by Joan Rylen
Smith beeped them. “You ready to move? Hayes and Cervantes are coming up.”
“Almost done,” Vivian said, trying to hurry and wrap Wendy’s ankle. When she finished, she put Wendy’s sock and hiking boot back on.
Wendy stood up gingerly, testing weight on her left foot. “I’m okay. It’s tender but I’ll live. Let’s go.”
They started out again, and it wasn’t long before the girls reached the old mining camp.
“Finck’s here, right?” Vivian asked the team.
“Affirmative,” Smith answered.
Lucy, going against orders, ventured over to one of the shacks and poked her head in the door. She gasped, then hollered, “AHHHHHH!” She turned tail and hauled ass up the trail.
49
LUCY’S scream carried through the valley and reverberated off the mountain faces. Vivian figured the people down in Vail could hear it. Finck ran out of his hiding place in a shack, gun drawn, and Nelson shouted question after question in the girls’ ears.
Vivian, Wendy and Kate had run after Lucy. If Lucy screamed and ran away from something on a trail in Colorado, it was a good idea to follow suit.
Vivian finally turned around and saw what she had fled from. A mountain lion ran at full speed across the meadow toward a pine grove.
“Holy Jesus…oh my gosh…mother of a son of a sailor,” Lucy said between pants, hand on her chest. “I thought I was going to be mauled. You should’ve seen its teeth. Fuckin’ A!”
“Damn, that thing was huge!” Vivian yelled.
“We wouldn’t’ve let you become a kitty treat,” Wendy said, giving Lucy a one-armed squeeze.
The tension and fear in Vivian gave way to a burst of uncontrollable laughter. She bent over, she was laughing so hard. The other girls joined in, her hysterics being contagious.
Hayes and Cervantes ran up the trail and met Finck, who didn’t look happy. The girls walked back down the trail to them.
“That’s one heck of a set of lungs you’ve got,” Finck said to Lucy, putting his gun back in the holster.
Cervantes shook her head. “I thought it was Craig.”
“Or a raccoon,” Hayes said with a grin and gave Lucy a light punch on the arm.
She rolled her eyes. “Yeah, yeah. I’d like to see what any of y’all would do if a mountain lion bared its fangs to you.”
Finck made a gun with his finger and thumb and did a pretend shot.
Wendy shifted from foot to foot. “Holy crap, my ankle. Think any of these places have a chair I can sit in?”
Finck shook his head. “The closest thing to a chair is that rock right there.” It was not much of a rock.
She laughed, then looked at the girls. “Screw it. Y’all ready to keep going?”
They were, but Lucy bent down to tie her shoe.
“We’ll hang back in one of the shacks for a few minutes,” Hayes said and indicated Cervantes. “We need to stay behind you guys.”
“Got it,” Lucy said, standing and then walking up the trail.
Finck went back to his post.
They didn’t get far before Vivian said, “Uh oh” and fiddled with her shirt.
“What?” Nelson beeped.
“My mike has come undone,” she said into the abyss that was her cleavage. “I don’t see it.”
“Go back to Cervantes and have her fix it,” Nelson instructed.
They walked back to the mining camp and Vivian leaned into the cabin Hayes and Cervantes had gone into.
She caught them in full make-out mode. Lips locked, hands in inappropriate places, moans and groans.
Vivian let an “oh” of surprise escape before she could stop it. She covered her mouth and Cervantes looked up at her, horrified.
“Oh, uhhhh … we, we were—”
Hayes scrambled to his feet and helped her up. “We were just playing the couple-in-love-out-for-a-hike part.”
Nelson said in Vivian’s ear, “What’s going on? I can’t hear you.”
They must have their microphones off, she thought, then turned from the shack and said loudly into her shirt, “That was Hayes and Cervantes. The reception must not be good in there since you couldn’t hear them.”
Vivian turned back to the agents, who had straightened their clothing. “My mic needs to be re-stuck. It’s gone missing.”
Cervantes got right to it and Hayes politely stepped out of the shack.
“Well, he is cute,” Vivian said with a smile once she was done.
