I got up, smiling at his concern. “Thanks, Hector.”
Just for laughs, I hit the remote on the Suburban-the horn tooted and the lights flashed from under the collapsed porch. The left rear tire was flat, and the quarter panel had been pushed up into the wheel well. I could probably get it going if I had the Jaws of Life, parts, and a day to work on it.
I loped along on the surface of the snow against the blowing wind. It was a little tough, but I got the front of the snowshoe in the open back doorway of the DOC van and pulled myself up, glancing more than once at the alcove on the adjacent cabin where the cougar had appeared.
Nothing, just more snow.
I scrambled my hand around on the top of the Dodge till I found my 1911 and pulled it toward me, banging the collected snow off and returning it to my holster as I hung on to the back drip rail. My eyes clung to the mountain lion print closest to me, and I was reminded of just how big she was.
I was glad now that I’d moved one of the benches from the porch in front of the door of the lodge.
The sound of my snowshoes landing was muffled by the snow, and I turned toward Tensleep Road but froze. The big cat hadn’t gone far and stood in plain view underneath the lone light on the power pole, her eight-foot-long body pale in the halo of the falling snow. She looked at me from over her shoulder, and I was beginning to think that this was extremely odd behavior.
It was possible that she was just angry with Hector and me for driving her from her temporary lair, but it didn’t seem that way. It was almost as if she was saddened and, even with the reception I’d given her, unhappy to leave.
It was probably warmer in the little corner of the roof she’d found.
Pulling the. 45 from my holster, I waved it at her, but she just stood there looking at me.
A gust of snow blew from the collapsed roof, striking my face like sand and, ducking slightly away, I closed my eyes.
When I reopened them she was gone, and the flakes continued to float down in the circle of light like the spotlight on an empty stage, and it was as if she hadn’t been there at all.
6
They’d blown through the piled-up berm at the bridge. The dual tracks of the Thiokol Spryte were almost three feet wide leading up West Tensleep Road, but it was easier to just walk between the tread marks in my borrowed snowshoes.
That wasn’t why I was standing there, unmoving.
After they’d busted through, they had stopped. You could see where the snowcat had steered slightly to the right. I pulled my Maglite from my duty belt and shined it on the tracks, hoping I’d see an oil or fuel leak. There were a few drops, but nothing that was going to slow the behemoth. My eyes were drawn to something leading to the snowbank, what looked like a different kind of leak-possibly antifreeze.
I stood there looking at what was illuminated by my flashlight, which, like the light in the parking lot, provided a center stage spot for a curtain call or maybe a prologue.
Pissed in the snowbank was a single word.
ABANDON.
Raynaud Shade had pretty good handwriting, considering the instrument.
ABANDON.
He’d seen the Basquo reading the Inferno. He’d left the message for me and evidently hadn’t had the bladder capacity to finish the stanza: “… hope all ye who enter here”-the warning above the gates of hell in Dante’s opus.
Maybe he’d seen a similarity between our situation and that of the Italian poet. The wind pressed at my back and the flakes swirled around, but the impromptu calling card stayed there as if he’d written it in molten lead.
It was about a mile up to the Battle Park cutoff, where I assumed they’d turn west and try for the Hyattville Road that led toward the tiny town and eventually to Manderson, which was situated alongside the Big Horn River. Then what-north to Basin or south to Worland? Try as I might, I couldn’t see what they were gaining by going off-road. They, and by they I meant Shade, had to know that there would be an entire law enforcement army waiting for them when they got off the mountain in either direction.
There were no roads that connected the north side of the Bighorns with the south side, and the only substantial trail that led east was over Florence Pass near Bomber Mountain and Cloud Peak toward the Hunter Corrals. Florence Pass was more than eleven thousand feet, and if they tried that they were likely to solve society’s problems on their own, which was fine for the convicts but not for the two hostages.
A lot of people made the mistake of heading up West Tensleep in the hopes that it led somewhere besides Cloud Peak, a 13,167-foot glaciated monolith, seventh largest in Wyoming, with a vertical mass of one minor and three major cirques that supported its own weather pattern. The Crow, Cheyenne, and Lakota venerated Cloud Peak as a place to bestow gifts of redemption and to retrieve Eewakee, or the mud-that-heals. In 1887, U.S. Engineer W. S. Stanton, the white mountaineer who claimed to have conquered the mountain’s west slope first, discovered medicine bundles and a bivouac that the Indians had left behind.
So much for being first.
ABANDON.
The message pissed in the snow kept invading my thoughts as I trudged on, my snowshoes keeping me on the surface of the snow, the history of Wyoming alpinism unable to wipe the urinated message from my mind.
The trees on either side of the road had sheltered the way so far and I appreciated the protection, but the weight of the snow was already taking its toll, and I could hear heavy branches cracking and falling like severed limbs.
There was a consistent wind, and I ducked my hat against the gusts as the snow continued to dart down at a thirty-degree angle-at least it wasn’t adhering itself to me like it had in the open spaces back at Deer Haven-but I could tell that the temperature was dropping.
I figured there wasn’t much need to be concerned about being ambushed, just the steady slog of working my way higher into the range and staying between the wide tracks of the surplus snowcat. If I fell into one of the troughs, I knew I was off course.
The collar of my sheepskin coat had attached itself to the left side of my face, and the narrow V – shaped aperture that I looked through allowed me only a limited view of the road ahead, so I was more than a little surprised when suddenly there was the glare of a lot of lights and the thrum of internal combustion from a fast-moving, highly lifted 4?4.
I bounced off the Jeep’s grill and threw myself to the right-the vehicle had slowed and missed rolling over my legs by about a foot as it slid to a stop. I lay there for a moment and then started getting up. The snowshoes were cumbersome, and it took me a while to stand and make my way to the lee side of the Jeep, which was shaking from some kind of thunderous music being played on its stereo. I paused for a second and remembered another time on the mountain when I’d been assaulted by a different kind of music-drums, specifically.
I waited patiently as the driver rolled down the window about four inches and looked out at me. His voice was agitated. “What the hell are you doing walking in the middle of the damn road?!”
I breathed a laugh and had a coughing fit from the cold of the high-altitude air. “What the hell are you doing speeding down a mountain in this weather?”
He was middle-aged, a little chubby, and in his early fifties, with black hair and a black goatee, a Hollywood smile, and a black down jacket with a black Greek fisherman’s hat. On closer inspection, even the Jeep was black, black being the new black. I glanced at the Wrangler-it probably had about thirty thousand dollars’ worth of modifications, and from the decibel level, they were mostly in the stereo.
“You mind turning your music down?” I hung an arm over his side mirror and took a few breaths as he did as I requested. He seemed a little worried, and I guess I would’ve been too if I’d found somebody traipsing up West Tensleep Road in the middle of a high-altitude blizzard. “I’m Sheriff…” I cleared my throat.