The Old Man was stunned. That message could have been left only by Stewie Woods.
The Mercedes topped a hill on the highway. The Bighorn Mountains loomed ahead; they were light blue, peaked, and crisp in the morning sun. The small town of Saddlestring, from this distance, looked like a case’s worth of glinting, broken bottles strewn across the hardpan at the base of the foothills.
23
Sheridan Pickett, still in her pajamas, was nestled in a pile of couch cushions in front of the television when Maxine began barking at the front door. This ruined Sheridan’s perfect Saturday morning. She tossed candy wrappers and a half-eaten bag of chips aside and scrambled out of the cushions, wrapping herself in her terrycloth bathrobe as someone knocked heavily and then rang the doorbell.
Sheridan had been instructed never to open the door for strangers and she was rarely tempted. Ever since the man had broken into their house and hurt her mother she had been especially cautious.
People often came to the door looking for her dad, because his office was in the house. Sometimes they were ranchers who wanted to file damage claims or complain about hunters or fishermen, and sometimes they were hunters or fishermen who wanted to complain about ranchers. Her dad always asked people to call first and set an appointment, but sometimes they just showed up. Since it was her dad’s job to serve the public, her parents had told her that if she was home alone and someone stopped by, she should be polite and get a telephone number where her dad could call them.
She cinched her robe tightly and approached the window. Pulling aside the front window curtains, Sheridan peeked outside.
An older, portly, pear-shaped man stood on the front porch. He had a round, full, red face and was not shaved. He wore a low-crown gray cowboy hat, and a weathered canvas ranch jacket and blue jeans. Scuffed lace-up outfitter boots with riding heels poked out from the bottom of his Wranglers. Sheridan always noted the boots men wore because she thought that boots, more than anything, defined who a man was.
The man stood looking at the door, his shoulders slumped, his head tipped forward, as if he were very tired. She looked out through the yard and could see the roof of a car over the fence but couldn’t tell what kind of car it was. Sensing her eyes on him, the man turned his head and saw Sheridan looking out at him. He smiled self-consciously at her. Sheridan thought he had a friendly face and that he looked like somebody’s grandfather.
Nevertheless, she made sure the door chain was secured before opening the door the several inches the chain would allow.
“Is your father the game warden in this area?”
There was a wooden sign out front on the fence that said exactly that, but oftentimes strangers either didn’t see it or chose not to acknowledge it.
“Yes, he is,” Sheridan said. “He’s not here right now but he’ll be back soon.” This is what she was supposed to say, that he would be back soon. Sheridan’s mother had drilled this into her, this deliberate vagueness.
The man seemed to be thinking. His brow furrowed and he stroked his chin.
“It’s important,” he said, looking up. “How soon will he be back?”
Sheridan shrugged.
“Do you think it will be in a few minutes or a few hours?”
Sheridan said she didn’t know for sure.
The man rocked back on his boot heels and dug his hands into the front of his jeans pockets. He looked annoyed and troubled, but not necessarily with Sheridan as much as with the circumstances in general. She had not been much help to him, but she would only say what her parents had told her to, nothing more.
“I can give you his cell phone number,” Sheridan offered. “Or if it’s an emergency you can call the 911 number and ask the dispatcher to radio him.” She wanted to be helpful.
The man didn’t respond.
“I suppose you can’t let me come in and wait for him?”
“Nope,” Sheridan said flatly.
The man smiled slightly. It was clearly the answer he expected.
“If I leave him a note, would you make sure he gets it?”
“Sure.”
“Back in a minute.”
The man turned and walked through the picket fence gate toward his car. Sheridan went into her dad’s office and got a business card from the holder on his desk. She waited at the front door. Then she saw the man emerge from his car. As he came through the gate he was licking the back of an envelope.
“Here’s his card,” Sheridan offered, exchanging it for the envelope through the crack in the door.
The man’s handwriting on the envelope was wavery and poor but it said “Game Warden,” followed by the word “Important,” which was underlined three times. She read the return address on the envelope.
“Are you a lawyer?” she asked. The printing was for the law offices of Whelchel, Bushko, and Marchand, Attorneys at Law, in Denver, Colorado.
When the man looked at her there was something very sad in his eyes.
“No, I’m not. I just borrowed the paper.”
“Okay.”
“Make sure you give that to him the minute you see him, little lady,” he said as he backed off of the porch.
“My name’s Sheridan Pickett.”
He stopped before opening the gate and looked over his shoulder.
“My name is John Coble.”
Sheridan shut the door and threw the bolt home as he slowly walked to his car and got in. Through the windshield, she watched him as he collapsed into the driver’s seat. He seemed exhausted. Then he rubbed his eyes with both of his hands, ran his fingers through his gray hair, and reached forward and started the engine. He backed up and drove away on the Bighorn Road.
Sheridan took the envelope into her dad’s office and put it on his computer keyboard where he would see it right away.
John Coble, the Old Man, felt remarkably good about what he had just done. It was the first thing he had felt really good about in two months. It was possible, he hoped, that he had set some wheels in motion. The girl had been suspicious of him, which was a sign of both intelligence and smart parents. She was a good girl, it seemed to him.
