“Oh, and earlier, you know what he asked me?”
“What?”
“He asked if we’d ever run across any remains of that girl runner. You know, the one who took off running and never came back?”
“What did you tell him?”
“I said sure, we raped and killed her.”
Camish laughed again, and Caleb joined him, and Joe looked up from the last citation he was scribbling and wondered when he’d left Planet Earth for Planet Grim.
HE HANDED THE CITATIONS to the brothers, who took them without protest.
“I’d suggest you boys get out of the mountains and straighten up and fly right,” Joe said. “You’re gonna have big fines to pay, and maybe even jail time if the judge comes down hard.”
“Straighten up and fly right,” Camish repeated in a soft, mocking tone.
“What’s the reason you’re up here, anyway?” Joe asked. “I find people all the time looking for something they can’t get at home. What’s the story with you two?”
The brothers looked at each other.
“You wanna tell him?” Caleb said.
Camish said, “Sure.” He turned to Joe. “Let’s just say this is the best place for us. I really don’t want to go into detail.”
Joe waited for more that didn’t come. Finally, he reverted to training and said, “If you want to contest the citations, I’ll guess I’ll see you boys in court.”
“Gee,” Camish said. “Do we have to wear ties?”
Caleb snorted a laugh at that.
“You can wear what you want,” Joe said, feeling ridiculous for responding.
Caleb said to Camish, “But we got folks to look after.”
Camish shot Caleb a vicious glance, which shut his brother up.
“What folks?” Joe asked.
“Never mind my brother,” Camish said. “He knows not what he says sometimes.”
Caleb nodded, said, “I just babble sometimes.”
“Is there someone else up here?” Joe asked.
“Ain’t nobody,” Camish said.
“Ain’t nobody,” Caleb repeated.
JOE MOUNTED BUDDY, clucked his tongue to get him moving, and started back up the hill. He was never so grateful to ride away. He tried not to look over his shoulder as he put distance between himself and the camp, but he found he had to if for no other reason than to make sure they weren’t aiming a rifle at him.
They weren’t. Instead, the Brothers Grim were laughing and feeding the citations into the fire, which flared as they dropped the tickets in.
THAT NIGHT HE DISCOVERED his satellite phone was missing. He remembered powering it down and putting it away into its case the night before, after leaving the message for Marybeth. He emptied the contents of both panniers and checked his daypack and saddlebags looking for it. He thought: They took it. He re-created the encounter with the brothers step-by-step and pinpointed when it likely happened. When he’d followed Caleb to the cache.
“The arrow,” he said aloud and rooted through all of his gear again. It was gone as well.
His anger turned to thoughts of revenge. If the brothers used the phone—and why else would they have taken it?—their exact location could be determined. It was how the feds tracked down drug dealers in South America and terrorists in the Middle East. Joe could bring a team back up into the mountains and nail those guys.
Being out of radio contact was not unusual in itself, and often he didn’t mind it one bit. This time he did. Marybeth would worry about him. In fact, he was worried himself. And what if the brothers hadn’t taken his phone for their own use? What if they’d taken it to isolate him, to cut off his communication with the outside world?
LATER, AS GRAY WISPS of clouds passed over the moon and the wash of stars were so close together they looked like swirls of cream, he lay outside his tent again in his sleeping bag, with the shotgun across his chest, and he thought how different things could have turned out if he’d taken Caleb’s advice and simply ridden away when he had the chance.
EVERY YEAR at the Wyoming Game Wardens Association meeting, after a few drinks, wardens would stand up and recount the strangest incident or most bizarre encounter they’d had the previous year. There was a sameness to many of the stories: poor hunters mistaking deer for elk or does for bucks, the comic and ridiculous excuses poachers came up with when caught in the act, out-of-state hunters who got no farther into Wyoming than the strip club in Green River, and run-ins with hermits, derelicts, and the unbalanced. It was always amazing to Joe how more often than not those who sought solace in nature were the least prepared to enter it. But it was exactly the opposite with those brothers. He felt he was the one who was encroaching, as if he’d barged unasked and unwanted into their living room.
They were the reason he’d lain awake all night with his hand on his shotgun as if it were his lover.
Joe thought bitterly, This isn’t fair. This was not how it was supposed to be on his last patrol.
It was like walking into a convenience store for a quart of milk and realizing there was an armed robbery in progress. He didn’t feel prepared for what he’d stumbled into. And unlike other situations he’d encountered over the years—and there were countless times he’d entered hunting and fishing camps outnumbered, outgunned, and without backup—he’d never felt as vulnerable and out of his depth.
HE THOUGHT HOW STRANGE it was that no one—hunters, ranchers, hikers, fishers—had ever reported seeing the Grim Brothers. How was it possible these two had lived and roamed in these mountains and not been seen and remarked upon? Two six-and-a-half-foot identical twins in identical clothing? That was the kind of legend that swept through the rural populace and took on a life of its own. It was exactly the kind of tale repeated by men like Farkus at the Dixon Club bar.
So how could these brothers have stayed out of sight?
Then Joe thought, Maybe they hadn’t. They’d certainly been seen before.
But whoever had seen them felt compelled to keep their mouths shut. Or maybe they never lived to tell.
AFTER SEVERAL HOURS, Joe dragged his bag a hundred yards from the camp into a copse of thick mountain juniper on a rise that overlooked the tent and his horses. If they came for him, he figured, he’d see them first on the approach. He sat with his back against a rock and both the shotgun and the .308 M-14 carbine with peep sights within reach. Finally, deep into the night, he drifted into an exhausted sleep.
He didn’t know how long he’d been out when his eyes shot open. It was still dark, but the eastern sky had lightened slightly. A dream had terrified him, and he found he’d cut into the palm of his hand with his fingernails and drawn blood.
In the dream, Caleb sneaked into his camp, rolled him over in his sleeping bag, and took a vicious bite out of the back of his neck. The pain was horrific, worse than anything he’d experienced.
To assure himself it had been his imagination, he glided the tips of his fingers along his nape to make sure the skin wasn’t broken.
THURSDAY, AUGUST 27
3
THE ONLY SOUNDS JOE COULD HEAR AS HE RODE FROM THE trees into a sun-splashed meadow were a breeze that tickled the long hairs of Buddy’s black mane and made far-off watery music in the tops of the lodgepole pines, the huffing of his horses, and the squeaks and mews from his leather saddle.
That was until he heard the hollow thwap somewhere in the dark trees to his right, the sizzle of a projectile arcing through the air like a shooting spark.
And the thunk of the arrow through the fleshy top of his thigh that pinned him to the saddle and the horse. The pain was searing, and he fumbled and dropped the reins. Instinctively, he gripped the rough wooden shaft of the arrow with his right hand. Buddy screamed and crow-hopped, and Joe would have fallen if the arrow hadn’t been pinning him on the saddle. He felt Buddy’s back haunches dip and dig in, and suddenly the gelding was bolting across the meadow with his eyes showing white and his ears pinned back.