Текст книги "Breaking Point"

Автор книги: C. J. Box

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Текущая страница: 15 (всего у книги 21 страниц)

25

IT WAS PAST MIDNIGHT WHEN JOE REACHED THE summit of the mountain and turned to look back. He could see for miles and even locate the distant thread of highway because of the lights on the few vehicles using it. Twenty-five miles away was the tiny cluster of lights from the headquarters of Big Stream Ranch. The FOB was obscured from view by the ocean of trees below, but he knew approximately where it was by a faint glow of lights powered by generators.

The mountaintop was bare of trees or any kind of vegetation except stubborn lichen holding on to granite for dear life, and it was illuminated by moonlight and millions of pinprick stars. Underwood and his team were behind him, their horses picking their way up through the icy granular crusts of snow and loose dark shale. The wind blew from the west into Joe’s face, and he kept the brim of his hat tilted down so his eyes wouldn’t tear. The wind was surprisingly cold for August and numbed his face and hands.

Joe checked his cell phone for bars because sometimes he could get a wayward signal on the top of a mountain at night, but there was no reception. He was glad he’d made contact with Marybeth before, so she knew he was all right. He hated to have left her alone.

One of Underwood’s team cursed the darkness and the cold, his voice harsh enough to cut through the wind. When the agents were close enough to start to crowd him, Joe nudged Toby on over a wide snowfield that looked like a pond or small lake in the moonlight, and led them over the mountain to the western slope. As he descended, he left the cold wind on top. And as he walked his horse into the thick stand of trees, he left the moonlight as well.

–

DEEP IN THE TREES, Joe could see only what the yellow orb of his headlamp would reveal. Toby could see better than he could in the dark, so he had to trust the horse wouldn’t trap them in down timber or walk over a cliff. When he glanced over his shoulder, he saw the lenses of five bobbing headlamps, and sometimes the wayward beam of one slicing out to the side.

He emerged into a small mountain meadow where the canopy opened to allow moonlight. He reined Toby to a stop and waited.

Underwood joined him a few minutes later, and Joe said, “This is ridiculous. We’re only going to get our horses or ourselves hurt trying to ride down this mountain in the dark.”

“We have our orders,” Underwood said without conviction.

“Fuck the orders,” one of the team grumbled from the dark. “We need to get some rest, and my legs and butt are numb. If we ran into trouble right now, it would take me five minutes just to get out of this goddamned uncomfortable saddle.”

The others agreed, and they slowly dismounted. There were plenty of moans from saddle sores and distended knees and aching buttocks. One agent said loudly this was the worst assignment he’d ever had. Joe thought it interesting that Underwood no longer reprimanded them for their loose talk.

And by painfully climbing off his own horse, Underwood seemed to agree with them. They’d gone far enough for a while.

One of the agents said, “I guess we’re just supposed to sleep in the open. Oh, thank you, Regional Director, for your excellent planning.”

Underwood said, “Try spooning. That’s what they did in the Civil War.”

Joe stifled a grin when Underwood’s suggestion was met with a fusillade of angry curses. He thought for a moment that the expedition might just implode under its own combination of aimlessness and disorganization. That would be just fine with him, he thought. Joe almost felt sorry for Underwood, who was tasked with commanding a mission by a man he didn’t like or respect. He was a professional, though, and his background girded him for unpleasant duties.

“And no fires,” Underwood barked.

Just then, Underwood’s satellite phone burred and lit up.

“Yes, Director Batista,” Underwood said, loud enough to quiet the team of agents.

“Jesus Christ,” one of the agents whispered. “Does the son of a bitch know we stopped?”

–

WHILE UNDERWOOD LISTENED to his boss and said very little except to grunt and agree here and there, Joe showed the agents how to loosen the cinch straps on their saddles, picket their horses far away from one another so that each horse could graze and not get tangled with another. Then he revealed to the agents where heavy rubber rain slickers were rolled up and tied behind the seat of each saddle itself.

“Don’t unfurl the slickers with a lot of noise and force,” he said to them. “You’ll spook the horses. They get scared at flapping things. You can use the slickers for sleeping. They’ll keep you warm enough on top and the moisture in the ground won’t soak into your clothes.”

“We’re the fucking Wild Bunch,” one of them said, pulling on a long dusterlike yellow slicker.

“I think they all died in the end,” another one said sourly.

–

THE AGENTS WERE GRATEFUL if not happy, and Joe left them sprawled in the grass of the meadow. The yellow slickers held the moonlight. Joe thought the sight of four yellow forms writhing around to get comfortable in the grass looked sluglike and slightly comical.

