“Thanks, Dewey.”
“Wait here. Let me give Jon a call.”
He left the room.
“What do you think?” Cork said to Stephen.
“We’re here and that’s good. We’re going up in a helicopter and that’s good. And Deputy Quinn is really nice and that’s really good.”
The deputy had been gone only a few minutes when another officer entered the room. He was tall and bulky, and he fixed Cork and Stephen with the eye of a hunter.
“Who are you?” he said.
Cork stood up to introduce himself. “Cork O’Connor. And this is my son, Stephen.”
The man made no move toward them to shake hands. “What are you doing here?”
“Waiting for Deputy Quinn.”
“He brought you back?”
“That’s right.”
“Briefed you?”
“Yes.”
“Do what he says, clear?”
“Crystal.”
“All right then.” He turned and left.
“Who was that?”
“Sheriff Kosmo would be my guess.”
“Not very talkative.”
“You got his message, didn’t you?”
“Well, yeah.”
“ ’Nuff said.”
A few more minutes, then Deputy Quinn returned. “Okay, we’re all set. We’ll meet Jon at the airfield in fifteen minutes. Did you see Sheriff Kosmo?”
“He stopped in to have a word,” Cork said.
“One word, period,” Stephen added.
Quinn laughed. “If Jim likes you, Stephen, you sometimes get two. All set?”
“Yes.” Stephen leaped to his feet.
“Then let’s go.”
As they passed the contact desk, Quinn said to the deputy there, “Kiss-My-Pulitzer still around, Bolger?”
“Nope. I stonewalled her and she split.”
“I’m ten-seven for the next hour, unless something new develops with the air search.”
“I copy. Good luck, O’Connors,” Bolger said.
“Thanks,” Stephen threw back and gave him a wave.
Outside, the mountains to the west were blue-white under an azure sky. “The airfield’s up there,” Quinn said, pointing toward a massive ridge rising beyond the outskirts of Hot Springs in the direction of the mountains. “Just follow me.”
He got into a departmental TrailBlazer. Cork and Stephen hurried to their Wrangler and followed the deputy out of the lot. They took a street called Carson that cut due west before winding its way up the ridge Quinn had indicated. They passed the town’s water tower and what looked like a small, abandoned mining operation. At the crest of the ridge, the road divided. A sign pointed to the right and read, OWL CREEK GOLF COURSE-PUBLIC WELCOME. Quinn took the left fork, and Cork spotted the airfield immediately, a fenced area with several hangars and a couple of other small buildings beside a single runway. The gate was open, and they rolled through. Cork followed the TrailBlazer to the far side of one of the hangars, where they found the chopper and its pilot waiting.
Jon Rude’s face was all about friendliness, from the laugh lines and the big smile to the wry glint of his eyes. He was Cork’s height, just under six feet, and had a handshake that was firm without over-doing it.
“Thanks for letting us ride along,” Cork said.
“No problem. Ever been in a chopper before?”
“A few occasions doing S and R back in Minnesota.”
“That’s right,” Rude said. “Dewey told me you were in law enforcement for a while. What about you, Stephen?”
“I never have.”
“You do okay on roller coasters?”
“Heck, yes.”
“Then you’ll be fine. We’d best be off. Got a lot of territory to cover.” He addressed Quinn. “Any word from the others?”
“Nothing new.”
“Okay, then. Stephen, you want to ride shotgun?”
“Sure.”
“You’ll need eagle eyes.”
“I got ’em.”
“Hop aboard and let’s see what we can see.”
TEN
Day Four, Missing 76 Hours
That’s my place down there,” Rude said. He banked the chopper in order for Cork and Stephen to have a better view.
They were flying low over a flat valley that was threaded down the middle by a stream lined with cottonwoods. The floor of the valley was covered with irrigated fields, mostly alfalfa. Rude’s place consisted of a small ranch house, a barn, a corral, and a few outbuildings. From the air, it looked nice and neat. The nearest neighbor was a good half mile distant.
“I call her the Chopping R.” Rude grinned.
“Do you ranch?” Cork spoke into the microphone attached to the flight helmet he wore. Rude had given flight helmets to both him and Stephen. Without them, the noise inside the cabin would have made verbal communication almost impossible.
“Yeah, but I can’t make a living at it. Truth is, around here it’s hard to make a decent living at much of anything, so I do just about everything. In winter, I fly skiers who like the
extreme stuff up to remote slopes. In fall, I fly hunters. In summer, I do some crop dusting. Most of the rest of the time I contract out my services to BHPC.”
“BHPC?”
“Big Horn Power Co-op. I fly their power lines doing inspection or giving a hand with repairs when they need me. My wife’s taking classes down in Riverton to be a teacher. Soon as she’s finished and gets herself a position at a school, things’ll ease up a lot. I’ll be able to spend more time with the ranch.”
“Kids?” Cork asked.
“One. Gorgeous girl. Anna Marie. Six.”
They left the valley, and the land rapidly turned harsh, almost desertlike. The grass was replaced by sand and rock and low-growing cactus and sage. The dusting of snow gave the place the alkaline look of an area where nothing could live. Wide, empty flats lay between ridges of barren stone, and as far as Cork could see in every direction there was no sign of human habitation.
“North section of the Owl Creek Reservation,” Rude said. “Big place, not an acre of it worth shit. Maybe gas or oil underneath, nobody knows. We won’t let anybody go looking.”
“We? Are you Arapaho?”
“On my mother’s side. German on my father’s. Fifty-fifty.”
The mountains loomed ahead, great, hoary giants whose crowns touched the sky. This close they were absolutely forbidding, and Cork felt his hopes take a bitter slide.
The chopper began to bounce and to be shoved right and left.
“Lot of downdrafts and crosscurrents as we head into the mountains,” Rude said. “Can be tricky. You guys okay?”
“Yeah,” Stephen said.
Over his shoulder Rude said something to Cork, but all Cork picked up on the headgear inside his flight helmet was static. He said, “I’m not reading you, Jon.”
Rude made a sign for Cork to whack the side of his flight helmet. When Cork did, he could hear Rude again.
“Sorry,” Rude said. “I’ve been meaning to get that looked at. In the meantime, if you can’t hear, just give her a good smack.” He pointed toward a massive formation in the distance, three peaks joined by a ridge that created a wall across the wilderness. “Up there, that’s Heaven’s Keep. Found a plane in that area yesterday. We thought at first maybe it was the one your wife was on. Turned out to be an old crash site.”
Stephen said, “Why do they call it Heaven’s Keep?”
“Know what a keep is?”
“No.”
“The strongest part of a castle, the part that’s hardest for an enemy to take. Looks pretty formidable, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah. But what about the heaven part?”
“I always figured it’s because it’s so high that it feels connected to heaven. That’s my explanation anyway. Now the Arapaho take a whole different approach. They call it Honoocooniinit. Basically means they consider it the devil.”
Below them the land was covered with evergreens and seemed to have become a turbulent sea full of deep plunges and sudden rises that crested in knife-edged ridges of rock. They flew over meadows too small for a plane to land safely where the snow lay drifted deep enough to bury a house. They followed canyons whose rugged walls would smash a plane into small pieces. Over it all loomed Heaven’s Keep, casting a long, dark shadow across the ice-white landscape.