Back of Beyond

by C. J. Box

  “So I ask again,” Cody said, “what the hell is going on?”

  Gannon gathered himself and sat up with a moan. “Every inch of me hurts,” he said.

  “More is about to,” Cody said, and shot him in the knee.

  “Jesus!” Mitchell said, jumping back. “Why’d you do that?” The spent casing landed between his boots.

  Cody said to Mitchell, “I’ve seen this particular method of interrogation work pretty well before.” Thinking about the year before in Denver. It had certainly worked then, to a point.

  Gannon howled and grabbed his mangled leg with both hands. Cody hoped he wouldn’t pass out from shock before he started talking. Nevertheless, he took careful aim at Gannon’s other knee.

  “Please, no, no…,” Gannon begged.

  “Hoyt, I don’t know about this,” Mitchell said, shaking his head.

  “Tell me why you’re on this trip,” Cody said to Gannon.

  “We’re trying to find that plane,” Gannon shouted, fighting through the pain. “That goddamned plane that went down.”

  “What plane?” Cody asked, but as he said it he recalled something Larry had said. Something about a disabled private airplane flying south toward Yellowstone that was spotted by citizens in Bozeman but never reported missing by anyone. The incident had caused the assembling of the interagency Homeland Security search and rescue team and that was when Larry said he met Rick Doerring of the Park Service.

  “That goddamned plane that went down last winter,” Gannon said through clenched teeth. Black blood seeped through his fingers, which were laced around his shattered kneecap.

  “What’s in the plane?”

  “Jesus. Money. Jesus. Drug money.”

  “Why go with Jed? Why didn’t you just come up here on your own and go get it? Why involve all these people?”

  Gannon was starting to shake. His teeth chattered. “It wasn’t my fucking idea. Jesus, I’m going to bleed out and die.”

  “Let’s hope,” Cody said. “So whose idea was it? You said ‘we.’”

  “My partner. All my partner’s idea. All of it.”

  Cody took a deep breath, fighting back the urge to shoot again. Mitchell hovered, shaking his head.

  Cody said, “So your idea was to what? Come up here with Jed’s clients and break off and find this damned plane? Use him so he could lead you here?”

  Gannon nodded his head. “Yeah, that. We wanted to come on our own but with the snowpack and the flooding, this was the first time we could get to where we think the plane crashed. When we found out Jed was leading his clients where we wanted to go—and would be the first to get there anyway—we signed on. Believe me, there wasn’t supposed to be all this trouble.”

  Cody gestured with the rifle, urging Gannon to keep talking.

  “None of this other stuff—those three stupid guys back there—was supposed to happen. But that idiot Jed decided to take a different trail, and one of ’em—Glode—got mad about it. That and his wife going down with D’Amato. So he said he was going back on his own. We couldn’t risk him getting back to the vehicles and telling the Park Service where we were going. What if they sent rangers after us? They might locate the plane before we did.”

  Cody thought the likelihood of the Park Service sending rangers to tell Jed McCarthy to get back on the established route was crazy and unlikely, but he didn’t want Gannon to stop talking, so he urged him on.

  “So I went with Glode. I tried to talk him into going back with the others, but he was stubborn and had a bug up his ass and he wouldn’t turn around. And you know what happened. I had to stop him.”

  Cody took a step toward Gannon, still aiming down the sights at his other knee. “Why take out D’Amato and Russell, then?”

  Gannon closed his eyes. His chin shook. “They wouldn’t have found Glode or me and they might have gone all the way to the parking lot looking for us. There was a good chance they’d call the Park Service and report a couple of missing men. It was a worse situation than what happened with Glode, because at least that guy deserved it.”

  “So you shot them both point-blank when they found you,” Cody said. “And left them to bleed out or wait for animals to find them. Thinking they’d be mauled beyond recognition if their bodies were ever found and maybe not even point to you.”

  Gannon rocked back on his haunches holding his knee. He said, “This whole damned thing is a clusterfuck. Everything’s gone wrong.”