Cervantes’ cheeks went from pink to full-on crimson. Nelson coughed in her ear. Smith laughed.
The girls got back to the trail, working their way toward the old homestead. A little way down the path, ferns grew in lush patches and the pines began thinning out.
Vivian stopped at a side trail. “Is this the way to the cliffs?” she asked the girls. “I bet it has great views of the mountains.”
“Don’t take that,” Nelson said. “No detours, stick to plan.”
Vivian sighed, knowing she was missing a magnificent picture opportunity, but kept going. A few minutes later the pine trees gave way to a meadow and she didn’t feel too bummed about missing the cliff view. The mountains rose around a meadow full of wildflowers, and she felt like she should hold out an imaginary skirt and twirl around like Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music.
“This is amazing,” Kate said and whipped out her camera.
Lucy got out her cell phone. “We need one together. Huddle up, girls.” She snapped a picture holding her cell phone as high above them as she could, which wasn’t very high. The picture had a small bit of each of the girls — Vivian’s curls and chin, Lucy’s left eye, Wendy’s chin, Kate’s right eye.
Keeper.
“Look at that.” Vivian pointed to one of the mountaintops that was more rounded than peaked.
The peak sort of resembled a thumb or other body part according to Vivian’s trashy imagination. Lucy held her hand in front of it, in a grip, and moved her hand up and down. All of the girls cracked up and Kate lined up a picture.
“I think this wins the trashiest of the trashiness award on this vacation,” Wendy said through her laughter. “This is worse than the grotto pictures.”
Vivian tried her hand at it, and Kate got her handy picture, too.
Nelson said something, but Vivian couldn’t hear him over their laughing.
Wendy quit giggling enough to reply to Nelson. “You don’t want to know what we’re doing, but I promise it’s not dangerous.”
“I know where they are and probably what they’re doing,” Smith said to Nelson. “They’re coming your way.” He coughed, trying to cover a laugh.
Nelson sighed audibly in everyone’s ear.
It was just a mountain peak, but it looked a little too much like something else. While they were taking pictures, a thin white cloud drifted above the rock. Vivian doubled over.
“Keep moving!” Nelson finally shouted. “You’re out in the open and it makes it harder for us to cover you. You’re sitting ducks.”
“We couldn’t help it,” Vivian said to him. “You’ll see why later.”
Playtime over, they did as instructed and were soon enveloped again by pines and aspens. Though the temperature was in the low sixties, Vivian started to perspire and the knots on the aspens started to look like big, gaping eyeballs. A twig snapped off to her right and she picked up her pace, making Lucy, who was in front, hustle along.
“What is it?” Lucy asked.
“I just have this creepy feeling all of a sudden.”
The trail curved ahead and a dark-haired, bulky man about 5-foot-10 appeared, hiking at a brisk pace. He kept his head down and wore a baseball cap so Vivian couldn’t see his face. He reached into his pocket and fiddled with something.
“Run!” she yelled and dashed into the overgrowth.
She hauled ass, running for her life.
50
THAT’S him! That’s him!” Vivian yelled to Nelson as she ran through the aspen and pine trees off the
trail. Lucy was beside her, Kate and Wendy right behind.
Nelson shouted orders at the other agents on the trail, and Vivian heard running and crashing as the team took action.
She spotted a thick stand of spruce trees and ducked behind them. She sat against the thickest tree, shaking from fear and adrenaline.
“Did they get him?” she asked Nelson and the girls. There was too much commotion and chatter coming through the earpiece to make sense of anything.
“Oh my gosh,” Lucy said, sitting down next to her. “Do you think that was really him? He found us?”
“It was his build and height. It looked like he had dark hair and he had the muscular shoulders. It was hard to tell exactly because he was looking down, but I’m pretty sure it was him.”
Kate waved for them to be quiet. “Shhh, somebody’s coming.”
The girls knelt down, trying their best to hide among the foliage. Vivian kept her face down and her eyes squeezed shut.
“It’s Agent Cervantes,” Wendy said with a sigh. “She’s by herself. I think it’s safe.”
