River of No Return : A Jake Trent Novel (9781451698053)

by Bertsch, David Riley

  The chief discreetly shook his head at his wife.

  The gargantuan men looked at each other, but didn’t smile or respond. They turned and walked toward the front, where automatic glass doors led to an antiqued swinging saloon-style gate. The men pushed through without holding the door for Terrell and Charlotte.

  They stood in the middle of a large dining room. The wooden chairs had obviously been carefully chosen to mismatch just right, and they were overturned and resting on picnic-style tables. Game mounts were everywhere. They were regionally appropriate for the most part, but a few exotics sprinkled the walls: dik-diks, a polar bear, and even a rhino head.

  The restaurant was empty except for the four of them. Smelling sawdust and fresh paint, Terrell assumed the kitchen had never been used.

  After allowing them to wander for a few minutes, the men led Terrell and Charlotte downstairs to the kitchen. The men’s silence was off-putting. In the kitchen, empty and devoid of utensils, the giants stopped again, this time glancing at each other for a moment before one waved his hand in a semicircle, meaning Look around.

  “Well, this is weird,” Charlotte whispered to Terrell as they walked around equipment they didn’t know and had no interest in learning about. Terrell just shrugged. He caught one of the giants looking at his watch.

  “Somewhere to be, big guy?” Terrell broke the strange silence. He was getting annoyed with the bullshit tour. “What are we doing down here?”

  “Shhhh. Honey!” Charlotte pleaded.

  The men continued to look straight ahead.

  “We’re finished here. We’d like to go back up.” The chief pointed up.

  The slightly larger of the impressive men finally issued a thin smile and spoke. His English left something to be desired, and Terrell barely understood him.

  “Private dining room.” And motioned toward a back door in the kitchen.

  He looked at Terrell and repeated the words in the exact same tone. “Private dining room.”

  Charlotte spoke up. “Just follow him.”

  The chief did as his wife asked, and they were led to a small room with cement-block walls that had been painted gray. Not the level of luxury they had been treated to thus far. Inside, a small aluminum table sat without a tablecloth or place settings. Two matching chairs sat on one side, and there was a single chair on the other.

  The man spoke again. “Xiao.” He motioned them to sit down.

  Before Terrell could ask where they were and what the hell they were doing there, the men quickly stepped out, slammed the heavy door, and locked it.

  16

  WEST BANK, SNAKE RIVER. OCTOBER 20.

  9 P.M. MOUNTAIN STANDARD TIME.

  It was 9 p.m. before Jake heard from Schue. The good news was that Esma’s phone had been turned on. The bad news was that it apparently had no GPS and had been turned off shortly after Schue determined its general location. Not only that, but it also appeared to Schue that the phone was transmitting from an extremely isolated area, because only one tower was receiving a signal. So much for multilateration. The best Schue could do was outline a thirteen-mile radius from the tower. He included two attachments with his message, both screen shots from the government version of Google Maps.

  The first photo focused on the cellular tower, perched atop a high bluff overlooking a river. A highlighter-yellow hue showed the area where the phone could be, based on its signal strength. The tower was in a large expanse of wilderness intersected by a highway and the Salmon River. This didn’t encourage Jake. It made it more likely that the phone had transmitted while passing through.

  The second photo showed what Schue had labeled “Places of Interest.” These were buildings where a person was likely to be, but there weren’t many of them. A gas station attached to a home, an old tavern that was overgrown with grass, and four hunting camps up in the hills, away from the highway.

  Jake walked out to his vehicle to get his Idaho Gazetteer. The low hoot of a great gray owl echoed around the property. Marking his territory.

  Motioning J.P. over to the coffee table, Jake explained the satellite photos and then pointed out their location in the Gazetteer.

  “Rough country?” J.P. asked.

  “Very. These creeks are at about sixty-six-hundred feet.” Jake traced the small blue veins that emptied into the Salmon River. “Gas station is here, right after the road crosses the river. That will be easy enough. The hunting camps are up high, though. Where the sheep are. This one is at nearly nine thousand feet, on the top of Mount Phelan. There’s another peak, Mount Baldy, that has a couple of cabins near the summit. That’s well over nine thousand feet. We’re looking at a twenty-five-hundred-foot vertical ascent from the ends of these four-by-four roads to where Schue’s places of interest are.”

