"The. . . . evidence is all circumstantial," Cathy interjected. "We've handed over a quarter of a million dollars in good faith, and Mr. Wright doesn't care whether you find a Snowman or not. The story's got to be buttoned up. Contained, Jim. And I don't know that I'd take your word on anything."
"You can have your money back," Ashby countered. "I'm not getting any part of it. I can't afford a leak either. If we're all being selfish, my best interests are served by keeping the media out of it. Which is why I just threw the story away in two lines. I don't need anyone asking questions about a mystery death."
"What about the sheriff?" Monte asked.
"He's in my pocket," Ashby replied. "Now, if you're satisfied that this isn't some rip-off, Bradford and I ought to get started."
Monte nodded to her. As they got up to leave, she could not refrain from asking, "What made you ask for that precise amount of money?"
"Ashby asked for the money."
"What are you going to do with it?"
"Split it five ways. I figure that's a reasonable price for a man's life."
When they were outside, he opened his shirt and pulled down part of it, exposing the scar on his shoulder.
"Does it look familiar?" he askecl Cathy.
The sight of it shook her, and she defensively put her hand up to her eyes. What she had seen on the mountain would live on within her.
"Why are you going?"
"I want to kill the Snowman," he said with profound conviction, as though this was his quest, his passion.
The savagery of his reaction was virtually sexual. She had never encoutered a human being with such a finely tuned attitude of naked violence. It took her out of her own corporate sphere, where men were just as dangerous but were capable of modulating their desires, finessing their enemies by the astutely planned maneuver. Daniel Bradford stood exposed, baring his teeth and carrying a spear for the world to see.
"You coming in to count your money?" Monte asked, thrashing the air at mosquitoes. Bradford shook his head. "Well, are you going to deposit it?"
"No, why bother."
"Do you mean to say that you're going to walk around with it in cash?"
"Sure, who's going to take it from me?" he asked without concern.
"What if you get held up?" Monte asked, looking perplexedly at Cathy.
"l'll take the chance."
Bradford was handed a clipboard by the Wells Fargo guard, and he signed his name next to the entry "Received cash $250,000 denominations $100. After agreeing to meet Cathy and Monte back at the reservation after he had gathered his team, he took hold of the metal box and threw it in the back seat of the Cherokee. He picked up his guitar case and unceremoniously slid it alongside the box. Then, as they all waited for his next move, Bradford yanked the tab of a can of beer and climbed into the back seat.
"We've got a long ride, through the desert up to the Arizona border," he told Ashby, who was going with him. "It's just past Yuma. A place called Bard."
He sipped his beer slowly, relaxing like a seigneur accustomed to the attentions of an entourage. Bradford noticed Cathy looking with curiosity at his guitar case, and she finally asked, "What sort of guitar do you play?"
"I don't play," he replied. He lifted the clamps of the black case and pulled up the lid. She felt her saliva dry up, and she forced herself to smile pleasantly at the two sawed-off forty-gauge shotguns fastened to metal racks in the case. They were as awesome as pythons.
Chapter Nine
The seven mustangs in the corral were listless and hungry. Bone protuded through their withers, and their ribs pressed tightly against the flaccid skin of their sides. Ed Packard had served in Vietnam for three years as a weapons expert in Special Forces, but during the whole nightmarish experience he had never conceived of the horror that he now faced.
He would have to kill the mustangs.
He had nursed them as yearlings, when he bought the ranch two years ago with the savings he had accumulated after his discharge. His dream had been to leave behind the bitter memories of a wife who deserted him and the rat race of Los Angeles, where he had worked as a Physical Education teacher in an elementary school.
City people are sustained by fantasy, and Packard was no different from most. Locked in freeway traffic each day, he felt his need for privacy, a retreat away from the crowds and cars, become more urgent. One day he had picked up and roamed through the western
states until he found the piece of land that divine providence had selected for him.
