While he hadn’t summitted Black Tooth, Patrick had hiked to the base of Cloud Peak nearby. Eddie was right. The horses would reach a point of no return. Patrick filed the topic of Jimmy Beartusk away for later. There were more pressing matters to tackle now. Like two men needing medical attention and rescue. And where and how to secure Reno and The Lunker.
He wouldn’t tie them to a tree if he could help it, since, technically, it was against forest service and wilderness rules, because of the damage it causes to the trees. But he could hobble or highline them. There were two potential problems with hobbling, though. The first was that horses were fast ranging grazers and social creatures who would seek the herd they’d left behind. Even in his hobbles, Reno could move faster than Patrick could run. The second was that the two horses were as big as moose and hard to miss. If the goons hunting Eddie and Elvin somehow found their way up to Highland Park, they’d know they’d hit paydirt as soon as they caught a glimpse of the horses. Then he thought of a third problem. He only had one set of hobbles. So, as much as he’d love to leave them hobbled in the good grass down on the park, he couldn’t. That left him with only the option of highlining, which would keep them secure but wouldn’t let them graze.
He’d just have to come back later and take the horses for food and water. “I’ll highline them on the other side of the trees.”
“Suit yourself.”
The men and the horses pushed through the puny pines. Patrick was actually impressed to find them growing at all at this elevation. The conditions were inhospitable at best nine months out of the year. And, given their experience earlier that day, Patrick thought that estimate was probably a little generous. These trees took the worst Mother Nature could dish out and survived, despite the odds. Like the wildflowers that bloomed in July in this park. Their season was short and filled with wind, hail, and the searing sun of high altitude. Yet every year, columbine, balsam root, lupine, and a myriad of other flowers forced their way up through the rocky soil and bloomed spectacularly, as if their brilliance was in compensation for their short life spans. These were no hothouse flowers. Or trees.
Meanwhile, humans at lower elevations—especially in the cities—were soft in comparison. A hundred years before, homesteaders had braved Wyoming winters in tents and sod houses. Trappers had lived and worked in these mountains year-round. The Plains Indians had been doing that and more for centuries. Yet people these days stayed inside with gas heaters if the temperatures were less than temperate and blasted air conditioners all summer long. His family wasn’t much different. It was one of the reasons he liked to bring them on mountain adventures. To make them resourceful. To keep them tough and strong.
He smiled, proud of how they’d handled themselves today. No hothouse for his kids, either.
When he and Eddie broke from the trees, Patrick’s jaw dropped. In front of them was a stretch of jumbled boulders that rose hundreds of yards before it curved away with no summit in sight. No trail either. The natural forces that had created this rockslide had to have been immense. And he knew they were always just a breath away from another event, with almost no ability to predict when it might occur.
“I’m going to take a leak, man.” Eddie didn’t wait for Patrick to respond, just headed back into the trees.
“Okay, then,” Patrick said.
He tented his hand and looked up. Amazing. He had to come back and climb the peak someday.
A rhythmic sound caught his attention. He shifted his eyes toward it. A man was hopping from boulder to boulder, making his way down the field toward them with the speed and agility of a bighorn sheep. Patrick couldn’t believe he’d been up in the massif in the storm. He saw Patrick and raised a hand in greeting without slowing down.
Patrick waved back
The man was close enough that Patrick could see his wide smile under a Denver Broncos cap. He was wearing sunglasses, rock climbing shoes, and a backpack with climbing ropes and a pickax swinging from it. A solo climber. Patrick was impressed and a little intrigued. This was the kind of person for him to befriend if he wanted information on climbing Black Tooth. Or maybe even a guide.
“Hello, sir,” Patrick called. “Some weather, huh?”
“Nice enough now.” The man was ten feet away.
“You didn’t happen to see a plane on the ground up there, did you?”
Five feet. “This isn’t Bomber Mountain.” He pointed south. “That one’s easiest to climb coming off 16 from Buffalo.”
“No, I—”
The man passed him without stopping.
