by C. J. Box
Her adviser had said, “So you want revenge? I’m one of the few people who actually knows where he hangs his hat.”
Then her adviser told her he had access to a rocket launcher through some friends in the arms business. Said it could be shipped to her overnight. Her adviser was incredibly helpful, eager even. She never asked about agendas, because she didn’t need to know. All she cared about was that they had a common interest and a common purpose.
So now it was payback time. It was time to be cleansed.
Although Johnny and Drennen talked excitedly about what they’d do the next day all the way into the mountains to their camp—especially the prospect of holding and firing the rocket launcher she claimed she had for the job—they weren’t nearly as enthusiastic that morning when she returned to pick them up.
She wound through the pine trees through the established sites and took a side road that was clearly marked by the U.S. Forest Service as prohibited to vehicles. It was another full mile through dense lodgepole pines that scratched the paint on her rental before she found the two of them. The camp was a shambles. They each had a stained, thin dome tent and there were empty bottles strewn about, as well as chunks of foil and old bones in the fire pit. Clothes hung from lengths of parachute cord strung between trees.
As Laurie wheeled into the opening, she saw Drennen emerge from the trees zipping up his Wranglers. His face was gray and drawn, his eyes red. She killed the engine and got out. Drennen nodded hello to her and called out to Johnny, who backed out of his tent and stood up. He looked just as bad. She could tell by the way they exchanged looks they had come to some kind of agreement, and she waited to find out who would speak first.
“Me and Johnny,” Drennen said, shoving both his dirty hands into his front trouser pockets and staring at a place in the pine needles between his boots. “We had a little talk this morning. We’re not so sure this is a good idea.”
She leaned back against the grille of her pickup and felt the warmth through the back of her jacket. The mid-morning sun was just then shooting yellow shafts through the trees to the forest floor. The trampled-down grass sparkled with the last of the morning dew. The thin air had a snap to it. “What don’t you like today that you liked last night?” she asked calmly.
Silence. Both now looked at the ground. She wanted to slap them both and tell them to act like men, for God’s sake. But she waited.
Finally, Johnny mumbled, “Tell her, Drennen.”
Drennen cleared his throat. His voice was raw and thick from his hangover. “Me and Johnny don’t think ten thousand is enough to risk our lives for.”
She held in a grin. They were so . . . simple. She said, “Where do you get the idea you’re risking your life?”
“Well, Patsy,” Drennen said. “We were pretty drunk last night and it all sounded good. Especially that part about the rocket launcher. That sounds pretty damned cool. But we don’t even know this guy. We don’t know what he did.”
“He killed my husband,” she said. “What more do you need to know?”
Johnny kicked at some pine needles. “So he’s a bad guy?”
“Yes.”
“Then why didn’t the cops arrest him and throw him in jail?”
“Because they’re incompetent,” she said crisply.
Drennen said, “I hear that.”
“Look,” she said, “he’s a wanted man. That’s why he’s hiding out. There is no chance at all he’ll call the cops, because if he did, they’d arrest him. This is as safe as anything could be. Law enforcement won’t be weeping any crocodile tears if they find out something happened to Nate Romanowski, from what I understand. Hell, if any of us are ever caught, they might want to give us a medal.”
Drennen snorted a laugh, but stanched it after Johnny glared at him.
“I’m not going to beg,” she said. “You can either do this or not. You can try to make a living playing pool, or you can run back home and live with your parents for all I care. I’ll find someone else to help me.”
They stared at her dumbly.
“What about that Mexican?” she said. “You didn’t seem to have a problem with this last night.”
It took them a moment to recall the lie. Drennen said, “That was personal.”
She turned and tap-tap-tapped her fingers along the hood of the pickup as she walked around it. As she reached for the door handle, Drennen said, “We were thinking maybe twenty. Ten each. This is a big deal you’re asking, Patsy. If it don’t go right . . .”
