statements, revelatory of nothing.
“You want to go to the power company?” Frost asked. “See what’s happening?”
“What I’m thinking is, while the chief is out and about, maybe we stop by his house, have a little chat with his wife.”
Dagget and Frost, who had been in town three days, were agents with a unit of the FBI so secret that it was unknown even to the director of the bureau. They believed something was badly wrong in Rainbow Falls, but they didn’t have any clue what it might be. The whistle-blower who had alerted them to the situation knew only that during the past couple of years, enormous money had gone into some operation in this burg, channeled to a nonprofit named Progress for Perfect Peace. The sum was so huge — the funds laundered through so many accounts before arriving here — that it suggested a criminal enterprise of extraordinary proportions.
And this past afternoon, from their unit boss, Maurice Moomaw in D.C., they had learned that the Moneyman, source of those funds, was scheduled to arrive somewhere in the Rainbow Falls area the following day. Weather permitting, he would come in by helicopter from Billings. The Moneyman was a high-profile individual. If he was making a personal appearance, the conspiracy — whatever the hell it might entail — must be approaching one critical point or another.
“Talk to Jarmillo’s wife?” Frost didn’t like the idea. “I’m not ready yet to drop our cover.”
“I didn’t say we’d flash bureau ID. We snow her with some story just to see what she might say, just to get a look in the house.”
Frost shook his head. “I’m not a good bullshit artist.”
“You’ve seen me in action. I can produce more than a herd. You just stand there smiling and nodding, leave the rest to me.”
Frost considered the blinking light on the laptop map and then gazed through the windshield at the falling snow. All day, the atmosphere in Rainbow Falls had been strange, disquieting. He could not say why. The behavior of the police suggested they were engaged in some secret and perhaps illegal activity, but that alone wasn’t what made him so deeply uneasy. For the past several hours, he had sensed that the apparent normalcy of Rainbow Falls was a deception, as though the quaint and pretty town were only a hyper-realistic painting on a stage curtain, which at any moment would be swept aside to reveal a different municipality of strange and hideous structures in a state of advanced decay, narrow twisted streets, and in every shadow some creeping feral thing without a name.
Now, as the town succumbed to the bleaching snow, it seemed not to be vanishing beneath a shroud that would later be drawn aside by the restorative sun, but seemed instead to be fading entirely from the world. As if, when the snow eventually melted away, Rainbow Falls would be gone as though it had never existed.
Frost was not a man who spooked easily. Until now, he’d never had the kind of imagination that made hobgoblins out of shadows and sensed boogey-men around every corner. The problem wasn’t him. The problem was Rainbow Falls. Something was very wrong with this place.
“All right,” he said. “Let’s go have a chat with Jarmillo’s wife.”
Chapter 8
In addition to the guy in the Stetson and the greatcoat, two other men materialized out of the night and snow. They were also armed with shotguns.
Carson and Michael had their Urban Snipers as well as pistols, but seated in the Grand Cherokee, they were not in a position to survive an exchange of fire.
To Michael, she said, “I could shift gears, tramp the gas.”
“Bad idea. I didn’t take my invincibility pill this morning.”
“Then what do we do?”
“Whatever they want us to do,” Michael said.
“That’s pussy talk. We’re not pussies.”
He said, “Sometimes you’re too macho for your own good.”
The guy with the walrus mustache rapped on her window again with his gun barrel. He looked as if he had been constipated since birth. When she smiled at him, his scowl curdled into a glower.
Carson thought of Scout, her baby, not seven months old, back in San Francisco, in the expert care of Mary Margaret Dolan, housekeeper and nanny. Her little daughter had a smile that could melt glaciers. With Scout in her mind’s eye, Carson was overcome by a dread that she would never see the girl again.
Switching off the engine, she said, “They’ll make a mistake. We’ll get an opening.”
“ ‘All is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.’ ”
“Who said that?”
“I don’t know. One of the Muppets. Maybe Kermit.”
They opened their doors and got out of the SUV, raising their hands to show that they were not armed.
The cowboy with the walrus mustache warily stepped back from Carson, as if she were the biggest and meanest piece of work that he had ever seen. His face suggested fearlessness, but his quick shallow inhalations, revealed by rapid frosty exhalations, further belied his fierce expression. He directed her toward the front of the Grand Cherokee.
One of the other gunmen shepherded Michael from the passenger door and told him to stand beside Carson. This one wore a Stetson, too, and a leather coat with sheepskin collar. The cold air revealed his breathing to be less agitated than that of the other man. But his restless eyes, shifting from Carson to Michael and to various points in the night, revealed the fear that he was striving not to disclose.
These were not Victor’s creations. They were real men with some reason to know that horrific events were occurring behind the scenes in this apparently peaceful Montana night.
The third man, who quickly searched the SUV, appeared with both his shotgun and one of the Urban Snipers. “They have another of this here. Never seen its like before. Pistol grip. And it seems to be loaded with big slugs, not buckshot. They have two pistols and a satchel full of spare magazines and shotgun ammo.”
The second cowboy looked to the one with the mustache. “What you want to do, Teague?”
Teague indicated the Urban Sniper and said to Michael, “You want to explain that cannon Arvid is holding?”
“It’s police-issue. Not available to just anyone.”
“You’re police?”
“We used to be.”
“Not around here.”
“New Orleans,” Michael said.
“Used to be — but you still have a police-only gun.”
“We’re sentimental,” Michael said.
Teague said, “Ma’am, you handle a weapon that powerful?”
“I can handle it,” Carson said. “I can handle you.”
“What kind of police were you?”
“The best. Detectives. Homicide.”
“You come right at folks, don’t you?”
“Fewer misunderstandings that way,” Carson said.
Teague said, “I have a wife like you.”
“Get on your knees and thank God for that lady every night.”
Most people weren’t as bold at eye-to-eye contact as Teague. His stare was scalpel-sharp. Carson could almost hear her stare ringing off his with a steely sound.
“What’re you doing, anyway, riding around all gunned up?” Arvid asked.
Carson glanced at Michael, he raised his eyebrows, and she decided to go with a little bit of the truth, to see how it played. “We’re on a monster hunt.”
The three cowboys were quiet, weighing her words, glancing at one another. The soft silent snow coming down, breath smoking in the cold air, the great dark trees slowly fading to white all along the street … Their quiet
