High Lonesome

by Tanya Chris

“Yes, but will he?”

  “I don’t know. Joe’s a tougher sell. I figured I’d start where it was easy.”

  “Oh, I’m easy?” Tanner laughed. “I guess I did kind of grab your dick as soon as I saw you.”

  There was a sparkle to him this afternoon, like the veil the drug had laid over him was being lifted. Pyotr could see all the sweet, saucy Tanner that had only been hinted at before.

  “You know, most of the time you’ve known me, I’ve been sick or high,” Tanner said, as if reading his mind. “I’m worried you don’t even know who I am.”

  “I know how strong you are, how brave. I know that even when you’re sick, you’re thoughtful, that even when you’re scared, you don’t give up. I know you’re smart enough to think of hiding plans inside a trekking pole and stupid enough to steal them in broad daylight.”

  “Desperate enough,” Tanner corrected. “I don’t know what I was thinking. I wasn’t thinking, you know?”

  “I know.” He hugged Tanner. “We’re going to get to know each other better, OK? But first we need to get through this mess.”

  Joe popped back into the room. “We’ve got another one coming. A second hiker.”

  “From Flume?”

  “From Ganymede. Up the gully. I saw ’em out the window of the dorm. They’re not that far off.”

  Shit. “You said no one would be coming that way.”

  “Weren’t supposed to be.”

  It was his own fault. He’d been slack—too busy cuddling with Tanner and sexing up the both of them.

  He jumped up and checked out Joe’s window. The figure coming from Flume was close enough that he could make out some details now. It was almost certainly a man, appearing both broad and tall, though it was hard to tell without anything else in the frame to measure against, and his jacket was a bright blue over black pants.

  He ran upstairs to the dorm and checked the window that overlooked the gully. Slogging up the steep, snow-covered path—closer, but moving at a slower pace thanks to the slope—was a smaller figure in a bright red jacket and matching red ski pants.

  Whatever was about to go down with Green Tea, they were going to have a witness.

  It’s fine, he told himself. Extra bodies would make the encounter more anonymous, take Green Tea off high alert, deflect attention from Joe. Just a bunch of normal people having a normal day at a normal hut.

  “Get back in Joe’s room,” he ordered Tanner when he found him in the great room downstairs. “And stay in there until Green Tea is gone. I don’t want him anywhere near you.”

  Tanner rolled his eyes and stomped off to Joe’s bedroom, banging the door behind himself.

  “I guess he’s feeling better,” Joe observed. “Yesterday we couldn’t get him out of bed.”

  Right. Tanner was feeling better, and in a day or two all this would be over and he could concentrate on getting his life settled. But for now, he had a spy to meet.

  Chapter 17

  Joe

  He knew he was supposed to be acting casual. Pyotr was doing a fine job of it, sitting in one of the chairs in front of the stove with a magazine open on his lap and a cup of coffee at his elbow. He wasn’t even facing the doorway out to the foyer where Green Tea would enter, and he wasn’t sneaking peeks at it over his shoulder the way Joe kept doing either.

  Joe moved around the room, pretending to straighten things, though really everything was straight. He’d already called down to complain to Susan about letting someone through from Ganymede.

  “Oh God, not that woman?”

  Woman? The person coming up the gully was petite enough.

  “It’s that one I told you about,” Susan predicted. “The blond who’s got some urgent need to be up at Longline. I hope she’s satisfied with her options up there. She certainly wasn’t satisfied by anything down here.”

  “How’d she get through?” he asked.

  “Well, I let her.”

  “You let her?”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t think she’d get past the electrical crew. I was just so sick of arguing with her about it that when I saw her sneak past the barricade, I let her go. I figured they could deal with her. She must have sweet-talked them into letting her through.”

  So as Joe waited to see who would make it to the cabin first—the man from Flume or the woman from Ganymede—he knew that the woman, when she arrived, would be attractive.

  The door banged open in that way it had when the wind was coming from the west and he jumped. He’d been expecting it, had been looking right at the door when it opened, but he jumped nevertheless. He was so not cut out to be a spy.

