Well, thought Sloan, we’ll see about that.
‘Will you be ordering soon, Colonel?’ the maître d’ asked after he hung up.
‘Cancel,’ Sloan snapped. He slipped him a five and headed out into the rainy night. Knowing Hatcher, Sloan knew it could be weeks before he heard from him again. He went back to his office and tracked down Zabriski. Zabriski could find anybody. Besides, he was sure Hatcher was traveling under his own name. Hell, he hadn’t changed it so far. Besides, Hatcher wasn’t dodging Sloan, he was ignoring him. Sloan would get a line on him, just to show the son of a bitch.
The next morning he had his report.
‘He flew into Billings, Montana, on an Eastern flight last night, stayed at the Palace Hotel, checked out early this morning and caught a local feeder to Shelby,’ Zabriski reported.
‘Montana! What the hell could he be doing in Montana?’
‘I dunno, sir. But that’s where he went.’
‘Where the hell’s Shelby?’
‘About two giant steps south of the Canadian border,’ the agent answered. ‘There’s nothing there, Colonel, it’s been snowed under for three months. It’s where God lost his snowshoes.’
Montana? Sloan pulled out the Murphy file and went back over it, reading every line, looking for some reference to Shelby, Montana. But he found nothing. Well, hell, Sloan thought, where can he go from Shelby? He assigned Zabriski to take the next flight to Billings, wait for Hatcher to show up and follow him.
‘And, Zabriski, this guy’s slippery, got it? He’s got tricks you haven’t heard of yet.’
‘Do we bust him?’ Zabriski asked.
‘Hell, no, he hasn’t done anything wrong,’ Sloan said. ‘I just want to know what the hell he’s up to.’
Maybe, thought Sloan, he’s doing a double-back. Maybe he’s checking me out. The risk in hiring Hatcher was that he was too clever. If Hatcher turned into a loose cannon, he could be very dangerous.. After Los Boxes, it was much too early in the game to trust Hatcher.
The twin-engine De Havilland snaked its way through the narrow lane the blowers had trenched through the snow. On either side of the plane, high-piled snow banks loomed above the fuselage, snow that had been collecting for months. The airport terminal was a small one-story building almost hidden in the white drifts. There was a hangar nearby, barely peeking over the snow, with a tattered windsock flapping straight out from its warped pole in the subfreezing wind. That was all there was to the airport. Hatcher’s boots squeaked and his breath left trails of steam in his wake as he hurried across the snow-packed tarmac toward the warmth of the tiny terminal, which was barely the size of a large living room.
On one side of the room was an airline counter operated by a skinny young man who looked half asleep; facing it on the other side of the room was a food -dispensing machine and a combination taxi and rental car service, both operated by the same person, a grizzled man in need of a shave, wearing a fur cap and three layers of wool shirts. The arrival of the flight hardly stirred much activity in the terminal. There were only two other passengers on the small feeder line.
Hatcher drew a cup of coffee from the machine and waited until one of the passengers had gone through the drill of renting a car. When he left, Hatcher approached the fur-capped old man, who was leaning over the rental form, completing it with a stub of a pencil.
‘How long’s it take to get to Cut Bank?’ Hatcher’s frazzled voice asked.
The old man kept working on his form. ‘Depends.’
‘On what?’
‘Time a year. Summertime, takes about forty-five minutes.’
‘Well, how about in the winter, like right now, for instance?’
‘Two hours, if you know the road.’
‘Know how far it is up to the government hay station?’ Hatcher growled.
The old fellow kept writing and said, still without looking up, ‘Thirty-seven miles, more or less, most of it uphill. You ain’t used to driving in snow, forget it. They won’t even find you until spring.’
‘You the cabdriver, too?’
‘Yep.’
‘How much to run me up there?’
‘Son, you make it sound like a bike ride in the park,’ he said, still concentrating on the form.
Hatcher slid a hundred-dollar bill under his nose. ‘There’s another one just like that when we get back,’ he said in his chafing whisper. ‘I shouldn’t be up there more than an hour.’
The old fellow stared down at Ben Franklin’s cryptic grin for a few moments, then looked up. ‘You must be a government fella,’ he said.
‘You want a biography, it’ll cost you that Ben Franklin,’ Hatcher’s frazzled voice answered as he nodded toward the hundred.
‘Nuff said,’ the old man said, folding the bill and tucking it in one of his shirt pockets. ‘Last plane back to Billings is at four.’ He looked at his ‘watch. ‘Gives us six hours.’
‘How about Spokane?’
‘One flight a day. Two-thirty.’
‘Let’s aim for that,’ Hatcher said in his grating voice.
‘Uh-huh,’ the old fellow said and stuck out his hand. ‘Name’s Rufus Eskew.’
‘Chris,’ Hatcher said, shaking a hand tormented with calluses.
‘Better do something about that cold,’ Rufus said, reaching under the counter for his keys.
The chopper swept in low over the meadow, scrambling the deer that had already sniffed out the first batch of hay it had dropped. Simmons stood in the open hatch layered in heavy clothing, his face protected by a scarf against the frigid wind that blasted down on him and his partner from the chopper blades overhead. His eyes peered out from behind sunglasses between the scarf and the wool hat that was pulled down hard over his ears. His thick black eyebrows were caked with frost. He held on to the heavy lifeline over the side hatch and waited until the pilot whipped the chopper around.
Below them, the herd bounded about erratically, except for one magnificent stag who stood his ground, testing the air with his quivering nostrils, watching as the helicopter lowered over the frosted meadow that was trapped between two mountain peaks.
‘Lookit that arrogant son-bitch,’ Simmons yelled to his partner in the waist of the chopper. ‘That’s one gorgeous buck.’
They were twenty feet above the drifted lea when Simmons put both feet against the two-hundred-pound bale and kicked and pushed it out the door. He watched it tumble down, end over end, smack the ground and burst in a shower of snow and hay.
‘Come and get it, little darlin’s,’ he yelled down at the herd, which had been trapped by a sudden snowstorm and was facing starvation. On the other side, Eddie, his kick-boss, launched the last of the bales. He turned to Simmons and shot a thumb toward the roof of the plane. Simmons heard his voice over the intercom: ‘Okay, bombs away. Let’s go get some hot coffee.’
‘I hear that and that’s a roger and good-damn-news,’ the pilot answered.
Simmons and Eddie closed the hatch doors and sat in front of the feeble heaters. The air that blew out of the two vents was warm air only by comparison with the outside wind. Simmons took out a pint of Canadian Club, pulled down his scarf and took a long swig from the bottle. He wiped the mouth off with his gloved hand and gave the bottle to Eddie, then shook all over as if he’d been struck by lightning. ‘Who-eeee! That’ll get us home,’ he cried out, then pulled the scarf back up over his face, put away the bottle when Eddie had taken his turn, and wrapped his arms around himself. He would sleep for the twenty minutes it took to get to the station.
The pilot’s voice came over the intercom: ‘I just got a call from base. There’s a guy waitin’ there to see you, Harley.’
Simmons perked up. Now, who in hell would come out to the base to see him in this weather? he wondered.
‘What’s his name?’ Simmons asked the pilot.