Killer View (10 page)

“I don’t know. I guess so.”

“Lay off the pot for a while, okay? I need your memory clear.”

If the boy could have dissolved into the chair, he would have. Eyes to the dirty carpet, chin down, he said nothing for a moment. Then he looked up. “I take it he wasn’t with the government.”

“Mr. Jones, you’re not to leave the county without my permission. You do so and you will be considered at flight. Is that clear?”

“Is that legal?”

“You want to involve the courts? I’m happy to do so.”

“It’s clear,” the boy said.

“I want a written statement from you. Exactly what happened. Where, when, who, what. Every detail you can recall: accent, clothes, mannerisms, expressions, shoes, car, glasses, gloves—I don’t care how insignificant you think it might have been. I want that on my desk, in Hailey, by six P.M. this evening. Is that clear?”

“Yes, sir.”

“No excuses. No delays. No makeups. Six P.M.”

“Does it have to be typed?” Jones asked.

Walt shook his head in frustration. “It has to be truthful. I don’t care if it’s a podcast; I just want to know what happened. In your words, to the best of your ability.” He dug himself out of the couch and made for the door. “And I’d lose the weed, if I were you. Ketchum police will be watching you now.”

He headed out the door and, as he did so, he tugged on his jacket against the cold. The process of pulling the jacket up onto his shoulders instantly took him back to Randy’s coming out of the pickup truck the night before. Randy and Mark had been throwing jabs about Randy borrowing the coat.

Walt recalled Randy’s complaining about the smell of the winter jacket and Mark’s chastising him for forgetting a coat of his own in the middle of a blizzard. It had been Mark’s coat that Randy had been wearing up on the mountain. A loaner. A coat carrying Mark’s scent, not Randy’s. Walt had all but proven that dogs had been involved—the prints found alongside the tire track.

What if Randy had been pursued by dogs meant to target Mark?

Mark had tried to discuss something. Walt had joked about it, had failed to listen.

The same complaint he’d gotten from Gail on her way out the door.

TUESDAY

ROY COATS LEFT THE DOGS BEHIND THIS TIME. HE DIDN’T need to track some guy through a snowstorm. He didn’t need a cage to hide a girl.

Pulling a sled, he rode the snowmobile, a Yamaha Phazer, several miles up Sunbeam Road, pulled it into the trees, and locked and chained it. To some, this was the middle of nowhere—fifty miles past Galena Summit in a national forest of four million acres, so vast that it included the one-million-acre River of No Return Wilderness Area, the largest wilderness in the continental United States. He could have called upon the others to help him, but he was the best shot. He pursued this alone.

During the “work” on the girl, with the client in the other room cleaning himself up, Coats had made promises to her that he’d be gentler than the visitor had been. He’d won a moment of compromise on her part. She’d mentioned the doc’s frequent trips to a cabin in Challis. She didn’t know anything about any sheep but knew he’d been hauling mail-order gear up there. Coats had still done her, but he hadn’t yanked her hair or slapped her around the way the client had.

Now, he snowshoed the final mile, following nothing more than his internal compass, working from memory, having viewed a topographical map only once. He ascended a steep mountain ridge, holding just below the tree line, and then dropped down into thick forest, as the cabin came into view.

He picked up the fresh tracks of an elk herd and stayed among them for the sake of covering his own prints in the snow. He carried a CheyTac Intervention M-200 slung over his right shoulder. The weapon carried a Nightforce scope, which could be upgraded all the way to a digital device that plugged into a PDA and gave the weapon an effective range of twenty-five hundred yards—well over a mile—that accounted for wind speed and atmospheric pressure. The newspapers called it a
sniper
rifle. To enthusiasts like himself, it was an
antipersonnel
rifle, providing long-range, soft-target interdiction. He’d replaced the muzzle brake with an OPSINC suppressor. It wouldn’t scare a chickadee in the next tree over, if he had to use it.

His choice was not to use it, because it would be one hell of a tricky double shot. He had it sighted for two hundred yards. If needed, his target would never have a clue to his position. The target would not hear a thing until the wet
thwack
of his own shredded flesh. Thankfully, the contracted inventory included only the adults, and excluded any children. He didn’t have any desire to chalk a kid.

Tied onto the left side of his day pack was a D93S cartridge-fired rifle that he often employed in his private client work. With his special loads and the four-power scope, he could accurately project a dart from one hundred twenty-five yards. A single-shot rifle, it weighed eight pounds but was worth every ounce. The D93S was his weapon of choice for the work that lay ahead, but it was the CheyTac that made him feel secure.

He rubbed his sore knuckles through the glove, mulling over his recent mistakes. How he’d killed the wrong brother was beyond him— the dogs didn’t make such errors. He pushed that from his mind and stayed with the elk tracks, huge half-moons the size of horse hooves. As hard as it was to get past his mistakes, they had given him time to rethink his own priorities. He had his own uses for the doctor.

He climbed a tree to verify his position, keeping the pack and both rifles with him. From his position thirty feet up, he had an unobstructed view of a cirque of rock to the south, bejeweled and glistening in the spectacular afternoon sunlight; to the east, a semiforested expanse that trailed down toward the small town of Challis, just the roofs of a few small buildings visible. Dead center, looking southeast, stood a small log cabin in a sea of white, alone at the top of an escarpment, looking to him like a mole on a man’s bald head.

Carefully scanning the area with a pair of binoculars, he spotted the elk herd slightly north, watering at a spring above the bald man’s left ear. A mighty herd at that—thirty to fifty head. He located the herd’s only buck, carrying a monstrous twelve-point rack that he’d have loved to have on the wall of his own cabin. But that was for another day.

