Текст книги "Breaking Point"

Автор книги: C. J. Box

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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 21 страниц)

17

APPROACHING THE ELK CAMP ON HORSEBACK ON THE floor of the canyon, Farkus felt sick to his stomach. He’d made this kind of trek before, when a hunter in his party claimed he’d knocked down a deer or elk and they set out to find it, but the only time he’d been in a similar situation was three years before in the Sierra Madre, when he’d been recruited on a similar mission to find those two murderous brothers—and that hadn’t gone well at all. Jimmy Sollis’s constant chatter—he had certainly woken up—added to his unease.

“Look at this,” Sollis said, sweeping his hand to indicate the huge expanse around them. “Look how fucking far this was for a perfect shot. Jesus, one shot at eighteen hundred yards. It’s taking us nearly a half-hour to even get there. Man, what a rush. What a fucking rush.”

They rode abreast now, walking their mounts, like outlaws in a western movie, Farkus thought. The floor of the canyon was thick with a green carpet of grass and wildflowers—columbines and Indian paintbrush, mostly. The shallow creek flowed through it. The bed of the stream was orange pea gravel, and the water was cold, shallow, and clear. He could see shadowed darts of small brook trout shoot out from beneath the grassy banks and fin madly upstream, and he wished it meant something to him. Given the circumstances, though, it didn’t.

The elk camp was ahead of them, slightly elevated from the valley floor, but he could see nothing in it except a wisp of smoke from the untended campfire.

“I don’t see a body yet,” Farkus said, finally.

“That’s because he’s down, man,” Sollis said, lapsing into druggie cadence as well as acting like he was under the influence of something stronger than adrenaline, Farkus thought. “You don’t see him cause he’s down.”

“I think I liked it better when you wouldn’t talk,” Farkus grumbled.

Instead of feeling rebuked, Sollis threw back his head and laughed.

After a beat, McLanahan asked Sollis, “Where do you think you hit him?”

Farkus was grateful that at least the ex-sheriff appeared to understand the gravity of what they’d done.

Sollis said, “It was probably a heart or lung shot—that’s what I was going for. I’m thinking heart, because the poor son of a bitch dropped like a sack of cement. He might have stood and wavered a few seconds if I blew his lungs out.”

Farkus looked away.

“Any chance he’s pretending to be hit so he can draw us in?” McLanahan asked. “The guy is more wily than I thought, and he can shoot. You saw the way he took down that drone.”

“Not a chance, man,” Sollis said. “At that distance the round got there long before he could have heard the shot. He’d have to be some kind of wizard to guess I was about to pull the trigger a mile away, and from what I understand he wasn’t no wizard.”

McLanahan nodded, apparently satisfied.

“Look back.” Sollis laughed, turning in his saddle and pointing at the canyon ridge wall in the distance. “Look how damned far away it was. Jesus, what a rush . . .”

–

THEY WERE CLOSE ENOUGH that Farkus could smell the smoke. It was sharp and acrid, probably fueled by green twigs. A breath of wind shifted and took the smoke away. But there was also another smell tucked inside the smoke.

“Be alert,” McLanahan said, as he reached down and peeled back the security strap of the Bushmaster in its scabbard. He drew the rifle out and seated a round. Farkus observed and did the same and laid his rifle across the pommel of his horse.

“No reason to get excited,” Sollis said, and beamed, shaking his head at their precaution. “He ain’t going nowhere.”

Because the camp was situated on a rise from the valley floor, Farkus couldn’t see into it yet. But he recognized the size of the rocks circling the fire pit, and the stumps that had been chainsawed smooth and even to sit on. He got a flash of a memory: dusk, the last of the sun filtering through the trees on the western horizon, the fire blazing high, Butch Roberson leaning over and pouring a healthy splash of Wild Turkey into Farkus’s metal cup. He’d been talking about his daughter, how he didn’t feel like he was truly a man until that day in the hospital when she was delivered and he looked into her face . . .

–

“THERE HE IS,” McLanahan said.

The body was there just like Sollis had promised, and Farkus saw it as they rode up the rise. The body was on its side, facing away from them, partially curled around the fire itself. A clump of baggy green camo with legs extended, scarred hunting boots side by side in the grass.

Bursting through the fabric under Butch’s rib cage was a wet ball of red-and-gray intestine the size of a softball. So that was the smell he’d detected earlier, Farkus realized. The earthy, musky odor of a downed game animal being field-dressed.

“Gut shot,” the ex-sheriff declared.

Farkus waited for Sollis to say something defensive, but there was no sound. Maybe, Farkus thought, it had finally dawned on Sollis that his target had been a living, breathing human being.

