cliff. He suddenly reared back with a thunderous laugh that echoed off the rock walls. After a few moments he stopped, and the slits of his eyes would’ve knapped flint. “Seems like every time I see you, you’re accusing me of something, Lawman.”
I moved another impromptu game piece. “You brought it up.”
He chuckled. “Not about me.” He moved another stone that might have been a knight, and not for the first time I began wondering if the game was crook. His face stayed on the board as the grizzly one watched me, and it was almost as if the bear head was the one that finally spoke. “Checkmate. Go to sleep, Lawman.”
“Unlock the door.”
The boy doesn’t move, just stares at the dashboard of the truck. He knows this almost-man-knows the meanness in him. Saw him once at the Greyhound bus station in Hardin placing ash at people’s feet with the lost dreams of his eyes. They had seen each other for what it was worth, and they had both known that the hanging road was the line between them-even then.
The tap again. “Unlock the door.”
Not of our people, says the large man about the almost-man. Stay in the truck and do not unlock the door.
“Unlock the door.”
Do not unlock the door.
“Unlock the door.”
He turns his face to look at the almost-man, who raises a fist as if to break the glass and it is suspended in the air there like a falling tree, trapped by its branches. He thinks how angry the big man will be if he returns and finds the glass in his truck broken.
“Unlock the door.”
He unlocks the door.
These dreams were so real they left me shaken and unsure of which world I was in. I shrugged the buffalo hide farther up onto my shoulders and listened to Virgil snore-I was sure in no less a decibel level than that of a real grizzly-and then rolled over and returned to my restless, vision-haunted sleep.
“Bad dreams?” Virgil woke me with a hand on my arm, and I have to admit the rawhide-laced lance in his other hand was a little disconcerting. The weapon was about eight feet long with a painted coyote skull near the hilt, and it was wrapped in red flannel and studded with brass tacks, elk teeth, horsehair, and deer hooves that rattled when he moved. “It’s time-they’re asleep.”
I stretched my eyes and tried to clear my head. “How do you know?”
He stood and pulled the grizzly head back from his own, the snow falling like dandruff. “I have been watching them.”
It was a little more than a quarter-mile walk following Tensleep Creek. I had the advantage of the recovered snowshoes, but Virgil had the advantage of knowing the terrain, and we followed his footprints and walked in the rut where we’d dragged the dead convict.
He’d been right about the weather, and the full moon shone above us, broken by the passing clouds like camouflage. We made our way across the same ridge, the cold grinding the snow beneath us as the deer toes on Virgil’s spear clack-a-tated like wind chimes.
“Hunter’s Moon.”
I glanced up again thinking about the Native designations that even NASA had agreed upon for each monthly moon; Hunter was October. “Little early for that.”
His voice resounded in his chest. “Never too early for that; besides, it’s a moon and we’re hunting.” He stopped just below the ridge, careful not to concede a target even when no one was looking. “In the Snow Moon, I about froze my ass off.”
I had to think-February.
“What month is it now?”
“May.”
“Hmm…” He grunted. “Day of the week?”
“I believe it’s Sunday, early Sunday morning.”
It was clear and colder than before, and the moonlight made it feel as if, even in the wallow, we were walking across a spotlit stage. I was rested and feeling a lot better, the bruise on my leg not giving me any trouble. Virgil continued to carry my pack; I’d asked him why, but he’d only shrugged and walked on. I had the Sharps over my shoulder, just in case we didn’t have the element of surprise that the big Crow Indian had guaranteed.
We followed the frozen creek through another ridge and stayed to the left before crossing into the open again, still following Virgil’s earlier tracks. The timberline was on a hillside to our right, and he motioned for me to follow him to an area that overlooked a four-way split in the stream that made a wide meadow before the falls. In the cerulean light of the moon, I could make out only one rectangular outline nestled in the aspens below.
You could see where the driver had circled to the right, but then, when faced with the steep incline and more trees, had returned to the field to the west and parked.
We were going to have to take the long way to the east and circle the meadow or backtrack in plain view across the creek. We chose the long way, and it took the better part of a half hour, but I felt assured as we looked down on the vehicle that we hadn’t been seen. I adjusted the binoculars that Omar had thoughtfully given me, and my eyes drifted in and out of the shadows playing across the snow.
The area around the Thiokol had been trampled flat; there were no lights, and no one was outside-at least as far as I could see with the aid of the powerful optics.
“There has been no movement for two hours. They are city people and don’t know that the bad things happen at night?”
I shrugged the binoculars from my eyes. “They know about bad things, day or night. I’ll bet they’re asleep. It’s where I’d be if you hadn’t woken me up.” I was just starting to figure out a plan on how to approach the vehicle when in my peripheral vision I noticed Virgil holding the expedition pack out to me. I stood, took it, and rested it against the tree beside me. “You headed back?”
“Unless you would like me to stay?”
“No.”
It wasn’t fair to dragoon Virgil into official business that wasn’t his own. I slung the strap of the binoculars around my neck, pulled a glove off, and extended a hand. “Thanks.”
“For what?”
I continued to look up at the giant. “Well, for getting an eight-hundred pound four-wheeler off me, for one-I’d still be down there near the creek bed if it weren’t for you.”
He nodded and then glanced at the Thiokol. “Maybe that would’ve been better.” His double head turned back to me, the bear one sitting a full foot taller than mine-short, really, for a grizzly. “Anyway, I got beef stroganoff out of the deal.”
“And a bottle of Omar’s Pappy Van Winkle’s.”
He shuffled his enormous feet. “You saw that, huh?”
I rubbed the lump on my head-the cold must’ve reduced the swelling. “I did.”
His eyes came back to mine, and he finally took my hand, enveloping it in his. “You don’t miss much, do you, Lawman?”
“Nope.” I liked him, as much as you can like a giant sociopath who had killed so often he couldn’t even remember all the lives he’d taken, human and otherwise. “You better get out of here before the shooting starts.”
He stood there looking down at me, and I was sure that even if I could’ve made out more of his face, I still wouldn’t have been able to read his expression. It was hard not to try, though. His mammoth chest rose and fell, but he said nothing more, then stooped through the lower limbs and walked away without comment.
I listened as the deer hooves chattered into the distance, then turned and, bringing the binoculars back up to my eyes, studied the vehicle below just in time to catch someone standing in front of one of the frost-covered side windows strike a match and light what looked to be a cigarette. I lowered the binoculars and remembered one of my late wife’s slogans about smoking: “Cigarettes are killers that travel in packs.”