“I’m Patrick Flint.” He turned, staring after the man.
“Be seeing you on the mountain, Patrick.” The man again lifted a hand, this time in farewell, and disappeared into the stand of trees.
A minute later, Eddie re-emerged from roughly the same spot.
“Did you see the climber who just walked out?”
“No.” Eddie didn’t even appear interested in the topic.
“Well, I asked, and he hadn’t seen the plane.”
Eddie pointed up and to the right. “But there it is.”
Patrick followed the line of Eddie’s finger. “Well, what do you know.”
The wreckage was in plain sight once you knew where to look, especially now that the clouds over the area had lifted. White and red metal were a sharp contrast to the black boulders around it. From this angle, he couldn’t tell what type of plane it was. He wondered if it was visible from Highland Park at the right angle. If Cardinale and his men had binoculars, they might be able to pick it out from some distance away.
For a moment, the plane felt familiar to Patrick. “What were you guys flying in?”
“An airplane.”
Patrick closed his eyes and breathed softly through his nose. “What kind of airplane?”
“Something that had two wings, a propeller, and was big enough for three of us and our stuff.”
Patrick had an urge to punch Eddie. It wasn’t the first time. He had a feeling it wasn’t going to be the last. Clearly, he wasn’t going to get any useful information from him. Not that it mattered. Patrick didn’t know any reservation pilots, so he wouldn’t know this plane.
Eddie tested his foot on the first boulder. “I don’t remember how I climbed down this.”
“Go ahead. I’ll catch up. I have to get the horses set up.”
Eddie nodded. “It will take me longer.” He took a deep breath and stepped onto the first boulder. Patrick watched him for a moment. Eddie’s balance seemed poor, but that was to be expected with one of his arms in a sling, tucked against his belly.
“Be careful.” It was going to be hard enough to get two men down this rockslide. He needed Eddie’s help, not for him to become another man down.
Eddie didn’t answer.
Patrick retrieved a line from Reno’s saddle bags and quickly fastened it between two trees about ten yards apart. Then he unsaddled Reno, took off his bridle, looped his lead through the line, and did the same for The Lunker. After he checked Reno’s leg, which was good—great, really—he brushed the sweat out of the horses’ coats. Luckily, the two geldings were tired and ignoring each other. And with no mare around, he didn’t expect much drama.
He gave Reno one last pat on the neck. “I’ll be back soon.”
He shouldered the bags with the food, water, bedding, and medical supplies and left the horse supplies bag. After a few steps, he had a wave of profound appreciation for Reno, and all ungulates. How could the hooved herbivores be so muscular and strong? Patrick considered himself in decent shape, certainly from a cardiovascular perspective. He’d just run his first half marathon that summer. But he wouldn’t relish the thought of having to carry these packs—much less a saddle and full-grown man—up the mountain trails. Reno nickered. Patrick turned and waved, then felt a little silly.
Time to put his cardiovascular fitness to good use. He eyed the mountainside, tracing a line up it, then attacked the boulders. It was good to be str
etching the kinks out of his legs after a day of riding, and it was an immediate and intense thigh workout. He’d been worried about footing, especially in his cowboy boots, but, fortunately, the sun had dried the rocks. He was careful to place his feet on the horizontal planes, ones with rough surfaces when he could find them. Unfortunately, the saddle bags wreaked havoc with his balance. One side of the bags hung heavier than the other, and he cursed his poor planning in not redistributing that weight while he was on flat ground. Injuring himself would be an even bigger catastrophe than if Eddie did. He slowed down to a near crawl.
Every ten yards, he stopped to catch his breath and recalibrate his route, so as not to climb himself into an untenable position. He stood tall and arched his back, drawing in deep lung-fulls of crisp, clean-smelling mountain air. Then he looked around. Black Tooth was hidden by the slide. Behind and all around him was clear, summer-blue sky. Below in the distance, the tops of the angry, black clouds were thinning and moving south. Above him, Eddie was a dot near the plane, but Patrick had closed much of the gap already.
