CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Ak’is lay sprawled out on the thin pile carpet of Arthur’s motel room at the Rock Springs Inn, twitching and dreaming about something worth chasing, his muffled barks coinciding with the excitement of the chase. Initially, he had taken up his position facing the locked and chained door, with the unwavering determination of a military honor guard, but after an hour or so, his eyelids had grown heavy and his body lost its battle with sleep.
In sharp contrast, Arthur’s slumber had been uneasy, fraught with images of Sharon on their wedding day, which tumbled seamlessly into her broadcasting a live shot on television, which springboarded into a flashing kaleidoscope of pictures framing her different smiles throughout their ten years together. These flickering vignettes culminated in his distraught mind in a short film of Sharon’s surprise meeting with Ak’is the day Arthur brought him to the mesa. His male logic had been bolstering his resolve on the drive back, reassuring him that it was better to ask for forgiveness than for permission. Stupid advice, he thought, and obviously conceived by someone who was single or soon would be.
Arthur remembered the uneasiness in his stomach, and the shocked look on her face when he had opened the door of the Bronco, and a huge, furry black carnivore jumped out in one fluid motion, catching her completely off guard. After a few hours of verbal confrontation, the kind that women seemed to master before the age of ten, she agreed to live with her husband’s newfound companion, through a mutual understanding. “He doesn’t care about me anyway,” she had said. “He’s your dog.” She crossed her arms. “You’re the one who saved him from that cage. Brothers to the end now, I suppose. We will simply have to agree to tolerate each other, I guess.”
Arthur’s mind began to make the fast climb from its pit of memories as soft growls and sporadic huffs interrupted his recollections. The sounds Ak’is made while lost in deep sleep always made him smile. He sat up and rubbed his face and looked over the side of the queen-size bed. The room was dark, but light had managed to reach under the bottom of the door from the hallway on the other side, giving him enough illumination to see Ak’is’ legs twitching and his large paws moving as if he were chasing elusive prey. Just then, Arthur’s cell phone shattered the quiet with its familiar buzzing hum. The red glow of the room’s clock radio declared it was 8:46 p.m. when he picked up the cell phone and recognized the name and number on its glowing screen. He tapped accept.
“Yá’át’ééh,” Arthur said.
“Yá’át’ééh,” Jake repeated. “Sorry to call so late, but I just got the chance.”
“Not a problem,” Arthur replied. “What’s up?”
“Where the hell are you?”
“Wyoming,” Arthur said, “Rock Springs.”
“Well, I gave you your eight hours, and it cost me my backside getting reamed a new one by Agent Thorne a couple of hours ago.”
Arthur gave a wry grin. “How pissed was he?”
“Pissed enough to think I had been holding out on him. Started spouting all kinds of buffalo crap at me. Then I tried explaining that you were simply playing a hunch and had done the right thing by contacting me. Not that he believed that. In fact, all it did was let him know that you’re actively looking for Kanesewah.” He paused. “If you get in his way, he’s gonna arrest you for interfering in a federal investigation.”
Arthur rubbed his face again. “I’m shaking in my boots. What he’s got in the works?”
“He dispatched a detail to Utah to check out the house you found. By now they’re probably bothering the neighbors with all their floodlights and scurrying around like red ants devouring a frog. I told him you also mentioned there was evidence of another woman besides Sharon in the mix. He’s got his people going through everything pertaining to Kanesewah to see if they can figure out anything that might give them a name.” Bilagody paused again. “What led you to Rock Springs?”
“Like you said, a hunch.” Arthur threw off the sheets and swung his legs over the side of the bed. Ak’is raised his head, saw nothing of importance, and went back to sleep. “But my hunches are usually right. If I come across anything else, I’ll let you know.”
“Same here,” Bilagody said. “Arthur?”
“What?”
“Maybe you should rethink handling this alone.”
“Who says I’m going to be alone?” This time, Arthur paused. “I have friends everywhere.”