McLanahan was still trailing the packhorse, and he stopped both of his animals a few feet from the body and fire ring and leaned down, studying the body. Farkus hadn’t ridden around to see the face yet, although he nearly jumped out of his skin when he thought he glimpsed movement from the body’s extended right hand. After a double take, he saw the hand was still.

Then McLanahan said, “Son of a bitch. We got the wrong guy.”

–

PANICKED, FARKUS swung down from the saddle and left Dreadnaught to wander off to graze. He didn’t care. He still had the rifle in his hand as he lunged forward and grasped the body’s right shoulder and pulled it to him. The body flopped to its back, and the red-haired man moaned.

“Jesus—he’s still alive!” Farkus said, dropping the gun and jumping back. The man’s face was square, his head blocky, and there was a five-day growth of beard. Farkus had never seen the man before, but it certainly wasn’t Butch Roberson. The man’s eyes were wide open but didn’t move around, and there was a pink string of blood and saliva connecting the top and bottom lip of his partially open mouth.

“It isn’t him, is it?” McLanahan asked Farkus, his tone neutral.

“No.”

“Shit. I wonder who it is Jimmy shot?”

Farkus looked up. Sollis looked thunderstruck, but McLanahan seemed to be taking it in stride, which astonished Farkus.

He watched as McLanahan sat back and slowly surveyed the camp. The ex-sheriff said, “I see his backpack over there against a tree. Farkus, why don’t you see if you can find some kind of ID?”

“Me?”

“You. But first you better tie up your horse before it runs away on you.”

Stunned by the turn of events, Farkus sleepwalked Dreadnaught over to a thick lodgepole pine and tied the lead rope over a branch. He glanced up at McLanahan and Sollis as he made his way over to the backpack because he didn’t want to see the face of the gravely wounded man again. Sollis sat in the saddle staring out at nothing, slack-mouthed and frozen. McLanahan was squinting and looking into the middle distance, as if gears were working in his head.

Next to the backpack, propped on the side of the tree that had been out of their view, was a complicated compound bow with wheels and pulleys and a mounted set of razor-sharp broad-head arrows.

He called to McLanahan, “He’s an elk hunter. It must be archery season on this side of the mountain.”

“Gee, you think?” McLanahan said sarcastically.

“I don’t see any ID,” Farkus said, rooting through the pack. It smelled of stale campfire smoke and sweat, and the pack’s contents were typical: camo clothing, rain gear, a sleeping bag and pad, a one-man bivvy tent, freeze-dried food packets, maps . . .

“I’ll see if he’s got a wallet on him.” McLanahan grunted as he dismounted. To Sollis, he said, “Get down off that horse and give me a hand here, Jimmy.”

Sollis simply shook his head, as if by refusing the request he was also denying the reality of the situation.

While rolling the hunter back over to his belly so he could dig through his pockets, McLanahan said, “The dumb knucklehead. He should’a known to stay out of the mountains during a manhunt or use a known murderer’s camp, and especially not to wear the same damn clothes as the murderer.”

Farkus quit searching and wandered toward McLanahan and the hunter. Something wasn’t right, he thought, but his head was too fuzzy with the situation they were in to put it together.

McLanahan stood up holding a billfold from the hunter’s cargo pants. The wallet was inside a Ziploc bag. The ex-sheriff tore through the plastic and opened the wallet, studying the ID sheathed in thick plastic. Farkus could see McLanahan’s shoulders suddenly relax.

“Out-of-stater from Maine named Pete Douvarjo,” McLanahan said with obvious relief. “I was worried he was a local.”

“Still . . .” Farkus said, not understanding.

“Pretty likely his people have no clue exactly where he is right now. Did you find a cell phone or a satellite phone in his pack, Farkus?”

“I didn’t see one, but I didn’t look that close,” Farkus said.

“We’ll need to look.”

Douvarjo made a low moaning sound, and both Farkus and McLanahan turned toward him. Douvarjo hadn’t moved, and his eyes still stared at the sky.

“What are we going to do?” Farkus asked. “Do we call somebody? Can they send a helicopter here to airlift him out?”

“He isn’t long for the world,” McLanahan said, matter-of-fact.

Farkus covered his face with both hands, then splayed his fingers and looked out at McLanahan. “You aren’t saying we leave him here, are you?”

McLanahan looked up sharply. “What can we do, Farkus? The bullet passed through all of his vital organs and made a big-ass exit wound on the other side. He’s shutting down. It’s just a matter of minutes.”

“So we just stand here and wait?”

