Breaking Point

26

Jimmy Sollis wept in the moonlight.

With the daypack strapped on his back and his wrists bound in front of him, Sollis stumbled on a tree root, lost his footing, and did a face-plant into the dank-smelling musky ground. He hit his head hard enough to produce spangles of orange on the inside of his eyelids, and his face was covered with dirt and pine needles.

He clumsily got to his feet again. That damned pack threw his balance off and he nearly sidestepped and stumbled to the ground again, but he got his tired legs beneath him.

And stood there and cursed and cried. He hadn’t cried for years, not for anything.

It was all so damned unfair. .

Since that son of a bitch Butch Roberson had shot a crease in his cheek and sent him away, Sollis had blindly worked his way down the mountain. Without a map, a GPS, or a good sense of direction, he simply went down. Whenever he was given a choice to continue on a line or veer to the right or left, he chose whichever side descended. Several times, this had led him into tangled ravines he had to tear himself out of-his clothes were rags now-but sometimes it was the right choice. His goal was to get out of the black timber onto the valley floor, where at least he could see and be seen if someone was looking for him.

He’d long ago given up trying to retrace their route up the mountain, as directed by the son of a bitch Butch Roberson. Sollis hadn’t paid much attention to the trail they’d taken on the way up because he’d been concentrating on his footing, and it had been in daylight. Now, everything was jumbled and confusing. He told himself that if he kept walking down he’d eventually hit the bottom. It only made sense.

The trek had been pure torture. He was without any food-although there might be some in the backpack he couldn’t unshoulder or open-and his thirst was quenched only when he bumbled upon a small trickle of stream or creek.

Two hours before, he’d found a tiny ribbon of running creek and had dropped to his knees and plunged his face into it, only to find out in the dark there was less than an inch of water. He’d inhaled sand, twigs, and a floating beetle with the first gulp, and spit it out down his shirtfront. Aching of thirst, he’d pushed his way upstream through thorny brush until he located what looked like a wide and deep natural cistern bordered by rocks. Again, he dropped to his knees in the brush and lowered his head halfway between two white and spindly tree roots and drank deeply. The water was cold and cut its way down his throat and chilled him to the bone. But he kept drinking, ignoring the metallic taste.

When he was sated, he sat back and wiped his mouth dry. He could feel the hydration seep through his guts, and spread out to his extremities. Sollis couldn’t remember how long a human could survive without food and water, but he knew it wasn’t long without water. So he knew he’d staved off an ugly death.

Then he realized he was sitting back on something large and spongy, something that had some give to it. Something that smelled putrid. He turned and looked into the naked eyehole of a dead mule deer. He was sitting on its body, and the two long white roots he’d drunk between were its decomposing legs.

That was the first time he cried.

He’d been twenty years old when he first heard about the sport of long-distance shooting. Until that time, it seemed he’d spent his life under the shadow of his muscle-bound older brother Trent, who had landed a job as a deputy under Sheriff McLanahan in the Twelve Sleep County Sheriff’s Department. Oh, how their parents loved Trent, who played high school football and basketball and lifted weights (and shot human growth hormone into himself) all through college until he emerged double the size he went in. Sollis, meanwhile, ran with a pack of losers and was frequently in trouble. The joke in the Sollis house-which Sollis never found funny-was that someday Trent would arrest Sollis.

Ha-ha, Sollis thought bitterly, although he admitted to himself it might have happened if Trent hadn’t been killed in the line of duty the year before. He didn’t miss his brother at all.

Jimmy Sollis had been on a crew of roofers who followed hailstorms around the state and into Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota, when he first heard about long-distance shooting from the foreman. They’d been sitting on the peak of a roof eating their lunches in Lovell, Wyoming. The foreman said he still competed around the country, using high-end custom rifles to hit targets hundreds of yards away. Sollis got excited about the idea of it, and the foreman showed Sollis some of his rifles and agreed to take him to an event outside of Rock Springs.

Sollis was enthralled. He’d never been much of an athlete or a scholar, but something about propelling a small cylinder of polished heavy metal through the air to hit a target got him excited inside. It got him hard.

He learned about calculating windage, elevation, altitude, velocity, determining grains of gunpowder, learning how to breathe. .

