Coon chuckled. Joe didn’t appreciate it.
“Whatever you do, Joe, don’t engage them. Just stay where you are and don’t let yourself be seen. We can’t risk them finding you and blowing the case before we can move on it.”
“That’s thoughtful of you,” Joe said.
“Yeah — it didn’t exactly come out the way I wanted it to sound,” Coon said, his voice contrite.
“But it’s what you meant.”
Joe took Coon’s silence as agreement.
“I’m trapped here for the moment,” Joe said, explaining that his pickup was miles away through the forest and he wasn’t sure when he’d be able to retrieve it.
“There’s something else,” Joe added. “I need money.”
“We all need money.”
“No — I need cash. I’m tapped out, is what I’m saying.”
Coon said, “The governor didn’t give you a budget?”
“No.”
“Well — this is uncomfortable,” Coon sighed.
They worked out a way that Coon could transfer seven hundred dollars from a bureau emergency fund directly into Joe and Marybeth’s bank account. Joe could draw it out from the saloon ATM when it cleared, which he hoped would be soon.
“You’ll have to pay that back,” Coon said.
“Talk to the governor about that.”
Coon groaned but agreed.
“I’ll call you back as soon as I know when we can move,” Coon said.
Before Joe could speed-dial Marybeth, his phone lit up again. Coon calling back.
“That was quick,” Joe said.
“Ha-ha. No, I just remembered I had something to tell you. I forgot about it until now. Didn’t you say this fancy southern guy you ran into was named Whip?”
“Yes.”
“We might have something on him. The photo we’ve got matches your description, and I’ll send it to your phone in a second so you can ID it.”
“So who is he?” Joe asked.
“He might be named Robert Whipple, originally from Charlotte, North Carolina. My guys did a search of FBI databases and got more than a few hits on him. If it’s this Robert Whipple, you need to not run into him again.”
“Thanks for the advice,” Joe said. He could hear Coon shuffling through paperwork so he could summarize it over the phone.
“Robert Whipple, aka Whip, was a CIA Black Operator during Operation Desert Storm. He was with an off-the-books rendition and interrogations unit, but his cover got blown by a whistle-blower in the same unit who claimed Whipple murdered a couple of Iraqi Republican Guards who wouldn’t cooperate. The whistle-blower said Whip shot one of the Republican Guards in the back of the head with a .22 pistol in front of the other. The scared Iraqi told Whip everything he wanted to know, but it turned out the information was bad. Whip supposedly came back the next week and put a .22 round into that man’s head as well.
“Let’s see,” Coon said, reading further: “By the time the whistleblower made his allegations, Whip had vanished into thin air. He’s never been arrested, and his whereabouts were unknown — until possibly now. But his name was associated with several high-profile disappearances, kind of the same deal as Templeton himself. Dirty people seem to know his name—Whip—but they didn’t give enough information to tie Whipple directly to any murders.”
Joe felt his chest constrict. Again, he parted the curtains on the window. There were no new vehicles in the lot.
His phone chimed and he opened the photo message sent from Coon.
“Yup,” Joe said. The dark features, hooded eyes, and feminine mouth. “That’s him.”
“Man,” Coon laughed, “there is a nest of dangerous outlaws up there. I may end up getting a promotion out of this.”
Joe sighed and terminated the call.
Before he could call Marybeth, there was a rapid knocking on his door. Joe froze for a second and took a step toward his shotgun. The knocking was frantic, and sounded like a woodpecker hammering.
“Housekeeping.” A female voice Joe recognized as belonging to Alice from the front desk. Daisy barked at the sound.
“Why start now?” Joe asked her through the door, looking around at his armpit of a room.
“What did you say?” she asked suspiciously.
“Never mind. I don’t need anything.”
“Was that a dog I heard in there? Dogs are an extra twenty-dollar surcharge.”
“I’ll pay it.”
“Aren’t you going hunting today?” she asked. “Everybody else is gone. It snowed during the night and it’s still snowing.”
“Yup.”
“So you’re just going to stay in your room all day? Do you need any towels or anything?”
“No.”
“Are you sick?”
“No.”
“You can slip that extra twenty for the dog under the door, then.”
Joe rolled his eyes, dug out his wallet, and found his last twenty. As he slid it under the door, she snatched it with the speed of a change machine.
“Something else, Mr. Roma-nooski. If you’re staying in this room again tonight, you need to pay in advance. You can just slip that under the door like you did the other.”
Joe took a moment to think. If she wanted cash on the spot, he assumed he was still off the books and their unspoken arrangement could continue.
“I’ll have it for you tonight,” Joe said. “I’ve got to get some cash from the ATM.”
“You said cash, right?” she asked.
“Yup.”
She paused and seemed to be thinking something over. For a moment, Joe feared there might be someone with her. The door didn’t have a peephole so he couldn’t check that out.
“Look,” she said, her voice much lower. He had to lean toward the door to hear her. “Couple of guys came by this morning and asked whether I’d seen a man who kind of looked like you. They didn’t mention no dog, though.”
Critchfield and Smith, Joe thought.
“I told them you weren’t registered, which is the truth.”
“Thank you,” Joe said, not sure if he believed her. But then he thought she must be telling the truth or he would have already had visitors.
“I don’t like them two guys,” she said. “Never did. It goes back years. But I thought you’d want to know.”
“I appreciate it,” Joe said. “I really do.”
“Of course,” she said conspiratorially, “that means the price of this room just went up.”
He winced. “How much?”
“I’m thinking five hundred a night, two-night minimum — in advance.”
Joe said, “So a thousand.”
“That’ll be good,” she whispered.
“I’ll give it to you tonight,” Joe said.
“I think you’d better,” she said. Then: “Sure you don’t want some clean towels?”
He quickly texted Coon to make the loan at least twelve hundred dollars and “no less.” Then he imagined the special agent blowing his top.
When he reached Marybeth, he tried not to convey his growing sense of panic. There was no need worrying her when there was nothing she — or he — could do about it at the moment. She said it was snowing there, too, but it was supposed to clear up by late afternoon. The Twelve Sleep County Library and schools were closed due to the weather, but both would likely reopen the next day.
And, she said, Mrs. Young in California wouldn’t pick up.
“I’m guessing she sees the 307 area code and just won’t answer the phone,” she said. “I’m really frustrated.”
She said she was equally frustrated by the fact that she couldn’t locate a Facebook page or blog she could tie to Erik. That alone made her uneasy, since she assumed he was on the Web—he had to be—under a false name.