23
Nine miles west of Dubois, after summiting and descending the Absaroka Mountains, Nate slowed his Jeep and turned right on an untracked dirt road that led to a wide ribbon of ink that serpentined through the snow. The inside of the cab smelled of burned dust from the heating vents, hot tears from Haley, and the musky congealing blood that covered his flesh and clothing. The grille of his Jeep was packed with wind-driven snow from the drive over, and melting rivulets coursed down his headlights.
He wheeled parallel to the bank of the Wind River and parked behind a thick stand of willows, concealing the location of the Jeep from anyone behind them on the highway. He cut the headlights before opening his door and swinging his legs out.
“Do you want me to keep the motor running and the heat on?” he asked Haley.
He couldn’t see her face well in the soft glow from the dome light. It had been nearly two hours since she’d spoken to or even looked at him. She’d spent the whole of the trip over Togwotee Pass staring out the front windows in unsettled silence, her head tilted slightly forward, her hair hanging down over her face. Her cheeks were wet with tears, but she’d rarely sobbed, as if she’d been too proud to make a sound and reveal herself. Instead, she gripped the safety bar across the dashboard as if holding on for dear life.
He’d spent the whole of the trip deconstructing what he’d done to Trucker Cap, and analyzing the information he’d tortured out of him.
“Haley…”
She mumbled something that was snatched away by the muscular flow of the river behind him.
“What?”
“I said I don’t give a fuck what you do, you fucking monster!” she shrieked, her mouth twisted into rage, her eyes wide and rimmed with red.
Nate leaned back on his heels and waited a full minute before walking to the back of the Jeep for his duffel bag. He left the engine running and said, “I told you not to watch.”
Falling snowflakes disappeared on contact with the icy surface of the river, leaving tiny one-ring disturbances. Curls of steam rose from the flow into the even colder air and vanished like ghosts. As Nate shed his shoulder holster and hung it over a willow branch, he heard a beaver slap its tail on the surface upriver and the gloop sound of the creature diving deep. What little filtered moonlight there was marked the sides of the current with accents of light blue.
His clothing crackled as he peeled it off, because blood had dried through to his skin. He tossed each item into the middle of the river so it would float downstream, undulating in the current and over rocks, ending up who knew where: the Fitzpatrick Wilderness Area, Crowheart, or back home on the Wind River Reservation. Maybe his wretched clothing would be trapped beneath the heavy ice for the winter, washing the blood away, diluting the dissolving blood and fluids with startlingly clean and cold mountain water.
Snowflakes landed on his bare skin like icy fly bites.
The river itself was so cold it burned his skin and made him gasp. He waded in above his knees until the current upset his balance and his feet slipped on the smooth tops of the river rocks and he sat backward and went under. The tumbled silence underneath was awesome.
For twenty long and silent seconds, he bounced along the riverbed on his back and butt, naked feet out ahead of him, arms out to the side, eyes closed. As the river cleansed his flesh and the cold numbed all feeling, he briefly forgot about the blood that flowed from ripping a man’s ears off, the muffled pop from twisting his victim’s nose sidewise until the nostrils looked up at his cheek, the dull, dry cracking sounds of fingers being snapped back one by one, the undignified screaming, the unholy crunch of shinbones being stove in.
And when he emerged from the Wind River howling and trembling and thirty yards from where he’d left his duffel bag of clean dry clothes upstream, he fought back the depraved and exhilarating sense of yarak that had engorged him until he’d have to summon it back again.
She was still staring at the snow-covered windshield when he climbed back into the Jeep. He’d found an old pair of jeans in his duffel as well as a dark green wool tactical sweater from the old days to wear. He closed the car door and sat in silence for a few minutes, letting the heat from the vents warm his body until his muscles stopped quivering.
Then he turned to her and swiftly reached out and with his right hand grasped her ear through her dark hair. At his touch, her hands fluttered briefly in her lap like wounded birds. He drew out his. 500 with his left hand and pressed the gaping muzzle against the white flesh of her neck just below her jawbone.
“This is how it starts,” he said.
She still wouldn’t look at him, but her eyes welled with tears. She said, “Do whatever you have to do, Nate. Torture me like you tortured that man back there. I’m sure once you get started you’ll get me to say whatever you want me to say, but it won’t be true.”
“How did you hook up with Cohen?” he asked.
“You should believe me when I tell you he hooked up with me,” she said. “The man was relentless. Why would I throw my life away to go off in the middle of the mountains in Idaho and live like a hillbilly with a bunch of other men? There’s only one reason people do such things. It’s called love, Nate. Maybe you’ve read about it.”
He gripped her ear with more pressure and said, “Haley, the man back there told me there was a young and beautiful operator on the team. He didn’t know her name except by code. I’m thinking she was the one that got to Merle a month ago. I didn’t ask him to identify you in person, but now I want you to tell me something. Did you ever leave Camp Oscar?”
“I can’t believe you’re asking me this,” she said. He could tell she was trying hard not to let her lips tremble and betray her emotions. “If he said it was me, he was lying. He couldn’t even see me in the Jeep. The headlights were on him, and we never made eye contact.”
“Did you ever leave Camp Oscar?”
After a beat, she said, “Yes. And yes, it was two weeks ago.”
He increased the pressure but didn’t twist.
“My father is dying back in North Carolina,” she said. “I flew home to see him. Then I flew back.”
Nate said softly, “That would have been the third week of September?”
“Yes,” she said. “Right now I can’t think straight. Cohen took me to the airport on a Monday night…”
“September seventeenth,” Nate said.
“Okay. I got back Friday.”
“The twenty-first.”
“If you say so.”
“Merle was gutted on September twentieth,” Nate said. “So you had time to find him, get close, and murder him. Or did you just set him up so one of the operators could get to him?”
She blew out a quick, frustrated breath. More tears. “That whole week I was either at my parents’ house in Rocky Mount or at Nash General Hospital seeing my dad.”
She laughed bitterly. “I assured my dying father I knew what I was doing out here. That I’d found a good man and I was safe. That gave him some comfort, and I didn’t know I was lying at the time.”
She tried to turn her head toward Nate, but the grip on her ear prevented it.
She said, “I wasn’t in Wyoming. In fact, this is the first time I’ve ever even been here. If this is what it’s like, I never want to come back.”
“I never said Merle died in Wyoming.”
“Oscar told me. He knew because you contacted him. Think about it, Nate.”
Nate said, “I can check on that story pretty easily.”
“Do it,” she said, pleading. “Please do it. I flew from Idaho Falls to Salt Lake City and on to Raleigh, where my mom picked me up.”
“What airline?”
