"I figured that out," Rudloff said through bandages on his face that muffled his voice. "That's the only good thing about today, I reckon. We don't need no more laws. I'll head back up there when I'm patched up."
"I'd advise against it," Demming said.
"You gonna press charges?"
"Maybe."
"Where you gonna have the trial?" Rudloff chided.
Demming had no answer to that, and she ignored him for the rest of the trip.
Joe asked the helicopter pilot to take them back to the Bechlerstation to get his vehicle after they'd admitted Rudloff. The pilot agreed. They landed on the only clear, flat surface at the Bechler ranger station-the horse pasture-at dusk. Joe and Demming thanked the pilot and scrambled out. Joe was happy to be out of the air and back on the ground. Stevens was there to meet them and handed Demming a message.
In the Yukon, Demming unfolded the piece of paper. "I need to call the Pagoda," she said. "Ashby wants a full report on what happened."
"Do we need to get back to Mammoth, then?" Joe asked, contemplating the five-hour drive.
Demming seemed lost in thought. He wondered if the shock of what happened at the camp had been held at bay in her mind and was just now releasing. He'd seen that kind of delayed reactionto violence before, and had experienced it himself.
"Are you okay?" he asked.
She shook her head. "I guess so. That was a new one for me, I must say. I don't think I've ever been so scared as when I was looking into the muzzle of that rifle. His eyes-Jesus. They looked crazy and scared at the same time, which is never a good combination. And I feel ashamed that my first reaction when he got shot was pure joy-followed by nausea."
"I understand."
"I hate to feel so happy to see a man shot-up."
"He'll be okay," Joe said.
"I know. But to see that kind of violence up close like that… I don't think I'm cut out for it."
"You were magnificent," Joe said. "You saved our lives when you told Rudloff about that law because it delayed him long enough for Nate to aim. You nearly had me believing it. That was quick thinking."
"If only it were true," she said. "Joe, do you think there are many more like him? I mean, more crazy survivalists in the Zone of Death?"
"Probably."
"Whoever saved us, is he one of them?"
Joe smiled. "Nate? Yes, he is. But he's been that way since I met him. He doesn't live in Yellowstone, though. He lives in Saddlestring, where I come from. He once told me he values what he considers justice over the rule of the law."
"That scares me."
Joe nodded. "Me too. Luckily, he's on our side." Rather than drive all the way to Mammoth in the dark, they decided to go halfway, to the Old Faithful area instead, into the heart of the park. Since the next item on Joe's list was to question employees about the Gopher State Five, the diversionworked out. Demming used her radio to notify her husband that she wouldn't be home and said she'd call him when they got to Old Faithful.
"That probably won't go over very well," she said, as much to herself as to Joe.
"I understand," he said.
"I told him last night you were a nice guy, a family man."
He flushed. "I said the same about you to Marybeth."
"Now is the time for an uncomfortable silence," she said.
He agreed, silently. They backtracked north and entered the park proper through the gate at West Yellowstone, following the Madison River. The absence of any kind of streetlights made the moon and stars seem brighter and made Joe concentrate on driving, since bison or elk could appear on the road at any time. Demminghad been trying to nap but couldn't get comfortable. She gave up trying with a sigh.
"When this is over," she said softly, "I think I'm going to quit. I don't ever want to be that scared again, and I've got a husband at home and two great kids."
"What would you do?"
She shrugged. "Well, maybe I won't quit outright. I probably can't. I'm the primary breadwinner in the family, you know."
"Believe me," Joe said, "I know what that's like. My wife is in the same boat, unfortunately."
"Maybe I'll transfer out of law enforcement into interpretation," she said. "I'd like a life of pointing out wildflowers and bison dung to tourists from Florida and Frankfurt. That sounds a lot less stressful than what I'm doing."
"Same bureaucracy, though."
"Yeah, I know. And as an added bonus, less money." The old faithful area was the largest complex in the park, consisting of hundreds of cabins, the Snow Lodge, retail stores, souvenir shops and snack bars, a rambling Park Service visitor center, and the showpiece structure of the entire park: the hundred-plus-year-old Old Faithful Inn that stood in sharp, gabled, epic relief against the star-washed sky.
Since Old Faithful was the most heavily visited area, there were a few dozen vehicles in the parking lot despite the lateness of the season. Joe drove under the covered alcove of the hotel, which framed the famous geyser, which puffed exhausted steam breaths. The sides of the cone were moist with water, and steaming rivulets snaked downhill to pour into the river.
"Postcoital geyser," Demming said, rubbing sleep out of her eyes. "It just went off. We missed it."
Joe smiled in the dark but chose not to respond.
They unloaded their gear and pulled open the heavy iron-studdedseven-foot wooden doors and entered the most magnificentand bizarre lobby Joe had ever seen. He froze, like hundreds of thousands of visitors had before him, as he did when he first encountered the place two decades before, and tilted his head back and looked up.
"Wow," Joe said.
"Gets you every time, doesn't it?" Demming said.
"I'd forgotten."
"Does it seem smaller, now that you're older?"
Joe shook his head. "It seems bigger."
His memories came flooding back, the sense of awe he'd felt then and felt now just as strongly, as if he'd been gone only minutes. At the time he first entered the inn and looked up, he'd never seen anything like it-it was the biggest log room he'd ever been in and it seemed to rise vertically forever. At least three levels of balconies lined the sides, bordered by intricate knotty pine railings and lit by low-wattage bulbs in candlestick fixtures, culminating high above in obscure catwalks and a fancifulwooden crow's nest nearly obscured by shadow. Fires crackled from hearths in the massive four-sided fireplace that rose in a volcanic stone column from the central lobby into darkness. Then, as now, Joe felt he was looking into the vision-come-true of a genius architect with a fevered and whimsical mind, and it took his breath away.
He marveled at both the beauty and the brashness of the construction,something that rarely interested him because he was not a fan of the indoors. The inn was built on an epic scale to inspireawe, like great European palaces or castles. But instead of stone, it was built of huge logs, and rather than gilded carvings for decoration there was functional but eccentric rococo knotty pine and natural wood. It had been built not for a small royal family but for the masses. There was something very American about it, he thought.
And it was emptier than he remembered. When Joe stayed at the inn as a boy his father had chosen a cheap, faraway "room without bath" accessed by dark hallways like cave tunnels and what seemed, at the time, to be hours from the lobby and a wrong turn away from certain death due to poor navigation skills on his part. The only thing that kept him alive and on the right course, he remembered, were the growing sounds of voices from hundreds of visitors milling in the lobby, either waiting for the next eruption or having just returned from the last one. Getting back to their room through those circuitous pathways was another matter.
This time, though, Joe requested a single room with a bathroomon the second level within sight of the lobby balcony. He got one because the hotel was nearly vacant. A smattering of visitors sat reading in rocking chairs near the fireplace, a few more talked softly on the balconies. The absence of conventionalbackground sound-televisions, radios, Muzak-was striking.