Any Other Name

“Hello?”

“Dougherty, it’s Walt Longmire.”

“Yeah, I just called you.”

“I know, the transponders down here are covered with ice and malfunctioning; nothing is working. Did you find something?”

“I’ve been going through those files and came across a transcription that wasn’t in the computer, somebody else he talked to.”

“Who?”

“A woman named Izzy—does that ring any bells?”

A faint alarm went off somewhere in the periphery of my head, but nothing I could place. “Izzy?”

“Yeah, Izzy. Evidently she was involved with the Dave Rowan guy in something that Holman seemed highly suspicious of.”

I looked around, aware that I was still pursuing a felon. “Well, keep digging and get back to me.”

As I hung up, I could still hear his voice. “How?”

Rowan had continued through a door into the commercial area and around a counter where three P.O. boxes hung open, one with a key still hanging from the lock. There were wet boot prints there that trailed across the tile-covered floor and out the front.

As I pushed open the door into the silence of the outside, I saw that the tracks were much fresher and more defined, and that now there were two individuals walking. It looked as if they’d taken only one step out and then headed to the right, away from the bar toward the strip club and the scattered trailers belonging to the dancers.

There was a thundering noise growing louder to my left as I headed east on the frontage road, and all I hoped was that it wasn’t a plow coming up from behind preparing to dump a few tons of snow on top of me. The sound became more familiar as it grew louder, and I turned my head in time to see the billowing vortex of snow being swept along behind another Burlington Northern Santa Fe. As it is with mountains making their own weather, the mile-long train drew its own along with it, clearing the road and the surrounding area as it carried millions of dollars’ worth of not-so-hard fuel.

The pair of prints passed the trailers and angled into Dirty Shirley’s parking lot, making a beeline for the back door where I’d first seen the bouncer. I tried it but it didn’t budge, and then I thought about shooting the lock as they do on TV shows like Steadfast Resolution, but in reality, all that ever does is mess up the lock and not open the door.

Still thinking about that name, Izzy, I began the long trudge around the building and eventually got to the alcove that protected the front entrance. Where had I heard that before? I pulled on the door, it opened, and I eased it closed behind me.

It was dark in the interior of the building, and I couldn’t see much beyond some half-drawn heavy curtains that led toward an elevated area. There were a few illuminated liquor advertisements behind the bar that were reflected in the numerous mirrors on the black velvet walls. I stood there for a few seconds, letting my eyes adjust, and thought I might’ve seen something move.

I watched the mirrors and finally saw the end of a baseball bat hovering in the blackness. Unsure from which direction it was reflecting, I figured I had to make a guess. Remembering that the bouncer had led with his right, I decided to move to the left and direct fire to the right, where he’d most likely be.

As mistakes go, it was a doozy.

He was on the left and caught me with the Louisville Slugger. Luckily, it was a glancing blow and I’d dropped my head, but unluckily, I tripped on the shag carpet and tumbled off onto the dance floor. When I hit the ground, the .357 clattered out of my hand and slid across the tile underneath the other platform.

“You know, you really should’ve left off on this one. Not only are you too old for this shit, but you’re too dumb, too.” He patted the wooden bat in the palm of his other hand with a continuous smack. “Now I’ve got to beat you to death, and I was just getting to kind of like you.”

I rolled over and stared up at him. “Where’s the postman?”

“Dave is taking care of business.” He stopped at the step and took a few practice swings. “That’s what we’re all doing, taking care of business.”

I pushed a little away and propped myself against a chair. “And what part of the business are you in?”

He palmed the bat again. “Right now, the tenderizing business.” He stepped down. “USC, huh?”

“Yep.”

He raised the bat. “Well, Trojan, say hello to the Fighting Irish.”

I pulled the Colt Walker from my sling and carefully aimed it at his face. “Fight this.”

He stared at the massive barrel of the vintage firearm.

“I’ve never seen a human being shot with one of these cap and ball jobs, but I’ve heard they about half explode on contact, so not only do you get the primary wound, but bits and pieces of the ball scatter all over you.” I could see him weighing his chances. “But you won’t have to worry about that because before I take another hit with that bat, as my old boss used to say, I’ll spray your brains out of the back of your head like a manure spreader.”

There was a tense moment, and then he lowered the bat onto his shoulder and sighed. “I don’t want to go to prison; I just wanted to get my knee fixed.”

“It might be a little late for that.” I pushed off the floor, keeping the Walker on him. “What’s going on around here, anyway?”

He reached a hand out, but I ignored it and stood on my own, watching his muscles tense in his shoulders as he thought about swinging the bat again.

I shoved the big Colt in his face. “I’m getting the feeling that you just aren’t trustworthy.” I pulled the cuffs from my pocket, tossed them to him, and motioned toward the pole at the center of the stage. “Hook yourself to that.”

He stepped back. “No way, man.”

I lowered my aim at his good leg. “Do it, or you’re going to be rehabbing both of those knees.”

He dragged a chair from one of the tables onto the stage and did as I said, slumping into a seated position with his wrist attached to the chrome pole. “Happy?”

“Give me the bat.” He did, and I sat at another table with the lumber in front of me. “So I’ll ask the question again—what’s going on?”

“My question, exactly.”

The voice that came from behind me was female, sort of, and was accompanied by the sound of a slide-action being pulled back on a 9 mm semiautomatic. I turned and was treated to the sight of the sister of the sheriff of Campbell County and proprietor of the establishment pointing a pistol at me. “Tommi.”

She threw her purse and coat onto the bar and looked at the two of us. “What the hell is going on in here?”

Thor was the first to speak. “Thank God you’re here, Tommi. I caught this guy snooping around and hit him with the bat, but he got the jump on me and cuffed me to the pole—”

I interrupted. “Call your brother; I’m working on a case involving the missing women. Your boyfriend, Dave, the recently deceased bartender of the Sixteen Tons, and the mullet with the mouth cuffed to the pole here are all involved.”

She looked disgusted—then considered him and then me again. “Mister, I’ve done quite well in life knowing what aspects of my business I need to involve my brother in, and which ones I don’t—another thing I’ve fine-tuned is my ability to sniff out bullshit when it’s being shoveled my way.” She came down, sat in the chair across the table from me, and then readdressed her aim to the bouncer. “Now, Thor, you tell him everything he wants to know or I’ll shoot you myself.”

The blond kid pleaded. “Tommi, you don’t understand—”

The 9 mm went off, splintering a hole in the stage floor no more than a yard away from the kid’s foot as he wrapped himself around the pole.

I sat the Walker on the table and cleared my nearest ear with the tip of a pinkie. “You mind telling me when you get ready to shoot that thing again?”

She casually lifted the semiautomatic and blasted another round in the stage a foot away from the kid’s other sneaker, causing him to leap up, overturn his chair, and stand comically behind the chrome pole. She glanced at me. “I might be shooting some more.”

“Thanks for the warning.”

“Think nothing of it.” She took out a cigarillo and a lighter and rested her elbow on the table in order to sight the pistol on Thor’s private parts. “You were saying?”

The kid was on the verge of crying. “It wasn’t my idea.”

She puffed her cigarillo as if her life depended on it. “Comforting, seeing as how in the couple of years I’ve known you I’ve never known you to have one.”

“It was the postman, honest.”

I watched as Tommi’s hand tightened around the pistol. “Dave.”

“He always rings twice.” Figuring the kid was scared enough, I reached over and lowered Tommi’s weapon. “Tell me about Mr. Rowan, Curtis.”

“It was his idea.” Thor relaxed and leaned against the pole. “He gets these catalogs with women in them at the post office, and he figured he could go into the business himself what with it closing and him losing his job anyway.”

“Mail-order brides?”

“Yeah . . . Well, kind of.”

“Kind of?”

He nodded. “More like servants. We were all talking over at the bar one night, and he brought the subject up. We didn’t know that he’d already done it twice with women from town, but we figured we had a supply of girls that we could use from the club—”

“You mean you abducted these women against their will and sold them?”

“Um, yeah.”

I sat there, thinking that the report from Tommi’s pistol had affected my hearing. “Slaves.”

“Sort of, yeah.”

She raised the pistol and aimed again. “Can I shoot him now?”

I pushed the 9 mm away. “Not till we find out where the women are.” I turned and gave the bouncer my most immediate and severe attention. “At last count there are three—where are they?”

“Um . . .” He mumbled the next part. “All over.”

“I’m shooting this little bastard on general principles.”

I held the gun away. “Where are they?”

He shook his head as he spoke. “One might be somewhere in Florida, maybe.”

“Rowan has the list?”

He nodded. “He knows everything.”

“So, where is he?”

“I don’t know.” Tommi lifted the pistol again, and this time I didn’t attempt to dissuade her, and Thor suddenly remembered the conversation. “He came in here and told me you were going to kill us all and that I was supposed to stop you no matter what it took.”

“Then he left?”

“Yeah.”

I thought about it. “There had to be a place where you kept the women before shipping them out or delivering them; where was that?”

“We kept them sedated in the trailer.”

“The one that burned down?”

“Yeah.”

I stood. “What about Jone Urrecha?”

“Who?”

I gestured toward Tommi. “Shoot him.” She did, this time missing his foot by inches. “Your running partner, the Basque woman.”

“The schoolhouse.”

I stuffed the Colt Walker into my sling. “Over by the bar?”

“No, the old one back up the canyon road.”

I walked to the stage and lifted the short curtain that trimmed the dancing area but couldn’t see the .357. “There’s a pistol that slid under there that belongs to the detective that’s been working on this case. When the sheriff’s department gets here to take golden boy into custody, tell them about it, would you?”

She nodded. “Will do. You headed for the schoolhouse?”

“I am.”

“You can’t see a damn thing out there.” She stubbed her cigarillo out on the table. “You want me to send the troops and my half-wit brother after you, or do you just want to shoot that asshole Dave and leave him for the coyotes?”

“It’s tempting, but send them after me.”

“Will do.”

I straightened my hat and zipped up my coat with my good arm, careful of the bandage on my neck. “Can I drive there?” She and the bouncer looked at each other. “I take that as a no.”

“It’s just a dirt road and all rutted out; in weather like this I think you better walk.”

“How far?”

“’Bout a mile.” She frowned. “And I was going to marry that son of a bitch.”

—

When I came out the back door of the strip club and looked across the field, I could see that the Jeep was gone. I could also see the revolving lights of a Campbell County Sheriff’s car. I hustled across the parking lot and down the road, getting to the Sixteen Tons Bar in time to see the present sheriff of Campbell County and the retired sheriff of Absaroka loading the wounded investigator into the backseat.

“Where’s the EMT van?”

Sandy turned and looked at me as they made Harvey as comfortable as possible, his head wrapped with so many bar towels it was starting to look like the top of a snowman—all he needed was some coal and a carrot. “With this fog, you’re lucky that radio call you put in with my dispatcher got through to me. I’ll drive him over to the hospital and then come back.” He glanced past me, toward the mail office next door. “I understand we’ve got somebody who’s gone postal?”