She turned and smiled. “It has to go right. And if you follow my instructions and do everything to the letter, it will. You can be back here by this afternoon. I’ll go fifteen. No more.”
She waited.
“We got to discuss this,” Drennen said. “Give us a minute.”
While they turned their backs to her and talked, she looked at the packing crate in the bed of the pickup. It was four feet long and a foot high. Someone had stenciled the name and address of a Crate and Barrel store on the outside so no one would be suspicious. She remembered what her associate had told her about how the rocket launcher worked. It was accurate within a thousand feet, but it would be best to get much closer than that.
Next to the crate was a case of Coors she’d bought the night before and left in the back to keep cold. She called out to Johnny and Drennen, “You boys want some hair of the dog? It might help you make up your minds.”
Drennen said, “That sounds mighty good.”
While they ambled over, she lifted the lid off the crate. The weapon was short, fat, and looked lethal just lying there in the packing peanuts.
Johnny reached for a beer, but stopped when he saw it. He whistled in admiration. Drennen saw what he was looking at and whispered, “Fuckin’ A. You weren’t kidding, were you, Patsy?”
And she knew she had them.
9
Laurie Talich slowed and pulled off the two-track into knee-high sagebrush and turned off the GPS unit that had guided her there. It was nearly noon and heat waves shimmered across the plains. In the distance, the Bighorn Mountains framed the horizon.
“It’s an interesting view in that you can’t even tell from here there’s a canyon between here and those mountains,” she said to Johnny and Drennen. “But there is. From what I understand, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid used to hide in the caves down there.”
“I heard of them,” Drennen said.
“I saw the movie,” Johnny added.
Before they got to the canyon rim, she stopped the pickup to show them how to fire the rocket launcher. Her adviser had carefully gone through the procedure and made her repeat it back. She was not well versed in firearms of this size, but was shocked how simple it all sounded. So simple, she thought, even Johnny and Drennen couldn’t foul it up.
She climbed into the bed of the pickup and opened the lid of the crate. The boys watched her carefully, looking mainly at her butt, until she unveiled the weapon. Then they switched their interest to that. There was no disguising their visceral fascination with the rocket launcher.
She held it up and brushed clinging packing peanuts from the AT4. She was shocked how light it was. She’d anticipated something much heavier.
She showed them where to remove the safety pin so the sights would pop up automatically. She handed it over to them so they could hoist it on their shoulders and aim through the sights. They were like boys with their first air rifle, and they took to it instantly. Drennen stepped back and aimed it at Johnny and said, “Ka-pow. Die, rag-head, die.”
Johnny wrenched it away while she looked on in horror, but it didn’t go off. Johnny said, “Knock that off, you dimwit,” to Drennen. “And don’t call me no rag-head.” Drennen grinned and shrugged.
She showed them the two remaining safety steps, the repositioning of the cocking lever, then where a thumb could press the red firing button. Her adviser had told her she needed to press on the second safety while aiming. Then when she had the shot, hit the bu
tton. She repeated the procedure to them, and watched—again in horror—as Johnny armed the weapon and squinted down the sights toward a tree in the distance. Then he carefully uncocked it and waited for additional instructions.
“Make sure you know what’s behind you,” she said. “There’s back-blast.”
Drennen pouted, “So Johnny gets to shoot it, huh?”
“Yes, fool,” Johnny said.
“We’re still splitting the money,” Drennen said to Johnny. Johnny agreed.
“What if I miss?” Johnny asked her.
She shook her head. “You’ve got only one chance. This is a oneshot weapon, and after it goes off, that’s it. Just remember to bring the tube thing back to me. Don’t throw it aside because it’ll have our prints all over it.”
There was a faint footpath through the brush from where they parked to the rim of the canyon. She pointed it out and told them they were to take it. While they cracked the tops off more bottles of beer and watched and listened intently, she showed them the drawing she’d been given. She smoothed it across the hood.