For himself, he led Toby to the far edge of the meadow and unsaddled his gelding and picketed him. There was a one-man bivvy tent in the saddlebags, but Joe didn’t set it up. Instead he spread it out to use as a ground tarp and covered himself with a thin wool blanket he always packed along.

He propped himself up on an elbow on the saddle he’d use as a pillow, and ate two energy bars that had been in his emergency kit for at least two years. They were dry and crumbled into dust in his mouth, and swelled into a paste when he washed them down with water from his Nalgene bottle. He waited in the dark for Underwood to sign off with his boss. Occasionally, he could hear a word or two of Batista’s voice cut through the silence. He heard the words strategic, nonnegotiable, location, and autopsy very clearly.

Finally, Underwood said, “I’ve got some worn-out special agents here, sir. They need rest . . . I understand . . . Yes, I’ll get them up and keep them moving, and I’ll keep the phone on all night.”

As Underwood let the phone drop on its lanyard, he said, “Asshole.”

“Are we moving?” one of the agents asked defiantly.

“No,” Underwood said. “But if he asks us later, we did.”

Joe waited a beat, then said to Underwood, “I put your horse up over here. I’ve got a space blanket I could lend you. Do you want it?”

Underwood said, “Is that one of those silver sheets that’ll make me look like a baked potato?”

“Yup.”

He sighed. “I’ll take it.”

Joe handed Underwood the blanket, along with the Ziploc bag with the remaining two energy bars.

“They aren’t very good,” Joe said.

“Thank you anyway,” Underwood said, tearing into them.

–

AFTER UNDERWOOD SETTLED in his silver-lined blanket in the grass, Joe said, “What’s the plan for tomorrow?”

“So you want to talk,” Underwood said with irritation.

“I’ll keep it low so your guys don’t hear.”

“What about me? I’ll hear.”

Joe asked, “Do they have a location on Butch?”

“Yes. His phone is on, and it has a GPS feature inside the circuitry. They know exactly where he is on the map at least.”

“I knew about that,” Joe said. “Butch is smart enough to know it, too, so it surprises me he kept it on.”

Underwood shrugged. “Maybe he isn’t so smart. Batista has been trying to contact him for hours, but he must have the phone set to mute or he just doesn’t want to talk. The director wants to tell him the helicopter will be arriving at dawn.”

“Which way is he headed?” Joe asked.

“West. It sounds like he doubled back after he talked to us and he’s working his way down the mountain. Batista said his route is pretty erratic, though. They’re guessing at the FOB that Roberson is looking for a nice flat piece of sagebrush for the helicopter to land.”

“But it won’t happen, will it?”

“No. There is no helicopter,” Underwood said.

“What else?”

“Leave me alone.”

“Not a chance. The sooner you answer my questions, the sooner you can get some sleep. Or I’ll take that space blanket back. You do look like a baked potato, you know.”

“Damn you.”

“Has anything happened in the investigation we should know about?”

“Like what?”

“I thought I heard you say something about an autopsy,” Joe said.

“Oh, yeah. There was a preliminary autopsy on our two special agents. Both were shot multiple times with small-caliber rounds. Tim Singewald was hit four times, and Lenox Baker was hit three times. Didn’t you say Butch Roberson was packing a .223 semiautomatic rifle?”

“I think so. It looked like a scoped Bushmaster .223 with a thirty-round magazine. They’re common around here.”

Underwood said, “The rounds that killed the agents were small caliber. Once they run ballistics on them, I’m sure there will be a match.”

“Lots of folks up here have .223s,” Joe said. “They’re a popular coyote-hunting round.”

Underwood snorted. “They also found Roberson’s fingerprints all over the car Singewald and Baker drove up from Denver. I suppose you’ll say lots of people up here have the same fingerprints.”

“No,” Joe said. “I won’t say that.”

“Good. So can I get some sleep now?”

“One more question.”

“Jesus—what?”

“Back to how your agency operates. How much juice would someone have to have to get a noncompliance action going the same day? Are we talking low level, mid-level, or big-shot level?”

Underwood covered his face with his hand and moaned.

“I’m just curious,” Joe said.

“I told you I wasn’t going there.”

“But why not at this point? You seem pretty convinced Butch did it, so why does it matter who turned him in in the first place?”

“I never said anyone turned him in.”

“You implied it. So which level?”

