by Bart Paul
“Somebody’s been here. Might still be.”
He nodded. I walked around the wreck just looking, trying to remember how it was. Lester held that shovel like he was ready to smack somebody with the blade if they made a move on him.
“You figure somebody took him?” he asked.
“He didn’t just up and walk off. Even with his boxers.”
“Could it have been a critter? A bear, maybe?”
“I wouldn’t want to meet the bear who could make that old boy vanish without a trace.”
Lester bent over and looked into the cockpit through the windshield. “Well this looks about the same,” he said.
I was looking down through the door. “Nope. Somebody wiped the blood off the instrument panel.”
“Then I bet his wallet’s gone, too,” he said.
“Without going inside I can’t tell.”
“Damn,” he said. “Let’s just look.”
“Hold off a minute.”
I walked around the patch of grass. The ground up that high is just crumbly granite, even where stuff is growing. And in those spots it’s soft. There were plenty of footprints if you got low enough to the ground to see them. Lester watched me on my hands and knees like I was a crazy man, but he’d seen me do that before when we were hunting.
“What you got?” he asked.
“Couple of guys besides us. Now look here.”
He came over and I showed him the two ruts that helicopter skids had made in the new grass. They were pretty faint, but you could see them if you got close.
“County?” he asked.
“Let’s hope. This guy had been sitting right where he died for what, about six or seven months. Then he disappears in a single afternoon, less than twenty-four hours after you phone that idiot son of his.”
“And he’s a chopper guy,” Lester said.
“Yeap. He’s most definitely a chopper guy.”
“It’s probably no big deal,” Lester said. “Maybe somebody saw the wreck from the air and called it in, or maybe Gerald Q did the right thing and called the sheriff right after I phoned. Maybe it is County and they flew in and took him just like they would have if it’d been us who called.”
“Could be.”
“Or maybe after I called him, old GQ chartered a jet to Reno, rented himself a chopper, and flew his old man out while we were poking up the trail horseback. The body could be chilling at the coroner’s in Reno right now.”
“Maybe so.”
I put on my riding gloves and went back to the wreck. I pulled open the cockpit door, took off my hat and stuck my head in. The wallet was gone like Lester figured, and the paper sack with the sandwich and cash was gone. There had been a blue windbreaker, and that was gone too. A torn sheet of legal pad paper was stuck inside the windshield with electrician’s tape just below the spiderweb crack where the pilot had hit it with his head. It was covered with big printing in ballpoint. I didn’t remember it from before.
“Now this crash has been tampered with twice.”
“Who before this?” Lester asked.
“You, numbnuts.”
He tried to laugh it off.
“I got a bad feeling somebody is fixing to tell a different story than the one we know.” I stepped back so Lester could see the note. “Read that.”
He leaned in and read it out loud.
Got caught in a downdraft and missed the pass. Shook up and scared but not hurt bad thank God. Just a bump on the noggin. Have plenty of food, water and warm clothes, so don’t worry. Will cross North Pass and walk out to Little Meadows pack station for help as it looks to be closest to a paved road on map. Six or seven miles tops and I can flag down a ride from there. Will call when I get to nearest town. Don’t worry everybody. See you soon!
Lester finished reading. “Damn,” he said. “A guy would have to be crazy to want to climb over the pass and take that Little Meadows trail with all those creek crossings. Aspen Canyon is longer, but a damn site easier walk.”
“Especially for a dead guy.”
“There is that,” he said. “Plus that pack station being closed in the winter. Let’s see that again.” He reached past me for the note. I shoved him back.
“Jesus. Don’t touch a thing.”
I squatted down and poked a stick at nothing in particular. All I could do was just look around that grassy flat where the missing clothes and the body used to be.
“Why would somebody write a note like that?” Lester asked. “Did we miss it the first go-round?”
“Nope. And the blood got wiped off to make it look like he didn’t whack himself so hard. To make it look like he was in shape to walk out to the Sonora Pass road.”
