Breaking Point

17

Approaching the Elk camp on horseback on the floor of the canyon, Farkus felt sick to his stomach. He’d made this kind of trek before, when a hunter in his party claimed he’d knocked down a deer or elk and they set out to find it, but the only time he’d been in a similar situation was three years before in the Sierra Madre, when he’d been recruited on a similar mission to find those two murderous brothers-and that hadn’t gone well at all. Jimmy Sollis’s constant chatter-he had certainly woken up-added to his unease.

“Look at this,” Sollis said, sweeping his hand to indicate the huge expanse around them. “Look how fucking far this was for a perfect shot. Jesus, one shot at eighteen hundred yards. It’s taking us nearly a half-hour to even get there. Man, what a rush. What a fucking rush.”

They rode abreast now, walking their mounts, like outlaws in a western movie, Farkus thought. The floor of the canyon was thick with a green carpet of grass and wildflowers-columbines and Indian paintbrush, mostly. The shallow creek flowed through it. The bed of the stream was orange pea gravel, and the water was cold, shallow, and clear. He could see shadowed darts of small brook trout shoot out from beneath the grassy banks and fin madly upstream, and he wished it meant something to him. Given the circumstances, though, it didn’t.

The elk camp was ahead of them, slightly elevated from the valley floor, but he could see nothing in it except a wisp of smoke from the untended campfire.

“I don’t see a body yet,” Farkus said, finally.

“That’s because he’s down, man,” Sollis said, lapsing into druggie cadence as well as acting like he was under the influence of something stronger than adrenaline, Farkus thought. “You don’t see him cause he’s down.”

“I think I liked it better when you wouldn’t talk,” Farkus grumbled.

Instead of feeling rebuked, Sollis threw back his head and laughed.

After a beat, McLanahan asked Sollis, “Where do you think you hit him?”

Farkus was grateful that at least the ex-sheriff appeared to understand the gravity of what they’d done.

Sollis said, “It was probably a heart or lung shot-that’s what I was going for. I’m thinking heart, because the poor son of a bitch dropped like a sack of cement. He might have stood and wavered a few seconds if I blew his lungs out.”

Farkus looked away.

“Any chance he’s pretending to be hit so he can draw us in?” McLanahan asked. “The guy is more wily than I thought, and he can shoot. You saw the way he took down that drone.”

“Not a chance, man,” Sollis said. “At that distance the round got there long before he could have heard the shot. He’d have to be some kind of wizard to guess I was about to pull the trigger a mile away, and from what I understand he wasn’t no wizard.”

McLanahan nodded, apparently satisfied.

“Look back.” Sollis laughed, turning in his saddle and pointing at the canyon ridge wall in the distance. “Look how damned far away it was. Jesus, what a rush. .”

They were close enough that Farkus could smell the smoke. It was sharp and acrid, probably fueled by green twigs. A breath of wind shifted and took the smoke away. But there was also another smell tucked inside the smoke.

“Be alert,” McLanahan said, as he reached down and peeled back the security strap of the Bushmaster in its scabbard. He drew the rifle out and seated a round. Farkus observed and did the same and laid his rifle across the pommel of his horse.

“No reason to get excited,” Sollis said, and beamed, shaking his head at their precaution. “He ain’t going nowhere.”

Because the camp was situated on a rise from the valley floor, Farkus couldn’t see into it yet. But he recognized the size of the rocks circling the fire pit, and the stumps that had been chainsawed smooth and even to sit on. He got a flash of a memory: dusk, the last of the sun filtering through the trees on the western horizon, the fire blazing high, Butch Roberson leaning over and pouring a healthy splash of Wild Turkey into Farkus’s metal cup. He’d been talking about his daughter, how he didn’t feel like he was truly a man until that day in the hospital when she was delivered and he looked into her face. .

“There he is,” McLanahan said.

The body was there just like Sollis had promised, and Farkus saw it as they rode up the rise. The body was on its side, facing away from them, partially curled around the fire itself. A clump of baggy green camo with legs extended, scarred hunting boots side by side in the grass.

Bursting through the fabric under Butch’s rib cage was a wet ball of red-and-gray intestine the size of a softball. So that was the smell he’d detected earlier, Farkus realized. The earthy, musky odor of a downed game animal being field-dressed.

“Gut shot,” the ex-sheriff declared.

Farkus waited for Sollis to say something defensive, but there was no sound. Maybe, Farkus thought, it had finally dawned on Sollis that his target had been a living, breathing human being.

McLanahan was still trailing the packhorse, and he stopped both of his animals a few feet from the body and fire ring and leaned down, studying the body. Farkus hadn’t ridden around to see the face yet, although he nearly jumped out of his skin when he thought he glimpsed movement from the body’s extended right hand. After a double take, he saw the hand was still.

Then McLanahan said, “Son of a bitch. We got the wrong guy.”

Panicked, Farkus swung down from the saddle and left Dreadnaught to wander off to graze. He didn’t care. He still had the rifle in his hand as he lunged forward and grasped the body’s right shoulder and pulled it to him. The body flopped to its back, and the red-haired man moaned.

