The Echelon Vendetta (37 page)

“When’s the last time you spoke to him directly?”

But her suspicions had been aroused by the question. “You two don’t look so good. What’s up?”

“We’re a little concerned—” began Dalton, but she raised a hand to stop him.

“No offense, Micah, but I don’t know you real well yet. Willard, before you ask me any more about Pete, maybe you can tell me why you two look so damn worried about him?”

Fremont looked at Dalton, who shrugged and said nothing.

“We think Pete might be in some kind of trouble. It could be that somebody is looking for him, and we—”

“The Indian?”

Their reaction was impossible to miss, and she frowned at them. “Last time I saw Pete he was in here—maybe the second of October— had a couple of drinks, all cooped up in the booth at the back there, sitting with his eye on the door, and he was carrying that big old Ruger of his. He looked like he had a lot on his mind. I left him alone for a time, till the place emptied out, and then I sat down to have a beer with him. We talked about this and that and then he asks

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me if I had seen anybody new in Dayton, was anybody asking for him? Nobody was and I told him so, but this didn’t seem to settle him. I asked him what kind of trouble he was in and he said it was no big thing but if I happened to see a big man, looked like an Indian, with long gray hair down to his shoulders and lots of Navajo silver on him, well he’d appreciate it if I were to give him a call up there in his cabin. Last time I talked to him, and that was”—she glanced at a calendar behind the bar—“that was thirteen days ago now. I called him a few times since but never got an answer. Left messages but he never picked up.”

Fremont’s face had been closing down during this report, and Dal-ton’s passive expression did not hide his growing concern from her.

“Okay, I said my piece. How about you two fill me in?”

Fremont opened his mouth to speak but Dalton cut in.

“You know anything about Pete’s past, Katie?”

“I know he did government work. He never went into details. We don’t push people on their past around here. It’s not polite.”

“It’s possible that someone from Pete’s working years has gone off the rails and it may be that he’s out looking for him. This man would be tall, well built, in his late seventies, a man who’s seen a lot of outdoor work, but he wouldn’t necessarily look like an Indian. He might look like retired military. Have you seen anyone like that?”

“Without you narrow it down a bit, you just described half the old men in the Powder River country. But we know most of them. Wyoming’s only got one person for every five hundred square miles, so strangers get noticed. I talked to some of Pete’s friends around here, and he asked them the same favor, to let them know if they saw anybody like the man he described to me. Same man you described. But nobody has seen him. Just what is it you do for a living, Micah?”

“I’m with the government.”

“So’s my mailman. You look military, even though you got all that long lovely blond hair just like Jennifer Aniston. There’s some-

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thing hard about you, and I know Willard here’s got a lot more sand than he wants you to think he has. Also you’re both wearing sidearms and you look damned worried. So if it’s all right with you I think I’d like a better answer.”

“I think you’ve got all the information you need.”

Katie shook her head, as if Dalton’s answer had tipped a scale. She pushed herself off the bar, reached down under it, and came up with a gleaming Winchester carbine.

“Yeah. I expect I do. Come on, help me lock up.”

“Where are you going?” asked Fremont.

“With you two. Up to Pete’s place.”

“Sorry. There’s no way you’re coming with us,” said Dalton.

“I’m not?” she said, smiling thinly at him. “Tell you what. You two go on out to your government car out there and get a head start while I call up a couple of Pete’s friends, and then we’ll see just how far up the highway you get without me. How’s that sound?”

AT HER STRONG INSISTENCE,
they took Katie’s sixty-two Lincoln Continental convertible, which had once been gleaming black and which had probably come out of Dearborn with a front windshield that did not have an unexplained large-caliber bullet hole through the passenger side. Katie was at the wheel, Dalton next to her, with Fremont rather grudgingly installed in the backseat, Katie wheeling the huge machine expertly through the long sweeping curves of the two-lane blacktop that led upward into the Bighorns.

