Thug One walked to the foot of the rumpled bed and stood with his back to Nate.
“Put your hands behind your back and don’t turn around,” Nate said.
Because he was so muscle-bound through the shoulders and lats, Thug One could barely reach backward. Nate looped a zip tie around Thug One’s wrists and wrenched it tight, pulling the man’s hands together.
“That hurts,” Thug One said through clenched teeth.
“It’s supposed to,” Nate said, backing away and closing the door tight. He slid the glue gun out of his pack and sealed it. The fumes were sharp and acrid in the closed hallway.
Nate grimaced and thought, Boxer shorts and a shoulder holster?
He paused before going back into the great room, listening closely for any stirring upstairs. How could Scoggins have slept through the door chime, the broken bottle, and the conversation?
• • •
NATE WORKED FAST, cognizant of the three sleeping thugs in the guesthouse, the couple in the cottage, and Thug One fuming in his room. He ran down the hallway into the security room and located the Mac Pro server the technician used for the outside surveillance network. After yanking out all of the cords, he carried the machine back into the great room and unfurled a military-style body bag from his pack and stuffed it inside.
He left the body bag open.
Nate stood in the middle of the room and looked up at the four closed doors along the walkway and wondered which one Henry Scoggins slept behind. He could try them one by one.
Or . . .
The incredible BOOM of Nate’s gun was concussive in the closed house. The .50 caliber slug blew through the chain that held the elk antler chandelier aloft, and he stepped aside as it crashed to the floor.
Out in the compound, he visualized the three other thugs awakening from their stupor, having heard the shot and the crash. He guessed the cook had rolled over in her bed and roused her husband at the sound. Thug One must be glaring at his closed door, guessing what had happened on the other side and wondering if he’d ever again land a personal security job.
Nate stepped back into the dark vestibule. What happened next was important. He couldn’t kill an unarmed man—that was the twist. It was the reason he’d created the distraction instead of searching for Scoggins room by room.
He expected Scoggins to come rushing through one of the doors. Instead, there was an angry shout.
“Jolovich, what the hell just happened?”
So Thug One was Jolovich, Nate thought.
“Jolovich, goddamn you—you woke me up. What were you doing? Cleaning your damned gun again?”
Nate determined the voice was coming from one of the doors on the east side.
“Jolovich?” This time, there was a hint of panic with the anger.
Scoggins threw open an east door and staggered out to the railing. His sleep mask was pushed up on his forehead and he was in the process of digging a foam earplug out of his right ear—the reason he hadn’t heard the door chime. He wore the open robe Nate had seen him in earlier, and his thin legs and basketball-sized naked belly were shockingly white.
As Scoggins clutched the railing, Nate noted how the robe sagged more on the right than the left because of something heavy in the pocket.
“Jolovich, where the hell are you? Peterson?”
The technician must be Peterson, Nate thought. He stepped out into the dim great room.
When Scoggins saw him, he instinctively did a little knee-dip of surprise.
Scoggins fired questions: “Who the hell are you? How did you get in here? Where’s Jolovich?”
“Nate Romanowski. Used the keypad. Hiding.”
“Hiding?”
“It’s tough to find good help these days.”
“But . . .” Scoggins sputtered, gesturing toward the security room down the hallway.
“Peterson isn’t doing so well, either,” Nate said.
Scoggins shook his head, puzzled. “Why are you here?”
Nate said, “Guess.” He raised his weapon and said, “Come with me.”
Scoggins shook his head. “No.”
“Then you’ll die where you stand.”
Scoggins started to argue, then narrowed his eyes and squinted down through the dim light. Nate guessed all he could see was the gun.
“I can pay you more than they pay you,” Scoggins said.
“I’m sure you can.”
“Are you a reasonable man?”
“Never have been,” Nate said. “Now come down.”
Scoggins sighed and groaned and slowly made his way down the stairs. He was wheezing from the exertion, and when he got close Nate was shocked by how small and froglike he was just a few feet away. The sleeves on Scoggins’s robe were long and hung past his hands, and he kept his arms at his sides. As the man passed, Nate again noted the weight pulling down the material of the robe from the right pocket.
“Are you going to let me get dressed, at least?”
“No.”
“Jesus Fucking Christ,” Scoggins said, looking up toward the ceiling. “Which one of my enemies put you up to this?”
Nate ignored the question and prodded Scoggins with the muzzle of his gun, then followed him through the vestibule and outside. Nate paused on the porch while Scoggins walked a few steps ahead and fumbled for the ties of his robe against the night chill.
“It’s fuckin’ freezing out here,” Scoggins said, cinching his robe with his back to Nate, but actually reaching for his semiautomatic pistol in his pocket. He turned clumsily with the gun raised and Nate shot him in the heart. The impact lifted the man completely off his feet, and he collapsed in a half-naked tangle. The gun skittered across the flagstone portico.
• • •
HE DRAGGED THE BODY BAG with Scoggins, the server, and the pistol around the side of the house. Scoggins didn’t weigh as much as he looked, and the nylon of the bag sizzled along the manicured grass toward the river. In the distance behind him, Nate could hear shouting and pounding from the three thugs trying to get out of the guest cabin. Other voices—from the cook and her husband—melded with the noise. Jolovich remained in his room and stayed quiet.
