Walt Longmire 07 - Hell Is Empty (11 page)

I fingered the rounds as I thought.

The hostages were easy to understand; if Shade were cornered he’d need insurance. But why corner yourself and why in the mountains? I was sure the money was bullshit and simply Shade’s way of keeping them all going, but then what was in the duffel? Where and to whom was he attempting to get? Deer Park Campground was ahead, along with West Tensleep Lake proper, but no one in his right mind would be up that high this early in the season.

I was exhausted. I turned around and looked at Beatrice, who had lowered her head to the arm of the sofa and closed her eyes.

I left the rifle and carried my mug back to Omar and the butcher-block island. He seemed to be sobering up. “I’ve got to get going.”

He stood. “What’s a misanthrope?”

“Somebody who hates all of humanity.”

He shrugged with his good shoulder and stood. “Workin’ on that myself.” He studied me for a moment. “You should get some sleep; even a little bit would help.”

“I can’t, I’ve got to . . .”

“Got to what?” He started to fold his arms but then thought better of it. “They’re not going anywhere. Go back over to the other sofa and stretch out. I’ll wake you up in a couple of hours and you can start. It’ll still be before daybreak.”

He was right, of course.

“And I’ll go with you.”

The absurdity of that statement played across my face. “No, you’re not.”

“How many of them, with hostages, and only one of you?”

“You’re in no shape.” I gestured with my chin toward Beatrice. “And I can’t leave her here alone. I’ve got people back at Meadowlark, and you can wait and see what the weather does before you make up your mind to stay here or go there.” I glanced around at the comforts of the cabin I would soon be leaving. “Personally, I’d have groceries delivered and just hole up till the cavalry shows.”

He took a breath and cultivated it into a sigh. “I’ll make you a deal; you sleep for a couple of hours and I’ll let you go on your own.” He glanced back at the sofa and shook his head. “What we do when we think we’re in love.” He looked at me. “Deal?”

I settled into the Indian blanket chair opposite the sofa where Beatrice was sleeping, pulled my hat over my face, and listened to the logs spitting in the fireplace. Omar brought my sheepskin coat and threw it over me.

“I’m still not going to help you with the horny thing.”

“Shut up and go to sleep.” There was a pause, and then he added, “How are you going to follow them?”

I could already feel myself drifting away. “I’ve got snowshoes.”

Somewhere in the distance I could hear his voice: “Oh, I think we can do better than that.”

There is a familiar odor to old trucks; it is a comforting smell and it is what he smells now. The knobs on the dash are large and chrome metal and he pushes one in where it stays for a moment and then pops back at him. He blinks and then pulls the knob the rest of the way out, turning it and looking into the red-hot coils inside.

He doesn’t know why they have to fish; he doesn’t like fish, doesn’t like picking bones out of his mouth.

He points a finger into the lip of the cigarette lighter where the burning coil is cooling, but he can still feel the heat.

“Stay here while I go get more worms and some beer.”

So he stays, and he waits.

He puts the lighter back in the dashboard and listens to the breeze shimmering the yellow and stiff leaves of the cottonwoods alongside the Big Horn River. It’s warm and he becomes drowsy, having a dream of his own. A dream within a dream, but this one was real—where his father, eyes wide with whiskey, broke up the furniture and burned it one night.

He has that ability, they say, to blend dreams with life. In the murmuring voices in the next room he overhears the old woman saying it will lead to tragedy.

He unwraps the candy bar the big man left for him, a Mallo Cup in the bright yellow wrapper that feels slick in his hands, wondering who the Boyer Brothers are or where Altoona, Pennsylvania, is.

He starts at the knock on the window of the truck and looks up to see a smiling face with lots of teeth but no warmth. “Unlock the door.”

Snow machines scare me, and this one scared me more than any I’d ever seen before. It was red, blood red, and huge, with some sort of track system all its own. I guess it started out as a four-wheeler, but with all the modifications I really couldn’t tell.

There were lots of other sleds there in Omar’s garage, but it was easy to see why he’d chosen this one for me. A regular snowmobile would have skis on the front and those would take me only so far; with treads on the front and rear, this monster would be able to follow the narrow trails and, more important, be able to climb the rocks that were buried in the snow as well.