  “Then we should go tonight.”

  “No use. It’s four hours to Salmon, longer at night with the wildlife.” Jake knew this from his many fishing trips to the Salmon River. The River of No Return, it was called, because of its isolation and the severity of its terrain. “And wandering around at night with headlamps only puts us in danger if your hunch about foul play is right. Believe it or not, nighttime is not the best time for a raid, especially without night-vision goggles.”

  “Fuck! Don’t play know-it-all with me, man.” J.P. was up and pacing.

  “I’m trying to maximize our chances of getting Esma back.” Jake shot his old friend a look.

  J.P. nodded and sat back down. “What’s our plan, then?”

  “Sunrise is 7:38 a.m.” Jake was on weather.gov. “We leave here at 4 a.m.”

  “Fine.” J.P. didn’t look pleased.

  “Get a pack together tonight; we won’t have time in the morning.”

  * * *

  Jake fell fast asleep, only to be awakened by the growl of J.P.’s pickup leaving the driveway. He hopped out of bed and dialed J.P. Straight to voice mail. No reception on Teton Pass.

  Shit!

  Jake hurried back to his room, flipped on the light, and pulled on a pair of hiking pants. Then he ripped a quick-dry long-sleeve T-shirt from a hanger and put it on, adding a thick flannel over it. A mismatched pair of hiking socks would have to do.

  The alarm clock read 1:15 a.m. He left early. Damn.

  He opened the small safe in the bottom of his closet and pulled it into the light. The cold, matte black metal of the safe’s contents leached a grave atmosphere into the room.

  The Suunto Elementum Terra would be helpful for both its altimeter and digital compass. He strapped the timepiece on.

  The Glock 30 Mariner felt lighter than he remembered. He set it down on the hardwood floor and looked through the rest of the contents. There were two magazines for the Mariner, a ten-shot that had come with the gun and a thirteen-shot from an older Glock 21. He chose the latter for its capacity.

  The Blackhawk tactical holster felt stiff as he fastened it. Uncomfortable. After tossing a box of .45 caliber ammo into his pack, he slid the safe back into its hiding spot.

  Already in Jake’s backpack were extra warm clothes, a small inflatable sleeping pad, and his zero-degree sleeping bag, just in case the search lasted multiple days. He also had a one-liter aluminum water bottle, some iodine tablets, and enough dry food for three meals.

  Jake’s brain was racing. What else? His Costa sunglasses, down sweater, and waterproof shell were in the truck. Downstairs, he grabbed the printed email from Schue, the Idaho Gazetteer, and a topo map of the Frank Church Wilderness that surrounded the Salmon River. From the rack next to the front door of the guesthouse he grabbed his wool tuque and his fishing cap.

  It was frigid outside. Twenty degrees at best. Small flakes fell from the sky, intermittently pushed by a cold, sharp gust. It took a few miles for Jake’s SUV to warm up. He blasted the defroster to clear the windshield. Before he lost his cellular signal, he sent a t
ext message to his neighbor.

  Something came up. Please feed Chayote until you hear from me.

  In reality, the doggie door in the back was probably enough; the cattle dog was an accomplished hunter of streamside voles. The remains were left for Jake at the back door, where magpies and ravens quarreled over them.

  The convenience store at the foot of Teton Pass wasn’t open yet, so Jake turned into the Stagecoach Bar to get some coffee. A few drunk patrons remained, playing pool and sad tunes on the jukebox. The bartender looked happy to see a sober face.

  “Just a coffee to go, please.” Jake pulled out his wallet.

  “Early morning? It’s on me; just the dregs anyway.”

  “Thanks.”

  A twentysomething woman winked at Jake through a horde of flashy skier types: flat-brimmed, ski-rep-giveaway hats and tattered skate shoes. Graphic T-shirts and tank tops that said things like Live Simply and Send It!

