Back of Beyond

by C. J. Box

  Cody said, “I’m not going to lie and tell you you’ll be okay.”

  The man closed and reopened his eyes. Not out of disappointment, but a means of signaling Cody that he understood.

  Cody could feel blood from the exit wound soaking into the denim of his trousers. It was warm.

  “Can you hear me?” Cody said.

  Again, the man blinked.

  “Are you with the pack trip led by Jed McCarthy?”

  Blink. Yes.

  “Is there an older boy on the trip? Named Justin? Seventeen, eighteen?”

  Yes.

  “Is he okay?”

  Yes.

  “Man, I don’t know what to do. There’s no way to stop the bleeding.”

  Yes.

  “Did you see who shot you?”

  Yes.

  “Can you try to talk? Can you please try to tell me what happened and who did it?”

  Yes.

  The man closed his eyes and swallowed painfully. Cody looked skyward for a fresh thought or a signal that would give him—and the gunshot victim—some kind of hope. Or something he could do to make this poor man more comfortable.

  He felt the man die. It wasn’t a sound or a movement, but a sudden absence of firmness in his lap. Cody looked down. “Not now,” Cody pleaded. “Not before you tell me what happened.”

  The man’s eyes were still open but there was nothing behind them. His mouth was slightly open and red inside, the color of candied cherries. Cody reached up and closed the eyes, pulling the lids and hoping they’d stay that way. They did.

  * * *

  Cody rolled the body off his legs. In death, it seemed twice as heavy as before. He stood unsteadily. His muscles ached from riding and he was covered with a man’s sacred lifeblood; his jeans were black and sticky and orange half-moon-shaped pine needles stuck to the denim. He bent over and dug through the victim’s clothing and found a wallet and flipped it open. André Alan Russell, resident of Manhattan. Cody remembered the name from the file he took from Jed’s office.

  As he’d done earlier in the day, he photographed Russell’s body and wounds, knowing while he did it that the shooting had happened someplace else and this wasn’t the crime scene. He wondered how far Russell had come from where he’d been shot. He dragged Russell’s body off the trail. Before tucking it in beneath a massive fallen tree and covering it the best he could with heavy logs and branches, Cody looked skyward for a moment, then looted all of Russell’s pockets looking for a package of cigarettes that wasn’t there. Cursing, Cody then covered the body. The cover wouldn’t prevent predators from finding it—probably nothing would—but he hoped he could return with help to get the body out before it was torn up.

  He kept Russell’s New York driver’s license but cached the wallet and the contents of the man’s pockets in the crook of the aspen tree he’d used to keep Gipper around.

  Since Mitchell’s GPS was gone and he couldn’t get a reading of coordinates, Cody found a T-shirt in his saddlebag and ripped it up and tied one strip to the cover where the body was and another on a low overhanging branch at the trail to mark the location. He scribbled in his spiral notebook what he’d found and what he’d done with the body and Russell’s possessions.

  When he was through he stood and wiped sweat from his face and took off his hat to cool the top of his head. He could see no trace of Russell’s body beneath the cover he’d put on it, but he knew it was there. And the image of Russell’s last attempt to speak would be with him forever.

  * * *

  Back on Gipper, Cody contemplated turning around to try and retrieve the packhorse, but he feared the animal was still running and was miles away. He couldn’t afford to let more time elapse between him and Justin.

  He nudged his horse and Gipper reluctantly stepped back on the trail. As he walked his mount, Cody reached behind him into his saddlebag for the satellite phone. He’d thought long and hard about the situation he was in and had decided he couldn’t take any more chances on his own.

  Because now there were two bodies, and he had no reason to think there wouldn’t be more.

  He turned on the phone and watched the display screen. It was working, but there was no signal. He looked up; the tree cover was too thick. He’d need to wait until he rode into a clearing where the phone could hook up with a satellite. Clipping the phone to his belt next to the Sig Sauer, he cautiously rode on. He could smell Russell’s blood on his clothing and it mixed with the odor of his own fear.

