No more movement. No sound.
He went closer, then around to the front of the truck. Shining his light into the darkness between the vehicle and the wall, he saw a mass of something on the floor. A closer look revealed that it was feathers.
“Shit,” he said quietly. He’d shot at a poor damn barn owl. Fortunately for the owl, all he’d done was to separate it from part of its tail.
It was time to get out of here. He had one hell of a dangerous journey ahead. Reluctantly, he approached Mike’s body again and felt for a reload for the Magnum. He didn’t find one. He’d never know if the guy failed to bring extra bullets, or used more than one cylinder. Not that it was that important. Dead is dead, and they certainly hadn’t been killed by any barn owl.
It was time to do this, maybe lose his life and maybe not, but the longer he waited the more certain he felt that whoever had done three experts to death would find a way to kill a fourth—or was that a fifth? Diana had yet to be accounted for.
He turned out his light, went to the door, twisted the handle, and raised it onto the storm.
The wind was roaring steadily now, the snow gushing out of the sky in a horizontal cataract. He took his compass out of his pocket and oriented himself, then turned and closed the door.
He started off, pushing his way through snow that was two feet deep at a minimum. When he reached the road, he consulted his compass again, then turned and headed toward the town.
He’d find the Cherokee. He’d survive. He’d get this perp and see him take the needle.
The wind howled around him, clutching him, shaking him with the full power of nature at its most wild.
He struggled off toward the town, his compass his only guide.
CHAPTER TEN
Flynn’s struggled to stay on the road, to see any possible attacker, to somehow make progress against a storm that was like a living creature. He timed himself, hoping that he could get at least a rough idea of when he might be approaching the jeep. He also watched as best he could for the puma or for any other sign of danger.
When a flicker lit the snow, his first thought was that it was lightning. There was no thunder, though. Then, for the briefest moment, a neat pool of light crossed a drift to his right.
He reacted by dropping and rolling off the road. He let himself sink into the snow. Face up, he lay absolutely still, breathing as lightly as possible. Heat sensing equipment worked particularly well in conditions like this and he did not want his breath to reveal him to infrared detectors.
He reached for the Glock with his right hand, Mike’s Special with the left. He’d worked for years to shoot effectively with his left hand, and was able to hit targets firing from it at eighty percent of his right-handed proficiency.
If anything came at him, he was going to do his best to shoot it and the hell with the police self-identification mandate, this was kill or die. As always in moments like this, he took his attention away from his mind and even his problem, and concentrated it on his body. You’d think that paying attention to the problem was what you needed. But what you needed was a hunter’s form, and that was a physical discipline. As he emptied his mind, cocked silence filled him. His breathing became deep, his heartbeat slowed.
After a moment, a more intense light appeared, growing at first brighter, then slowly dimming. It was moving up the road, and it seemed to be coming from above, like a searchlight shining down from a helicopter.
As had been the case at the Hoffmans’, there wasn’t the slightest sound of an engine. A helicopter produces noise in two ways. There’s the engine sound, but the distinctive chopping is caused by the rotor, or wing, breaking the sound barrier for a moment each time the engine drives it forward.
There was no engine noise. There was no chop. So could this be one of the rumored silent wing choppers the air force had been working on? Was it the air force, then? Could it therefore mean safety?
No, this same type of aircraft had been used to kidnap the Hoffmans.
So the perp had a trained lion and a helicopter with a silent wing.
He waited, breathing evenly, letting the snow settle around him. He was freezing cold but must not allow himself to shiver. His face burned from cold, but he would not move to push the snow away.
The light flashed down again and again, continuing on past him, growing slowly fainter until it was finally absorbed by the darkness.
Did the possession of an advanced helicopter mean a defense connection of some sort?
If he got out of this alive, that would be another line of inquiry worth pursuing. Right now, though, it was all he could do not to let his mind frantically game survival options. From long experience and study, he knew that in conflict the body is a better master than the mind. He concentrated his attention on his senses, mostly his hearing.
From yoga, he’d learned a practice of containing his body heat, and he regulated his breathing carefully. He needed to remain here for an unknown amount of time, but without intense physical discipline he was going to have to move in a few minutes or be frozen.
He took in breath, held it deep, then expelled it slowly, retaining as much heat as he could.
The light returned, brighter this time. It was definitely coming from above, no question about that. If he had a helicopter with a silent wing, then maybe he also had a MindRay, maybe even a better one. Certainly heat sensors and night vision equipment. But would any of it register the presence of a mind in deep trance?
He concentrated his attention on his inner silence. His mind became totally quiet. He waited. They might get him, but there would be death among them.
Slowly, the light faded once again. Whatever equipment they had, they hadn’t found him. Unless, of course, they were waiting for him to stand up into an ambush. If they were certain that he was here, they might realize that the snow was concealing him from their detectors. Therefore, he had to remain hidden until they concluded that he was dead.
He couldn’t see his watch and dared not bend his arm, so he began to count. He needed to stay here at least half an hour, but how was he going to do that without freezing to death?
