White Star

by James Thayer

  The rifle spoke and jumped back against his shoulder. His view through the scope bounced to the sky.

  Arlen Able cheered, "You got him. He blew down. I saw his rifle fall over, too." He patted Gray's shoulder. "Nice work. You won't see that on the shopping channel."

  Sergeant Able picked up the radio and pressed the send button. "Pete, we can stick a fork in Trusov. He's done. Let's go gather the carcass."

  Below them, in the twins' room, Pete Coates muttered to himself, "Thank God. That son of a bitch." He stared down at the forms on the bed, forms made of artfully placed pillows. The bullets had spit up a few feathers. Julie and Carolyn and John were spending the night with Adrian Wade at her hotel.

  At the roof's door, Able turned back to Gray. "You coming? Let's go dance a jig over this guy's body. I want to see you drop your paper star, just like the good old days."

  Gray's rifle lay unattended on the cornice. He was slumped forward, leaning against the brick rail, blinking repeatedly and panting hoarsely. He had known he would pull the trigger. Of course he would. But the struggle to contain his disgust and confusion at his return to the profession and to suppress burning memories had exhausted him. Now it was done. With an effort, one of the most arduous in his life, he pushed himself upright, gathered the rifle.

  He stared out into the darkness toward his target. He had seen a head and a rifle. His shot had been clean. He was sure of it. But he whispered to himself, "Something is wrong."

  Then he followed Sergeant Able.

  Shed of the bathrobe, the detective met them on the street. An unmarked police car picked them up at the curb. The sniper's lair was a five-story apartment building on Tenth Avenue. They arrived a few minutes later. According to the sign above the mail slots, the apartment building was named the Zenith.

  Coates leaned against the buzzer until the landlord appeared. The detective had not alerted the landlord because of the risk of somehow spooking Trusov. The man was wearing a white T-shirt and Bermuda shorts and carried a half-empty package of Fig Newtons. The detective hung his gold badge in front of the man's eyes and pushed into the building, fairly dragging the landlord after him.

  "Show us the way to the roof," Coates demanded. Gray and Able followed. The sniper rifle had been left in the police car.

  "Sure, sure," the landlord cried. "Nothing up there, though. I run a clean place. No hookers, no drugs, and only one Greek couple on the third floor."

  The party ran up the stairs, Coates's hand at the small of the landlord's back, prodding him along.

  "It's them you're here for, ain't it?" the landlord asked, the wind loud in his throat. "Christ, I should've known. You should smell this place when they cook."

  On the fourth-floor stairs to the roof Coates pushed the landlord aside and pulled his .38 from his belt holster.

  "You won't need that," Able said. "I saw the spray."

  Nevertheless Coates held the handgun in front of him as he climbed the last flight of stairs and opened the door to the roof, Gray and Able right behind.

  Heat-softened tar clung to their shoes. They walked around the stair house to the east cornice. The body was in a tight curl three feet from the edge of the roof. Gray's eyes had not fully adjusted to the darkness after the bright hallways—he knew it took thirty minutes—but even so he could tell the body lay in a position he had never before seen, an unnaturally bent shape.

  They drew close, their shoes squashing bits of brain.

  "What the hell?" Coates snapped.

  The body was tied to a toppled chair. Many strands of rope wound around the chest and waist and legs to secure the corpse to the chair. A duct tape gag was across the mouth.

  A rifle had spilled to the roof near the body. Able lifted the weapon. "This is a Stevens .22. No sniper uses this. What's going on? A decoy?"

  Pete Coates lifted a red-rimmed cartridge that had been carefully set on its end near the chair. "Here is Trusov's signature."

  Owen Gray bent to the body. He grasped its shoulder to turn the face toward him. Tiny bells jingled. The top of her head was missing, leaving a gaping red and gray cleft where her lustrous hair had been.

  Mrs. Orlando stared back at him in the sightless reproach of death.

  PART TWO

  BURNING TAPERS

  The best weapon is the one closest at hand.

  —Afghan proverb

  CHAPTER NINE

  Owen Gray was going to ground. To the high country, to his old home. The land would gather him in and embrace him. Stone and sage and the summer wind would let him breathe again, and he would find his footing among the granite and grass. Or he would die in these mountains.

