“I don’t know the answer,” Nate said.
“I’m sure as hell going to find out,” Whip said, sitting back. “I liked it the way it was. I don’t need help, and we don’t need another operator. That’s just what I think. If it comes down between you and me, well, it’ll have to be you. No offense, of course.”
“Of course.”
Hill Top airport was three miles north of West Milford. It was a tiny, privately owned airstrip without a control tower or normal nighttime operations. Nate parked the van on the shadowed side of a private hangar and they wiped down the interior and exterior of the van and stripped the vinyl ABRAHAM’S FLORIST SHOP signage from the sides. Both broke their cell phones into pieces and threw them inside the body bag along with the cleaning rags and zipped it back up. Whip checked for spots of blood on the pavement since he’d shot a hole in the bag’s fabric, but said it was clean.
It was a cold night and moisture hung in the air to make it seem colder. Nate could see his breath, and his fingers and toes were starting to get numb.
They heard the airplane approaching at low altitude and it landed in the dark and taxied their way.
Nate and Whip grasped the opposite ends of the body bag and carried it toward the small plane.
Before they hefted the bag inside, Nate said to Whip: “It won’t be me.”
8
Joe Pickett drove north on U.S. 85 with Daisy sleeping on the passenger seat and a huge crate filled with 150 full-grown ring-necked pheasants in the back. Daisy was exhausted because she’d spent the first hour and a half staring at them through the back window.
Delivering the birds was the excuse Director LGD and her management team had come up with for Joe to enter Medicine Wheel County without suspicion, once Rulon had briefed her on the special assignment. The northeast corner of the state had had a particularly harsh winter the year before that had annihilated the pheasant population, and it was necessary to supplement the Black Hills with birds so the hunters wouldn’t gripe. Jim Latta, the local game warden, was in charge of releasing the newcomers that had been raised at the state bird farm in Hawk Springs; thus, it would appear legitimate for Joe and Latta to link up. That was the idea, anyway, Joe thought. Latta was unaware of the real reason Joe was coming.
Director LGD’s brain trust had come up with two cover stories for Joe’s sojourn. The first was under a departmental directive to double the number of public walk-in hunting areas on private land by the next fiscal year. Joe had established several in his district by working with local landowners, but there were none yet in Medicine Wheel County. Joe would supposedly use his experience to help Latta to further the directive.
Unfortunately, the second cover story meant he had to drive his truck four and a half hours southeast, load the crate of nervous pheasants with the help of the state biologists, and turn north again, skirting the eastern edge of the state.
The landscape changed character as he drove, from flat farmland to arid steppe. There had been an unusual cold spell and early winter snows the week before that still lingered under overcast skies. Skeletal cottonwoods in the eastern valleys had lost their leaves but were furred with frost even in the late afternoon. It was stark and white and rolling in every direction, and there was little oncoming traffic once he passed Mule Creek Junction and continued north. A single mangy coyote loped parallel to the highway for a while, but then turned as if it were ashamed of something when Joe slowed down to look at it.
Joe had never seen the vast stretches of Mongolia, but he guessed they would look similar under the pall of early winter. He knew the area consisted mainly of huge ranches that were once multigenerational but were now under out-of-state ownership. Scattered, frost-covered Angus cattle watched him drive past with dullards’ eyes.
North of Lusk, he’d pulled over to the side of the highway to wrap a canvas sheet from his gear box around the crate of birds. He secured it with nylon straps. The wind was cold and icy, and he feared it would freeze the birds to death before he could deliver them. Daisy watched from the rear window with twin threads of drool stringing from her mouth to the top of the bench seat.
Ten miles later, the highway turned pink. He’d once heard the reason was because the early road crews had used burned underground coal for a base, but the pink wasn’t cheery or bright — just strange and otherworldly.
He noted how pockets of isolated pronghorn antelope blended in perfectly in the terrain with its swaths of snow on sparse brown grass. It was almost impossible to see them unless the entire herd moved at once, because they seemed to be a part of the landscape itself.
After he crossed Hat Creek, he looked around for miles without seeing a single structure, and he felt like he was alone on the surface of a distant uninhabited planet. The radio station he’d been listening to began to crackle with static during the newsbreak — something about notorious New York financier Jonah Bank’s disappearance after he failed to show up in court. It was one of those stories that seemed to consume the eastern media but had no impact or relation to anything in Joe’s world. He’d not followed the story closely except to note that in Wyoming there was an actual Jonah Bank that was a bank. He reached down and shut the radio off.
He felt a pang of guilt for being lifted up by the pure solitude, with the open road and a new assignment out ahead of him. For brief stretches of time, he pushed aside the stress generated by Erik Young and Dallas Cates and thought about a certain Wyoming rancher and what he’d learned about him.
All around him was white isolation and vistas stretched out as far as he could see.
He loved it.
Joe had opened the file Coon lent him at three-thirty that morning because he couldn’t sleep. He’d made coffee and sat at his desk in his tiny side office in his robe and had read through the pages in order, trying to make some kind of sense of them.
He found Wolfgang Templeton fascinating. What would cause a man who had it all — it seemed — to give up and move on when everything appeared to be going his way? And if the FBI speculation was valid, weren’t there hundreds of other lucrative opportunities available to Templeton that didn’t involve creating a murder-for-hire gig? Nothing Joe read about Templeton suggested recklessness or anarchy. In every way, the man seemed measured, honorable, and professional — an American success story. Joe liked those. He’d never envied successful people or wanted them brought down — unless, of course, they turned out to be poachers. Or worse.
As he thumbed through the file, he found a photocopy of a small story in Investor’s Business Daily about Templeton’s last days in finance. Coon had not mentioned it during their meeting. It was called “CEO’s Bitter Last Hurrah,” and it had appeared the week Templeton suddenly retired.
According to the item, quoting from an anonymous source on the inside of the firm, Templeton had called his senior executives and board of directors together for an emergency meeting, where he declared, “Our free enterprise system is broken and can’t be fixed.” The source said Templeton was angry and blamed the state of the economy on “untouchable elites” and “crony capitalists working hand-in-glove with corrupt politicians.” There was no point anymore, he said, of “competing fairly and with a well-tuned moral compass” because the deck was stacked. According to the insider, Templeton said he could no longer serve as chairman, but would “do the right thing” outside the system. He gave no clues what that meant.