I carefully aimed at his extended right hand. “This is the last time I’m going to warn you. Stop.”
He didn’t, and I fired. I didn’t hit his hand but it must’ve been very close, because he yanked it back and looked at me. He wasn’t smiling now, and when he lunged this time, I took careful aim.
I don’t know how long I lay there before thinking of Saizarbitoria’s cell phone in my inside pocket. I pulled it out and looked at it, anything to keep from looking at the dead man who was staring at me, his legs still invisible over the crest of the ridge; definitely Fingers Moser.
I concentrated on getting the cell phone up and operating, pulling it from the Ziploc and turning it around and flipping it open. The phone immediately displayed a splash of green and then the photo of Marie and Antonio. I stared at the display and watched as two words marched across their smiling faces-NO SERVICE.
I slumped back in my new spot, a little away from the dripping gas leak.
Turning the mobile off, I stuffed it back in the plastic bag and sealed it, carefully sliding it into the inside pocket of my jacket. “I can’t even talk to Hector.”
I lay there feeling sorry for myself and then got up on one elbow to reach behind me and see how much of the spilled supplies I could find. The first thing I located was a Snickers bar. I broke it in half and stuck part of it in my mouth-it tasted like a piece of moldy firewood and was like chewing bark. I lay there allowing my saliva to soften it a little, then chewed some more and swallowed.
Figuring there might come a time when I’d want it, I poked the other half into my pocket, flailed my hand around behind me, and finally found something else-the paperback of Dante’s Inferno.
Great, some uplifting literature to help bolster my mood.
I dropped the paperback on my chest and started thinking about my immediate future. The weather was certainly a problem. There had been a brief break in the squall, but to the northwest I could see the broiling bank of storm clouds that was coming next. Pretty soon it was going to start snowing again, and then the wind would pick up and fill my little wallow, effectively turning me into a sheriff Popsicle.
I thought about the hungry cougar back at the lodge and wondered what else there was up here that might be waiting for the opportunity of an easy meal. There are wolves in the Bighorns to go along with the mountain lions and black bears; the Game and Fish said there weren’t any grizzlies in the range, but I knew a few old-timers who called bullshit on that one. I wasn’t anxious to be the bait staked out to discover if it was true or not.
I was pretty sure that the warmth of the partial sun, my body heat, and the engine would thaw the ice shelf underneath me enough that I could dislodge my leg. I just had to find some way of passing the time.
I stared at the book on my chest.
I was going to have to get pretty desperate to start in on that.
Cord never shot an arrow from itself
That sped away athwart the air so swift,
As I beheld a very little boat
Come o’er the water tow’rds us at that moment
Under the guidance of a single pilot
Who shouted, “Now art thou arrived, fell soul?”
“Phlegyas, Phlegyas, thou criest out in vain
For this once,” said my Lord; “thou shalt not have us
Longer than in the passing of the slough.”
As he who listens to some great deceit
That has been done to him, and then resents it,
Such became Phlegyas, in his gathered wrath.
My Guide descended down into the boat,
And then he made me enter after him,
And only when I entered seemed it laden.
I thought about the first time I’d read the epic poem in the old Carnegie library that was now my office. I’d had a draconic English teacher, Betty Dobbs, who had drilled us to the point that I’d had to go to the Durant Library to discover new ways of deciphering the text.
They used to keep a fire burning in the small, marble fireplace in the winter months, and there was a long oak research table that you could sprawl your books onto. The copy they had was a beautiful old tome, the Reverend Henry Francis Cary translation with illustrations by Gustave Dore. The thing had a weight to its presentation that had you believing that you were truly glimpsing hell in a handbasket rather than the moonings of a banished, heartbroken Florentine.
Contrary to popular belief, there aren’t that many descriptions of hell in the Bible, and the majority of images most people carry around in their heads are from the fourteenth-century poem, which means that our contemporary view of hell is actually from the Middle Ages.
A depressing thought, to say the least.
I had gotten to the eighth canto and was amazed at how much history and politics there was in the thing, observations that most certainly passed me by when I was sixteen.
I marked my place by dog-earring a page and placed the book back on my chest. My eyes were tired, I had a headache, and it had begun to snow again. I’d had an eye operation a few months back that had been an unqualified success, so I was pretty sure my headache was from the bump on my forehead and the gasoline fumes and not from my eye.
I pulled the cell phone from my pocket, took it out of the bag, held it up, and looked at the two words. I turned it off, dropped the thing in the Ziploc and back in my pocket, and pulled my glove back on.
The clouds were so low, it felt like I could reach out and touch them, so I tried-my black gloves looking even darker as they rose up to the steel afternoon sky. It was getting colder, and my hopes for thawing out enough space for my leg were taking a hit. I drew my other leg under the four-wheeler and tucked the book away.
I was about to pull my hat over my face and take a little nap when I saw the horn button on the handlebars of the Arctic Cat. It was a feeble hope, but a hope nonetheless.
I pushed the button with my thumb and listened to the extended and herniated beep of the horn. I waited a moment and then tried it again, this time bleating out three shorts-three longs-three shorts. I continued the SOS pattern until I noticed a difference in the tone, indicating I was killing the battery.
I pulled up the balaclava, went ahead and put my hat over my face, tucked my arms into my body, and rolled to my left in an attempt to get as much cover from the machine as possible.
Definitely a noise.
I’d been lying there half-asleep in my little snow cocoon when I thought I’d heard something, and this was the third time I’d heard it-a snuffling, huffing noise from up on the ridge.
The wind was now howling through the swaying trees, and I was loath to poke my head out, but I was damned if I was going to be eaten and not know what it was that was eating me. Brushing away the inch of snow that had fallen, I pushed my hat off and peeled back my goggles. It was brighter, but other than that everything looked the same.
The dead convict had been partly covered over by the falling, blowing snow, but up on the ridge the wind was stronger, so it was an uneven mantle. I glanced up and down the hillside, but there was nothing else there.
I was just about to put my hat back over my eyes when I heard the snuffling and what might’ve been a grunt or growl. I reached down for the Colt and kept a weather eye on the ridge.
It was then that the dead man disappeared.
I blinked to make sure I’d seen what I’d seen, and I had. One moment the man’s corpse had been there hanging over the hillside with only the bottoms of his legs hidden, and the next, something had yanked him by them, and he was gone.
Moser had to be at least two hundred pounds. No wolf could’ve done that, and I doubt a mountain lion could’ve either.