“From what I got from Curtis, the kid I handcuffed to a pole over at your sister’s strip club, he, the dead bartender, and the postman are running some kind of white-slavery ring.”

He guffawed. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

“I wish I were.” I glanced at the hills behind the small town. “Supposedly they kept the women in the old one-room schoolhouse up in the hills out here.”

Sandy stopped laughing and nodded. “There’s a road, but the fastest way to get there is to follow the railroad spur behind the school that deadheads about a mile down the canyon—and that way you can drive.” He pointed to a line of empty coal cars. “They sometimes park the cars there before they roll ’em down to Black Diamond, where they fill them up. When you get to the end of the line, hop over the top of the hill, and the school will be right there.”

I held a hand out. “Let me borrow your cuffs?” He handed them to me, and I reached for my keys. “There’s a road beside the tracks?”

He nodded. “A lot better one than that goat path on the ridge.”

I started to move off, but Lucian caught my arm. “What do you want me to do?”

I glanced at Sandy. “Is this the only road out of town?”

“In or out.”

I turned back to the old sheriff, the man who had gotten me into this mess. “Stay here in case he decides to make a run for it. Take Harvey’s car and set up out there on the entryway to the railroad crossing.” I started off toward my truck. “You see him, you stop him.”

Lucian called after me. “Like I did the bartender?”

I called back over my shoulder, “Or the coffeepot.”

14

There was a BNSF high-rail truck sitting at the top of the deadhead, the kind that can run on railroad tracks when the gear is lowered, and I slowed down and stopped to yell out my window, “Any chance of you guys moving these cars in the near future?”

He smiled. “You chasing the mailman?”

“He go by here?”

“About twenty minutes ago.”

I looked at the cars and at the narrow roadway on the side, clogged with snow. “Really, any chance of moving these damn things?”

He pushed the hood back on his Carhartt, and I recognized the man I’d met at the Sixteen Tons, Fry printed on a name patch. “In about forty-five minutes we’re gonna move ’em out and fill ’em up.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “The mine is worried they’re gonna get snowed in, so they’re gonna take this spur train and attach it.”

“No sooner, huh?”

He smiled. “Not unless you want to hook that big V-10 up and pull ’em yourself.”

“Don’t tempt me.” I rolled the window back up and decided that I didn’t need the sling anymore. Pulling the cumbersome thing off and stuffing it in my pocket, I carefully slid my arm into the sleeve of my coat—my neck was sore, but I could deal with that. I spun the wheel, negotiated my way around the coal cars, and began the slow and arduous task of drifting my way down the sloped road in an attempt not to slip off into the ditch or run into the train cars.

There was a fresh set of tracks that rolled alongside in a straight line, a testament to the Jeep’s more nimble design, but I kept turning into the slide and making progress. I glanced at the tops of the coal cars and could see that they were, indeed, empty.

The only way to keep any kind of forward momentum was by staying on the gas, even though I was traveling about thirty miles an hour sideways to do so.

Fortunately, when I got to the end of the line, there was a buttress of railroad ties and fill dirt, looking almost like a ramp, leading up to the last car, and, more important, an open area where I could goose the truck and climb up out of the ditch to straddle a flat spot.

I gunned the three-quarter-ton, dodged between two cottonwoods, both about as big around as a coffee table, climbed out of the Bullet, and looked at the Jeep tracks. I sighed and unlocked the Remington shotgun from my transmission hump, figuring if I was going hunting I might as well go prepared. Before closing the door, I reached in, snagged the mic from my dash, and thumbed the button. “Lucian?”

The old sheriff’s voice rang back. Static. “What do ya need?”

“I’m at the end of the rail spur, but that damned Jeep of his was able to slip through and follow the goat path leading up toward the school.”

Static. “There was a reason those drove into Berlin and Tokyo and not a bunch of pickup trucks, you know.”

“Yep, but what I need is for you to keep an eye out in case he circles around on the old school road.”

Static. “I’m backed up to the railroad crossing in the detective’s car. These assholes from the BNSF say I’m going to have to move when they hook on to that spur of yours, but when that thing starts moving there isn’t anybody going to be able to get through anyway.”

“Make sure you and the interceptor are on this side, would you?”

Static. “Sure, I wouldn’t want to miss any of the fun.”

I tossed the mic back inside, plucked a handheld from the side pocket, and clipped it to my belt. I closed the door, stepping into the midcalf snow, threw the strap on the twelve-gauge on my good side, and marched off after the Jeep.

It was getting warmer, causing the whiteout fog to thicken like pudding, and the snow in the gulley was over my knees, but there was still not much wind. Luckily, I had the Jeep tracks to follow, so I switched off and began walking the tire-track tightrope, finally making it to a stand of naked trees and another slight depression that flattened out to the ridge where the old schoolhouse must’ve been.

As I got to the top of the hill, I paused to catch my breath and promised myself that if the postman made a run for it, I would just shoot him, pretty sure I was too tired to do anything else.

There was a discernible shadow to the left with a smaller shadow to the right, about the size of a vehicle. I jacked a round into the shotgun and continued to follow the Jeep tracks, hoping that I wasn’t too late, but pretty sure that if Jone Urrecha was still alive, he would use her to negotiate.

It was about then that I heard the unmistakable whizz of a 9 mm round whipping past me into the distance. I immediately crouched, brought the Remington up, and pointed it in the direction of the report. “Rowan, you better throw down that weapon and call it quits.”

There was silence for a few moments, and just in case he was a better shot than I thought, I moved to the left a little, keeping a low profile against the slope.

His voice was high and nasal. “How about we make a deal, Sheriff?”

I pinpointed his location to be in or near the Jeep, so I continued to the left, figuring I could work my way along the ridge and circle around, keeping the school between us. “I don’t usually negotiate in these kinds of situations.”

“I’ve got the woman.”

“I know that.”

“You better stop moving out there or all deals are off.” There was more silence, obviously more than he could stand. “You want to hear my offer?”

I thought about letting him sweat, but I was concerned that as nervous as he was he might shoot Jone. “I’m listening.”

“What if I leave her here in the schoolhouse, and you let me go back down the hill in the Jeep?”

“And I’m supposed to trust you?” Against my better nature, I thought about it. “You know I’ve got officers back in town, right?”

“I know you’ve got an old, one-legged sheriff down there, but I’d imagine that the rest of them are trying to get Richard Harvey to the emergency room or scraping the citizenry off I-90.”

He had a point.

“I’ll leave her in the school for you.”

“Along with your gun.”

“What?”

“You throw that pistol of yours out here toward me or it’s no deal. I don’t mind leaving you to the Campbell County Sheriff’s Office, considering how you shot one of theirs—”

“I didn’t shoot him!”

“Good luck explaining that in the heat of the moment.” I let him think about it. “But I’m not letting you waltz out of here armed.”

“What makes you think I don’t have another gun?”

“Because if you had, you would’ve used it instead of that 9 mm. I’m hefting this twelve-gauge with a full-length barrel and loaded with buckshot.” I let him think about that. “It might not get all of you at this distance, but it will get some of you—that much I can guarantee.” It got real quiet. “I’m through negotiating, in case you’re wondering.”

There was no response, but something sailed through the air and landed with a soft thunk to my right. I moved in that direction and fished in the snow, finally pulling out a Ruger semiautomatic minus the magazine.

He found his voice. “I didn’t figure there was any reason to give it to you loaded.”

“Fair enough, but you better not be lying to me.”

The ignition on the CJ-7 fired, and I listened as a door opened. “She’s inside; a little drugged up, but I’ve found that makes ’em easier to handle.”

“You’re not going to get far.”

“I’ll take my chances; anyway, I’ve got friends.”

“So I hear.”

“Watch your back, Sheriff.”

The sound of the door closing was accompanied by the revving of the engine as he spun the Jeep around and circled to the right to what I assumed was the regular road to the school.

I unclipped the handheld from my belt and keyed the mic. “Lucian, can you hear me?”

Static.

“Lucian, if you’re reading me, the postman, Rowan, is headed down the hill; feel free to shoot the Jeep, but I’d like him alive so I can find out where the other woman is and about his partners in this little cabin industry of his.”

Static.

I listened to the sound of the Jeep as I fastened the radio to my belt and started back up the hill. It sounded like the four-by-four was having a hard time negotiating the rutted road, and even as if it might’ve veered to the right and circled around toward the railroad spur, but sounds were strange and untrustworthy in this kind of storm.

Just in case, I pulled Vic’s cell phone from my pocket and looked at the lack of bars; of course, NO SERVICE.

—

Depth-charging my way to the school, I could see the prints where he’d been standing but also where he had dragged the girl to the other side of the Jeep. “And that’s what you get for having one shred of trust.”

Just to make sure, I climbed the steps and yanked the door open—empty.

Leaping off the stoop, I tromped through the shallower snow on the ridge and pulled the radio from my belt. “Lucian, he’s got the woman with him, so be careful taking him.”

Static.

I headed off following in the tracks of the Jeep, which arced back toward the road we’d taken up from the railroad spur. “Now, why would he do that?” The road was worse but faster, so maybe he thought his odds were better doubling back and using the train for cover.

I had another hike ahead of me, but it was a path I knew and it was downhill. I sidled my way down the hill and back into the trees, where at least I could tell if I was upright.

There was a loud clanking noise, and I figured the empty coal train was pulling out. Great, just in time for Rowan to be able to drive on the tracks.

Increasing my speed, I finally got to the flat area at the bottom of the gulley where I could make better time. The sound of the clanking cars was thunderous, but I could still hear a high whining sound of tires spinning in the snow in an attempt to find purchase.

Moving into a hampered jog, I held the twelve-gauge with the butt under my arm in an attempt to keep it steady. There was a spot of darkness up ahead, but I was pretty sure that was either my truck or the buttress at the end of the line. I slowed when I got to the Bullet and looked around in all directions but still didn’t see the Jeep. I moved around the ties and stood on the railroad tracks, peering into the distance where the train had disappeared.

I could still hear the noise but could see nothing.

It couldn’t be more than a hundred yards ahead.

With a deep breath that imitated a steam locomotive, I pressed off and ran along the uncovered area where the coal cars had sat, finally seeing the Jeep turned sideways in a ditch where Dave Rowan must’ve pushed his luck just a little too far. The four-by-four was buried at the bottom of the trench, and the only thing it was doing at this point was throwing snow into the wheel wells.

I raised the shotgun and pulled the trigger, firing a round into the air a little in front of me so as to avoid any double-ought precipitation.

Rowan let off the gas, and his hands shot up to the roof of the CJ-7.

I lowered the barrel on him and yelled as I walked closer, “Shut it off!”

He did as I said and then raised his hands again.

“Where is the woman?”

He didn’t say anything, and I lowered the barrel of the twelve-gauge on him. “Where is Jone?”

He smiled a sickening smile and shouted back, “Jone who?”

I yanked the door open and grabbed him by the coat front, shoving the muzzle of the shotgun under his chin and forcing his head back. “Tell me where she is or I scatter the top of your head all over the insides of the Jeep.”

