*
Amanda and the entire campground were up and milling around as I approached.
“Hey,” I said. “What’s up?”
“Didn’t you hear that gunshot? It was like an explosion.”
“Yeah, I guess I did. Probably some hiker met a bear.… I think we should pack up and get rolling. We lost a lot of time stopping here last night.”
“Are you all right, Sebastian?”
“Sure. Why do you ask?”
“No reason. Where did you go?” she asked.
“Oh, just out for a walk, I guess. It was still dark so I couldn’t quite see where I was. Over the road and up into the foothills.”
“Did you go out alone? Was that wise?”
“Sure. No problem. I had my Webley with me.”
I pulled the pistol from my vest pocket.
“Wow. It smells like it’s been fired,” I said.
Amanda gave me a queer look.
“Are you sure you feel all right?”
“Yes. Yeah, sure.… I met Joe up there.”
“Joe? Joe who?”
“Joe. The old Indian medicine man who hangs out at your cabin.”
“I didn’t know there was an Indian hanging around the old cabin,” Amanda said.
“Yeah. I’ve met him several times. Good drinking buddy, although he has expensive taste in booze. He prefers Hendricks, but he’ll drink Tanqueray in a pinch.… I wonder what he was doing up there.”
Amanda gazed at me.
“How about a kiss,” I said, “and then we get out of here.”
She kissed my left cheek and rested her hand against the tattoo on the right side of my face.
“Okay, cowboy, but first we need to freshen your makeup. It’s all worn off, and the tattoo is showing bright as day.”
Chapter 44
Realizations
Yellowstone’s roads wind through the Absaroka Range on the east, with sheers cliffs on one side and equally sheer drops on the other. A thought, like a tiny, nagging cough, suddenly bloomed into realization as I negotiated the narrow incline.
“Sebastian!” Amanda screamed, staring in horror down the cliff on her side of the truck.
I corrected the wheel and saw gravel flying off the side of the road into nothingness.
“They should put guard rails on these roads,” I said.
“Are you awake? Are you all right?”
“Yeah, yeah. Let’s find a place to pull off,” I said.
“All right. That’s probably a good idea. What happened? Did you doze off?”
“No. I’m sorry, Amanda. What have I gotten you into?” I said. “You knew I was acting weird, didn’t you? I missed it. I was totally out of it, off in my own little world… or Empaya Iba’s own little world.”
“What are you saying?” she asked.
“I realize it now, Amanda, what happened last night and this morning.”
“What happened?”
I glanced at her and back at the road. Her face showed concern.
At the bottom of a hill, a car towing an Airstream signaled it wanted to pull out of a turnout. I flashed my lights, slowed and let him proceed. I took his spot in the turnout.
“Empaya Iba. The demon somehow took control, didn’t it?” I said.
Amanda nodded.
“I think so,” she said. “You—your focus changed, from wanting to get up to Montana as quickly as possible to insisting on stopping. It was as though you were physically restrained from going north of Lake Jackson.”
“I never felt a difference. My thoughts just…”
“What was attracting you, Sebastian? What drew you to that spot?”
“Orchids,” I said. “When I met Joe, he told me there was a meadow of red orchids farther up the hill. I think he was there to stop me.”
Amanda sat sideways facing me, just listening. I stared ahead.
“He can’t be real. He just can’t,” I said.
“The demon?”
“No. The Indian. Joe. He just can’t be real. How did he get there? How does he travel? He appears and disappears. But he drinks gin. And…”
I rubbed my unshaven chin.
“Empaya Iba can’t be real either. But people die,” I said.
I rambled, trying to line up thoughts so they made sense, but no matter how hard I tried, I could produce only two conclusions: I was insane, or I was possessed. If the latter, the demon was trying to force me places I shouldn’t go.
“I think Empaya Iba tried to kill me again,” I said.
Amanda leaned forward and grabbed my arm. I turned to her.
“I think it tried to kill me. I took my pistol out of my pocket up on the hill. At the time…”
I struggled to recall the precise order.
“I took it out of my pocket,” I said. “I was going to scratch my temple with it, if you can imagine doing that with a loaded gun. But I cocked it. The Webley doesn’t fire unless it’s cocked,” I said.
“I put the gun to my head. My finger was on the trigger.… Joe saved my life.”
I turned to Amanda again. Tears trickled down her cheeks.
“Are you really all right now, Sebastian?” she asked.
I shook my head, clearing cobwebs, as it were, and chuckled. I patted her leg, which felt warm and soft and inviting.
“Yes. I’m fine now. Probably crazy as a loon, but fine for the moment. You sure know how to pick a boyfriend,” I said, looking her in the eye. “Am I your boyfriend?”
She punched my shoulder.
“Yes, you dope. And I love you.”
“I love you, too, Amanda. We’ll get out of this,” I said.
“Or go down together,” she added.
A horn interrupted our kiss. In my rearview mirror I saw another clown hauling a huge trailer flashing his lights at me. It was time to give up the parking spot. I pecked Amanda’s cheek and eased our truck onto the road.
“You owe me a better kiss than that,” she said.