“Either way, I’d be very careful.” There was seriousness to Jake’s tone now. “I wouldn’t put it past Thorne to start tracking your cell phone. If he thinks you’re close to Kanesewah, he’ll want to find you. I saw a report on one of those cable news channels the other night that said the feds have at least a hundred planes wandering the skies every day, flying low and outfitted with high-tech cameras on their bellies, and simulated cell towers inside them that can force your phone to connect to them.”
Arthur rattled off his room number and the motel phone number. “Guess I’d better get off, then, before the NSA triangulates my position and launches a missile up my ass.”
“Hey!” Jake said, “that isn’t funny!”
Arthur tapped the red end prompt on the screen before Jake could finish his thought. Standing up, he crossed the room and felt the cold linoleum bathroom floor on his bare soles. He flicked on the light and removed the plastic wrapping from one of the glasses on the round plastic tray by the mini coffeemaker and ice bucket, and filled it with water. While he drank, he caught himself actually looking forward to the continental breakfast in the morning. The desk clerk manning the long brown front desk with the black polished stoneware top had promised him a delicious array of juices, coffee, cereals, biscuits and gravy, waffles, and other traveler’s fare in the breakfast area across from where they were standing. Arthur had decided on biscuits and gravy and a few cups of coffee. He planned to eat at one of the small square tables he had seen by the windows.
Finishing his sterile glass of room-temperature water, he set it on the floating vanity and slapped the light off. If the FBI could turn up anything useful, Jake would make it known in the morning. Arthur went over to the window, grabbed the dangling wands, and parted the curtains. The rain had turned to snow in the last hour of his drive and had only now stopped falling. Everything he could see before him had been covered in a fresh white blanket of frosty stillness. His eyes tracked a plane as it crawled across the empty black sky. Its navigational lights flashed their irregular patterns while its landing lights illuminated the clouds ahead of it like giant flashlight beams searching a smoke-filled room. He was idly wondering where its passengers were going and what they were going to do when they arrived there, when his attention turned to the bare trickle of vehicles moving along the interstate. He paused briefly but decided it wasn’t worth the effort wondering where they were going and what they were going to do, so he pulled the curtains back together and shuffled back to the bed.
After climbing in, he pulled the sheets up to his neck and succumbed quickly to sleep’s beckoning call, with the sense that he was closer to finding Sharon. Or maybe it was just the hope of the desperate, tugging at his consciousness. Either way, his instincts told him he was getting closer. And if the runners were moving by night in these mountains, they would be having a slow go of it. The bad visibility and slick roads would surely force Kanesewah to slow down and delay him a little. He couldn’t take the chance of losing control and ending up in a ditch. Arthur drifted off, hoping that tomorrow would bring him something more substantial than mere speculation to bolster his hope. Tomorrow would bring with it a … what had Edward once called it? Diné niyol. A Navajo wind.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The jagged peaks of the Teton Range were barely visible above the lodgepole pine forest, their craggy contours muted by the falling snow. It had already begun to cling to the pines and the ground, though not yet to the road they were traveling on. Sharon had turned toward the
back seat passenger-side window to make it harder for Leonard to look over his shoulder and ogle her breasts.
As they rolled up Highway 191, Sharon stared out the window, seeing and not seeing the dark expanse of Jackson Lake beyond the trees. She couldn’t yet tell whether the inklings of doubt she had planted in Gloria’s mind were gathering strength. At this stage, she knew she must use the utmost delicacy, feeding that doubt without appearing too interested, until its relentless nagging at Gloria’s subconscious either turned her into an ally or, at the very least, upset the dynamic between her two captors. Then again, if it did the latter, Kanesewah might start viewing both women as unnecessary. When she thought about it, her odds of getting through this alive seemed about as likely as winning the lottery.
