by C. J. Box
Johnny reached for a beer, but stopped when he saw it. He whistled in admiration. Drennen saw what he was looking at and whispered, “Fuckin’ A. You weren’t kidding, were you, Patsy?”
And she knew she had them.
9
Laurie Talich slowed and pulled off the two-track into knee-high sagebrush and turned off the GPS unit that had guided her there. It was nearly noon and heat waves shimmered across the plains. In the distance, the Bighorn Mountains framed the horizon.
“It’s an interesting view in that you can’t even tell from here there’s a canyon between here and those mountains,” she said to Johnny and Drennen. “But there is. From what I understand, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid used to hide in the caves down there.”
“I heard of them,” Drennen said.
“I saw the movie,” Johnny added.
Before they got to the canyon rim, she stopped the pickup to show them how to fire the rocket launcher. Her adviser had carefully gone through the procedure and made her repeat it back. She was not well versed in firearms of this size, but was shocked how simple it all sounded. So simple, she thought, even Johnny and Drennen couldn’t foul it up.
She climbed into the bed of the pickup and opened the lid of the crate. The boys watched her carefully, looking mainly at her butt, until she unveiled the weapon. Then they switched their interest to that. There was no disguising their visceral fascination with the rocket launcher.
She held it up and brushed clinging packing peanuts from the AT4. She was shocked how light it was. She’d anticipated something much heavier.
She showed them where to remove the safety pin so the sights would pop up automatically. She handed it over to them so they could hoist it on their shoulders and aim through the sights. They were like boys with their first air rifle, and they took to it instantly. Drennen stepped back and aimed it at Johnny and said, “Ka-pow. Die, rag-head, die.”
Johnny wrenched it away while she looked on in horror, but it didn’t go off. Johnny said, “Knock that off, you dimwit,” to Drennen. “And don’t call me no rag-head.” Drennen grinned and shrugged.
She showed them the two remaining safety steps, the repositioning of the cocking lever, then where a thumb could press the red firing button. Her adviser had told her she needed to press on the second safety while aiming. Then when she had the shot, hit the button. She repeated the procedure to them, and watched-again in horror-as Johnny armed the weapon and squinted down the sights toward a tree in the distance. Then he carefully uncocked it and waited for additional instructions.
“Make sure you know what’s behind you,” she said. “There’s back-blast.”
Drennen pouted, “So Johnny gets to shoot it, huh?”
“Yes, fool,” Johnny said.
“We’re still splitting the money,” Drennen said to Johnny. Johnny agreed.
“What if I miss?” Johnny asked her.
She shook her head. “You’ve got only one chance. This is a oneshot weapon, and after it goes off, that’s it. Just remember to bring the tube thing back to me. Don’t throw it aside because it’ll have our prints all over it.”
There was a faint footpath through the brush from where they parked to the rim of the canyon. She pointed it out and told them they were to take it. While they cracked the tops off more bottles of beer and watched and listened intently, she showed them the drawing she’d been given. She smoothed it across the hood.
“This is where the opening of the cave is,” she said, pointing to an oval marked with an X. “There’s a place with some cover on the trail down where you can see the cave entrance, if you know where to look for it. That’s where you hide and aim. But like I told you on the way here, don’t just blast away. Make sure you actually see him. Make sure he’s there.”
“How far is the cave from this hiding place?” Drennen asked.
She paused and tried to recall what her adviser had told her. “Five hundred feet. So it’s not that far.”
“What’s he look like?” Johnny said.
“I’ve never seen him, but he’s tall with long hair. He’s a big guy. But it’s not like there are going to be other people down there in that canyon.”
“And we have to actually see him, right?”
“That’s why I gave you the binoculars,” she said. “We have to confirm he’s there. Don’t just shoot at the cave and hope you catch him inside.”
“And if he ain’t there?” Drennen asked.
“Come back after a few hours. We’ll have to try again later.”
“No one said anything about a later,” Drennen said.