“Jesus-he’s still alive!” Farkus said, dropping the gun and jumping back. The man’s face was square, his head blocky, and there was a five-day growth of beard. Farkus had never seen the man before, but it certainly wasn’t Butch Roberson. The man’s eyes were wide open but didn’t move around, and there was a pink string of blood and saliva connecting the top and bottom lip of his partially open mouth.

“It isn’t him, is it?” McLanahan asked Farkus, his tone neutral.

“No.”

“Shit. I wonder who it is Jimmy shot?”

Farkus looked up. Sollis looked thunderstruck, but McLanahan seemed to be taking it in stride, which astonished Farkus.

He watched as McLanahan sat back and slowly surveyed the camp. The ex-sheriff said, “I see his backpack over there against a tree. Farkus, why don’t you see if you can find some kind of ID?”

“Me?”

“You. But first you better tie up your horse before it runs away on you.”

Stunned by the turn of events, Farkus sleepwalked Dreadnaught over to a thick lodgepole pine and tied the lead rope over a branch. He glanced up at McLanahan and Sollis as he made his way over to the backpack because he didn’t want to see the face of the gravely wounded man again. Sollis sat in the saddle staring out at nothing, slack-mouthed and frozen. McLanahan was squinting and looking into the middle distance, as if gears were working in his head.

Next to the backpack, propped on the side of the tree that had been out of their view, was a complicated compound bow with wheels and pulleys and a mounted set of razor-sharp broad-head arrows.

He called to McLanahan, “He’s an elk hunter. It must be archery season on this side of the mountain.”

“Gee, you think?” McLanahan said sarcastically.

“I don’t see any ID,” Farkus said, rooting through the pack. It smelled of stale campfire smoke and sweat, and the pack’s contents were typical: camo clothing, rain gear, a sleeping bag and pad, a one-man bivvy tent, freeze-dried food packets, maps. .

“I’ll see if he’s got a wallet on him.” McLanahan grunted as he dismounted. To Sollis, he said, “Get down off that horse and give me a hand here, Jimmy.”

Sollis simply shook his head, as if by refusing the request he was also denying the reality of the situation.

While rolling the hunter back over to his belly so he could dig through his pockets, McLanahan said, “The dumb knucklehead. He should’a known to stay out of the mountains during a manhunt or use a known murderer’s camp, and especially not to wear the same damn clothes as the murderer.”

Farkus quit searching and wandered toward McLanahan and the hunter. Something wasn’t right, he thought, but his head was too fuzzy with the situation they were in to put it together.

McLanahan stood up holding a billfold from the hunter’s cargo pants. The wallet was inside a Ziploc bag. The ex-sheriff tore through the plastic and opened the wallet, studying the ID sheathed in thick plastic. Farkus could see McLanahan’s shoulders suddenly relax.

“Out-of-stater from Maine named Pete Douvarjo,” McLanahan said with obvious relief. “I was worried he was a local.”

“Still. .” Farkus said, not understanding.

“Pretty likely his people have no clue exactly where he is right now. Did you find a cell phone or a satellite phone in his pack, Farkus?”

“I didn’t see one, but I didn’t look that close,” Farkus said.

“We’ll need to look.”

Douvarjo made a low moaning sound, and both Farkus and McLanahan turned toward him. Douvarjo hadn’t moved, and his eyes still stared at the sky.

“What are we going to do?” Farkus asked. “Do we call somebody? Can they send a helicopter here to airlift him out?”

“He isn’t long for the world,” McLanahan said, matter-of-fact.

Farkus covered his face with both hands, then splayed his fingers and looked out at McLanahan. “You aren’t saying we leave him here, are you?”

McLanahan looked up sharply. “What can we do, Farkus? The bullet passed through all of his vital organs and made a big-ass exit wound on the other side. He’s shutting down. It’s just a matter of minutes.”

“So we just stand here and wait?”

“For now.”

“Then what?” Farkus said through his fingers.

“I haven’t decided yet.”

“Sheriff,” Farkus said, “we just shot an innocent man.”

“I’d call it an understandable accident, Farkus. And that’s exactly what it was. This poor guy was in the wrong place at the wrong time, doing the wrong thing.

“One thing I’ve learned,” McLanahan said, “is how important it is to control the story-they call it the narrative. I let it get away from me a year ago, and now we’ve got Wheelchair Dick puttering around with my job. I’m not going to let it happen again.”

He gestured toward Douvarjo. “Nobody will remember this if we bring in Butch Roberson. The story will be how the ex-sheriff who really knows and understands this county went up into the mountains on his own and brought down the bad guy while the Feds and the new sheriff sat on their asses. We’re on a manhunt for a killer wearing camo clothes and we happen on a man bearing that description in the act of shooting down a federal drone. What else were we to think?”

Farkus started to argue when it hit him what was wrong. It must have occurred to the sheriff at exactly the same time, because McLanahan’s face went taut and he asked, “Farkus, did you see a rifle?”

From above them in the dark timber, a voice said, “I need all of you to throw down your weapons and turn around. You on the horse-climb off now.”

Farkus recognized the voice.

It was Butch Roberson.