by Bart Paul
“I got to make this right.”
“I know you do.”
“Starting with Mitch.”
“Mitch is an idiot,” she said.
I finished washing the plates and we went to saddling up. We worked without talking like we had been doing this together for years. She caught me watching her cinch up one of the mules.
“I’ve worked cattle with you and rode in the Fourth of July parade and we’ve team roped,” she said, “but this is new.”
“Yeah?”
“It’s kind of okay.”
“You should go to work for Harvey.”
“Yeah, right. Think of the career opportunities.”
Working together, we got the two light loads up and tarped and lashed down good and tight with me taking the lead on the hitches. I’d saddled my horse with Lester’s rig for her to ride, and I went to hand him to her. She was cradling the 12 gauge in her arm.
“How you going to carry that thing down the switchbacks and lead a string of mules too?”
“You tell me,” she said. “You’re the packer.”
I took it from her, shucked the shells then wrapped it in her jacket and tied it longwise along the top of the sawbuck on an unloaded mule.
“What else did Mitch say?”
“That he was sorry,” she said. “Sorry for all of us.”
“He didn’t sound sorry. He sounded pissed.”
“He said he and two Highway Patrol officers picked up a Cuban with an assault rifle at the trailhead around midnight. The jerk came bouncing into the campground on an ATV with the light on. They’d been watching him come down the trail for half a mile. A kid could have caught him. Mitch has him in custody, but he’s not talking. No habla inglés. He was pretty thrashed after his little hike down the switchbacks, and real afraid.”
“He should be. Just one guy?”
“Just one,” she said. “The other must have been smarter and slipped by in the dark.”
“That leaves at least two of them still loose.”
I put the shells in a ziplock and tossed them in an empty pack bag.
“Hop on and check your stirrups. Lester’s legs are probably longer than yours.”
She swung up. “Shows how observant you’ve been all these years,” she said. “They’re fine.”
“That’s ’cause he rides with ’em shorter than you.” I handed her the roan with a mule tied behind. “I’ll go first on Harvey’s mare. She hates being in the back, but she’s real good on the gnarly spots.” The stirrups still looked too long for her, but I didn’t say another word.
I checked my cinch, stepped aboard, and untied the big black packhorse. When I led him and two mules past Sarah, she was staring at the lake. She had her sunglasses on so I couldn’t see her red eyes.
“I don’t ever want to come back here,” she said.
I pulled up and looked out at the lake. It was a nice clear day with the sun hitting the snow on Crown Point and the peak reflecting on the water.
“You got to. You can’t blame the place.”
“Tommy, that first night when you knew that Les had stolen the watch from the wreck, why didn’t you just call me and tell me about it? You could have said he took it as proof of identity or something. The money might’ve been a problem, but anything would have been better than this.”
“I guess I got the rest of my life to come up with an answer to that.” I led the way out of the trees to the trail around the lake.
We were spread out single file, so we didn’t talk once we left the lake and started down the switchbacks. Some of the backcountry trails were deer trails, stock trails, or Indian paths over the mountains as old as time, but this trail was picked and shoveled and dynamited by packers, the Forest Service, and the CCC over the last hundred years. When the old Summers Lake pack outfit went under, the Forest Service didn’t waste any more time maintaining it. The switchbacks would be good enough for backpackers if they were tough enough, but there were some real dicey spots for stock, so Harvey and horse campers hadn’t used it for years. As hairy as that trail was, the clear sky gave us long views of the country below us and a high-up look right into the snowy granite peaks just to the south. I felt damn near close enough to touch the one that Lester had never stopped talking about since that day we climbed it in cowboy boots when we were seventeen.
I got off a couple of times and led my string real slow over some slides where there were boulders on the trail and nasty drop-offs and no way around but over. The pack horses and mules were pros, and since only two of the five carried a load, they could concentrate on their footing. When I’d get past a bad spot, I’d wait for Sarah to do the same before I got mounted, but she was hand enough I didn’t worry about her.