“For now.”

“Then what?” Farkus said through his fingers.

“I haven’t decided yet.”

“Sheriff,” Farkus said, “we just shot an innocent man.”

“I’d call it an understandable accident, Farkus. And that’s exactly what it was. This poor guy was in the wrong place at the wrong time, doing the wrong thing.

“One thing I’ve learned,” McLanahan said, “is how important it is to control the story—they call it the narrative. I let it get away from me a year ago, and now we’ve got Wheelchair Dick puttering around with my job. I’m not going to let it happen again.”

He gestured toward Douvarjo. “Nobody will remember this if we bring in Butch Roberson. The story will be how the ex-sheriff who really knows and understands this county went up into the mountains on his own and brought down the bad guy while the Feds and the new sheriff sat on their asses. We’re on a manhunt for a killer wearing camo clothes and we happen on a man bearing that description in the act of shooting down a federal drone. What else were we to think?”

Farkus started to argue when it hit him what was wrong. It must have occurred to the sheriff at exactly the same time, because McLanahan’s face went taut and he asked, “Farkus, did you see a rifle?”

From above them in the dark timber, a voice said, “I need all of you to throw down your weapons and turn around. You on the horse—climb off now.”

Farkus recognized the voice.

It was Butch Roberson.

18

“THIS IS WHERE I SAW HIM,” JOE SAID AS THE SIX horsemen entered the alcove. They’d ridden through the severed fence and into the burnished red forest of dead and dying trees. “Over there is where he paused to eat, and that’s the tree he leaned his pack against. Right next to it was his rifle.”

Underwood reined his horse to a stop, and his team followed suit. Underwood leaned forward in his saddle and took the pressure off his back by grasping the saddle horn. He looked around and said, “So he was coming off the mountain when you saw him?”

“No,” Joe said, dismounting and walking Toby around the perimeter of the camp. “Butch didn’t come down from the mountains. He was going up into them, from the east.”

“He walked across the Big Stream Ranch to get here, is what you’re saying?”

“That’s right,” Joe said. “He cut the fence back there and continued on.”

“Why’d he cut the fence?”

“Your guess is as good as mine,” Joe said, “but I think he was just frustrated. I think he was striking out at anything that reminded him of you guys.”

Underwood snorted and shook his head. Then: “Didn’t anyone on the ranch think it was unusual for a guy on foot to be just walking across their property? Doesn’t that Frank Zeller goof have cowboys or farmhands watching the place?”

“It’s a very big ranch,” Joe said. “Butch Roberson could have easily stayed concealed as he came across. There are some deep irrigation ditches on the meadows down there and plenty of hills to hide behind. Or he might have crossed it before daylight—I don’t know.”

“Or maybe he had some help?” Underwood asked, raising his eyebrows.

“I wouldn’t know,” Joe said, looking up at Underwood.

Underwood asked, “So if he was coming up from the ranch when you saw him, how did he get here in the first place?”

“I’d like to know that myself,” Joe said. “His truck isn’t parked anywhere down there, but he indicated he’d walked all the way.”

“So someone dropped him off,” Underwood said.

“Yup.”

“Which means someone else is involved in this whole thing. Do you have any theory on who that might be?”

Joe shrugged. It had been a question hounding him in the back of his mind since the day before. Was it one of Butch’s friends or employees? A stranger he’d commandeered on the road? Or maybe someone closer?

“I’d like to know who it was,” Underwood said.

“Me, too.”

“So maybe he had some help getting out here and some more help getting across the ranch.”

Joe asked, “How big is this conspiracy going to get before we’re through?”

“I don’t trust these people,” he said, squinting.

“And they don’t trust you,” Joe said.

–

“SO GIVE ME your best guess,” Underwood said, his eyes probing Joe’s face. “Where do you think he went after you let him get away?”

“I told you,” Joe said with heat, “I didn’t let him . . .”

“I know, I know. You didn’t know he was a murderer at the time,” Underwood said sarcastically. “But putting that aside, where do you think he went?”

Joe looked around, twisting at his waist. He studied the dry forest floor and the slope of the terrain.

He said, “Because he came from the highway down there to the east, I think his intention was to continue west toward the peaks of the mountains. There’s a lot of wild country up there, and plenty of places to hide out. He knows the mountains from hunting here. What I don’t know is whether he planned to go over the top and drop into the canyons on the west side, or hole up here on the eastern slope.”

“Why would he go over the top?” Underwood asked.