“I’m only paying you if the job is done,” she said. “That was our deal.”
Drennen sighed theatrically. “He better be there, then.”
“That’s what I was told.”
“Who told you?” Johnny asked. “Who else knows about this?”
She shook her head. “Someone who knows the situation, and who knows Nate Romanowski.”
Johnny grimaced, but seemed to accept it.
“There’s something very important you need to know,” she said, looking from Johnny to Drennen and back again, making sure she had their full attention. “You’ve got to make the shot count. If you miss or screw up, we’re all in deep shit.”
Drennen sat back against the passenger door, shaking his head. “What are you talking about?”
“This guy we’re after,” she said. “He’s got a reputation. Have you ever heard the line, ‘When you strike at a king, you must kill him’? Some guy named Emerson said that.”
“Who the fuck is Emerson?” Drennen asked. “Is he somebody big?”
“Never mind,” she said, sorry she’d repeated the line from her adviser since she didn’t have a clue, either. “Don’t worry about it. Just don’t miss. It shouldn’t be that hard.”
They each took another beer with them and stuffed another in the back pockets of their Wranglers. She climbed back into the pickup cab. Her knitting bag was behind the seat and she pulled it out. She’d taken to storing her knitting needles in the shafts of her tall cowboy boots, and she drew them out. She was a piss-poor knitter, but she was nervous and needed something to do with her hands. Since she’d taken up the craft, all she’d managed to complete was a piece that was twelve inches wide and fifteen feet long. It had no purpose. It was the longest scarf in the world, she thought, and she didn’t know how to end it.
She watched them walk down the path with the rocket launcher, trading it back and forth to get the feel of it. She’d made them repeat the firing procedure back to her before they left and they seemed to recall it. Men were intuitive when it came to weapons, she thought. Maybe it was the only thing they were intuitive about. She recalled how Chase was with his handguns, like they were an extension of him. She got edgy even looking at one, and rarely handled the.38 she kept hidden away in her knitting bag.
She had given them the drawing so they wouldn’t fire at the wrong place.
Johnny and Drennen were in view for five minutes before they found the trail that would lead them down into the canyon. She’d been assured that it wouldn’t be booby-trapped on the top half of the trail, so she didn’t even mention it to them.
When they were out of sight, she knitted furiously, waiting for the explosion.
She was looking forward to feeling cleansed.
10
“Faster, faster,” Nate said to Alisha, who was throwing her clothing into her bag.
She looked up with fear in her eyes and swept her arm around the interior of the cave. “What about all this? You can’t just leave it.” She meant the furniture, gear, books, and electronics he’d amassed in his three years there.
He shrugged as he took his shoulder holster and the.454 down from a peg in the wall and put them on the table. “All I need is this,” he said. Then: “And my birds. In fact, I’m going to go get them hooded up so we can take them with us.”
She rolled her eyes. “You need more than a gun an
d your birds.”
“And you,” he said, misunderstanding.
“No,” she said. “You need clothes. And your satellite phone. Here,” she said, grabbing an empty duffel bag and placing it on the table. “I’ll pack them while you get the birds ready.”
He nodded, and turned for the opening. As he did, the receiver for one of his motion detectors chirped. Nate froze and stared at it. It was the uppermost sensor.
“Okay,” he said. “We’ve got to hurry.”
Johnny said, “I think I see it.”
“Where?”
“Over there. On the other side. Follow my arm.”
Drennen stood shoulder-to-shoulder to Johnny and bent so he could rest his cheek on Johnny’s bicep. He squinted down the arm, past the pointer, across the canyon.
“It’s kinda dark,” Johnny said. “It looks like a half-moon behind some bushes. It don’t look like one of those caves in the cartoons. It’s more like a slash in the rocks.”
After a beat, Drennen said, “Okay, I think I see it.”
“Keep your eye on it,” Johnny said. “Let’s move down the trail a ways. If we can see the cave, that guy can see us. So let’s move until we can get hid.”