He started climbing again. When he reached the outer fringes of the crash site, the smell of aviation fuel grew stronger. Eddie was sitting there with his legs splayed in front of him and his back against a boulder. Patrick leaned over, winded.
The other man’s face was ashen. “I gotta sit here for a minute, man.”
Patrick thought it was odd that he wasn’t in a hurry to check on Elvin, no matter how bad he felt. “I’ll go see about the others. Listen for me. I’ll shout if I need your help.”
Eddie nodded.
Patrick moved into the wreckage, paying close attention to where he put his feet. One misstep and he could rip a chunk in his hide on jagged metal, or, worse, fall against something lethally sharp. Twenty-dollar bills blew around his feet. Strange. As a pilot, walking through a crash site was beyond sobering for Patrick. He took a deep sniff. More aviation fuel, but there was no smell of anything burning. With all the precipitation, anything short of an explosion would have been extinguished quickly. Caution was always the best option, though, and he continued scanning for fire and smoke.
He eyed the remains of the plane as he headed for what was left of the cabin. It was a few sizes up from his Tri-Pacer. A Cessna 210 Centurion. Six seats, high fixed wings with struts—an old design, which told him it had been built before 1967—propeller driven, with a retractable tricycle undercarriage unlike his Tri-Pacer. It was a popular and reliable aircraft. Something had obviously gone wrong on this flight, though. Since eighty percent of plane crashes were pilot error, chances were slim that it had been this bad boy’s fault.
Patrick patted the intact tail. The plane hadn’t rolled. But it had crumpled. The undercarriage was flattened, the bottom of the fuselage ripped open, one wing broken off and the other crushed. Pieces of wing and fuselage littered the ground. He made his way toward the door. The entire propeller, nose, and cockpit were smashed between two rocks. It looked like the propeller had been thrown backwards into the pilot’s seat on its impact with a boulder the size of a dump truck.
He stepped back, taking in the side view of what was left of the plane as a whole. Most of it was white, except its red belly. He turned and read the tail number, and the recognition he’d felt when he first saw the crashed plane from below suddenly made sense. N-BTF46. A heavy ball formed in the pit of his stomach.
He knew that call sign. The BTF stood for Bruce Timothy Folske, and 46 was for his year of birth. A vanity tail number, to match the confidence and ego of its Buffalo-based owner, Bruce Folske. Vietnam and civil aviation pilot. Wyoming aeronautical legend. Sometimes mechanic who maintained his own plane on a shoestring budget and had been battling a fuel leak in his Centurion.
Patrick’s friend.
And a plane that had sputtered before crashing, suggesting that at least one of its wing tanks was empty. Then where had the aviation fuel around the site come from? The tanks required manual switching between them, and Patrick knew a plane could become fuel starved and still have fuel left in the other wing tank. He hated to think Bruce could have stalled and gone down with fuel left, but his mind went back to the sobering statistic about crashes caused by pilot error. Eighty percent. Eighty percent. Eighty percent. As a doctor, he was accustomed to his decisions meaning the difference between life and death for his patients. His feet were firmly planted on the ground when he made them. Not thousands of unforgiving feet in the air like when he was piloting.
Please, God, don’t ever let me grow complacent.
A new thought struck Patrick, and it gave him pause. He’d thought the plane had come from the reservation. And Eddie had told him the two survivors were Indians—Dead Indians, originally, to be exact, until he changed his story. Another lie? Or was someone else piloting Bruce’s plane? Patrick felt a flicker of hope.
“Bruce!” Patrick shouted.
There was no answer. Eddie had said the man was unconscious. Patrick leapt toward what was left of the front seats.
What he saw there stopped him in his tracks. He had seen plenty of gruesome dead bodies in his time, but nothing topped this one. The man’s shiny, bald head was lopped off partway and hanging to the side. His once-powerful torso was impaled on the yoke, and his intestines had spilled out over and around the column. The stench from the bowels made Patrick’s eyes water. And an ungodly buzzing noise was coming from everywhere and nowhere all at once. Patrick’s eyes adjusted to the dim light and he saw movement at Bruce’s neck. What the . . . ? Then he saw the same type of movement on his belly.