It was early morning, about six thirty, and the big-game hunter had returned three times with supplies stuffed under his one arm, including my backpack, my snowshoes, and a leather rifle scabbard. He gestured toward one of the snowmobiles. “This one over here is the fastest, but without experience on these things, especially this one, you’ll end up piled into a tree or off a cliff.” He looked down at the machine where he’d stacked my supplies. “Not that this one’s for the faint of heart—more than a thousand cc’s. I had it special-made in Minnesota. The suspension is custom-reinforced, and the Trax-System will not fail.”

“How fast will it go?”

He studied the machine in the battery-lit garage like it might leave on its own. “Faster than you want.”

“Of that, I have no doubt.” I sat Saizarbitoria’s pack on the utility rack of the ATV. “What if I wreck it?”

“I’ll buy another one, or three.” He rested a much larger pack on the rack with mine and propped the rifle on one of the rubber and metal tracks. “I took the liberty of packing you some supplies. There’s food, drink, a sixty-degree-below-zero bag, and a pair of Zeiss 20×60 image-stabilization binoculars.”

“I don’t want to know how much those cost.”

“About six grand.”

“I told you I didn’t want to know that.”

He reached back with his good arm and pulled something from a shelf. “Here.”

I unfolded a massive amount of newfangled mountaineering gear. “What’s this all about?”

“A few years back one of my hunters was a Denver Bronco; he had a bunch of stuff shipped up here and then left it. It’s too big for me.”

I unbuckled my gun belt, took off my hat, jacket, jeans, and boots, and slipped on expedition-weight long underwear. “Which Denver Bronco?”

“Hell, I don’t remember. I don’t watch that shit—he was a big son of a bitch, though, like you.”

Omar took my sheepskin coat and helped me sort through the pile, handing me a pair of 300-weight fleece pants and a jacket to match, a black Gore-Tex North Face Mountain Jacket and overpants, a balaclava, and a pair of insulated gloves. I transferred my pocketknife into the overpants and found that I could still get my gun belt over the entire ensemble.

“Thanks.”

I pulled on my boots, thought about the cell phone, and then carefully placed it in an inside pocket of the jacket. I picked up the two-way radio and handed it to Omar. “Here, it’s useless to me and I don’t want the weight.” I then picked up Sancho’s pack, unzipped the top, and dumped the contents into Omar’s. Everything but the copy of the
Inferno
made it in.

I grabbed the thumb-worn paperback and glanced at him. “Saizarbitoria’s idea of a joke, I suppose, or maybe he thought I was going to get bored and have some reading time.”

He lifted the weapon onto the saddle of the machine. “You said they had a rifle?”

I zipped the tactical jacket and put on my hat. “Armalite .223 with an infragreen scope, but it’s the short barrel, maybe sixteen inches.”

“Dangerous up close, but not so good at distance with that carbine model.” He admired the rifle in the leather sheath. “We call this ‘evening the playing field.’ ”

I turned my head and looked at him.

“I’ve got all kinds of handguns and carbines, but nothing that’ll reach out and touch with the impact of this one—besides, I thought it might be a sentimental favorite.”

I looked at the weapon and felt the rush of heat at the remembrance of how things had turned out with a weapon very much like this one almost two years ago. “Favorite, but certainly not sentimental.” I carefully lifted the .45-70 from the case, sliding the leather cover away. “The three in the stock holder?”

He sighed. “I don’t even have extra ammo—just brought it up here on a lark as decoration. I never thought I’d be shooting it. You’ve only got the three.”

I nodded, feeling the accustomed weight close to eight pounds. I liked the accuracy of the drop-block weapons, the simplicity and smooth action of fewer moving parts. “Well, this gives me an edge over that short-barreled .223.”

“If you hit him, he’ll know he’s been hit.” He leaned over and slipped open the butt of a plastic rifle scabbard mounted on the other side of the vehicle. “This is padded and should absorb a lot of the vibration and shock should you hit something.”

“Omar, it’s a museum piece, worth a lot of . . .”

“Take it.”

I didn’t move, giving him the opportunity to change his mind, and then reached across and carefully placed the Sharps in the boot, and his eyes stayed on the encased weapon. I watched him for a long moment and could pretty much guess what was running through his mind, over and over and over again. “Your first?”

