Free Fire

by C. J. Box

  Nate went about starting a fire, rolling logs the length of small cars into the massive stone fireplace. Within twenty minutes, the fire threw sheets of orange light on the walls and started to warm the place. The FBI assault team unpacked their weapons and equipment using the light from the fire and from headlamps they’d brought. Several of them scrambled when a deep-throated whooshing sound seemed to shake the walls, and Joe said, “It’s just Old Faithful erupting outside.”

  Joe noticed how the assault team spoke to one another in whispered voices or via radio mikes strapped to their shoulders, even when they were all in the same room. He got the distinct feeling that despite Portenson’s overall command of the operation, these men were in their own tight universe. The squad commander, a beefy and intense man with a breast patch that read “McIlvaine,” kept up a low monologue with his men while flashing quick, suspicious looks at Nate, Joe, and Portenson.

  After pulling a dust sheet off a table, Joe sat down at it with Portenson, Ashby, and McIlvaine. McCann, still bound and gagged, was seated across from Portenson. Nate hovered nearby, pretending to tend the fire. He fed it with wood the length and girth of rolled-up Sunday newspapers.

  As the fire crackled and the snow fell outside, Joe outlined his plan to Portenson and played back sections of the recording of McCann that implicated Langston, Ward, and Layborn. While he listened, Portenson rubbed his hands together. At first, Joe thought the agent was warming them. Then he realized Portenson was growing more excited the more he heard, apparently confirming that the case was solid after all and soon he would be making headlines, receiving commendations, and requesting a transfer to Hawaii. McIlvaine, meanwhile, shook his head. The assault commander smiled wolfishly, obviously not surprised by the corruption of his brethren. McCann looked bored as he heard his own words played back.

  “So we can arrest them in one fell swoop,” Portenson said, nodding. “That’s the part I like. We’ve got video and audio equipment with us, so we’ll get it all down.”

  “I assume they’ll all arrive together,” Joe said, ignoring the camera crew comment.

  “If they can get here at all,” McIlvaine said. “The weather’s gotten worse, not better.”

  “What kind of lead do you think we’ve got on them?” Portenson asked Joe.

  “I’m guessing a few hours,” he said. “It would take a while for them to get together and talk this all through. They’re big talkers, according to McCann. They like to have meetings to decide what to do. So they’ll know McCann is gone, and they’ll have his call about Olig and going to the FBI. There have been rumors up here all summer that Olig is alive and hiding out around here; no doubt they’ve heard them too. That’s why we mentioned Olig, so they’d draw their own conclusions. We wanted to get them to come here, but we didn’t want it to be too obvious.”

  McCann rolled his eyes, said, “Mmff.”

  “He wants to say something,” Portenson said.

  Joe reached up and pulled the tape away, much more gently than Nate had done it.

  “What if I don’t cooperate?” McCann asked. “There’s a big assumption being made here.”

  “Why wouldn’t you?” Portenson said. “This is the best chance you’re going to get. If it all works out, you can cut a deal and testify against your buddies. You might even walk . . . again.”

  Joe sat back and said nothing. The idea that McCann would once again go free bothered him nearly as much as his plan falling apart. He vowed that it wouldn’t happen but kept his mouth shut. When he glanced up at Nate, he saw Nate studying him as if reading his mind. Nate nodded slightly, as if to say, “McCann won’t walk.”

  There had been no discussion about the arrangement Joe had made with Portenson, and Joe found it odd that after the initial acknowledgment, the agents had conspicuously ignored Nate. Again, Joe got an inkling something was going on beneath the surface with McIlvaine and his assault team that might or might not involve Portenson.

  “I want some assurances,” McCann said to Portenson in his haughtiest manner. “I want a piece of paper that says if I cooperate to make the arrests, the federal prosecutor will give me immunity.”

  Portenson simply stared. Even in the poor light, Joe could see that blood had drained from the agent’s face.

  Ashby looked from Portenson to Joe, concerned.

  “I can’t get a piece of paper here in time,” Portenson said. “You know that. We’re in the middle of fucking nowhere. It’s Sunday night.”