  Things were happening ahead of him. He was hours and miles behind the pack trip, but closing in. He couldn’t wrap his mind around the motivation for the murders but it was obvious whomever was behind it was entering a new stage. The killings leading up to the pack trip departure had been meticulously planned to resemble accidents or suicides. A good deal of thought had gone into them.

  Tristan Glode’s body had been well hidden. It was possible, Cody thought, the murder had taken place out of view of the others on the trip and they may not even know it had occurred. But Russell was different. He’d somehow managed to get away and he’d not been pursued, probably because the killer knew his victim would bleed out. But unlike the murders preceding Russell’s, there was no indication of careful planning or execution. Russell had not been chased down and disposed of to hide the crime.

  Which meant, for one reason or another, that the situation had grown desperate. Desperate men, Cody knew, were capable of anything.

  As was he.

  * * *

  A few minutes went by and Cody checked the phone to see if he’d acquired a signal yet so he could call Larry. He looked up ahead of him and saw a pair of splayed boots that belonged to a third victim.

  Gipper woofed and started to backtrack furiously.

  Filtered sun shimmered on their coats and he could see at least one massive round head and the humps on their backs and the bulge of heavy muscles beneath the fur.

  He’d have to fight off a feeding grizzly sow and her two cubs to identify the body.

  32

  With Gipper in a panic—backtracking blindly, woofing, eyes white and almond-shaped, ears pinned back—Cody jerked on the reins and tried to stay in the saddle. He knew his reaction was as out-of-control as his horse’s and he wasn’t helping the situation, but he didn’t know what to do. The big brown grizzly sow looked up with a mouthful of red meat. The two cubs—one auburn, the other brown like his mother—scrambled back over the body and fell in behind her giant haunches, peering out at him with black eyes.

  Cody managed to crank Gipper’s head to the side and stop him from scrambling long enough to slide his right boot out of the stirrup and swing down to the ground with his rifle. Gipper pranced as if he was electrically charged and pinned Cody to a tree trunk, crushing the wind out of him, then crow-hopped back toward the trail. Cody slipped off the side of the horse, stunned and gasping for breath, and felt the reins being pulled away through his fingers.

  Gipper was gone, crashing through the timber straight away from him, bouncing through the tight grouping of trees, leaving behind showers of broken branches and pine needles. He could hear his horse grunting and feel the hammering of his hooves on the forest floor through the soles of his boots.

  Cody swung the muzzle of the AR-15 toward the body and the bears. The cubs had turned their heads away to the right, transfixed by the panicked run of the horse as it crashed through the trees. The sow, though, locked her eyes with Cody and stretched out, guarding the body with her baseball-mitt-sized paws. The long red strip of flesh swung back and forth in her jaws.

  “Get away,” Cody hollered, fitting the butt plate of his rifle to his shoulder, aiming down the peep sights and fitting the front sight on her arched left eyebrow. “Get the hell away from there.”

  The auburn cub switched his attention to Cody and stood up. He was only three and a half feet tall, a nascent miniature of his mother. His front paws curled down and rested almost comically on his bulging belly. Although he want
ed to, he didn’t look formidable except for the blood on his snout.

  The brown cub mewled and shot out from behind his mother on all fours, scrambling over the body, straight toward Cody.

  “Get back, little guy,” Cody bellowed, stepping toward the charging cub and stomping his lead foot while fixing his sights on him. “GET BACK!”

  The cub came within ten feet before stopping abruptly. It was a deliberate false charge, a bluff move apparently hardwired into grizzly bears that often worked, but Cody refused to run and wouldn’t fire and reveal himself unless he had to. Because he knew if he harmed the cub the sow would be all over him before the ejected brass hit the ground. The .223 rounds from his rifle might slow her, but they wouldn’t likely stop her.

  Standoff.

  He couldn’t run because the grizzlies could chase him down. Even the cubs had flashing claws and teeth.