Johnny carried the AT4 by a handle that swung up from the top of the barrel. He crouched and picked up his pace, his cowboy boots clicking against loose rocks. Drennen ducked and followed, keeping his hands out in front of him in case he slipped on the loose gravel. He plucked the beer bottle from his back pocket, twisted off the cap, and threw the cap aside.
Johnny didn’t slow down until there was a thick wall of sharpsmelling brush on the left side of the trail that obscured the view from the cave entrance. When Drennen caught up and joined him, Johnny put the AT4 down and gently parted two stiff boughs. “See it?” he asked.
“I lost it,” Drennen said, then took a long drink that made his eyes water.
“Put that beer down and use your binoculars. That’s what they’re for.”
“Fuck you,” Drennen said, but he did as he was told and placed the bottle between his boots. He raised the glasses to his face.
Johnny waited while Drennen adjusted the focus on the binoculars. He watched his friend, trying to read him.
“Okay,” Drennen said finally. “I found it again.”
“What do you see?”
“Well, it looks like the top of the cave. There’s a bunch of brush hiding the lower half, but the hole looks tall enough for a man to walk in and out of without bending over. I can’t see inside-it’s dark-but it looks like there are blankets or some such thing tied back on each side.”
Johnny nodded and drew out the map from his back pocket. He unfolded it and held it out in front of him, matching the features in the drawing to the canyon itself.
“Yeah,” Johnny said, “Where we see that opening is where Patsy has the X.”
“Hot damn,” Drennen said, chuckling. “This is gonna be the easiest fifteen grand we ever made.”
“We ain’t made it yet,” Johnny said. “Keep your eyes on that cave. See if you can see him. I’ll get ready, and if you see that son-of-a-bitch, you tell me. We may not get another chance.”
The mews for Nate’s falcons was eight feet tall and six feet deep and was located twenty yards west of the cave opening. It was constructed of dried willow branches gathered near the river, and although it was in the open, the construction material rendered it almost perfectly camouflaged. Inside, he started with the peregrine while the eagle watched imperiously. He slipped a leather-tasseled hood over the hooked beak of the bird and fastened it in back. The hoods inured the raptors from reacting to outside stimuli and blinded them so they wouldn’t try to fly while being transported. Each bird had a custom hood sized for a tight fit.
He paused after the peregrine was hooded to glance through the willow branches toward the opposite cliff face. He could see no movement, and he knew how often a wandering deer or bobcat unknowingly strolled through the motion detector. Unfortunately, there were several dense stands of mountain juniper hiding portions of the trail. He watched for a few seconds to see if anyone-or anything-emerged from them. Nothing. But his sense of urgency didn’t diminish and the hairs on the back of his neck were pricked.
Nate turned back to his birds and hooded the red tail. She didn’t object and it took less than a minute. He looked at the eagle, who was sizing him up as well, and sighed. The eagle didn’t take to a hood, and it was often a struggle. He said, “Cooperate just this once.”
The eagle shifted its weight back and forth on the thick dowel it perched on. Its talons were black, long, and diabolical. Even through the thick welding glove Nate wore when he carried the eagle, she was capable of clamping down with power that practically took him to his knees. Now, he thought, is not the time for any foolishness.
He raised the large hood to her head deliberately, so she could see what he was doing. “Come on,” he said gently, “come on. ”
Outside the mews, Alisha called to him. “Nate, another one of these boxes went off.”
Sensor number two, he thought. Jesus. “Get back inside,” Nate called back. “I’ll be there in a second. Stay out of sight, Alisha, please.”
“Okay,” she said, chastened.
“ Oh shit,” Drennen squealed. “I see somebody.”
Johnny took a deep breath. He was both excited and more than a little nauseous.
“Make sure,” Johnny said, raising the rocket launcher to rest on his right shoulder. He snapped the sights into place and leaned his cheek against the tube. He could see the top of the cave in the distance, and when he fit the scope against his eye, it leapt into view. There was movement, but he couldn’t make out what it was. Whoever had been at the opening had gone back inside.