His eyes widened, but his voice still had confidence. “You wouldn’t do that.”

I slipped the barrel away and blew out the passenger-side window.

He jumped, and I was betting he soiled himself just a bit. “Agha . . . !”

I jacked the slide mechanism, bouncing the empty shell off his chest, and shoved the muzzle back under his chin. “I’ve had a long day, and I wouldn’t press my luck if I were you.”

He was sobbing now. “Look, it wasn’t my idea—”

“Actually, it was your idea; abducting and selling women out of Arrosa, Wyoming. I guess you figured you could get away with it because you were out here in the middle of nowhere, but the game’s over. I don’t know where Linda Schaffer is, but I’ll find out. You sold Roberta Payne to the card dealer over in Deadwood, but now she’s dead, he’s dead, and the guy who tried to kill me is dead—and you’re going to be dead if you don’t tell me where Jone Urrecha is right now.”

He glanced past me up the hill toward the tracks. “In the train.”

I stared at him.

“She’s in the last coal car.”

I staggered back and looked up at the tracks, the train long gone. “Damn it!”

I pulled out the cuffs I’d borrowed, hooked Rowan to the roll bar on the Jeep, and snatched the keys as I dug back up the hill.

“What about me!”

“I’ll try and remember that you’re here.” I snatched the radio from my belt and keyed the mic. “Lucian, are you there?”

Static.

“Lucian, the woman, she’s in the last coal car of the train that pulled out from the spur. We’ve got to stop that train!”

Static.

“Lucian!”

Static.

I reached my truck and threw the radio into the back, climbed in, fired up the Bullet, and yanked the mic from my truck radio, which was more powerful than the handheld. “Lucian, can you read me?”

Static.

“Damn.” I pulled the selector into gear and began the arduous task of backtracking along the roadway beside the tracks, almost sliding into the Jeep but then correcting and continuing down the slippery way. It was harder this time but probably because I was in even more of a hurry.

I finally saw the BNSF high-rail truck at the end of the spur with its emergency lights on and floored the Bullet, almost slipping down the bank in the process. I steered into the drift, blew by the high-rail, and locked up my brakes—all in all, an accidental show of remarkable driving acumen.

I threw myself from my vehicle and slapped my hand on the window of the rail truck; Fry dropped his coffee as I yelled into the glass between us, “Stop that train!”

Brushing the cup from his lap, he mouthed the word What?

I slammed the glass again. “There’s a woman in the last car of that coal train you’re loading!”

His eyes bugged like headlights as he looked past me down the road at the empty tracks. “Lord almighty.”

“Get on your radio!”

He shook his head as he rolled down the window. “There’s no radio reception; something must’ve happened to the transponders that relay out of Gillette.”

I became aware of another vehicle sliding to a stop behind me and turned in time to see Lucian dropping his window. “What the hell is going on?”

“The woman, she’s in the last coal car of that train. Rowan threw her in there in hopes of getting rid of her.”

“Like the hobos?”

“Yep, like the ho— homeless.” I started around. “We’ve got to catch that train and stop them from loading.”

Lucian picked up the mic from the floor. “These damn things aren’t working.”

“I know.”

The BNSF driver, Fry, yelled at me, “That booth is on the north side—there’s nobody you can get on our side of that train.”

I kicked a tire, in full realization that my options were running out. “Are there any other roads?”

He made a face as he looked off into the fog, the delineation of the horizon lost in all the whiteness. “One, but you have to go out past the highway, then down the frontage road, and then drive in on the gravel, and it probably hasn’t been plowed.”

I pulled the cell phone from my pocket. “Who can I call?”

“Nobody; it’s a skeleton crew working tonight. We’re supposed to load this train and then call it quits.”

“Nobody has a phone?” The ludicrousness of this statement coming from my mouth was not lost on me. “Somebody?”

“No. There won’t be anybody in the administrative offices, and without radios you won’t be able to get hold of anybody in the chute section—it’s all computer generated, and besides, as you might have noticed, there’s no service out here.” He shook his head. “There just isn’t any way.”

I stared at the tracks leading west, my mind racing like a runaway locomotive. I bit the inside of my lip and stared down at the steel wheels of the high-rail gear equipment on his massive truck. “Oh, yes there is.”

—

As fast as the driver was working, it was still agonizingly slow. His voice was strained as he shouted down from the cab of the oversize truck. “This is a really bad idea.”

“Give me a better one?” We watched as he lined the one-ton truck up with the rails, rapidly backing up and pulling forward. “And hurry.”

Fry shouted down. “I don’t get this thing right, we get derailed in the first twenty feet and then it’s going to take a hell of a lot longer, I can tell you that much.”

With a mechanical whine, the steel wheels lowered onto the iron rails just enough to carry the weight of the vehicle but still allowing the traction to the tires that would provide us with power. The driver jumped from the other side and came to the front, touching a lever and lowering the front high-rail wheels onto the track with a loud, jarring noise.

He pushed back his hood again and smiled as he shook his head. “Just so you know, this goes against every safety regulation on the line.”

“I’ll take responsibility.”

He nodded with the same smile as he turned and walked around, climbing in the driver’s side. “You take responsibility for the three switches between here and the mine?”

Hoisting Lucian up into the cab, I followed, closing the door behind me. “What about the switches?”

He engaged the transmission, hit the gas, and we lurched forward. “No radio—no dispatch; we hit one of those switches and it’s turned against us and we get hit head-on by another mile-long train going in the opposite direction.”

I looked down the rails, feeling more and more like a maiden tied to the tracks. “That would be bad.”

He nodded and studied me. “Very bad.”

We gathered speed. “How fast can this thing go?”

“Pretty damn fast on the straight and flat—faster than you’re gonna want to go.”

“Bet me.”

Lucian leaned forward. “And once we get there, what the hell are you going to wanna do?”

“I’ll figure that out when it happens.” We were picking up speed, and the high-rail began sounding more and more like a train, with the clickety-clack of the rail joints closing time like the second hand on a stopwatch. “How long does it take to load one of those cars?”

He glanced at the clock on his dash. “About a minute.”

“How many cars per train?”

“A hundred and forty, give or take, but they’ve already filled those.”

I looked at the clock, too. “So, where are we on the spur?”

He swallowed. “I’m betting near the end.”

I braced a hand against the dash. “Speed up.”

“You want me to go faster than this?”

“Yep.” He did as I said, and the snow swirled and whipped around the windshield like galloping ghosts. “They have to slow the train to load it, right?”

He nodded. “They’ll just run it at about three miles an hour.” His head swiveled around, and then he turned back to look at both Lucian and me. “Did you see that switch indicator?”

“What does a switch indicator look like?”

He glanced out the window. “A very large, blinking green light.”

“No.”

Lucian interrupted. “There was a red one.”

We both looked at him.

The old sheriff shrugged. “Large, blinking red light to the left.”

The driver hit the gas even harder. “It’s a train coming the other way.”

Lucian and I looked down the rails joining in the distance at a vanishing point, fully expecting to see a BNSF locomotive heading straight toward us. “Where?”

The driver’s mouth set in a straight line like a teeter-totter, weighing the odds. “I know this switchman, Bruce; he always throws early. I’ll hit the horns, and he’ll switch it back just long enough to get us through before that big son of a bitch comes over onto our rails.” With that, he hit the air racks on the truck by pulling a cord near the headliner—three short, three long, three short.

I shouted, “SOS?”

He smiled. “He’ll know it’s me—we were in the Navy together.”

We all peered through the snow and fog, and up ahead, in the far distance and barely a glimmer in the fog bank, was a light.

“Is that what I think it is?”

He nodded his head and hunched a shoulder over the steering wheel. “Another coal train, headed east.”

“And through us?” Lucian joined me in bracing both hands against the dash, for all the good that was going to do. “How long before we know if he switched us through?”

The driver pushed the throttle some more, continuing with his Morse dots and dashes. “Any time now.”

I peered through the windshield, trying to ignore the growing orb slightly to our left. “Will there be another indicator?”

“Nope.”

“So we just have to get to the switch before the other train does?”

“You got it.”

I glanced at the speedometer on the dash. “We go straight, right? I mean, we don’t have to change directions, do we?”

He glanced down. “No, we’d roll at this speed.”

“That’s comforting.”

“And then probably get run over by the train anyway.” He glanced at me. “Say, who’s the woman in the coal car?”

I stared at the man, amazed that he would ask a question like that at a time like this. “A woman by the name of Jone Urrecha.”

“The Basque Rose?” He took the cigarette from his mouth and licked his lips. “The dancer from over at Dirty Shirley’s?”

“You know her?”

He smiled and held the cigarette out, studying the glowing tip. “Oh, hell yeah. I used to go over there every week after shift until she left.” His hands tightened on the wheel, and his head nodded up and down in determination. “We have to damn well make it.”

I took a deep breath and glanced at the old sheriff. “Having fun?”

His jaw was tight, and his eyes widened as we both turned and looked at the oncoming train. “If I was next to the damn door, I’d make a jump for it.”

—

With a sudden burst of clarity, the front end of the locomotive leapt into view like a building on wheels, a gigantic, stories-high building on wheels. The driver gave one last rhythmical blast of the horns as we shot through the switch, and I saw a man standing by the levers, looking up at us with an amazed and horrified look on his face.

The other train blew by us and continued east, rocking the cabin of the high-rail like a hundred fully loaded eighteen-wheelers, its own horns drowning out ours in an instant. All I could see in the side mirror were the flashing sides of the freight cars as they shifted onto the track where we’d just been only seconds ago.

The driver gave one last blast of the air horns. “Hell yeah, just like draggin’ ’em down in Douglas.” He turned to look at us. “We used to play chicken down there after they closed the drag strip.”

Lucian turned and looked at me as I glanced at the driver. “How many more switches?”

“Two.”

Lucian muttered, “Jesus H. Christ.”

“Nah, the others will see Bruce pulled his switch late, and they’ll figure something is up. They wouldn’t send another train through on this line anyway, so we’re good.”

The rhythmical thumping of the rail joints continued to sound like a mechanical second hand, and all I could think of was a woman lying at the bottom of a coal car with the jarring off-and-on progression of two hundred tons of the stuff thundering into each container growing louder and louder.

“Can you climb out of one of those cars?” The driver lit another cigarette, clamped it between his teeth, and offered the pack to us. “No, thanks, even though the conditions have me thinking about taking it up.”

He nodded and stuffed the cigarettes back in his shirt. “No way, the sides are smooth and close to twelve feet tall—I suppose if you were some kind of pro basketball player, maybe.”

I remembered Rowan saying that he kept the women drugged—there was no way Jone Urrecha was getting out of that coal car without help. “How much farther?”

Fry checked his odometer. “About a mile and a half.”

“When we get close, are you going to be able to stop this thing?”

“On a mercury dime, my friend.”

I peered into the distance, the swirling clouds of snow worse with the passing freight that still roared and clanked only a few feet away. “I think you’re enjoying this more than we are.”

