Hell Is Empty

9

“The first thing I ever killed was a couple of rattlesnakes.” The gigantic man shifted his weight and turned his two heads toward the opening. “When I was ten, I came upon two prairie rattlers mating. They saw me and tried to get apart, but they couldn’t. I cleaned them; snakes are easy, and I remember them with their heads cut off still striking at my hand on the handle of the frying pan.” He tilted the pot in front of him and inspected the beef stroganoff that he was cooking.

There may have been stranger places in which I’ve woken up than Virgil White Buffalo’s cave in the Bighorns, but I can’t remember where they might’ve been. As caves go, it was a comfortable one, with rugs, pillows, and even a jury-rigged exhaust flume wedged into and continuing through one of the large cracks in the rock ceiling. Assorted hides were piled against the front, and I had to admit that the whole system made the place pretty cozy.

“I don’t know how many lives I’ve taken since then, hundreds, I suppose. None of them really in the right.”

I studied my host, crouched over the fire and illuminated by the flames, and could’ve sworn a bear was cooking my supper. “I thought there weren’t any grizzlies in the Bighorns.”

“There aren’t.” He picked up a wooden spoon and dipped it in the concoction, moving the crustier parts at the side back into the center of the pot. “Anymore.”

Virgil White Buffalo was a legend, and last summer I’d had him in my jail when I’d mistakenly arrested him for the murder of a young Asian woman. He’d assisted me in apprehending the actual culprit but then had melted into the Bighorn Mountains. I hadn’t had any contact with him since then but had suspicions that the Cheyenne Nation might have.

“Where did you get the head and cape, Virgil?”

He stopped stirring the formerly freeze-dried concoction and nodded, mostly to himself. “He was a neighbor, but we ended up not getting along.”

I filed away the thought that it might behoove me to do everything within my power to get along with the very large Crow Indian. I rubbed my head where the handlebars had struck it; the goose-egg lump made me feel like I was growing a horn. “You heard my SOS?”

“No.”

I sat up a little, careful to keep the sleeping bag around my legs, especially the bruised one. “The gunfire.”

“Yes.”

Virgil’s rocky abode wasn’t very far from where I’d overturned the vehicle, and with a little verbal assistance he’d retrieved my. 45, had gotten the Cat running, and had parked it underneath a tree. The cave was a ledge that Virgil had closed off with a multitude of rocks, almost a Bighorn cliff dwelling. Thirty feet in the air and sheltered by the towering fir trees, there was no way you’d ever notice it if you hadn’t known it was there.

The elk hide that was draped across the only opening blew inward, the powdered snow skimming across the granite floor. “Still crappy out there?”

“Yes.” He gazed toward the opening and then crouched over to rest a few rocks at the bottom of the hide to keep it from blowing. “It will likely continue through the night and maybe for a few days after.” He went back to the fire but glanced at me. “Why, you’re in a hurry?”

I shrugged. “On the job.”

“Always with you people.” He nodded again, occupying himself with the stirring. “The shoebox.”

“Yep.”

“Have they done something bad?”

“Escaped convicts.”

“Oh.” For the first time, he smiled, and it was a sly one. “Like me.”

“Well-” I glanced at the surrounding rock and noticed that Virgil had gone so far as to decorate his walls with some ledger drawings, the one nearest me showing the epic battle between Virgil and the grizzly. “Not exactly.” Strangely enough, the figure of Virgil seemed to be turned with his back toward the bear so that he was driving the spear behind him.

He carefully spooned the rehydrated dehydrated-de-jour into two metal bowls and brought me some. Virgil’s entire cooking kit was in an olive drab army surplus box, probably from WWII, complete with pots, pans, plates, utensils, and cups carefully held in place by narrow leather straps and small brass rivets that reflected the fire. He reached behind him, brought over an old percolator, and poured us both cups of coffee. “I have some powdered cream, but I think it might be left over from the Ardennes Offensive.”

“I’ll pass.” I wondered how many other people in the Bighorns knew the German term for the Battle of the Bulge. When I’d first met Virgil, I’d attempted to crush his larynx, and our relationship had been verbally one-sided. To my shame, I hadn’t thought he was all that intelligent-a judgment I’d soon amended upon discovering beneath the heavy brow the fine mind capable of playing chess on a grand-master level. I spooned a few mouthfuls and sipped my coffee. “The beef stroganoff is always a good freeze-dried bet.”