  “Then forget it,” McCann said, sitting back. “No paper, no cooperation.”

  Portenson, Ashby, and Joe exchanged looks. To Joe, it seemed as if the other two were in the first stages of panic. McCann was playing them the way he’d played his partners, played the Park Service, played a jury, played the system.

  “No paper, no cooperation,” McCann said again, firmly.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Joe saw Nate suddenly rear back and throw a length of wood, which hit the lawyer in the side of his head, making a hollow pock sound. Before McCann could slump off his chair, Nate was all over him, driving him into the hardwood floor.

  McCann gasped, and Nate reached down and twisted his ear off, yanking it back so the tendons broke like too-tight guitar strings.

  “No cooperation, no fucking ear!” Nate hissed, holding it in front of McCann’s face like a bloody poker chip.

  Ashby said, “My God!”

  “Fuckin’-A!” McIlvaine said, approvingly.

  Blood spurted across the floor, ran down McCann’s neck onto the floor. Nate reached down and grabbed McCann’s other ear, growled, “You want to make another threat, law boy?”

  “Please, no! I’ll do what you want! Please, somebody get him off me!”

  Joe grimaced, stood, said, “Nate.”

  McCann shrieked, “I’ll help! I’ll help! I’ll help!”

  As Nate pulled McCann to his feet, he flipped the severed ear onto the table like a playing card he no longer needed. McIlvaine picked it up and inspected it, whistling to himself.

  Portenson looked at Joe, raised his eyebrows, shook his head. “We don’t do this kind of crap, Joe.”

  Joe winked. “Sure you do.”

  ONE OF THE assault team was placed in the woods near the highway interchange with a radio so he could call ahead if anyone was coming. Inside, Joe had watched with interest as McIlvaine efficiently placed the rest of his men throughout the cavernous lobby: two on the second-floor veranda with automatic weapons and a full field of vision of the lobby and door, one in a room on the side of the front desk with a view of the door, another behind the glass in the darkened gift shop, next to the hallway that was the only means of escape.

  While the commander checked in with his team, Ashby bandaged McCann’s head and cleaned up the blood on his face and neck. McCann looked terrified and never took his eyes off Nate, who prowled around the fireplace like a big cat.

  “Is this the way you do things in Wyoming?” Ashby asked Joe.

  “When Nate’s helping me, it’s the way we do things,” Joe said. “This wasn’t his first ear.”

  “I’ve been meaning to ask you about that guy.”

  Joe shook his head, said, “Don’t.”

  WITH THE INN set up for an ambush, Joe and Nate prepared to go find Bob Olig. They strapped headlamps on their heads and Portenson handed Joe a radio.

  “We’ll call you the second we see a vehicle coming,” Portenson said, “although you’ll probably hear it from the chatter. We want you back as soon as you hear because we need you to help set the trap.”

  Joe nodded, clipped the radio to his jacket breast pocket, and put the earpiece in.

  As they climbed the stairs into the absolute darkness of the inn, Joe could hear the assault team checking in with one another. It was pure business, he noted. He wondered again what they’d been discussing among themselves earlier.

  NATE LED JOE up set after set of ancient, twisted knotty pine staircases into the upper reaches of the inn. The o
nly light as they climbed was from Nate’s bobbing headlamp and his own. It got slightly warmer as they rose, but never warm enough that their breath didn’t escape in clouds of condensation. They stepped over or ducked under the chain barriers on each floor to prevent visitors from using the staircases. Joe didn’t like the way the old wooden steps creaked, and he felt a wave of sweat break over him when one of the steps cracked sharply under his boot but didn’t give way.

  They paused to rest on the top landing. The ancient weather-stained boards of the ceiling were right above them. Joe looked around by rotating his head so his headlamp would throw light. At the end of the landing to their left was one of the bizarre Old Faithful crow’s nests that extended perilously over the expanse of the lobby. It looked rickety and diabolical, something designed in a fever dream. He took a step toward the crow’s nest, felt the planks of the walkway sag, and stepped back. Below them, what seemed like a mile down, was the muted orange light from the fireplace. The combination of fear, darkness, and height made Joe swoon and lose his balance, and he bumped into Nate.