Underwood cursed and said, “Big-shot level, of course. The mid-level types might get some kind of investigation opened, but they wouldn’t be able to make agents jump like that. Obviously, somebody with influence knew who to call to get them to react like that.”

“So Julio Batista was in on it from the beginning, then?”

“I never said that.”

“You implied it.”

“Jesus fuck,” Underwood moaned. “Leave me alone. Yes, I would guess whoever called talked to the director in person. No one else could have made the decision so quickly to send agents directly from Denver. Usually, we’d let the local EPA staff handle it first.”

“That’s what I thought. Which means Batista knows who got this whole thing going, but he doesn’t want to volunteer that information.”

Underwood grunted.

“So if Butch Roberson just goes away, Batista will probably never be asked.”

Underwood grunted again.

Joe thought about it, and said, “So what’s our plan?”

Underwood took a deep breath and slowly expelled it through his nostrils. “We keep moving down the mountain to the west until we pick up his track. You’re a tracker, right?”

“Not really,” Joe said.

“I think even I could follow the prints of three guys.”

“Maybe.”

“Anyway, Batista said they’ve put together a big interagency task force that will be coming up this direction from the west. They’re on their way now in a convoy of four-wheel-drives. The idea is they’ll flush Roberson our way and we’ll trap him in a pincer movement and he’ll have no choice but to turn loose his hostages and we’ll nail the son of a bitch in the morning.”

Joe nodded in the dark. “So you’ll flood the zone with people until you corner Butch.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“What do you think Butch will do when he realizes there is no helicopter? Do you think he’ll keep his end of the bargain?”

“Batista thinks he won’t have any options at that point.”

“Why is that?” Joe asked.

“Because we will have aircraft coming. Roberson won’t know it isn’t a helicopter until it’s too late.”

Joe felt a chill crawl down his neck. “What’s coming?”

Joe could see Underwood’s teeth in the moonlight as he smiled. “This is what I was worried about earlier, but I wasn’t sure he could make it happen. Drones—two of ’em this time. One is assigned to the EPA, and it’s just an observation unit like the last one. Just cameras and shit on board. But the second one is the kicker. Batista threw my name around and got authorization for a military drone to be assigned to us. All the way from an airbase in North Dakota. That one happens to be armed with Hellfire missiles.”

Joe was speechless for a moment. Then he said, “You’re going to blow him up?”

“Into a million pieces,” Underwood said, shaking his head. “Just like one of the many Al Qaeda number twos. That is, if Roberson doesn’t release the hostages and give himself up. So he will have a choice in the matter.”

“Aren’t Hellfire missiles used to blow up tanks on the ground?”

“Yes, and terrorists in their bunkers. But they’ll work pretty damned well on domestic terrorists, I’ll wager.”

Joe said, “If you want to start a war out here, this is the way to do it.”

Underwood shrugged it off. “I’m not worried about that.”

Joe said, “I am.”

“Please,” Underwood pleaded, turning his back to Joe, “leave me alone.”

“Good night, Mr. Underwood,” Joe said, and carefully reached up and clicked off the digital recorder again.

“Game Warden,” Underwood said, a few minutes after Joe assumed he was asleep. “Now I have a question for you.”

“What?”

“If a war started, which side would you be on?”

Joe hesitated. He said, “I’ll have to get back to you on that.”

–

JOE WAS IN HIS SLEEPING BAG, staring back at the hard white stars, when he heard Underwood’s phone buzz again. Batista, no doubt, with more orders, he thought.

Instead, Underwood walked over to Joe with the space blanket over his shoulders and extended the phone.

“It’s your wife,” he said with irritation. “Make it quick.”

–

“ACCORDING TO THE BIO on the agency website, Juan Julio Batista was born in Chicago in 1965,” Marybeth said. “That makes him forty-eight years old—our age. There’s no mention of a wife or children. He worked for an environmental group called One Globe in the Denver field office from 1989 to 2003, when he was hired by the EPA. He was named director of Region Eight by the Washington bigwigs in 2008.

“It says he graduated from Colorado State University in 1987. Majored in sociology and minored in environmental affairs.”

“Anything else?” Joe asked, aware that Underwood was hovering.

“Tons of media mentions,” she said. “He likes to give press conferences, and he’s mentioned dozens of times when his agency takes action against polluters.”

“Hmmmmm.”

“Let’s see,” she said, obviously scrolling through the site. “Region Eight oversees Colorado, Montana, North and South Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming. But we knew that.”

“Has he ever worked for Region Ten?” Joe asked.