“Yes, it is. Thank you for including it.” He sipped his own coffee and studied the expedition pack and beaded leather gun sheath lying next to me. “You have a lot of supplies and are well-armed.”

“They’re bad guys.”

He finished the stroganoff in his usual record time and sat the tin bowl back by the fire; then he gestured toward the opening with his lips the way Indians have a peculiar tendency to do. “They have a woman with them.”

We studied each other, and I had to concentrate so that I would not keep making eye contact with the grizzly’s features that hovered over his own. The bear’s jaws were separated into two pieces on the headdress and hung alongside the open maw along with beads, eagle feathers, abalone shell discs, and strands of rawhide with tiny, cone-shaped bells made from snuff container lids that made a faint tinkling sound when he moved his head.

“You’ve seen them outside the vehicle?”

“Yes.”

Virgil didn’t exactly offer a lot of information, so I primed the pump. “Where?”

“Near the falls, about a quarter-mile from here.”

I blew a breath. “Why’d they stop?”

He gestured toward my bowl with a forefinger as thick as a broom handle. “Are you going to eat that?”

I handed it to him, waited until he was through, and then asked again.

He placed my bowl on top of his own and reached across to pull a bottle from my pack. “Can I have some of your whiskey?”

“It’s not mine, but I think Omar loaned it to me for the long term; he’s the one that loaded the pack.”

“The hunter.” He pulled the cap from the bottle of the Pappy Van Winkle’s Family Reserve and leveraged a dollop into his coffee. “You have good friends, Lawman. We’ll drink Omar’s whiskey then.”

“Bourbon.” He held the neck of the bottle out to me, but I shook my head. “Working.”

He shrugged and twisted the top back on. “The trail narrows at the falls, and with the timberline, the shoebox can’t go any farther.”

“When did you see them last?”

He thought about it. “An hour before I found the dead man and you.”

“Then they heard the shots, too?”

“Oh, yes.” He sipped his high-octane coffee and smiled. “Don’t worry. They are bedded down, and it will be an uneasy night for them. They’ll wait till the morning if they move, but the weather will break sooner and we can catch them unawares before that if you would like.”

I sipped my own leaded coffee. “I would like.”

He stretched his back, and it was as if the grizzly was rearing behind him. “So, you wanna play some chess, Lawman?”

Virgil had cleaned up from dinner, and we were into our third match and waiting for the weather to settle to make our move. The big Indian had placed a fat candle on one of the rocks and was using the light from it and the fire to examine the fourteenth-century giant blue devil on the cover of the Inferno.

His eyes came up to mine. “Looks scary.”

I studied the makeshift chessboard and tried to remember if the larger stone with the smaller one sinewed together was the king or queen.

“It’s got a Virgil in it; he was a Roman poet.”

He flipped through a few pages. “Dead, huh?”

“More than two thousand years ago. Maybe you were named after him.”

“No-I was named after my great uncle; he was an irrigation ditch digger.” He opened the book about halfway. “What’s it about?”

I moved what I thought was my queen diagonally on the checkerboard that was made from the remains of a Purina feed bag. “It’s a poem, an allegory.”

“Ah, something that’s about something else. Does it rhyme?”

“Only in Italian, not in English.”

His large fingers moved a small, singular rock that I assumed was a pawn, as he continued to study the paperback. “So, that is Italian on one page with English on the other?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “What’s the first thing it’s about?”

“A guided tour through hell.”

He considered the cover again and then tossed the book onto my legs. “I was in Vietnam and federal prison.” He shifted his haunches and looked at me. “I don’t need to go through that again.” Something made a noise outside, a long, piercing cry that mixed with the wind and then died. He glanced toward the opening. “Cougar, female.”

“Might be the one I saw down at Deer Haven Lodge yesterday. Maybe she’s tracking me.”

He took a deep breath and studied the board. “No. That noise, that call-she’s looking for her mate. Not the heat call, but the one of loss.” He noticed me studying him. “I didn’t kill him.”

“Good to know.”

“She might eat some of that dead guy down there; how much of him do you have to bring back?” I didn’t respond, and his eyes came back to mine. “These convicts-are you going to kill more of them?”

“Not if I don’t have to.” I thought about the man we’d put underneath the tree boughs by the four-wheeler. “So far I’m one and one.”

“You let one live? That’s good.” He moved another large stone with sinew and no twig, and I thought I remembered it being a bishop. “Maintains a balance.”

He looked at the opening again, the flickering light reflecting the scar that ran across his face like chain lightning. “Three men, one woman.”