“So what’s somebody trying to prove?”
“A lie, Lester. A big, felony kind of lie.”
“But we know different,” he said, “right?”
“We don’t know what we know anymore.” I picked up my hat. It was getting on to late afternoon with a nasty breeze coming over the pass, and we were a long way from home. “We best stop by Callie’s and see if any of them other eighty people you left her number with phoned her.”
“I’m getting spooked,” he said.
“You should be.”
“You worry me, old son,” he said. “You’re getting that look.”
“Yeah, well.”
We slipped and slid down the snowfield. At the bottom we cinched up our horses, grabbed that damned packhorse with the tools, which was another damn lie, and rode back down the trail. I always felt at home up in this country, the wilder the better, which is why I came back. But now that big mountain half scared me to death.
Chapter Six
We rode back not saying a word. Below the forks the trees along the creek gave us shelter from the wind. We dropped altitude traveling at as fast a walk as the rocky ground would let us. The sun was already down behind us and we could just see glimpses of last light skimming the rim of the canyon. We came to the rise where the Forest Service sign marked the end of the Wilderness Area and let the horses rest. We looked out from a natural notch in the rocks down to The Roughs and all of Aspen Canyon spreading out below us like a big chute, spilling all the way past the valley to the piñon hills out in Nevada about twenty miles distant. It was so pretty that for a minute I forgot the mess we were in. Then it just looked like more ground to cover, empty and far from home.
“So who’s been looking for him?” Lester asked. We were just hitting the top of the second meadow about half an hour below The Roughs, fairly rattling along. It was coming on dusk with a new half moon dropping down behind us.
“You know. Everybody. The Air Force. Nevada National Guard. County Search and Rescue. Civil Air Patrol. Nevada Department of Public Safety. Santa Claus.”
“I mean who wants him found?”
“Every-damn-body. His family and rich fly-boy friends, I guess. His wife.”
“So who doesn’t want him found?” Lester asked. “The idiot son?”
“He’d be my first guess, but you never know.”
“So it could be somebody we don’t even know about yet,” he said. “Damn. That whole business back there would cost a pile of money,” Lester pulled his horse up. “Hiring a helicopter, finding a couple of lowlifes willing to drag a corpse.” He kind of laughed. “Take him off that snowy mountain, the old boy will be getting ripe pretty damn quick. The meat’ll be falling off the bone like an overdone turkey.” He made a face. “What the hell are they going to do with him, anyway?”
“Whatever they were going to do they’ve already done.”
“There’s a lot of country back there,” Lester said. “They sure found him quick.”
“Well you gave the guy everything but the GPS coordinates, for Christ’s sake. But whether it was the idiotstick son or somebody else, they hadn’t been to the wreck when the note on the windscreen got wrote. Leastwise they weren’t local. Whoever scribbled that only knew the country from what they saw on a map. Otherwise he woul
d have claimed to be heading the easier way east down Aspen Canyon like we’re doing.”
“Just like I told you he should,” Lester said.
“There you go. You’re a damn genius. Now let’s get going. Be full dark soon.”
“We still got some moon,” he said. Then he smiled. “A rustler’s moon. Besides, the horses know the way.”
“They’re the only ones left who do.”
We screwed down our hats and hit a long trot until the next aspen grove and by then the wind had died. It was another hour before we were poking along the last bit of jeep trail through the sage and moonshadow just above the pack station with the creek racing along below us on the right. I half expected to see Harvey’s truck waiting for us in the trees and wondered what the hell I would tell him about where we’d been, but of course the only trucks outside the trailer were Lester’s and mine. We unsaddled and turned out the stock. By then we were fried and hungry.