“This is where the opening of the cave is,” she said, pointing to an oval marked with an X. “There’s a place with some cover on the trail down where you can see the cave entrance, if you know where to look for it. That’s where you hide and aim. But like I told you on the way here, don’t just blast away. Make sure you actually see him. Make sure he’s there.”
“How far is the cave from this hiding place?” Drennen asked.
She paused and tried to recall what her adviser had told her. “Five hundred feet. So it’s not that far.”
“What’s he look like?” Johnny said.
“I’ve never seen him, but he’s tall with long hair. He’s a big guy. But it’s not like there are going to be other people down there in that canyon.”
“And we have to actually see him, right?”
“That’s why I gave you the binoculars,” she said. “We have to confirm he’s there. Don’t just shoot at the cave and hope you catch him inside.”
“And if he ain’t there?” Drennen asked.
“Come back after a few hours. We’ll have to try again later.”
“No one said anything about a later,” Drennen said.
“I’m only paying you if the job is done,” she said. “That was our deal.”
Drennen sighed theatrically. “He better be there, then.”
“That’s what I was told.”
“Who told you?” Johnny asked. “Who else knows about this?”
She shook her head. “Someone who knows the situation, and who knows Nate Romanowski.”
Johnny grimaced, but seemed to accept it.
“There’s something very important you need to know,” she said, looking from Johnny to Drennen and back again, making sure she had their full attention. “You’ve got to make the shot count. If you miss or screw up, we’re all in deep shit.”
Drennen sat back against the passenger door, shaking his head. “What are you talking about?”
“This guy we’re after,” she said. “He’s got a reputation. Have you ever heard the line, ‘When you strike at a king, you must kill him’? Some guy named Emerson said that.”
“Who the fuck is Emerson?” Drennen asked. “Is he somebody big?”
“Never mind,” she said, sorry she’d repeated the line from her adviser since she didn’t have a clue, either. “Don’t worry about it. Just don’t miss. It shouldn’t be that hard.”
They each took another beer with them and stuffed another in the back pockets of their Wranglers. She climbed back into the pickup cab. Her knitting bag was behind the seat and she pulled it out. She’d taken to storing her knitting needles in the shafts of her tall cowboy boots, and she drew them out. She was a piss-poor knitter, but she was nervous and needed something to do with her hands. Since she’d taken up the craft, all she’d managed to complete was a piece that was twelve inches wide and fifteen feet long. It had no purpose. It was the longest scarf in the world, she thought, and she didn’t know how to end it.
She watched them walk down the path with the rocket launcher, trading it back and forth to get the feel of it. She’d made them repeat the firing procedure back to her before they left and they seemed to recall it. Men were intuitive when it came to weapons, she thought. Maybe it was the only thing they were intuitive about. She recalled how Chase was with his handguns, like they were an extension of him. She got edgy even looking at one, and rarely handled the .38 she kept hidden away in her knitting bag.
She had given them the drawing so they wouldn’t fire at the wrong place.
Johnny and Drennen were in view for five minutes before they found the trail that would lead them down into the canyon. She’d been assured that it wouldn’t be booby-trapped on the top half of the trail, so she didn’t even mention it to them.
When they were out of sight, she knitted furiously, waiting for the explosion.
She was looking forward to feeling cleansed.
10
“Faster, faster,” Nate said to Alisha, who was throwing her clothing into her bag.
She looked up with fear in her eyes and swept her arm around the interior of the cave. “What about all this? You can’t just leave it.” She meant the furniture, gear, books, and electronics he’d amassed in his three years there.
He shrugged as he took his shoulder holster and the .454 down from a peg in the wall and put them on the table. “All I need is this,” he said. Then: “And my birds. In fact, I’m going to go get them hooded up so we can take them with us.”
She rolled her eyes. “You need more than a gun and your birds.”
“And you,” he said, misunderstanding.