  He had finally figured out Nikolai Trusov's message. The Russian had wanted to chase Gray from the city to the wilderness, to a proper dueling ground. Trusov would have kept on killing whomever was standing near Gray until Gray complied. And now Trusov would follow Gray to these mountains. Gray was going to prepare for him as best he could. The Russian would quickly determine where Gray was, and would be coming. Gray did not know when Trusov would arrive in the mountains, but it would be soon. Time was short.

  A thicket of kinnikinnick crowded the dirt road, the shrub in full white bloom. Its oval leaves scraped the rental Jeep on both sides. Gray engaged the vehicle's four-wheel drive for the last hundred yards up the incline toward the cabin. Rocks spit from under the Jeep as the wheels found purchase. The canyon of white fir and lodgepole pine opened, allowing serviceberry and syringa to grow in patches of white sunlight. When he was twelve years old, Gray had made tobacco pipes out of syringa stems, using beetle grubs to eat through the pith to hollow the stems just as Chief Joseph had. Dogwood leaves flavored with licorice fern served as tobacco. Gray had spent his youth studying the Nez Perce and Shoshone and Kootenai.

  He downshifted, then guided the Jeep around a stone outcropping to gain his first glimpse of the larch tree in the front yard. The larch was not common in the Sawtooth Range, and its grand trunk rose almost 250 feet barren of foliage until reaching a bushy top. This glorious spire had stood sentinel in front of the cabin for all of Gray's memory, and all of his father's and grandfather's.

  Gray drove the vehicle around the larch to the gravel patch that served to keep mud from the front door during the spring melt. He set the parking brake. When he opened the Jeep's door he was met with the brace of mountain Idaho, the stirring redolence of red cedar and bracken and columbine blooms and damp earth, scents sharpened in the thin air, scents that always filled Gray with a longing for times past and people gone.

  He stepped around the Jeep toward the porch. Birthplace of three generations of Grays, the cabin was made of lodgepole pine, used because their trunks taper so little. The building had outgrown its origins as a one-room hut with one door and one grease-paper window hastily thrown up to keep the winter of 1903 at bay. Over the decades several more rooms had been tacked on. Hardwood floors and plumbing and electricity had been added, and a porch and pantry, closets and a massive stone fireplace. Gray climbed the porch and opened the door with the key, then stepped inside.

  The air was thick with dust and mold and the scent of dry pine. Gray left the door open and pulled aside window shutters to brighten the room. Memories rushed in with the light. The scene—every corner, every cranny, every worn stick of furniture—was from his youth. The three-legged stool next to the iron fireplace tools, the pole and peg coat hanger, the couch covered with a red and purple Shoshone blanket, a Sears Roebuck coffee table, the cracked leather chair with the brass brads, the rag rug in front of the fireplace, the room was as it ever had been. Gray had inherited the home and five hundred acres from his father. He had returned to Idaho for the funeral, but not since.

  Gray's friend Jeff Moon, who lived in Ketchum, looked after the place with a weekly visit. In return Moon rented it to hunters during the season and kept the proceeds.

  The heirloom was still in its corner. The term was Gray's father's, and it referred to a chair Gray's grand
father had made out of deer antlers in the 1930s. The seat and back were horsehair covered with tanned buckskin, but everything else on the chair—legs, arms, frame, armrests—was artfully placed whitetail and mule-deer antlers, more than two dozen of them, flowing here and there, with knotty curves and dangerous points. The result was a grotesquery so forbidding and unwelcome that Gray's mother had never been able to give it away despite earnest efforts over several decades. The heirloom was hazardous to sit in, took thirty minutes to dust, and was impossible not to stare at. As a child Gray had avoided the chair lest it snatch him up. And in all his life he had sat in it only a handful of times, simply to prove to himself he could escape. The chair still sat ominously in its corner, daring anyone to approach.

  Built when wood was free and oil heating was a suspicious notion found no closer than Boise, the fireplace almost made up the entire west wall. The mantel and hearth and fireback were washed river stone. The firebox was as large as a Volkswagen. The andirons and grate were made of mule sled runners, bent into their new shape by a Ketchum blacksmith.

