“They’re probably fetching Rulon’s dinner,” Nate grumbled. “Maybe giving him a nice foot massage.”
“What was that?” Baird asked Joe.
“Nothing important,” Joe said, glaring at his friend.
“Sheriff, can you see the license plates on the pickup and horse trailer at all?”
“Not real well,” Baird said. “I can barely make one of them out through the trees. I can’t see the numbers clearly, though.”
Joe asked, “Is the plate blue?”
“Yes.”
“I’d bet you a dollar it’s a Michigan plate.”
“That sounds right.”
“We’ll be there as soon as we can,” Joe said.
“Who is we?” Baird asked.
“Yeah, who is we?” Nate asked as well.
“Keep in radio contact,” Joe told Baird. “And back out of there if you see those guys again. Seriously. You don’t want to take them on without help.”
Joe was under no illusion the sheriff would believe him and re treat.
A HALF HOUR LATER, Joe’s radio crackled to life.
“Joe, you there?” Baird asked. Joe noted the urgency of Baird’s tone and his complete absence of radio protocol.
“Yes, sheriff, what is it?” He felt icy fingers pull back on his scalp.
“Jesus!” Baird said, and the transmission went to static.
Joe’s pickup was in a steady climb into the mountains, struggling with the weight of the horse trailer full of horses behind it. When the animals shifted their weight around, Joe could feel the trailer shift and pull back at his truck. His motor was strained and the tachometer edged into the red. He floored it. While he did so, he tried to raise the dispatcher who’d originally connected them.
When she came on she was weeping. “Did you hear the sheriff?” she asked. “I think those bastards got him.”
“I heard,” Joe said. “But let’s not speculate on what we don’t know. Time to sit up and be a professional. Are you dispatching EMTs? Anybody?”
The dispatcher sniffed. “Everybody,” she said. “But you’re the closest to him by far. I hope you can help him. I hope they didn’t . . .”
“Yes,” Joe said. “Hey—you don’t need to talk about him that way yet. He may be okay.”
“Okay,” she said, to placate Joe.
A few minutes later, Nate said, “Wonder what’ll be left of him.”
27
THE LACK OF WIND WAS RARE AND REMARKABLE, JOE thought, and the single thin plume of black smoke miles away deep in the timber rose straight up as if on a line until it finally dissipated at around 15,000 feet.
Joe and Nate had just summited the mountains, and the eastern slope was laid out before them in a sea of green between the ranges. The vista was stunning: a massive, undulating carpet veined with tendrils of gold and red. The thread of black smoke seemed to tenuously connect the mountains with the sky.
“It’s like whoever set the fire said, Look at me,” Nate said as they plunged down the other side of the mountain in the pickup. “I’m wondering if they wish they hadn’t set a fire now. Or if they’re trying to draw us in.”
“Black smoke like that isn’t from a forest fire,” Joe said.
“Nope.”
“Smoke that black usually means rubber is burning,” Joe said.
“Do you know how to get there?” Nate asked.
Joe nodded. “There are quite a few old logging roads ahead. I’ve been on a few of them. It’s been so dry, though, we should be able to find Baird’s tire tracks and follow him in.”
Nate surveyed the vista in front of him as Joe eased forward. “Rough country,” he said.
“In every way,” Joe said.
THERE WAS ONLY ONE open road that went to the southeast toward the smoke, and there were fresh tire tracks imprinted over a coating of dust. Joe made the turn and drove down the two-track as swiftly as he could over the washboarded surface without shaking the pickup apart. Nate hung out the passenger window like a Labrador, Joe thought, with his hand clamped on his hat.
“This looks like the right road,” Nate said, pulling himself back in. “We need to be ready.”
Joe nodded. Afternoon sun fanned through the lodgepole pines as he shot along the dirt road. In his peripheral vision, he saw Nate dig his weapon and holster out from under the bench seat and strap it back on.
“You loaded?” Nate asked, pulling Joe’s new shotgun out from behind the seat and zipping off the gun cover.
“Shells in the glove box,” Joe said.
Nate, who was never unloaded, sighed and found the shells and fitted them into the receiver.
“I have mixed feelings about this thing we are about to do,” Nate said.
“I know.”
“You do, too.”
Joe grunted. “If it weren’t for Diane, I might be tempted to turn around.”
“But we can’t let feelings get in the way,” Nate said, putting the shotgun muzzle-down on the floor and shoving the stock between the bench seats so it wouldn’t rattle around on the dirt road. “We’ve set our course. It doesn’t matter what we think about politics or the law or anything else. It’s not Speed kills, it’s Hesitation kills. If we find those brothers and you’ve got a shot, take it. These boys aren’t going to let us lead them back to jail. They’ve left all that behind, I’m afraid. Don’t start talking or reading them their rights or trying to figure out where the hell they went off the rails. Just shoot.”
When Joe started to object, Nate said, “It isn’t about who is the fastest or the toughest hombre in the state. It’s never about those things. It’s about who can look up without any mist in their eyes or doubts in their heart, aim, and pull the trigger without thinking twice. It’s about killing. It’s always been that way.”
SHERIFF RON BAIRD’S county Ford Excursion was parked twenty feet off the two-track in a grove of aspen trees that overlooked the campground below in the distance. It wasn’t burning, but it had been worked over.
Joe pulled up beside it and jumped out of his pickup with his shotgun. He circled the Excursion. The hood was open and all visible wires had been sliced in half or pulled out and thrown to the ground like angel-hair packing from a shipping crate. The front windshield was smashed inward and cubes of safety glass sparkled like sheets of jewelry on the front bench seat, with errant cubes of it on the hood. The tires were flat and air had stopped seeping out from the open wounds in the sidewalls.
Baird was nowhere to be found.
Nate had opened the passenger door and stood outside the truck on the running board. Using both hands, he tracked through the air how he guessed the brothers had come up from down below on each side in a pincer movement converging on Baird’s vehicle.
Joe said, “I wonder where they took him.”
“They marched him down the hill,” Nate said, binoculars at his eyes. “I see him.”
Joe felt a spasm of fear shoot through him. “Is he alive?”
“I think so. But he doesn’t look real good.”
“How so?” Joe asked.
“Looks like he’s got an arrow sticking out of his ass.”
THE STENCH FROM BURNING FUEL, tires, and plastic was nearly overwhelming on the valley floor. The pickup that towed the horse trailer, the trailer itself, and Dave Farkus’s pickup was on fire. Baird was fifty yards off to the side of the camp, and he appeared to be hugging the trunk of a tree.
“Do you see any sign of the brothers?” Joe asked as they drove down the hill toward the scene. He’d shifted to four-wheel drive because of the incline, and he let the compression of the motor hold back his truck and trailer.