He returned to the snow and moved deeper into the forest, working his way silently to the very edge of the trees, less than fifty yards from the front of the cabin and the apron of snow that surrounded it. The snow was deep, so he climbed fifteen feet into a lesser tree and found a perch. He sighted the CheyTac and strapped it to a branch so that it was firmly locked onto the lower-left corner of a window to the left of the cabin’s front door. At this distance, he could have shot a screw out of the door hardware, if he’d chosen to.

Next he readied the dart rifle directly alongside the CheyTac, slinging a pouch at his waist carrying four extra darts. It was a double shot: the CheyTac would shatter the window so the dart could travel through smoothly and on target, a difficult, technical shot that only made it all the more attractive to him.

He had no plans to kick in the door. Playing Bruce Willis was definitely Plan B. Patience was a hunter’s true gift. His best tool: the ruse. He doubted he could coax the good doc to come outside onto the porch, but that was why he’d brought the two rifles. The double shot would do the trick.

He rechecked the sights of both rifles—the CheyTac was strapped in place, the dart rifle free. He spent fifteen minutes getting the setup just right: the CheyTac would be triggered with his left hand; the D93S aimed and fired from his right. He’d have just the one chance because of the single dart. After that, like it or not, he’d have to pull a Bruce Willis on the cabin. The narrator inside his head favored this second option. The hunter opted for the first.

With a piece of Velcro holding the barrel of the dart rifle in place, Coats produced a double-reed elk bugle from his pack and held it to his lips. The bull elks bugled when in rut, and, though the season had just passed, the snow had come early, and it was not impossible that a male might still be out here, sounding his call. A vet would know this. Only the most effective bugling would ensure success.

But he was a professional hunter. Few understood the art of duplicating the wailing oboelike sound of an adult bull elk as he did. He believed any vet, any hunter, would be drawn by the chance to see a bull elk up close. There were few animals as beautiful and regal.

The procedure took some practice: sound the bugle; secure the device in his belt, reach for the D93S, and pull his eye to scope. Bugle, belt, rifle, scope. He waited. He tried another dry run. It took five seconds for him to get the bugle stashed and his eye to scope. It would take a person in that cabin at least a few seconds to get to a window upon hearing it.

Bugle, belt, rifle, scope.

He was ready.

He let out an enormously loud bugle, quavering with tremolo— more of a shriek than a cry. His eye focused on the cabin window . . . waiting . . . waiting.

No one came.

Another try: a second loud bugle—a trill up and down an out-of-tune scale, a screech, like fingernails on a blackboard.

Eye to the scope.

Light shifted on the far side of the window. It was an incredibly subtle change, but something was moving inside the cabin. Coats exhaled and then drew in a deep breath, his index finger moving from the trigger guard to in front of the trigger.

Another change of light. A slight movement of the curtain.

There! The curtain was pushed aside. Seen through the scope, the hand looked gigantic. A head moved into the frame: a man. Middle-aged. He could see the day-old whisker stubs on the man’s cheeks.

Aker.

The scope’s crosshairs stopped a few centimeters from dead center. He trained this magnified empty space on Aker’s chest, his own heart thumping wildly. His left hand came up and found the CheyTac’s trigger. He had yet to breathe, still working on the same breath. He squeezed: left, then right.

The CheyTac’s recoil ripped it off the limb, but that scraping sound was the only noise it made. The D93S popped, sounding like one strong handclap.

Through the scope, he saw flashes of blinding light as the window shattered. Pieces of glass rained down both inside and out. The curtain fluttered.

Then nothing.

No indication of success.

No indication of failure.

Nothing.

He jacked the CheyTac into place, ready to unload the magazine, if need be. If he’d missed with the dart, if the doc made a run for it...

He waited. One minute . . . Two . . .

He had no choice.

Time for Uncle Bruce
.

THE BARREN, SNOW-COVERED HILL ROSE STEEPLY FROM THE locked gate like a bubble of shaving cream. A primitive road had been cut into the winding hillside, jutting out like a frown. Walt saw what might have been tracks—it could have been game or people—but there was too much drifting snow to know for certain.

The top of Mark Aker’s four hundred acres abutted the western edge of the Challis National Forest. A quarter mile to the west ran Yankee Fork Road, a dirt track, snowed in for the winter, that connected the town of Challis to the abandoned mining town of Sunbeam. To the east were a few sprawling ranches. This was God’s country, the last vestiges of community before the National Forest spread north and east for hundreds of square miles.

“No sign this gate’s been opened recently,” Brandon complained. “You still want to go through with this?”

A sharp but distant rifle report sounded. Small-gauge, Walt thought, as he connected the sound to the one he’d heard the night of the search:
like a limb snapping.
If anything was the Wild West, it was Challis, Idaho; the sound of a rifle, even out of hunting season, would normally have been of no interest. The reverberating dull echo prevented Walt from determining the direction of origin, but its proximity to Aker’s cabin put a spur in his backside.

“Hurry!” It had taken him all morning to round up Brandon and to make the three-hour drive. The sound of a gunshot fueled his impatience.It made sense that Mark might hide his family here—with the property listed under Francine’s maiden name there was little chance it would be connected by others to Mark—but maybe they hadn’t been the only ones to figure it out.

They vaulted the gate. Walt pulled his snowshoes through and was strapping them on as Brandon beat him to it and started up the unplowed road.