  Pyotr just kept perusing his magazine as if he gave no fucks about spies banging in. Joe hurried past him to the foyer, grateful someone had arrived. Now he could be busy instead of pretending to be busy.

  “Hey,” he said, when he got close enough so he wouldn’t have to shout. “Welcome to Longline.” He already knew it was the person coming from Flume by his blue coat and the bulk of his figure. A big guy with a grizzled grey-and-white beard and a matching mop of hair turned from the door to face him. “Rough out there today?”

  “Hot,” the newcomer said. He wore his jacket unzipped without any gloves. He leaned his trekking poles up against the wall, then wrestled his pack off his shoulders and dumped it into the staging area. Joe found himself wondering if there was a gun in his pack or if the guy had one strapped to his back like Pyotr did.

  The newcomer pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and mopped his forehead with it.

  “Much slower than anticipated.” He had an accent. Something Scandinavian maybe. Did that mean he wasn’t Green Tea or did he just have the ability to put on an accent like Pyotr? Joe reminded himself it wasn’t his job to figure out who the spy was. He was a hut caretaker, nothing more.

  “Lot of work slogging through that snow, huh?”

  In the four years he’d lived at Longline, he’d probably had this conversation four hundred times. In the summer, you talked dehydration and heat fatigue. In the winter, wind burn and hypothermia. On nice days you talked about how perfect the weather was, and on lousy days you said how you’d still rather be outside than in a cubicle.

  And on days when the snow was melting, you talked about how much work it was slogging through it. Even with a Russian spy, apparently.

  “I’m Joe.” He offered his hand to the man who’d gotten his boots off. “I’m the caretaker here.”

  The man shook his hand with brief, manly precision, the bulk of his hand swallowing up Joe’s.

  “Lars.”

  Lars took his boots over to the drying rack and hung them correctly without even glancing at the helpful diagram posted next to it. He appeared to be a much more solid outdoorsman than Pyotr. More solid all the way around. His gut extended over his ski pants and he stood taller even than Tanner. His shoulders looked like they were used to carrying a load and his face was weathered with the chapped lips and red cheeks of a man who spent a lot of time outdoors. If this was Green Tea, at least the Russians had sent the right guy for the job.

  “Well, Lars, like I said—welcome to Longline. Are you hungry? Can I get you some lunch?”

  It was past the hut’s official lunch hours, but since he didn’t have any other customers besides Tanner and Pyotr, who he realized he’d forgotten to feed what with everything that’d been going on, he could extend the lunch period for today.

  Lars trailed behind him into the great room, his sock-covered feet quiet despite his bulk. “Lunch would be appreciated.” He lowered himself into one of the chairs at the table with a grunt. “Haven’t had anything but power bars for eight hours now.”

  “You got an early start.”

  “Soon as they told me I could leave.”

  Joe handed him one of their laminated menu cards and leaned over to explain what-all he could actually make on it. “Power’s still out,” he explained. “Nothing fresh, I’m afraid.”

  Lars grunted again and threw
the card down on the table. “Whatever you’ve got. I’m easy.”

  “OK.” He raised his voice and looked over at Pyotr. “How about you?”

  “Starving,” Pyotr said. “Now that you mention it.” He rose, stretching his arms above his head so that Joe caught a flash of his flat, hairless stomach. He came over and offered his hand to Lars. “Pete.”

  Pete. Oh, right. Pyotr wouldn’t want to come across as Russian, not now. He was playing the role of American-willing-to-sell-out-his-country.

  Lars shook Pyotr’s hand as perfunctorily as he had Joe’s, then looked him up and down. “Didn’t think anyone was allowed at Longline. I’ve been trying to get here for two days now.”

  “Pete got trapped up here,” he said, almost tripping over the word Pete.

  “Been here a couple days,” Pyotr agreed. He took the seat across from Lars. “Glad to see a new face. I was hoping someone would show up.”