Flies. His stomach lurched, but he was able to keep from retching. This wasn’t his first rodeo. It just never got any easier, especially not when it was someone he knew. A friend. Because it was Bruce. There was no helping him. There wasn’t even a way Patrick could envision recovering him and bringing down his body. It would take a team for that operation.
But now that he’d seen the man, his distrust of Eddie redlined. This man had died in the crash. He was nearly decapitated for God’s sake. There was no way he had been alive, as Eddie had most recently claimed. But how had Bruce ended up here, crashing his beloved Centurion into the base of Black Tooth, with Eddie and Elvin onboard and three Chicago gangsters looking for them? Where had they been coming from, and where were they going?
And what was Eddie’s game? Instinctively, Patrick patted his chest. His revolver was holstered and ready. He unbuttoned his jacket and overshirt for access, wondering if Eddie was carrying. He hadn’t found a weapon on him when he examined him, but he would still have to assume the man had a weapon and be very, very careful.
His attention had zeroed in so quickly on the gory fate of his friend, that, for a moment, he’d forgotten about Elvin. Forgotten, that was, until a weak voice from the back seat said, “Help me. Please, help me.”
Chapter Twenty-nine: Fear
Middle Little Goose Trail, Cloud Peak Wilderness, Bighorn Mountains, Wyoming
Friday, August 12, 1977, 5:15 p.m.
Trish
Trish’s heart was pounding so hot and hard in her ears that it hurt. The man with the Chicago accent was back, and he was really upset with George. From the sound of all the horse hooves, his two giant friends were with him, too. These were the men that her dad didn’t like, and that George and Eddie were afraid of. Trish was scared of them, too.
She had to be silent as a mouse. She lowered herself to a crouch behind some rocks, trying to make her breathing quieter. She wobbled into the hard surface, brushing her face against it, getting a nose full of dirt and moss and . . . and . . . something that smelled like poop. She felt a sneeze coming and a gag. Grabbing her shirt, she wiped frantically until she’d dislodged whatever it was. She squeezed her nostrils shut with her fingers and swallowed the sneeze. Then she froze, listening to see if anyone had heard her. The noise wasn’t too loud, was it? After a few seconds of no reaction from below, she relaxed. This was a good hiding spot. The rocks were big and thick. They’d muffle any s
ound she accidentally made, like the sneeze, and no one would see her. But the men would know how many people were with George just by counting the horses. They wouldn’t know which people, though. Or where they were. If worse came to worst, she and Perry could make a run for it. Those guys were flatlanders. City slickers. They could outrun them in the woods. The men would never be able to find them. She felt good about that.
She listened for her brother and didn’t hear him. That was good, too. She flashed back to the Gros Ventre Wilderness earlier that summer, when she’d been lost and responsible for her five-year-old cousin Bunny. The only thing that had kept her going when a strange man had found them and taken them was knowing she couldn’t let anything happen to the little girl. And she’d kept her safe until her grandpa had helped them escape and find their parents.
Well, now she couldn’t let anything happen to Perry. Her baby brother was completely annoying, but also, she had to admit, pretty awesome. When she’d been unconscious in the truck wreck after Barb Lamkin drove them off a cliff, it had been Perry who’d saved her. The little squirt had stepped up, big time. If he needed her today, she would do the same for him. She just hoped it didn’t come to that. Just go, she willed the men. Get out of here.
Below her, George’s voice was loud and high-pitched. “You guys must have gotten turned around. You’re headed down the mountain, not up. Or did you find your friend?”
The accented man’s laugh sounded malevolent. “We hired you to get us up to Highland Park.”
“That’s what I was—”
A second man said, “You took us in the wrong direction and left us out there. Pretended to be sick. Bad move.”
“No, I had you on Solitude Trail. And I am sick. I’m just really tough.”
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