“Two convicts, two hostages.” I studied the board, the ambiguity of the pieces reminding me of my life.

“You’re sure?”

I took my eyes from the collection of stones between us. “Of what?”

“Who is who.”

I pulled my hat down and shouldered the rolled collar of my jacket further up onto my back as a draft struck my neck. “What makes you ask that?”

“These escaped convicts, they had help?”

“A woman. Beatrice. She’s back down the road at Omar’s cabin.”

He nodded. One of his large fingers rested on another stone, the turquoise and coral wolves on his ring chasing each others’ tails. He nudged the piece forward. “This woman, are you sure she is the only one who is helping them?” He finished the move and then looked at me.

I ignored the board and looked back. “There was talk that they were going to meet somebody up here, somebody who was going to lead them out of the mountains.”

He sat there like that, unmoving, his eyes reminiscent of the dead ones that I’d stared into at the base of the cliff. He suddenly reared back with a thunderous laugh that echoed off the rock walls. After a few moments he stopped, and the slits of his eyes would’ve knapped flint. “Seems like every time I see you, you’re accusing me of something, Lawman.”

I moved another impromptu game piece. “You brought it up.”

He chuckled. “Not about me.” He moved another stone that might have been a knight, and not for the first time I began wondering if the game was crook. His face stayed on the board as the grizzly one watched me, and it was almost as if the bear head was the one that finally spoke. “Checkmate. Go to sleep, Lawman.”

“Unlock the door.”

The boy doesn’t move, just stares at the dashboard of the truck. He knows this almost-man-knows the meanness in him. Saw him once at the Greyhound bus station in Hardin placing ash at people’s feet with the lost dreams of his eyes. They had seen each other for what it was worth, and they had both known that the hanging road was the line between them-even then.

The tap again. “Unlock the door.”

Not of our people, says the large man about the almost-man. Stay in the truck and do not unlock the door.

“Unlock the door.”

Do not unlock the door.

“Unlock the door.”

He turns his face to look at the almost-man, who raises a fist as if to break the glass and it is suspended in the air there like a falling tree, trapped by its branches. He thinks how angry the big man will be if he returns and finds the glass in his truck broken.

“Unlock the door.”

He unlocks the door.

These dreams were so real they left me shaken and unsure of which world I was in. I shrugged the buffalo hide farther up onto my shoulders and listened to Virgil snore-I was sure in no less a decibel level than that of a real grizzly-and then rolled over and returned to my restless, vision-haunted sleep.

“Bad dreams?” Virgil woke me with a hand on my arm, and I have to admit the rawhide-laced lance in his other hand was a little disconcerting. The weapon was about eight feet long with a painted coyote skull near the hilt, and it was wrapped in red flannel and studded with brass tacks, elk teeth, horsehair, and deer hooves that rattled when he moved. “It’s time-they’re asleep.”

I stretched my eyes and tried to clear my head. “How do you know?”

He stood and pulled the grizzly head back from his own, the snow falling like dandruff. “I have been watching them.”

It was a little more than a quarter-mile walk following Tensleep Creek. I had the advantage of the recovered snowshoes, but Virgil had the advantage of knowing the terrain, and we followed his footprints and walked in the rut where we’d dragged the dead convict.

He’d been right about the weather, and the full moon shone above us, broken by the passing clouds like camouflage. We made our way across the same ridge, the cold grinding the snow beneath us as the deer toes on Virgil’s spear clack-a-tated like wind chimes.

“Hunter’s Moon.”

I glanced up again thinking about the Native designations that even NASA had agreed upon for each monthly moon; Hunter was October. “Little early for that.”

His voice resounded in his chest. “Never too early for that; besides, it’s a moon and we’re hunting.” He stopped just below the ridge, careful not to concede a target even when no one was looking. “In the Snow Moon, I about froze my ass off.”

I had to think-February.

“What month is it now?”

“May.”

“Hmm…” He grunted. “Day of the week?”

“I believe it’s Sunday, early Sunday morning.”

It was clear and colder than before, and the moonlight made it feel as if, even in the wallow, we were walking across a spotlit stage. I was rested and feeling a lot better, the bruise on my leg not giving me any trouble. Virgil continued to carry my pack; I’d asked him why, but he’d only shrugged and walked on. I had the Sharps over my shoulder, just in case we didn’t have the element of surprise that the big Crow Indian had guaranteed.

