Free Fire (41 page)

“No more ambushes of park rangers like Judy Demming.”

“That wasn’t planned,” Langston said, stammering. “It just happened.”

“Okay,” Portenson whispered inside, clearly relieved. “We’re back on track. He just got the bastards to incriminate themselves.”

McCann changed the subject. “When we agreed that I would take care of Hoening and the Gopher State Five, you agreed to pay me for it. I did my part. You didn’t do yours.”

Barron said, “The SEC—”

“Fuck the SEC,” McCann said. “My deal was with you.”

“We can still pay,” Barron said. “If we can get things back on track like you say. If we can make an announcement to attract investors—”

McCann exploded:
“That’s what you should have done months ago!”

Layborn said to Barron, “Why are you letting this asshole dictate to us? Can’t you see what he’s doing?”

Ward looked terrified, Joe thought. He almost felt sorry for him.

“So,” McCann said, “I’ll ask you one more time. Did you bring me my money?”

Silence. Ward looked as if he was about to break down. Joe saw Langston make eye contact with Layborn, giving him a prearranged signal.

“Even better,” Layborn said, unleashed, narrowing the distancebetween him and McCann. “I brought you this,” and before Joe could react, he raised his weapon and fired twice,
pop-pop
, the gunfire splitting the silence. The impact of the bullets sent McCann toppling straight over backward in his rocking chair.

“Jesus!” Ashby shouted, scrambling.

Suddenly, Layborn swung his pistol toward Bob Olig, saying,“And you—”

Through the radio, McIlvaine barked, “Pull!”

And Layborn’s head exploded from automatic gunfire. His headless body stayed erect for a second before crumpling to the floor.

“Freeze!”
McIlvaine shouted from the dark.
“All three of you, down on the ground, hands behind your heads, now!”

Ashby threw open the gift-shop door. Joe, Nate, and Portensonran out behind him. Joe felt adrenaline shoot through him like electric currents as he scrambled, the afterimage of Layborn’s death seared into his vision.

Everything was happening at once: agents were thundering down the stairs in their heavy boots; Olig was screaming and cursing from where he was now hiding behind the fireplace; Langston, Ward, and Barron were dropping to their knees and flopping onto their bellies as ordered.

Within half a minute all three were cuffed and searched. Only Langston had a weapon. Barron was pleading, saying he had no part in anything, was an innocent businessman. Langston hissed at him to shut up, but Barron was already offeringto testify in exchange for a lighter sentence.

Ward was in apparent shock, staring at a river of Layborn’s blood as it snaked across the floor toward him.

As Joe walked toward the still-living triumvirate of EnerDyne,he saw something white and blood-flecked rolling slowly across the hardwood floor and reached down and snagged it as if spearing a lazy grounder at shortstop. Layborn’s glass eye looked at him accusingly from his palm. He remembered what Demming had said and rotated the eye. Yup. The National Park Service logo was on the other side.

Joe’s heart was still beating hard when the agent from the gift shop came out beaming, said to Portenson, “We got it all on tape. It’s perfect.”

“Then shut the system down,” McIlvaine said, with a menacingsmile.

By then, McCann had been helped to his feet and was standingthere gasping for air. Despite the Kevlar vest under his parka, the impact of the bullets had punched the breath out of him, and he wheezed raggedly. Olig had stripped off his vest and thrown it across the room as if wearing it another second insulted him somehow. He was furious, he said, about how close he’d come to death, how long the agents had waited.

Joe squatted next to Chuck Ward. Ward still had the distant, almost animal look of shock on his face. Joe had seen many game animals in the back of pickups with the same look.

“How could you do this?” Joe asked. “How could you betray the governor like this? Worse, how could you betray Wyoming?”

Ward studied the hardwood floor inches away, tears forming in his eyes.

Joe repeated his question, and this time it got through. He absentmindedly worked Layborn’s glass eye in his hand like a big prayer bead.

“He knows everything, Joe,” Ward said.

“Who?”

“The governor. Our boss. Nothing gets by him when it comes to revenue.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Then don’t. You’re so naïve.”

“You’re lying.”

Ward turned away with a bitter smile. He was lying, Joe thought as he stood up. Of course he was lying. Of
course
he was lying.