We went inside, and I lit the lamps in the trailer. I stood there in the front room looking things over while Lester took a shower. It wasn’t super noticeable, but just enough things were moved around that a person could tell someone had been there and wanted us to know they had. And then there was the smell. On top of the smoke of a fresh-struck wooden match and the almost sweet smell of plain kerosene burning clean in the glass lamps on the table was something different. A thick perfumey stink, but just a leftover hint, and not like anything from a woman. More like some pimp bouncer with gold chains at the Midnight Ranch or the mensroom at a ballgame on a hot day or a barracks on Saturday night when the passes were handed out. I’d already spooked Lester enough and didn’t say anything about it right away. While he was still in the shower, I grabbed a flashlight and went out to the tin shack behind the propane tank under the aspens. It was where Lester and I used to bunk a few summers back when Harvey and May lived in the trailer. We used it mostly for storage now, but it’d be packed with deer hunters or extra help come fall. I reached up under some tar paper above the door frame and felt for my deer rifle. It was my dad’s good Remington .270, and it was still there in his saddle scabbard. I set the flashlight on an iron bunk and eased the rifle down from where I’d wedged it up between the wall studs. I slid it out of the scabbard and opened the breech, then clicked it shut and ran my hand over the stock. It would be wanting a good oiling, but just holding it made me feel better. I guess it was coming to that. I sat down on the plank porch of the shack with the rifle across my knees, looking out over our horse pasture to the trees above the little bridge in the dark, memorizing the terrain I’d known my whole life. The tin shack had been another snow survey hut built sometime in the fifties to replace the log cabin at the forks. Harvey bought it for surplus about the time I was born, and drug it down from the second meadow with a Cat. It still had the yellow Forest Service sign on the door telling folks in green letters Do Not Molest. It was a little late for that. When I heard Lester coming out of the shower I got up, slipped the rifle back in the scabbard, then stowed it behind the seat of my Dodge and went back inside. After I showered off we drove to town to see Callie Dean. “So what do we say if this GQ has reported the wreck and we didn’t?” Lester asked. I was making the last turn through the pastures.
“He won’t just yet.”
“But what if he did and then Sarah asks us?”
“Improvise, Lester.”
He stared out the window at nothing in particular until we hit the street lights. “I’m hungry as hell,” he said then. “God, I hope she hasn’t closed the kitchen.” He looked over at me like it was our biggest worry in the world. “What time is it, you think?”
“You’re the one with the damn watch.”
I parked behind the Sierra Peaks next to Albert’s Firebird and we went inside. Ed said that Callie had called in sick and that he’d had to close the kitchen early. He didn’t seem too pleased. He said he had a couple of spaghetti dinners he could rustle up if we were starving. Lester allowed we sure were. I started in on some Dago red and garlic bread that Judy brought us, while Lester asked Ed if he could use the office phone to call Callie out at the lake. While he was gone, I chewed my bread and watched some fly fishermen talking to Tony Aguilar in the bar. They were dressed like fly fishermen, but the clothes looked like they just bought them from the sporting goods store down the street. They were built more like cops or bodybuilders than businessmen. They seemed to be doing all the talking.
Lester came back quick enough.
“She don’t answer,” he said. “You think she’s alright?”
“Sure.”
“You think we should go out there and see?”
“Yeap.”
“Then you don’t think she’s alright,” he said.
We dug into our dinners, and were just finishing when Tony stopped by our booth. The fly fishermen were heading out the front door of the bar, laughing.
“Who’s your pals?” Lester asked him. “Some sort of Mexicans?” The fishermen were both black-haired and Latin looking.
“They’re Cubans,” Tony said, like it was something nasty.
“Like I said. Some sort of Mexicans,” Lester said. “Kinda like you Argen-tines.”
“They asked a bunch of questions about last winter,” Tony said, pretty much ignoring Lester. “About the search for that missing plane. Did it extend this far west, that sort of stuff.”
Lester sat up. “What’s it to them?” he asked, but he was looking at me.
“Flying buddies of the rich one,” Tony said. “But from the way they talked, they’re no pilots. Just arrogant assholes.”