  “Careful,” Nate cautioned.

  Joe grunted. He didn’t realize he had a fear of heights and had never experienced this feeling before.

  To their right was a heavily varnished door with a painted sign on it reading NO ENTRANCE.

  Nate said, “Look.” The orb of his headlamp illuminated the rusted steel doorknob and lock. The lock looked rusted shut and wouldn’t give when Nate gently rattled it.

  “I wonder where we can get a key,” Joe said. “Do you want me to call down to see if Ashby has one?”

  Nate shook his head, examining the lock more closely. He ran his finger down the lock plate.

  “See these gouges?” Nate whispered. “They’re new.”

  Joe leaned over and could see them, a series of horizontal scratches that revealed bare metal. “Try this,” Joe said, handing Nate his pocketknife.

  Nate thrust the three-inch blade between the edge of the door and the jamb, levered it down, and pulled back sharply. There was a click and the door opened an inch.

  “Somebody’s oiled it recently,” Nate said, handing the knife back to Joe.

  Before they opened the door and continued, Joe turned the volume down on his radio and unsnapped his holster. Nate already had his .454 out, loose at his side. The last thing Nate said before opening the door was, “Don’t shoot me.”

  The hallway was narrow, twisted, completely dark. Joe’s shoulders almost touched both walls in places. The ceiling was low and the floor uneven. This was Bat’s Alley, the mysterious passageway built for no apparent reason by the architect of the inn at the turn of the last century. Nate dimmed his headlamp and Joe did the same.

  Joe followed Nate twenty yards until the hallway took a forty-five-degree turn to the left and the floor rose slightly. There were several closed doors on either side now, the openings misshapen and heights uneven. A single small porthole allowed a blue-tinged shaft to fill the hallway with just enough light to create dark shadows. As they passed the porthole, Joe stopped to stick his head into the opening and look out through an oval of thick, mottled glass.

  The scene outside was dark and haunting. The snow on the ground far below was tinted blue, the timber black and melded with the black sky. There wasn’t a single light outside, only the falling snow. In the distance, in the geyser basin, rolls of steam punched their way into the night like fists.

  Another turn of the hallway, and then a distinct smell of food cooking. Another turn, and they could see a band of yellow light from beneath a door at the end of Bat’s Alley.

  Nate turned in the darkness, whispered, “We’ve got him.”

  Joe nodded, his shoulders tense, heart thumping. He slipped his Glock out and, as silently as he could, worked the slide. From behind the door, he could hear hissing and something boiling or bubbling. And someone humming. Joe recognized the tune as “Mambo No. 5.” Joe hated that song.

  At the door at the end of the hallway, Nate paused, mouthed, “Do we knock?”

  Joe nodded yes, and Nate rapped on the door. Although he did it gently, the sounds seemed startling and rude. The humming stopped.

  Nate knocked again.

  Joe heard shuffling and saw the knob turn and the door swing open.

  A man stood there wild-eyed, his mouth agape. He looked like a well-fed yearling bear—short, stout, heavy, with long hair sticking out at all angles from a perfectly round bowling ball of a head. He wore a walrus mustache that had taken over most of his cheeks. There was a gun in his hand but it was pointed down.

  “Bob Olig, I presume?” Joe said.

  Olig worked his mouth but no sound came out. His eyes were fixed on the gaping muzzle of Nate’s .454, which was six inches from his eyebrow.

  “Drop the weapon,” Nate hissed.

  Olig dropped the gun with a clunk, and Nate kicked it across the room.

  “You don’t get a lot of visitors, I’d guess,” Joe said.

  “I get no visitors,” Olig said, his voice throaty, as if he hadn’t used it for a while. “Who are you?”

  “My name’s Joe Pickett. I’m a Wyoming game warden. This is Nate Romanowski.”