  Jake sipped his coffee and let the engine warm in the parking lot. The bartender was right. Dregs. Oh well. He hoped the brew was as strong as it was bitter.

  Driving at night was dangerous in the Tetons and the surrounding area. Elk, mule deer, moose, and large predators were active in the dark, and roads provided a travel option for them that they couldn’t pass up. The man-made game paths attracted all sorts of fauna. It would be illegal and reckless to drive fast—the highways mostly had special night speed limits to protect animals—but Jake had no doubt that J.P. was speeding.

  After Jake hit the summit of the pass at 8,431 feet, his cell phone would get only spotty reception. He called J.P., who was blasting some sad Eddie Vedder song.

  J.P. apologized a few times, reiterating that he’d had a bad feeling about whatever was going on with Esma. Jake couldn’t blame him. He remembered his concern for Noelle during last summer’s escapade. Placating J.P. to the best of his ability, Jake told his friend to wait in the grocery-store parking lot in Salmon, where they could meet up and detail a plan.

  For the remainder of the four-hour drive, Jake tried his best to analyze the day’s mission through a sleepy head. He knew the basic strategy of a law-enforcement manhunt. But things were different when the target was a victim rather than a perpetrator, and most serious searches involved dozens of trained professionals. Jake and J.P. would have to do their best on their own. If the initial search turned up something that might convince the local police to take notice, the increase in manpower would provide a huge advantage.

  There were some things Jake wasn’t willing to share with J.P., like the fact that in a true missing-persons case two outcomes dominated the list of results: Most often the whole thing was a miscommunication and got cleared up during the first day. If that didn’t happen, the search generally turned into a body recovery.

  The other fact Jake was keeping from his old friend was that the hills of Idaho were a longtime haunt for white-­supremacist and neo-Nazi groups. Only a hundred or so miles to the west, a small Idaho town called Bad Axe hosted a huge annual rock festival every October featuring neo-Nazi bands. These were the unusual and uncomfortable truths that Jake came to know at the Office of Special Investigations.

  Jake stopped for coffee and a bathroom break in Mud Lake, Idaho, a two-hour drive from the area where Esma’s cell phone had transmitted. It was 3:36 a.m. on an October Friday, and the fishermen in Mud Lake were having their coffee and cheap gas-station pastries before driving west to Salmon in pursuit of steelhead. Jake wished he were there to fish, rather than search for missing girlfriends.

  Outside, a drift boat with high gunwales and a towering bow rested on its trailer. These boats were designed for the rowdy rivers where steelhead often swam. Unlike Jake’s skiff, they were built to withstand serious white water.

  Steelhead madness took over Idaho, Oregon, and Washington every autumn. The fish, outsized rainbow trout that grew large in the Pacific Ocean before spawning in freshwater rivers, were revered as a sport fish because of their bulk, strength, and challenge on a hook and line.

  To the fly fisherman, steelhead held a position of particularly high acclaim. Their fickle nature—they didn’t actively feed when on a spawning run—meant that catching a fish a day was a success. Days and days of being skunked were punctuated by those magical hours when a few foolish fish indulged the angler. This was all part of the allure.

  Once hooked, steelhead put up a frantic and acrobatic fight, launching their chrome, missile-like bodies toward the heavens in an attempt to escape the hook. Add the frothy, strong currents of the prototypical steelhead river to the mix, and it was inevitable that hooking a fish was only one small battle in the war. Landing rates on some steelhead rivers dipped below 50 percent.

  In the most popular rivers, steelhead, gallivanting romantics from the sea, sneaked through a maze of lures, fly baits, and bare snagging hooks to their spawning grounds. Many never made it.

  Immigrants, really, Jake thought. Their survival instincts whisper to them, Move or perish.

  Jake’s thought process was interrupted when he missed a right turn near the Idaho National Laboratory.

  Shit! He swung the SUV around and joined the fishing traffic north toward Salmon.

  * * *

  J.P. was well ahead of Jake. He had just passed Diamond Peak and Scott Peak and was now on the final leg of the journey. Highway 28 rose gradually up toward Lemhi Pass, a modest hill compared with Teton Pass. But the flurries increased with elevation, and the road was slick with windblown snow.