If she didn’t shift her focus, she would scream. She remembered the morning, just before this nightmare began, when she and Arthur discussed having children, for the first time in what seemed an eternity. That had been the first step. And this time, she wanted to see it through. It was the one thing they were missing, the one thing that could get them back to where they were before. And the thought of creating a life and holding that life and nurturing it, sharing its joys and sorrows, its victories and disappointments, and seeing its potential to become more than they themselves would ever be, was wondrous to contemplate. Tucking that thought into a private corner of her mind where it could keep her warm and calm, she pulled up the blanket and tried to close her eyes.
She had started to doze off when Kanesewah jerked the steering wheel and stomped the brake. Her eyes flew open in time to see the white-tail buck and doe that had darted across the roadway. Gloria woke from her sound sleep as her head slammed the window. She let out a string of expletives in Spanish and then English, which brought a laugh from Leonard. While the two bickered, Sharon tried to locate whatever had tapped her right foot during the evasive maneuver. Reaching with the toe of her shoe beneath Gloria’s seat, she felt something solid. She gazed out the window while sliding the right edge of her foot behind the object and slowly pulling it back toward her.
She squirmed in her seat as if trying to get comfortable, and let her eyes sweep across the cell phone that lay on the carpeted floor mat. Covering it with her foot, she prayed that it not come to life with whatever ringtone its murdered owner had chosen. All she had to do now was keep it concealed until she could get a hand on it and slip it into a pocket. If it still had battery power, and if they stopped somewhere that could reel in enough signal to send a text …
* * *
For the next five hours, the cell phone lay concealed beneath her foot. All the while, she kept making mental notes of everything they passed, trying to remember it all. A highway sign would be a godsend, a town’s name the holy grail. She remembered the tension of passing through the south entrance of Yellowstone: Kanesewah calmly showing the pass from when they had entered Tetons, the ranger glancing at it and then at the three of them as the snow continued to fall and melt against the warm windshield. Then the gate had gone up and Kanesewah drove through, and Sharon let out the breath she hadn’t known she was holding. She recalled skirting the eastern edge of Lewis Lake, heading northwest at the West Thumb of Yellowstone Lake, then seeing nothing but dark wooded wilderness. She remembered seeing a park sign for Old Faithful then crossing more water. Then she remembered breathing in the nauseating sulfur fumes rising from the mud pots and fumaroles that covered the area.
They had driven on for quite a while before crossing Nez Perce Creek, then followed the twists and turns of the Firehole River until it disappeared into the more mountainous darkness. Then they crossed another river. The Jefferson—yes, that was it! And just before the highway split, they had passed some campground. What was it called? She struggled for the name. Madison—Madison Campground! Pushing her mind further, she remembered a slight grade coming out of the basin on Highway 89. The blasting heater pulled in more of the pungent sulfur smell. Gloria made a wry remark, and Kanesewah chided her to keep quiet; they would be out of it soon enough.
Sharon moved through her mind, trying to remember the name of the river that now rolled silently by in the snowy darkness to their right … the Gibbon! She was pleased with herself for remembering it. Too many damn rivers in this high country. From now on, she would try to note only the prominent landmarks that might give Arthur a solid trail to follow. Kanesewah had planned this route well. The road would be open and plowed until it closed for the winter in December. And, unless the snow really dumped, they would be through the north gate without any difficulty, provided that the rangers at that entrance didn’t already know of their existence.
As they passed Nymph Lake, Kanesewah suggested to Gloria that someone had named it “Nympho Lake” after her. Her hand sprang up, signaling that he was number one. He laughed. She lit a cigarette and offered it to him. He leaned over, and she slid the filtered end between his lips before lighting another for herself. Both dropped their windows a few inches to circulate the air. Sharon held her breath until the pungent smoke began to escape through the openings, then she pulled the blanket closer—all while keeping her foot on her newly found treasure.
“I have to pee again,” Gloria said.
“Jesus Christ, where in hell do you think I should pull over and let this fucking event happen?”