“To get farther away from you guys,” Joe said. “He knows the country over there like he does here. I know that because there are two elk areas that run adjacent to each other, Area Thirty-five is this side of the mountain and Area Forty-five is the other side, and both are general elk permit areas, so special permits wouldn’t be necessary. Area Thirty-five opens a week before, so I’d guess Butch hunts this side first, then moves west a week later if he wants to. It just makes sense that he’d be more comfortable hunting east to west. The terrain is easier on this side, more slope and forest broken up by natural meadows and parks. There’s more open feed on this side.”

Underwood said, “It’s like you’re speaking Greek to me.”

Joe sighed and said, “Once you go over the top, the country gets tougher. There are a few brutal canyons, including Savage Run. What tends to happen is the elk herds on this side get early pressure from hunters and move over the top to get away from them and hide out in the rough country. My guess is Butch is doing the same thing.”

“That’s all very interesting,” Underwood said. “But as you said, you’re guessing.”

“Yup.”

Underwood sat back and sighed, then raised the satellite phone that hung from his neck on a lanyard. “I’ve got to check in with FOB One,” he said, a hint of weariness in his voice.

“FOB One?” Joe asked, knowing the answer.

“Regional Director Batista,” Underwood said. “We need to know whether to proceed or go back. He’s calling all the shots.”

Joe noted the team of special agents behind Underwood exchanged cynical glances with one another that were not meant for his eyes. But he found it interesting.

–

WHILE UNDERWOOD TALKED with Batista—listening much more than talking, Joe observed—Joe walked down the slope until the timber thinned and opened up and he could see the expanse of the Big Stream Ranch below. The FOB, at that distance, was a small dot on a sea of sagebrush and grass.

He’d found over the years that he thought best when he was in the open, without being closed in by a tree canopy, or a ceiling, or the roof of a pickup. Somehow, his mind needed the open space of a vista to focus.

Things had been moving at lightning speed since the afternoon before, when he’d encountered Butch. Hell had broken open, and hundreds of bureaucrats were gushing out. If there was a strategic plan behind the investigation, he didn’t know what it was. All he could see was a blizzard of actions and movement based on a predetermined conclusion. And now the governor was involved.

Usually, when confused by circumstances, Joe talked with Marybeth or Nate Romanowski. Rarely was their advice similar, but it helped frame the issue for him to decide. But with Marybeth understandably preoccupied and Nate who knows where, he felt unmoored and drifting out to sea.

For the second time that day, he felt empathy toward Butch Roberson, and could understand why the man had snapped.

–

“OKAY,” UNDERWOOD SAID to Joe and his team, “gather up. We have the word.” He said “the word” with slightly disguised contempt.

One of the agents snickered, then looked away when he noticed Joe was looking at him.

Underwood said, “We’re to engage hot pursuit of Butch Roberson. Joe Pickett will stay with us and help navigate. The director says that every hour that goes by is an hour wasted, so we should plan on being out all night at the very least.”

One of the agents moaned but cut it off quickly after a hard glance from Underwood.

Underwood continued: “I have the coordinates of where, approximately, the drone went down. Before contact was lost, there is some video of a man—probably our subject—in a clearing of some kind. Our job is to move swiftly toward that spot and intercept him.

“On the way there, I need everyone to keep on full alert. Keep your eyes and ears open. Look for tracks, or disturbances, broken twigs, anything. This guy is dangerous, and he’s desperate. But he knows the backcountry and we don’t, so we can’t assume he’ll roll over or give himself up easily.”

Underwood ordered the agents to prepare their weapons, and to mute cell phones and satellite phones. They would communicate with one another, he said, by radio. No one was to talk to anyone at the FOB without going through him first, so that lines of communication were clear.

As the agents unpacked headsets and earpieces to plug in to their radios, the man who had snickered earlier said to Underwood, “Sir, we aren’t exactly wilderness types. All these horses . . . I don’t know. Looking for tracks? I don’t have any training in that.”

He looked around at the other agents and two nodded in agreement. Underwood turned and pointed to Joe.

“What about you?”

“I’ve done it,” Joe said, “but I’m not an expert in the field of man-tracking. I think Butch is smart enough to stay low-impact when he moves.”

“You’re the best we’ve got,” Underwood said.

Another of the agents spoke up and said, “I don’t think we’re prepared for this kind of thing.”

Joe nodded in agreement, although he knew Underwood wouldn’t grant him a vote in the matter.

“I understand,” Underwood said to the agent. “But you heard me. I’m relaying our orders.”

“Where do we sleep?” another agent asked. “Do we have tents and sleeping bags and such?”

“No.”

“What about food?” another asked.

“There’s bottled water and a couple of boxes of energy bars on the packhorse,” Underwood said.