  Antlers. It seemed his family history had been defined by antlers. The dining area was in the main room, to the rear near a passthrough to the kitchen. Above the unvarnished pine table was a moose-antler chandelier, another twisted horror lovingly fashioned by Gray's father. Three 1,400-pound moose had given their all to illuminate the Gray table, and each rack measured over fifty inches across. Six twenty-five-watt bulbs were attached to the antlers. The electric cord was skillfully hidden as it crawled up an antler to the ceiling. The slightest draft would catch the antlers' sweeping shovels, slowly swinging the chandelier. Gnarled and grasping shadows would creep across the table.

  On a stand near the leather chair was a General Electric radio, a black Bakelite box with two knobs and a green frequency indicator that glowed in the dark. Gray knew from experience that the old radio could pull in stations as far away as Salt Lake City and Sacramento and Cheyenne, and Gray remembered roaming the length of the band night after night, finding dozens of faint and scratchy stations, a wondrous connection to the outside.

  His parents' bedroom was off the main room, and Gray's room was behind the kitchen. He passed the kitchen's wood stove, made of cast iron and resembling the front end of a locomotive. Gray pulled the tong to open the door to his room. He had never understood why the room had bunk beds, as he had no siblings. He had always slept on the top bunk. His gray and brown Shoshone blanket still covered the thin mattress. The blanket was trimmed with purple glass beads that glinted with light. Gray's desk and chair were against a wall. The desk light was made of a miner's tin lunch growler. A 1905 reprint of The Original Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, all eight volumes, also lined the top of the bookshelf. These books were the most influential reading of his youth, and Gray had never fully escaped them. The rifle case next to the desk was empty.

  Gray moved to the back of his room, to the double-panel doors locked with a four-inch-square Master Lock padlock. Gray had reinforced this closet with two-inch planks on all interior surfaces and with quarter-inch steel hinges. Here were those items Gray didn't want the hunters who rented the cabin to take home accidentally or otherwise. He found the small key on his key ring and opened the lock and then the door. He yanked the string of the overhead light.

  The history of the Gray family in the Sawtooths could be traced by the contents of this closet. Gray's great-grandfather Mason had resigned his army commission at Fort Abraham Lincoln and had rushed into Idaho in 1878 when gold was discovered on Yankee Fork. Mason's placer pan, almost three feet across and worn to a high sheen by years of hope and backbreaking work, was on a ledge in the closet. Mason had died broke, which was the prospector's usual reward. His son George—Gray's grandfather—turned to the forests and streams for his provender. In the early years of the century George Gray would often harvest a hundred salmon or redfish a day using spears. The fish were salted, smoked, or canned, and sent to Boise. George's spear heads—wickedly barbed and with edges that would slice grass—were stacked in a corner of the closet. George had then tried sheep and then cattle. In another closet corner was his branding iron. G. George and his son Dalton—Gray's father—had supplemented their income by trapping wolves and coyotes for the government bounty. A dozen foot traps hung by their anchor chains from the closet's side wall. The traps' jaws were closed and the villainous teeth were interlaced like short fingers.

  All these endeavors had busted out, and it was a hardscrabble existence until Gray's father made a discovery that to his dying day he could scarcely credit: rich Californians would travel three days on a train to the Sawtooths to shoot game. In the mid-1940s, Dalton Gray began his career as a hunting guide.

  Owen Gray lifted a Remington over-under shotgun from the weapons rack on the closet's south wall. He broke it open. The chambers were empty. His father would help the outlanders kill anything they might like: chukar, Chinese pheasants, blue grouse, whitetails and mulies, moose, elk, bighorn sheep, rainbow trout and salmon, and in the early days cougars and black bears and grizzlies.

  A simple trick virtually guaranteed his clients would become repeat customers. During the hunts Dalton would always come across several rattlesnakes, and while the Californians watched he would grab the snake's tail, whirl the rattler around and around, then crack it like a whip, snapping the snake's head off. He'd offer the head—inch-long fangs dripping poison—as a souvenir to the gasping Californians. Every Gray for four generations had mastered this moronic stunt—Owen was no exception—but it never failed to leave the customer slack-jawed and convinced their guide was Kit Carson reincarnated.