  He wondered if that was some kind of spy come-on, like acknowledging to Lars that he’d been waiting for him. If it was, Lars didn’t take him up on it. He pushed his chair farther from the table so he could stretch his legs out in front of him and looked at Joe like he was trying to remind him that he had a job to do.

  Right. The food. And if Pyotr and Lars were going to execute a secret spy exchange, they obviously wouldn’t want a witness for it.

  “I’ll just be in the kitchen,” he said, as though he needed to explain.

  Everyone got tuna, because the stack of tuna cans was the first thing his eye settled on when he opened the door to the pantry. He grabbed a couple of cans of stew and set those to warming. He wondered if Lars would want coffee but didn’t want to go back out and interrupt them if they were spy-bonding, so he just went ahead and put water on in anticipation.

  Before anything had heated or boiled, he heard the front door bang open again. That would be visitor number two, the woman from Ganymede. So much for giving the guys privacy, because no more than a few moments passed before he heard the sound of a woman’s voice out in the great room, which meant—he sighed—that she hadn’t taken her boots off before walking across his floor.

  If Pyotr and Lars had been talking, he hadn’t been able to hear them, but he could definitely hear her. There were spaces between her words that indicated someone was responding, but not a lot of them. Talkative customers definitely weren’t his favorite. Guys like Lars—Russian spy or not—who knew how to sit down and wait for his meal in silence—those were his favorite.

  The water boiled, and since Lars and Pyotr had already been interrupted, he figured he might as well ask who wanted coffee. He stuck his head out of the kitchen door and saw the woman, blond hair spilling over her shoulders, her coat and boots still on, standing by the table hanging over Pyotr and Lars.

  “I’ll be with you in a minute,” he told her when she looked up at him. “Coffee, Lars? Pete?”

  Pyotr shook his head, but Lars nodded. He went back into the kitchen and spooned freeze-dried crystals into two cups and poured water over them. He ate a sandwich and sucked down his own coffee quickly while the stew finished heating. He was going to need caffeine to deal with the one-two punch of a taciturn Russian spy and a bouncy blond who didn’t know enough to take her boots off before walking into the dining room.

  He loaded up a tray with food for Pyotr and Lars and carried it back out into the dining room, thinking that he’d have to figure out how to smuggle something into his room for Tanner. Tanner had barely eaten in days and now that he was feeling better, maybe his appetite had come back.

  He greeted the woman as he set the food in front of the men. She’d shed all her red outerwear. Her heavy coat was draped over the back of one chair and her ski pants were unzipped and lying across the seat of another. She should have been soaked through with sweat, the way Lars had been, but her hair bounced around her shoulders as if she’d walked out of a shampoo commercial, and although her makeup was subtle, he could tell she was wearing some.

  “You must be the guy in charge,” she said with a bright smile.

  “That’s me. I’m Joe.”

  “Holly.”

  “Glad you made it here safely, Holly. Why don’t we get you squared away.” He gathered up her coat and pants. “If you could just grab your poles. We like to leave all this outerwear in the foyer.”

  He led the way into the foyer. Unlike Lars, she didn’t walk silently, not with those heavy boots she had on—boots which had tracked water and mud everywhere she stepped.

  “You can put your poles over there,” he said, pointing to a clump of them near the door. “Boots go on the drying rack.”

  Holly had four poles in her hand and when she leaned them haphazardly against the others, the whole mass slid down in a clatter. He bent and picked them up, realizing when he caught sight of the wrap of red tape around one of them that she’d grabbed Tanner’s poles too.

  “Oh.” He stood with them bunched in his fist. “Those are, um, mine.”

  She laughed and nudged him. “See, I’m not the only messy one. Sorry about throwing my shit around. I was just exhausted, you know? I thought I’d never get here. I swear I could see the hut for like an hour, getting closer and closer but never close enough. I was about to drop.”

  She looked fresh as a daisy and her smile was infectious. She had on a bright purple fleece that made her blue eyes dance and beneath those ski pants she’d stripped off she wore nothing but a pair of silky white long johns through which he could see that she had on red thong underwear to match her coat.

  She must have caught him looking because she laughed again and said, “I was way overdressed. I thought the snow meant it was cold.”