“Flying buddies from the Flying W?”
“Who knows, Tomás.” He put a hand on my shoulder. “I better go do my paperwork for the county. At least they pay quicker than rich bastards.” He nodded and left through the side door of the restaurant like he didn’t want to run into the Cubans.
“You about done?”
“Yeah,” said Lester.
“Then let’s scoot on out to the lake.” We hadn’t been in that place for more than twenty minutes.
We were flying past the logging road turnoff to the pack station. I told Lester that somebody had been in the trailer that afternoon before we got back from North Pass.
“What were they after?” he asked. He looked about half sick.
“Us, I figure.”
“But they didn’t take nothing.”
“They were just letting us know they were there. Like a dog pissing on a tree.”
“So if they know where we live . . .” He didn’t even bother to finish, just stared ahead at the road.
I pushed the truck through the sagebrush curves in the creek canyon, then floored it on the straightaway to the lake.
We parked above the cabin in the trees like always, but Callie’s Nissan was gone. When we got out, Lester walked down the dirt drive to where it looped around and you could see it end on the pavement by the water. He looked back like he couldn’t believe she wasn’t there.
“The hell?” he said.
Inside there was a note from Callie stuck on the refrigerator.
Hello my sweet boys. I got a call from our new best friend Jerry Q. He’s coming down from Reno and I’m meeting him up at State Line Lodge. I said I didn’t know when you were coming off the mountain and he said he wanted to touch base. Boy he’s a charmer. Rich and cute—just my type! Things are moving fast for us. I’ll be late, so don’t wait for me. This is very cool. Hasta mañana vaqueros.
Love, C
Lester pulled the note from the fridge and just stared at the paper.
“You think we should drive up there?” he asked.
“Don’t you?”
“Shit.” He dropped into a chair at the dining room table. “She should get service out at State Line.” He punched in numbers on the house phone on the table. Then he set it down. “Straight to voicemail,” he said. “Damnit, Tommy we got hell’s own long day ahead of us tomorrow. Fence to fix. And the yard lights? W
e already lost today farting around with the plane. We can’t go gallivanting all over the place, right? What do we tell Harvey?”
“Who are you and what’d you do with Lester Wendover?”
“Screw you.”
“Hell, Lester, calling the idiot-stick was your idea. Now he’s come to Reno. Strange Cubans are in town asking about that plane, and somebody’s dogging our tracks. We got to go. Besides, diesel’s cheaper at State Line and I’m getting low.” I pointed to the answering machine. The light was flashing. “See who’s been calling your girl.”
He hit the button. The first message was a woman’s voice. She said she was an attorney named Nora Ross from the Beverly Hills law office representing the dead guy’s wife. She was calling back about Callie’s voicemail that we’d found the plane.
“. . . this office is naturally interested in any information you might have about her husband’s disappearance or the location of his airplane, but inquiries with the Frémont County Sheriff ’s office indicate that they have no knowledge of such a discovery. Unless verification can be provided, Miss Dean, this office will be forced to regard your message as a hoax, or worse, some sort of an attempt at fraud, which I need to remind you would be actionable. Please call me at . . .”
Then the phone picked up and Callie came on the line. She sounded just as sweet and charming as could be.
“Oh, Miss Ross, it’s so good of you to get back to me. Trust me, this is no hoax. My fiancé Les Wendover is a back-country outfitter, and when he found the poor man’s body we—that is he—thought the proper thing to do was first to notify your—”
Then the message cut off.
“I wish I knew what she thought she was trying to pull.”
Lester just looked sort of numb. “I don’t know,” he said. “She’s just trying to make something happen.”
“Girl doesn’t know when to shut up.”
He pushed the button again, but it was only him, calling from the Sierra Peaks. He killed it before I could hear. Then he stuck the note back on the refrigerator and sort of smoothed it flat like that would put everything back to normal.