But there was more to be done. His next trick would be harder, and much more unpleasant.
Luckily, he knew these mountains well, and after seeing the crude map that Charlie had pulled from Tod Marchand’s pack, he had a very good idea of where Stewie Woods’s cabin would be.
24
Joe was approaching the grade that would lead to switchbacks up the mountain, when he looked in his rearview mirror and saw the horse trailer listing to the side. There was Lizzie, who liked to thrust her entire head out of the false window opening in the trailer as if she was desperate to force air in through her nostrils, leaning to the left.
He pulled over onto the shoulder and got out. Curls of acrid dark smoke rose from the flattened right tire. He’d been riding a flat for a few miles. The bearings were white hot and smoking in their sleeves of steel and the asbestos brake pads had sizzled and melted.
He unloaded Lizzie and picketed her in tall grass, which she munched as if she had never eaten before. With her weight out of the trailer, Joe assembled the jack and raised the trailer into the air to change the tire. He barely even noticed the green Mercedes SUV that roared by him on the highway.
John Coble saw the horse trailer and the familiar pronghorn antelope decal on the door of the pickup as he passed and he took his foot off of the accelerator.
It had to be the game warden, he thought.
Coble studied the reflection in his rearview mirror as the Mercedes began to slow. The driver of the truck was in the ditch next to the trailer, working the handle on the jack. Behind the man, a buckskin horse was staked down, contently grazing.
Coble looked at his watch. It was approaching eleven. He had no idea how far behind him Charlie Tibbs was but he still expected to see the black Ford at any moment.
He had already wasted time in Saddlestring finding the game warden’s house. He had left
his message for the game warden, done his good deed. Coble had been a little reluctant to meet the game warden face to face in the first place, having no idea how that would go.
Coble made the decision to continue on to the cabin. He pressed on the accelerator and his head snapped back into the headrest as the Mercedes rocketed up the base of the mountain.
Three miles past Crazy Woman Creek, Joe slowed and pulled off the highway onto a gravel two-track. The thick lodgepole pine trees formed a high canopy above, casting deep shadows over the road. The crude map he had drawn from Marybeth’s directions was on the console between the seats. He had never been on this particular road before, but knew it led through the National Forest to several sections of state and private land where there were old hunting lodges and mining claim cabins. As he drove further up the mountain, the road worsened, pocked now with spurs of granite that slowed him down considerably.
Because of the thick trees, Joe was surprised when he crested the mountain and a massive valley opened up before him. He stopped before he had completely emerged from the forest, put the truck in park, and grabbed his binoculars from his pack on the seat beside him.
It was a beautiful valley, pulsing with summer mountain colors. The two-track wound down the mountain and along the length of the valley floor before disappearing into a grove of shimmering aspen. The groves fingered their way down the slope to access a narrow serpentine creek. On Joe’s left, to the south, the mountainside was rugged, marked by cream-colored granite buttes that jutted from the summer grass like knuckles of a fist straining against silk. Between the knuckles were dark stands of spruce in isolated pockets.
A shadow from a single high cumulus cloud scudded slowly across the valley from east to west, its front end climbing up tree trunks while its mass engulfed entire stands of timber, darkening them, before sliding back over the top of the grove to hug the ground again.
On his right, to the north, the mountain was heavily forested. A few grassy parks could be seen through breaks in the timber where tree branches opened up. Matching the terrain to a worn topo map he pulled from his map file, Joe guessed that the lodges and cabins were tucked into the trees to the north.
Through the binoculars he could find only one structure, an ancient log cabin that was leaning so far to one side that it looked like it could collapse any minute. The door gaped open and the windows were gone. This was obviously not the place.
Joe eased down the road into the valley with his hand-drawn map on his lap. Whatever would happen this afternoon would happen here in these mountains and forests, he thought. Either Stewie would be waiting for Marybeth in the cabin he had described to her or this was a hoax of some kind. And if Stewie was in fact alive, what would his reaction be when instead of his old girlfriend, he met the girlfriend’s husband?
Joe scanned the trees and undergrowth that lined the edge of the road, looking for an old, lightly used road that supposedly broke off from the two-track and headed north to the top of the mountain. The road would be blocked by trees that had been dropped across it, the directions said, so it was necessary to approach the cabin on foot.
As he descended further into the valley, Joe watched the signal strength on his cell phone dwindle to nothing. He tried his radio to contact the dispatcher and heard only static in return. He was effectively isolated and out of contact, and would remain so until he eventually emerged from the mountain valley.
It was warmer on the valley floor and Joe unrolled his window. His slow drive toward the aspen was accompanied by the low hum of insects hovering over the carpet of newly opened wildflowers, with spasmodic percussion from small rocks being squeezed and popped free under the weight of his tires. He noticed, as a matter of habit from patrolling, that there was already a fresh tire track on the road—which was unusual in such a remote area.
He followed a road through the trees where the noon sun dappled the aspen leaves, looking for a turnoff to the right.
When he saw the glint of steel and glass—a vehicle—deep in the Caragana brush through the passenger window, he immediately tensed up, but kept driving slowly as if he had seen nothing at all.
