Thank God he was piloting a Tri-Pacer. The little plane was the next best thing to a helicopter when it came to short strips. And this strip had suddenly become very, very short. With only feet to spare, the Tri-Pacer jerked to a standstill, nose tilted down. Patrick wiped sweat from his brow and exhaled. He had been so focused on stopping that he had almost forgotten about the figure that had made it necessary. Now he couldn’t see it.
“Dad . . .” Trish’s voice was taut.
Patrick glanced over at her. Her eyes were huge. “What is it? Are you okay?”
“You saw that, right? You saw the man in the runway?”
“The man?”
She nodded. “He looked . . . dead.”
A dead man—on a runway? It was hard to believe. Maybe she thought she saw a man, but it was probably a deer. But he had to check it out. “Stay in the plane.”
Patrick turned off the switch, advanced the throttle to full forward, then closed it. He opened the lightweight door, not waiting for the propeller to stop spinning, something he would not normally ever have done. He climbed out and jumped to the ground, peering through the distortion caused by the blades. He still couldn’t identify the figure. Giving the propeller a wide berth, he ran around his aircraft until he could see the figure in front of it.
And, to his surprise, he saw that Trish was right. It was a man, with an emphasis on “was.” An American Indian. And what was left of him wasn’t a pretty sight.
Chapter Two: Toss
Buffalo, Wyoming
Thursday, August 11, 1977, 10:00 a.m.
Perry
“Throw me the ball!” Perry shouted to John Pantis.
John didn’t react. What was wrong with him? Perry’s best friend was usually completely focused during their personal practice time. Today he’d spent half his time staring off into the distance.
Perry waved his arms. “Hey, John. I’m over here.” His voice was a little sarcastic. But then he was a little irritated.
John finally pulled his gaze away from a group of girls who were practicing cheers in the end zone, fifty yards away. “Huh?”
John had grown four inches since last season, which Perry, at five foot three, could forgive him for, but just barely. John was a shoo-in for starting quarterback on their eighth-grade team. But what he’d gained on Perry in height, he’d lost in strength, because Perry had been lifting weights like a mad man for a whole year.
Perry flexed a bicep and admired his muscle. “Dude. Throw. Me. The ball. I’ll never make wide receiver if I don’t get in some catches.”
John’s face was flushed. He pulled his arm back and released a wobbly spiral that sailed over Perry’s head. Really, what was wrong with him? Perry ran after the ball and tossed it back to his friend. The ball careened off John’s chest. This time, Perry followed John’s gaze and really zeroed in on the girls. Kelsey Jones was staring back at John, her head cocked, one hand over her mouth as she giggled into the ear of one of the other cheerleaders.
Oh, no. Kelsey? Not John. He couldn’t. He wouldn’t. They didn’t have time for girls. Football season was about to start. Not that Perry could fault John on his taste. Kelsey was maybe the cutest girl in their class. Long, straight brown hair. Big, dark eyes. And a wide smile that made Perry smile back at her even when he didn’t feel like it. Perry didn’t stand a chance with a girl like her. She was taller than him, for starters. And she was popular. Perry was . . . he didn’t know what he was. He had friends. He was involved in sports. He wasn’t an outcast. He just wasn’t the guy most likely to be voted homecoming king their senior year.
But John had a chance. John was pretty much a stud. Perry’s mom said his family was Greek. They’d moved to Buffalo the same year the Flints did, from somewhere on the east coast. John had a permanent tan and curly dark hair. And, of course, he was tall. If Perry was as tall as John, he figured girls would be looking at him, too. But that wouldn’t mean he’d slack off during football season because of it.
Perry’s mind rushed through his options. He could ignore this disturbing development. He could confront John and bring him to his senses. Or he could separate John from the problem. John had gotten a new horse earlier in the summer, and he and Perry had taken some cool rides around their houses, but John had never gone on a real mountain trail ride. Perry knew it was something his friend was dying to do. He could invite him.