The road climbed, in a series of switchbacks and narrowing hairpins, past the tumbling waterfall that was the source of the Tongue River, past a valley strewn with limestone obelisks called the Fallen City, but climbing, always climbing, a rise of over six thousand feet above the sunlit valleys that fell precipitously away below them.

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Dalton, trying to appear calm while Katie raced around a curve with a drop on his side of a thousand feet, stared back over the shrinking landscape of the Powder River country and realized that a thin greenish tint of uneven land at the farthest reaches of the eastern horizon could very well be South Dakota.

The engine was laboring and the heat gauge was bumping against the red line when she made a hard right turn at a sharply inclined gravel road and headed up an impossible grade, a grade intended for horses, and sure-footed horses at that.

The rear wheels were spinning out a spray of gravel and the men in the car had become strangely silent as Katie fought the wheel and swore softly to herself in a low growl. After an endless climb over rocky ground, the trail shrank down to a narrow path between encroaching brush and pines, stiff thorny branches scraping along the paintwork and clutching at Dalton’s sleeve. The temperature dropped almost ten degrees, and now there was a distinct chill in the clear air.

“You boys doing okay?” asked Katie, taking her eyes off the road at a point in a goat-track hairpin curve that was already forcing Dalton to recall Naumann’s prediction that he had less than three weeks to live, and wonder if this car trip was exactly what Naumann had in mind.

“Just fine,” he said, through gritted teeth, as the huge car lurched across a steel-slotted grate laid over a six-foot-deep storm ditch, pushed its blunt snout through a stand of twisted mesquite and stunted firs, and came to a grinding, bouncing halt in a clearing.

On the far side of the clearing a narrow graded road, reasonably well finished in coarse sand, led in a blind curve around a cliff of yellow stone that soared upward, easily two hundred feet, its sawtooth peak lost in a gathering mist.

“We better walk from here,” said Katie. “Can’t turn this beast around at Pete’s front yard and I don’t like backing up on the goat walk he calls a driveway. He usually leaves his truck here.”

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This sentiment found much favor with Dalton and even more with Fremont, who had spent the last ten miles holding on to the handle of the back door, ready to open it and leap for his life before Katie drove the Lincoln off a cliff, which he was morally certain she was going to do at any moment. He peeled his bone-white trembling fingers off the latch and shoved the door open, cursing quietly to himself.

Katie pulled her Winchester out of a scabbard sewn to the interior of the driver’s door and pushed the door shut, staring across the clearing at the narrow track that ran around the curve of the cliff face, a sandy track without a mark on it, not even the tracks of her own boots from her last trip up here only five days ago. She crossed the clearing, levering a round into the Winchester, and crouched down at the beginning of the road.

“Nobody’s been here,” she said, touching the dry sandy soil with a fingertip and putting the tip to her mouth, tasting it. “Wind up here’s been blowing hard all weekend. Tracks are all gone.”

She stood up and looked at the two men, Dalton with his Colt Python in his hand and his canvas cattle coat pulled in tight against the chill, and Fremont looking taut and white-faced, his pale skin contrasting oddly with his bright-red nylon vest. Fremont’s .45 was in his right hand, the hammer cocked.

“There’s only one way in,” she said.

“I know it,” said Fremont, “I been here before.”

“Okay. How you want to do this?”

“I’ll lead,” said Dalton, stepping forward. “If anything goes wrong, Willard knows who to call.”

“That I do,” said Willard, happy to have a man back in charge, even if Dalton had no idea what was waiting for them around the curve. Katie followed the men at a distance of thirty feet as the three of them came slowly around the long slightly inclined grade cut into the wall of the cliff. Through a thin screen of brush on their right

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they could catch brief glimpses of a far blue country spread out below them and thin wisps of pale cloud a hundred miles away.

The sand was gritty and their boots crunched faintly, the sound blowing away on the strong cold wind that was flowing straight into the cliff face. Halfway around the curve Dalton caught—they all caught—a strong whiff of corruption, something very large and not too long dead, coming from close by.

