by Bart Paul
I ran over to Jack. He was face down in the water with blood pouring from the side of his head making oil-slick swirls on the ripply surface. I rolled him over and dragged him out of there as another burst of fire from down-trail ripped the trees and chipped the rocks, but not so close. Either the shooter was a sprinter or we had a second gunman. I checked Jack up close and could only see the one wound. A round had sliced his scalp across the side of his temple, taking a bit off the top of the right ear. I looked back for a second and saw the woman’s corpse rocking in the shallow water I’d stirred up like she was doing the backstroke. I untied the wildrag from my neck and wrapped it around Jack’s head and cinched it down. His ear was red, and he was covered with blood on that side of his head, soaking his shirt. I told myself even superficial wounds to the face and scalp sometimes bleed like crazy.
“What the hell is—” he said.
I dragged him behind a deadfall tamarack and we hugged the ground. I scanned the slope that rose up across the trail where the first shots sounded but the timber was too thick. I reached to my hip on pure instinct, but of course I had no weapon other than my skinning knife. I’d only been looking for a missing kid. I rolled Jack enough to take off his duty belt with the Smith & Wesson. The dog trotted over to us and checked Jack out.
“You gonna tell ’em to quit?” Jack said. He had his hand on the dog’s neck.
I shushed him.
“You gotta holler,” he said. “Tell ’em they coulda killed us.”
“That’s probably the plan.”
“Then who the hell is ‘they’?” he said. He looked bothered and confused.
I figured Jack’s duty belt was going to be too big for me so I just buckled it and slipped it over my shoulder. Then I pulled the .357 and checked the cylinder.
“We gotta get you out of here, pal. We can figure out who ‘they’ are later.”
He raised his head and his color drained. “My goddamn horse run off.”
I kept his revolver in my right fist and got my left arm around him and dragged him to his feet. I waited that way for a second, scanning the woods and rocks. The little pond had settled, and just below the surface the corpse of the missing bank manager still stared skyward with those shrunken white eyes. As quiet as I could, I walked Jack toward where the mare was tied, wary about the shots that came from that direction. Jack sort of whispered to the dog and patted his leg and the dog followed, staying close.
I saw something dark moving through the trees down-trail from Sarah’s mare. I motioned to Jack. He leaned against a boulder with one hand on the dog, but whoever it was saw us and kept coming. I could see some sort of long gun come up but it didn’t fire. Then the uphill gunman squeezed off another few rounds. Jack held up two fingers. I nodded and pulled him down so he could crawl a dozen feet to another deadfall, then collapse.
“Triangulation,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“They must be pros.”
“If they were pros, we’d be dead.”
They might be amateurs, but live fire is live fire, though only the one shot that creased Jack seemed to come close. I was worried as hell about Sarah’s mare. I thumbed back the hammer of the .357 and peeked over the deadfall and saw the second gunman walking closer, looking toward the spot we’d just left. He raised the weapon but still didn’t fire. Then he swung the barrel until he looked to be pointing right at Jack and squeezed off two rounds. They didn’t come close, either. A bit of tree bark drifted down on us. He must’ve shot six feet over our heads. I shot in front of him once before I even got a good look at him, just to back him off. The shot echoed in the canyon like a damn cannon, and the guy dropped.
“Stay put.”
I crawled toward the shooter, stopping behind a tamarack about thirty feet away to wait and watch for any movement. There was no way I could’ve hit the guy. I turned back toward Jack to look for anyone coming up behind him. All I heard was the rush of the creek just out of sight and the nice breeze in the pines. I stood up and walked to the shooter. He was on his back with one foot bent under him. His dirty black shirt looked shiny in the sunlight slanting through the tree canopy. It was Kayleeana’s dad. Or the gink who’d said he was. He had a head wound soaking down into his shirt and the wet grass. He wasn’t moving. I checked for a hint of a pulse, but he was gone. I kept my fingers on the artery for a bit longer than I needed to, just to be sure, then wiped my hand on my jeans. He’d been hit by a clean shot. It was a shot I’d have made—if I’d been trying to kill him.