Fry nodded and pulled the cigarette from his mouth. “I rarely get to chase a train down with my truck and save a fair damsel in distress.”

Lucian mumbled as he looked at me. “You would have to flag down the craziest bastard that works for the entire Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad.”

I ignored him and watched the distance ahead, finally spotting a couple of lights, strangely enough, arranged almost as if in a cross. “Is that it?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

“It looks big.”

“Well, it’s a train . . .”

My eyes widened as I realized, for the first time, that the back of this train was being pushed by a locomotive. My hands crept out to the dash, as did Lucian’s. “Is that an engine?”

He squinted his eyes and took the cigarette from his mouth again, and I was pretty sure he was judging time by how fast he was smoking it. “Don’t worry about it, it’s a couple of pushers they’ve got in the back.”

The lights of the coal train were impressive and enough to let the driver know to hit his brakes as the string lights of the coal mine’s delivery system lit up the sky like Russian Christmas. “How are we going to gauge our gapping distance?”

“You said it runs about three miles an hour; doesn’t the last car have a ladder on it?”

He tucked the cigarette into the corner of his mouth like the bolt action on a rifle. “Yeah, but do you know how fast three miles an hour is when you’re out there slipping and sliding around on the ice and snow beside a moving train?”

I stared at the multiple lights. “How close can you get?”

He glanced at me and then at the train ahead, consistently applying pressure on the brakes. “I told you, I can put you nose to nose.”

I began rolling down the window with the manual crank. “Do it.”

Lucian looked at me. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

I pulled the Colt Walker and rested it on the dash. “The hood of this truck gives me a six-foot height advantage; all I’ve got to do is make it from the front of this thing onto the observation platform of that locomotive.”

He shook his head. “Have you lost your mind?”

I unbuckled my safety belt and nudged over to the door as Fry slowed, judging the distance between us and the back of the train. “I’m open to suggestions.”

The train continued its crawl forward. The driver turned to look at me. “You see what we’re up against?”

“I do.” I took a deep breath. “From here to the loader, how many cars would you say we’ve got?”

He studied the distance. “Less than twenty, probably sixteen at best.”

There still wasn’t much wind, but the patterns of the few falling snowflakes were disorienting to say the least. I gripped the headache bar that protected the top of the cab and rested my rear near the windowsill. I started to reach out and pull myself up when I heard the crashing noise of the coal being loaded—one minute between loads.

That was a fast sixty seconds.

I waited until the driver roared forward and positioned himself right behind the train, almost to the point where I was sure we were going to run into it. Bracing my hand, I slipped a boot up onto the seat and could feel the strongest grip in Absaroka County latch on to my leg to make sure I didn’t slip.

Lucian let go, and I pulled my other leg after and lodged my boot on the windowsill, pushed off and landed with my chest on the headache rack; then I grabbed hold of the spare tire that was mounted there with both hands, ignoring the numbness in my arm.

Lucian called out from the cab. “You all right?”

Standing on the sill, I edged forward, glancing down at the slick, white hood of the one-ton truck. “Yep.” The clanking cacophony continued again, and the train surged forward with another tremendous crashing noise.

Another load. Another minute.

I held on as the driver crept forward, trying to buy me time. As soon as he stopped the truck, I took the leap of faith onto the hood and watched with satisfaction as it dented, providing me with a shallow divot in which to stand. I stooped and crept forward, extending my good hand toward the opening in the railing at the center ladder, figuring the more visibility I gave Fry, the better.

Looking past my fingers, I tried to gauge the distance beyond the high-rail gear, the tail mechanism that had taken the place of a caboose, and the front of the pushing locomotive—a good ten feet, at least.

The train continued forward with another thunderous load, and I looked down at my feet and laughed at the absolute absurdity of the situation.

I stepped back on the hood and placed a foot against the windshield. Looking down at the driver, his face blurred by the reflection of the glass and the patterns of the snow, I shouted. “Nose to nose!”

I watched the determination tighten his face as he hit the accelerator, and I stepped forward just as the front of the high-rail struck the back of the train. I could feel my boots slipping on the sheet metal, and my arms involuntarily stretched out as I left the truck, the forward momentum lifting me up into the delicate flake-filled air.

15

There are few things in the world harder than a locomotive, let me tell you.

My hand locked around the top of the left-side railing in a death grip, while the rest of me swung to the right and tangled around the other railing and the headlamp mount. My face hit the chain between the railings, which damn near strangled me but hopefully didn’t pull the bandages covering the wound on my neck, but it was the numbness in my right hand that caused me to slip. I kicked my boots into the hoses below me, hoping for any kind of purchase, finally wrapping a leg around the side long enough to get my other boot on a tread and ease the pressure.

Pulling my hat down tight, I scrambled up onto the platform and discovered that the ladder led to nowhere.

I turned and looked at Fry, and he stuck a hand against the windshield with a finger pointing up.

Great.

Hoisting myself, I landed onto the hood of the great orange and black beast, and even had time to glance in the cab, green-lit and eerily vacant. I climbed over the top and looked down the expanse of the thing, the cars disappearing in the ground fog. Loping along and feeling like a train robber in some sort of old black-and-white movie, I got to the end of the locomotive and was pleased to see another ladder leading down to another platform that provided easy access to the last coal car.

There was another loud noise as I started down the ladder, and once again, the only thing on my mind was . . .

That was a fast sixty seconds.

Jumping the gap between, I started up the ladder on the left and lunged over the edge to look inside. The ambient light from the mine illuminated half of the car, but the side closest to me was a contrast in complete darkness. I could see that there was a long board, possibly a two-by-twelve, sticking up from the middle of the coal car and extending to the corner and, on closer inspection, I could see another lying on top of it.

I concentrated on the darkness and yelled her name, in hopes that she might hear me over the tremendous roar of the coal being loaded. “Jone!”

My eyes began adjusting, but all I could see was the snow, sprinkled with a fine coating of coal dust, that had drifted in the bottom of the car. All I could think of was the remark that Lucian had made about the unfortunates who had met their demise at the bottom of two hundred tons of coal—pulverized pepper steak.

I stared into the darkness, willing my eyes to see her just as the mile-long train jerked forward, and I made the mental note that there had been four cars filled since we’d gotten there, which meant that if the driver’s calculations were correct, we had only a dozen or so cars to go.

I looked down the rails, but with the fog I couldn’t even see the cars in the distance, let alone count how many had been filled. Looking back, I shook my head and tried to figure out where she might be. “Jone!”

My eyes wandered to the boards half lying there, and I had the horrible thought that he must’ve walked her along on them and then dropped her in the next-to-last car.

There were five support rails spanning the last car’s width, and I was going to have to fish the two-by-twelves out and get them up onto those supports before I could get to the next car up the line.

I was reaching for the boards when the thunderous noise came again, and I lurched forward, which almost threw me into the empty container. Scrambling, I counterbalanced, slapped my hands against the rungs of the ladder, and clung there, my right arm reminding me that it wasn’t 100 percent.

I turned back to the job at hand and counted in my head—ten cars to go. It was an estimate, but the high-rail driver had impressed me as a man who knew whereof he spoke.

Grabbing the end of the top board, I leveraged it from the car and began the arduous task of trying to balance it on the edge, turning it toward the middle and getting the end up onto one of the nearest supports.

The edge of the board tipped, so I was going to need the other board to span the length of the car. Following the same maneuver, I leveraged the second board up and clattered it onto the supports parallel to the first one, but I was sweating like a bottle of beer in a biker bar.

Climbing onto the nearest board, I pushed the other one ahead, watching it slide on the ice and go about half the distance I wanted it to. Trying to gauge just how many of my sixty seconds were left and figuring not many, I loped a few steps ahead, grabbed the end of the second board, and pushed it, watching as it shot forward, bumping on the far edge and sliding past the end of the board where I now stood, creating a gap of about two feet.

“You have got to be kidding.”

I crept forward onto the unsupported four feet that was left of the first board, feeling the length of the thing tip up behind me. There wasn’t anywhere to stand, so I backed up and hunkered down in a three-point stance. I was getting an idea of the timing of the loaders and figured I could use the momentum of the moving cars to assist me in the traverse.

Clutching both sides of the board, I waited, and it didn’t take long for the loading to recommence.

Nine cars to go.

Feeling the surge of the train as it continued pulling all its tonnage, I threw myself forward when I was sure we were moving together at peak speed, clomping down the two-by-twelve as if it were a wooden boardwalk.

Feeling the first board begin to give way beneath me, I leapt and watched as the train cars continued at their steady pace, leaving me to fly forward like a cue ball on a clean break.

I really hadn’t had to worry about the gap as I sailed over that with no problem. What I should’ve worried about was landing halfway onto the frost-covered second board and sliding over the side between the two cars.

Gripping the two-by-twelve like a lemur, I put a hand out and was able to stop my forward momentum enough to slide sideways with my legs hanging down between the last and next-to-last cars.

Swallowing hard, I threw a leg back onto the board, reached out, and grabbed the lip of the next car just enough to allow me to get mostly back on the board—wondering how Tom Mix did this shit on a regular basis.

I pushed the top of my body over the edge and looked down into the car and, in the contrast of dark and light, there, sticking out into the flat beam of the mine’s arc lights, half buried in the drifts, was a woman’s leg.

I forced the name from my mouth with all the air I could muster. “Jone!” Staring at the leg, hoping it would move. There was no response. “Jone!”

Nothing.

Edging to the side, I figured the only way to get down into the car, and, more important, back out, was on the board that had just tried to kill me. With a boot on the ladder, I brought it forward and tipped it down past her leg.

I looked at the angle, trying to judge if I’d be able to climb back out on the thing with a woman on my shoulder, and every voice in my head answered with an absolute negative. I thought that if I rigged the board from side to side as opposed to lengthwise, it’d certainly be a shorter distance and the side of the car would provide a better brace anyway.

Still listening to the noise of the loader, I braced myself on the ladder for the next short burst forward, throwing my arms over the side and hugging the lip as the thing clanked ahead for the anticipated distance and the noise began again. I wasn’t sure, but it was almost as if it were becoming more violent.

Eight cars to go.

I grappled my way over the edge and turned toward the hateful board, hugging it so as not to take the entire slide at once, alternately gripping it and loosening to allow my descent into the darkness. It seemed to take forever, but I finally felt my boots kick against the steel of the car, notifying me that I’d reached bottom.

The snow had drifted on the trip from Arrosa, the bulk of it seeming to have flowed to the back of the car where Jone Urrecha lay.

Stepping around the board, I stooped to pull her up. She was lean and half-starved, and I lifted her easily, her long hair slipping against my chest; I could see the matted blood where her head must’ve struck the edge, but she was still breathing.

She was wearing a pair of jeans and a stained sweatshirt, and her body convulsed in shivers; even unconscious, she wanted to live, but she was not only drugged but concussed as well.

I pulled her face up and shook her gently. “Jone?”

Nothing.

“Jone?”