“I know what you’re getting at—Idaho. The Sackett case. No, he never worked there. I can’t find any connection.”

Joe asked, “Anything at all to tie him to Pam and Butch?”

“Nothing I can find.”

“What about Pate?”

“I found some mentions, but they just stop in 1988.”

“That fits,” Joe said, and told Marybeth what Underwood had revealed.

“That’s just . . . odd,” Marybeth said. Joe could visualize her mind racing. “I’ll dig deeper tomorrow at the library.”

Marybeth had access to several state and federal databases from the library computers that she wasn’t supposed to have. She’d assisted Joe with investigations several times.

Underwood extended his hand for the phone back.

“Good work,” Joe said.

“Stay safe.”

–

LATER, AS JOE closed his eyes, he heard the faraway sound of two unmanned drones whining through the sky.

26

JIMMY SOLLIS WEPT IN THE MOONLIGHT.

With the daypack strapped on his back and his wrists bound in front of him, Sollis stumbled on a tree root, lost his footing, and did a face-plant into the dank-smelling musky ground. He hit his head hard enough to produce spangles of orange on the inside of his eyelids, and his face was covered with dirt and pine needles.

He clumsily got to his feet again. That damned pack threw his balance off and he nearly sidestepped and stumbled to the ground again, but he got his tired legs beneath him.

And stood there and cursed and cried. He hadn’t cried for years, not for anything.

It was all so damned unfair . . .

–

SINCE THAT SON OF A BITCH Butch Roberson had shot a crease in his cheek and sent him away, Sollis had blindly worked his way down the mountain. Without a map, a GPS, or a good sense of direction, he simply went down. Whenever he was given a choice to continue on a line or veer to the right or left, he chose whichever side descended. Several times, this had led him into tangled ravines he had to tear himself out of—his clothes were rags now—but sometimes it was the right choice. His goal was to get out of the black timber onto the valley floor, where at least he could see and be seen if someone was looking for him.

He’d long ago given up trying to retrace their route up the mountain, as directed by the son of a bitch Butch Roberson. Sollis hadn’t paid much attention to the trail they’d taken on the way up because he’d been concentrating on his footing, and it had been in daylight. Now, everything was jumbled and confusing. He told himself that if he kept walking down he’d eventually hit the bottom. It only made sense.

The trek had been pure torture. He was without any food—although there might be some in the backpack he couldn’t unshoulder or open—and his thirst was quenched only when he bumbled upon a small trickle of stream or creek.

Two hours before, he’d found a tiny ribbon of running creek and had dropped to his knees and plunged his face into it, only to find out in the dark there was less than an inch of water. He’d inhaled sand, twigs, and a floating beetle with the first gulp, and spit it out down his shirtfront. Aching of thirst, he’d pushed his way upstream through thorny brush until he located what looked like a wide and deep natural cistern bordered by rocks. Again, he dropped to his knees in the brush and lowered his head halfway between two white and spindly tree roots and drank deeply. The water was cold and cut its way down his throat and chilled him to the bone. But he kept drinking, ignoring the metallic taste.

When he was sated, he sat back and wiped his mouth dry. He could feel the hydration seep through his guts, and spread out to his extremities. Sollis couldn’t remember how long a human could survive without food and water, but he knew it wasn’t long without water. So he knew he’d staved off an ugly death.

Then he realized he was sitting back on something large and spongy, something that had some give to it. Something that smelled putrid. He turned and looked into the naked eyehole of a dead mule deer. He was sitting on its body, and the two long white roots he’d drunk between were its decomposing legs.

That was the first time he cried.

–

HE’D BEEN TWENTY YEARS OLD when he first heard about the sport of long-distance shooting. Until that time, it seemed he’d spent his life under the shadow of his muscle-bound older brother Trent, who had landed a job as a deputy under Sheriff McLanahan in the Twelve Sleep County Sheriff’s Department. Oh, how their parents loved Trent, who played high school football and basketball and lifted weights (and shot human growth hormone into himself) all through college until he emerged double the size he went in. Sollis, meanwhile, ran with a pack of losers and was frequently in trouble. The joke in the Sollis house—which Sollis never found funny—was that someday Trent would arrest Sollis.

Ha-ha, Sollis thought bitterly, although he admitted to himself it might have happened if Trent hadn’t been killed in the line of duty the year before. He didn’t miss his brother at all.

