Free Fire

12

The iowan’s name was darren rudloff, he told Joe and Demming over the roar of helicopter rotors, and he was from Washington, Iowa, which he pronounced “Warsh-ington.” He’d lost his job at a feed store, his girlfriend took up with his best bud, and his landlord insisted on payment in full of back rent. He felt trapped, so he figured what the hell and headed west armed to the teeth to live out his fantasy: to be an outlaw, to live off the land. He liked Robinson Lake. There had been dozens of hikers on the trail over the summer, but he’d avoided them. None were brazen or stupid enough to walk right into his camp, as Joe and Demming had done. When asked about the murders or the murder scene, he said he knew nothing other than what he’d read before he came out. All this he told Joe and Demming while the IV drips pumped glucose and drugs into his wrists to deaden the pain and keep him alive, while EMTs scrambled around his gurneyreplacing strips of Joe’s shirt with fresh bandages until they could land in Idaho Falls and get him into surgery.

Joe found himself feeling sorry for Rudloff, despite what had happened. Rudloff seemed less than dangerous now. In fact, he seemed confused, childlike, and a little wistful. Joe had a soft spot for men who desired the simplicity of the frontier that no longer existed, because he’d once had those yearnings himself. And, like Rudloff, he’d thought that Yellowstone was the place to seek them out. They’d both been wrong.

Demming confessed to Rudloff that she’d lied to him about Congress passing a law.

“I figured that out,” Rudloff said through bandages on his face that muffled his voice. “That’s the only good thing about today, I reckon. We don’t need no more laws. I’ll head back up there when I’m patched up.”

“I’d advise against it,” Demming said.

“You gonna press charges?”

“Maybe.”

“Where you gonna have the trial?” Rudloff chided.

Demming had no answer to that, and she ignored him for the rest of the trip.

Joe asked the helicopter pilot to take them back to the Bechlerstation to get his vehicle after they’d admitted Rudloff. The pilot agreed.

They landed on the only clear, flat surface at the Bechler ranger station-the horse pasture-at dusk. Joe and Demming thanked the pilot and scrambled out. Joe was happy to be out of the air and back on the ground. Stevens was there to meet them and handed Demming a message.

In the Yukon, Demming unfolded the piece of paper. “I need to call the Pagoda,” she said. “Ashby wants a full report on what happened.”

“Do we need to get back to Mammoth, then?” Joe asked, contemplating the five-hour drive.

Demming seemed lost in thought. He wondered if the shock of what happened at the camp had been held at bay in her mind and was just now releasing. He’d seen that kind of delayed reactionto violence before, and had experienced it himself.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

She shook her head. “I guess so. That was a new one for me, I must say. I don’t think I’ve ever been so scared as when I was looking into the muzzle of that rifle. His eyes-Jesus. They looked crazy and scared at the same time, which is never a good combination. And I feel ashamed that my first reaction when he got shot was pure joy-followed by nausea.”

"I understand.”

"I hate to feel so happy to see a man shot-up.”

“He’ll be okay,” Joe said.

“I know. But to see that kind of violence up close like that. . I don’t think I’m cut out for it.”

“You were magnificent,” Joe said. “You saved our lives when you told Rudloff about that law because it delayed him long enough for Nate to aim. You nearly had me believing it. That was quick thinking.”

“If only it were true,” she said. “Joe, do you think there are many more like him? I mean, more crazy survivalists in the Zone of Death?”

“Probably.”

“Whoever saved us, is he one of them?”

Joe smiled. “Nate? Yes, he is. But he’s been that way since I met him. He doesn’t live in Yellowstone, though. He lives in Saddlestring, where I come from. He once told me he values what he considers justice over the rule of the law.”

“That scares me.”

Joe nodded. “Me too. Luckily, he’s on our side.”

Rather than drive all the way to Mammoth in the dark, they decided to go halfway, to the Old Faithful area instead, into the heart of the park. Since the next item on Joe’s list was to question employees about the Gopher State Five, the diversionworked out. Demming used her radio to notify her husband that she wouldn’t be home and said she’d call him when they got to Old Faithful.