There was the slightest movement under her eyelids.

“Jone?” One of her eyes opened slowly, and then the other did the same, almost as if they’d been glued. Without the benefit of the flashlight all the doctors on television and in the movies seem to have handy, I was still pretty sure that her eyes were lacking any constriction. “Jone?”

A hand came up feebly but then dropped to her side, and she groaned, all good signs. “Jone, I’m going to need your help. We’re in a pretty lousy situation, and I need you to do some climbing.”

Her head jogged to one side and then lolled down with her chin resting on her chest.

“Great.” I looked back at the board angling up to safety and wondered how far I could push her before she slid off the side.

When I removed my jacket, I noticed blood on the collar—my wound must have been seeping—but I gently wrapped the coat around her anyway. I moved onto the board, straddled the thing, and took a deep breath, looking at the angled climb as if it might as well be to the moon. I gripped the wood and started up, my boots slipping on the surface like a gerbil on a wheel.

I dug in a little harder and got enough momentum to slide my hand up and regrip. My boots continued to slip but provided just enough traction to allow another increment of advance—I figured at this rate we’d likely be out of the car by Valentine’s Day.

I paused and took a deep breath, trying to calculate how many of my sixty seconds had gone by, figuring about thirty, which meant I had another thirty seconds to get Jone and myself out of harm’s way.

I was almost to the point where I could grab one of the cross supports but was afraid that if I did, I’d lose traction on the board and we’d just go over. We needed to get a hell of a lot higher than this. So, repositioning my hand, I nudged us again. I pushed her even farther but was struck by the fact that she weighed less this time.

I raised my face and looked up to see Fry smiling down at me as he grabbed the young woman and pulled her up the board toward him. “Couldn’t just sit there. Thought maybe I could help if you got her far enough.”

I laughed. “How did you get up there?”

“The front of the high-rail is jammed onto the locomotive, so I just put it in neutral and climbed on the way you did.”

“Did you get a hold of the men doing the loading?”

“No, so we need to get you out of there now.”

As he pulled her from the car, I risked moving my left hand from the board and placed it on the support brace that ran from side to side. “Where’s Lucian?”

He pulled Jone over the side and draped her over his shoulder. “Pretending to drive the truck, not that you have to—I think he enjoys being in charge.”

With the force of a T-bone crash, the car suddenly vibrated in a clacking din, jarring the three of us like fleas on a shaking dog. I watched Fry grab the side of the car with one hand, still clutching Jone with the other so she wouldn’t slip away. The two-by-twelve did its usual slide and clattered to the inside of the car, and I scrambled to hang on to the cross-member, finally giving up on the board and grabbing the support with both hands. Hanging there like a high plains piñata, my right arm reminded me that it was still half numb, leaving my left to support my two hundred and fifty pounds.

I flew through the air, landing on the floor in the middle of the car with a cracking sound.

That was a fast sixty seconds.

Seven cars to go.

Reaching for my hat, I shook my head and looked up to see Fry still there holding the young woman. “Get her out of here.”

The sound of the car somewhere ahead filling with coal was so loud now I could hardly hear myself, but he had and replied, “What about you?!”

“Don’t worry about me, I can climb out on the board.” My eyes scanned the darkness of the car until I saw the end of the thing leaning against the corner and another buried in the snow and pointing toward me—broken in half.

I sighed deeply and probably loud enough for him to hear. “The board broke; maybe I can just climb out as it fills?”

“A hundred and twenty tons of coal?!” He shook his head violently. “It’ll be like treading quicksand, and two inches of this stuff the size of a door weighs hundreds of pounds—it’ll crush you like an egg!”

Rolling to my side, I pushed off and stepped over to see that the thing had broken in half at a knothole, probably where I’d been standing. I held the broken end up where Fry could see it, his eyes wide. “There’s another board lying on the back car. Get Jone off of here, then get that board and throw it down to me, and I’ll take care of the rest!”

He looked over his shoulder to where I hoped the board still lay, shifted Jone, and disappeared over the edge.

I dropped the piece of broken board and even thought about kicking it, but the way things were going I’d have only broken my foot. I massaged my arm, which actually helped make it feel better.

It wasn’t that I didn’t think Fry could get the board, but first he had to carry the woman to safety, then retrieve the two-by-twelve, and get back up here with it—a tall order at best.

Just as I was thinking of what to do, the cars shook, and the pieces of board clattered together.

Six cars to go.

I stretched my jaw and looked around, trying to figure some way of getting out of the damn car, but could see nothing that might assist—one thing I was sure of, this board and I were through.

I walked from one end to the other, looking for some sort of hand- or foothold, but it was useless; the loading and unloading of the coal had polished the insides like mirrors.

Looking up at the chutes, I could still see only the sporadic bulbs and machinery of my death; like treading quicksand—those words had stuck in my head. I stood in the feathery drifts of snow and, figuring I’d at least save myself the embarrassment of getting the crap beaten out of me when the cars loaded again, placed my back against the bulkhead.

I was leaning against the cold metal, closing my arms around me in an attempt to keep warm, and thinking about all the ways in my life that I thought I’d go, this not being one of them—squashed like a mouse at the bottom of a coal bin.

I looked up, hoping to see Fry but knowing there was no way that he could’ve accomplished his rounds that quickly.

The high-rail truck continued to blast its horn, but with the sound of the coal dumping into the empty cars, there was no way that they would ever be heard.

I’d always thought that I was a pretty capable guy with the ability to take care of myself in just about any situation, but it was possible that I’d finally met my match with a hundred tons of black rock.

That flight from Gillette would have one empty seat, and the red-eye flight from Denver would leave without me, and the car waiting for me in Philadelphia would never take me to the maternity room at Pennsylvania Hospital.

A promise, the most important in my life, would never be kept.

I would never get to see my grandchild.

There was suddenly a vibration in the back pocket of my jeans, almost like a reoccurring thought attempting to get my attention. I reached down and pulled out Vic’s cell phone.

The screen was cracked, but there were two bars, and I punched the button as fast as I could. “Hello?!”

“Are you on your way to the airport?”

I choked with a croaking laugh as I cupped my hands around the phone. “Cady?!”

“I can barely hear; where are you?”

I looked around and yelled, “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you!”

“Daddy—”

The cars rattled, and I lost my footing but not the phone.

That was a fast sixty seconds.

Five cars to go.

“Cady, I need you to do something, and I need you to do it quick!”

She suddenly sounded exasperated. “How quick? I’m kind of busy having a baby here—”

“Like in the next four minutes, as if my life depended on it! Which it does!” I yelled into the phone, attempting to override the noise of the coal cars and the high-rail’s horn. “I need you to call Black Diamond Mine in Gillette and tell them it’s an absolute emergency that they stop loading the train in their yard—right now!”

“And what do you want me to tell them?”

“To stop loading coal!”

“Right now?”

“Now!”

“Do you have the number?”

“No, I don’t have the damned number! Cady, look it up and call them right now or else I’m going to be killed!”

“Okay, you don’t have to yell . . .” There was a pause. “What do you mean killed? Where are you?”

“At the bottom of a coal car that they’re filling right now—call!”

“Oh, my God—”

The phone went dead, and I was at least pretty sure that I’d conveyed the immediacy of the situation. I quickly dialed 911 and was soon speaking with the dispatcher for the Campbell County Sheriff’s Office, the same woman I’d spoken with before. “The Black Diamond Mine, out near Arrosa!”

The train shifted again, leaving me standing in the middle, where I’d just been.

Four cars to go.

“And you want us to tell them what?”

I stared at the phone and then cupped it back to my ear. “To stop filling the coal cars. There must be some kind of emergency number that you can use to get through to them!” I stood there looking up at my impending hundred-ton doom.

“There’s an administration number, would you like me to call that?”

I held the phone to my forehead, attempting to send brain waves telepathically through the air. “No, they’re not going to be in the offices this time of night, and it’s New Year’s Eve, for Pete’s sake; how about an operations manager or the loading facility?”

“Sir, can you move to another spot? The place where you are is awfully noisy . . .”

I held the phone back out and looked at it again, suppressing the urge to bounce it off the metal walls.

“Lady, I’m standing at the bottom of a coal car, and if you don’t get through to someone in the next three minutes they’re going to drop a hundred tons of low-sulfur, anthracite coal on my head like I’m at the bottom of a mine! Now, would you please try and get through to someone at the Black Diamond so that that doesn’t happen? Please!”

I hung up, figuring that if this was the last three minutes of my life, I didn’t want to spend them extraordinarily annoyed.

Walking to the front of the car like a caged prisoner on a three-minute death row, I scanned the walls again, hoping for any kind of irregularity that might provide me with a way out. Seeing nothing, I walked to the back of the car and looked up at the spot where Fry would hopefully appear.

The sound of the coal dropping only a few cars away was so deafening I doubted that anyone would hear me if I called them, but I felt like calling Cady again to tell her all the things she already knew.

I felt like calling Vic and telling her all the things I knew, things we hadn’t discussed, things we should have.

I thought about calling Henry and thanking him for his help with all my harebrained schemes, and for being the best friend anyone could have had.

A granddaughter, at least that’s what Virgil White Buffalo had prophesied on the mountain, when he had also told me that there were dark days ahead—You will stand and see the bad, the dead shall rise and the blind will see . . . Maybe I should’ve listened to him a little closer in the lodge, because I couldn’t come up with a situation that ended more darkly than this one.

Taking a deep breath, I prepared myself for what I was likely going to have to do, maybe scramble up a corner as the thing filled, trying to imagine what the chute was like. As I recalled, it was large and square and started unloading at the front and then moved to the back at three miles an hour, the coal dropping straight down. That wasn’t good, in that I was hoping that the stuff would fill the bottom so that I could keep stepping on it to get high enough to pull myself out.

More than likely, I wouldn’t make it.

The phone rang again, and I looked at it, seeing it was Cady. I punched the button and shouted over the din of the roaring coal dropping into a car that sounded a heck of a lot closer than four away and braced my boots in the snow to keep myself from bouncing around like a Ping-Pong ball.

“Cady?”

I could hear her screaming on the other end of the line, but the noise was so loud that I couldn’t make out the words. “Cady, did you get through?”

There was more, but I still couldn’t hear what she said, not so much for the noise as the sight of the loader methodically moving through the next car in front of me, dropping its tonnage and shifting inexorably toward the car where I stood.

Fry had miscalculated by two cars, not a bad estimate really, and I was no longer in the last car but the next to last.

Less than one car to go.

“Oh, shit . . . ” I looked down at the phone in my hand and then brought it up to my ear. “I know you did the best you could do, punk. I love you.”

I hit the button and looked up, watching the curtain of black descending into the next car, the vibrations of impact causing my car to shudder as if in a death grip.

The dust wafted over the rim and floated back toward me like the transparent veil of some grim reaper. I backed into the bulkhead, forgetting that I was already at the rear and there was nowhere else to go.