Jimmy Sollis had been on a crew of roofers who followed hailstorms around the state and into Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota, when he first heard about long-distance shooting from the foreman. They’d been sitting on the peak of a roof eating their lunches in Lovell, Wyoming. The foreman said he still competed around the country, using high-end custom rifles to hit targets hundreds of yards away. Sollis got excited about the idea of it, and the foreman showed Sollis some of his rifles and agreed to take him to an event outside of Rock Springs.

Sollis was enthralled. He’d never been much of an athlete or a scholar, but something about propelling a small cylinder of polished heavy metal through the air to hit a target got him excited inside. It got him hard.

He learned about calculating windage, elevation, altitude, velocity, determining grains of gunpowder, learning how to breathe . . .

At the events he attended with his foreman, Sollis collected business cards from custom gunmakers who had booths set up, and started saving chunks of his paycheck—and supplementing his income by dealing meth to roughnecks on the side. His first long-distance rifle, a Sako TRG-42 chambered for .338, won him $2,500 at the Orem, Utah, Invitational—and he was off. He’d reinvest his winnings into more precision rifles, because a man could never have enough rifles. He sent the rifles away to custom gunsmiths who tweaked the weight of the trigger pull and equipped the weapons with specialized scope rings and high-tech optics. Sollis found he had a natural ability to calculate velocity, drop, and windage. He could hit what he aimed at.

But he wanted more. Sollis had listened to a couple of books on tape written by Marine snipers, and he desperately wanted to use his newfound skill on Iraqis, Iranians, or Afghanis. He had no strong feelings about which. So he signed up for the U.S. Marines, telling the recruiter in the White Mountain Mall in Rock Springs they were getting a blue-chip player, that they didn’t realize the LeBron of snipers was standing right in front of them, actually volunteering to join their playground pickup team.

The Marines rejected him because of his rap sheet of drug-related arrests, and because of that sexual assault charge with the underage cheerleader back in high school. Furious, he tried the Army, then the Navy. But the word was out among the recruiters and he was black-balled. The foreman told Sollis about private defense contractors who might be able to use his skill, and Sollis was interested. Anything was better than roofing for a living.

So when ex-Sheriff McLanahan drove up that morning before dawn as Sollis crossed from his rental house to his pickup to go to work and offered him a chance to go with him, Jimmy Sollis jumped at it. The opportunity to use his skills for the good of humanity and on the right side of the law? He was all over that.

He had no idea that it would result in a gut-shot hunter from Maine, or a desperate hike down a mountain in the middle of the night. And all because McLanahan hadn’t warned him off before he pulled the trigger on the wrong man.

It burned Sollis how McLanahan had acted once that son of a bitch Roberson had shown up. Suddenly, it was all Sollis, as if McLanahan hadn’t recruited him and given him the signal to fire.

It just wasn’t right.

–

TO MAKE matters worse, that phone Roberson had hidden in his daypack kept ringing and he couldn’t even answer it. He thought:

He’d had his nine-thousand-dollar rifle taken away from him;

He was lost;

If he somehow made his way back to Saddlestring, he’d likely be arrested for gut-shooting a hunter from Maine;

His belly was filled with rotten dead deer seepage;

Mosquitoes were feeding on the back of his neck where he couldn’t reach;

His cheek ached from the bullet that had creased it;

And . . .

Nobody loved him.

And now he couldn’t even answer the goddamned phone.

–

JIMMY SOLLIS PAUSED near the middle of a small clearing in the trees. He realized the hairs on the back of his neck and his forearms had pricked up because he’d seen, heard, or sensed something that was off. He stood still until his breathing returned to normal from the exertion of the trek through a long jumble of down trees and branches.

When he could hear again over the rhythmic pounding of his own heart, he slowly turned his head to the right, then the left. He wondered what it was that had made him stop, made the hairs prick up. Sollis had a creepy thought that someone might be watching him.

The terrain had leveled somewhat after an hour of clawing his way over and through the timber on a steep slope. The moon, straight overhead, lit up the grassy meadow in a shade of light blue. The wall of trees on all four sides of the clearing was dark and impenetrable by the light, though, which made him think that whatever or whoever was watching him hung back in the shadows.

“Who’s there?” he croaked. “Come on out, or I’ll come in after you.”

He regretted how the end of his sentence had risen in pitch and revealed his fear.

He listened for a response. Nothing.

Then a small puffball of a cumulus cloud drifted across the face of the moon and plunged the meadow into gloom. Sollis waited for the cloud to pass so he could see again.

He tried to recall what it had been that spooked him, something out of the corner of his eye, something he glimpsed or thought he’d glimpsed: a huge human face. It made no sense.