His rifle was a beat-up Ruger Mini-14. The magazine only had two .223 rounds left so I tossed that toward the creek. For two rounds, the rifle wasn’t worth the weight of the carry.
I walked back to Jack.
“Gimme your radio. I’ll get us some help.”
“The radio was on my horse,” Jack said. “Who the hell is the guy you shot?”
“Cody Davis. Father of the missing girl.”
“Tommy, that makes no goddamn sense. We were trying to help him, for chrissakes.”
There was no phone service so deep in the canyon, so with no radio we were on our own. I walked up the trail another dozen feet and stopped, standing quiet, watching and listening for some sign of the original shooter. When I didn’t catch a trace, I hustled to where Sarah’s mare was tied and led her to Jack and got him mounted. He was mostly dead weight so that wasn’t as easy as it sounds.
“What’s the plan?” he said when he was aboard. He leaned forward with his left hand on the horn and his right hand clamped around my coiled rope on the saddle-fork, his feet dangling loose in my stirrups.
“We cross the creek and pick our way down the canyon, keeping off-trail through the tall timber in places you wouldn’t ride if you didn’t have to. Stick to terrain a four-wheeler can’t go.”
Jack whistled for the dog and I started leading the mare. We passed the gink I’d tried to miss, twisted on the ground. I watched Jack looking down at the guy’s town shoes. The dog checked out the fake dad, too. That probably wasn’t what the guy had in mind when he asked for a dog the day before.
“You steady up there?”
“So far,” Jack said. He reached up and touched the wildrag wrapped around his head. His fingers came away sticky from blood.
“I must look like a damn pirate,” he said.
“You look like Keith Richards.”
In twenty minutes I’d led the mare across the crotch-high, hard-flowing, slippery-bouldered creek. I only fell twice, but the mare stopped with better footing than me and let me lean on her till I got upright. I reached the shallows wet to my armpits, and cold from the snowmelt creek even in the warm morning. Jack would’ve laughed if he wasn’t so groggy. A few minutes more and I’d stranded us in aspen thickets and deadfall. We waited there, listening for anyone on our trail. After a minute or two I could just make out the faint buzz of a motor. The dog had liked swimming the creek, but when he whined once Jack spoke sharp and he was quiet.
“If the dog gives us away, you can kill him,” Jack said. “That’s how the Comanche useta do it so the dogs didn’t give away the location of the people.”
“Whatever you say, pal.”
The motor had sounded closer for a second then began to fade. It could have just been county search and rescue. I pulled my riflescope and scanned the far side of the creek. I thought I saw movement but couldn’t be sure. Could’ve just been the wind. We heard a voice shout way off in the distance, then the whinny of a horse. The voice sounded high-pitched, almost like a woman’s voice or somebody singing or yodeling.
“Sounds like somebody calling your name,” Jack said.
“You’re loopy.”
We got moving again until I managed to high-center the mare on an avalanche-downed aspen. I thought she’d have a come-apart with Jack on her, but she managed to jump her hind-end over the trunk once she calmed down. I’d never been on this side of the creek so far back in the canyon. If Jack was in better shape, I’d have led him
back to the trail and let him make a run for the pack station by himself. After another forty-five minutes we came to some beaver dams and I knew we were opposite Blue Rock, so we were making tolerable time even with bad terrain. I stopped and pulled Jack down from the horse to check his wound and let him rest. I dabbed his head and ear with betadine from my drugstore first-aid kit and could see the bone of his skull exposed by the bullet furrow.
“You look half scalped.”
“I feel like a bad hangover,” he said. “I know you. I bet you got whiskey in your saddlebag. Gimme some whiskey.”
