Blood trail

15

THE STATE-OWNED Mitsubishi MU-2 whined and shook as the twin props gummed their way through the thin mountain air and achingly pulled the airplane from the runway into the sky. Joe kept his eyes closed and his hands gripped tightly on the headrest of the seat in front of him as the ground shot by and he wondered if they'd reach cruising altitude before the plane shook apart. For the longest time, he forgot to breathe. The aircraft was the oldest one in the state's three-plane fleet, and Joe had heard it described as "the Death Plane" because it was the same make and model that had crashed years before and killed the popular governor of South Dakota. Joe wondered if his governor was sending them a message by ordering the old death trap out of mothballs in the Cheyenne hangar and sending it north to pick them up. Inside, the seats were threadbare and a detached curl of plastic bulkhead covering vibrated so violently in the turbulence that it looked like a white apparition. There were six seats in the plane, three rows of two. Randy Pope sat in the first row and had put his briefcase on the seat next to him so Joe couldn't use it. Not that Joe wanted to. Instead, he took a seat in the third row so he could grip the headrest in front of him and, if necessary, pray and vomit unobserved.

Eventually, as the craft leveled out and stopped shaking, he relaxed his grip, took a breath, chanced looking out the cloudy window. It helped, somewhat, to get his bearings. The Bighorns rose in the west looking hunched, dark, and vast like a sleeping dinosaur, and the town of Buffalo slipped beneath them. He noted how the North Fork and Middle Fork of the Powder River, Crazy Woman Creek, and the South Fork flowed west to east, one after the other, like grid lines on a football field. Joe envisioned each from ground level where he was much more comfortable. It calmed him to put himself mentally on the ground on the banks of the rivers, either in his pickup or on horseback where he could look up and see the silver airplane like a fleck of tinsel in a blue carpet. He sat back, closed his eyes, and tried to slow his heart down. JOE AWOKE with a start as the plane bucked through an air pocket that left his stomach suspended in the air a hundred feet above and behind him. He was surprised he'd actually fallen asleep. Joe gathered himself and looked outside and saw the rims and buttes of Chugwater Creek and the creek itself. It wouldn't be long before they touched down in Cheyenne. His feet were freezing from what he guessed was a leak in the fuselage, and he lamented that he'd not had time to change out of his bloody clothes before leaving for Cheyenne to see Rulon. He rubbed his face and shook the sleep from his head, saw that Pope, two rows up, was staring ahead at the drawn curtains of the cockpit. Not reading, not talking on his cell phone. Just staring, deep in thought.

Joe unbuckled his belt and moved up a row until he was behind and to the left of his boss. "Why did you bring Wally Conway?"

The question startled Pope, who flinched as if slapped.

"I didn't know you were there," Pope said. "Quit sneaking up on me."

"Why did you bring Wally Conway?"

Pope looked at Joe, his eyes furtive. "I told you. I wanted a friend with me. Someone I could trust."

"Then why did you leave your friend?"

"He wanted to help. What, did you want to leave Robey up there all by himself while you and Buck Lothar went on your little walkabout?"

"So why did you leave?"

"I told you," Pope said, his eyes settling on Joe's forehead. Despite the cold inside the cabin of the plane, tiny beads of sweat had broken out across Pope's upper lip. "I've got an agency to run. I can't run it and communicate with the governor while I'm out running around in the woods."

"Something's not making sense to me here," Joe said.

Pope squirmed in his seat and his face flushed red. "Wally Conway was one of my oldest and best friends." Pope's eyes misted. "I don't have that many friends anymore."

The admission startled Joe. Pope had never confided anything personal to him before.

"There's something I want you to see," Pope said, digging into the pocket of his coat and producing a small digital camera. He turned it on and an image appeared on the screen. He handed the camera to Joe with a hand that shook. "That's Frank Urman's head spiked to the wall of my room."

Joe cringed and looked away.

"Look at this one," Pope said, advancing the photo. "You can see the head of the spike he used to pound it into the wood. And here's a close-up…"

Joe couldn't bring himself to look.

"Disturbing, isn't it?" Pope said. "I'm finding it real hard to get that image out of my mind. It's hard to concentrate and think on my feet. I keep seeing that head on the wall."