At the events he attended with his foreman, Sollis collected business cards from custom gunmakers who had booths set up, and started saving chunks of his paycheck-and supplementing his income by dealing meth to roughnecks on the side. His first long-distance rifle, a Sako TRG-42 chambered for.338, won him $2,500 at the Orem, Utah, Invitational-and he was off. He’d reinvest his winnings into more precision rifles, because a man could never have enough rifles. He sent the rifles away to custom gunsmiths who tweaked the weight of the trigger pull and equipped the weapons with specialized scope rings and high-tech optics. Sollis found he had a natural ability to calculate velocity, drop, and windage. He could hit what he aimed at.

But he wanted more. Sollis had listened to a couple of books on tape written by Marine snipers, and he desperately wanted to use his newfound skill on Iraqis, Iranians, or Afghanis. He had no strong feelings about which. So he signed up for the U.S. Marines, telling the recruiter in the White Mountain Mall in Rock Springs they were getting a blue-chip player, that they didn’t realize the LeBron of snipers was standing right in front of them, actually volunteering to join their playground pickup team.

The Marines rejected him because of his rap sheet of drug-related arrests, and because of that sexual assault charge with the underage cheerleader back in high school. Furious, he tried the Army, then the Navy. But the word was out among the recruiters and he was black-balled. The foreman told Sollis about private defense contractors who might be able to use his skill, and Sollis was interested. Anything was better than roofing for a living.

So when ex-Sheriff McLanahan drove up that morning before dawn as Sollis crossed from his rental house to his pickup to go to work and offered him a chance to go with him, Jimmy Sollis jumped at it. The opportunity to use his skills for the good of humanity and on the right side of the law? He was all over that.

He had no idea that it would result in a gut-shot hunter from Maine, or a desperate hike down a mountain in the middle of the night. And all because McLanahan hadn’t warned him off before he pulled the trigger on the wrong man.

It burned Sollis how McLanahan had acted once that son of a bitch Roberson had shown up. Suddenly, it was all Sollis, as if McLanahan hadn’t recruited him and given him the signal to fire.

It just wasn’t right.

To make matters worse, that phone Roberson had hidden in his daypack kept ringing and he couldn’t even answer it. He thought:

He’d had his nine-thousand-dollar rifle taken away from him;

He was lost;

If he somehow made his way back to Saddlestring, he’d likely be arrested for gut-shooting a hunter from Maine;

His belly was filled with rotten dead deer seepage;

Mosquitoes were feeding on the back of his neck where he couldn’t reach;

His cheek ached from the bullet that had creased it;

And. .

Nobody loved him.

And now he couldn’t even answer the goddamned phone.

Jimmy Sollis paused near the middle of a small clearing in the trees. He realized the hairs on the back of his neck and his forearms had pricked up because he’d seen, heard, or sensed something that was off. He stood still until his breathing returned to normal from the exertion of the trek through a long jumble of down trees and branches.

When he could hear again over the rhythmic pounding of his own heart, he slowly turned his head to the right, then the left. He wondered what it was that had made him stop, made the hairs prick up. Sollis had a creepy thought that someone might be watching him.

The terrain had leveled somewhat after an hour of clawing his way over and through the timber on a steep slope. The moon, straight overhead, lit up the grassy meadow in a shade of light blue. The wall of trees on all four sides of the clearing was dark and impenetrable by the light, though, which made him think that whatever or whoever was watching him hung back in the shadows.

“Who’s there?” he croaked. “Come on out, or I’ll come in after you.”

He regretted how the end of his sentence had risen in pitch and revealed his fear.

He listened for a response. Nothing.

Then a small puffball of a cumulus cloud drifted across the face of the moon and plunged the meadow into gloom. Sollis waited for the cloud to pass so he could see again.

He tried to recall what it had been that spooked him, something out of the corner of his eye, something he glimpsed or thought he’d glimpsed: a huge human face. It made no sense.

But because the moonlight was muted, his eyes adjusted, and the face, measuring two feet wide by three feet tall, emerged from the utter darkness just inside the trees to his right. Sollis gasped and squared off against it, his bound hands out in front of him to ward off the Attack of the Face.

He saw eyes the size of charcoal briquettes, a wide nose, a thick mustache, and a sardonic grin. He realized he was looking at the side of an ancient cabin or line shack, and some bad artist years before had painted the face on the siding.

“Jesus Christ.” Sollis sighed, dropping his hands and letting his shoulders relax. It was just an old shack.

