them that Mesa began to understand what Hardy had said.
According to the defendant’s testimony, Donovan Birch had threatened Austin, saying “There’s an easy way and a hard way, makes no difference to me.” The warden was spoiling for a fight, Austin claimed.
When a reporter interviewed Mrs. Birch about that testimony, she maintained that in her fifteen years of marriage, she had never heard her husband use such a phrase. Mesa concluded that the expression had been one of Lowell’s instead. Those indifferent words repeated by Austin, and remembered over a lifetime of loss had triggered Garrett’s deadly reckoning.
Mesa finished her story by midnight. “A Legacy of Revenge” would run as her first feature in the Mining City Messenger. She thought about sending a copy to Derek to discuss when he was ready to speak to her again.
That weekend, Butte awakened to snow on the East Ridge. The first snowfall always generated an air of anticipation, especially when it came early which would mean plenty of game headed to lower altitude just in time for hunting season. The valley saw a flake or two, but the weather report had predicted six to ten inches at higher elevations for the next few days.
Each morning when Mesa walked to work, she would glance toward the mountains and think about Garrett Birch. The search for him was more than a week old, but the snow would slow it down. She had no way of knowing
if his survival instincts were as good in the mountains as they had been in Afghanistan. In the spring, shed hunters looking for antlers often came across human remains. She could only hope this would not be how Garrett would end up.
She and Chance had gone together to see Hardy, who was now a guest in the Silver Bow county jail awaiting extradition to Utah. He would face grand larceny charges for the theft of the Cessna. Sheriff Solheim had conferred with Layton James. If Hardy agreed to plead guilty and make restitution, he had a chance to be paroled without serving any time, but that would mean he would have to stay in Utah.
Hardy had changed, that was certain. Mesa couldn’t be sure exactly what had done it—seeing what had happened to Garrett Birch, or surviving another plane crash. Either way, Hardy seemed older and wiser.
On Sunday morning, Nana went to church with Philip Northey. Mesa begged off. Instead, she drove out to Mount Moriah cemetery, which had once been the edge of town but now rested quietly between uptown and the flat.
For some time, she sat on the concrete curbing around the Ducharme family plot where her mother and her grandfather were buried. She watched the black and white magpies hopping from gravestone to gravestone, and a Red-tailed Hawk circling above.
The cloudless, cobalt skies were the ideal advertisement for Big Sky country. Even though it was barely sixty degrees, the bright sunshine warmed Mesa. The wind was gusting, and she removed several pinecones that had fallen onto the burial plot. Finally, she began walking back to the car. It was then she saw Chance cycling toward her up the cemetery path, his red and white cycling shirt dazzling in the sunlight.
When he reached her, he took off his helmet and wiped the sweat from his brow. “Adrienne saw the Blazer parked outside the cemetery gate and wondered if maybe you were here.” He got off his bike and walked alongside her. “I think we should talk about the Messenger.”
“Is this where you tell me you’re pulling out of the newspaper business altogether?” Mesa said, teasing him.
“Nothing like that,” he said, his voice serious. “Just the opposite. I know you coming back to Butte was mostly because of the pressure I put on you. That was my mistake, and a big one. If you want to go back to your old job, I’ll understand. I’ll work with Irita and Nan and we’ll get along. It won’t be the same without you, but it will have to be good enough.”