He said, “I couldn’t risk calling you or coming to your place because I don’t know if you’re being watched and I can’t afford to leave any physical or digital records of my location or movements. The last thing I want to do is involve you or your family in what’s happening.”
Joe cleared his throat and sat back. “Good thing I showed up alone, then. The department assigned me a trainee, but when I called the TeePee Motel he wasn’t in, so I didn’t bring him along. I don’t know where he is.”
“That would have been unfortunate,” Nate said.
Joe leaned forward with his elbows on the tops of his knees and squinted at Nate. “So what is happening, Nate?”
Nate continued to feed twigs to the flame and didn’t look up. “Those three guys in the boat. They drew on me and I put them down. One of them shot me in the shoulder with an arrow.”
“Ron Connelly, the Mad Archer, I’d guess,” Joe interjected.
“Yes. They took me by surprise because they were locals. I let my guard down and they took advantage of it, which I think was the strategy all along. It was self-defense, Joe. Two of them were pulling guns as I shot them, and the one in front — the Mad Archer — had already put an arrow into me. I want you to know that even though you can’t really help me, because I know how you are. I understand it’s too late for that anymore.”
Nate took Joe’s lack of response as agreement. He said, “When you go off the grid, there are advantages and disadvantages. I always knew that. I’m not accountable for anything except to my own code, which is how I want it, because I trust my code more than any set of laws manipulated by those with their hands on the levers. But that’s an old story,” he said.
Joe nodded for him to go on.
Nate said, “I’m nonexistent as far as the government is concerned, and that’s harder these days than you’d think. But when something like this happens — or what happened to Alisha — I can’t respond through normal channels. I can’t let anyone know. I smashed my phone and there’s no way to find me. But I can’t call the cops or get a lawyer to defend me because then I’m back in the system and that’s where the bastards want me to be.”
Joe nodded, thinking it over, and finally asked, “How are you doing? You said you got hit with an arrow.”
Nate tented a half dozen bigger sticks over the fire and watched as the flames licked around them like tongues tasting peppermint sticks before they ignited. “I’m okay,” he said. “I can barely use my left arm, but it’s healing. I’m okay. I’ll be in yarak soon.”
“‘Yarak’?”
“Falconry term. Look it up,” Nate said, waving the exchange away.
“I can’t take you into town, but I could take you to the clinic on the res,” Joe said. “We might be able to work something out with them to keep it confidential. You’ve got lots of friends there.”
Nate shook his head. “No — I won’t involve anyone else in this. This thing I’m in is mine alone. And anybody who comes near me could get into trouble that’s not of their doing. I learned that when I stopped in to see Alice Thunder. I can’t risk anybody else, Joe. It’s not right.”
Joe looked confused.
“Alice promised me she would take a flight out,” Nate said. “But I could see her finding an excuse not to leave. The only thing I’ll ask you is to tail up and make sure she goes on vacation. Can I ask you that?”
“Done,” Joe said.
“What I couldn’t figure out,” Nate said, nodding, “is why. Why would three locals decide to try to rub me out? I didn’t even know them very well, and I’d never had any trouble with them. And I’m pretty sure the people I used to work with who want me dead wouldn’t associate with rubes like that. The Mad Archer and the Kellys weren’t professionals. They were rednecks with guns, and like everybody around here, they knew how to aim and shoot, but that didn’t qualify them as anything special.”
Joe said, “I might know something about it.”
Nate looked up, surprised. There was enough flickering orange light now that he could see Joe’s face.
“This afternoon, I went out to the Kelly place,” Joe said. “Two of the men you killed were Kellys — Paul the father and his son Ronald, better known as Stumpy.”
“The gargoyle,” Nate said with derision. “I’ve done it before, but I don’t take any pleasure killing the mentally or physically handicapped, even if they want to kill me.”
Joe hesitated, looking Nate over. Then he said haltingly, “No one I’ve ever known would make a statement like that.”
Nate shrugged, and Joe continued, “Yeah, him. Anyway, I talked to Paul’s wife and Stumpy’s mom, Pam Kelly. She’s in a state of rage because you took two of her men away, and it wasn’t a very pleasant conversation,” Joe said.
Nate asked, “You went and talked to her? Is this after the sheriff interviewed her?”
Joe shook his head. “McLanahan did a cursory call to her saying he was sorry for her loss. But he didn’t interview her.”
“But you did,” Nate said as a statement.
“She’s a piece of work, and I wouldn’t want to cross her. She’s mad at Paul and the world in general. She was literally tearing her hair out. I mean, she had strands of it in her fingers when I showed up.”
Nate said, “It didn’t have to happen.”
“I know,” Joe said. “But try telling that to Pam Kelly. The weird thing was I didn’t get the impression she was crazy from grieving as much as angry that Paul and Stumpy had let her down. Anyway, I asked her why she thought Paul and Stumpy went out in their boat with the Mad Archer. At first, she acted like she had no idea at all, but I could tell she was lying about part of it.”
“Which part?”
“I don’t think she knew anything about the boat trip in particular. For all she knew, they were going hunting. It took a while to get to the bottom of why they were with the Mad Archer. Apparently, they’d met him just a couple of weeks ago and he recruited them into some scheme that would make them big money. Pam Kelly didn’t know what it was, but she really liked the idea of big money and didn’t ask a lot of questions.”
Joe sighed and said, “It’s no secret that all the trouble Stumpy and Paul got into with their illegal guiding operation was all run out of Pam’s home office. She wants nice things but she was stuck with a loser. Paul’s disability checks didn’t go very far, I guess. I’ve heard it said that she wore the pants in that family, and my talk with her confirmed that.”
Nate said, “Someone was going to pay them to kill me?”
“That’s what I got out of it,” Joe said.
“Did she say who it was? It sure as hell wasn’t the Mad Archer, I’m sure.”
Joe said, “There are probably fifty-four game wardens across this state who aren’t very busted up about what happened to that guy. So at least you’ve got that going for you.”
Nate smiled.
“No, I don’t think it was Ron Connelly behind anything. He was a dupe just like the Kellys,” Joe said. “I asked Pam Kelly who might have been behind it and she said she saw a man with them a couple of weeks ago. She’d gone to visit her sister in rehab in Riverton and wasn’t expected back for a couple of days, but her sister had flown the coop. So she got home before she was expected back and apparently surprised them all — Paul, Stumpy, Ron Connelly, and a mystery man — when she walked into the kitchen and found them sitting at her table. The man she didn’t know got up and walked out and drove away and she never saw him again. When she asked her husband who the man was, he said he didn’t know his name but he was the one who had the big money. She called him the Game Changer. She said Paul seemed to be scared of this Game Changer guy and didn’t want to talk about him at all.”