It was worth a try.
“Nimrod,” he said.
John picked up the ball and shot Perry a funny look. “Sorry.”
“My dad is taking us on a trail ride into the mountains tomorrow. We’re going to camp out. Want to come with?”
John’s vision cleared and his eyes lit up. “That sounds cool. But what about practice?”
“Practice with the team doesn’t start until next week. It’s our last weekend of freedom.”
“But you’ve been obsessed about our practices.”
“Sure, because it’s the only way we’re going to make starting quarterback and wide receiver. But I guess it’s okay for us to take a few days off. As long as we bring a ball with us. We can get in some work on the mountain.”
“Far out.” John lifted his hand for a high five, and Perry slapped his palm against his friend’s.
From way off the field, a man shouted, “Perry Flint, is that you?”
Perry looked over and saw a guy with white-blond hair, the mountains behind him. It was mid-August, and there was barely any snow left on the peaks. It was so far into August, in fact, that it barely smelled like summer anymore. In early summer, he could smell the funny blue trees that his dad called Russian olive out here on the field.
Perry squinted at the guy. He had told his mom he was getting a ride home with John’s dad, who had dark curly hair. It couldn’t be him. And Perry’s dad was flying somewhere with Trish. Anyway, it didn’t look like him either.
The guy waved, heading Perry’s way. Perry waved back and walked toward the man, with John right behind him. Then Perry got a funny feeling. The trial. He’d testified the day before, in the morning. It had brought back a lot of bad memories of the night Coach Lamkin had tried to kill him—and his mom and his sister—but some good ones, too. He had pulled his mom and Trish from a truck before it blew up, after a mountain lion ran in front of them and the coach drove it off the side of a cliff. People had made a really big deal about that. He’d been kind of a hero, he guessed. There had been a lot of reporters in town for the trial wanting to know all the gritty details. They’d camped out at the courthouse and even showed up at the Flints’ front door.
Perry’s dad had been polite but firm with them. “No interviews. We all just want it behind us.” Privately, he’d told Perry and Trish that he didn’t want to contribute to Coach Lamkin getting any more press or glorification.
If this was a reporter, would it be okay with Perry’s dad if Perry told the story of how he’d rescued his family? Nothing about the coach, of course.
The guy shouted, “It’s George. George Nichols. I’m the electrician. I’ve been working at your house.”
Not a reporter. Perry moved even closer. The guy had killer sideburns, which Perry was definitely going to grow himself, as soon as his facial hair came in. If his facial hair ever came in. His dad had grown a beard last winter, and it was so patchy that his mom used to shake her head and say, “He looks like a mangy dog,” when his dad left the room. Then Perry finally recognized the man as George. For a moment, he was disappointed, but then he grinned. Perry’s dad had met George at the hospital when George had been working on a job there. He said George was the most handy and practical young man he’d met in a long time, and his dad didn’t toss praise around lightly, so Perry knew he liked the electrician.
When George had been working at their house, he had showed Perry how to make sparks by touching two wires together. Then George had told Perry about the time he’d lit a trash can on fire to set off the alarms at his high school so he wouldn’t have to take a test. Perry ha
d confessed to George that he’d pulled a fire alarm to get out of school early to go skiing the previous March. George had gotten suspended. Perry had, too, and grounded. They’d talked about football some. George had played safety for the Sheridan Broncs in high school. But what was he doing at the field here in Buffalo?
“Hey, George! What are you up to?”
“I was just doing some work at the school. I decided to come out to the field when I saw people tossing the ball around.” George closed the rest of the distance between them.
“It’s just me and my friend John. John, this is George.”
“Nice to meet you, sir.” John shook George’s hand.
“Sir? I’m not that old.” George guffawed. “But nice to meet you, too, kid.”
Perry had an idea. “John’s helping me learn to play wide receiver. Do you wanna line up against me while I run some routes?”
George flipped his blond bangs from his forehead. “Sure. Why not?” He started jogging in place, then stretched side to side.