  Gesturing with the rifle, he advanced several steps as aggressively as he could manage. He screamed at them and bellowed for them to leave and ended up coughing raggedly in what ended as a series of rough barks.

  The brown cub wheeled and ran back to his mother. As soon as he reached her, the sow snorted and jumped back from the body, then spun and crashed away into the timber, followed inches away by the brown cub. The auburn cub remained standing on his hind legs.

  “You better go, too,” Cody growled.

  The auburn cub seemed to suddenly realize he was alone, and he fell to all fours, yelped, and scampered into the woods.

  Cody lowered the rifle, closed his eyes, and let out a long chattering breath. He looked down to see if he’d fouled himself and he was relieved to find out he hadn’t. Over the next minute, he felt his heartbeat slow down. He propped the rifle against a tree trunk and rubbed his face with clammy hands, thinking that the sensation of receding adrenaline was not unlike the first stages of a hangover.

  * * *

  He sensed the bears had not gone far. As he approached the body he held the rifle out in front of him and swept the timber on both sides with his eyes. He could still feel his heart beating hard, and the tips of his fingers and toes ached for nicotine to stop the nerve ends from jangling.

  He winced. The smell of fresh blood and exposed stomach contents was acrid. Shards of flesh were ripped from clean white bones and the pile reminded him of the aftermath of a Thanksgiving turkey.

  Trying not to look at the mutilation directly, he kept his head to the side while he rolled the body over. The underside was not as torn up. In the back pocket of the trousers he found a wallet. Inside was an EasyPayXpress Unlimited MetroCard for the New York subway system, $480 in cash, assorted credit and business cards, family photos of a very large and dark-haired clan, and a New York State driver’s license identifying the victim as Anthony Joseph D’Amato.

  D’Amato’s clothes had largely been torn away and they’d bunched beneath his back. Cody rooted through the shredded clothing and felt something crackle. It was the familiar and fantastically welcome sound of crinkling cellophane, and Cody dropped manically to his knees and ripped at the bundle with both hands.

  Within a slit and blood-spattered double Ziploc bag was a crushed, half-empty pack of Marlboro Lights.

  “D’Amato,” Cody said, “bless you for being a secret smoker.”

  It was obvious one of the grizzlies had swiped the plastic bag with claws that sliced through the cigarettes to the skin below. Cody rooted through the pack, breathing in the sweet smell of powdered tobacco, and found three intact cigarettes. The longest one had a small smear of red on the side of it.

  He looked at it for a second and conceded that yes, he was smoking a dead man’s last bloodstained cigarettes.

  He lit up and sat back and inhaled, looking around for the bears, half expecting them to come barreling out of the forest like demons to rip his throat out while his defenses were down.

  And he wasn’t sure it would be the worst way to go because at least it would be epic and quick.

  * * *

  He left the body of D’Amato on the trail until he could figure out what to do with it. He had no rope to hang it, and it would be a matter of time before the bears came back. His camera was gone with Gipper.

  Cody bushwhacked through the brush in the general direction his horse had run. As he shouldered through tree trunks and stepped over downed timber while smoking his cigarette, he felt it was getting lighter. He walked toward the light and within ten minutes stepped out of the trees into a small grassy clearing.

  The satellite phone had a signal. He punched the number for the cell phone Larry had said to call. Reception was clear and he heard it ring on the other end. Four, five, six rings. No voice mail prompt. Cody let it ring, figuring Larry would eventually hear it and pick up.

  While he waited he slowly pivoted in the meadow so he could keep his eyes out in every direction. He held the AR-15 muzzle down in his right hand. The safety was off. There were no signs of bears, or wolves, or his horse, or whomever had killed Tristan Glode, Russell, and D’Amato. And before them, the string of recovering alcoholics including Hank Winters.

  * * *

  Two minutes later, Cody was surprised when he heard a click through his earpiece. Someone was on the other end.

  “Larry?” Cody said.