“I can’t get the door open!” a man’s voice shouted from the compound.
“Don’t you think we know that, old man?” one of the thugs yelled back.
A woman’s voice: “Go find Jolovich, Ron.”
Ron: “You go find him. You know how he is.”
• • •
NATE LEFT THE BODY BAG on the bank and an opening in the wire fence. He splashed in the shallow water upriver to unanchor his boat. He pulled it behind him to the lawn, then lifted the body and the contents onto the floor of the boat and swung in.
Within a few minutes, river sounds overtook the shouting and thumping from the Scoggins compound. He withdrew his cell phone and powered it on again. When he had reception bars, he made the call.
It was answered after one ring. Nate could hear the whine of an engine in the background.
“Did you do some good?”
“Affirmative.”
“Good man! How far out are you?”
“Forty-five minutes.”
“Splendid! Magnificent! I’ll be there.”
Nate punched off.
• • •
THE DRIFT BOAT was slightly more sluggish because of the dead weight inside, but he stuck to the swift channels. The eastern horizon was banded with a creamy rose color, and the stars in that quadrant of sky were fading in intensity.
The temperature dropped as he powered the boat downriver, and the steam got thicker. He could feel waning body heat on his legs from the bag at his feet.
Nate tried not to dwell on what had just happened at the compound. He could sort that out later. Leaving Peterson and Jolovich alive we
re wild cards.
• • •
AS HE CRUISED in a fast current that took him down the center of the river, he saw the falcon watching him from the gnarled dead branch of an ancient cottonwood. It was a peregrine with a mottled light breast and sharp black eyes. He knew how unusual it was to see a peregrine in the open, and it chilled him how the bird seemed to focus on him as he passed, as if assessing his worth. Peregrines, as Nate intimately knew, were killing machines—the fastest predators in the sky.
That bird, Nate thought, had no right to pass judgment on him. Peregrine falcons, unlike other raptors, would target any kind of prey, whether ducks, rabbits, geese, cats, or mice. They were stone-cold killers.
So what was he now? He had no idea anymore, and shoved the thought aside. Unbidden, the image of his friend Joe appeared, an unreadable expression on his face. He shoved that aside, too.
• • •
IN THE DISTANCE, he could hear the buzz of a small plane approaching. Right on time. The old asphalt airstrip was less than a half-mile downriver.
Saddlestring, Wyoming
A month later, Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett winced against an icy wind in his face as he stood with his hands jammed into his parka pockets on the top of a treeless mountain in the Bighorn Range.
“Come on,” he shouted to the tow truck driver, “you can do it.” He knew his words had been snatched away by the wind.
The driver was named Dave Farkus, and he’d had no idea when he took the part-time job at a local towing and recovery company in Saddlestring that it would mean taking his leased one-ton up a steep mountain switchback road to the very top as the first big snow of the winter rolled across the northern horizon, headed straight toward them. Farkus had managed to get his 1997 Ford F-450 truck turned around and had backed up to the edge of the snowfield, but he was obviously having second thoughts about trying to retrieve the vehicle that was buried deep seventy yards away. All that could be seen of the buried pickup—Joe’s departmental vehicle until he’d sunk it to the top of the wheel wells on an ill-fated run across the field two years before—was the dented top of its green cab and several radio antennas whipping back and forth in the wind. Farkus looked over at Joe through his closed passenger-side window and gestured with a what-can-I-possibly-do-now? shrug.
“Unwind the cable,” Joe shouted, using his hands to mimic the action so Farkus could understand. Farkus pretended he couldn’t and looked at Joe with the uncomprehending stare of Joe’s yellow Labrador, Daisy.
Joe and Farkus had spent the last hour digging with shovels through the hard crust of snow around the back of the pickup until they located the rear bumper. While Joe continued digging until he uncovered the rear wheel, Farkus had walked back to his truck to bring it closer. He had taken an inordinate amount of time while Joe labored. The snow beneath the crust was grainy and loose, and for every shovelful he threw out, a half-shovelful filled in the hole. Beneath his insulated Carhartt overalls, Wranglers, red uniform shirt, and parka, he was sweating hard by the time Farkus showed up. The wind was cutting through it all, though, and he was chilled as he waited for Farkus to do something. He was afraid the strong wind was sifting the snow back into the hole he’d dug and would fill it up, at the rate they were proceeding.
Joe groaned and made his way to the tow truck and climbed inside. It felt good to get out of the wind into the warm interior, although it smelled of fast-food wrappers, grease, diesel fuel, his own sweat, and Farkus.
The view through the windshield was stunning, now that he could look at it clearly without squinting his eyes against the wind. Frozen blue-black waves of mountain summits stretched as far as he could see at eye level. Many were topped with white skullcaps of snow that had not melted during the summer, and between the ranges were deep wooded ravines and canyons that dropped out of sight. They were at least nine and a half thousand feet in elevation, above the timberline, where the only life was the scaly blue-green lichen on the sides of exposed granite boulders. The approaching storm clouds, rolling from the north with black fists, looked ominous.