  Cody said, “So why did Jed take the other trail?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t know … it’s all his fault this happened.”

  “He didn’t kill three people,” Cody said, “or put my son in danger.”

  Gannon writhed in pain. “Worse,” he said. “Worse.” As if that somehow lessened his own guilt.

  “So your partner is still with the others on the pack trip?” Cody said.

  Gannon nodded, his eyes closed, his mouth contorted.

  “Which one is he? Jed?”

  Gannon either couldn’t speak or refused to say.

  “I said—”

  “Damn you!” Gannon bellowed as his eyes shot open. He glared at Cody with unbridled hate. “You’re a cop. I know you’re playing rough and you’ll think of some story to cover you later. I know you won’t kill me. But I damned sure know she will.”

  Cody felt the hairs on his neck stand up. “What did you just say?”

  37

  Jed McCarthy was angry and anxious and almost missed the game trail he was seeking to go up the mountain. That Dakota was miffed at him was one thing. But to blatantly disregard his instruction to bring him another horse, to vanish like that leaving only his saddle on a stump, was another. And why did she take the lame horse with her? Where in the hell did she go when she should have been getting dinner ready for his clients?

  So he’d gotten another damned horse from the herd and put his saddle on it and ridden out of there.

  “Women,” he said, as if it were a curse word.

  He wondered if she’d be there when he got back to camp. He wondered whether—hoped—Tristan Glode, Tony D’Amato, and Drey Russell had returned as well. He didn’t care about Wilson, never had.

  If they were all back his world would be in order again, even if Dakota had split the blanket for good. He could cope for the rest of the trip without a petulant Dakota dragging him down.

  He’d make sure that future didn’t have any women like Dakota in it, he thought with a crooked grin.

  As he wound his way up the mountain directly west away from the trail he caught a glimpse through the trees of a J-shaped glacier on the side of a mountain face. He recognized it and nodded to himself, then reached back and undid his saddlebag to compare it against the Google map printouts in his file. The file was missing, and he bellowed, “Dakota! You bitch!”

  * * *

  He thanked God she hadn’t dug deeper and found the satellite phone. He’d never even told her it existed, or that he brought it along on every pack trip just in case he got into some kind of trouble. He was afraid she’d make a casual reference to it and a client would hear her and want to use it. Pretty soon, he’d have clients lined up wanting to call home, check on their kids, call the office, and so on. He was a purist about the wilderness and about the experience he wanted to impart on his trips, and that experience had very much to do with isolation and forcing his guests to not keep in contact with home.

  But this was different. This was about him. He punched in the number he was told not to call under any circumstances until he was done with the trip and it rang three times before it was picked up.

  “What?”

  “This is Jed. I’ve got a problem.”

  “I know who the hell it is. It’s not a good time.”

  “I said I have a problem. I need your help.”

  “You’ve got more problems than you know, Jed. I’ve been trying to reach you for two fucking days. Don’t you ever turn that thing on?”

  “No,” Jed
said. “I told you. I don’t even tell anyone I have it. If someone heard me talking on it—”

  “I know, I know, you already told me, for Christ’s sake. But given the circumstances, I thought you’d at least check it.”

  Jed said, “Someone took the map.”

  Silence.

  “I said—”

  “I heard you! How in the hell did that happen? Who took it?”

  “Don’t worry,” Jed said. “I know who it is and I’ll deal with her later. She works for me. Correction: worked for me. I don’t think she’s smart enough to figure out what we’re even looking for. But right now I’m practically there. I can see the glacier. I need you to send me that map again as an attachment. You can do that, can’t you?”

  “If she’s got the map she might figure it out.”

  Jed took a deep breath and looked up at the sky. “She won’t figure it out. I’ll make sure she doesn’t. I’ll make up a story about something—don’t worry about it. Right now, I need another copy of that map. Can you send it or not?”

  A long sigh. “I told you it wasn’t a good time. I’m on the way somewhere now. I’ve got to deal with a problem of my own.”