“That probably won’t go over very well,” she said, as much to herself as to Joe.

“I understand,” he said.

“I told him last night you were a nice guy, a family man.”

He flushed. “I said the same about you to Marybeth.”

“Now is the time for an uncomfortable silence,” she said.

He agreed, silently.

They backtracked north and entered the park proper through the gate at West Yellowstone, following the Madison River. The absence of any kind of streetlights made the moon and stars seem brighter and made Joe concentrate on driving, since bison or elk could appear on the road at any time. Demminghad been trying to nap but couldn’t get comfortable. She gave up trying with a sigh.

“When this is over,” she said softly, “I think I’m going to quit. I don’t ever want to be that scared again, and I’ve got a husband at home and two great kids.”

“What would you do?”

She shrugged. “Well, maybe I won’t quit outright. I probably can’t. I’m the primary breadwinner in the family, you know.”

“Believe me,” Joe said, “I know what that’s like. My wife is in the same boat, unfortunately.”

“Maybe I’ll transfer out of law enforcement into interpretation,” she said. “I’d like a life of pointing out wildflowers and bison dung to tourists from Florida and Frankfurt. That sounds a lot less stressful than what I’m doing.”

“Same bureaucracy, though.”

“Yeah, I know. And as an added bonus, less money.”

The old faithful area was the largest complex in the park, consisting of hundreds of cabins, the Snow Lodge, retail stores, souvenir shops and snack bars, a rambling Park Service visitor center, and the showpiece structure of the entire park: the hundred-plus-year-old Old Faithful Inn that stood in sharp, gabled, epic relief against the star-washed sky.

Since Old Faithful was the most heavily visited area, there were a few dozen vehicles in the parking lot despite the lateness of the season. Joe drove under the covered alcove of the hotel, which framed the famous geyser, which puffed exhausted steam breaths. The sides of the cone were moist with water, and steaming rivulets snaked downhill to pour into the river.

“Postcoital geyser,” Demming said, rubbing sleep out of her eyes. “It just went off. We missed it.”

Joe smiled in the dark but chose not to respond.

They unloaded their gear and pulled open the heavy iron-studdedseven-foot wooden doors and entered the most magnificentand bizarre lobby Joe had ever seen. He froze, like hundreds of thousands of visitors had before him, as he did when he first encountered the place two decades before, and tilted his head back and looked up.

"Wow,” Joe said.

"Gets you every time, doesn’t it?” Demming said.

“I’d forgotten.”

“Does it seem smaller, now that you’re older?”

Joe shook his head. “It seems bigger.”

His memories came flooding back, the sense of awe he’d felt then and felt now just as strongly, as if he’d been gone only minutes. At the time he first entered the inn and looked up, he’d never seen anything like it-it was the biggest log room he’d ever been in and it seemed to rise vertically forever. At least three levels of balconies lined the sides, bordered by intricate knotty pine railings and lit by low-wattage bulbs in candlestick fixtures, culminating high above in obscure catwalks and a fancifulwooden crow’s nest nearly obscured by shadow. Fires crackled from hearths in the massive four-sided fireplace that rose in a volcanic stone column from the central lobby into darkness. Then, as now, Joe felt he was looking into the vision-come-true of a genius architect with a fevered and whimsical mind, and it took his breath away.

He marveled at both the beauty and the brashness of the construction,something that rarely interested him because he was not a fan of the indoors. The inn was built on an epic scale to inspireawe, like great European palaces or castles. But instead of stone, it was built of huge logs, and rather than gilded carvings for decoration there was functional but eccentric rococo knotty pine and natural wood. It had been built not for a small royal family but for the masses. There was something very American about it, he thought.

And it was emptier than he remembered. When Joe stayed at the inn as a boy his father had chosen a cheap, faraway “room without bath” accessed by dark hallways like cave tunnels and what seemed, at the time, to be hours from the lobby and a wrong turn away from certain death due to poor navigation skills on his part. The only thing that kept him alive and on the right course, he remembered, were the growing sounds of voices from hundreds of visitors milling in the lobby, either waiting for the next eruption or having just returned from the last one. Getting back to their room through those circuitous pathways was another matter.