  “Cold enough if you’d stopped moving for long.”

  “That’s why I just kept plugging.” She hopped up with her boots in her hands and brought them to the drying rack where she studied the pictogram before plonking them onto a pair of metal prongs. “I figured if I stopped, I’d never get here.”

  The drying rack was near the doorway into the great room and she wavered there like she was about to go back through it. He wanted to give Pyotr and Lars time to finish their transaction, so he jumped back into the conversation.

  “How long are you staying?”

  “I’m not sure. I’m just so glad to be here finally.”

  “Let me show you the dormitory upstairs”

  She looked him up and down once with her head tilted to the side. “Sounds good. Why don’t you show me what you’ve got.”

  Oops, OK. That had sounded like a come on. He hadn’t been trying to get her upstairs so he could get with her, as hot as she was. It would be disloyal to Pyotr and Tanner, for one thing, though it wasn’t like they’d talked about exclusivity. They’d been exclusive because they were the only people in the building, that was all, and besides, weren’t they automatically not being exclusive by all fucking around together?

  Regardless, he wasn’t interested. He just wanted to distract Holly from the dining area so Pyotr could transact his business, and now that Tanner’s poles were in the foyer, he needed to distract her from that too.

  “So, you were really determined to get here.” He gestured for her to go first up the stairs. He wasn’t going to sleep with her, but he didn’t mind getting a peek at her ass.

  “You know how it is when you need to be somewhere and you just can’t get there. I’ve been really frustrated by the delay, believe me. I’d have been here yesterday if I could’ve.”

  “I wasn’t expecting anyone today either, to be honest. How’d you get through that gully?”

  “Oh, I have my ways.” She turned as she said it, catching him looking at her ass, and winked. “I was on a mission.”

  He smiled back as neutrally as he could. “To the right at the top of the stairs,” he told her, not that there were a lot of places to go on the second floor. Aside from the long dormitory, there was a storage closet where they kept their spare linens.

  Holly pushed into the
dorm. She looked around like she’d been expecting something different, but this was it. A series of bunk beds. One of them had Pyotr’s pack on top of it and his clothes strewn across it. Resting against one of the other bunks was Tanner’s pack. Shit. They should’ve thought to hide that.

  Holly’s gaze swept quickly around the room, then back to him. She raised an eyebrow at him like she was waiting for him to make a move and didn’t understand why he hadn’t made it yet. Maybe Susan’s jokes about the blond having a hot date were spot-on. She might have a caretaker fantasy, an image of the rugged man living off the land like something out of those romantic westerns he liked to read. If so, she’d be disappointed. He wasn’t a strong, self-sufficient cowboy so much as a scared boy hiding from the world.

  A boy who happened to have an eyeglass case stashed on the back of the shelf at the top of his closet.

  “What about Joe?” Tanner had asked Pyotr earlier. Joe had been on his way into the room to warn Pyotr they had another guest coming, but those words had stopped him. He’d held his breath, not really wanting to hear the answer until it came.

  “I want Joe too. Is that all right?” and Tanner’s response, “Yes, but will he?”

  Would he? Tanner wanted him, Pyotr wanted him, and he wanted them too, but he couldn’t have them unless he came down off this mountain. Tanner had asked him if he had to live on top of a mountain to stay clean, and he’d said no, but he wasn’t being honest—not with Tanner and not with himself. He’d stayed clean those first two years, yes, but it’d been two years of daily struggle, a struggle he’d felt like he was losing even before his blood test came back positive.

  Life had been better up here on the mountain. Safer. Until … until Tanner had shown up with everything he’d been running from.

  You couldn’t run from heroin because even on top of a mountain it would find you, and because what you were really running from was yourself.

  He wanted to go down the mountain with Tanner and Pyotr, but he also wanted them to go away, to leave him alone so he could take that case down from his shelf and maybe just sniff a little. Maybe not do it at all, maybe just look at it, because when he looked at it—that grimy grey powder in a Ziploc bag—he swore he could feel the high again.