“About as much as he intends to keep his promise to me.”
They drove north out of Hot Springs on the highway toward Cody. Ten miles out of town, they turned west onto Horseshoe Creek Trail, a dirt road that followed a thread of water toward the distant Absarokas. The route that Rude had carefully laid out for them would take them through the north part of the Owl Creek Reservation, then southwest to their destination, a total distance of seventy miles over dirt tracks that could hardly be called roads and that, Rude had warned them, were often barely navigable.
Cork had been born and raised in Tamarack County. To him, the place he lived was alive with energy-the dance of sun off water, the song of trees in wind, the electricity of a forest just before a storm-and everywhere he looked there was only beauty. What he’d seen of the Owl Creek Reservation felt to him blasted and barren, and he wondered at the deep love the Arapaho held for the land they called home. There was a certain desolate splendor he could understand. The long ridges and buttes sculpted of red rock, the yellow sand, the pale green sage and spiked cactus, the bruised mountains looming against the iridescent sky. To be alone in such a place could, he understood, help you to an awareness that you were in the heart of a great spirit. It could also, if you were ill-prepared, scare you to death and probably kill you. It seemed a land impossible to love.
Two miles off the highway, they crossed an old wood bridge over the creek, and after that the road was rough and the going slow. Cork often kept the Wrangler to a crawl as he maneuvered up and down tiers of bare stone or around boulders strewn along the bed of a dry wash.
“You’re from the West,” he said to Parmer. “What’s the difference between a gulch, a wash, and a draw?”
Parmer said, “A wash has water in it more often than a gulch or a draw. A draw can be a temporary situation and not so pronounced. A gulch has been around and will be around for a while. It’s deeper than the other two. That help?”
“Is that true or just Texas bullshit?”
“Made it up on the spur of the moment, but damned if it doesn’t feel right to me. Rattlesnake.” Parmer pointed toward a coil on a flat sun-blasted rock to the right ahead.
“How do you know it’s a rattler?”
“Check out the pattern of its skin. Diamondback.”
As they approached, the snake uncoiled and vanished on the far side of the rock.
“Hard country,” Cork said.
“My kind of country,” Parmer said. “Reminds me of West Texas. The beauty of empty places.”
They found the connection that Rude had marked on the map, another road as desolate as the one they’d just traveled, heading toward Red Hawk, which was thirty miles to the south. Rude had given them this circuitous route at Cork’s request. Cork didn’t want anyone following where they were headed that morning. The new road was a little easier and led across low, barren hills. Small trees sometimes greened the banks of creeks where the snowmelt from the Absarokas ran. After twenty miles, they turned west onto another dirt track, rumbled over a cattle guard, and shot through a gap in an endless line of barbed-wire fencing. A sign affixed to a fence post at the side of the road read: NIGHT FLYING RANCH. NO TRESPASSING. They were now on land owned by Lame Nightwind.
They drove another half hour toward the mountains, passing cattle grazing on the low, distant hills. They climbed a rise among the foothills of the Absarokas, which were spotted with lodgepole pines. At the top of the rise, they looked down on the house and outbuildings of Nightwind’s ranch.
Cork killed the engine and reached to the backseat for a knapsack he’d packed that morning. He pulled out a pair of field glasses and got out of the Jeep. Parmer joined him. For the next couple of minutes, Cork scanned the ranch compound. There were four large structures: the ranch house; a long, low building near it that, from the wide doors, he took to be a garage; the barn with its corral; and another building so close to the barn that, without binoculars, Cork might have been fooled into thinking they were both part of a single construction. The area around the ranch house wasn’t landscaped. It had been left in its natural state. The architecture of the house, which was built of wood and rock, made the structure seem formed from the ground on which it stood. The garage was of the same design. The barn and the other outbuilding were the same red as the desert cliffs. Hay, rolled into round bales big as hippos, lay stacked against the north wall of the barn. Enclosed by a rail fence was a large pasture where several horses grazed. The pasture grass was being irrigated by a large impact sprinkler that flung out powerful bursts of water.
Cork swung the binoculars to the east. Through a trough between two hills the gray tarmac of Nightwind’s airstrip was visible. He handed the glasses to Parmer, who did his own scan of the scene.
“I don’t see anybody,” Parmer said.
“Inside maybe.” Cork spotted something to his right. “Give me the glasses.” Cork took a look at a thread of smoke rising from behind a long arm of exposed rock nestled against the side of the hill a quarter mile west of the ranch compound.
“What is it?” Parmer said.
“A small cabin. Smoke’s coming from a chimney. I can’t see much.”
“Nightwind?”
“I don’t know.”
“What now?” Parmer asked.
“We announce our presence, or we have a look at the airstrip and hangar first.”
“If we let Nightwind know we’re here, we might never get a look at what’s in that hangar.”
“My sentiments exactly.”
Cork turned the Jeep around and headed back down the rise. When they were well out of sight of the ranch compound, he struck east toward the hills that hid the airstrip. After ten minutes of careful maneuvering over rugged open ground, he parked in front of the hangar that had been built beside the strip. A steady breeze swept along the face of the foothills. The wind sock attached to the top of a pole planted at the tarmac’s edge pointed south.
They left the Wrangler and walked to the hangar door. Their shadows slid up the siding like the rattlesnake that had slithered off the rock that morning. Cork tried the door. It was locked. There were windows, but they were covered with dust, and when he wiped the glass he couldn’t see any better what was hidden inside. Parmer had separated from him and disappeared around the far end of the hangar.
“Over here,” Cork heard him shout.
He found Parmer holding a windowpane that was tilted open.
“You find it like that?” Cork asked.
“No, but it was unlocked. Mind if I go first?”
Cork held the window while Parmer climbed inside, then Parmer did the same for Cork. The hangar sheltered two planes. One was the yellow Piper Super Cub that Nightwind had flown during the search for Jo. The other wasn’t Sandy Bodine’s missing Beechcraft King Air, but it was a single engine.
“If that’s a Cessna Four Hundred, we’re in business,” Parmer said.
Cork felt every muscle draw taut as they skirted the Piper Cub and approached the other plane. Cork wasn’t familiar with aircraft, and it wasn’t until he saw the word Beechcraft on the tail that he realized it was a dead end.
“Damn,” Parmer said. “I suppose it was too much to hope for.”
They did a brief search of the hangar and found maintenance records and a flight log, which showed a lot of activity, but none of it to Wisconsin.
“What now?” Parmer asked.
“Now we go up to the house and announce ourselves to Nightwind.”
“And what? Ask him what he did with the plane and the people on it?”
“Maybe. Maybe we bluff him a little and see if we can get a feel for the cards he’s holding.”
“One gambler to another, that’s a risky strategy unless you know your opponent.”
“Got a better suggestion?”
Parmer said, “Your game. You deal the cards.”
They exited the way they’d entered. As they rounded the corner of the hangar to return to their Jeep, they were confronted by a lanky man with a rifle. He was Indian, Arapaho, Cork guessed. Maybe sixty. He wore scuffed cowboy boots, jeans, a denim work shirt, and a beat-up brown cowboy hat. His face was deep in the shadow of the hat brim, but his dark eyes were clearly visible and clearly hostile.