I pulled my flask, and he sipped a little. I was stowing it in my saddle pockets when I heard another far-off motor that almost sounded like the putt-putt of a Harley, but I figured I must have Harleys on my mind since that morning. I listened and it faded out. Then we got moving again. I didn’t want to say so, but Jack was right. The voice we’d heard did sound like it was calling my name, kind of faint and eerie, and it sounded like the voice of a woman.
CHAPTER FIVE
I found a game trail through tamarack and willow against the south canyon slope. The trail passed too close to the big trees, and I had to lead the mare into the mud more than once to keep her from scraping Jack out of the saddle or sticking him with dead and jaggedy branch stubs.
“There’s more to this than meets the eye,” Jack said.
“No foolin’.”
“I mean the parents of that missing kid,” he said. “They weren’t playing straight with you.”
“True.”
“Question is, why?” Jack said.
“The question is, where the hell’s that little girl?”
“I thought you told Harvey this was none of your affair.”
Jack was so smeared with blood I couldn’t tell if he was joshing me or not.
We slogged down-canyon through bogs and timber for another hour or more. We finally got opposite the second meadow, and I started to lead the horse back toward the creek. Then something half hid by the trees caught my eye. I swung the horse around and waded through mudholes and pushed through willows until I got to a camo-patterned dome tent hidden deep in the Jeffrey pine at the foot of a steep slope. The entrance of the tent faced the slope, not the meadow.
“What the hell?” Jack said.
“Just sit tight and quiet. I’m gonna tie the mare with you on her.”
I found a spot where Jack wouldn’t be buried in branches, then I poked around the tent. It was good-sized, about shoulder-high on me, and pitched tight, so I didn’t figure it was abandoned. And it hadn’t gone through a winter in the Sierra. Not even close. I found a fire ring set up against the hill so the tent would block the view of the flame. I unzipped the flap. Inside was a mummy-bag and some freeze-dried food packages and yogurt and cooking stuff, but no clothes or personal gear except hiking socks. Everything was tidy, even the ground, which was nothing but pine duff. You could see where it had been disturbed, but pine duff doesn’t hold footprints, so the person left no trail. I hustled back to Jack and untied the mare.
“Some damn poachers, you think?” he said.
“Yeah. Maybe. It’s a pretty snug little setup, but if someone’s hung some meat here, I didn’t catch a trace.”
“If we run across the owner,” he said, “we should ask ’em if they seen that kid.”
“Right.”
I got the mare turned around and headed towards the creek, but I couldn’t quite figure that tent. It was meant to be hidden, so I guess Jack’s suspicion that it was poachers made the most sense.
I kept to the tree line when we got to the edge of the meadow so we could make better time on the solid ground and still not be super visible. Plus, we’d be able to see or hear anyone out on the trail. We got to the drift fence where I’d seen the little girl’s footprint, and I stopped to look at it again, like maybe it could tell me something. I could see our tracks from earlier in the day and my tracks from the day before, both sets careful to step around the girl’s footprint. There were the deep-running prints of a barefoot horse that was hauling ass. That would be Jack’s palomino. But now there was a last set of hoofprints, the even, clear impression of a horse at a calm walk. A lone horse with a set of hand-clipped front shoes. The new prints covered both mine and Jacks, and stepped right in the high-top print I’d tried not to disturb. The new tracks were heading down-canyon, so they might’ve been made by whoever shot at us. Maybe the first shooter that we never got a look at. I snapped out of it when the dog whined. He was watching something coming at us from down-canyon. I led the mare into some young pine right at the edge of the creek and pulled Jack’s revolver. Through the branches I could see a rider coming a few hundred yards off leading a horse. Before I could see her hat or the sunglasses she wore riding into the afternoon sun, I could tell it was Sarah from the way she moved and how she held herself. When she got closer, I could see that the horse she led was saddled and yellow, and though she wasn’t in uniform she’d armed herself. I stepped out of the trees and waited for her. I was always happy to see that beauty, now maybe more than usual. She hopped off and kissed me quick, then took a fast look at Jack’s oozing bandage and my wet boots and muddy clothes. I briefed her about the shooting while she tended to Jack. Then I showed her the new set of tracks.