A half-mile from the vehicle, the aspen began to thin, and Joe eased to a stop off the road and turned off his motor. If the person in the car was trying to hide from him, Joe expected to hear a car start up and retreat up the mountain. But it was silent.
Quietly, Joe got out of his pickup. He slipped his .12 gauge shotgun from behind the seat, loaded it with three double-ought buckshot shells, and filled his shirt pocket with additional shells. Then he eased the pickup door shut.
Lizzie anxiously backed out of the trailer, and he was grateful she didn’t slam a shoe against the metal floorboard or whinny when she was free. He mounted, secured his hat tightly on his head, slid the shotgun into the saddle scabbard so only the butt of it showed, and nudged Lizzie back toward the road. He kept her in the trees with the road on his right, and she picked her way back to where he had seen the vehicle.
Joe narrowed his eyes as they entered the alcove where the old road was and leaned forward in the saddle to avoid a chest-high branch. It was quiet here, away from the stream, and Lizzie’s footfalls were the only sound. He was tense, his senses tingling, and he could feel his heart beat in his chest.
As he approached, Joe could see that the car was a dark green, late model SUV with Colorado plates. Someone had broken leafy aspen branches and laced the hood and windshield with them in an attempt to hide the car. Joe recognized the familiar Mercedes logo on the grille. Because he couldn’t call a 10-28 in to the dispatcher, he noted the license plate number in his notebook for later, when he would have a radio signal again.
He dismounted, reins in hand, and peered through the branches at the leather interior. There was an open backpack on the front seat, but there was no one in the car. He felt the hood with the palm of his hand—it was still warm. That puzzled Joe because he had assumed that the vehicle belonged to Stewie, or whoever was posing as Stewie, and therefore that it would have been parked for some time. But the cuts on the branches were fresh as well. Joe squatted and confirmed that the vehicle’s tire tread matched the tread pattern he had noticed out on the road.
Joe stepped back and, with his eyes, followed the old road through the trees until it ended beneath two massive spruce trees that had fallen—or were dropped—over it. A single footprint in the loose dirt of the old road pointed up the mountain. This had to be the place, he said to himself. But someone had gotten here before him.
Joe mounted Lizzie and nudged her out of the shaded alcove into the grassy park where the old road led. Riding parallel to the two downed trees, he finally reached their crowns, then turned Lizzie to go back down, along the other side of the trees, to get back on the road.
He wasn’t sure what he should do now, how he should proceed. His original plan was that he would ride up to the cabin, find out who was in it, and make a report. But circumstances had changed. The SUV meant that a third party had entered the picture. He was out of radio contact and the threat that he could be entering a situation, alone, that he wasn’t prepared to handle was very real. Everything he had ever learned told him he needed backup and that the smart thing to do right now was to retreat back to the road, drive to the top, and call the dispatcher for assistance.
That’s when he heard a truck rumbling down the two-track.
Crouched behind the wall-like branches of the downed trees that blocked the road, Joe waited for the vehicle to drive by. He saw flashes through the trees as it came down the road from the east, the same direction Joe had come. When it passed by the alcove he saw it in full: a sleek, massive black pickup with dark windows, pulling a horse trailer. Then, almost immediately after it passed him, Joe heard the low hiss of brakes and saw brake lights flash through the brush. The truck was backing up.
Joe turned to check on Lizzie and saw that she was feeding on grass just behind him. He hoped against hope she would keep her head down. If she heard
or sensed another horse in the trailer, it would be just like her to raise her head up and call to it. Horses were like that, mares especially, he had noted. They wanted to connect with other horses.
“I’m sorry, girlie,” Joe whispered in her ear as he unlashed a coil of rope from the saddle horn and slipped it down over her head as she ate. Then he circled the coil around her front legs with his right hand, caught the loop with his left, and pulled it hard and fast. With a double hitch, he tied her head down against her ankles so she couldn’t raise it.
Lizzie’s nostrils flared and her eyes flashed with white. Joe tried to keep her calm, patting her shoulder and whispering to her, so she wouldn’t panic and try to buck the rope off. He could feel her muscles tense beneath his hand, but kept talking to her in what he hoped was a soothing voice, telling her he was sorry but it was for her own good, telling her that there would be some good grass to eat at the end of the day.
She calmed, exhaling with resignation, and Joe briefly closed his eyes with relief.
When he turned back to the tree and the alcove beyond it, he saw that a tall man wearing a gray Stetson had emerged from the black Ford and was now studying the SUV.
Joe considered calling out to him, but something about the man precluded it. Joe watched as the man approached the vehicle, much as Joe had, but the man did it looking down the sights of a semi-automatic pistol he held stiffly in front of him. Joe watched as the man circled the SUV, nudging branches away so he could see inside. The man was now on the driver’s side of the car. If the man were to look up, Joe thought, he would see Joe in the trees. But the man didn’t look up because he was busy smashing in the driver’s side window.
The Stetson twisted and lowered as the man reached inside the car toward the dashboard. Then Joe heard a small pop and saw the hood of the SUV open.