Perry settled into his stance with George in front of him.
George winked. “Don’t worry. I’ll go easy on you, kid.”
Perry laughed.
“Hike,” John yelled.
Perry took off running, with George sticking to him like glue. John threw the ball, and Perry leaped for it. As he was coming down, George collided with him, and Perry hit the ground like a sack of potatoes, mouth full of grass and dirt. All the air whooshed from his lungs, and the sky turned black with blinking stars for a few seconds. Then a hand grasped his and George pulled Perry to his feet.
“Man, are you okay?”
Perry nodded. He wasn’t, not completely, but he wouldn’t have admitted that for anything. Some smelling salts would have been nice, though.
“Are you sure you want to play wide receiver, kid? You’re kind of on the small side for it.”
Perry would have answered in the negative, if he’d had enough breath to form any words. He made an okay sign and got back down into his stance.
Chapter Three: Land
Dubois Municipal Airport, Dubois, Wyoming
Thursday, August 11, 1977, 1:00 p.m.
Patrick
Hours after the dramatic landing, Patrick wrapped up his statement to an officer from the Dubois Police Department. Trish had given hers first and was waiting for him at the tiny pilot’s shelter with Constance Teton. All in all, the process had been much quicker than Patrick would have imagined. The cops had shown up darn fast for law enforcement in this area, where small cadres of officers had to cover incredible square mileage.
Just as the officer released Patrick, the man’s radio squawked. “Be advised that the FBI is on the way to the Dubois Airport crime scene.”
Patrick’s eyebrows rose. He’d expected Federal Bureau of Investigation involvement with the murder of an American Indian so close to the Wind River Reservation, where they had concurrent jurisdiction with the tribal police. But talk about fast—same day, when they were based out of Billings, over three hundred miles away? Either they were running low on things to do or someone thought this was a big case. It was all the hint Patrick needed to get out of Dubois before someone decided it was essential that he stick around to talk with the Feds as well.
He wiped sweat from his forehead as he walked over to Trish and Constance. It was already nearly eighty degrees out. The women were in the shade of the building. Constance—a tall, pretty Shoshone nurse in her twenties—was standing. She gave off a strong odor of perfume. Without the wind to disperse it, it was the kind of scent that would have given Patrick a headache. Trish was sitting on the ground cross-legged with her chin in her hands, elbows on her knees.
His daughter had met Constance a few months before, on the heels of the murder of Big Mike Teton, Constance’s husband. Constance had been in a tailspin at the time. She had convinced herself she had feelings for Patrick, then made a pass at him in front of Susanne and the kids. The incident hadn’t created a favorable impression on his family. Now Constance was wearing a diamond on her ring finger, which Patrick suspected meant she was engaged to her boyfriend of several months, Tribal Police Officer Justin Dann. But with their history and with Trish watching and listening, Patrick didn’t dare inquire about the woman’s romantic life.
An ambulance sounded its siren twice, then slowly drove the remains of the man they’d found in the runway away from the airstrip.
“Hello, ladies. I just have to fuel up, Trish, and we can be on our way. Constance, I hope the clinic can put that x-ray machine to good use.”
“We will.” Constance was staring after the ambulance. “You know who that was, don’t you?”
Patrick cocked his head. “No.” Other than a height of about five foot eleven, weight of maybe one hundred seventy-five pounds, probable age in his early thirties, and race—American Indian—Patrick hadn’t been able to determine much about the man. His skull had literally been flattened on one side and half his face had been scraped off.
“It was Jimmy Beartusk.”
Patrick shrugged. The name didn’t ring a bell.
“He was one of Elvin Cross’s cousins. Grew up with all of us on the reservation, although his father is Crow.”
Patrick hadn’t ever met Beartusk, but Elvin was not okay. Far from it. He ran with Eddie Blackhawk, Constance’s brother, and the two of them dabbled in illegal poker games and thuggish behavior. “Speaking of Elvin, how is your brother?”
