Joe was thrilled to see his old friend, even though he couldn’t put into context what he’d just observed. But no doubt Whip was now out of the picture.
Behind Critchfield, Alice Pulochova was assisting Latta around the building so he could go inside. Alice pushed Emily through the snow in her wheelchair. Gene Smith leaned back against the grille of Latta’s pickup with his arms crossed, waiting for marching orders from Critchfield — or whomever Critchfield was talking to on the phone.
Joe waited until Latta and Emily were safely inside before he said to Daisy, “Here we go.”
The pickup shot quickly down the mountain, the front bumper pushing snow, fantails of snow shooting out from the wheels on both sides. Joe had little traction and winced as he sideswiped a tree that dumped a heavy load of snow on his windshield, but he didn’t slow down and hit the wipers on high to clear it.
By the time he emerged from the trees and could see again, Critchfield and Smith were two hundred yards away.
Critchfield heard him and lowered the cell phone as Smith shouted and pointed toward Joe’s oncoming truck.
Joe gunned it.
While he closed the distance between them, Smith ran back to Latta’s pickup and backed out of the cab with a black rifle of some kind with a long magazine. Critchfield warned Smith off, and jogged to his own pickup and reached in through the open passenger window.
Instead of a weapon, Critchfield emerged with a new cell phone in his hand. He opened the passenger door and stepped behind it. Behind him, Smith scrambled and did the same.
Joe kept going, closing the gap to a hundred yards. He felt himself start to pucker…
He could see Critchfield duck down below the open window of the door. The cell phone rose to fill it, Critchfield’s thumb on the speed-dial button.
The explosion came from the outside wall of the processing plant next to Critchfield’s truck — the concussion like a thunderclap as the wall erupted in flame and smoke. Joe felt his pickup buck from the shock waves and ducked down to his right as chunks of the stone wall smashed into the grille of his vehicle. The windshield imploded and thousands of tiny cubes of glass, like ice, covered the inside of the cab.
Joe stomped on the brake and the truck slid to a stop in the snow. His ears rang from the explosion and all he could hear was a low humming sound inside his head. Daisy was covered with glass, and tried to shake it off as if it were errant beads of water.
He climbed out of his pickup with his shotgun but realized as the smoke cleared he wouldn’t need it. Critchfield had been cut in two. His bottom half was behind the open door of his vehicle. The blackened top half was fifteen feet away and smoldering, as was the driver’s-side door that had been blown through the cab like a giant scalpel. Somehow, Critchfield’s cowboy hat had gone undamaged and was crown-down in the snow.
Smith was writhing on the ground in his death throes, both arms and one leg severed completely from his body, bleeding out so fast that he’d be dead within seconds. Joe gagged at the sight. He turned and ordered Daisy back into his truck. He didn’t want his dog sniffing the body parts.
Despite the steady hum in his ears, Joe heard the thumping of approaching helicopters as they skimmed over the southern horizon. He looked up to see a convoy of speeding SUVs on the highway coming from the south with lights flashing.
Everything had worked according to plan, except there was no one alive to arrest. Except Nate, who was suddenly standing beside him. He hadn’t heard him walk up through the fog in his head.
“Are you all right?”
“Just great,” Joe said. “And you?”
“Dandy.” Then: “How did you know there was a bomb inside the wall?”
“I put it there. Critchfield thought it was still under my truck.”
“How did you know he’d park there?”
“I didn’t,” Joe confessed.
Nate said: “See that?”
Joe followed Nate’s outstretched arm. Most of the stone wall of the processing facility had collapsed in the explosion, revealing the contents of the locked-up room. Which was why Joe had planted the explosive there in the first place. The bomb had served as a kind of search warrant made up of C-4.
“Oh God,” Joe said. He’d suspected what he was seeing when he thought his darkest thoughts, which was why he’d hidden the bomb in the wall.
Two thick male human bodies hung head-down from meat hooks. They swung back and forth from the aftershock of the concussion. The bodies were naked but covered by stained white cheesecloth, the kind used by hunters to cover big game animals they’d skinned and hung from trees. Both corpses had visible wounds: one with five or more small gunshot wounds in his face and neck, the other a gaping chasm.
“The one on the left is Henry P. Scoggins the Third,” Nate said. “You know the other one.”
“Jonah Bank,” Joe whispered. “Anybody would recognize him.”
Nate shrugged. “I always wondered what they did with the bodies we brought back.”
Joe was speechless. But it hit him like a hammer. “They’re being aged,” he said in a whisper. “They sell sausage to the public and dole it out bit by bit to every hunter who gets his game processed here. Critchfield was the butcher.”
“I’ve always heard humans taste like pork,” Nate said with a whistle. “I guess that’s right. Damn, I kind of liked that sausage, too.”
Joe said, “Which means the Feds won’t be able to pin more murders on Templeton unless he confesses. The remains of all the other victims have been… consumed.”
He had trouble saying that last word. Then he looked straight at Nate.
“The only way you get out of this, maybe, is to become a state witness,” Joe said. “I know the Feds want to nail Templeton really bad. That’s why they sent me up here. Tell the Feds everything you know so they can build a bigger case against him. They might make a deal.”
Nate scowled but didn’t respond.
Joe squared up against Nate and raised his shotgun to parade rest. “If you don’t, I’m going to have to arrest you right here. I don’t like it any more than you do, but you really crossed the line this time.”
“You’d do that, wouldn’t you?”
“Yup.”
“That’s something I’ve always admired about you, Joe.”
Joe gestured toward the highway. The federal convoy was making the turn onto the road that led to the Black Forest Inn. Above, the helicopters were stabilized and lowering from the sky to land.
“So you trust them?” Nate asked.
“The Feds? Not at all,” Joe said. “Not one bit. Too many of ’em these days are no better than government thugs. But I trust Agent Coon. He’s always been straight with me.”
Nate said, “It won’t be the first time I worked with the Feds.”
Joe closed his eyes briefly in relief. The last thing he wanted to do was try to arrest Nate if Nate didn’t want to be taken. Joe said, “I know about Whip. I saw what happened up there. But where are all the others? The cavalry is here and they don’t have anyone to arrest. All I can figure is someone must have tipped them off.”
“Probably.”
“So where are they?”
Nate said, “The sheriff, judge, and chief of police were all manacled together the last I saw them. But they’ve probably cut themselves free by now.”
“Who cuffed them together?”
“Moi.”
Joe was stunned. “I’m glad you didn’t…”
“I’m not a murderer, Joe.”
“Glad to hear that, Nate.”
The roar of the first helicopter landing drowned out any more conversation. Joe reached up and clamped his hat on his head so the rotor wash wouldn’t send it away.