A time for reckoning, p.19
A Time for Reckoning, page 19
Well hello to you, as well. I stick out my hand. “Tony Valenti, Sheriff.”
He stares down at my hand as if it’s a rancid fish. “Ain’t you the guy helping that Polish broad who’s trying to rip off Mark Lewis?”
“If you mean the young woman who’s divorcing Lewis, then yeah,” I reply.
“I know who you are,” he mutters with distaste. “Maybe you and your friends ain’t welcome round about these parts, Mr. Valenti.”
No response comes to mind, at least nothing that isn’t ill-advised under the circumstances.
Donahue takes a step closer—to intimidate me, I suppose. It might work better if he wasn’t a good six or seven inches shorter than I am.
“You open to a bit of friendly advice?” he asks.
I suspect I’m about to receive it no matter what I say, so I wait for him to continue.
“I suggest you don’t come around here no more.”
“Y’know, Sheriff, we didn’t start a thing,” Dirk says. “Maybe we should be the ones filing a complaint.”
Donahue ignores him.
“Dirk’s right, Sheriff,” I say. “This is the second time I’ve come to Douglas and the second time someone has set out to do me harm. I’d like to file a complaint.”
“There’s nothing I can do for you, son—even if I were so inclined, and I’m surely not.”
Public-spirited law enforcement at its finest.
Donahue cocks his head at Smith’s building and asks me, “Is your business here done with?”
“For the moment.”
His cold eyes lock on mine. “Okay, then. You’ve had a chance to get your bitchin’ off your chest, and I heard you out. Now, you’d best be on your way back to the big city before something bad happens to you.”
“Is that a threat?”
He shoots a sideways glance at his deputy and guffaws, as if I’ve said something funny. “Naw, just a friendly warning, mister,” he says as his voice and eyes harden.
“Enough bullshit, Sheriff,” Marty says while pushing off the truck fender with an expression that warns “you don’t want to tangle with me.”
Donahue’s eyes narrow.
“We’ll be on our way shortly,” Marty adds casually. “We might stop for a bite to eat on our way out of town.”
The eyes of the deputy or whatever the young guy is widen a bit, betraying a hint of fear. Even Donahue seems a bit taken aback by the brash reply and latent menace radiating off Marty, whose eyes have turned flinty as they bore into the sheriff’s.
Donahue hitches up his belt and forces a little smile that doesn’t mask the unease in his eyes. “You do that, boys,” he says as he turns away. “Then get the hell outta my town.”
Marty winks at me as he climbs back into our pickup.
“We’re stopping for lunch?” I ask.
He chuckles. “No, the sooner we get out of this shit-tip little town, the better, but I wasn’t going to let that hick run us off.”
“Shit tip?” I ask.
He smiles and cranks the wheel to steer out of the parking lot. “Limey term for the local landfill.”
So far, so good with our little sojourn to the Wild West. Next stop, Montana.
32
After our run-in with Sheriff Donahue in Douglas, Marty and I decided to spend the night in Casper before heading to Montana yesterday. Marty was clearly disappointed when Dirk begged off an invitation to accompany us. The drive from Casper to Butte took just under twelve hours. We had a quick dinner and retired to our rooms around ten o’clock last night.
Marty wakes me up with a call at five-thirty in the morning. He hears me out as I curse him to hell and back, then laughs and tells me to get my ass in gear. I shower and drop my duffel bag into the truck on my way to join Marty at a twenty-four-hour diner across the highway from the Holiday Inn where we spent the night. My thoughts are on Trish, Frankie, and the potential peril that today may hold as I cross the roadway. A screaming air horn, the roar of air brakes, and squealing tires jolt me back to the present as I’m almost mowed down by a big rig hauling a front-end loader. I wave contritely at the angry truck driver, scurry the rest of the way across the highway, and duck inside the restaurant.
“Got your head out of your ass now?” Marty asks lightly as I slide into the booth across from him.
“Yeah,” I mutter.
