felt really good about in two months. It was possible, he hoped, that he had set some wheels in motion. The girl had been suspicious of him, which was a sign of both intelligence and smart parents. She was a good girl, it seemed to him.
But there was more to be done. His next trick would be harder, and much more unpleasant.
Luckily he knew these mountains well, and after seeing the crude map that Charlie had pulled from Tod Marchand's pack, he had a very good idea of where Stewie Woods's cabin would be.
***
Joe was approaching the grade that would lead to switchbacks up the mountain, when he looked in his rearview mirror and saw the horse trailer listing to the side. There was Lizzie, who liked to thrust her entire head out of the false window opening in the trailer as if she was desperate to force air in through her nostrils, leaning to the left.
He pulled over onto the shoulder and got out. Curls of acrid dark smoke rose from the flattened right tire. He'd been riding a flat for a few miles. The bearings were white hot and smoking in their sleeves of steel and the asbestos brake pads had sizzled and melted.
He unloaded Lizzie, and picketed her in tall grass, which she munched as if she had never eaten before. With her weight out of the trailer, Joe assembled the jack and raised the trailer into the air to change the tire. He barely even noticed the green Mercedes SUV that roared by him on the highway.
***
John Coble saw the horse trailer and the familiar pronghorn antelope decal on the door of the pickup as he passed and he took his foot off of the accelerator.
It had to be the game warden, he thought.
Coble studied the reflection in his rearview mirror as the Mercedes began to slow. The driver of the truck was in the ditch next to the trailer, working the handle on the jack. Behind the man, a buckskin horse was staked down, contentedly grazing.
Coble looked at his watch. It was approaching eleven. He had no idea how far behind him Charlie Tibbs was but he still expected to see the black Ford at any moment.
He had already wasted time in Saddlestring finding the game warden's house. He had left his message for the game warden, done his good deed. Coble had been a little reluctant to meet the game warden face to face in the first place, having no idea how that would go.
Coble made the decision to continue on to the cabin. He pressed on the accelerator and his head snapped back into the headrest as the Mercedes rocketed up the base of the mountain.
***
Three miles past crazy woman creek, Joe slowed and pulled off the highway onto a gravel two-track. The thick lodgepole pine trees formed a high canopy above, casting deep shadows over the road. The crude map he had drawn from Marybeth's directions was on the console between the
seats. He had never been on this particular road before, but knew it led through the National Forest to several sections of state and private land where there were old hunting lodges and mining claim cabins. As he drove further up the mountain, the road worsened, pocked now with spurs of granite that slowed him down considerably
Because of the thick trees, Joe was surprised when he crested the mountain and a massive valley opened up before him. He stopped before he had completely emerged from the forest, put the truck in park, and grabbed his binoculars from his pack on the seat beside him.
It was a beautiful valley pulsing with summer mountain colors. The two-track wound down the mountain and along the length of the valley floor before disappearing into a grove of shimmering aspen. The groves fingered their way down the slope to access a narrow serpentine creek. On Joe's left, to the south, the mountainside was rugged, marked by cream-colored granite buttes that jutted from the summer grass like knuckles of a fist straining against silk. Between the knuckles were dark stands of spruce in isolated pockets.
A shadow from a single high cumulus cloud scudded slowly across the valley from east to west, its front end climbing up tree trunks while its mass engulfed entire stands of timber, darkening them, before sliding back over the top of the grove to hug the ground again.
On his right, to the north, the mountain was heavily forested. A few grassy parks could be seen through breaks in the timber where tree branches opened up. Matching the terrain to a worn topo map he pulled from his map file, Joe guessed that the lodges and cabins were tucked into the trees to the north.
Through the binoculars he could find only one structure, an ancient log cabin that was leaning so far to one side that it looked like it could collapse any minute. The door gaped open and the windows were gone. This was obviously not the place.
Joe eased down the road into the valley with his hand-drawn map on his lap. Whatever would happen this afternoon would happen here in these mountains and forests, he thought. Either Stewie would be waiting for Marybeth in the cabin he had described to her or this was a hoax of some kind. And if Stewie was in fact alive, what would his reaction be when instead of his old girlfriend, he met the girlfriend's husband?
Joe scanned the trees and undergrowth that lined the edge of the road, looking for an old, lightly used road that supposedly broke off from the two-track and headed north to the top of the mountain. The road would be blocked by trees that had been dropped across it, the directions said, so it was necessary to approach the cabin on foot.
As he descended further into the valley, Joe watched the signal strength on his cell phone dwindle to nothing. He tried his radio to contact the dispatcher and heard only static in return. He was effectively isolated and out of contact, and would remain so until he eventually emerged from the mountain valley it was warmer on the valley floor and Joe unrolled his window. His slow drive toward the aspen was accompanied by the low hum of insects hovering over the carpet of newly opened wildflowers, with spasmodic percussion from small rocks being squeezed and popped free under the weight of his tires. He noticed, as a matter of habit from patrolling, that there was already a fresh tire track on the road--which was unusual in such a remote area.
He followed a road through the trees where the noon sun dappled the aspen leaves, looking for a turnoff to the