Covering my nose and mouth with a glove, I watched the bottom of the chute as big as the doors on the trailer end of an eighteen-wheeler move the length of the car next to me, dropping a hundred tons straight down in a man-made avalanche.

Trying to keep my hands free, I tucked the phone in my pocket even though it continued to vibrate. No matter what happened, no matter the weight of whatever hit me, I was going to have to remember to keep digging up and out of the car.

Backing into the corner because I figured the majority of the coal would drop in the center, I braced my arms and prepared for the next-to-last load of the train. The rumbling noise subsided like a wave having crashed, and I raised my head—if I was going to die, it wasn’t going to be on my knees.

No cars to go.

The gigantic chute was over me, and I could see the operator’s booth, which for some reason had bullet holes in the Plexiglas, the shattered panes spidering cracks out in all directions.

The loader shut down suddenly, and a couple dozen chunks of coal tumbled into the car. I looked straight up, and Fry was hanging over me with the board lying on the rim. “Hey, you okay?”

Looking up at the loading chute and not completely sure I was absolutely out of harm’s way, I caught my breath and coughed, maybe twice. “Um, yep.”

As the noise dwindled, I heard the sound of a very large-caliber pistol going off and heard a spak as another round hit the control room window. The shocked operator lifted his glasses from his eyes and peered through the dust at me, and a familiar voice rose out into the night like the sound of a coyote. “And if you turn that son of a bitch back on I’ll empty the rest of this hogleg into you!”

Fry, with his head turned, was obviously enjoying what I assumed was an epic romantic spectacle of the American West—Lucian Connally, waving the Colt Walker in the air, sitting astride the locomotive behind us. Fry turned and looked down at me with a bright smile. “That old, one-legged boss of yours . . . He’s some kind of loco.”

I croaked a response. “Boy howdy.”

16

“No, I’m all right. Honest.” I reached up and touched the thick bandage the doctors had wrapped all the way around my neck and tried to ignore Sandy Sandburg, two of his deputies, three highway patrolmen, Lucian, and Corbin Dougherty as they tried not to look interested in my call. Standing in the entryway of the Campbell County Memorial Hospital Emergency Room, I leaned against the wall and nodded into Vic’s cell phone. “I know; it was a bad situation, but I’m okay now.”

“So you’re on your way to the airport, right, Dad?”

There was no use lying, she’d inherited her mother’s unerring ability to spot dissembling at every level. “I’ve just got to make a stop on the way.”

“What kind of stop?”

“I’ll make the plane, I promise.” I pulled out my watch and looked at it. “I’ve got an hour and a half, the weather has cleared, sort of, and it’s on the way.”

“I’m going to kill you myself.”

“Honest, I just need to make one more stop to sew things up, then I’m off to the airport.”

I listened to her sighing on the line. “If you don’t, I’m giving the baby your middle name . . .”

I smiled, confident that I was no longer in really big trouble. “Oh, don’t do that.”

“I’m serious.”

I laughed. “What if it’s a girl?”

“Then it’ll be even worse, and she’ll have no one else to blame but you.” Another sigh. “Excuse me for asking, but isn’t there a sheriff’s department in Campbell County and a Gillette police force, and isn’t Uncle Lucian involved in getting you into this?”

“Well—”

“Is he there?”

“Well—”

“Put him on.”

I glanced at the old sheriff and then tried handing him the phone, but he acted as if I were trying to hand him a stick of dynamite, lit. He brushed the device away with a hand and stepped back into the fluorescent light of the Campbell County Memorial Hospital Emergency Room.

I pulled the phone back to my ear. “I don’t think he wants to talk to you.”

“Hold it out where he can hear me then.”

I did as I was told and listened as she raised her voice to be heard from afar. “Uncle Lucian?”

He looked at the phone, then at me as if I were a dirty rodent, and then snatched the thing out of my hand. He took a deep breath of his own and plastered a smile on his face for the performance. “Hey, Cady, darlin’ . . . How you doin’, honey-bunch?”

For the next two solid minutes, the old sheriff looked at the floor and said nothing except for a few monosyllabic grunts and a few yeps. After the final response, he handed me back the phone and blew out air through his puckered lips.

I listened, but she had already hung up, so I pocketed the cell and looked at him, pale as I’d ever seen him. “We need to get me on that plane at midnight.”

He barked a short laugh with no joy in it. “In no uncertain terms.”

“Did she thank you for saving my life?”

“She did.”

I turned to look at the unofficial eight-man task force. “We don’t need this many people.”

Sandburg laughed and shook his head. “The only one that doesn’t need to be in on this is you.”

“Yep, well . . . I started it, so I’m going to finish it.”

He turned to the assembled manpower. “Run along and try not to be an embarrassment to your collective departments.” They nodded and did as he said, the automatic doors opening and closing, allowing the arctic wind to creep in, always uninvited. “I don’t know if that plane of yours is going to get off the ground tonight. Not with all this fog.”

Walking past him, I paused to let the air in again. “It will clear before midnight.”

—

I held the door open for Lucian, and I helped him climb into my truck but then he stuck a boot out to hold the door open. “How ’bout we just get a head start over to the airport; I got a funny feeling about this one.”

I stood there, the cold trying to creep up the backside of my Fauxhartt Kmart special coat that the hospital staff had returned to me. “You getting scary in your old age?”

“Maybe so.” He didn’t move but sat there with his boot still propped in the door—a spanner in the works, Lucian style. “In all my years on the job, I don’t think there’s ever been a situation I’ve looked forward to less.”

“Maybe you’re the one who should sit this one out.”

He studied the sticker on my dash, the one that read WARNING, USE OVERDRIVE IN HIGH SPEED PURSUIT, and the addition Vic had made in marker below that read AND DO NOT SHOOT THROUGH WINDSHIELD. He started to say something but then stopped and then started again. “I warned her that you were like a gun; that we had to be careful where we pointed you . . .”

I thought about how it had all started, how it had been a favor for a woman with a set of legs that didn’t work because of a carefree accident with to-go cups so long ago. I thought about how it had been a search to find out why a man who had never broken a rule in his life had checked into the Wrangler Motel, locked the door, and taken his life. “I’m sorry.”

He looked at me. “For what, doing your job?”

I nodded. “This job is hateful sometimes.”

His jaw clamped shut, but the words still escaped. “If I never taught you anything, I taught you that a long time ago.” He moved his foot and gestured toward the door. “Now close that damn thing before I catch my death.”

I shut it and thought to myself that it would take a sight more than that to kill Lucian Connally, and then walked around the back of my truck as the Campbell County Sheriff’s car pulled up and stopped, the Campbell County Sheriff rolling the window down and airing an elbow. “How ’bout you just head on out to the airport, Walt?”

I stopped and looked into the muted distance at the southern hills. “Why is every cop in Wyoming trying to get rid of me?”

“We like you; that’s what we do with people we like.” He shrugged and gestured toward Dougherty, sitting in his passenger seat. “Right?”

The patrolman smiled a thin grin.

“You’re playing backup on this one, Sandy, I don’t even want you in the house.”

He studied me. “You’re sure about this, huh?”

“Yep.”

“It’s going to be a big deal.”

I pulled my keys from my pocket. “Look on the bright side.”

“What’s that?”

“Your family’s not involved after all.”

I climbed in the Bullet and began the slow drive to the west of town and the Iron Horse subdivision. The weather didn’t seem to be getting that much better, and although the snow had stopped, the term “socked in” kept coming to mind, and I started thinking about promises. There was supposed to be more weather tomorrow, but I hoped to be gone long before then.

The whole case wasn’t ending the way I’d hoped it would, but that was usually the scenario in my line of work. I drove carefully on the unplowed Echeta Road, guiding the tires in an almost out-of-body experience. I looked over at Lucian, but he was staring out the passenger-side window, lost in his own thoughts. In some ways, I’m sure he was sorry that we’d ever become involved in this investigation, but like me, he knew that you had to ride the trail till it ended. It was a lonely pursuit we had chosen and one that always finished with reading one more report, making one more phone call, or knocking on one more door—and reading one more person their rights, if you were lucky.

I took a right and then pulled up to the railroad crossing and stopped, making sure I looked both ways.

“I bet you’re gonna be a lot more careful around these things, huh?”

I pulled out and made the right into the warren of streets.

—

The only addition to the Holman household was a blue Volvo, sitting in the driveway, but other than that, everything looked the same as it had—even the Santa was still lying in the yard like a New Year’s Eve drunk, the coal dust spread across him like Lucian’s pulverized pepper steak. “You’re not going to reinflate that silly bastard again, are you?”

“Yep, if for no other reason than good luck.” I pushed open the door and started across the yard, picked up good St. Nick, and plugged in the tiny air pump, just as I’d done before. I watched as the sheriff’s car pulled up behind mine and also saw three more deputy cars down the street, along with three from the Highway Patrol.

Sandy, Dougherty, and Lucian met me at the sidewalk as I gestured toward the assorted manpower. “What the heck is that?”

“I told ’em to go away, but they won’t.” The sheriff glanced over his shoulder. “It’s your escort to the airport.”

I glanced at the door. “You’re still not going in.”

“The hell I’m not, it’s my county.”

I cast my eyes at Lucian. “We started this, and we’ll finish it.”

He glanced at us. “You two armed?”

“Nope; there isn’t going to be any shooting.”

He nudged his hat back. “Nice to be sure about those types of things.”

“Yep, it is.” I turned and walked toward the front door with Lucian in tow.

I knocked and then rang the doorbell.

Nothing.

Lucian tried the knob, and the door floated open into the museum-like interior of the Holman home in a déjà-vu-all-over-again experience. With a glance back at the old sheriff, I entered. Everything was exactly as it had been the first time we’d walked into the place, our boots making strange, crisp sounds on the plastic walkways that crisscrossed the house.

Heading into the kitchen, I stopped when I noticed something out of place, a coffee cup on the kitchen counter with peach lipstick on the rim.

Lucian touched the handle of the mug, turning it with a finger. “Not Phyllis’s shade.”

“Any reason to check the upstairs?”

He shook his head. “Not that I can think of.”

I moved toward the basement door, noticing that the wheelchair was still parked at the top.

There was no muted sound of a ballgame as there had been before, just an uneasy silence and three black screens looking back at the woman. Easing my way past the stair elevator, I stepped to the side and Lucian joined me.

Phyllis Holman wasn’t working; her fingers were laced in her lap over a knitted afghan. At first, I thought it might’ve been a commercial break, but there was no graceful tapping at the letters that would form sentences, that would form paragraphs, that would form the kind of entertainment that would distract people from their lives, lives that sometimes led to the situation we now found ourselves confronting.

The elderly woman stared at the blank screens, dark as the world collapsing around her, and refused to acknowledge our presence.

I stepped forward, positioning myself between two of the monitors. “Mrs. Holman?”

She didn’t respond.

“Mrs. Holman.”

She looked up at me, at first annoyed, but then focused on my face and the bandage around my neck. “You’re hurt.”

I took off my hat. “Yes, ma’am. It’s been a long day.” She nodded and then returned her eyes to the television without saying anything more, and I waited, but not very long. “No game?”

