Nate cringed. Then: “How did he take it?”
“He was much more gracious than you,” she said. Then, with a flip of her hair, “Mr. Whip will do anything I ask.”
So that was it, Nate thought. He smiled cruelly at her.
“It’s not like that,” she said. “He’s not my type. Too preppy. As far as I’m concerned, he’s just a very important colleague. He’d like it to be more, but that would be unprofessional. Mr. T. would frown on it.”
“One question,” Nate said. “Does Mr. T. know you come up here sometimes? Not on official business?”
Brannan got in and shut the door. Before starting the motor, she said, “No, and I’d appreciate you not mentioning it. He’d frown on that, also.”
“I guess I’ll see you tomorrow night,” Nate said.
“Try to be nicer and more pleasant to Herself than you are to me,” she called out, spinning gravel as she backed out.
20
It was late afternoon when Joe pulled off the highway and bounced down an untrammeled grassy lane that wound through an old apple orchard two miles from Wedell. As he stopped, hundreds of fat birds lifted from where they’d been feeding on dropped fruit. It was obvious it had been years since anyone tended to the trees or pruned them, and a third of the orchard was gnarled black skeletons. An ancient farmhouse had smashed-in windows and the open front door looked like a ghoul face saying Boo, he thought. But there was no one around.
Joe set up the ramps and backed the four-wheeler out of his pickup onto the grass. The fat tires crushed apples and made the air tangy. He hid the ATV even deeper in an impenetrable tangle of Russian olive bushes on the side of the abandoned house. Joe transferred his shotgun into the ATV’s saddle scabbard and filled the saddlebags with extra ammunition, a few bottles of water, binoculars, spotting scope, tool bag, Maglite, camera, evidence kit, handheld radio, a roll of topo maps of the county, and his Filson vest.
Then he climbed back into his pickup.
Anna B.’s face appeared at her office window as he drove into the parking area and stopped in front of cabin number eight. When he got out and looked over his shoulder, she was gone.
Again, he tried not to look up at the light fixture as he yawned and stretched theatrically and shuffled into the darkened bedroom. The bed was out of view from the light fixture, if indeed there was a camera in it. Joe fell back onto the bed, making the bedsprings creak.
He waited an hour, then checked his watch: five-thirty. Rolling silently off the bed, he opened the hasp on the rear window and tried to open it, but it wouldn’t give. Apparently, they’d painted the window shut when it was refurbished. Joe wondered if it had been intentional or a careless mistake.
He wedged the long blade of his Leatherman tool between the window and the wood frame and carefully sawed down the seam. He had to do it on the sides as well.
Finally, using his legs to give him more momentum, he pressed the palms of his hands against the bottom of the upper window frame and shoved. There was a wooden-sounding pop as it opened. Had it been too loud?
Nevertheless, he swung one leg across the sill and bent forward so he could squeeze his shoulders and head through the opening, and he dropped to the ground. His knees barked in pain as he landed, and he paused to let it recede. It did, somewhat. He thought to himself that he wasn’t yet used to aches and pains where they didn’t used to be. And, he thought grimly, it would only get worse.
When he looked up, he saw Daisy staring sadly down at him, her front paws on the sill.
“Stay,” he whispered. She moaned and dropped back into the cabin. He hoped she wouldn’t start whining. He hated to leave her.
Joe gathered himself and stood on his tiptoes to close the window behind him as quietly as he could. He left it open an inch in case he’d have to reenter his cabin the same way he’d left.
Then he turned and entered the copse of pine trees. His boots crunched on the carpet of dried needles. He had the key to the four-wheeler in his front pocket. His phone was muted, but he was aware of it in his right breast pocket in case he received a text or call from Marybeth or the FBI.
Or Sheridan.
There were hundreds of old logging roads through the spruce and ponderosa pine forest. He wasn’t even sure he’d need to consult his topo maps to find his way to where he wanted to go.
Joe mounted the four-wheeler and started it up and raced through the gears on an overgrown logging road in the general direction of the Black Forest Inn.
The terrain was steeper and more heavily wooded than he had anticipated. Deadfall blocked the old road in several places, and he found himself picking through brush around hazards on the ATV. The temperature dropped twenty quick degrees as the sun nosed over the western hills and the light choked off the dappling on the tops of the trees.
It took thirty-five minutes to navigate the wooded hills to the northeast. Twice, he emerged from the timber to note the distant ribbon of the state highway. He encountered no hunters or other ATVs on the old logging road, although as he neared the Black Forest Inn he saw day-old tire tracks on the trail.
As he wound down the trail through a thick stand of aspen, he sensed heavy forms within the trees to his right that weren’t trunks. A small band of elk — a bull, a spike, three cows, and a calf — stood like statues in the trees as he passed. He wondered how many other elk hunters had been down the trail that day who simply hadn’t seen them. He’d heard of some elk learning to freeze instead of run when being hunted, although he’d never encountered it before. To reward them for their adaptability, he didn’t slow down and gawk but kept his eyes forward until he could no longer see them in his peripheral vision.
At dusk, the trees thinned and he slowed his ATV to a crawl. On a massive grassy bench below him were the winking lights of the Black Forest Inn. The turrets on top looked oddly medieval against the burnt-orange sunset as he descended from the hills. It was almost dark enough for headlights, but he didn’t want to turn them on and draw any more attention to his arrival than necessary.
The parking area was filled with four-wheel-drive vehicles with license plates from states as far away as California and New York, as well as a kind of unofficial corral of muddy ATVs in the crushed grass on the north side of the inn. In the parking lot, a few scruffy hunters leaned against their vehicles, drinking beer. A bearded man raised his bottle in salute.
On the south side of the inn, three pickups waited their turn on the roundabout that served the meat-processing facility dock. Joe looked over as he passed. Two hunters in camo and blaze orange had backed their truck with Michigan plates to the loading dock. Meatcutters in bloody white aprons helped the successful hunters jam meat hooks through the back hocks of two big buck deer and swing the carcasses inside. The game had been gutted but not skinned, and Joe instinctively checked for white paper license tags on the bodies. They were there — wired to the tines of the antlers. Because he wasn’t in uniform and not on official duty, he was glad he didn’t have the dilemma of illegal deer being received right in front of his eyes.
Joe parked his ATV among twenty others on the north lot and climbed off. His inner thighs and palms tingled from the vibration of the two-stroke engine and he’d picked up enough road dust, pine dust, and mud on his clothing to appear as he hoped to appear — as just another hunter.
The air smelled of fall in a Rocky Mountain hunting camp: cool air, pine, mulch from the forest floor, gasoline and diesel fumes from the vehicles, and the metallic bite of spilled blood, wet hides, and raw meat.