“We’re over here,” Lucy called to Cervantes, who made a beeline in their direction.
She patted Vivian on the shoulder. “False alarm. The hiker you ran from is with Vail PD.”
“Oh Jesus,” Vivian said and wiped a tear of relief from her eye.
“But he reached in his pocket to pull something out,” Kate said. “What was it?”
“His walkie-talkie. He’s not mic’ed up like the rest of us.”
Lucy took a deep breath and put her hand to her chest. “He about scared the pee out of me.” She tapped her foot for a moment. “Speaking of which, I gotta take a trail pee. Since you’re here with us, can I take off this microphone so Nelson can’t hear me?”
“NO!” Nelson answered before Cervantes could answer.
Cervantes grinned. “Just cover it with your hand. We’ll wait for you over there.” She indicated a spot a few feet away.
Lucy walked behind some fir trees and started singing to the tune of “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.”
“Pee, pee coming out of me,
Into dirt and by the tree.
Down the trail so fast you go,
Where to, I don’t really know.
Agent Nelson, don’t you agree,
You’re glad you didn’t hear me pee.”
The girls cracked up at Lucy’s song. Cervantes tried to keep a straight face but had a hard time with it. Nelson, however, started coughing during the first line and went completely silent after that. Vivian could only assume he was either rolling on the ground laughing or completely horrified. Judging by his response, it was the latter.
“Cervantes, get them back to the trail, please,” he said evenly. “Girls, no more singing. I couldn’t hear anything else, and that is unacceptable!”
Wendy wagged a finger at Lucy. “Ummmm, you got in trouble.”
“Trail. Now!” Nelson barked.
The girls followed Cervantes through the forest. She consulted with the team and got an all-clear before leaving the girls. She went left to meet her lover-boy, Hayes, and the girls went to the right, toward whatever awaited at the cabin.
They hiked along without issue before coming to another steep section on the path. The switchbacks kept them huffing, and Vivian stopped to rest halfway up.
“I thought this was supposed to be one of the easier trails around Vail,” she said after she had caught her breath.
“It is,” Nelson said. “Can you keep moving?”
“Yep.” Vivian took a swig out of the CamelBak and they set off again.
At the top of the last switchback Vivian paused, causing Kate to bump into her. Two hikers approached, one brown-haired and about the same height as Craig. He looked up and waved, and Vivian could breathe again.
“Hey,” he called as he got near. “It’s not much farther to the top and it’s so worth it.”
“Thanks,” the girls said at the same time as they walked past.
“Watch out for the two guys up there in the cabin,” he called over his shoulder. “They’ve been hanging around up there awhile, and it feels like they’re up to something.”
“Thanks,” the girls said again, and Vivian had to work to hold in the laughter.
“There ain’t no tellin’,” Wendy said once they were out of earshot.
“Any sign of Craig?” Kate asked the party line.
“Negative,” Nelson said.
They walked past a pond where a busy little beaver had created the Hoover Dam of beaver dams. Sticks, twigs and decent-sized logs barricaded a stream, creating beaver paradise.
“Wonder if Beaver-Snatch from Beaver Liquors used to live here,” Lucy said and shook her head.
“That thing was so ugly, it’s hard to imagine him living, much less out here,” Wendy said and tossed a twig on the dam.
Upstream, patches of snow remained beneath fir trees and wildflowers grew in an alpine meadow.
Kate stood in awe. “Nature is incredible. And beavers are nature’s hardest-working architects, especially considering they use their choppers to cut down their building materials.”
“Well said,” Nelson beeped in their ears. “Now get moving to the cabin.”
They rounded a bend and the expanse of wildflowers continued. Nestled far back in the field underneath a grove of spruce and fir sat a log cabin, a beaten path leading to the door.
Vivian looked around the open meadow. “We see the cabin,” she told the team.
“Clear,” Shick said.
“Proceed,” Nelson answered.
Vivian picked up the pace. The trail continued past the cabin, farther up the mountain, and she got a weird vibe. She dismissed it as too much openness but was glad when Kate reached the cabin.