But because the moonlight was muted, his eyes adjusted, and the face, measuring two feet wide by three feet tall, emerged from the utter darkness just inside the trees to his right. Sollis gasped and squared off against it, his bound hands out in front of him to ward off the Attack of the Face.

He saw eyes the size of charcoal briquettes, a wide nose, a thick mustache, and a sardonic grin. He realized he was looking at the side of an ancient cabin or line shack, and some bad artist years before had painted the face on the siding.

“Jesus Christ.” Sollis sighed, dropping his hands and letting his shoulders relax. It was just an old shack.

He went to it, and saw what a crude and stupid face it was. He wondered if the mountain man or cowboy who had painted it had been doing a self-portrait or if it’d been the face of someone he knew. Not that it mattered now.

Sollis moved around to the front of the structure and saw the open misshapen door, and two broken-out windows that seemed to squint up and to the right because the building was leaning that way and about to fall over. There was no roof on the shack because it had buckled and fallen inside, which left no room in there to stretch out and sleep and no reason to go in.

He walked to the other side of the shack and found the rusted frame of what looked like a Model-T Ford pickup in a small grove of aspen trees. The rubber was gone from the tires and the fabric on the seats had long before been eaten away. Three eight-foot trees sprouted up from beneath the car frame, one from where the motor should have been.

Sollis cursed again. There wasn’t anything in the shack or around it that could help him. The crappy old cabin looked to have been built in the 1920s or 1930s—long before there was any electrical or telephone service available. Back before the Forest Service had closed all the roads to the public. Whoever had driven up there, built a shelter, painted the face, and left his pickup, was long gone.

Then he stared at the rusted frame of the Model-T, and he got an idea.

–

THE FRONT BUMPER was thin and insubstantial by modern standards, he thought, but the top edge was fairly sharp. Sollis was on his knees in the grass, working his arms and the plastic bindings back and forth along the edge, sawing at the zip ties. It made a low moaning sound.

It took him nearly an hour to feel some give, and another ten minutes to saw completely through. The shards of the ties fell to the ground.

Sollis cried “Yes!” and stood up and rubbed at his sore wrists. His mind had wandered a couple of times as he sawed away mindlessly and the sharp rim of the bumper had scratched his skin, but the bleeding wasn’t bad.

Feeling unbelievably free, he loped from the old car frame into the open meadow and slung the daypack to the ground. He felt so much lighter without it, and he opened the top flap and rooted through it to see what the contents were. Clothing, mainly, which he had no use for. But he found a filled plastic bottle of water, and he opened it and drank. It nearly washed the taste of the deer water out of his mouth.

He found no food except a can of Van Camp’s Pork and Beans. He started to root through the pack for a knife or can opener when the phone started ringing once again. He’d nearly forgotten about it, and Sollis found it in a side pocket of the pack.

The display showed a number with a 307 area code with no name attached to it. The face of the phone was confusing at first, but he saw the icon of a standard telephone handset and punched the button and held it up to his ear.

“Who is this,” Sollis said, “and why do you keep calling?”

There was a beat of silence, as if the caller was surprised there was someone on the other end.

A high voice with a slight Hispanic accent said, “Butch, this is Juan Julio Batista.”

“Who?” Sollis asked.

“Who is this?”

“Who do you think it is?” Sollis said cautiously.

“Butch Roberson.”

“Yeah, right,” Sollis said sarcastically.

“Let’s not play these games.”

“Fine, I’ll hang up.”

“No,” Batista said urgently. “Please stay on the line.”

“Technically, it isn’t a line,” Sollis said.

He could hear muffled voices from the other end, as if the caller had placed his hand over the microphone. Sollis found it annoying, and was prepared to turn off the phone and call one of his roofer buddies to come get him, when Batista came back on.

Batista said, “Can you hear the helicopter coming? It should just about be right above you.”

Sollis was confused. Then he recalled Butch Roberson’s demands, and smiled a second time. Maybe, he thought, he could get the pilot to take him away. Off the mountain, away from everything, maybe far enough the cops couldn’t find him right away.

He heard the sound in the night sky. It increased quickly in volume. Sollis had never been close to a helicopter in his life, but in the movies a helicopter made a whumping sound when it flew. This sounded more like a flying lawn mower.

“Stay right where you are so the pilot can see you,” Batista said. “Is there enough clear space where you are for it to land?”

“I’m not sure,” Sollis said, looking around at the small meadow.