Portenson skipped over and gave Joe a bear hug, almost lifting him off the ground. “It was perfect,” Portenson said. “Your plan, it was perfect! Even better, it’s federal prosecutor-proof! This is the biggest arrest we’ve ever made in our office, and I was in charge! I’m going to get the hell out of this fucking state afterall.”

He kissed Joe sloppily on the cheek, and Joe looked away.

“I’m next,” McIlvaine said, stepping up after Portenson let go. He wrapped his arms around Joe and clamped hard, nearly squeezing Joe’s breath out.

“Okay, okay,” Joe grunted.

But McIlvaine didn’t let go. Instead, he squeezed harder. Suddenly, what was about to come next hit Joe like a hammer. The realization was worse than McIlvaine’s grip.

“Get his weapon,” McIlvaine ordered one of his men, who plucked the Glock out of Joe’s holster.

Across the room, before Joe could shout out a warning, two agents clubbed Nate to the ground with their rifle butts. They took his .454 and cuffed him behind his back, shouting at him to
“stay the fuck down.”

Joe tried to get loose, arching his back in a wild jerk, attemptingto take McIlvaine to the ground with him, but the FBI commander was too strong. After Nate was bound with an agent on top of him and a gun jammed into his temple, McIlvaine pressed his mouth to Joe’s ear.

“I’ll let you go now, but don’t try to save your friend. There are way too many of us, and you saw what happened to Layborn.”

When McIlvaine released him, Joe staggered away, sucking in racking breaths. He saw Portenson staring at him, shaking his head sadly.

“We had a deal,” Joe said, gasping.

“Yes we did,” Portenson said, “and I honored it. But you didn’t have a deal with
him.
” He gestured toward McIlvaine.

“He’s been on our list for quite a while,” McIlvaine said, confirming without saying what the whispering campaign on the radios had been about.

Joe threw himself at Portenson and his fist caught the FBI agent square in the nose, hard, smashing it flat against his face in a concussion of dark red blood. Portenson dropped to the floor, unconscious. Joe tumbled on top of him, cocked his arm back for another blow, when McIlvaine and two other agents tore him away.

Before cuffing Joe around a knotty pine stanchion to keep him out of the way, McIlvaine leaned into his ear again and said: “Don’t you know by now?
Never trust a Fed
.”

Through a fog of rage and betrayal, Joe watched as the assaultteam read Miranda rights to James Langston, chief ranger of Yellowstone Park; Layton Barron, CEO of EnerDyne; Chuck Ward, chief of staff for the governor of Wyoming; and Nate Romanowski,ex-special forces officer and outlaw falconer. Layborn’s body had been rolled up in dustcovers taken from tables in the restaurant. Portenson moaned from where he lay on the couch near the fire, holding a handkerchief to his head.

McIlvaine had ordered up another snow coach from the South entrance to take everyone away. It would be three hours before the tracked vehicle could get to Old Faithful, he reported to his men.

Across the room, Joe and Nate locked eyes.

“I’m sorry,” Joe said.

“Don’t worry about it,” Nate mouthed, “it’s not your fault.”

“It is,” Joe said. “I’ll get you out. I promise.”

“You promise?” Nate said, arching his eyebrows, the words visibly relaxing him, making him smile.

With every fiber in my soul
, Joe thought but didn’t say, becauseMcIlvaine stepped between them to block the exchange. The commander winked at Joe, then wheeled and kicked Nate in the ribs so hard Nate curled up into a ball, his face purple from pain.

“Stop it!” Joe screamed, but at the same time he felt incrediblyindebted to Nate, wondering if he could possibly come through with his promise and thinking,
I have to
.

That’s when del Ashby shouted, “Hey! where’d McCann go? And where is Olig?”

The room froze with silence. Even Joe turned from Nate and looked around.

The front door burst open, and the FBI agent who had been stationed in the woods entered, shook the snow off his coveralls,and said, “Who just took the snow coach?”

32

The flamers were being lit one by one, the whole line of them, columns of angry fire reaching as high as six feet into the snowy night sky, melting the falling snow with sharp sizzles that sounded like
zzzt
, warming the air around Sunburst Hot Springs so much that Bob Olig felt comfortable taking off his parka and tossing it aside.