“A debt I will gladly pay,” I said. “So, you’re the businessperson in this truck. What’s our next step?”
Amanda considered a moment.
“Money is the first issue.”
“Boy. Ask a businessperson for a plan, and the first thing she comes up with is money. I guess that’s why I’m not a businessman,” I said.
“Do you disagree?”
“No, I just thought you would come up with something like, oh, drive to Seattle, catch a freighter to Hawaii, then double back through the Panama Canal to Miami or New York and hope that gives Mike enough time to round up the people who are trying to kill me.”
“Sebastian, how do you come up with these ideas?”
“Is that a real question?”
“No. But the one thing your plan is missing is how to pay for all that. It’s really not a bad plan, you know, catching a freighter for a long ocean voyage,” she said.
Ideas came and went with me in a flash. I had already moved on.
“Okay. So, we need money,” I said. “Any ideas on how to get it?”
“If Charles were alive, he could send it to us someplace. I have plenty of ready cash.”
“Cash, as in dollar bills, or cash as in liquid assets?”
“Greenback cash,” she said. “My grandfather instilled in me the need to have a supply of cash and silver tucked away where it can be reached in an emergency. Charles knew the hiding places.”
“Wow. Loose cash. You must have really trusted that guy,” I said.
“He got me out from under my ex-husband.”
“An interesting choice of words,” I said.
“He wasn’t a bad man, my ex; he just wasn’t faithful. He knew a lot of the family secrets. Charles convinced him to forget them and go away and stay away.”
“How did he do that?”
“Couples should have some secrets. That’s one on my side of the ledger. But it was inventive. Charles was like that.”
“Sounds like you miss him,” I said
.
“I do. He was a friend as well as a lawyer. Maybe more so.… I wonder what he’s doing now.”
Now it was my turn to stare.
“Uh, Amanda, he’s dead,” I said. “I’m sure of that.”
“Not Charles. My ex.”
Her tone brightened.
“He owes me. That’s how we get the money,” she said.
“Your ex is going to give us—you—money? Cash?”
“Of course. He knows where the stash is.”
“How can you trust him? You said he was—”
“He wasn’t a thief. He was a philanderer. A brilliant business mind, but he thought with another part of his body around pretty young women. The last I heard he was on his third or fourth wife.”
“In a row or at the same time?”
“In a row. He’s not that other kind of Mormon. He’s the smart kind, just crazed for young meat.”
“That’s harsh,” I said.
Amanda gave me a look that said, Go no further.
“Of course, he was a fool to give up someone like you. An idiot really,” I said.
“Nice recovery, cowboy.”
“I was being sincere,” I said.
“I know. But you need to work on your timing.”
“You can’t expect perfection on this side of the truck.… So how does this work? And what is his name, other than ‘the ex’? You haven’t talked about him a lot.”
“Thomas. Tom. Tom Kingston. His family goes way back in the Mormon hierarchy,” Amanda said.
“So. Tom, as in what you called me at the tattoo shop?”
“Totally a coincidence.”
“Sure it was.”
“Drop it, cowboy.”
“Consider it dropped. Just like you dropped the Kingston name, or did you not take his name?”
“I kept my family’s name. It has a certain power in Colorado, and you don’t just throw away assets. Tom didn’t mind. In fact, he insisted. It made things easier later,” she said.
“Oh.”
There wasn’t much to say.
“You work on getting rid of Empaya Iba,” Amanda said. “Let me worry about Tom and the cash.”
I did. She did. Neither plan worked out quite as we’d hoped.
Chapter 45
The Ex
Whether from jealousy or from decades of judging other men based on how they treat women, I didn’t put a lot of faith in Amanda’s ex.
She reached him at his office in Salt Lake City on one of our newly acquired throwaway phones. I was driving toward Bozeman in Montana, where we planned to make a decision about whether to go east toward Billings or west and north toward Butte and Helena.
I could hear both sides of the conversation pretty well. He had one of those voices that carried, which is the polite way of saying he was a back-slapping bigmouth, my least favorite type of human being. What had Amanda seen in this caricature of a used car salesman?
I made a sour face at Amanda. She patted my thigh; I kept silent.
Tom was all business. He’d had a visitor who intimated he was with the government, but he hadn’t shown any ID. The visitor wanted to know if Tom had heard from Amanda recently. Not in twenty years, thank you very much, Tom had told him.
Our pursuers were casting a very wide net and doing it very quickly, I thought.
Tom asked Amanda what she wanted. She told him, and for reasons I cannot fathom, he agreed immediately. Before he hung up, he said he would be in touch and that she should never call his office again. The conversation may have lasted ninety seconds.
“I suppose he has some redeeming qualities,” I said.
“He’s frightened,” she said. “That’s how he gets when he can’t control everything. Whoever visited him must have given him a serious scare.”
“Do you think he’ll follow through, or should we assume he’s going to let his visitor know you’ve been in contact?”
“He’ll do what he says.”
“You have a lot of faith in this guy.”
“Actually, I have no faith in him. But I do have information that would send him to jail, and he’s too pretty for jail.”
“You are a never-ending source of wonder,” I said.