It was a foreclosure, and the bank offered him reasonable terms. He put down fifteen thousand in cash, took out a second mortgage, and saw himself as a gentleman horse rancher who would hunt and fish throughout the year. Idylls such as his, unless backed up by substantial financial reserves, tend to go sour. The inexperienced city man fell prey to larcenous horse traders and unscrupulous feed merchants, not to mention the drought which burned out his rich grazing pasture. Packard's credit soon ran its slender course, and he was shunned by the local tradesmen and harassed by the bank.
Yes, he would kill the horses rather than see them sold for fifty dollars a head when he knew they'd be worth a thousand apiece if they could be properly fed. He'd been up all night brooding, and when he walked out of the barn carrying his Loaded Rossi Overland .20-gauge hammer shotgun, he was tempted to turn the weapon on himself. The horses straggled to the fence posts and whinnied pathetically when they saw him. Dumb stupid beasts who depended on him; he loved them all with a strange, inexplicable ardor.
He heard a truck engine behind him, and he wheeled around with the shotgun stock pressed into his shoulder and knew that he'd fire if it was the bailiff, a fat, tobacco-chewing soak, who'd served him with writs twice before. He'd pour kerosene on the body and he'd just hang in and wait for the locals to prove he'd done it.
He sighted the Cherokee and released the safety, then suddenly lowered the weapon as the truck splayed pebbles from the driveway. The people in the wagon had to be lost. In his desperation he considered robbing them and stealing the wagon, which he could sell to settle his debts. But he pointed the gun at the ground and masked his panic with a welcoming smile.
When the door opened and he saw the tall man with the burnt skin emerge in his faded Levi's and denim shirt, he was startled by this unannounced reunion with the man who had trained him to mountain-climb before he'd been sent to Vietnam.
It had been at an Indian reservation where Bradford and a Sherpa had been civilian instructors for the Special Forces unit which had been assigned to the Golden Triangle in Laos. Packard had dropped Bradford a few letters when he had bought the ranch, inviting him to stay there for as long as he liked. But Bradford had never replied, and Packard had simply ignored the slight. Now he approached Bradford with his hand extended.
"What'd you do, strike oil on the reservation?"
"Not yet, but we're still praying," Bradford said, looking at Packard's drawn features and the embittered, forlorn cast of his mouth. He seemed whipped and scared to Bradford. "How's the horse business?" he asked out of courtesy, when all around him the acrid smell of failure hung like stale air before a thunderstorm.
"I've got my ass in a sling and it's getting kicked so often I don't feel it any more."
"How much are you stuck?"
"If you're lending, well, twenty-five hundred would get my head bobbing over the waves."
Bradford looked at the baked red clay hillside, the starved horses, the ramshackle cabin, and knew that Packard had been burned out.
"Can you get your horses boarded somewhere?"
"Why?"
"I want you to go on a skiing vacation with me—all expenses paid and fifty thousand dollars for your end."
"You wouldn't shit an old friend, would you, Dan?"
When Bradford pulled out a fresh stack of hundreds with a band around them indicating that the bundle contained five-thousand dollars and then handed the money to him, Packard shook his head uncomprehendingly. The gift made him edgy and unc
ertain, and he rubbed his dry, cracked lips with a trembling hand. "Who do I have to kill?"
"I'll let you know when I'm ready," Bradford replied.
It took several hours before Packard could make arrangements to have his horses boarded at a large neighboring ranch. He tethered his horses and rode with them in a file down the road to an open corral, where two hands took them. The bank manager was surprised by the cash payment he made to settle his arrears, but he made no effort to question Packard. He deposited the money to Packard's account and wrote down his instructions to pay the bills Packard had accumulated in town. He hoped he'd never see Packard again. These surly Vietnam veterans were a different, violent breed.
The three men made East Las Vegas in three hours flat. The Cherokee wagon cruising at ninety was as comfortable as a club chair. Bradford had tracked Spider Howard to his last known address: the county jail.
Spider had served with Packard as a demolitions expert, then had taken a job as a security man at Caesar's Palace. But the temptation to find a method to beat the tables had been too powerful for him to withstand. So Spider had developed the infallible "Spider Craps Percentage System." And after a spurt of small wins he had eventually crapped out, to no one's surprise but his own.
