"The policeman is positive it was Trusov?"
"No question. He yanked his patrol car around and tried to give pursuit but the pickup disappeared. He alerted his department and the Montana Highway Patrol. They found the truck in the western outskirts of Butte, abandoned. They can't find Trusov anywhere, and speculate he has found another vehicle and is continuing west." Coates lifted his beer glass. "I'd like to know how Trusov determined you are in Hobart, which it sure looks like he has figured out, coming in a beeline here."
"Do you want to tell him?" Adrian asked, bringing her gaze around to Gray.
"Tell him what?"
"How Nikolai Trusov knows where you are."
"You tell me," Gray challenged.
Adrian said, "You left him a message, Owen."
The detective stared at Gray.
She went on. "I called your home telephone number in Brooklyn. On your recorder is the message 'No one is home right now. If you are looking for Owen Gray, he is at his father's place on Black Bear Creek near Hobart, Idaho.'"
"Son of a bitch." Pete Coates's voice rose and he pointed his fork at Gray. "You guessed Trusov would call your number, and you've deliberately told him where you are."
Gray was silent.
Coates fairly shouted, "Owen, you are intentionally setting up a duel between you and Trusov, is that it?"
Again Gray said nothing.
Coates put down his fork. "Trusov wants you to meet him in the field, and you've decided to oblige him. Am I right?"
"I came to Idaho," Gray said lamely. "If he is following me, so be it."
"Owen, this isn't the goddamn OK Corral. Nikolai Trusov is a killer, and he is superb at it. And now you've decided to play a game with him, to go mano a mano with him? I thought you and I were working for the same thing, but I guess we no longer are."
"I guess not," Gray said quietly.
"I ought to throw you in jail for your own protection.' Coates's voice was lower. He was settling down. He lifted his beer. "Goddamnit."
"Pete, you might be the most skilled detective at the NYPD," Gray said, "but I don't believe you'll be able to stop Nikolai Trusov before he finds me."
PART THREE
MYSTICAL JEWELS
Sometimes the fish devour the ants, and sometimes the ants devour the fish.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Few entered Idaho's Big Wood River Valley unnoticed and unremarked.
Big Ed Gatwick cruised in from Lewiston on his 1950 Harley Panhead. The motorcycle's frame-off restoration had taken him two years, and he had installed the best: S&S rods and pistons, Sifton lifters and cam, and a Screaming Eagle carb. The fenders and frame were painted black-cherry pearl, and everything else was either black leather or gleaming chrome. Big Ed blew through Hailey and headed north toward Ketchum and Hobart in a reclining position, his gloved hands on the handlebars above the Springer fork, his black boots high on rests, and his bulk low in the curved seat. Seventy-four cubic inches filled the valley with an echoing rumble, a throbbing balls-grabbing pulse that for Big Ed Gatwick was proof God existed, for only He could have created such a sound, with apologies to the Harley Davidson Company.
Gatwick's club was the Lewiston Death Deacons, and he was leading six Deacons to the Galena Lodge near Galena Summit, north of Hobart. Going to do some drinking, toking, joking, bust a head or two, it was all on the agenda. Once in a while he and the others would push around an overwhelmed small-town sheriff, and you couldn't have more fun than that. The club liked to show up in some jerkwater town unannounced and uninvited, party hard, then clear out before the law could rally its forces. The biker wore a black leather jacket with the Deacons' colors, a hooded grim reaper carrying a scythe. Gatwick's gray beard was blown over his shoulder by the rush of wind. He wore a pill helmet, and on his nose were green-tinted granny glasses.
In Gatwick's rearview mirror — a glass sliver put there only to appease hard-ass state patrolmen — Jig Lawrence piloted his Harley. The others trailed behind, weaving side to side, filling the highway and turning some heads, and that's what it was all about.
Gatwick rounded a corner and squinted through the sunglasses. A cop car was ahead on the side of the road, and some orange barricades. Gatwick slowed the Harley, drawing near to the roadblock. A copse of pine trees bordered the highway, where a dirt road trailed away into the hills. The cop was an old gummer, his belly over his ammo belt and jowls over his shirt collar. A soft touch, looked like. The biker squeezed the brake. A lone old man wearing a gun, and all the hicks in this valley depending on him for law and order. Gatwick laughed as he brought the Harley to a stop in front of the cop.
"Everything's legal, Officer." The biker called, grinning contemptuously. He revved the engine once for punctuation.
Roy Durant could move faster than he looked. He took three steps and pressed the kill button on the Harley's handlebar. The motorcycle sputtered and died.
Big Ed rose over his seat. "Hey, you got no right—"
Jig Lawrence pulled up next to Gatwick. Then the others came, roaring their engines, a threatening, demanding sound, and they circled the police chief.
Durant held out his hand to Gatwick. "Your license, quick."
Big Ed insolently leaned back on his seat and was about to say something when the air was split with a hammering bellow that drowned out the motorcycles, a gut-thumping percussion that made the bikes and their riders seem puny and irrelevant, drowned in the blare.
Gatwick's head jerked to the sound.
"Sorry," Idaho National Guard Sergeant Ralph Neal yelled, smiling. "Just clearing my barrel."
The sergeant's fists were gripping the handles of an M2 heavy machine gun pintle-mounted on the back of a hummer. His thumb was on the butterfly trigger. The 100-round disintegrating-link shell belt rose from the sergeant's feet to enter the breech, and was still swaying. Slight wisps of gray smoke rose from the barrel as bits and pieces of a pine tree drifted to the ground. The sergeant's driver, Private John Goode, also grinned malevolently, the stock of an M16 resting against his thigh, the barrel poking above the windshield. Arrayed in the trees behind the jeep were a dozen other members of the Guard, all dressed in desert camouflage, all on loan to Pete Coates. They had been assigned to help man the checkpoint. A troop truck was parked farther into the trees.
Big Ed swallowed so hard his Adam's apple bounced against his leather jacket's lapel. He said nothing. It took only a moment for Chief Durant to look at each Deacon's license and stare into each face, matching it with the features of the Russian he had memorized. The Deacons were silent and docile, refusing to meet Durant's gaze.
Then Big Ed Gatwick kicked his Harley into life, leaned it over to turn south, and sped away, back down the road he had just come up. Jig Lawrence and the rest of the Deacons followed, a swift and ignoble retreat.
Chief Durant gave the sergeant a thumbs-up and hollered gleefully, "That's about as much fun as this old man is ever going to have."
This was Elsa MacIntire's fifteenth round-trip from Missoula to Jackpot, and her right arm ached as it always did. In fact, everything ached on her right side: knuckles, wrist, elbow, shoulder, even her hip. She once figured that between the time the bus dropped her group off in Jackpot at five in the afternoon until she reboarded the vehicle at nine the next morning, she pulled a slot machine handle over five thousand times, and that included a slight pause every ten minutes to light a new cigarette. She stood at the machine like a sentry at her post, steady and resolute, unfailing in her duty to drop another quarter into the slot the instant the wheels stopped. Her gaze was usually on the middle distance, the cigarette smoke a veil in front of her face. She rarely bothered to look at the bars, bells, and fruit on the wheels, because the spinning red light on top of the machine would announce a win, and she would be rewarded with the nurturing sound of quarters dumping into the payout cup.