I felt like calling Vic and telling her all the things I knew, things we hadn’t discussed, things we should have.
I thought about calling Henry and thanking him for his help with all my harebrained schemes, and for being the best friend anyone could have had.
A granddaughter, at least that’s what Virgil White Buffalo had prophesied on the mountain, when he had also told me that there were dark days ahead—You will stand and see the bad, the dead shall rise and the blind will see . . . Maybe I should’ve listened to him a little closer in the lodge, because I couldn’t come up with a situation that ended more darkly than this one.
Taking a deep breath, I prepared myself for what I was likely going to have to do, maybe scramble up a corner as the thing filled, trying to imagine what the chute was like. As I recalled, it was large and square and started unloading at the front and then moved to the back at three miles an hour, the coal dropping straight down. That wasn’t good, in that I was hoping that the stuff would fill the bottom so that I could keep stepping on it to get high enough to pull myself out.
More than likely, I wouldn’t make it.
The phone rang again, and I looked at it, seeing it was Cady. I punched the button and shouted over the din of the roaring coal dropping into a car that sounded a heck of a lot closer than four away and braced my boots in the snow to keep myself from bouncing around like a Ping-Pong ball.
“Cady?”
I could hear her screaming on the other end of the line, but the noise was so loud that I couldn’t make out the words. “Cady, did you get through?”
There was more, but I still couldn’t hear what she said, not so much for the noise as the sight of the loader methodically moving through the next car in front of me, dropping its tonnage and shifting inexorably toward the car where I stood.
Fry had miscalculated by two cars, not a bad estimate really, and I was no longer in the last car but the next to last.
Less than one car to go.
“Oh, shit . . . ” I looked down at the phone in my hand and then brought it up to my ear. “I know you did the best you could do, punk. I love you.”
I hit the button and looked up, watching the curtain of black descending into the next car, the vibrations of impact causing my car to shudder as if in a death grip.
The dust wafted over the rim and floated back toward me like the transparent veil of some grim reaper. I backed into the bulkhead, forgetting that I was already at the rear and there was nowhere else to go.
Covering my nose and mouth with a glove, I watched the bottom of the chute as big as the doors on the trailer end of an eighteen-wheeler move the length of the car next to me, dropping a hundred tons straight down in a man-made avalanche.
Trying to keep my hands free, I tucked the phone in my pocket even though it continued to vibrate. No matter what happened, no matter the weight of whatever hit me, I was going to have to remember to keep digging up and out of the car.
Backing into the corner because I figured the majority of the coal would drop in the center, I braced my arms and prepared for the next-to-last load of the train. The rumbling noise subsided like a wave having crashed, and I raised my head—if I was going to die, it wasn’t going to be on my knees.
No cars to go.
The gigantic chute was over me, and I could see the operator’s booth, which for some reason had bullet holes in the Plexiglas, the shattered panes spidering cracks out in all directions.
The loader shut down suddenly, and a couple dozen chunks of coal tumbled into the car. I looked straight up, and Fry was hanging over me with the board lying on the rim. “Hey, you okay?”
Looking up at the loading chute and not completely sure I was absolutely out of harm’s way, I caught my breath and coughed, maybe twice. “Um, yep.”
As the noise dwindled, I heard the sound of a very large-caliber pistol going off and heard a spak as another round hit the control room window. The shocked operator lifted his glasses from his eyes and peered through the dust at me, and a familiar voice rose out into the night like the sound of a coyote. “And if you turn that son of a bitch back on I’ll empty the rest of this hogleg into you!”
Fry, with his head turned, was obviously enjoying what I assumed was an epic romantic spectacle of the American West—Lucian Connally, waving the Colt Walker in the air, sitting astride the locomotive behind us. Fry turned and looked down at me with a bright smile. “That old, one-legged boss of yours . . . He’s some kind of loco.”
I croaked a response. “Boy howdy.”
16
“No, I’m all right. Honest.” I reached up and touched the thick bandage the doctors had wrapped all the way around my neck and tried to ignore Sandy Sandburg, two of his deputies, three highway patrolmen, Lucian, and Corbin Dougherty as they tried not to look interested in my call. Standing in the entryway of the Campbell County Memorial Hospital Emergency Room, I leaned against the wall and nodded into Vic’s cell phone. “I know; it was a bad situation, but I’m okay now.”
“So you’re on your way to the airport, right, Dad?”
There was no use lying, she’d inherited her mother’s unerring ability to spot dissembling at every level. “I’ve just got to make a stop on the way.”
“What kind of stop?”
“I’ll make the plane, I promise.” I pulled out my watch and looked at it. “I’ve got an hour and a half, the weather has cleared, sort of, and it’s on the way.”
“I’m going to kill you myself.”
“Honest, I just need to make one more stop to sew things up, then I’m off to the airport.”
I listened to her sighing on the line. “If you don’t, I’m giving the baby your middle name . . .”
I smiled, confident that I was no longer in really big trouble. “Oh, don’t do that.”
“I’m serious.”
I laughed. “What if it’s a girl?”
“Then it’ll be even worse, and she’ll have no one else to blame but you.” Another sigh. “Excuse me for asking, but isn’t there a sheriff’s department in Campbell County and a Gillette police force, and isn’t Uncle Lucian involved in getting you into this?”
“Well—”
“Is he there?”
“Well—”
“Put him on.”
I glanced at the old sheriff and then tried handing him the phone, but he acted as if I were trying to hand him a stick of dynamite, lit. He brushed the device away with a hand and stepped back into the fluorescent light of the Campbell County Memorial Hospital Emergency Room.
I pulled the phone back to my ear. “I don’t think he wants to talk to you.”
“Hold it out where he can hear me then.”
I did as I was told and listened as she raised her voice to be heard from afar. “Uncle Lucian?”
He looked at the phone, then at me as if I were a dirty rodent, and then snatched the thing out of my hand. He took a deep breath of his own and plastered a smile on his face for the performance. “Hey, Cady, darlin’ . . . How you doin’, honey-bunch?”
For the next two solid minutes, the old sheriff looked at the floor and said nothing except for a few monosyllabic grunts and a few yeps. After the final response, he handed me back the phone and blew out air through his puckered lips.
I listened, but she had already hung up, so I pocketed the cell and looked at him, pale as I’d ever seen him. “We need to get me on that plane at midnight.”
He barked a short laugh with no joy in it. “In no uncertain terms.”
“Did she thank you for saving my life?”
“She did.”
I turned to look at the unofficial eight-man task force. “We don’t need this many people.”
Sandburg laughed and shook his head. “The only one that doesn’t need to be in on this is you.”