With the connivance of the call girls who visited the conventioneers' rooms at the hotel, Spider had burst in on passionate dentists, rueful Legionnaires, and pleading Shriners and insisted that he had to report them to the management and of course the vice squad. Fifty, a hundred, or whatever he could wheedle from the distressed but willing-to-pay victim had provided Spider with the stake necessary to resume rolling with his modified system. But then an East Las Vegas detective who'd heard a series of complaints had checked into the hotel, playing the John role with the muddled helplessness of Jack Lemmon, and when Spider entered to rip his eyes out, Spider's days on the badger circuit had ended.
It was $1,500 for bail, a $500 fine or sixty days. Spider was now in his thirty-sixth day in the county jail, and he often thought with fondness of his time in Nam, which in his imagination took on the patina of glory days during which he had acted with conspicuous bravery, blowing the V.C. apart with his armory of high explosives. He had sent a pleading telegram to Packard, who responded with an apologetic postcard that the walls were closing in on him.
When the car pulled up to the jail, Ashby began to wonder not only about Bradford's sanity but about his own.
"Do we really need a criminal?" he asked.
"Come on, Jim, relax. Spider was just pulling a scam and got caught. It wasn't anything like some of the rip-offs you must've seen in your time."
Bradford paid Spider's fine, which was reduced because of the time he'd served. The bony black man now had swabs of gray in his thick hair. The smile creases were tight pockets lodged in his face like cheap tailoring. Spider was surprised to see Bradford, and he kept up a steady gabble of questions as he checked the envelopes with his personal effects. His cash, a five and four singles, looked thin, mean, and faded when he tucked it into his wallet.
"Why'd you put up the money?" he asked as they walked toward the gate.
"You still remember how to climb, don't you?"
Spider pointed to the walls of the jail. "I couldn't handle these."
"Well, we're going climbing, and you'll be paid fifty thousand for your part."
"Man, I been layed, relayed, and parlayed in Vegas, so don't play games with me."
When Packard showed him the roll of cash, Spider knew that his luck was about to change.
The guard who escorted inmates in the exercise yard watched the money display, then shook his fingers across his belly as though cooling them.
"You mean to say we had Lou Brock here and never knew. What next, Spider?"
"Ann-Margret on a toasted bagel," Spider said.
"Can't kill fuckers like us," Packard said.
"You the rich uncle?" Spider asked, peering at Ashby.
Bradford's lone dissent prevailed against the three others: No, they didn't have the time to spend a night on the town in Vegas. They would have to head west to China Lake just above Fremont Park for another man in the crew Bradford was building. Packard took over from Ashby, who had been caught nodding at the wheel. Packard, like a boy experimenting with his first set of wheels, kept the accelerator down at an even one twenty.
They reached the isolated cabin by the side of the lake. A small wooden sign with childlike block letters crookedly printed on it stated:
EXPERT GUIDE
Fishing and Hunting
Across the lake in the last bands of afternoon sunlight two men with hunting rifles and a third who was unarmed stood motionless as though captured in a stone frieze. Bradford and Packard left the others to walk off their stiffness and cut through the underbrush toward the hunters. The rustling of dried leaves and fallen branches distracted the hunters, who turned to the source of the sound.
"Game warden?" one of them asked the short, lithe, slender yellow-skinned man who wore a tightly bound long black pigtail.
"The game warden is away. His brother takes his place, and he runs a store in town. Never comes around." He peered at the ground. "The tracks are hard. They'll be coming, down for water soon."
Along a ridge beyond the lake a small herd of Sierra mule deer stood circumspectly, sniffing suspiciously at the air. A lead buck clambered gracefully ahead. The hunters were paunchy, middle-aged, wealthy men with English Purdie .30-.30 rifles, bedizened in suede jackets and leather cartridge bandoliers. They struck Bradford as absurd, perpetrating fraud in their role as sportsmen. Two of the cows were pregnant, and the bucks' antlers were re-forming after the seasonal shedding.