“Yeah.” His eyes came up to mine but then returned to the scabbard. “Does it get easier?”

“Not really.” I cleared my throat and stood there trying to think of the words that would make it in some way better. “He was a bad guy with a lot of notches; he would’ve killed you, raped and killed her, and then who knows how many more he would’ve killed.” He nodded, dealing with the sickness that overtakes your soul when you take a life—the sick/scared before, and the sick/sad afterward. “It’s amazing, isn’t it, what human beings can become.”

When I came back from my own sicknesses he was looking at me. “You gave me some advice, now let me give you some.” His eyes went back to the scabbard. “You better become a misanthrope, too . . . Kill ’em, kill ’em all. Kill ’em fast.” His hand went to the rifle scabbard. “And from far away.”

The handle grips were heated, and the motor warmth of the big Arctic Cat that Omar had loaned me floated up against the trunk of my body before being whipped away at speeds approaching forty miles an hour. The ATV was capable of going a lot faster, but I wasn’t. Fortunately, Omar had remembered to loan me a pair of antifogging goggles or my eyes would’ve been frozen to my eyelids.

Even with the blowing snow and the four hours that had passed, the tracks of the Thiokol were evident, at least until I arrived at West Tensleep Lake. It was only when I got to the fork in the road that I slowed the Cat to see which direction in the parking loop they’d taken. The wide tracks continued on the high road, which was what I’d expected, figuring the cover story that Raynaud had planted was indeed false. The snow had reached levels where no regular wheeled vehicle could go, and even trying on horseback would’ve been nothing but a slog.

Then the tracks simply disappeared.

I pulled up to the two bathroom structures buried in the snow and overlooking the pull-through parking area. Nothing there.

There were no vehicles in the place, and no tracks whatsoever.

Where could the damn thing have gone? It wasn’t as if it a were svelte mode of transportation.

Listening to the idling motor of the ATV, and watching the trees sway with the wind, I sat there thinking about the last time that I’d been this high; about how things had not gone well, and I’d had to haul two men from Lost Twin Lakes in a blizzard. That had been difficult, but it wasn’t the memory that held me still at the moment.

I’d seen and heard things all those months ago—things I’d never seen or heard before yet which continued to haunt me.

I cut the motor and listened more carefully.

There was the noise of the wind, like something colossal moving past me, something important—so imperative in fact that it could not pause for me. It was the cleaning sound that the wind made in the high mountain country, scrubbing the landscape in an attempt to make it fresh.

I thought about the dream of the boy in the truck, the trees moving—and how the dream didn’t seem to be mine. Maybe our greatest fears were made clear this high, so close to the cold emptiness of the unprotected skies. Perhaps the voices were of the mountains themselves, whispering in our ears just how inconsequential and transient we really are.

The snow continually fell, and the canvas unrelentingly washed itself clean.

I saw some movement to my right, a different kind of movement surging against the insistence of the wind. I stared at the copse of trees by the sign that marked the entrance to the Lost Twin trailhead. My eyes through the goggles stayed steady, but I couldn’t see anything more, just the movement of the limbs and branches.

Something else moved to my left, and I whirled in time to see a shape dart back into the trees where the ridge dropped off into the open, white expanse of the lake.

I quietly dismounted the Cat and stepped onto the surface of the snow, which crunched like cornflakes under the Vibram soles of my Sorels. I thought of the Sharps fastened to the side of the Arctic Cat, but instead slipped the glove from my right hand and unsnapped the safety strap from my .45, drawing it from the holster and moving toward the small ridge.

I was not seeing any green dots.

I kept looking at the grove of trees to the right but could catch sight of nothing more. By the time I got to the top, I could make out where the wind had struck the rise, lifted its load, and then dropped the snow, flake by flake, in a drift as sharp as the edge of a strop razor.

It was then that something made a noise very close to me. I stood there for a moment and looked around. It was muted and almost like music. I looked down at the ground, but it wasn’t coming from there, it was coming from my coat. I remembered that I had put Saizarbitoria’s cell phone in the inside pocket of the high-tech jacket. I unzipped and pulled out the device, took it from the plastic bag, and looked at the number on the display—Wyoming, but not one I recognized. I flipped it open and used Vic’s patented greeting: “What fresh hell is this?”