“I saw somebody move,” Johnny said.
“I can see better,” Drennen said. “He’s in the shadow of the cave, but I can make him out. Long hair, Patsy said. Long black hair. It’s him.”
“Are you sure?” Johnny asked, suddenly getting cold feet. “Are you fucking sure? Didn’t Patsy say he had blond hair?”
“That was him, goddamn it,” Drennen hissed. “Shoot, shoot, shoot! Now!”
“Fuck,” Johnny said. “I forgot the stupid cocking lever.”
“I knew I shoulda done it,” Drennen said, now hopping from foot to foot, barely able to contain himself. As he hopped, he moved back farther on the trail but kept the binoculars up.
“Okay,” Johnny said, raising the AT4 back up.
“Dumb shit,” Drennen said, still moving back and inadvertently slipping behind Johnny. “Don’t forget those other two switches.”
Then Nate realized how quiet it was outside. The birds and rodents seemed to be holding their breath. And almost imperceptibly, he heard a sound, a sharp if distant metallic click.
He knew that sound, it was a sound from his past, and he roared in reaction and wheeled inside the mews and threw open the door as the roar and the whoosh filled the canyon.
For Johnny, the muscular thrust of the rocket was exhilarating, and the flash and roar of the explosion inside the cave took his breath away. The heavy boom echoed back and forth from canyon wall to canyon wall, and the sheer power of it seemed to wash over and engulf him and open his pores. The vapor trail hung in the air as if frozen there, a white snail’s-track of smoke that extended from the juniper stand midair over a tumbling river far below and straight into the mouth of the cave.
Nate saw it: a lightning bolt of smoke and light streaking his direction from a thick stand of juniper halfway down the trail.
The rocket vanished into the opening of his cave. The explosion a split second later threw him back into the mews, flattening it, and he crashed to the ground in a sharp tangle of broken willows, broken skin and bones, and panicked falcons.
Johnny jumped to his feet and threw the tube aside and howled, “Jesus! Did you see that? I got him, Drennen! I got that son-of-a-bitch with a perfect shot. Did you see that?”
&nbs
p; His ears rung and his hands shook and white-hot adrenaline shot through his veins and he thought it was better than sex, better than money, better than anything. He wished he had a camera with him to get a snap of that vapor trail and the huge gout of smoke rolling out of the cave. He’d put it on his Facebook page.
Then he turned around and saw Drennen writhing on the trail. Drennen’s clothes were on fire, and so was his hair. Acrid black smoke haloed his head. His face was black and swollen and looked like charred meat. He’d stepped right in into the back-blast.
“She told you not to do that,” Johnny said.
Drennen squealed like a little girl, the sound coming from inside his throat. Johnny watched as Drennen rolled in the dirt until the flames were out.
Behind him, a golden eagle lifted up from the smoking debris and caught a thermal and rose into the cloudless blue sky. Johnny turned and tracked it as it rose, mesmerized.
11
Nate Romanowski moaned and attempted to roll over to his belly in the debris, but he couldn’t make his arms or legs respond. He was on his back and he could see the eagle in the sky above him rising up and out of the canyon. His ears rang with a high whine, and his mind seemed to be disconnected from his body, as if his thoughts were a gas that had been released under pressure to form a cloud around him.
He closed his eyes and tried to pull himself together, to reassert control over his limbs and will his thoughts back into his head. Oh, how his ears screamed.
He wasn’t sure how long it took for his faculties to return, but he realized they had-somewhat-when he was able to reach up and rub his face with his hands. His skin was covered with a film of grit. Then, struggling, he managed to flop over to his side. Thin wooden slats from the decimated mews snapped under his weight and his head swooned. He threw up his breakfast and could smell it along with the sharp and familiar stench of the explosives and dust, and the combination made him remember where he was, although he was unsure what had happened.