When we got partway down the switchbacks, we looked down into a cirque with a meadow and trees at the near end of it, and Henry Lake at the far end off to the north. The switchbacks cut across the face of the rock above the meadow. At the furthest end of the lake there was a stand of tamarack and a stretch of beach. The water there was shallow and looked yellow over the sand. I was looking out at the lake when I saw the ravens. There was a cluster of them down at the bottom of the switchbacks. When I looked out, I saw a few more cruising the thermals and a single turkey vulture circling above them like he was figuring if whatever was down there was worth tangling with that bunch. Then the buzzard hit a downdraft and flapped those long wings, fighting to get himself some altitude. I pulled up and turned in the saddle to get Sarah’s attention, but she’d already seen it. She pointed to the rocks and brush down below.
“I guess that’s why Mitch only caught the one,” she yelled.
I nodded and we kept on riding. When we got closer to the meadow we could see the body. We crossed a wornaway spot, a hole in the trail where backpackers had cut the switchback and made a slide, a kind of chute between the two parallel legs of the trail, one about ten feet above the other. Hikers thought it was fun to skitter down a cutoff like that, but they made it dangerous for stock. The second Cuban must have hit that slide in the moonlight and lost his footing. The drop to the meadow was only about sixty feet, but he probably bounced off some nasty hunks of granite on the way down. The animals picked their way over the worn-away spot, and we kept on going to the end of the switchback and reversed direction again.
“Should we check to see if he’s still alive,” Sarah said, “or do we take the ravens’ word for it?”
“The ravens. Those two Cubans were definitely the C-Team.”
Within a few minutes we were riding along the edge of the meadow on the floor of the cirque with mountains on three sides and the lake ahead of us and only five miles to go to the trailhead. We came on the second ATV below Henry Lake. The Cubans had ridden up as far as they could until the trail got rocky, then left the ATV right in plain sight. I got off and looked at the sticker on the gas tank.
“It’s from a rental outfit in Mammoth.” I jotted the name in my tallybook.
“Why would they be down in Mammoth?” she asked.
We made such good time once we got down into the canyon in the sagebrush that we beat Harvey to the trailhead by half an hour.
He drove up in the stock truck. Dave Cathcart followed in his pickup. They parked under the Jeffrey pines by what was left of the corrals and outhouse of the old pack outfit. We shook hands all around and Sarah hugged her dad for a minute, but nobody hardly said a word. Harvey and May had been just crazy about Lester like he was their own son. We stripped the packs and saddles and loaded them in the bed of Dave’s truck. The first thing I untied was Sarah’s shotgun and handed it to her. We stopped when two more cars drove up from the campgrounds. One was a county sheriff ’s SUV, the second was a sedan that said U.S. Marines. Mitch got out, nodded at the rest of us, and took Sarah off past the outhouse to talk. A major in woodland camo got out of the car carrying a binder.
“Sergeant Smith?” he asked.
I walked over and we shook. He wasn’t much older than
me, head shaved under his cap and with a long burn scar on his forearm that went up under his short sleeve and showed on the side of his neck. He said his name was Tuggle, and he was the Sea Stallion pilot from the training base who’d be hauling the Jet Ranger out of Boundary Lake as soon as they flew in a SEAL crew to rig things up. He opened the binder. It was full of laminated topo maps. He’d flown over the lake before and knew the spot where I showed him to land, and knew the section of the lake where the chopper went down. I told him the depth, the type of helicopter, and the best place to put a diving crew in the water.
“You’re welcome to fly with us,” he said.
“I’ll go if you need me, but I’d rather not.”
“I understand, Sergeant.”
He was probably the only one who did.
“I’d take it as a favor if you didn’t ask Deputy Cathcart either. She’d feel like it was her duty, but it would be real hard on her.”
“Consider it done,” he said.
We shook again, and he walked over and said something to Mitch, then he got in his car and drove back toward the campgrounds.