  Olig shifted his eyes from Nate’s gun to Joe. “I’ve heard of you. Cutler told me.”

  Joe nodded. The connection was made.

  “I’m making some moose stew,” he said. “Would you like some?”

  “No, thank you,” Joe said, thinking that any other time he would have accepted because he liked moose.

  They went inside, but there was barely enough room for the three of them. The room was narrow, with an extremely high ceiling. Two Coleman lamps hung from metal hooks, hissing. A camping stove burned in the middle of the floor, heating a dented aluminum pot filled with the bubbling dark moose stew. A cot and sleeping bag took up a wall on the inside, and there was a college dorm-like bookcase built with planks and bricks. Tacked to the walls were a map of Yellowstone, a laminated cover sheet of the Kyoto Accords with a red circle drawn over it and a slash through it, and several ripped and puckered magazine pages featuring the actress Scarlett Johansson.

  “I get lonely,” Olig said, flushing. Then, “I don’t get it. What are you guys doing here?”

  Joe said, “We came for you.”

  “You need to come with us,” Nate said.

  Something passed over Olig’s face, and he stepped back as far as he could in the small room. “I’m not going anywhere,” he said.

  “Sure you are,” Nate said, growling.

  “We’ve got Clay McCann,” Joe said.

  Olig’s eyes flashed. “He’s here?”

  “Downstairs,” Joe said.

  “I want to kill that prick.”

  Joe nodded. “I assumed that. Otherwise, I’d guess you would have been long gone by now.”

  “Damned right.”

  Nate shot a puzzled look at Joe.

  “You were friends with Mark Cutler, weren’t you?” Joe asked. “He gave you the room up here while you two tried to figure out why McCann shot your friends from Minnesota, right?”

  Olig nodded.

  “And you two figured out that there were people in the Park Service in on the crime, right?”

  He nodded again.

  “So you stayed here until the two of you could get enough evidence on who was on which side and you could turn them in. But they got to Cutler, and you figured you were next.”

  “I thought you might be them,” Olig said, gesturing to his gun on the floor.

  “Nope,” Joe said. “We want to get them too. And we’ve set up a trap here tonight using McCann and you as bait. We want them to come in and incriminate themselves so we can throw the whole lot of them into prison.”

  “This is a dream come true,” Olig said, rubbing his bear-cub hands. “But you need to leave me alone in a room with Clay McCann. Five minutes. That’s all I need. I’ve been dreaming of this for months.”

  “You’ll need to stand in line for that
,” Joe said.

  “I should be first. He killed my friends.”

  Joe shrugged, conceding the point.

  Nate turned from Olig to Joe. “We can’t stand here talking all night.”

  “I know,” Joe said. “I want to make sure Mr. Olig is with us.”

  Olig said, “You bet your ass I am.”

  AS THE THREE of them went down the hallway, Joe asked, “Besides revenge, why did you stay?”

  Olig sighed. “Guilt. Then fear. I should have been at Bechler with my friends that day, but I was pissed at Rick. I didn’t like his idea about going national with the bio-mining protest. Since I’ve been up here I’ve found myself thinking of things differently. The black and white I used to see when it comes to environmental issues had turned gray. I figured, shit, we might find a cure for cancer with those microbes, or something. We shouldn’t automatically oppose everything. I mean, what makes us so fucking smart? We’re the beneficiaries of people before us figuring out shit that makes our lives better or helps us live longer. Why stop now, just because we think we know it all? The last thing I thought about, though, was that those microbes could be used for energy development.”

  “So you figured that out, huh?”

  “Not me,” Olig said. “Cutler had his suspicions. We all knew about the flamers, but Cutler was a geologist and thought about why they burned. He also told me he was going to show you. That was the night before he was killed.”

  “So you saw the message to us?” Joe asked.

  “Yeah,” Olig said. “I prowl around at night when everyone’s sleeping. Otherwise, I’d go crazy in that little room. I scared some guests a few times though,” he said, chuckling at the recollection.

  “Do you know how far the conspiracy goes within the Park Service?” Joe asked.