'Then we're through?' the Old Man asked with hope.
'Not quite.'
The Old Man felt as if Charlie had reached through the fence and punched him in the side of the head. Charlie knew how the Old Man felt about this. He had told Charlie countless times in the last few days: he wanted this job to be over.
The Old Man shook his head. 'I can't see our luck holding out forever, Charlie. They can't keep adding targets to the list. They just can't.' His voice was anguished.
'Just one more after the lawyer,' Charlie said. 'And please keep your voice down.'
The Old Man looked up. Charlie was staring at him coolly, evaluating him. Under this withering glare, the Old Man capitulated.
'But this will have to be the last one, Charlie. Any more, and so help me, I'll quit. And you can tell our employers that. This is it.' The Old Man spat out the last word.
Charlie Tibbs was silent.
'So after the lawyer where do we have to go? Who is the target?'
Charlie hesitated. The Old Man understood why This was violating their agreement not to discuss the details of more than one job at a time. It had probably been a good idea, the Old Man conceded, since he wouldn't have stuck with it this long if he had known in advance how elaborate and twisted their mission would become. The Old Man wished he were stronger, more sure of himself and their cause--more like Charlie.
Charlie quickly looked left and right before speaking, and then leaned closer until his hat brim touched the fence.
'Our duty isn't to question.' Charlie bit out the words. 'We don't know the reasons these targets were chosen and that's good. All we know is that a lot of thought has gone into this and they've got the whole thing figured out. We just follow orders.'
'No one's questioning anything,' the Old Man answered, his tone deliberate. He wondered why Charlie seemed so defensive.
Charlie sized up the Old Man again, his light blue eyes raking across the Old Man's face like talons.
'Saddlestring, Wyoming,' Charlie spoke in a voice that was barely audible over the amplified swimming pool sounds from elsewhere in the complex. 'That rumor about Stewie Woods isn't going away. Now it's that he--or somebody pretending to be Stewie Woods--is contacting his old
colleagues.'
The Old Man felt a rush of anger. 'That's not possible. You know that's not possible.' Charlie nodded. 'It's probably one of his hangers-on trying to get something going. But we have to check it out.'
'It's not possible,' the Old Man said again, shaking his head, trying unsuccessfully to come up with a scenario where Woods could have walked away from that explosion.
'And there's something else,' Charlie said. 'Because this guy, whoever he is, is pretending to be Stewie Woods, the local game warden in Saddlestring is snooping around. Other law enforcement might follow. That's heat we don't need. So we need to squash this pretender as quickly as possible.'
'Do they have any idea who the pretender is?' the Old Man asked.
'Not yet,' Charlie answered, narrowing his eyes. 'But they expect they will shortly'
Part Two.
It was a month after elk-calving season in the Bighorns and Joe Pickett was doing a preliminary trend count. The purpose of the trend count was to assess how the elk had wintered, and how many babies had been born to replenish the herd. The season for calves was generally May 20 through June 30, so all of the new ones should have dropped. He rode near the tree line on his buckskin, Lizzie, looking down the slope into the meadows and brush for the elk. It was one of those rare, perfect, vibrant July mornings that pulsed with color and scent. Wildflowers were bursting open in the meadows like strings of mute fireworks, and saplings were stretching sunward after recently breaking out of the solitary confinement of the snowpack. Swollen narrow stream beds were flexing their muscles with runoff. Summer was here, and it was in a hurry.
The cow elk used the tall sagebrush just below the tree line for calving, and Joe had found seven elk cows and six month-old newborns so far. It was a good year for elk given the fairly mild winter and the moist spring. He could smell their particular musty presence even before he saw the first mother and calf. The mothers eyed him wanly as he quietly rode by in the shadows of the trees. One tried to lure him away from her calf by fully exposing herself in the meadow and trotting through the open field toward the opposite rise. She stopped in clear view to look over her shoulder, and snorted when Joe rode on and didn't pursue. Her calf looked at him through a fork in the tall brush. The calf was all eyes and ears, and Joe was close enough to see a bead of condensation on the calfs black snout.
Joe rode deeper into the trees and further up the mountainside until the mother elk turned back to her calf. He goosed Lizzie through the timber, toward a patch of sunlight that became a small grassy park and dismounted. He tied up his horse and sat on a downed log, where he stretched out and let the sun warm his legs. Pouring a cup of coffee from his battered Thermos, he tipped up the brim of his hat and sighed. The coffee was still hot. Joe had put off doing any serious thinking until he was in the mountains, hoping the quiet solace of the outdoors would help him find the answers he was looking for. Now, he reviewed the particularly odd chain of events that had that started with Jim Finotta getting to Sandvick and Judge Pennock's refusal to advance Joe's charges against Finotta.
Judge Cohn in Johnson County had reluctantly agreed to review the charges against Finotta but had yet to take any action. It was very likely that the charges, and the case, would go nowhere. The previous day, Joe had received a call from Robey Hersig saying that Judge Pennock was furious with him--and Joe, for taking the case out of the county Hersig reported that Finotta was burning up the telephone lines between his law office in Saddlestring and the governor's office in Cheyenne.