The cold penetrated deeper and faster than he’d thought possible, coming in through his double ply of long johns, making his bones ache and his skin go numb.
Time passed. He remained still. Methodically, he moved his fingers and toes.
When he’d heard nothing for what he hoped was at least fifteen minutes, he moved slightly.
No light flickered, no sound came but the wind.
He moved more, lifting his head until he could hear the intimate whisper of snow as it slid out of the sky.
As he came to his feet, he did an immediate reconnaissance up and down the road. It appeared that he was alone. To the east, the sky was slightly brighter, but darkness still dominated. He glanced at his watch. Five fifteen. He had not been under the snow for ten or twelve minutes. He had remained here for more than two hours.
He struggled back up onto the road and turned south, then resumed plodding.
Walking was hard work and extremely slow and even without his pursuers to capture him, it was clear to him that he might not make it out of this. If he didn’t find the jeep and then also missed the crossroads and therefore didn’t find the town, he would die within the hour. In fact, unless everything went perfectly and he had luck, one way or another, he was going to die in this place.
Ahead, a frozen road sign danced in the wind. It was caked with ice and unreadable, but he could see that it contained an arrow pointing to the right.
It was the way to the town. Even better, sometime in the past two or three hours, it had been plowed. Snow was blowing again, but when he put his feet down they hit tarmac, not crunching ice. He was able to safely increase his speed, which he did, forcing more and more out of himself, but at the same time getting his body into the same kind of rhythm that enables animals to lope for hours, checking his breathing, his heart rate, going for the long pull.
He be
gan to allow himself to think that he might have escaped.
The road, though, seemed to go on forever. How long had they driven to get from the town to the Hoffman’s turn off? He recalled ten minutes at most. The snow had kept them to twenty miles an hour, perhaps a little faster. So his best guess was that he had about five miles to go. He set his walking speed at four miles an hour, very fast for these conditions, but possible. He knew how each speed felt, from two to six miles an hour. The fact that the road had been plowed was a major plus. If he’d had to slog through the same depth of snow that had choked the side road, he wouldn’t have made more than two miles an hour at best.
By the time he could finally see the town’s streetlight, putting one foot in front of the other had become a struggle. Beyond it was the Motel 6, a strip of twelve rooms, two cars in front, most likely salesmen sheltering from the storm. He needed to inform the local authorities about the disaster at the Hoffmans’, but he had no idea where the police station was located. He headed for the motel. They’d have a phone.
The office was lit by a single storm candle guttering in a saucer on the counter. The room was empty and it was cold. So they’d lost power.
“Hello?”
Nothing.
There was an area map glued under plastic, beside it a stand with brochures promising hunting, fishing, and hot-air balloon rides. They touched him with a strange nostalgia, and he found that he understood the look he’d seen in the eyes of cops who had seen carnage. They longed for the time before, and now so did he.
“Excuse me? Hello?”
Still nobody.
He went around the counter and leaned into the office. An ancient woman sat slumped behind a weathered old desk.
“Excuse me, ma’am?”
When she still didn’t respond, he went around the desk and touched her shoulder. Her blouse was dank, the bones beneath dry and light.
Finally, there was a sort of subsurface shudder and she slowly unfolded. She looked up at him out of eyes that had once been tiny with cunning, but were now tired old beads of suspicion. She blinked. Blinked again. Then her face lifted itself from its wrinkled depths, the eyes suddenly full of flicker, and he saw ancient loves reflected there.
“Well, what do I have but a fine-looking young man in here,” she said, then she smiled and the whole room lit up. “My God, where’d you come from?”
“Broke down ’bout a mile out.”
“Lucky it wasn’t more. Lucky we got room, night like this.” She unfolded from the desk, her face briefly rigid with pain. Then the smile came back and she glided into the front like the dancer she must once have been.
He followed.
“Can’t run a card till we get the juice back. You good for forty bucks?”
He pulled out his wallet. “I’ve got the cash.”
“Well, that’s fine then.”
“Where’s the local police station?”
“You in trouble?”
“I’m a policeman from Texas. I need some information.”
“You lookin’ for the rustlers, aint’cha? It’s Mexicans, I’m tellin’ you. Them illegals. They got trucks, Texas. Big trucks. And guns, too. Big’uns. You’re carryin’ two pistols, Texas. Ain’t enough.”
The eyes were sharp, no question there. “Where’s the station?”
“There’s no police here in Ridge, we got about fifty people living around here is all. You’ll have to go on down to the town of River City. There’s a state police barracks there. Four fellas. This is Montana. We ain’t got a lotta police.”
“Is there a bus through here?”
“Eight in the morning, if it’s on time. Stops at the café. But you’re gonna sleep like an old dog, you lie down on a bed, boy. Want a call?”
“Yeah, that would be good.”
With no computer, she didn’t record the registration, which was just as well. The more he thought about it, the less sure he was that he would stop at that barracks. He really did not want to explain the Hoffman place to the state cops, how he had gotten there, what he had been doing, any of it. What he wanted to do was to get to an FBI office, and that would mean going all the way to Billings on that bus.