Dave and Harvey and I finished loading the stock, and we all waited for Mitch to finish with Sarah. After a bit the two of them walked back. Mitch carried the 12 gauge.
“What’s this bullcrap about another body at Henry Lake?” he said.
I started walking over to the stock truck.
He followed me. “You’ll need to come by and make a statement.”
“I’ll be by soon as I get these animals squared away.” I walked back to Dave’s pickup and rooted around in one of the pack bags in the bed.
“Don’t keep us waiting,” Mitch said. “You got this county shot up like Tijuana on a Saturday night. No doubt about it. I’m just glad your dad isn’t alive to see it.”
I pulled the ziplock with the 12 gauge shells out of the bag and tossed them at him.
“Catch.”
He took a grab but missed, and the ziplock landed in the pine duff. I walked over to the stock truck and climbed in the cab and slammed the door. When I looked back, Mitch was getting into his SUV. Harvey climbed up behind the wheel next to me and fired up the GMC.
“I’m real sorry about that little mule, Harv.”
He kind of grunted but couldn’t say anything just then. He reached into his shirt and pulled out a half pint of Jim Beam. I took it and had a pull, then another, then handed it back. He had a pull and buried it back in his shirt. I watched Sarah through the windshield picking up the ziplock and getting in her dad’s pickup. She didn’t look back. After they all drove away, their dust hung like fog under the pines.
Chapter Sixteen
We ran the stock down the loading chute, and I popped open a bale of hay and spread it in the mangers along the corral fence. The saddle horses left out in the meadow ran up to get a share. We pulled the saddles and packs from Dave’s pickup and stowed them in the shed.
“Don’t suppose anyone’s called Lester’s folks.”
“Mitch had a deputy from up there tell them Lester was killed, no more’n that,” Harvey said. “May was going to call, but she hadn’t stopped crying. I can if you’d rather.”
“No. I’ll drive over to Grass Valley tomorrow.”
“They’d like that,” Sarah said, “I’ll go with you if you want.” Her nose and eyes were red, and she sounded stuffed up.
“You wouldn’t want to piss off Mitch.”
“Old Mitch looked like he’d been weaned on a pickle back there at the campground,” her dad said.
“Mitch and Tommy have a history,” Sarah said. “A real unfortunate history.”
“We was just like brothers till he pulled me over one night out by the reservoir when I was sixteen and slammed me face-down on the hood of my mom’s Camaro. Anybody want a beer?”
“Hell yes,” Harvey said.
“Let’s see if those damn Cubans left us any Coors.” I got up and walked to the trailer. I wanted to do this while the sun was up and folks were around. Inside, it was the same beechwood veneer on the walls and the bench seat under the front window where I always bunked, the same fishing rods hanging on the rack behind the door, the same Forest Service poster—a Charley Russell painting of a horse bucking through a cookfire—with the big letters along the top saying Prevent Range Fires. The same sink and fridge and the oven door–glass all brown from smoke and grease, and the narrow hall heading back to the shower and toilet and bedroom, and the same kerosene lamps on the table. And Lester’s crap just about everywhere, even the bag of chocolate chip cookies he’d left on the counter.
I brought the beer out and we all sat on the pack platforms under the aspens, but I couldn’t sit still.
“Come on, Dave. Let’s take a look at your colt.”
He got up and followed me down to the corral. The colt looked up as I walked over to where he was munching hay at the manger between a couple of the mules. I slipped a hackamore on him and led him out.
“He’s coming along real nice.” I hobbled the colt in the shade, talking to him and rubbing him down.
“I can see that,” he said. “I’m surprised you had any time for him.”
“I wanted to get him going for you.”
“He let you trim his feet?” he asked.
“After I roped a foot or two. Messed with ’em.”
“You got on him yet?”
“Yeap. But I put in a lot of groundwork first so’s he’ll be rock solid. You know, for an older gentleman such as yourself.”