“I don’t know,” she said, “but you’d better find somewhere before I piss on this seat!”
He muttered, “Woman, you’re getting to be a pain in my ass.”
Another mile rolled by before Kanesewah spotted a pullout on the left side of the road. Tucked in behind some trees was a stone structure with log trusses holding up a cedar-shake roof. He slid the Yukon into the small parking area beside the structure.
“That’s not a bathroom!” Gloria said.
“Look,” he told her flatly, “you’ve gotta piss and so do I. We’re a long way from Helena, so just get out and piss!”
“This is bullshit!” she said. “There’s got to be something
farther up.”
“Fucking broads,” he growled as he dropped the shift lever into gear and pulled away.
They drove in silence, passing two more pullouts that resembled the one they had left behind. Gloria pointed frantically at an expansive paved parking area. Kanesewah pulled in next to the small unisex facility that all national parks offered now to save on building costs and political backlash, and parked so the Yukon’s headlights illuminated the structure. Gloria darted from the truck, ran to the building, and flung open the door.
Sharon decided this might be her only chance. She told Leonard that she had to go, too, and he grudgingly agreed. Gloria emerged from the building into the headlights and walked back to the truck. Sharon knew she would have only an instant. When Kanesewah opened his door and got out and Gloria opened hers to get in, she snatched up the cell phone and slid it beneath the blanket.
“Fuck, it’s cold!” Gloria exclaimed as she directed the warming dash vents toward her.
“When I come back, you can take her,” Kanesewah said, slamming his door.
Gloria turned to look at Sharon. “Well, I guess everybody’s gotta go sometime,” she said, grinning at her own double entendre.
Kanesewah was back in barely a minute. Then Gloria led Sharon to the small building. Sharon had managed to slip the cell phone into a front pocket of her pants before stepping into the freezing mountain cold with the blanket wrapped around her. They walked to the shelter.
“I thought you said he cares about you,” Sharon said.
“Shut up,” Gloria snapped. “You don’t know shit. I’m tired of uppity bitches like you thinkin’ their shit don’t stink and talkin’ about my life like they know anything about it.”
“Okay, I’m sorry,” Sharon said. “I just think he’s using you. Or haven’t you ever given any thought to what he’ll do when he doesn’t need you anymore?”
“I said,
shut the fuck up!” Gloria pulled the revolver from her coat pocket and pressed the muzzle against Sharon’s back. “Get it?”
Sharon nodded. “If you don’t mind, I’d like some privacy this time.”
Gloria sighed. “Christ. You think I’m gonna watch you piss?” She glanced toward the SUV, squinting against the bluish glare of the headlights. “Whatever, bitch. Just get it done. And don’t fuck around. I’m freezing my coño off.”
Sharon stepped into the small room and closed the door behind her, locking it while banging the seat to mask the sound. Goose bumps covered her bare legs as she slipped her slacks and panties down to her knees and steeled herself. After the initial shock of contact with the cold seat, she pulled the phone from her pants pocket. She flipped the antique open with her thumb, and the small screen lit up. No signal bars meant no hope of getting a message out. But the battery was at full charge, and she had to try. Even if the signal found no way out now, it would keep trying until it hit that magic spot in the cellular galaxy where it would be allowed to slip through the digital veil and get to Arthur.
She made the expected noises for Gloria while discovering that the phone wasn’t password protected. Two seconds later, she had located the text function. She was relieved that the owner had disabled the key click function, perhaps after hearing news reports of robberies in which store clerks had been killed when the key clicks gave them away.
As Sharon emptied her bladder, she thumbed the small keys as fast as she could.
may b only chance to contact
somewhere north of Yellowstone
heading for great falls
then canada
brown yukon mn plt
find me I luv u
S
Gloria pounded on the door. “Hurry up, bitch! My fuckin’ lips are freezing together! Both sets!”
Path of the Dead Page 11