Dalton pulled the hammer back and stepped to the outer edge of the trail. The smell was very powerful now, carried to them on the wind flowing up from the valley. Katie was at his side, her Winchester in her hands. She leaned over and peered down through a long drop, a cliff face dotted with short spiky shrubs, a few needle-tipped pines jutting out like quills.

“There,” she said, pointing the muzzle of the carbine at an outcrop of rock sixty feet down the face. Something red and broken lay on the ledge, partially impaled on a pine branch, white bones showing through torn pink flesh and purple entrails, a fan of shattered ribs bared to the sky like teeth from an ivory comb.

“It’s a buck deer,” said Fremont, standing a little ways off and holding on to the branch of a pine as he leaned over the cliff’s edge.

“Been there quite a while,” said Katie. “Should have smelled it last Friday, I guess, but the wind was coming the other way.”

Dalton was studying the carcass carefully. “It’s been skinned,” he said, in a low voice.

Katie squinted at it.

“Yes,” she said, shaking her head. “What kind of a wasteful fool would skin a buck carcass and then just throw all that venison away?”

Fremont and Dalton exchanged a look, which Katie caught, but they said nothing as they trotted around the last of the curve, where the ledge opened up to a plateau of flat yellow limestone about thirty feet wide. The whole of the Powder River country stretched out before them, hundreds and hundreds of miles of open grassland

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fading into a deep, hazy blue. In the valley the long shadows of the Bighorns behind them were creeping out toward Ranchester as the sun ran down into the west. They turned and looked at Pete Kear-ney’s cabin, a stout, solid fortress of a home built out of square-cut timbers and roofed in slate, set hard up against the cliff face, a sheer rise that went soaring up a hundred feet before disappearing behind a thatch of scrub pine.

The front of the cabin, sheltered by a low beamed porch, was shuttered with thick pine slabs, and the door, a flat panel of solid pine, was crisscrossed with steel bands. The cabin looked dusty, and dry leaves had blown up all along the windward face, as if the last man who had lived there had boarded it up and gone west in the dying days of the last age. A shrill cry from overhead made them all look up as a golden eagle circled far above them, three long sweeping passes traced against the pale blue sky, before he decided that they were not prey—at least not easy prey—and he wheeled away to the south, peeping absurdly.

Katie walked up to the cabin door and kicked it hard, hard enough to make the dust bounce off the planks. Grit drifted down off the underside of the porch, glimmering in the late-afternoon light.

“Pete! You in there? It’s Katie.”

Nothing. The wind rolling in across the plateau. From an unseen spring bubbling up in the cliff face came the hissing murmur of racing water. In a stand of trees at the far end of the ledge a crow cursed them and then laughed raucously, joined in a moment by others of his kind—from the sound they made, a multitude, all of them well hidden in the trees, their cries echoing off the face of the cliff.

“I don’t like all them crows around,” said Katie. “Isn’t natural. Now what, trooper?” said Katie, looking at Dalton quizzically.

Dalton lifted the Colt Python and blew a fist-size hole in the upper-right hinge plate, the wood chips flying, the boom of the gun

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sending a huge flock of crows soaring into the blue sky, braying and screeching madly. Another shot into the middle hinge, and a third into the lowest one, followed by a fourth round into the door latch. In the deafened silence that followed the only sound was the oiled metallic ratcheting as Dalton reloaded his Colt.

Katie kept her Winchester leveled on the door. Fremont, his back to the two of them, was watching the curve of the road, the trees at the far end of the shelf, the open plateau, his .45 in both hands, the muzzle slightly lowered.

Dalton stepped up to the door, put a gloved hand into the gaping splintered hole where the door latch had been, set himself, put a boot against the frame, and gave the door a massive pull. It groaned against the timbers, shifted a half inch, and then flew right out of the frame, the huge door slamming to the ground with a thunderous clap and narrowly missing Dalton’s boots as he stumbled backward off the porch. Katie caught him in a wiry grip to keep him from falling. The doorway loomed open, the interior as black as a mine.