Bradford and Packard stepped into the clearing, and the hunters, momentarily distracted, turned when their guide put his fingers to his lips. They fired wildly, missing the cows which had wandered down to the edge of the lake.
"You ruined our shot!" one of the men barked furiously.
"You couldn't hit a duck's ass if it was sitting on your plate," Bradford said.
"Give us the guns," Packard said.
They took the guns from them, and now the deer were running flat out in high, loping, rhythmical movements, as though attached to springs.
"I'll take the lead stag," Bradford said. "You get the buck at the end."
Two shots rang out, piercing the tranquil stillness of the woods, and two bucks fell silently on the other side of the lake. He and Packard dropped the guns in the soft mud of the bank. A school of minnows formed a black mass as they swam away from the noise. In the middle of the lake hungry bass leaped out of the water. The hunters started off through the muddy shallows for the fallen bucks.
"You just cost me a day's pay," Pemba said with irritation.
"Since when did you become a hunting guide?" Bradford asked.
"When I stopped eating tsampa and found I preferred steak. What are you doing here?" he went on, overcoming his indignation "I've been pleading with you for years to come here and work with me. We could have built a real business." Pemba had remained in the States, and still had visions of becoming a capitalist and returning to Namche Bazar, the village he was born in, with a fortune.
Pemba stared at Packard, trying to place him; then, unsettled, he turned to Bradford for some explanation. There had to be a good reason for Bradford to leave the reservation. When his shoulder was touched by the familiar hand of his friend, images of their past together and the tragedy they had witnessed on Lhotse burst to the surface. Pemba had spoken little English when he arrived with Bradford in the United States, and he had been battered by questions which he could not understand when he attempted to corroborate Bradford's account of the disaster.
Now Packard shook his hand and said:
"You and Dan trained our unit on the reservation, remember?"
"Yes, I do now . . . it was years ago . . . What's happened, the war's over?"
"I'm raising an expedition," Bradford said as they started through the woods bac
k to Pemba's cabin.
"An expedition?" He was incredulous, and the remote expression left his face, replaced by bewilderment. "What do you mean?"
"We're going after the Yeti."
"Back to Everest?"
"No, he's been traced to Sierra."
"That's impossible," Pemba said. "Foi ye! How?"
"No one knows. Pemba, I want you to be my sirdar."
Pemba's eyes revealed shock and anxiety. It seemed to Bradford that during this ten-year hibernation both of them had dreaded this moment. They had been imprisoned by their experience, and now the two survivors were being forced to be tested again.
Chapter Ten
It was late in the evening when the five men returned to the reservation. The Indian agent had been out on a bender for two days, and they took over his house for a preliminary strategy meeting.
The final member Bradford had selected for his team was a six-foot-five-inch Indian whom he had taught to climb when he first came to the reservation. Jamie Dask now spent part of the year as a guide, leading gentlemen mountaineers up scenic routes to Mount Whitney. He was an easy-going twenty-four-year-old who had hoped to play pro basketball. Although he was a strong rebounder for his size, he simply wasn't fast enough for the NBA.
Monte and Cathy were waiting for them. Monte had brought with him the scaled topographical map of Sierra and the layout of the resort. It was spread out on a rough-hewn rectangular table which was supported by wooden horses. For a while Monte watched with a sense of despair as Bradford moved a ruler and red felt pen over it, making crosses and triangles at various elevations. His fate was in the hands of this motley antisocial crew of wasted men. At best the prospects were bleak. He would lose the company money that had been advanced to Bradford and he would be eased out of his position. Word would get around to other companies, and Monte would be unemployable.
"The good news is that each man's share is fifty thousand dollars. An equal split," Bradford said as he studied his team's reactions. "The bad news is terrible. None of us is going to have the time to get into the condition we should be in for a high-altitude climb. You're not being paid that kind of money because we're going on a picnic. Some of us may die," he added, pitching his voice low so that the possibility gained a heightened reality. "If anyone has second thoughts, now's the time to pull out. When we're on the ice you may regret your decision."
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