Lucy stopped in the meadow to pick a handful of yellow flowers. “Avalanche lilies, my favorite.”
“Quit your pickin’ and pick up the pace,” Vivian called to her and stepped inside.
Agents Nelson and Shick stood at opposite ends of the one-room, two-window cabin. Gaps between the logs provided peepholes and gun muzzle clearance. It also allowed for ample airflow, which was not what Vivian desired at the moment since a chill ran up her spine.
“Home, sweet home,” Shick said and swept his arm around the room.
Nelson took his rifle out of the wall and repositioned it to the front left window. “Welcome to the Bighorn Hilton, where skiers, hikers and attempted murderers are welcome.”
51
NELSON sure did know how to make a girl feel welcome. The dank cabin was bad enough, but hearing “attempted murderer” brought the day back into focus. The hike up had been nice, but Vivian was here on a mission and this was her last shot.
“So what do we need to do now that we’re here?” she asked.
“Sit down and relax. Make sure your cell phone is on,” Nelson answered, glancing at his watch. “We still have several hours before dark. I want you to stay here and give Craig enough time to pin down your location.”
Poking her head out the window, Wendy asked, “Hayes and Cervantes are out here, right?”
“Yes, and Finck as well,” Nelson said. “Several Vail PD will come and go on the trails connecting to the Grand Traverse but will not stop at the cabin.”
“What’s the Grand Traverse?” Vivian asked. “That trail running up the mountain from here?”
“Yes,” Shick said. “Remember you came up on the Bighorn Creek Trail, which ends right here. And if you look through this crack,” he indicated a three-quarter-inch gap in the logs, “the Grand Traverse Trail picks up from here.”
Nelson went outside to do his periodic perimeter search. “We need you to stay here for a while. I’ll be back in 10.”
The girls sat in the dirt and settled in for the wait. Vivian tossed a small rock in the air she had found lying on the ground. She grew bored with that and started a game of toss the rock through a cabin wall crack.
Wendy sat next to
Vivian and began to pull the petals off one of the flowers Lucy had picked.
She barely whispered, “He loves me,” pluck, “he loves me not,” pluck.
After de-petaling three flowers, Lucy grabbed the rest of the bunch. “You’re killing my bouquet. Why don’t you just ask him!”
Wendy shrugged and tossed the stems aside. Still whispering, she said, “Two out of the three ended with he didn’t love me, anyway.”
Kate patted her shoulder. “What does your heart tell you?”
“That he loves me.”
“Flower power,” Vivian said, picking up some of the pulled petals and tossing them in the air.
“Whew,” Shick said. “Glad that’s settled!”
Lucy had four flowers left and stuck one in Vivian’s ponytail, one in Kate’s barrette and one behind her own ear. She held the last one in front of Wendy. “No more petal pulling. Stick it, sista.”
Wendy tucked it behind her ear. “For decoration only.”
“I have to… uh… you know,” Kate said and stood, crossing her legs.
“Trail pee!” Lucy chimed.
“Yes.”
“I gotta go again, too,” Lucy said, then looked at Vivian and Wendy. “And you know what they say.”
“What who says?” Wendy asked.
“They.”
“I guess not,” Vivian said. “What do they say?”
“Go when you can, not when you have to!”
“Sound advice. I’ll go,” Vivian said.
“Me, too.” Wendy stood up.
Nelson opened the door. “I’ve got an escort on her way up. She’ll take you.”
A minute or so passed until Cervantes walked up the trail and met them behind the cabin.
“No peeking through the gaps,” Wendy said to Shick and Nelson before they walked beyond the clearing.
“Yeah, no crack gazing through the cracks!” Lucy said and laughed.
“And no singing,” Nelson commented.
Cervantes made a fist around her microphone. “Cover it like this. I’ve peed twice and you didn’t hear me, did you?”
Vivian had not. She wanted to ask what else had she covered the microphone for but decided against it. Cervantes was friendly enough, but the girls didn’t know her that well. Best not to push it when they needed her covering their back, literally at the moment. Plus, she had a gun.