We followed the frozen creek through another ridge and stayed to the left before crossing into the open again, still following Virgil’s earlier tracks. The timberline was on a hillside to our right, and he motioned for me to follow him to an area that overlooked a four-way split in the stream that made a wide meadow before the falls. In the cerulean light of the moon, I could make out only one rectangular outline nestled in the aspens below.

You could see where the driver had circled to the right, but then, when faced with the steep incline and more trees, had returned to the field to the west and parked.

We were going to have to take the long way to the east and circle the meadow or backtrack in plain view across the creek. We chose the long way, and it took the better part of a half hour, but I felt assured as we looked down on the vehicle that we hadn’t been seen. I adjusted the binoculars that Omar had thoughtfully given me, and my eyes drifted in and out of the shadows playing across the snow.

The area around the Thiokol had been trampled flat; there were no lights, and no one was outside-at least as far as I could see with the aid of the powerful optics.

“There has been no movement for two hours. They are city people and don’t know that the bad things happen at night?”

I shrugged the binoculars from my eyes. “They know about bad things, day or night. I’ll bet they’re asleep. It’s where I’d be if you hadn’t woken me up.” I was just starting to figure out a plan on how to approach the vehicle when in my peripheral vision I noticed Virgil holding the expedition pack out to me. I stood, took it, and rested it against the tree beside me. “You headed back?”

“Unless you would like me to stay?”

“No.”

It wasn’t fair to dragoon Virgil into official business that wasn’t his own. I slung the strap of the binoculars around my neck, pulled a glove off, and extended a hand. “Thanks.”

“For what?”

I continued to look up at the giant. “Well, for getting an eight-hundred pound four-wheeler off me, for one-I’d still be down there near the creek bed if it weren’t for you.”

He nodded and then glanced at the Thiokol. “Maybe that would’ve been better.” His double head turned back to me, the bear one sitting a full foot taller than mine-short, really, for a grizzly. “Anyway, I got beef stroganoff out of the deal.”

“And a bottle of Omar’s Pappy Van Winkle’s.”

He shuffled his enormous feet. “You saw that, huh?”

I rubbed the lump on my head-the cold must’ve reduced the swelling. “I did.”

His eyes came back to mine, and he finally took my hand, enveloping it in his. “You don’t miss much, do you, Lawman?”

“Nope.” I liked him, as much as you can like a giant sociopath who had killed so often he couldn’t even remember all the lives he’d taken, human and otherwise. “You better get out of here before the shooting starts.”

He stood there looking down at me, and I was sure that even if I could’ve made out more of his face, I still wouldn’t have been able to read his expression. It was hard not to try, though. His mammoth chest rose and fell, but he said nothing more, then stooped through the lower limbs and walked away without comment.

I listened as the deer hooves chattered into the distance, then turned and, bringing the binoculars back up to my eyes, studied the vehicle below just in time to catch someone standing in front of one of the frost-covered side windows strike a match and light what looked to be a cigarette. I lowered the binoculars and remembered one of my late wife’s slogans about smoking: “Cigarettes are killers that travel in packs.”

Following the tree line around the meadow, I found a pretty good spot where I could approach the Thiokol Spryte from the rear where it had no windows. One side mirror hung crookedly and the other was completely encased in ice, so if they were going to see me they were going to have to stick their heads out or open the rear doors.

The closer I got to the thing, the more it reminded me of one of the old APCs we’d used in Vietnam, the one with the clamshell doors. Still a good fifty yards away, I could see the handles and figured the direct approach was the one I would use-simply yank the doors open and lead with the Colt. I certainly didn’t see any reason in yelling out who I was and, more important, where I was until I had the drop on them. I was walking slowly, but the snow was so dry and cold it crunched even under the snowshoes; hopefully, they couldn’t hear it.

I’d left the backpack at the edge of the clearing but had the Sharps cradled under one arm, the binoculars still hanging from my neck. A gust of wind carried over the western ridge, causing the pines to sway and giving me a little white noise with which to work as I traversed the last fifty feet and stopped only a few yards from the Thiokol. I stood there, not moving and listening for any sounds that might escape from the Spryte, but could hear nothing. If my calculations were correct, it’d been about fifteen minutes since I’d watched someone inside light their cigarette-plenty of time to smoke it and go back to the sleeping bag, if not to sleep.

I slowly let out my breath and watched as the vapor trailed to my right, dissipating and fading into the half-moonlit meadow as I took the last few steps.