Somebody had to have a record of the men who had died on this operation, who they reported to, who they were, for that matter. Because he didn’t think he’d been told a straight story, not any of it. But somebody would know in Washington or wherever, and the FBI office in Billings would be the place to start locating that person. He didn’t want to try to involve the locals anymore, not when he was the only survivor. God only knew where things might go, when some smart detective realized that he was the only witness and the only person who had come out of there alive.
“Look,” the old lady said, “I can’t get the keycard machine to print a key, so here’s a maid’s key. It works on all the rooms but please don’t take advantage of that.”
“No ma’am.”
“All we got here is a meat broker, some kinda pesticide salesman, and a couple of them gay cowboys keep comin’ around here since that damn movie. Ten years and they’re still comin’. Gay cowboys, my God, how could there be so many?”
“It’s a solitary life,” Flynn said.
He left her shaking her head as she negotiated the snow-swept walk that fronted the line of rooms. It was ungodly cold. If his cell phone had been working, he would have pulled up the weather app, but he made a guess that it was no more than zero, and probably below.
There was no heat in Room Seven, but also no wind and no snow. He did not undress, but wrapped himself in the thin blanket and stretched out on a mattress that wasn’t long enough for him.
He lay there, his mind turning over what had happened. But what had happened? A lion, a helicopter in a raging windstorm?
“Oh, Abby,” he said in the privacy of the inner dialogue that he carried on with her, “what secrets do you know?”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
He slept like an animal sleeps, with just enough awareness left behind to rouse him if there was trouble. Sometime toward dawn, he heard the snarl and clank of a gang of plows passing outside. Later, a woman sang to herself on the other side of one of the cardboard walls. Or was that Abby come to him?
A little after seven, thin light woke him. He was washing his face in a chilly memory of hot water when the old lady called. He thanked her and headed out.
The sky was ribbed steel, cold and low, and the wind was blowing what felt like a pretty steady forty miles an hour out of the northwest. There was no snow falling, but streams of it rose from the drifts and pummeled his parka and face. His two-day growth of beard provided welcome insulation.
The café was closed. “No Juice,” said a sign scrawled on the door. He needed to eat. There were pies in a case on the counter, bags of Fritos on a stand. He could drink raw eggs without a problem. Plus, the lock was simple. The problem was, if he got caught, there’d be a ridiculous hassle to deal with, and more trouble for him if those bodies had already been found.
He stood on the stoop of the café, looking for the bus. He didn’t know where it was coming from or where it was going. It didn’t really matter, though. Away from here, that was all that mattered.
He was stomping and blowing on his hands when it finally showed up at nine twenty. It was like an angelic apparition, the big, muddy, slab-sided Greyhound. It had been in a war with the elements, but it was here, rumbling and clattering and shaking, brown ice dripping along its windows, shadowy travelers within.
When he got on, he found it packed. Probably a lot of people were cold. Probably they were looking for shelter in Billings. Well, so was he.
He went to the back where there were still a few seats, and took one beside a huddled red parka.
With a hiss of air brakes and a rumble from the engine, the bus started off. A few minutes passed, and the red parka stirred. “How long to Montana?” its occupant asked as she raised her head.
“We’re in Montana,” he replied. He turned to h
er.
It was Diana, and he was too surprised to speak.
“Help me,” she said.
“Of course. I thought—”
“I don’t know how I escaped.” Her hand came toward his. He looked down at it. She withdrew it, entwining it with the other, twisting them together.
“What happened?’
She glanced toward the seat in front of them. “Not now.”
“I understand. Where are you going?”
“Billings. I’ve got to make a report and I want a secure line, not a cell phone.” She took a long breath. “This is unprecedented.” She returned to her previous hunched posture. “How did they do it?”
“That’s not my question to answer.” She’d sent three men to their deaths. How they had been killed or by whom were not the issue. The fact that they’d been exposed to the danger, that was the issue. Her issue.
She turned to him. “You don’t want to talk about it?”
“No.”
“But you would have handled things differently?”
“Yes.”
“You need to know more. Then you’ll understand more.”
“Who’s going to tell me?”
He felt her cold fingers brush his wrist. He did not react, but he also found that he did not move away. “I don’t have that authority,” she said.
“Then there’s something wrong in your chain of command, lady. I’m what you got left on the front line, and you can’t tell me my mission? That’s poor.”
“You’re furious.”
“Too goddamn much secrecy. Lives wasted. So, yeah.”
“And I wasted them?”
“If I get to submit a report, that’s part of what I’ll say. You shouldn’t be doing this work. Sorry.”
She sucked in breath. There was anger in her eyes, a flush in her cheeks. Not used to criticism, that was clear. “I didn’t know he had a tiger,” she said. “Nobody could know that.”
“It was a lion.”
She whirled in her seat, eyes now flashing. “That was a Siberian tiger.”
“Oh?”
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