He pulled his parka hood back and said, “We’re going to need to take your hook and cable out there and wrap it around the rear axle. Then you can power up the winch to pull it out.”
“That truck is buried deep,” Farkus said, bugging his eyes with exasperation. “What if we try and it pulls my outfit into the snowfield with that storm coming? We might never get out.”
“There’s only one way we’ll find that out.”
Dave Farkus was fifty-eight and pear-shaped, with rheumy eyes, jowls, thick muttonchop sideburns that had birthed a full beard, and a bulbous nose. He worked hard at not working hard, but he’d shown an uncanny ability to get caught in the middle of several conflicts that had involved Joe as well. He wore a thick grease-stained down coat and a flocked bomber hat with earflaps that hung down on each side. Tributaries of frozen snot ran down his whiskers from his nostrils from helping Joe dig out the back of the truck.
“Joe . . . if I wreck this truck or leave it up here like you did . . .”
“No whining,” Joe said. “You owe me this, remember?”
“Aw, jeez,” Farkus said, sitting back and shaking his head. “That’s not even fair.”
Fifteen months before, Joe had helped Farkus by shepherding him out of Savage Run Canyon during an epic forest fire that had blackened thousands of acres of timber. Farkus had been injured at the time, and Joe’s actions had saved his life. Joe didn’t particularly like Farkus, and Farkus didn’t particularly like Joe. But in the hospital under sedation, Farkus had said to Joe, “If there’s anything I can ever do for you, just ask.”
And Joe had asked, once he found out Farkus had had to go back to work when his disability claims had finally been denied by the state workers’-compensation division.
“How long has the damn thing been up here?” Farkus asked.
“Two years,” Joe said. And one month.
“I’m sure the state has written it off by now. Who the hell cares if we even get it out?”
“I do,” Joe said.
Joe had been at the wheel, trying to drive across the perennial snowfield to connect with his friend Nate Romanowski when he’d buried his departmental vehicle. The ridge overlooked the South Fork of the Twelve Sleep River far below, where Nate was about to get into a gun battle that would change the course of his life. Joe had to abandon his vehicle and climb down the mountain on foot. The snows had come before he could convince a vehicle-recovery company to try and retrieve it. The summer before, another recovery company had made it as far as the summit before turning back, saying they couldn’t risk damaging their equipment on such a foolish mission. Joe had lost another entire year because the fire the summer before had blocked the access road and littered it with downed burned trees.
Joe wondered again, as he had constantly over the last year, where Nate was now, what he was doing. And whether he would ever see him again.
Farkus tried again: “Why don’t we say we tried and go home before this storm hits?”
“That wasn’t the deal.”
“Why in the hell do you care so much about a wreck on top of a mountain?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Joe said. He wasn’t willing to tell Farkus that he was on very thin ice with his new director, Lisa Greene-Dempsey, who never failed to mention that Joe Pickett was responsible for more real actual property damage than any other employee of the agency. She’d soon issue another year-end report with his name at the top of the list unless Joe could mitigate the cost by bringing back at least the last of his wrecked pickups.
“I’ll go with you, come on,” Joe said. “Let’s go hook that cable on and get it out of here. Then we can get off the top before the storm hits.”
As he spoke, he felt the vibration of his cell phone deep in his breast pocket beneath the parka. Cell service was spotty in the moun
tains, and it surprised him. A few seconds later, there was another call. He didn’t want to take it, though, because he didn’t want to give Farkus another excuse to delay.
“If I wreck this truck, my boss will take it out of my hide,” Farkus said. “I could lose my job.”
“Since when have you wanted a job, anyway?” Joe asked. “Now, let’s go.”
“That was mean,” Farkus said.
• • •
IT TOOK NEARLY AN HOUR of winching, digging, repositioning the tow truck, and reattaching the hook and cable to free the pickup and drag it out of the snowfield and position it on the wheel lift of the truck.
Joe’s satisfaction on getting his old pickup out sank by degrees when he watched it get winched through the snowfield. The pickup was a wreck. The windows had been crushed inward by the weight and pressure of the snow, and the cab was packed with it. He couldn’t even see the steering wheel inside. The sidewalls were dented and the rear left tire was flat. He could only guess at the condition of the motor and drivetrain after being encased in ice for two years. If anything, the pickup might provide some parts, but it would likely never be put into service again. Meaning he’d still top the list.
Farkus cursed under his breath as they cinched the nylon web ties on the rear wheels of the pickup.
“Okay,” Farkus hollered, when the straps were tight. “Let’s get out of here.”
“Give me a minute,” Joe said, stepping back to the cab and opening the driver’s-side door.
“What in the hell are you doing?”
“Checking something,” Joe said, digging out handfuls of snow from inside until he could reach behind the bench seat and feel around. It was still there.
He closed the door and climbed back into the cab of the tow truck with Farkus.
“What was that all about?”
“Never mind,” Joe said, relieved.
“We’re getting off this damned mountain with our lives,” Farkus said.
“We’ve done it before,” Joe smiled.
“It’s barely November. And it’s snowing.”