  Breathing.

  “Larry, is that you?”

  No other background sound. Just rhythmic breathing. Cody checked the display on his phone to make sure he dialed the correct number. He had. A phone rang somewhere in the background. It was a familiar ring.

  “Who is this? Can you hear me?”

  The breathing quieted and there was silence but the line was still open. Cody recognized the action as when someone places their hand over the microphone to muffle sound.

  “Speak to me,” Cody said. “Say something. I’m calling on official police business. This is an emergency.”

  After a beat, the line was disconnected.

  Battling doubts and tendrils of cold fear rising up from his lower stomach, he punched in the numbers again. He did it deliberately, making sure he didn’t misdial.

  The recorded message said the number was no longer available.

  * * *

  Cody lowered his handset and stared into the sky. It hadn’t been Larry, he was sure of it. And it hadn’t been a stranger answering an unfamiliar phone, like if Larry had inadvertently left the phone unattended on his desk or at a restaurant.

  Whoever answered kept quiet until Cody identified himself. Until Cody had spoken, revealing himself. As if he’d been waiting for the call for quite some time.

  And the ring in the background—before it was muffled—was as familiar to him as the sound of his alarm clock. He knew it because it was how the obsolete phones rang in the Lewis and Clark County Sheriff’s Department headquarters.

  * * *

  Deep in the timber, in the direction of the trail, he heard a branch snap.

  Cody kept the satellite phone on and clipped it back on his belt. He squinted toward the wall of trees to the east where the sound had come from.

  There was the click of steel on rock, a distinctive sound. Then the snort of a horse.

  Gipper?

  Wrong direction, Cody said to himself while raising the AR-15. He wished he had his gear because he very much wanted to replace the short magazine in his rifle with a thirty-rounder.

  He heard the squeak of leather and another footfall. His mouth went dry.

  A horse was coming. Maybe more than one. It was approaching in a deliberate manner that meant someone was in the saddle.

  He lowered himself into a shooter’s stance and took a deep breath.

  33

  As Jed approached Camp Two walking his horse behind him, the conversations stopped abruptly.

  “My horse went lame,” he said. “I didn’t get very far on him before he pulled up hurt.”

  “So you didn’t find them?” Knox asked, distressed.

  “Didn’t get that far,” Jed said.

&
nbsp; “Jesus,” Knox cried to the others, “is anything going to go right at some point?”

  Jed knew he had to extricate himself and turn their attention to other matters. He thought, Get out ahead of the situation and take over in the lead again.

  He was heartened that no one actually confronted him as he entered the camp. Although Dakota, Rachel Mina, and the girl Gracie seemed to view him with challenge and fear—fear was okay, challenge wasn’t—none of them said a word. Which meant they were ceding control of the situation to him, at least a little. He shot a glance at the dad. Angry fathers could be a force to themselves. He hadn’t expected Ted Sullivan to take him on and the man didn’t.

  Whatever they’d been saying about him was suddenly off-limits now that he’d shown up. It used to bother him a little when he’d overhear his clients criticizing him or the decisions he made, but it didn’t anymore as long as it didn’t evolve into open revolt, which it never had. Jed understood how groups worked. A bunch of strangers thrown together sought common ground, and that common ground was often the outfitter who’d brought them together. He was the common denominator among clients of different social strata and interests. So in order to converse, they’d have to find something to either celebrate or bitch about, and that usually turned out to be him, one way or another.

  Jed said to everyone, “Look, folks, I know you’re all worried about what’s going on. It’s crazy to have lost those people, and I’m damned sorry it happened. I’m also damned sorry I took off after them on a horse with a bad wheel.” He gestured toward his bay.

  “What I need to ask you folks,” he said, “is to remain calm. Please remain calm. I can kind of tell there are all sorts of conspiracy tales flying around and all sorts of speculation. That’s natural. But you’re here in this fine camp with plenty of food and comfort. There’s no reason to be worried about anything.”