She didn’t look at me this time. “No.”

I nodded and stepped in a little closer. “We’re looking for your daughter—we’re looking for Connie.” She said nothing. “Mrs. Holman?”

“She’s not here.”

“Her car is parked out front.”

Her hands shook as she spoke. “She’s not here.”

“There’s also a half cup of coffee on your kitchen counter with lipstick traces.”

“That’s my cup.”

“You and I both know you never left a cup on a counter in your life.” I took a deep breath and slowly let it out with my words. “It would be nice if life weren’t so messy, but that’s just not the nature of things; we want things to be perfect, but most of the time we just spend our existence cleaning up the messes we make—and sometimes the messes of other people, people about whom we care most in the world.”

Her eyes came up slow, and the words came from her mouth in a staccato of verbal bursts. “Can’t. You. Just. Go. Away?”

“You know we can’t.” I waited a moment and then continued. “That’s what happened with Gerald, wasn’t it? When he found out what your daughter was guilty of and that it was something that he couldn’t clean up—at least not without breaking the law, which was something he’d never do—he punished himself.”

“Go away.”

“That’s the problem with guilt, it’s a two-way street; our children have to live with the things we do, and sometimes we have to live with their actions.” I moved in closer. “We tell them that we can protect them, but we can’t even protect ourselves from the mistakes we make—that’s why I’m here.”

“I told you—go away.”

“He didn’t tell you what she was doing, did he? He thought he could protect you if he killed himself and took the knowledge with him, but these things often can’t be hidden. We found the report that he didn’t file, the one where he talked to a woman by the name of Izzy. It took me a long time to put it together, but then I remembered that Lucian had referred to your daughter as Izzy, the nickname Gerald had used for her. I don’t think your daughter is a bad person, Mrs. Holman. I don’t know how she got involved in all this, but she’s made some terrible mistakes and she’s going to have to answer for them.”

She finally looked at me, the words striking out like a machete. “I hired you.”

“No, ma’am, you didn’t. You requested my help and I came, but nobody’s paying me.” I stood there with her glaring at me. “We’ve got a warrant, and there are about a half-dozen police officers out in front of your house right now, but I don’t really want it to happen like that.”

Her chin dropped to her chest, and she began fussing with the blanket that hid her legs, and I wasn’t surprised when she pulled a small Smith & Wesson revolver from the folds and held it there pointed at the floor.

I sighed deeply and then placed my hand in my pocket and waited.

The sobs that wracked her body were horrifying to listen to and watch, and all I could think was that this poor woman had paid enough in one life.

I glanced at the door to our right. “Where is Connie?”

“It wasn’t supposed to be like this . . .”

“I know.”

“We didn’t do anything wrong; we were good parents.” Her eyes came up to mine. “I didn’t know.”

“I’m sure you didn’t, but people have been hurt and people are dead.”

She raised the pistol a little higher and looked at it.

“Where is Connie?”

She pointed the .32 at me, and all I felt was tired.

“Go away.”

I shook my head. “You know I can’t do that.”

She pulled the hammer back. “I said, go away.”

“That’s not how this is going to end, all these horrible things, with one more horrible act . . .” I held out my hand. “It’s just going to end quietly and with dignity.”

There we were, the two of us staring at each other, neither of us wanting to be where we were, doing what we were doing, facing what we were facing. I tried to imagine how far I would go to protect my child, but I was just too tired to measure that kind of infinite distance.

Phyllis Holman held the .32 on me until her hand began to shake and then carefully lowered the hammer, turned the thing sideways, and held it out to me.

I took it and then turned to see Lucian holding his own sidearm hidden along his leg as I passed him and headed toward the door to the right. “I thought you were unarmed.”

He countered to the left and approached Phyllis as I continued on. “I ain’t ever unarmed.”

I turned the knob and swung it open to reveal a lonely room with only a single bed, a nightstand, and an old dresser. The wallpaper was peeling, and the carpet was stained, an anomaly in the otherwise pristine Holman house—a room to be used and forgotten, shunned and shut away, a cell. There were narrow windows above, two of them, choked with snow, and an old door in the far corner.

There was no one in the room, but the covers of the bed were pulled to one side where someone had been sitting, hiding, waiting. I looked behind the door to make sure there was no one there, stuffed the Smith into my pocket, and tried the other door. I pried it open to find stairs leading to a set of cellar doors, one of them pushed back, the fog rolling down the steps.

I launched up them as fast as my exhausted legs could carry me and stood in the backyard; there were prints leading toward the side of the house, and it looked like she’d started for her car but had seen the constabulary out front and had doubled back toward a small gate in a chain-link fence. Did she really think she had a chance of getting away? I thought about calling in the troops but figured she was probably tired, cold, and afraid and that I would rather try and talk her in myself.

Lifting the clasp, I stepped through and closed the gate behind me, turning to follow the prints as they made their way through an abandoned lot and then down a slope to a flat area. There were a few cottonwoods, bare and stark in the frozen fog, and it was almost as if I were rushing across a white desert.

There was a shape in the distance that looked human, but as I got closer, it seemed to fade away. I thought I could hear something coming, but sound was muffled and seemed to resonate from all directions. I thought about the buffalo in Custer State Park, and what Virgil had said, and it seemed like the natural world was closing in around me. Unconsciously, my hand drifted down to the confiscated .32 in my pocket; evidently, I never went unarmed either.

When I got to the edge of the hill, I looked to the west and could see the sheriff’s department’s light bar rotating blue onto the front of the Holman house. When I turned east I saw the figure again, just barely within my field of vision. I stepped and half slid down the hillside and started jogging down a path. After a moment, in one of those patches of clarity that happen on a foggy night, I could see her striding along Echeta Road, parallel with the train tracks, and eventually the highway.

Being in the state she was in, I suppose she thought she could just walk away into the fog.

I continued after her as she headed back toward the center of town, walking alongside the twelve-foot chain-link fence that guarded the railroad tracks, the spiraled razor wire making it seem as if we were in a prison.

In the distance, I could hear the horn of an oncoming train, possibly the one that Jone Urrecha and I had escaped from.

Hurrying my pace, I got within fifty yards of her and called out. “Connie!”

She stopped and turned to look at me, the slight wind pulling at her hair and long wool coat as if we were in some Brontë novel. She stood there like an unfinished phrase.

We looked at each other. I guess it was the most hopeful moment I had had, but I ruined it by starting toward her again. When I did, she turned and began running.

About twenty more yards down the road she slowed and dodged to the right through an opening in the fence, her coat snagging on the wire and holding her up.

Running faster, I got within an arm’s length, but she shrugged off the heavy garment and left it hanging as she leapt forward and then began climbing the short hill leading toward the tracks. I tried pushing myself through the area where the chain-link had been cut and pulled apart, but the opening was too small. “Connie!”

At the top of the incline, she stepped onto the ties and turned to look down the tracks where the whistle blew again, closer this time. Then she turned and looked back at me, the breeze blowing her hair across her face, hiding half of it.

We stood there as before, looking at each other, but this time I could move no closer.

Seeing my situation, she seemed to relax, and then spoke. “I used to come here when I was a kid; we’d put pennies on the rails and then come back and get them.”

I pulled her coat from the wires and held it out to her through the opening. “Come take your coat; it’s freezing out here.”

She stood there, unmoving.

The train horns sounded again, and she turned toward them, the hair blowing back from her face. “I used to dance.”

I looked down the rails but couldn’t see anything yet.

“I was really good.”

I turned back to look at her and watched as she stretched her neck.

She went up on tiptoes, placed her arms in position, and turned, slowly at first, but then gaining momentum until she spun like a dervish. Coming to a stop, she faltered a bit and leaned forward, catching herself and laughing. “I’m a little out of practice.”

I pulled at the fence, but the opening was only wide enough for me to fit one leg and a shoulder through, my face pressed up against the chain-link.

Her voice was high and just a little bit manic. “I used to practice all the time, trying to keep my weight down I got stuck on amphetamines and a bunch of other stuff . . .” She moved her feet up onto the rail and balanced there. “It never goes away, you know.”

The train horns sounded again.

“You’d be amazed at the things you’ll do; things you can’t even imagine.” She began walking the rail as if it were a balance beam in a portrait of poise, flexibility, and strength. “Dave got me involved in all this, and I helped him. It got more involved, and he sold Linda to some guy in Florida.”

She twirled again and then stopped.

“I had this plan for my life, but when that fell through I decided I’d teach and help other people with their dreams . . . But I guess that didn’t work out, either.”

I could hear the train now, the vibration of the thing pounding the rails like punishment.

She stopped and turned to look in its direction. “I don’t think I can watch it—don’t have the stomach for it.” Then she turned to look at my face. “I guess that makes me a coward, huh? I might jump out of the way or something.” She turned on the rail and continued her performance. “Can’t have that.”

The horns sounded again, and now I could see the four headlights of the locomotive pushing through the fog, bound and determined to get somebody this time. Pulling on the post at the other side, I felt my jeans tearing and the canvas of my coat shredding as I tried to get through the ragged edges.

Struggling against the opening, I felt the wire ends drag across the side of my face, pulling at the bandages on my neck, and the sudden warmth of my blood as it trickled down my cheek and saturated the collar of my coat.

Breaking my head free, I yanked at the rest of me, but the opening wasn’t big enough, and I just hung there like a side of beef and watched the big train coming down the line like a juggernaut of justice, inevitable and unstoppable.

She took a few more steps on the rail but then stopped and folded her arms over her chest, still facing the other way. “I guess it’s time to go.”

I grunted and pulled hard, and with one sudden yank, I staggered forward and fell on the ice in the ditch on the other side.

Pushing myself up, I could see the coal train only a couple hundred yards down the tracks, rumbling toward us at speed. I scrambled off the ice up the incline toward the woman, but slipped and slid down on the snow, gritty with coal dust.

When I looked again, it was a lot closer.

I figured it would take a few seconds to get the rest of the way up the incline and another few to get a hold of her and snatch her from the tracks.

I looked back as I dug in with my boots and, taking an angular route, scrambled up and could now see the details of the giant orange and black conveyance, the front rails with the safety chain hanging between, the treads that led over the hood, and even noticed that the front had a modified cowcatcher—that would be the part that struck us.

No way I was going to make it.

Even with the approaching roar of the train, I could hear the siren of a car pulling onto the road behind me and could see the revolving illumination of the blue lights on the snow. Doors slammed, and I could hear Sandburg and Dougherty calling from behind me but couldn’t understand the words.

Catching a few good footholds, I felt myself going up the hill before I was even aware that I was trying, the snow and coal dust passing under my eyes as I just kept digging and trying not to look to my left, focusing so hard that all I could hear was my breathing.

Reaching the top with a roaring rush of my own, I finally glanced back and could see the train was on top of us, the horn blaring in a din that was deafening. I threw myself into her and felt the toe of my boot hit the end of a tie, and all I could think was that I was going to trip and land the both of us on the rails.