Constance and Big Mike had given Eddie a home on their ranch, and he’d repaid them by hosting secret games there that could have landed them all in prison. And, after Big Mike had died and Patrick had been pushing the tribal police to classify his death as a murder, Eddie had threatened Patrick. At the time, Patrick had suspected Eddie had a hand in his brother-in-law’s death, although it turned out that the threat was nothing more than Eddie’s usual attitude toward outsiders he believed were meddling in reservation business.
Constance sighed. “He’s all right. Busy. He’s been staying out of trouble.”
Patrick wasn’t sure he believed that, but he responded to be polite. “Good.”
Her eyes looked hopeful. “He and Elvin have gone legit. They’ve started running tours on the res for big money types out of Jackson Hole.”
“What kind of tours?”
“Nature, mostly. To see the area, the wild horses, migrating animals. But also some cultural experiences, like our pow wow and sweat lodges.”
Patrick couldn’t picture Eddie and Elvin willingly bringing outsiders onto the reservation and into their culture, but stranger things had happened. “I hope that’s a success for them. Did Beartusk work with them?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe.” Constance frowned. “Do the police know what happened to him?”
“They don’t. But I could hazard a guess.” He glanced at his daughter.
She sighed and made his name into a two-syllable word. “Dad, I saw him. You can’t make it any worse than I’ve already imagined.”
She was right. He rubbed his forehead. “It looked like he fell from a plane.”
But not from that great a height. His head was flattened, but intact otherwise. While a human body falling has a terminal velocity—a top speed—based on weight and wind resistance, the height for someone to achieve their max before hitting the ground was pretty substantial. Like Empire State Building substantial. From that height, he would have expected to see more severe damage than Beartusk sustained.
Constance nodded. “Or was tossed. Otherwise, why didn’t someone stick around and report it?”
She wasn’t saying anything Patrick hadn’t thought of himself—the damage to Beartusk’s head was greater than that to the rest of his body, for instance, which told Patrick that the man probably fell headfirst. But that wasn’t conclusive to being pushed, and Patrick tried to stick to facts instead of speculating. Besides, if he were to speculate, pushing someone from a plane wasn’t an easy task. Quarters would have been cramped.
Beartusk wouldn’t have gone willingly unless he was incapacitated first. That close to the ground, the pilot couldn’t have given up controls to muscle Beartusk out. A third person would have probably been on board to do the tossing. If a tossing is what had occurred. Unless Beartusk had been unconscious, high, extremely drunk, drugged, or dead already, he’d known what was coming. There would be an autopsy ordered in a case like this one, and the police would be able to determine whether he’d been drugged. Probably even whether he’d been pushed.
No matter how it happened, it was horrible to contemplate. Patrick pictured a plane lifting off the runway, quickly climbing to an unsurvivable height. A door opening. Strong arms pushing a man out. His body tumbling in the air. The wet crunch as he hit the ground. Patrick couldn’t think of anything much worse than falling from a plane and anticipating the moment of impact when the ground would rip off your skin, break your bones, and crush your brain and internal organs. He’d been the doctor on the scene a few years before in Dallas when a woman was pushed off a penthouse balcony to a ground-level concrete walkway. Her bloody, contorted form still haunted his dreams. Now, it would be replaced by Beartusk’s.
Patrick winced and put an end to his grim musings. “Whatever happened, it didn’t occur long before we landed. His body was still warm.”
Constance pushed her hair back, agitated. “What kind of animal would do something like that?”
“Someone who was really upset with Beartusk, I’d say. Hopefully, if he was pushed, it won’t be too hard for the police to figure out who did it and bring them in.”
Constance snorted. “Yeah, right. You obviously don’t remember much about justice around here. At least on the reservation.”
And this from a woman dating a tribal cop. There was a reason the Wind River Reservation and its residents had a reputation for violence and lawlessness, and he remembered it well. “Well, if you hear anything about it, let me know. I’ve got a vested interest.”
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