  “Are you on duty?”

  “Yeah. But what I’m doing is off the books.”

  “Can you send it to me when you get back to your office?”

  “Yeah.” He was distracted. “Yeah, I can do that.”

  “How long before I can expect it, then?”

  “I don’t know. Forty-five minutes at the latest. Providing there’s no one around.”

  Jed nodded. “Okay then. Good. So what’s the other problem you referred to?”

  “There’s a cop after you.”

  Jed felt his insides contract. “What?”

  “There’s a cop after you. His name is Cody Hoyt, and he’s completely fucking nuts. His son is on your trip, I guess. Jed, he somehow thinks there’s a connection between some murders and someone on your trip. That’s why he’s after you.”

  Jed shook his head. “I don’t understand. What murders?”

  “The last one happened up here a week ago. He thinks whoever killed this guy—his name was Winters—is on your pack trip. He wants to find him.”

  “So what are you telling me?”

  “To watch out. I lost track of him two nights ago in Bozeman, but he was definitely headed your direction.”

  “Are you saying he’s in the park?”

  “I don’t know. I’m going to find out. That’s where I’m headed right now. I know a guy who probably knows where he is.”

  “He’s in the park?” Jed said again.

  “I told you, I don’t know.”

  “And what do you mean he thinks there’s a killer on my trip? Who in the hell is that supposed to be?” Thinking: If anyone, it’s Wilson.

  “I don’t have a name. I don’t even have a description. I’m not sure he knows.”

  “The boy must be Justin because he’s the only boy on the trip.”

  “Okay.”

  “Why in the hell would a killer book a pack trip? This makes no sense.”

  “I know, I know. I’m just telling you what I know.”

  “Look,” Jed said, trying to keep his anger at bay, “You told me you’d take care of the back end. You told me all I’d need to worry about was finding that wreckage and you’d handle your end and make sure nobody put things together. You fucking told me you’d use all your … influence … to make sure I was the only one looking for that plane.”

  “I know all that. You think I don’t?”

  “I don’t know anything,” Jed said, shouting into the mouthpiece, “except you assured me you’d handle your end. What the hell is going on here? Can’t you control a single fucking cop?”

  A long sigh. “He’s gone rogue. Nobody can control this guy. Believe me, I thought I’d put him out of the picture, but somehow he got away.”

  Jed said, “So what do you want me to do? Do you want me to just turn around and forget everything? Do you want me to quit? Well, I can’t do that because I’m here. I see the glacier. This whole trip has fallen apart and I’ve got clients gone and angry and I’ll probably lose my business if any of ’em tells the Park Service.”

  “Just calm down, Jed. I’ll handle my end.”

  “You’ve fucked up your end, if you ask me.”

  “Look, I’m here. I’m ten minutes away from his house. I’ve got to go inside and get some answers. I’ll call you back as soon as I know where Hoyt is. And I’ll send you that map and the GPS coordinates the minute I get back to the office. Just don’t fucking panic.”

  Jed said, “You’d better make this right. The rest of my damned life depends on it.”

  “I will. Don’t worry. Now keep your phone on.”

  38

  At the same time, two and a half miles away, Cody and Bull Mitchell hoisted Jim Gannon up over a high branch. They’d decided based on what Gannon had told them they had to move as quickly as they could to overtake the pack trip, and bringing along the wounded Gannon and four extra horses would slow them down. Using tape and bandages from Mitchell’s first-aid kit, they’d bound up Gannon’s knee the best they could and tied his hands and feet together. Mitchell had fashioned a seat harness out of rope they could use to lift him.

  “Give me a couple of minutes,” Mitchell said, breathing hard from the labor of pulling on the rope with Cody. “I need to get these spare horses picketed so they’ll be okay.”

  Cody nodded and unhooked the satellite phone and powered it up. He had a good clear signal and no messages. He started to key in the number for Larry’s secret cell phone, thought better of it, and called Larry’s ex-wife’s cell. She was a real estate agent and was never without it day or night.