The train bore down with a sudden rush of wind, carrying the fog and thunderous din with it. Making sure to use my left arm to wrap her up, I carried the two of us across the tracks onto the downslope with a tremendous thump, tumbling and sliding to the bottom.

Still holding her next to me, I watched silently as the thing passed by, car after car after car. She began crying and clutched me, finally converting the sobs into a low and steady moan that unintentionally mimicked the train’s whistle in a sad and wrenching lament.

EPILOGUE

The taxicab driver said that the regular route to Pennsylvania Hospital would be a parking lot this time of morning, especially with the snow piled to the curbs and the fact that it was New Year’s Day and therefore the Mummers Parade but that he knew a shortcut.

He patted the dash of the run-down Crown Vic. “Beena will get us there, she used to work for the police department.” He turned to look at me. “Baggage?”

“More than I can carry.”

“Where is it?”

I closed the door behind me. “Sorry, I was joking.”

He nodded and turned back toward the meter. “Cash or credit?”

“Cash.”

“We’ll get there even faster.” He punched the button on his dash and then the accelerator. We drove, and he continued to smile at me in the rearview mirror. “I have to tell you, that’s one bad hat you’re wearing.”

“Thanks.” We drove on, taking a banked loop underneath the highway, which was, as he’d predicted, jammed.

“Texas?”

I watched the floating snow flurries, somehow different from that of the high plains. “Wyoming.”

“Where’s that?”

“Above Colorado and below Montana.”

He edged the Crown Vic forward and then hit his horn as an individual in another cab cut in front of him and attempted to crowd his way into the lane escaping the airport. “There’s a state in between those two?”

“Since 1890.”

I could see him still studying me in the rearview mirror, probably taking note of the bruises, stitches on my face, bandages around my neck, and that little piece of my ear that was missing. “Don’t they have doctors there?”

I breathed a tired chuckle. “Yep, but my daughter lives here, and she’s the one having the baby.” On cue, I felt the phone vibrating in my pocket. One of the flight attendants had been kind enough to plug the thing in and recharge it after giving me a glass of champagne or it would’ve been long dead. I pulled it out and recognized the number. “Sweet-pea?”

The voice of the Cheyenne Nation came on the line. “I am supposed to ask where you are. Please do not answer with any other location than the City of Brotherly Love.”

“Just got in a cab from the airport.”

Another pause. “There was a car waiting for you, did you not see the man holding the sign with your name on it?”

“Are you kidding? I’m lucky I saw the airport.” I looked around. “Well, I’m in this one. Anyway, I’m on my way to Pennsylvania Hospital, right?”

“Yes, everyone is here.”

“Well . . . Almost everyone, I hope.”

“The only other member of the party is due at 8:20 A.M.”

I nodded into the phone. “Thanks for the reminder.”

“You have two hours to get to the hospital. Do you think you will make it?”

I leaned forward to get the taxi driver’s attention. “How long to Pennsylvania Hospital?”

He studied the road ahead. “Thirty minutes, tops.”

I repeated the response to the Bear, but this time it was someone else on the line. “Hurry up and get here, these fucking people are driving me up a wall. You’d think that no one had ever had a baby in the history of vaginas.”

“By fucking people I assume you mean your family?”

“All of ’em, including my uncle Al who in the spirit of the New Year was the only one thoughtful enough to bring wine and glasses.” There was a pause. “How you doin’?”

I stared at my reflection in the window. “I’m good.”

“I heard you’re even more torn all to hell than when we left you.”

“A little.”

There was a pause. “Where are you anyway?”

I spoke out to the driver. “Where are we?”

He trailed the words over his shoulder as I held the phone out. “Lindbergh Boulevard, driving past Suffolk Park.”

When I returned the device to my ear there was real annoyance in her voice. “What the fuck are you doing all the way over there?”

“Avoiding the Mummers.”

“Let me talk to the taxi driver.”

“No.”

There was mumbling in the background and then the voice on the phone changed again. “Daddy?”

I smiled at her voice. “Hey, punk.”

“You’re going to be here, right?”

“Come hell or high water.”

“Do not get involved in any investigations between wherever you are and the hospital.”

“I won’t.”

“I love you.”

“I love you, too.” The phone went dead, and I repocketed it as we took a right. There was an area of leafless trees, the dark branches reaching up into the metallic sky like veins.

“You are having a grandbaby?”

His voice breaking my reverie, I looked at the one eye I could see in the rearview mirror. “Yep.”

The traffic became more congested, and we slowed. “Congratulations.” We moved a little farther but then stopped again, and he handed me a card with his name on it. “If you have any need for a driver while you are here in Philadelphia, I would be honored to assist you.”

I read it and looked up at him. “You’re a Patel?”

“You know my name?”

“I know the occupation. You’re sure you don’t have any family running a motel in Wyoming?”

“We’re everywhere, a third of all motel owners in the U.S. are called Patel, and it is a surname that indicates that they’re members of a Gujarati Hindu subcaste.”

“I know.” I smiled. “The Patel Motel phenomenon.”

“You actually know this?”

“I do.”

He smiled at me in the mirror. “With your hat, you are a real cowboy?”

“No.” We slowly passed under another highway and into the patchwork of blocks that made up most cities, red brick and buildings a lot older than 1890.

He drummed the steering wheel, venting his frustration with the traffic. “But they let you wear the hat?”

“I’m a sheriff.”

He shrugged. “So you get to do whatever you want.”

I thought about it and watched the landscape change from strip malls to light industry as we passed over the Schuylkill River. “Not exactly.”

He eyed me again. “Looks like somebody did whatever they wanted to you—no offense.”

“None taken.” I felt the stitches on my face, feeling as if I were growing spines through my cheek like a porcupine; the itching had finally gotten so bad that I’d just taken the bandages off. “I’ve had a rough couple of days.”

“Chasing bad guys?”

I smiled even though it hurt, his phrase reminding me of the answering machine message my daughter had recorded for me: This is the Longmire residence, we’re not able to answer your call right now because we’re out chasing bad guys or trying on white hats . . . “Something like that.”

“Train robbers?”

“Nope.” I had slept and dreamed the entire flight from Gillette to Denver, awakened briefly to climb on the second plane, and then had dreamed and slept from Denver to Philadelphia, but the dreams were crowded with white buffaloes and dark prophecies. I was still tired. Maybe it was because I was punchy, but every once in a while you find yourself in a situation where you want to talk, and sometimes it’s to a total stranger, maybe even a stranger who doesn’t know that a faraway place like Wyoming exists. “There was a suicide of a sheriff’s investigator in an adjacent county, and I was called in on the case.”

“Sheriffs have investigators out there?”

I glanced up at the skyline of the fifth-largest city in the United States and the back of William Penn or, at least, the Alexander Milne Calder twenty-seven-ton bronze sculpture of the man, one of two hundred and fifty bronzes that adorn the outside of city hall, with seven hundred rooms, the largest municipal building in the country. “Oh, I bet you’ve got them here, too.”

“This Wyoming sounds like a rough place.”

“Not really, we have about twenty homicides a year in comparison to Philadelphia, which averages about three hundred and twenty.”

“Yes, but we are a big city.”

“And we’re a big state.”

Calder had wanted the statue to face south so that the detail he’d wrought in Penn’s features would be highlighted by the sunshine to better reveal the complexity of the work. There would be no sunshine today, but it didn’t matter; the statue faces northeast toward my daughter’s building in Old City near Fishtown, commemorating the site where Penn signed the treaty with the Lenape tribe to create the city. “Anyway, this suicide put me on the case of three missing women.”

“Did you find them?”

“Yep.”

He shrugged. “That’s good.”

“One is dead.”

“That is bad.”

“Yep.” I sighed. “And I guess there’s somebody out there that’s put a contract on my life.”

“I am sorry for your troubles.”

It was a heartfelt statement. “Me, too.” I spotted a cheese steak joint and felt my stomach growl and tried to think of the last time I’d eaten anything. “One of the women was found in Miami, and we turned all the information over to the FBI—the authorities there located her.”

The phone vibrated in my hand. “Excuse me.” I cupped it to my ear. “I’m ten minutes away.”

“I’m hoping that’s not the case.”

I recognized the voice of the Gillette patrolman. “Dougherty?”

“Yeah, did you make it to Philadelphia?”

“I did, what are you doing working on New Year’s Day?”

“The sheriff offered me the Cold Case position and I took it. He said I had a unique skill set that would be perfect for the job.”

“He fire Richard Harvey?”

“He’s out on dental leave.”

“I bet. What can I do for you?”

“I just thought you’d be interested that the Las Vegas PD did a search on Deke Delgatos’s place and found a bunch of personal correspondence with a guy in Mexico City who they think is the one who put the hit out on you. You ever hear of a guy by the name of Tomás Bidarte?”

I could feel my jaw tightening.

“Sheriff?”

“Yep . . .” I thought about the man who had almost killed Vic, the man who had gotten away. “Yep, I have.”

Dougherty seemed sorry to have brought up the subject. “I just thought it was something you ought to know, you know?”

“Yep. No, thanks, troop. Any word on Jone Urrecha?”

“She’s fine; a little worse for wear due to the concussion and exposure, but they’re only keeping her a few days for observation so I’m having dinner with her sister.”

“Corbin, you dog you.”

“It’s just dinner.”

“Make sure she doesn’t bring her stapler.”

I hit the button and rested the phone on my knee. So, he wasn’t dead, not by a long shot. I thought about how Henry and I had covered all that ground down near Sulphur Creek and hadn’t found a trace of the man.

The driver interrupted my thoughts. “This is your first grandchild?”

“Um, yep.”

“Girl or boy?”

“A . . .” I thought of white buffaloes and Virgil as I listened to the slush of the melted snow rhythmically scour the underside of the Crown Vic; I attempted to collect my wayward thoughts. “A friend of mine says it’s a girl.”

“Good, girls are best.”

“And why is that?”

“Sons, they have their own plans, but a daughter or granddaughter, they will love you forever and take care of you in your old age.” The traffic had slowed to a stop, and I couldn’t help but pull my pocket watch out and check the time as he watched me. “Don’t worry, we’ll get you there, my man. What time is this daughter of yours scheduled to deliver?”

“Eight-twenty.”

He shook his head. “Nothing to worry about. Take it from a man with five children; they always go later than they say. I will bet you a ten-dollar bill.”

The exhale of my breath clouded the window beside my face. “You haven’t met my daughter.”

The car began moving again, and we’d almost made it to midtown when we lurched to a stop to allow a SEPTA surface trolley to go by. “These damned trolleys, they are so slow, and they take forever.”

“How many cars?”

Not fully understanding my question at first, it took him a few seconds to answer. “Um, two.”

I slipped my hat over my face and smiled, looking forward to seeing all my old friends—and a new one. “You’re on.”

Cady and Michael Moretti

Proudly Announce the Birth of Their Daughter

Lola Longmire Moretti

At 8:20 AM EST

7 Pounds

20.5 Inches

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