“I did, and I’m about to leave another one handcuffed at this location.”
“Another one?”
“Yep, and there’s a body at Omar Rhoades’s cabin at Bear Lake.”
“Oh, Walter.” There was a rustling of some papers. “Tommy Wayman, Joe Iron Cloud, and a detachment of Highway Patrol are at the last turn at Tensleep Canyon and should be joining Henry before too long. Do you know about the weather?”
“It’s cold but dry up here for now.”
“It’s going to get much worse. The NOAA says that was only the front of the storm and that this blizzard is carrying fifty-mile-an-hour winds with severe mountain temperatures that will likely reach forty below zero. It’s going to be a complete whiteout by midmorning.” There was only a short pause. “Walter, you have to stop.”
I placed my thumb over the OFF button.
“Walter, please? They are on their way; at least wait until Henry and the others get there.”
“Don’t worry, they’ll find me.” My thumb hovered over the button. “I’ve got to go.”
“Walter…”
I punched it and looked at the indicator, which still read fully charged. I turned the satellite phone off and hoped for the best.
The Junk-food Junkie was looking at me when I raised my face. “Popp’s dead?”
“Yep.”
“Good, he was a prick. How about the Mexican kid?”
“Hector. Alive and well.”
“What about Fingers?”
I didn’t answer.
He seemed to take a certain amount of satisfaction in that at least one of his companions was alive, but the troubled expression returned to his face as he began rocking again. “You cannot like leave me here.”
“I don’t see as how I have much of a choice, Freddie. Unless you want to leave the comfortable environs of the Thiokol and accompany me farther up the range, but the weather report isn’t good.” I studied the Fed phone and wondered if any of the other ones had been left. I held the device out. “I don’t suppose they left any more of these, dead or otherwise?”
“No.” He wiped his hands, rattling the restraints that held them close to the bench, and looked at the water bottle beside him. “How am I supposed to drink that, cuffed like I am?”
“Pour it into the lid a bunch of times, but I’d not wait too long or it’ll freeze. The other option is keeping it close to your body.” I pushed my own water bottle inside the pack to help it stay insulated and then placed the satellite phone in one of the outside pockets of my jacket in hopes that the cold would do the battery some good.
“Hey, have you got any more food?”
I dug into the expedition pack, dragged out Omar’s sandwiches, and handed one of them to him. “Here.”
He took it, crouched down to reach his hands, and began eating. He studied me from under the knit cap, his eyes shifting like bad cargo. “You should just let me have the other one, too.”
“How do you figure?”
He swallowed and took another bite. “You’re gonna be like dead here in a few hours anyway.”
I stood there looking at him for an elongated moment. “Dead, or like dead?” He didn’t say anything more, so I repacked, starting with placing the other sandwich back in my pack. “Beatrice said that Shade had a waterproof duffel with him. Do you have any idea what’s in it?”
“He’s got a lot of stuff with him, some of it that she brought and some that he took from those FBI guys.” He took another bite and chewed, suddenly sullen. “You don’t get it, do you, Sheriff?” He licked the mayonnaise from the corner of his mouth with his tongue and shook his head. “It doesn’t mean shit that you’ve stopped us; he’s not like us. I mean, we’re the kinds of guys that give people nightmares.” He shifted his weight and leaned back against the bulkhead with one shoulder. “He’s the kind of guy that gives us nightmares.”
I lifted the pack up onto the seat by the door to make it easier to hoist onto my shoulder, stretched my eyes, and rubbed my face. “Then I guess you’d better stay awake.”
It was starting to snow again, but through the tides of the storm I could see small leaks of moonlight seeping to the ground. I was able to follow their tracks, but before heading into the timber, I checked the early morning western sky for stars-there weren’t any. This was not a good thing. I was feeling tired again and that wasn’t good, either. I took a deep breath and exhaled through my nostrils, the vapor blowing across the expanse of my jacket like the twin trails of two locomotives. Maybe what I needed to do was work up some steam.
Even as cold as it was, there was still a discernible amount of water dropping from the rocks above; of course it was smothered under a two-foot casing of ice, but the dull thudding of the falling water pounded a rhythm and I settled into a comfortable pace. It’d been a long while since I’d had this kind of physical activity at altitude, and I figured the burgeoning headache that seemed to be mushrooming in the front of my head was just that. Of course, the knot on my forehead probably didn’t help.
I wondered once again where Raynaud Shade thought he was going.
The path straightened at the ridge along Mistymoon Trail, bypassing some smaller ponds I remembered. I knew this area better than Virgil’s since we were now approaching the main trail. Of course, I’d been here mostly in the summer and that was a different landscape. I’d fished Gunboat Lake with Cady and before that with my late wife, what seemed like a few lifetimes ago. Before my daughter was born, Martha and I made summer pilgrimages in an attempt to break up the heat and to supplement my civil service wages with a freezer full of brookies and a few rainbows-some as large as ten inches, big for being that high.
I remember my wife on those trips, mostly with her hair tied back with a bandana, as she dutifully breaded the fillets and carefully browned them over an open campfire. I remembered the closeness in our double sleeping bag and the smooth soles of her feet as she attempted to keep them warm by pressing them against my legs.
A surge of wind pulsed against the trees on the far ridge as if trying to push them aside and then swirled into a snow devil in the frozen meadow below, the tiny tornado jumping the hard surface of the water and moving across the small valley toward me. Just as suddenly as it had appeared, another gust caught it, and it was gone.
I wasn’t even aware that I’d stopped walking.
Standing there on the ridge trail, I realized I’d come to a fork and my subconscious mind had been unable to make the choice. The main path led north, the one to the right went east toward Mirror and Lost Twin lakes.
I felt a shudder run through me that had nothing to do with the temperature. I could feel a slight twinge in my fingers and in that little portion of my ear that was missing, and felt kind of like those amputees that reach to scratch limbs that have long been removed.
I adjusted my collar, pulled the balaclava over my nose, stuffed my gloved hands in my pockets in an attempt to further insulate my long-healed wounds, and stared at the path east. There were no tracks, but I could swear that someone was watching me. It was the same feeling that I’d had at the West Tensleep parking loop at the start of this trail. My mind made the logical connection and moved back to the time when I’d been even more sure that I’d been watched, prodded, cajoled, and enticed.
I thought about the questions I’d asked Henry after I brought George and him out of the wilderness, and the inadequacy of his answers. Maybe there were no answers to what had happened on my multiple trips to and from Lost Twin Lakes that time on the mountain-maybe there were no answers because there was nothing there at all.
Perhaps, but it still felt as if something had been there and that something was here now.
I glanced up the main trail where there were three sets of snowshoe prints. Looking for movement, I let my eyes unfocus, but there was nothing there. I took a few steps and felt a sudden sense of loss, snow devils being better than the real ones.
I lifted the binoculars just to check the trail more closely and saw what I must have sensed-there was another set of footprints along the creek bed. I tromped my way down the slope, kneeled-careful not to let the top-heavy pack topple me over-and gently blew in the nearest print. It was a huge track, moccasins, smooth with just a trace of the stitching on the side-crude stitching that could only have been homemade.
Virgil.