“This is crazy,” one of the agents said, and the others agreed.

Joe was surprised when Underwood looked to him. “What do you think—will we find him by nightfall?”

“That depends,” Joe said, uneasy at the turn of events. “What are the coordinates?”

Underwood handed down a scratchpad with figures and a topo map of the Twelve Sleep National Forest. Joe sat down on the same stump he’d seen Butch Roberson sitting on and spread the map over his thighs.

When he calculated the location, he looked up. “It’s over the top of the mountains.”

Underwood said, “Seriously? How long would that take?”

“Most of the night,” Joe said.

“Let me call FOB One,” Underwood said, raising the satellite phone.

“It might make more sense to drive around to the other side,” Joe said.

Underwood conveyed the situation and relayed Joe’s suggestion. Joe could tell by the way Underwood’s face froze that it wasn’t received well. The agents looked on with stony silence.

“We proceed as ordered,” Underwood said after he signed off, and tried to get his horse to walk away from the glares. But the horse didn’t move.

“Click your tongue,” Joe whispered to Underwood.

Underwood clicked his tongue and his mount stepped forward. He mouthed “Thanks” as he walked the horse by Joe.

–

JOE LED, followed by Underwood and his four special agents, and they climbed slowly up the mountain. The slope wasn’t steep yet, but the constant climb tired the mounts, and he stopped every twenty minutes to allow Toby to rest. They rode in shadow broken by shafts of afternoon sunlight that penetrated through the canopy. The ground was barren of foliage in large stretches, and was covered by a carpet of dry pine needles and bits of bark fallen from dead pine-beetle-killed trees.

The trees were dead, the forest floor was dry, and the slight breeze from the south was warm. As the horses stepped they made a crunching sound, and the combined cacophony of twenty-four hooves at times sounded like applause rolling slowly up the mountain. Joe wondered how they would ever attempt to be stealthy in the parchment-dry forest. A dropped match or cigarette butt, he thought, could make the whole mountain go up in flame. He was grateful none of the special agents lit up.

–

WHEN HE SAW an aberration on the floor of the forest—a disturbance in the carpet, a flap of mulch turned over—he pointed it out to Underwood. Joe felt more than saw he was on Butch Roberson’s route.

The trunks of the trees were so dense in places that Joe had to weave Toby through them. Sometimes, he loosened the reins and trusted his horse to weave his own way through. The agents followed as best they could, but their trail horses balked at times and had to be urged to continue. It was a dangerous situation and could turn into a wreck if one of the horses panicked in the sea of trees, and he held his breath at times until the small string made it through the tightest spots. Trail horses liked trails, Joe knew. They weren’t thrilled with exploration, or tight fits, or climbing mountains, unlike Toby.

Although Joe could at times only intuit the route Butch had taken, there were places where, due to obstructions or granite walls, there was no choice where he’d had to go if his goal was to traverse the range.

His intuition was confirmed when they crossed a tiny stream of springwater from somewhere above them and he saw, quite clearly, a boot track in the mud. Joe photographed it with his digital camera to compare it with any other clear tracks they found later.

–

AS JOE RODE, he heard bits and pieces of conversation from the agents behind him. Underwood held his tongue.

The grumbling was typical of men being charged with a pointless and ill-conceived task, he thought. They didn’t like being so far from the FOB without proper food and shelter, they didn’t like riding horses, and they didn’t like Regional Director Julio Batista.

Joe thought he might be able to establish some common ground after all.

–

TWO AND A HALF HOURS after they’d left the dry camp, as the intense afternoon sun fused the forest with burnished orange, Underwood’s satellite phone burred with vibration on his chest.

Joe looked over his shoulder as he walked Toby and watched Underwood adjust the volume of the set as he listened. Something dark passed over Underwood’s face at whatever he was hearing, and after a minute or two Underwood looked up and gestured with his free hand for Joe to stop.

Were they being given the word to go back? Joe wondered. He halted Toby and sidestepped so Underwood could catch up alongside him.

As Underwood approached, he lowered the phone from his ear and covered the mic with his other hand. He said, “It’s for you.”

“Who is it?”

“Regional Director Batista.”

“What does he want?”

Underwood took a breath and extended the handset. “Our suspect somehow got ahold of a satellite phone of his own and he called the FOB. He’s on the line now and they’re patching it together into a conference call.”

“You’re kidding?”

“I’m not. He says he has a couple of hostages, including the ex-sheriff of this county. He’ll let them go, but only if we agree to a list of demands. And he says the only guy he can trust to be involved in the negotiation is Joe Pickett.”