  Owen Gray returned the shotgun to the rack, placing it next to a Winchester twelve-gauge double barrel. Hanging on the back wall were a pair of whitetail rattlers—antlers with tips blunted for safety which hunters ground and clicked together to call bucks through dense undergrowth. Along the wall were a Remington 700 under a mounted scope and a bolt-action .330 Weatherby Magnum with a muzzle brake Dalton Gray had made himself. When Owen was sixteen years old, his father had promised to purchase the Weatherby for him if Owen could spend one week in the mountains. "That all I have to do?" Owen had asked. "You ain't heard all of it." His father grinned. "One week, and you can take your bowie knife. Nothing else." Gripping his knife, Owen had left the cabin that August Sunday as naked as when he came into the world. He returned seven days later, only a few pounds lighter and wearing a mulie's hide. The Weatherby and a handshake were waiting for him.

  On a small shelf on the back wall were bottles of doe-in-heat scent, the labels yellowed with age. Boxes of shotgun shells and rifle cartridges crowded the shelf. An axe and wedge, a two-man crosscut saw, and a sledgehammer leaned against a wall. Other tools were in a wood box on the floor. The room also contained more than twenty-five knives wrapped in an oilcloth bundle on the shelf.

  Gray lifted the axe. As a child he would leave this axe outside for the night and wait by his bedroom window to watch porcupines lick the handle for the salt. He left the closet and passed through his room. He re-entered the kitchen and was startled not to find his mother standing at the counter, his eternal picture of her, wide and solid in her print dress, usually pounding dinner to tenderness, the fleshy thump-thump filling the house as her meat hammer rose and fell, rose and fell. His mother had died of stomach cancer six years ago. His father passed away a year later. Ruth Gray was an antidote to the wilderness, and after she went, Dalton didn't last long. His death certificate listed heart failure as the cause, but Owen Gray knew it had been loneliness and grief.

  After years in New York City it was difficult for Gray to imagine that at nineteen, when he joined the Marine Corps, he had never been outside the Sawtooth Range except for several trips to Boise, eighty miles southwest. His father had told him that if he wanted a journey he could go deeper into the mountains. Until he left for boot camp, Gray's horizon had always been the next jagged mountain range, and he knew all there was to know between
himself and that horizon. He had learned since that it was only a short distance to those peaks.

  Carrying the axe, Gray left the cabin through the kitchen door. The screen slammed behind him. Behind the house were two smaller one-room cabins for hunters, and behind them a small barn and corral. Attached to the barn was a tack shed. These outbuildings were made of clapboard weathered to a dull gray and curled. He crossed the packed ground to the woodshed, a firebreak distance of fifty feet from the house. Hidden by a wall of chokecherry and mountain maple and down a small ravine, Black Bear Creek gurgled and ran. Pink and purple mountains rose above him in all directions.

  The woodshed was a peaked and shingled roof on four posts. Two-by-fours crisscrossed on three sides for lateral support. He walked around several horseweeds and a musk thistle, then stepped into the shed. Almost three cords of wood were under the roof. His father had cut the wood, which lasted years in the high elevations before beginning to rot. The splitting block was a two-foot-high wedge of Douglas fir.

  Gray picked up a length of wood and put it on the block. The axe swung in a practiced arc, and the blade sank into the wood. Gray lifted the axe, the wood clinging to the blade, and brought it down again. The halves toppled to the ground. These pieces should have been a good size for the fireplace, but he picked up one, returned it to the block, and halved it again. Then he lifted the smallest piece and split it with a well-aimed swing. Now he had kindling.

  But he swung again, this time at the sticks on the ground. The blade bit through them and dug into the earth, the shattered halves flipping into the air. Gray grunted as he brought the axe around again. This time the whistling blade missed wood entirely, and shot into the soft ground, sending chips skittering away. Then again and again and again. The blade chewed up the ground.

  The axe changed course, slamming into one of the shed's support posts. Splinters shot away. The axe slashed at it again, and the ancient wood fractured and grasped the steel blade. Gray ferociously ripped the blade out of the wood and sent it soaring again into the post. A hollow cry escaped him. He chopped maniacally at the post, and the top portion of the post began to sag under the roof's weight.