“Maybe that’ll teach you to look both ways before crossing the street,” he says with a grin. “Especially a highway.”
I guzzle as much coffee as a human can consume over the course of a hearty breakfast of greasy scrambled eggs with sides of sausage and bacon that fairly drip grease. A pile of something alleged to be hash browns sits off to one side. The server helpfully drops off a towering plate of white toast, which I imagine is supposed to soak up all the cooking oil and fat we’re shoveling down our throats. I conjure up a vision of a piece of toast floating on a sea of grease. Marty spends the time laying out our plans for the day between mouthfuls of food.
He continues to lament the lack of time he’s had to plan for today’s visit to Mac’s cabin—not even the twelve-hour drive and his days in Casper provided enough time, apparently—but he can’t stay in America indefinitely. He’d been unsettled as we passed the Little Bighorn battlefield yesterday, where George Armstrong Custer led his Seventh Cavalry to disaster. “That’s what comes of an ill-advised, half-assed attack,” he said. I hope we’ll fare better than the soldiers who perished with Custer.
After we finish eating, Marty magically produces a pair of big thermoses. He stuffs a handful of sugar, creamers, and sweeteners into his pocket while we wait for the server to fill the thermoses. Finally, with me now sufficiently caffeinated to cross the road safely, we walk into the hotel parking lot. I make for the front door.
“I checked us out before breakfast,” Marty says as he pops the pickup’s locks.
We’re heading west on I-90 twenty minutes later when I decide to take Marty up on his offer to talk about Trish, maybe as much to get our minds off our worries as anything else. I’d spent hours during the long drive yesterday agonizing over the loss of Trish. Perhaps talking it through with someone new will help.
“She sounds like a special lady,” he says after I spend fifteen or twenty minutes telling him about her and our time together.
“She was,” I murmur.
“Sounds like love at first sight, too,” he adds with a smile.
“Not exactly. I was interested in someone else when I worked with Trish. I ran into her at the courthouse after that crashed and burned, so I asked her out. Best move I’d made in a long time,” I conclude with a smile. “Actually, one of the few good moves I’ve ever made when it comes to women.”
He chuckles. “I feel the same about my wife. I definitely married up, mate.”
“How does your wife feel about this trip?”
His brow furrows. “She’s not crazy about it, but she knows about Frank and agrees that he needs to be found.”
“And stopped.”
He doesn’t answer for a long minute. “We didn’t dwell on that aspect. She sees this as a search mission.”
“As opposed to search and destroy.”
He nods. “I’d prefer to see this play out the way she wants. I doubt it can.”
We leave it at that and return to chatting about Trish and Marty’s wife until we turn north on Highway 93 an hour later. By the time we do, I realize that Marty is developing into a fine friend—despite the limited time we’ve spent together. I’d like to spend more time hanging out with him under better circumstances.
We pull off the road to relieve ourselves in the woods as we near the southern reaches of Flathead Lake. I finish first and take a moment to tilt my face to the sun while I wait for Marty. It’s shaping up to be a lovely day. Perhaps a little on the cool side, but it’s September and we’re a good way north.
“Working on your tan, princess?” Marty asks before he tosses me the truck keys.
“I drove all day yesterday,” I whine.
He laughs. “Suck it up, mate. I’m navigating, and I want to eyeball the surroundings as we get closer.”
Well, then. We certainly don’t want me navigating—not unless we’re willing to risk an accidental detour into Canada or Alaska.
Highway 93 takes us to the south end of Flathead Lake, where we turn onto Highway 35 and hug the east side of the lake for a half hour until we reach a pretty little town named Bigfork. I open the windows and let the fresh mountain air whistle through the cab to keep me awake. I want lunch, but Marty won’t let me out of the truck.
“We’re in stealth mode now, Tony. Can’t risk Frank seeing us.” He reaches behind my seat and pulls out a cooler I hadn’t noticed. “Picked up a few subs and goodies before we left Butte. We have ham and cheese, roast beef, and some sort of Italian thing. What’s your pleasure?”