He laughed at that. “Oh, he’s not for me.” He looked over at Sarah. She was walking up the trailer step to go inside. “You putting a start on him will be icing on the cake for her. But don’t say anything. It’s a surprise.”
“You got it.”
I saddled him up and led him around, and he was as good as could be. I had used my dad’s rig once I unbuckled the rifle scabbard. I knew Dave would recognize it. Then I hobbled him again so he could just stand quiet for a while.
Sarah came out of the trailer ten minutes later with a towel around her neck. She was dressed, but her hair was wet and she was wearing one of my shirts.
“You mind?” she asked. “I just had to shower.”
I sort of shrugged.
“Dad,” she said, “we better get going.”
“Okay, doll,” he said.
“Are you coming, Tommy?”
“I thought I’d clean up first.”
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll wait for you in town. We’ll see Mitch together if you want.”
“Yeah.”
“That is sure a nice colt, Dad.”
I said so long to Dave and Harvey and unsaddled the colt and turned him back into the corral as they drove off. I picked up my jacket and Lester’s chinks, slid my rifle out of the scabbard and went into the trailer. I got myself a glass of water and sat at the table. I pulled Nora’s satellite phone out of the jacket pocket and called Grass Valley. When I was done talking to Lester’s dad, I drank the rest of the water and left the phone on the table and stood at the sink for a minute. Then I hung the chinks on a wall hook, stood the rifle in the closet, and went into the back to shower. The stall was warm and steamy from Sarah just using it, and the soap was still wet.
I took my time straightening up the place. Finally I sat down again with a yellow pad and wrote out a time line of everything that happened since that morning I first saw the wreck, checking my tallybook now and again. It was harder to write than I thought. When I tore it out of the pad I had four pages. I folded them up and put them in one of Lester’s old finance company envelopes.
I picked up the satellite phone again and punched Nora’s cell number. I kind of jumped when I heard a female voice say yes.
“Damn it, woman, where have you been? Are you alright?”
I heard a kind of gasp.
“Nora?”
“No, Tommy,” she said. It was Sarah.
I didn’t say anything for a minute.
�
�She’s dead, isn’t she.”
“How did you know?” Sarah asked.
“You wouldn’t have answered her phone otherwise.”
“Oh god, Tommy.”
“Where are you?”
“The Ponderosa Motel,” she said. “It’s pretty bad. Gerald Q is here, too.”
“Well, that’s something.”
“Are you coming down? You sound awful.”
“Yeah. I’ll be down. What else do I have to do.” I took the rifle from the closet and drove to town.
I turned on to Main Street from the Summers Lake road. Before I even got to the courthouse I could see sheriff ’s cruisers and an ambulance and a few people standing on the left side of the street at the far end of town. I parked in front of the Mark Twain Café across from the Ponderosa Motel and didn’t get out of the truck right off. The door to the motel room was open and there were two ambulances in the lot. An EMT slammed the rear door of one of them and pulled out his phone and checked his messages. I saw Sarah come out of the room with Mitch and the lady from the motel. Sarah was still wearing my shirt. I waited for a semi to roll by then crossed over to the motel parking lot. The motel lady stood with Mitch watching me cross the street. She looked up at him and nodded. The two of them hustled back into the office before I got across. Sarah waited for me outside the room.
“Mitch says it looks like murder-suicide,” she said. “Like they had sex, then he beat her to death and shot himself. A single pistol shot to the mouth.”
“Yeah, right.”
“The medical examiner did a once-over before they took her out. Found evidence of recent sexual activity,” she said. We stepped inside the door. A Do Not Disturb card still hung on the knob. “But with all the blood it sure could have been rape. You have a better scenario?”
I got a whiff of the same nightclub smell of rank cologne that I first smelled up in our trailer the night we found the body had been swiped from the plane. Then there was that other smell of blood and shit and death. GQ’s stupid cowboy hat was lying on the rug with blood seeping onto the brim.
“Yeah. I got a better scenario.”