This time, though, Joe requested a single room with a bathroomon the second level within sight of the lobby balcony. He got one because the hotel was nearly vacant. A smattering of visitors sat reading in rocking chairs near the fireplace, a few more talked softly on the balconies. The absence of conventionalbackground sound-televisions, radios, Muzak-was striking.

The Zephyr front desk people and bellmen were friendly but worn out from the summer.

“We’ll get you checked in and we can grab a bite,” Demming said, “then I’ve got to get on the phone to Ashby and my husband.”

“You aren’t staying here?” Joe asked.

She shook her head. “We aren’t allowed. The Park Service has housing across the road next to the Zephyr housing. I’ll stay there and meet you early tomorrow.”

Joe nodded and took his key. He threw his bags on the bed in a refurbished room that was nothing like the dark hovel he remembered,and met her in the vast empty dining room.

He watched her leave after dinner and found himself feeling a little sad she was gone. He liked her. He hoped she would be able to make the transfer she wanted into interpretation.

Since he didn’t have a cell signal, Joe used a pay phone from a bank of them in a room off the first-floor balcony to call Marybeth. Her day had been filled with shuttling Sheridan and Lucy to the bus, from the bus, to Sheridan’s volleyball practice and Lucy’s piano lesson. Hectic but normal. Joe told her about Darren Rudloff.

“So Nate is there?” she asked.

“Yes, but we haven’t really met up.”

“He just saved your life and vanished.”

“Same old, same old,” he said, smiling at the statement as he made it.

“I’m glad he’s there.”

“Me too. I just wish working with Nate was more conventional.”

“Then he wouldn’t be Nate, would he?”

“Nope.”

She said they would leave early Saturday morning to get to Yellowstone by early afternoon.

“I can’t wait,” he said.

In his room, Joe poured himself a light bourbon from his traveler and reviewed the growing file. It had helped to see Mc-Cann’s office and the murder scene, to feel them, to re-create the crime in his mind. But there had been no Eureka! moments. He read the rest of Hoening’s e-mails and found several more references to hot-potting and flamers, but nothing that helped advance any kind of theory. He kept hoping he would find a referenceto McCann that would link the victims to the lawyer. Nope.

Hoening’s superior was a man named Mark Cutler, who was area manager of the Old Faithful complex. Joe made a note of the name and intended to interview Cutler in the morning.

He transferred his notes from the day onto a legal pad for his report to Chuck Ward and the governor. While he wrote, he heard a roaring and splashing sound and at first thought an occupant in the next room had flushed his toilet. But it came from outside.

Joe parted the curtains and threw open the window and watched Old Faithful erupt. The wind shifted as the geyser spewed and filled his room with the brackish aftereffect of the steam that smelled slightly of sulfur.

As tired as Joe was, he couldn’t sleep. When he closed his eyes, scenes from the previous two days replayed in a herky-jerkyvideo loop: the meeting at the Pagoda, the two old men scrambling from his sight in his hallway, the long day in the car with Demming, Clay McCann’s office, Darren Rudloff, the fruitless look into the mind and motivations of Rick Hoening’s e-mails, his own repressed memories of his brother’s funeral and the subsequent breakup of his family.

He opened his eyes and looked at his wristwatch, shocked it was only 10:30 P.M. Without television, radio, or the routine of home, his body clock was thrown off. He considered going back over the file to see if something jumped out at him that hadn’t before, now that his subconscious had asserted itself. Instead,he rooted through the desk and read about the Old FaithfulInn in Zephyr brochures.

A half-hour later he dressed, thinking he would go for a walk, hoping the physical activity would help shut down the video loop in his brain. Maybe he’d watch Old Faithful erupt again. He grabbed a jacket, considered taking the Glock, decidedagainst it.