“The Italian, of course,” I say with a wink.
He points to a little pullout beside the lake. “We’ll park here. Back up to the water so I can keep an eye on things.”
He studies maps on his cell phone while we eat.
“What happens when we lose the cell phone signal?” I ask.
He chuckles and tosses me a portable GPS. It’s surprisingly heavy for its size. “We use this satnav unit. That little puppy will track our progress, mark points of interest, and keep us from getting lost out here in the middle of nowhere.”
“How does it know where we are when we’re away from roads?” I ask while I turn it over in my hands.
“It uses the Navstar satellite network to plot position,” he replies. Then he pulls out a device I haven’t seen before. “This little gizmo connects my phone to Iridium satellites so I have phone coverage wherever we are.”
“So, that’s how you pulled your little trick at Jo’s,” I say. The idea of being able to call in the cavalry at any time is reassuring—so long as I don’t let myself think about what happened to Custer’s Seventh Cavalry.
When we finish eating, Marty climbs into the back seat and pulls on a set of hunting fatigues to help him skulk through the woods unobserved. When he finishes and climbs back into the front of the cab, I wriggle between the seats into the back and don an identical set of fatigues. I find a bow and arrow that had been out of sight beneath the fatigues.
“A bow and arrow?” I ask in surprise.
“That’s to make our ‘just out hunting’ explanation plausible if a forest ranger asks what we’re doing out here in full-fledged hunting outfits.”
I turn a blank stare on him for further explanation.
“Hunting season here doesn’t gear up for another few weeks. The only game we can legally hunt at this time of year in Montana is antelope—and then only with a bow and arrow.”
“But you’ve got a rifle. We have handguns, too. How do we explain that?”
“Yeah, well, it’s legal to carry the handguns, and who is stupid enough to go deep in the woods without protection from bears?”
“Not I.”
Marty chuckles. “If we happen to run into a game warden, make sure to mention that we’re from out of town, just a couple of city boys looking for antelope in the mountains.”
I give him a blank look.
“Most of the antelope out this way are down in Wyoming, so they’ll probably get a kick out of us flailing around up here. Nothing stupid city folks get up to is likely to surprise folks around here. A pair of city idiots lost in the woods isn’t going to raise suspicions, right?”
“Got it.” This guy thinks of everything. I like that.
After eating and polishing off a couple cans of Coke, I gather up our waste and reach for the doorhandle. Marty clamps a hand on my arm.
“We don’t get out of the truck, mate. Stop at one of those trash bins, and I’ll dump the garbage.”
I pull up close alongside a big green bearproof trash container and Marty dumps our waste. Then we drive south out of town and climb into the mountains along a sun-dappled forest road. After ten or fifteen minutes, we park alongside a stream where fishermen in hip waders are flyfishing a little more than a mile away from our target. A mile as the crow flies, anyway. We spend close to an hour inching our way through the woods, with Marty studying his GPS unit and meticulously marking waypoints as we go. I find myself enjoying the rich earthy smell and beauty of the forest, the blue sky peeking through the towering tree canopy, and the bird song and chattering of squirrels and chipmunks. The spongy ground underfoot, often carpeted with pine needles and fallen leaves, is pleasant to walk on. The setting is undeniably idyllic.
We drop to the ground behind a little rise when our target finally materializes through a gap in the trees. Marty wriggles forward on his belly until his head and shoulders disappear into a shrub. He reaches down and pulls a pair of binoculars out of one of the leg pockets of his fatigue pants and settles in for a long look. I can’t see much of anything and decide my best course of action is to keep out of the way. I duck my head so it isn’t visible from the cabin. My heart rate is spiking as I imagine Frankie down there, armed with some sort of monster gun that is lethal to little brothers. I hear Marty grunt a couple of times before he backs out of the shrub five minutes later.
We spend the rest of the afternoon deep in the woods, cautiously circling the cabin while Marty tries to locate a prime observation post where we won’t be readily visible from the cabin. The sun has settled halfway toward the mountaintops when he finally finds one he’s happy with.