“No,” she said. “You need clothes. And your satellite phone. Here,” she said, grabbing an empty duffel bag and placing it on the table. “I’ll pack them while you get the birds ready.”
He nodded, and turned for the opening. As he did, the receiver for one of his motion detectors chirped. Nate froze and stared at it. It was the uppermost sensor.
“Okay,” he said. “We’ve got to hurry.”
Johnny said, “I think I see it.”
“Where?”
“Over there. On the other side. Follow my arm.”
Drennen stood shoulder-to-shoulder to Johnny and bent so he could rest his cheek on Johnny’s bicep. He squinted down the arm, past the pointer, across the canyon.
“It’s kinda dark,” Johnny said. “It looks like a half-moon behind some bushes. It don’t look like one of those caves in the cartoons. It’s more like a slash in the rocks.”
After a beat, Drennen said, “Okay, I think I see it.”
“Keep your eye on it,” Johnny said. “Let’s move down the trail a ways. If we can see the cave, that guy can see us. So let’s move until we can get hid.”
Johnny carried the AT4 by a handle that swung up from the top of the barrel. He crouched and picked up his pace, his cowboy boots clicking against loose rocks. Drennen ducked and followed, keeping his hands out in front of him in case he slipped on the loose gravel. He plucked the beer bottle from his back pocket, twisted off the cap, and threw the cap aside.
Johnny didn’t slow down until there was a thick wall of sharpsmelling brush on the left side of the trail that obscured the view from the cave entrance. When Drennen caught up and joined him, Johnny put the AT4 down and gently parted two stiff boughs. “See it?” he asked.
“I lost it,” Drennen said, then took a long drink that made his eyes water.
“Put that beer down and use your binoculars. That’s what they’re for.”
“Fuck you,” Drennen said, but he did as he was told and placed the bottle between his boots. He raised the glasses to his face.
Johnny waited while Drennen adjusted the focus on the binoculars. He watched his friend, trying to read him.
“Okay,” Drennen said finally. “I found it again.”
“What do you see?”
“Well, it loo
ks like the top of the cave. There’s a bunch of brush hiding the lower half, but the hole looks tall enough for a man to walk in and out of without bending over. I can’t see inside—it’s dark—but it looks like there are blankets or some such thing tied back on each side.”
Johnny nodded and drew out the map from his back pocket. He unfolded it and held it out in front of him, matching the features in the drawing to the canyon itself.
“Yeah,” Johnny said, “Where we see that opening is where Patsy has the X.”
“Hot damn,” Drennen said, chuckling. “This is gonna be the easiest fifteen grand we ever made.”
“We ain’t made it yet,” Johnny said. “Keep your eyes on that cave. See if you can see him. I’ll get ready, and if you see that son-of-a-bitch, you tell me. We may not get another chance.”
The mews for Nate’s falcons was eight feet tall and six feet deep and was located twenty yards west of the cave opening. It was constructed of dried willow branches gathered near the river, and although it was in the open, the construction material rendered it almost perfectly camouflaged. Inside, he started with the peregrine while the eagle watched imperiously. He slipped a leather-tasseled hood over the hooked beak of the bird and fastened it in back. The hoods inured the raptors from reacting to outside stimuli and blinded them so they wouldn’t try to fly while being transported. Each bird had a custom hood sized for a tight fit.
He paused after the peregrine was hooded to glance through the willow branches toward the opposite cliff face. He could see no movement, and he knew how often a wandering deer or bobcat unknowingly strolled through the motion detector. Unfortunately, there were several dense stands of mountain juniper hiding portions of the trail. He watched for a few seconds to see if anyone—or anything—emerged from them. Nothing. But his sense of urgency didn’t diminish and the hairs on the back of his neck were pricked.
Nate turned back to his birds and hooded the red tail. She didn’t object and it took less than a minute. He looked at the eagle, who was sizing him up as well, and sighed. The eagle didn’t take to a hood, and it was often a struggle. He said, “Cooperate just this once.”