"It's done," Sonny Chareaux said. "We have the photograph."
"Good. Check him out then, quickly, and use the radio to contact me as soon as you know."
"But if I can find out nothing about him easily, how far should I go?" Sonny Chareaux asked. "Or perhaps I should say, what are the limits? How hard should I push?"
Alex Chareaux hesitated for a brief moment. "There are no limits on this one," he answered finally. "Do whatever you have to do. We need to know before sunset."
"I understand."
After hanging up, Sonny Chareaux walked over to his brother and waited the remaining seconds until both Polaroids were ready. He examined each of them, taking extra time with the one that showed the pilot and the man they knew as Henry Lightner coming down the ramp.
"Do we get to kill them?" Butch Chareaux asked hopefully.
"I think so," his older brother said, looking out the terminal window at the two men who were unloading duffel bags and a rifle case out of the Lear's storage compartment. "We shall see."
"So what do you think?" Len Ruebottom asked in a low voice as they walked in through the wide terminal door, causing Henry Lightstone to wince. Fortunately, of the ten or eleven people that he could see inside the Bozeman Airport terminal, none of them were within earshot.
Lightstone had given Ruebottom the rifle case and one of the duffel bags to carry in the hope that the task would be sufficiently distracting. But the young rookie agent-pilot had already forgotten one of his primary directives.
"You've seen one small airport, you've seen them all," Lightstone observed as he paused to take in the entire waiting area in one long, appraising glance.
Of those ten or eleven people, he noted, at least a couple of the men looked big, mean, sinister, or vicious enough to be Alex Chareaux's brothers. Which meant that he had to get rid of Len Ruebottom as quickly as possible. "No, I mean…"
Deliberately ignoring the young pilot, Lightstone made a visible show of looking around and then finally managing to locate the large, bright-yellow Hertz sign that would have been easily visible a hundred yards away. He walked over to the counter, dropped his duffel bag, and turned to stare straight into Len Ruebottom's clear, innocent eyes.
"Really appreciate you're getting me up here on short notice, Len," he said, giving him a friendly employer-to- employee type of smile. "I'll give you a call when I need a pickup."
"Uh, yes sir," Ruebottom acknowledged, finally remembering his proper role. "Anything else I can do in the meantime?"
"Not a thing," Lightstone said firmly. "Just look after the plane, hang on to that paper, and stay near a telephone."
Then he turned to face the waiting Hertz clerk before Len Ruebottom had a chance to say anything else that just might get one or both of them killed.
"Hello," Lightstone said, smiling pleasantly at the attractive young woman. "The name's Lightner."
"Oh, yes, of course," she said, nodding in apparent recognition as though she had memorized all of the names on the displayed reservation packets. With barely a glance backward, she reached around for the one that was marked "Lightner" in big capital letters.
"First name Henry?" she asked before opening the envelope.
"That's right."
As he handed her Henry Lightner's driver's license and credit card, Lightstone turned his head just enough to see Len Ruebottom's broad back as he walked out the wide terminal-door access to the tarmac and the waiting Lear jet. He also noted that he couldn't see either of the two men who had seemed to resemble Alex Chareaux, but he really wasn't worried about the Chareaux brothers at this point.
Not as long as Len Ruebottom got the Lear and his rookie-agent ass back up in the air and out of Bozeman within the next few minutes.
God save us all from the nice guys. They're the ones who get you killed every time, he told himself as he returned his attention to the attractive Hertz clerk.
"Do you know where you'll be staying?"
Lightstone sensed the presence of a man behind him, but he didn't worry, because it didn't matter now if Sonny or Butch Chareaux were standing behind him or waiting for him out by the Bronco. He could deal with the Chareaux brothers on his own just fine. The only thing that he was really interested in right now was hearing the high-pitched whine of two powerful jet engines revving up as Len Ruebottom taxied the Lear back out onto the runway for takeoff.
"Somewhere between Big Timber and Lewistown," he lied reflexively. "Depends on how far I get."
"Okay then, Mr. Lightner, I think we have everything all ready for you," the young woman said cheerfully as she handed him the contract. After he had signed it, she took the multipage form back, separated out and folded his copy, then handed him the packet along with a set of keys. "I've marked the stall where it's parked, and it's filled with gas. You want to be sure to fill it up… but you know all of that, don't you?"
Lightstone nodded.
"Then just watch out for those storms, and have a nice trip." She smiled one last time before looking back at her dwindling row of reservation packets with an oddly forlorn expression.
Thirty minutes later, after having made a trip to the bathroom, buying a container of coffee to go, and stowing the duffel bags and rifle in the back of the Bronco, Henry Lightstone drove out of the airport en route to U.S. Highway 90.
In doing so, he tried very hard not to look at the sleek and shiny Lear jet that was still parked all by itself about fifty yards from the Bozeman Airport terminal building.
The eighty-mile drive from Bozeman to Gardiner wound down along the shallow Yellowstone River and through one of the more spectacular high-peak passes in the western United States. But the view was wasted on Lightstone, who was having trouble just paying attention to the road.
He kept thinking about the empty Lear jet sitting out on the Bozeman Airport tarmac with the U.S. registration number Three-Three-Five- Charley-Papa painted in nice readable block print on its side.
And a twenty-five-year-old rookie agent-pilot, with a pretty wife and two young kids, who had no business getting drawn into an undercover investigation with a freak like Alex Chareaux if he didn't know enough about covert work to do exactly as he was told.
"God damn you, MeNulty," Lightstone swore to himself, over and over again.
He almost pulled off the road at Miner to find a phone and warn MeNulty to get Carl or Larry or Dwight out to Bozeman to find out what the hell was going on with that plane. But he knew that if he did something like that, the word would immediately get back to Alex Chareaux.
And besides, Lightstone reminded himself, there were at least six vehicles behind him, any one of which might be driven by Sonny or Butch Chareaux. He really didn't want to have to explain a sudden phone call.
So he kept driving and tried not to think too much about all the little mistakes that a novice investigator like Len Ruebottom could have made. And it didn't help that every time he thought about Len Ruebottom and his family, he saw the ravaged face of Bobby LaGrange, his ex-partner from San Diego, bruised, beaten, and near death in that hospital bed.