“I wish I knew if he was here,” he grumbles after doing a little additional exploring nearby. “Let’s go grab supper and come back at dusk.”
His GPS guides us back to the truck, which is a lot closer than I would have guessed.
“Of course, if Frank is here and is serious about security, tonight might turn into a cat-and-mouse hunt,” Marty says while he unwraps a ham and cheese sub and twists the lid off a bottle of water. After he takes a bite, chews, and swallows, he gazes back into the woods and says, “He’ll deploy countersurveillance measures.”
“Such as?” I ask.
“Cameras at a minimum, possibly infrared sensors. That’s what I’d do. We’ll have to be very discreet scoping the place out—a little peek here, a little peek there, doing what we can to make it appear as if any sensors we trigger are from incidental wildlife contact.”
I take another bite of my sub and wonder what I’ve gotten myself into.
After we eat, Marty studies the GPS for a couple of minutes, then slides into the backseat and motions me back behind the wheel. “We need to move the truck off the road and out of sight.”
The sun is sinking behind the hills, leaving us in a lingering twilight that is unique to the mountains after the sun disappears but hasn’t fully set.
“Parking lights only,” he says while motioning me forward. “There’s a spot a few hundred yards ahead that should be perfect.”
I edge out onto the empty road and creep along for a few hundred yards until Marty points at a little screen of trees with a faint set of tire tracks leading into it.
“Pull the truck all the way in,” he says.
I do, grimacing as branches etch their way along the sides of the truck. I get out and peer anxiously at the damage, hoping I won’t have to mortgage the house or sell my Porsche to pay the rental company for the paint scratches.
Marty connects his phone to the satellite network, then pairs mine to it. He leans close and positions the GPS screen so we can both see it. “See this glowing waypoint?”
A little yellow vehicle icon glows on the screen.
“That’s the truck,” he says. Then he taps another waypoint that he’s identified with a little cabin icon. “That’s Mac’s cabin. If something happens and you’re on your own, tap both spots at the same time and the unit will trace a path between them so you can find your way back to the truck. See?” he continues after he taps the dots and a faint line appears between them.
I nod. This is not a scenario I want to think about.
We lock the truck and set out for our observation post. Then we settle in to wait. And wait. It’s an unseasonably cool evening with the temperature forecast to dip into the low forties. A chill wind is blowing. I learned long ago that you can bundle up against the cold, but a chill wind is the devil itself. I tuck myself deeper within the folds of my jacket. It helps, but not much. We’re surrounded by tall trees that sway in the breeze and drop the occasional pinecone that startles me. The ground is damp and ripe with the smell of peat. The woods that seemed so inviting in the afternoon are miserable in the night.
“This sucks,” I grumble.
Marty doesn’t reply.
Our night-vision goggles tint the world green. Marty is happy for the cloud cover, claiming it will help keep us concealed within the inky night.
Pretty much every bone and appendage in my body is numb, and the single Kleenex I thought to tuck into a pocket is soaked with snot from my dripping nose by the time a sweep of headlights bounces into the lane leading to the cabin. Marty goes taut at my side. I’m shocked at how bright the lights appear through my NVGs and am tempted to switch them off. Marty doesn’t, so I don’t.
The vehicle, a pickup not unlike our own but with a rack of lights atop the cab, pulls into the vehicle enclosure. My stomach knots in a mixture of anticipation and fear when a door slams and we wait to see who comes out of the carport. We have a good angle to see between the carport and door, a prime reason why Marty selected this spot for our reconnaissance mission.
“Shit!” Marty curses when the wind picks up and blows branches into our line of sight as the driver strides to the front door and goes inside. An interior light snaps on behind drawn curtains. I hope Marty got a better look than I did. Whoever is down there is big and almost certainly a man, but between the branches and a forage cap on the guy’s head, I didn’t get a good enough look to confirm that it’s Frankie.
“Bloody wind,” Marty mutters after the door closes. “Did you get a good look?”