“I figured something was up when Jack’s horse came blasting in by the corrals,” she said. She pulled her radio from her belt. “I’ve got a county ambulance standing by.” She put a hand on Jack’s knee. “Hey, old friend. Are you going to need a chopper ride to Reno?”
“Hell no,” he said. “Just a clean bandage and another shot of whiskey.”
We left him up on Sarah’s mare so he wouldn’t have to get off and back on again. I lowered the stirrups and tightened the cinch and got on the Rez horse. We headed on down the trail as easy as we could so as not to jostle Jack too much. It was too breezy to talk, but when we got into the first meadow we rode abreast and I told Sarah about finding the woman’s body, the getting shot at and shooting back, and about the shape the body was in.
“What about the little girl?” she said.
“No trace. But one of the shooters was her dad.”
“My god, honey,” she said. “Which one?”
“The dead one,” Jack said.
The ambulance was waiting in front of our cabin when the three of us rode into the pack station an hour later. The EMTs wouldn’t let the dog ride with Jack to the Emergency Ward in Mammoth Lakes, so Harvey said he’d watch him while Jack got his wound tended and his ear sewn up. It was late afternoon when Harvey and I unsaddled and Sarah and I drove down into Paiute Meadows.
Mitch Mendenhall was waiting for us in his office behind the county court house. He was the Frémont County sheriff and no fan of mine. No matter what Jack had said, me marrying his best deputy hadn’t smoothed things between us any. The three of us sat down at a table, and Mitch closed the door.
“Are you certain you saw Erika Hornberg’s body?” he said. “How the heck can you be sure? That woman’s been missing the better part of a year.”
“Didn’t say it was her. But it looks like her, and both Jack and I think it sorta fits the facts.”
“What facts?” Mitch said.
“Size is about right. Clothes kinda similar. Body wasn’t fresh. And I knew her. She was my neighbor. I used to shoe her horses when I was in high school.”
“We can bring in her brother,” Sarah said. “Buddy Hornberg can ID her for us.”
“Well, if he can,” Mitch said, “that’ll save the department beaucoup bucks.”
“I’ll call him,” Sarah said. “And you should call Becky Tyree.”
“Jeezo,” Mitch said. “That old hide is a pain in the butt.”
“It’s a courtesy,” Sarah said. “She was Erika’s friend and was ready to put up bail for her when she disappeared.”
“You’re just sucking up to Becky ’cause she gave you forty acres in the canyon,” Mitch said.
I was halfway out
of my chair when Sarah stopped me with a glance.
Mitch laughed. “Old Becky is always throwin’ her money away on some hard case,” he said. “Remember that old husband of hers?”
“The ranchers around here support each other,” Sarah said, “to keep the valley viable and developers at bay. So yeah, Becky was the one who engineered a land swap with the Dominion partners to get back the pack station site. She hated it when outsiders put Harvey out of business. Now everybody wins.”
“‘Specially you two,” Mitch said.
Sarah pretty much ignored him and got back to it. “When Kurt Hornberg died,” she said, “his kids struggled. Buddy wasn’t the rancher his dad was, everyone knows that. Erika helped all she could with a banking job in town.”
“And helped herself to their money,” Mitch said. “Talk about a bank job.”
“That may turn out to be the case,” she said. “But for now Erika’s only a person of interest—and a missing person.”
Mitch glared at her across the table. “Well, we gotta get the body out of there,” he said. “No matter who the hell it is.” Then he glared at me. “And the body of the guy you shot.”
“He was the one who claimed to be the missing girl’s father, and he called himself Cody Davis. I didn’t say it was me who shot him.”
“What—you shot so many guys here the last couple of years you can’t keep track?”
“I generally hit what I aim at. If I say I didn’t hit him, I didn’t hit him.”