Clay McCann leaned back against the trunk of a lodgepole pine, noting how the flames played on Olig, made him look biggerand meaner than he really was, making him look like some kind of biblical avenger. The handcuffs bit into the flesh of Mc-Cann’s wrists.

“Just take them off for a minute,” McCann said. “Please? I need to scratch my ear where that maniac tore it off. It really hurts and I need to scratch it.”

“Gee,” Olig said, roaming around looking for more flamers to light, “I really feel for you.”

The stolen snow coach was parked in the trees at the edge of the firelight. McCann could see a reflection of flame in one of the side windows. The pain in his chest had steeled into a steady throb and he was just now able to speak. He recalled how he’d tried to shout as Olig attacked him earlier and hustled him out the front door of the Old Faithful Inn, but the impact of the bulletshad kicked not only the breath out of him but also his abilityto talk.

Finally, Olig walked over to where McCann was sitting.

“I’ve been thinking of you for a long time.”

McCann sighed. “Why weren’t you there that day?”

“Rick and I had a disagreement. I decided to pass on the reunionthis year. I wish I was there.”

McCann smiled malevolently. “I wish you were there too.”

Olig said, “I wondered for months what it could possibly feel like to kill someone. It’s beyond my understanding how someone like you could be so cruel. Someone supposedly with education, like you.”

McCann thought about it for a moment. “It isn’t as hard as you think. It was a means to an end. Nothing personal, like I said earlier.”

Olig seemed to be studying him, his mouth curling with revulsion.

“That makes it worse,” he said.

“Maybe it does,” McCann conceded.

“Get up.”

McCann felt a trill of pain in his groin, and he squirmed. “I’m sure we can work something out if you’ll let me try.”

“Nope,” Olig said. “No deals. Especially with a lawyer who killed my friends.”

“But you’ll be a murderer,” McCann said. “You’ll be as bad as me.”

Olig smiled. “I’ll never be as bad as you.”

“I’m not moving.”

Olig reached out and grabbed McCann’s good ear, asking, “Do we have to go through this again?”

McCann felt the flames on his face as he was pulled toward the hot springs. He thought about running, thought about fighting,thought about trying to negotiate.

The surface of the water smoked with roils of steam, looked oddly inviting. He thought of Sheila, hoped he’d see her again wherever he was going, hoped she wasn’t too angry with him.

He felt a massive, two-handed shove on his back and he was flying forward. The water was so hot it seemed cold.

It was quick.

33

Joe drove lars’s pickup back toward mammoth with Ashby in the passenger seat. It was two-thirty in the morning,the snow had stopped, and the FBI agents had left an hour before with their prisoners en route to Jackson Hole. The snow was deep and soft, but the oversized tires bit well and Joe had no doubt that if he held the vehicle steady and kept it moving forward, he wouldn’t get stuck.

As quickly as they’d come, the storm clouds dissipated, leaving a creamy wash of stars and an ice-blue slice of moon that lit the snow blue-white. Joe didn’t even need his headlights.

He and Ashby hadn’t talked about what happened. Ashby seemed lost in his own thoughts and loyalties, and Joe certainly was. Joe replayed his brief conversation with Ward. Of
course
Ward was lying about the governor. If Rulon knew about the microbes and the motive for the murders, why would he have sent Joe to investigate?

Unless, Joe thought darkly, Ward and Rulon expected him to fail. Unless they figured Joe Pickett, shamed ex-game warden, was too bumbling and incompetent to crack the case, thus givingthem the political cover of claiming it had been investigated but nothing was found. And, eventually, Ward would be rich personally and the State of Wyoming would have yet another source of revenue.

Could Rulon possibly be that manipulative? Yes, Joe thought, he could. But was he? Joe wasn’t sure.

The only thing he was sure about, as he drove, was that he’d use the relationship he’d established with the governor to press for Nate Romanowski’s release. The governor owed him that, Joe figured.

Joe was so deep into rehashing his situation and what had happenedthat he didn’t notice that Ashby was gesturing frantically, pointing at something through the window, sputtering as he tried to put words together. “My God, Joe, look! It’s Steamboat!”