  “Cindy Olson.”

  “Cindy, this is Cody Hoyt. I’m out of town and I need to reach Larry.”

  “Oh, it’s you. The man who shot our coroner.”

  It seemed like ages ago, Cody thought. “Yes, well, there’s a good story that goes along with that but I’ll need to tell you at a better time. Right now, it’s urgent I get ahold of Larry.”

  “Ah,” she said, “you probably tried his office and his cell but he didn’t pick up.”

  “Sort of.”

  “Then you probably didn’t hear. I’m surprised you didn’t, since you two have such a deep bromance. Larry’s been suspended. You can reach him at home, I suspect. Suggest to him that he spend some of his downtime looking for work because he’s got a child support payment coming up.”

  “Why was he suspended?”

  “Guess, Cody.” And she hung up.

  He called Larry’s house. He lived outside of Helena near Marysville on U.S. Highway 279.

  “Larry,” Cody said.

  There was a beat. Then, “It’s you, you son of a bitch. Where are you? Did you get my messages?”

  “I got ’em.”

  “Then why in the hell didn’t you call me back?”

  Cody said, “I don’t have time to explain, but in a nutshell I got paranoid. I didn’t want you to know where I was because of that fire in Bozeman.”

  “What are you saying?” Larry sounded hurt. “You thought I had something to do with that? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “I don’t know what I was thinking,” Cody lied. “Blame it on the DTs. I’m fucking miserable, but we got the bad guy. Or at least one of them.”

  “Who is it? And who the hell is ‘we’?”

  Cody outlined hiring Mitchell, and the trail of bodies leading them to Gannon. “He’s here now,” Cody said. “We hung him up in a tree so the bears and wolves won’t eat him. The Park Service can cut him down and take him to a clinic. Not that I really care about that, but we’ll need his testimony to nail his partner, who is also on the pack trip.”

  “His partner?” Larry sounded genuinely baffled. That made Cody feel better toward him.

  “A woman.”

  “Ah, Rachel Mina,” Larry said. Cody leaned
into the phone, shocked Larry knew the name. “Although that’s not her married name, which is Rachel Chavez.”

  “How do you know that?” Cody asked.

  “You dumb shit, it was what I was trying to tell you when I called. I didn’t know about Gannon, but I did know about Rachel Mina Chavez. It’s called police work, and I think I connected all the dots. Of course, that’s before they suspended me for withholding what I knew about you.”

  Cody felt his head begin to spin. “Tell me what you know,” he said.

  Larry sighed. Cody could anticipate from that sound Larry was going to roll it out in the only way he could. He glanced up to see if Mitchell was still taking care of the horses and saw he was. And Jim Gannon swung slowly in a circle over his head, passed out. The late evening sun made a long shadow across the meadow of Gannon’s figure, and in silhouette it looked like the outfitter was hanging from the tree by the neck.

  “We were looking at the wrong angle with those murders,” Larry said. “At least I was. All I could think of was alcoholics. So how do we get a connection between all these alkies in four different parts of the country? The thing I was trying to figure out was if it were possible they were all in the same place at the same time, like we talked about. Like an ex-alcoholic convention or something. And if not that, something to do with their jobs. But their professions didn’t lend that any hope. They might all travel from time to time, but not to the same places or for the same reasons. I couldn’t figure out how to put them in the same place at the same time, or to have something in common to link them besides drinking. To all be exposed somehow to whatever would later cause them to be murdered.”

  Cody said, “You’ve got to get to it, Larry. We need to get going.”

  “I know, I know. But do you remember when you told me Winters said no matter what, you can find a meeting?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So I got together with the brains at ViCAP and they were able to access his travel records. Winters flew exclusively on Delta out of Helena, so it wasn’t difficult. Man, that guy was all over the west but nothing jumped out at us. But one of the FBI boys thought to pull the records from Shulze as well, thinking if we could cross-reference just one flight or destination between them—put the two of them in the same place at the same time—we’d have something to go on.”