He went to it, and saw what a crude and stupid face it was. He wondered if the mountain man or cowboy who had painted it had been doing a self-portrait or if it’d been the face of someone he knew. Not that it mattered now.

Sollis moved around to the front of the structure and saw the open misshapen door, and two broken-out windows that seemed to squint up and to the right because the building was leaning that way and about to fall over. There was no roof on the shack because it had buckled and fallen inside, which left no room in there to stretch out and sleep and no reason to go in.

He walked to the other side of the shack and found the rusted frame of what looked like a Model-T Ford pickup in a small grove of aspen trees. The rubber was gone from the tires and the fabric on the seats had long before been eaten away. Three eight-foot trees sprouted up from beneath the car frame, one from where the motor should have been.

Sollis cursed again. There wasn’t anything in the shack or around it that could help him. The crappy old cabin looked to have been built in the 1920s or 1930s-long before there was any electrical or telephone service available. Back before the Forest Service had closed all the roads to the public. Whoever had driven up there, built a shelter, painted the face, and left his pickup, was long gone.

Then he stared at the rusted frame of the Model-T, and he got an idea.

The front bumper was thin and insubstantial by modern standards, he thought, but the top edge was fairly sharp. Sollis was on his knees in the grass, working his arms and the plastic bindings back and forth along the edge, sawing at the zip ties. It made a low moaning sound.

It took him nearly an hour to feel some give, and another ten minutes to saw completely through. The shards of the ties fell to the ground.

Sollis cried “Yes!” and stood up and rubbed at his sore wrists. His mind had wandered a couple of times as he sawed away mindlessly and the sharp rim of the bumper had scratched his skin, but the bleeding wasn’t bad.

Feeling unbelievably free, he loped from the old car frame into the open meadow and slung the daypack to the ground. He felt so much lighter without it, and he opened the top flap and rooted through it to see what the contents were. Clothing, mainly, which he had no use for. But he found a filled plastic bottle of water, and he opened it and drank. It nearly washed the taste of the deer water out of his mouth.

He found no food except a can of Van Camp’s Pork and Beans. He started to root through the pack for a knife or can opener when the phone started ringing once again. He’d nearly forgotten about it, and Sollis found it in a side pocket of the pack.

The display showed a number with a 307 area code with no name attached to it. The face of the phone was confusing at first, but he saw the icon of a standard telephone handset and punched the button and held it up to his ear.

“Who is this,” Sollis said, “and why do you keep calling?”

There was a beat of silence, as if the caller was surprised there was someone on the other end.

A high voice with a slight Hispanic accent said, “Butch, this is Juan Julio Batista.”

“Who?” Sollis asked.

“Who is this?”

“Who do you think it is?” Sollis said cautiously.

“Butch Roberson.”

“Yeah, right,” Sollis said sarcastically.

“Let’s not play these games.”

“Fine, I’ll hang up.”

“No,” Batista said urgently. “Please stay on the line.”

“Technically, it isn’t a line,” Sollis said.

He could hear muffled voices from the other end, as if the caller had placed his hand over the microphone. Sollis found it annoying, and was prepared to turn off the phone and call one of his roofer buddies to come get him, when Batista came back on.

Batista said, “Can you hear the helicopter coming? It should just about be right above you.”

Sollis was confused. Then he recalled Butch Roberson’s demands, and smiled a second time. Maybe, he thought, he could get the pilot to take him away. Off the mountain, away from everything, maybe far enough the cops couldn’t find him right away.

He heard the sound in the night sky. It increased quickly in volume. Sollis had never been close to a helicopter in his life, but in the movies a helicopter made a whumping sound when it flew. This sounded more like a flying lawn mower.

“Stay right where you are so the pilot can see you,” Batista said. “Is there enough clear space where you are for it to land?”

“I’m not sure,” Sollis said, looking around at the small meadow.

“Stay where you are.”

“I am. I can hear it coming, but I can’t see anything.”

“It’s coming, believe me. Look up,” Batista said.

There was more muffled talking in the background.

Sollis did, and saw a dark cigar shape hovering over the eastern wall of trees. There were no lights on it, and he could see it only because it blocked out a line of stars. It didn’t move but stayed in one place, which didn’t seem natural.

“That doesn’t look like a helicopter to me,” Sollis said, as a red ball of flame appeared from underneath the unmanned drone.

He heard the whoosh coming straight at him.

And he never heard anything else.