The hallway was dark but not as dark as he remembered it, but he felt familiar relief as the warm glow of soft light on the logs lit his path to the open, empty lobby. Even the desk clerks seemed to be taking a break. The strange mechanical clock on the fireplace ticked, and his boots echoed on the wooden stairs to the lobby floor.

As he reached out for the iron latch on the studded door something made him pause and turn around.

Not every rocking chair in front of the hearth was empty. Nate Romanowski was asleep in one of them, his hands hangingat his sides, his boot soles splayed, his head back and mouth open.

Joe crossed the lobby and nudged Nate’s boot with his own. “Tag, you’re it,” Joe said.

Nate cracked an eye. “Hey.”

“Thanks for today, Nate. I mean that.”

His friend sat up and rubbed his face, waking up.

“Why didn’t you stick around?” Joe asked.

“I heard what that ranger said about the new law,” Nate said. “I believed her.”

Joe chuckled. “She’s good, isn’t she?”

“Yeah.”

“That was good shooting.”

“I’m a good shot.”

Joe pulled a chair over and sat down next to Nate. The fire was nearly spent, but the heated stones of the fireplace radiated warmth.

“I wanted to see the murder scene,” Nate said, “find out if I could get any vibes from it. I got nothing. But I was glad I was there when you and the ranger walked up.”

“Me too.”

“Are you figuring anything out?” Nate asked.

Joe thought about it before answering. “Overall, I’d have to say. . nope.”

Nate simply nodded. Joe filled Nate in on what had happenedso far, where he was headed. As Joe talked, he studied his friend. Nate appeared to be only half listening, as if there was something else on his mind.

When Joe was through, he asked, “Any questions? Any ideas?”

“Not yet.”

“Okay, then.”

Nate stood up, checked the front desk to confirm there was still no one there, then stepped over a metal barrier and approachedthe fireplace. “Watch this,” Nate said, and started climbing the chimney using the outcrops of volcanic stones for hand- and footholds.

“Nate. .”

He scaled the fireplace until he vanished into the gloom. Above, in the shadows, Joe could hear Nate’s heavy breathing and the scuffle of his boots on rock. Ten minutes later, Nate rejoined him after scrambling from the chimney onto a cat-walkand taking a series of rickety, ancient stairs back to the lobby.

“I used to do that when I worked here,” Nate said in explanation.“Every night if I could.”

Joe shook his head. “When did you work here?”

“Many years ago.”

“I never knew that.”

“There are a lot of things about me you don’t know.”

“And I’m not sure I want to know them.”

“No,” Nate said, “you probably don’t.”

Joe sat back in his chair. “This is quite a place, isn’t it? I read that it was built in 1903 and 1904, in the middle of winter. Some days it was fifty below. The guy who built it had a sixth-gradeeducation, but he was a self-taught genius.”

Nate agreed. “He was a wizard too. If you noticed, the windowson the building don’t correspond with particular rooms or floors. They’re scattered against the outside like they were just thrown up there and stuck. That’s intentional. The architect wanted the look of the hotel to be random and asymmetrical, like nature itself. And it’s just as interesting inside. There are secret stairways, hidden rooms, and a crazy dead-end hallway called Bat’s Alley. They’re closed to the public, of course, and very few people know about them.”

Joe looked over. “But you know about them.”

Nate nodded Of course but didn’t meet Joe’s eye.

“Nate, what’s going on? There’s something wrong, I can tell. You didn’t climb that chimney to impress me, although it did. You climbed it because something’s eating at you and you need to think.”

Nate sighed but didn’t disagree.

“What is it?” Joe asked.

“I was over in the Zephyr housing area earlier,” Nate said. “I was wondering if there was anybody still here who I knew when I worked here.”

“Yes?”

Nate leaned forward, rested his elbows on his knees, and cocked his head. “Joe, there’s somebody you probably ought to see.”

Joe was puzzled.

“Did you bring the Glock?” Nate asked.

“I left it in my room.”

“Good,” Nate said, rising. “You probably don’t want a weapon around afterwards.”