  Despite having consumed two energy drinks, J.P. was tired. Drained, really. He had run out of thinking, and he was anxious to act. The swirling winds blew the powdery snow around in psychedelic patterns like a storm cloud developing in a time-lapse sequence. It distracted him, tried to pull him toward sleep.

  In the town of Leadore, J.P. pulled his old pickup into a convenience store. It was only 5:15 a.m., and the store was dark.

  “Goddammit!” he shouted, to no one in particular. The sound was dampened by the falling snow.

  J.P. looked around. There was a house about five hundred yards to the north of the store, but nothing else.

  He picked up the thin doormat, a map of Leadore on Highway 28 with the caption Leadore, Idaho: Ten Miles Past the End of the World. He looked around one last time, wrapped the mat around his elbow, and smashed through the windowpane closest to the doorknob. No alarm.

  Only illegal if you get caught.

  He reached through the broken pane and unlocked the door. A bell rang when he opened it and startled him. He started to jog back to the truck, but stopped short.

  Fuck it.

  J.P. ran back inside, took a few Red Bulls from the cooler, and grabbed a carton of cigarettes from the rack behind the counter. Before leaving, he shuffled through his pockets and found a twenty-dollar bill, which he left on the counter.

  “Sorry,” he said, again to no one in particular.

  J.P. was on cigarette number five by the time Jake’s vehicle pulled into the parking lot. He stubbed it out prematurely and walked briskly to the driver’s-side door. It was snowing harder. An inch of snow lay on the asphalt. Dawn was still a ways off, though the pines to the east were silhouetted against a slightly lightened sky. It was 5:20 a.m.

  * * *

  Around them, Jake noticed the sleepy-eyed fishing guides sitting in their rumbling diesel trucks, staying warm while waiting to meet their clients. The early season snow covered their boats. They sipped coffee, ate breakfast burritos, and chewed tobacco.

  Steelhead guides had a name for inland trout guides: lucky. The anadromous rainbow trout had several discouraging traits, among them their tendency to stop chasing flies when the sun was high. A steelhead guide’s normal day would start hours before dawn, when he would check river flows, read fishing reports, and ready the gear and boat. Then came the rush to beat the crowds to the most productive runs. It was import
ant to be in a run and swinging your fly right at the magic hour before the sun came up. On a cloudless day, clients might be allowed to fish until an hour and a half after sunrise. If they were lucky enough to have a cloudy day, fishing would remain worthwhile longer.

  When the sun was high, the guides tried to catch up on sleep on the riverbanks, while the clients buzzed them with questions and fiddled with their gear. Then, after what seemed like an eternity to the clients and a flash to the guides, the group would wander back down to the river and fish until after sunset. A good steelhead guide might spend fourteen or fifteen hours with his clients per day. Not to mention readying the gear before the trip and breaking it all down and cleaning the boat after.

  Not that this effort was always reflected in their gratuities—another reason steelhead guides called trout guides lucky. Often, the hard work resulted in nothing but a short tug, the pull of something that could have been a steelhead. No fish for a picture. No bragging rights. The clients, spoiled by trout-a-plenty, would decide the guide was to blame and leave him a measly forty bucks.

  This day looked to be promising; fish numbers in the Salmon River were prime, and the snow-spewing clouds might very well have the steelhead in an aggressive mood.

  “Why don’t you get in?” Jake said. “We’ll have plenty of time today to get wet and cold.”

  J.P. shrugged and got in the passenger seat. He cranked the defroster and held his hands near the windshield to thaw them.

  “You have gloves?” Jake asked.

  “Nah. You?”

  “In my pack.” Jake motioned to the backseat.

  “I’ll be all right.”

  “You’ll get frostbite. We’ll grab you some at a convenience store.”

  J.P. shrugged again.

  “It’s going to be tough going out there. We’re going to find Esma, but our first priority needs to be ourselves. We can’t help her if we’re injured or dead.”

  “Affix your own oxygen mask first, before helping others around you?”

  “Exactly.”