As he drank his fresh coffee, he smoked and watched the clouds slowly drift together over the northwest horizon. Like the gathering clouds, pieces of a plan scudded in his mind. Simple, organic: a variation on a poetic justice theme that Gator Bodine himself had scripted.
Finally, the phone rang.
Griffin picked it up, thumbed the power button. “Hello.”
“Harry, it’s J. T.; I got a read on the license plate and talked to some people. You, ah, gonna tell me what this is about? Like, does it involve our friend?”
“Not directly. Fact is, they were all three just here, looking like Ozzie and Harriet; you ask me, they’re getting close to packing up and coming home.”
“Yeah?” J. T. said, waiting.
Griffin opted to be straight with J. T., up to a point. “Look, you been up here, the sheriff is spread kind of thin.”
“Uh-huh. And you help out, is that it. The Community Watch.” More waiting.
“Okay. I think we got a guy way back in the woods cooking meth. I come up with a license on a silver-gray Pontiac. This mystery lady visits him-”
“Bingo,” J. T. said, his voice on surer ground. “Sheryl Marie Mott. Caucasian female, thirty-six, goes five feet eight, one-thirty pounds, dark hair, blue eyes. Drives a 2001 Pontiac Grand Am GT. And Harry-watch the cowboy shit. She’s associated with the OMG motorcycle gang, some real bad-news bikers.”
“She got a record?”
“Nothing that resulted in convictions. She was looked at a few years back on suspicion of smuggling dope into the prison. Nothing that would stick. And dig this. Under identifying marks on her sheet, it says ‘red Harley wings tattooed under her belly button hip to hip.’”
Griffin chuckled, “Talk about getting your red wings, huh?”
“There it is. And to answer your question, to quote my unimpeachable source; she’s the perfect chick, strictly likes to fuck and cook. Cook meth, that is.”
“Thanks, J. T. Now when I talk to Sheriff Nygard I got a little more to go on than just my overactive imagination.”
“I can make some more calls-BCA’s got a flying meth squad could help out the sheriff-”
“I’ll let him know.”
After a pause, J. T. asked, “So they’re all right, huh?”
“Hey, when I saw her an hour ago she just came from getting her hair done.”
“I guess. Question is, what’s she gonna do next? She goes back in the Army…,” J. T. said.
“It’ll kill Broker, she does that,” Griffin said.
“He won’t admit it, though; dumb fuck. Maybe nothing changes. Okay, look, Harry; you watch your ass, hear?”
“Lima Charley. Thanks again.”
Griffin switched off the phone, stood up, and stretched. Looking around, he thought, Not a bad day for a walk in the woods. But first he went in the house and sat at his desk computer, connected to the Net, and Googled “meth labs.” Got some book titles, clicked to Amazon.
Christ, lookit all this shit:
After almost two hours clicking his way through the sites, he thought he had a basic fix on the kind of equipment to look for. Okay. Let’s do it.
He pulled on silk-weight long underwear, a fleece sweater, tan wind pants, and a pair of wool socks. Then he laced on his Rockies. In the bedroom, he reached behind the books on the first shelf of the bedside table and withdrew a folded chamois cloth, unwrapped it, and removed the classic 1911 Colt.45 semiautomatic and two magazines, one loaded with seven rounds, the other empty to rest the spring. He inserted the magazine, racking the slide, and set the safe. Then he felt behind the socks in his top dresser drawer, took out a box of ammo and a shoulder holster, loaded the second magazine, slipped it in the leather carrier on the holster, and shoved in the pistol.
No big thing. Most of the locals carried a sidearm when they ventured into the big woods. They didn’t believe the tree-hugger propaganda about wolves never attacking humans.
After he’d strapped on the pistol, he pulled on a bulky fleece sweater and a lightweight Gore-Tex windbreaker and emptied the coffeepot into a thermos. He put the thermos in his pack with a plastic bottle of water, two energy bars, and a pair of binoculars. The pack already contained a first-aid kit, a compass, and a small but powerful halogen flashlight.
His mind at this point was still relatively empty. Whatever he found would dictate taking it to the next level.
His gear assembled, he went out, started up his Jeep, and drove north though the Barrens. When he came to the intersection where County Z crossed 12, he turned right, following Teedo’s directions. Checking the tenths clicking off on his odometer, he watched the tree line along the left side of the untracked road, alert for the overgrown logging trail. About two miles. One-point-nine…There.
He slowed, shifted into four-wheel low, and turned left through an opening in the trees. Branches batted the windshield, snagged at the fenders. Fifty yards in, the wheels started to spin, so he stopped. The snow was deceptive, the ground beneath it thawed and wet. He unfolded the county map again.
Getting out, shouldering his pack, he oriented to the map and visualized the vector of the trail cutting across the acute angle formed by 12 and County X. Maybe three miles to Gator’s farm. He folded the map, tucked it in his parka and started to walk.
Soon the tall pagodas of red and white pine boughs blocked the sky, and he moved in limbo light, hemmed in by balsam and black spruce. Since the sun didn’t penetrate in here, the snow still clung to branches, not soft and fluffy but thawed and refrozen into thick chains that weighted down the boughs.
Sweating now, he unzipped his parka, removed his hat and gloves. The silence played tricks with his ears, sometimes buzzing, sometimes ringing. Nothing moved, no birds, no squirrels; just the hushed tramp of his boots in the snow.
Then, when it seemed the dense tangle of trees would never end, the trail opened ahead and dipped. The sky returned, and he picked his way down the granite shoulder of a wide ravine. Coming up the other side, he saw the four-foot-tall cairn of small boulders that marked Camp’s Last Stand.
He stopped, removed his pack, took out the thermos, unscrewed the cup, and poured coffee. Then he lit a Lucky, and as his sweat evaporated, he revisited the story of local legend Waldo Camp. Desk clerk in the Granite Falls Post Office, Camp had trudged out here all alone on deer opener in 1973 to hunt this wide ravine. He had constructed such a perfectly camouflaged blind up on a granite shelf that they didn’t find him for three days after he went missing. The temperature had been mild on opening day when The Big One crushed his heart. A much younger Ed Durning, doctor at the town clinic and acting medical examiner for the county, made this deduction when they found Camp sitting on a stump, slouched against a pile of deadfall. His trousers and long underwear were tangled down around his boots. To a man, the search party swore that Camp had never looked so good; eyes locked wide open, and this beatific grin frozen on his parted lips.
Underscore the frozen. A serious cold snap had moved in, and Camp was slumped, petrified, in a sitting position, left hand holding his.243 perfectly erect, and his right hand clamped around his limp frosty pecker.
His family took it in stride and put Waldo’s other claim to fame on his tombstone: “Sold a joke to
Griffin finished his coffee, stowed the thermos, and hiked up the ravine. Just like Teedo said, the trail forked. Griffin took the left path, and soon the canopy and thickets of spruce closed in, plunging him in dim silence broken only by the rush of a stream coursing through the granite boulders.
Then, up ahead, the skeletal white trunks of the paper birches shimmered in the gloom. Walking closer, he saw the dull twinkle of three tin buckets hooked to the trees.
Close now. Just a few hundred yards.
Moving more cautiously now, he caught glimpses of a clearing to his left. He left the trail and worked his way