“After I found out he cheated on me, I had Charles dig up all of Tom’s secrets. I promised myself no husband of mine would ever surprise me again.”
She smiled sadly.
I tried to change the subject.
“Want to get something to eat?”
“No. Let’s find a place to stay. I didn’t sleep well last night,” she said.
“My fault.”
“No one’s fault. Let’s just give ourselves a day of rest before we take our next step.”
That sounded ominous, I thought.
*
I was too wound up to sleep so while Amanda napped in our latest hotel room, I scouted escape routes and hiding places, bought another phone and some fresh supplies, and generally wondered about things.
As I scouted and shopped, I worried up ways to keep Amanda safe, regardless of what happened to me. If I left her now, I thought, I could head east and south toward Florida, the one place we had not talked about as a hiding place. I could hole up in a trailer park and let Mike do his thing. Then I could reemerge when the coast was clear.
But the crazies looking for me might still go after Amanda. They might assume she would know where I was and attempt to use her as leverage to force me from my hiding place. Amanda would still be in danger without me, and I knew what rejection felt like. I wouldn’t do that without discussing it with her first.
My mind flitted here and there, and I pondered what it would take to sit down, really focus, and think these guys to death. Apparently, I had the power, or Empaya Iba had the power. Would that be cold-blooded murder or self-defense? What was the point of having a power and not being able to use it on your enemies? Of course, that’s what Mike Owens and his crowd thought, too. And quite frankly, I didn’t know who was a friend and who was an enemy.
Around sundown, I wandered back toward the motel.
Over my years of photography travel, I developed a preference for small, quiet, out-of-the-way places to stay, the kind you drive past on two-lane highways, wondering who in the world stays in places like that. They tend to accept cash, if offered, ask very few questions, and keep poor records. They are also never part of a national or international reservations database, the kind that NSA probably taps into just to let its newbies practice hacking into computer networks.
We had settled on a motel several miles northeast of Bozeman on the local road up to Sacagawea Peak. I figured if we were being followed, our pursuers would have to make a decision about our destination. They would assume we were heading either east or west on I-90. They would not think of continuing north on local roads. Or so I hoped.
Amanda was perched on an uncomfortable chair made of forest scraps, the kind of thing prison inmates used to construct. She wore a baggy beige sweater with the sleeves pulled down over her hands. She was bare-footed, and I couldn’t tell whether she had anything else on or not.
She uncurled and met me as I stepped out of the truck.
“I thought you might have left me,” she said.
“Amanda, I’m sorry,” I said, immediately guilty for having thought of doing just that.
“I heard from Tom,” she said. “He’s bringing the money. We have to meet him in a park in Bozeman at 6:00 tomorrow morning.”
“I’m impressed. He didn’t waste time,” I said.
“He wants to be rid of me,” Amanda said. “I suspect he’s already on the road.”
“How did he contact you?”
“He did what we’ve been doing. He bought a cell phone. He said he planned to throw it away as soon as he got off the call. He wanted me to throw away my phone, too.”
“Did you?”
“Yes, after taking out the battery. I took a walk and found a creek. It’s sleeping with the fishes.”
&nb
sp; “Well, there’s a morbid reference.”
“Sebastian, hold me.”
I hugged her while she cried quietly.
“I’m sorry to have dragged you into this, Amanda,” I said.
“You didn’t drag me in. I rescued you, remember?”
“I still dragged you in.”
“I’m where I want to be. I just hope you are, too.”
“I am.”
She rested her head on my shoulder, and I couldn’t tell if she was still crying or not. She stirred.
“I’m famished,” she said. “Will you buy me dinner?”
“With delight, fair lady. I think you can have anything you like so long as it’s beef or buffalo or beefalo,” I said, knowing that we were in big meat-eating country.
“I was actually thinking of a nice vegan casserole.”
I released her and held her at arm’s length.
“You’re kidding. Please tell me you’re kidding,” I said.
“Yes, I’m kidding. You think I got to this size eating vegan?”
She stepped back and opened her arms as if to say, See?
“I rather like your size,” I said.
“Enough. It’s getting deep in here. Let’s go find food.”
We kept conversation light over two of the biggest steaks I had ever seen in my life, but reality kept intruding. Banter kept leading to plans and contingencies, if this, then that. Finally, we settled into a companionable silence. Over decaf coffee, we held hands across the table.
On the way to the motel, we detoured to the park where we were to meet Tom in the morning and drove around it in the dark. I had wasted all the daylight looking for escape routes, and our drive through the park ranked as yet another wasted effort. It was dark. There were no street lights. All we saw was darkness swept by the truck’s headlights. We found no buildings, no hills, no place to hide. It looked like we would have to charge the machine gun nest in the morning, marine style, and hope for the best. If Tom was followed, we were screwed.
Chapter 46
Faithless
I was right in doubting Amanda’s ex. The SOB never showed up.
Instead, he sent someone else he had betrayed.
Our vehicles turned into the park at the same moment, he from the south and we from the north. He stopped; we stopped.
The Mark of the Spider: A Black Orchid Chronicle Page 23