"We're beginning our descent into Cheyenne," the pilot drawled over the speaker. "Make sure you're buckled up."

Joe returned to his seat chastened. In the last few hours he'd accused his boss of getting two men killed and also tried to strangle him. Maybe, Joe conceded, what Pope said about him was true.

As the plane eased out of the sky and the landing gear clanked and moaned and locked into place, Joe closed his eyes and once again gripped the headrest in front of him as if the harder he squeezed it, the safer he would be.

But he still wondered why Randy Pope had brought Wally Conway into the mountains and left him to die. CHEYENNE WAS cool and windy and Joe clamped his hat on his head as he followed Pope down the stairs of the plane to the tarmac. A white Yukon with state license plate number one was parked behind the gate next to the general aviation building and he could see two forms inside the smoked glass. Joe recalled that the last white Yukon he'd been assigned from the state ended up a smoking wreck in Yellowstone Park. He doubted they would want him to drive this one.

Whoever was at the wheel of the Yukon blinked the lights on and off to signal them. Joe followed Pope, who walked briskly as if to signal to the people in the car he wasn't actually with his subordinate, but simply traveling in the same plane with him.

A highway patrol officer, likely assigned to the governor's detail, got out and opened the two back doors while a state aeronautics commission staffer unlocked the gate. Joe took a deep breath of the high-plains air. It was thin at 6,200 feet, and flavored with sagebrush and fumes from the refinery at the edge of the city. As he glanced to the south, the golden capitol dome winked in the sun over the top of a thick bank of cottonwood trees turning yellow and red with fall colors.

As they approached the gate, Pope said, "Try to keep your comments to a minimum when we talk to the governor."

Joe said, "I work for him."

"You work for me."

Joe shrugged. He climbed into the backseat of the Escalade next to Pope and the doors shut, instantly killing the howl of cold wind.

She turned around in the front seat, said, "Hi, Joe."

"Hello, Stella."

Stella Ennis was ivory pale, with piercing dark eyes and full dark lipsticked lips. She wore a charcoal skirt suit over a white top with a strand of sensible business pearls. Her hair seemed richer and even more auburn than Joe remembered, and he guessed she was coloring it to hide the strands of gray. She looked at him coolly, assessing him in one long take that seemed to last for minutes although it really didn't, and he couldn't read what she concluded.

"I'm Randy Pope," Joe's boss said to her.

"I know who you are," she said, not looking at him.

Joe saw Pope and the trooper exchange glances. Joe nervously fingered the wedding ring on his hand, something he'd done without realizing it the first time he met Stella in Jackson.

Stella said, "The governor wants to see you two immediately. As you can guess, there's going to be an investigation by DCI to determine what happened up there, and no doubt there will be questions by the media and some members of the legislature. Governor Rulon wants to make sure we're all on the same page before the shit hits the fan. There may be charges brought, so be prepared."

"Charges?" Pope blanched.

"One never knows," she said. "When three people are killed in an operation, there are always those who insist on some kind of accountability, someone to blame. Not that we want any scapegoats. But we think we can head off anything like that happening if we can get out in front of it."

"We'll work with you however we can," Pope said, trying to get her eye. She finally broke her gaze with Joe and her eyes swept over Pope as if he were out-of-place furniture as she turned back around.

"Let's go, Bob," she said to the officer.

Stella said, "Word about what happened last night is tearing across the state like wildfire. We are very, very lucky the legislature isn't in session, or it would be a sensation on the floor. This is the first time in the state's history a governor has closed down state lands to hunting. And our understanding from the Feds is that they will follow suit this afternoon. We're already getting e-mails and constituent phone calls saying Governor Rulon is a dictator and much, much worse."

"I can imagine," Pope said, but the words just hung there when she chose not to respond to him.

Stella said, "We called a press conference for three-thirty. The governor plans to let everyone know what's happened and what measures he's taken. It's important that we have our story straight and our plan in place."

Joe checked his watch. An hour and a half before the press conference.

As they traveled down Central to downtown, toward the gold dome, Joe looked out the window at the stately houses on the avenues.

Stella Ennis was still attractive and sensual and familiar. But she was also still a murderer, and only Stella and Joe knew it. This time, unlike the first time he'd met her, there was no zing.

For which he was grateful.