He dragged the body bag with Scoggins, the server, and the pistol around the side of the house. Scoggins didn’t weigh as much as he looked, and the nylon of the bag sizzled along the manicured grass toward the river. In the distance behind him, Nate could hear shouting and pounding from the three thugs trying to get out of the guest cabin. Other voices — from the cook and her husband — melded with the noise. Jolovich remained in his room and stayed quiet.
“I can’t get the door open!” a man’s voice shouted from the compound.
“Don’t you think we know that, old man?” one of the thugs yelled back.
A woman’s voice: “Go find Jolovich, Ron.”
Ron: “You go find him. You know how he is.”
Nate left the body bag on the bank and an opening in the wire fence. He splashed in the shallow water upriver to unanchor his boat. He pulled it behind him to the lawn, then lifted the body and the contents onto the floor of the boat and swung in.
Within a few minutes, river sounds overtook the shouting and thumping from the Scoggins compound. He withdrew his cell phone and powered it on again. When he had reception bars, he made the call.
It was answered after one ring. Nate could hear the whine of an engine in the background.
“Did you do some good?”
“Affirmative.”
“Good man! How far out are you?”
“Forty-five minutes.”
“Splendid! Magnificent! I’ll be there.”
Nate punched off.
The drift boat was slightly more sluggish because of the dead weight inside, but he stuck to the swift channels. The eastern horizon was banded with a creamy rose color, and the stars in that quadrant of sky were fading in intensity.
The temperature dropped as he powered the boat downriver, and the steam got thicker. He could feel waning body heat on his legs from the bag at his feet.
Nate tried not to dwell on what had just happened at the compound. He could sort that out later. Leaving Peterson and Jolovich alive were wild cards.
As he cruised in a fast current that took him down the center of the river, he saw the falcon watching him from the gnarled dead branch of an ancient cottonwood. It was a peregrine with a mottled light breast and sharp black eyes. He knew how unusual it was to see a peregrine in the open, and it chilled him how the bird seemed to focus on him as he passed, as if assessing his worth. Peregrines, as Nate intimately knew, were killing machines — the fastest predators in the sky.
That bird, Nate thought, had no right to pass judgment on him. Peregrine falcons, unlike other raptors, would target any kind of prey, whether ducks, rabbits, geese, cats, or mice. They were stone-cold killers.
So what was he now? He had no idea anymore, and shoved the thought aside. Unbidden, the image of his friend Joe appeared, an unreadable expression on his face. He shoved that aside, too.
In the distance, he could hear the buzz of a small plane approaching. Right on time. The old asphalt airstrip was less than a half-mile downriver.
2
A month later, Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett winced against an icy wind in his face as he stood with his hands jammed into his parka pockets on the top of a treeless mountain in the Bighorn Range.
“Come on,” he shouted to the tow truck driver, “you can do it.” He knew his words had been snatched away by the wind.
The driver was named Dave Farkus, and he’d had no idea when he took the part-time job at a local towing and recovery company in Saddlestring that it would mean taking his leased one-ton up a steep mountain switchback road to the very top as the first big snow of the winter rolled across the northern horizon, headed straight toward them. Farkus had managed to get his 1997 Ford F-450 truck turned around and had backed up to the edge of the snowfield, but he was obviously having second thoughts about trying to retrieve the vehicle that was buried deep seventy yards away. All that could be seen of the buried pickup — Joe’s departmental vehicle until he’d sunk it to the top of the wheel wells on an ill-fated run across the field two years before — was the dented top of its green cab and several radio antennas whipping back and forth in the wind. Farkus looked over at Joe through his closed passenger-side window and gestured with a what-can-I-possibly-do-now? shrug.
“Unwind the cable,” Joe shouted, using his hands to mimic the action so Farkus could understand. Farkus pretended he couldn’t and looked at Joe with the uncomprehending stare of Joe’s yellow Labrador, Daisy.
Joe and Farkus had spent the last hour digging with shovels through the hard crust of snow around the back of the pickup until they located the rear bumper. While Joe continued digging until he uncovered the rear wheel, Farkus had walked back to his truck to bring it closer. He had taken an inordinate amount of time while Joe labored. The snow beneath the crust was grainy and loose, and for every shovelful he threw out, a half-shovelful filled in the hole. Beneath his insulated Carhartt overalls, Wranglers, red uniform shirt, and parka, he was sweating hard by the time Farkus showed up. The wind was cutting through it all, though, and he was chilled as he waited for Farkus to do something. He was afraid the strong wind was sifting the snow back into the hole he’d dug and would fill it up, at the rate they were proceeding.
Joe groaned and made his way to the tow truck and climbed inside. It felt good to get out of the wind into the warm interior, although it smelled of fast-food wrappers, grease, diesel fuel, his own sweat, and Farkus.
The view through the windshield was stunning, now that he could look at it clearly without squinting his eyes against the wind. Frozen blue-black waves of mountain summits stretched as far as he could see at eye level. Many were topped with white skullcaps of snow that had not melted during the summer, and between the ranges were deep wooded ravines and canyons that dropped out of sight. They were at least nine and a half thousand feet in elevation, above the timberline, where the only life was the scaly blue-green lichen on the sides of exposed granite boulders. The approaching storm clouds, rolling from the north with black fists, looked ominous.
He pulled his parka hood back and said, “We’re going to need to take your hook and cable out there and wrap it around the rear axle. Then you can power up the winch to pull it out.”
“That truck is buried deep,” Farkus said, bugging his eyes with exasperation. “What if we try and it pulls my outfit into the snowfield with that storm coming? We might never get out.”
“There’s only one way we’ll find that out.”
Dave Farkus was fifty-eight and pear-shaped, with rheumy eyes, jowls, thick muttonchop sideburns that had birthed a full beard, and a bulbous nose. He worked hard at not working hard, but he’d shown an uncanny ability to get caught in the middle of several conflicts that had involved Joe as well. He wore a thick grease-stained down coat and a flocked bomber hat with earflaps that hung down on each side. Tributaries of frozen snot ran down his whiskers from his nostrils from helping Joe dig out the back of the truck.
“Joe… if I wreck this truck or leave it up here like you did…”
“No whining,” Joe said. “You owe me this, remember?”
“Aw, jeez,” Farkus said, sitting back and shaking his head. “That’s not even fair.”