The handle on the vehicle was a large lever-action one, like those you saw on walk-in freezers in grocery stores. There was a small trip mechanism at the end of it with matching holes where a padlock could be used to secure the two doors. If I’d had enough padlocks and the other doors were so equipped, I could just lock them in and let them drive around until they ran out of gas.

I carefully played the small trip mechanism out of the way of the bar, placed a hand on the foot-long lever, and remembered to breathe, hoping that the moonlight would illuminate the interior enough so that I could see who it was I might have to shoot.

I yanked the handle up and swung the door wide, jamming the. 45 into the opening. There was no one inside near the doors, but something glowed to my right, so I aimed the Colt at the small amount of light and movement.

The other Ameri-Trans guard sat covered in a blanket against the bulkhead. He was puffing on a cigar, his right hand cuffed to the grating that divided the cab from the cargo space. He pumped the stogie like a bellows and rocked back and forth; I could barely make out his eyes, he’d pulled his knit company logo cap so low on his forehead. “Thank God, I thought I was going to have to be here like all night.”

I kept the. 45 on him but allowed my eyes to scan the interior-empty-and then looked back at him. “You’re alone?”

“Yeah.”

“Where are the others?”

He nudged the cap back with the butt of his free hand. “Gone, man. They’ve been like gone for hours.”

“Where?”

He shrugged. “Hell, I don’t know. I don’t know where I am.” He shoved himself a little farther into the corner but continued rocking. “You mind coming in and closing that door? I’m like freezing my ass off.”

“What’s your name?”

“Brian Heathman. We’ve met.”

“We have?”

“Yeah, back at that lodge where the Bureau guys set up camp; it was like just a handshake.”

I readjusted the Sharps and lowered the Colt. “Sorry, Brian, that seems like a million years ago. I’m going to get my pack. Stay here.”

He nodded his head and squinted his eyes through the irony and cigar smoke as he rattled the handcuffs. “Very funny.”

I holstered the Colt, made the round-trip to the tree line, and returned with the pack. I removed my gun-hand glove, tucked it in my inside pocket, and then pulled the Colt out again and stuffed the semiautomatic into the side of my coat.

I opened the door and tossed the pack onto the floor of the Thiokol. Heathman had pulled the blanket up around his neck. I climbed in and shut the door behind me, careful to leave it unlatched, as he reached overhead and turned on the dome light.

“You’re going to run down the battery on this thing.”

Still rocking, he removed the cigar from his mouth and shook his head. “The transmission is like shot; it’s a lawn ornament. Hey, you don’t have anything to eat, do you?”

I pulled the pack up, unzipping and rooting through the detachable top. I found the aged bag of Funyuns and held it up.

He tucked the cigar into the corner of his mouth and took the bag. “Oh man, these have the cutout. Frito-Lay hasn’t used those since like ’05.”

“Cutout?”

He held it up for my inspection. “The little window where you can see the product; they’ve all got solid bags with a photograph now.” He turned the bag to look at it. “Who knows how old these things are.”

I glanced into the pack, aware that I had a few sandwiches further down, but I wasn’t giving those up just yet. “I’ve got some very old Mallo Cups, and some beef jerky that appears to have hardened into iron ore.”

He transferred the cigar into his attached hand and ripped open the vintage chips with his teeth. “Anything to drink?”

Pulling one of the water bottles from the side of the pack, I placed it on the bench at his covered feet and took another for myself. I unscrewed the top, resting it on the seat beside me, and took a swig. No need for ice. “Didn’t they leave you anything?”

I took a little time to study him-he looked rather incongruous with the cigar in his cuffed hand. He was a little heavy, which might’ve explained why Raynaud Shade had left him behind. Maybe.

“No.”

“What did they expect you to do?”

Reaching in and pulling a few of the ringlets from the bag and examining them for bugs, he seemed satisfied and popped two in his mouth. “He said you’d be along.”

I took another swig from my water bottle. “He did, did he? ”

“Yeah.”

“He didn’t think that Fingers Moser would finish me off?”

“Hell no. That guy was a nutcase, and Shade like wanted to be rid of him in the worst way.”

I leaned back against the interior side of the Thiokol and could feel the cold emanating from outside. “How’s the other hostage?”

“The FBI agent? She’s fine; a little roughed up, but she was okay when they left.”

“And you have no idea where they went?”

“Nope.” He rested the bag in his lap, plucked the cigar from his opposite hand, and stuffed it back in his mouth. Then he wiped his fingers on the blanket, bunching it so that his hand was underneath the fabric.

“Hey, Junk-food Junkie.”

The tone of my voice and the use of his nickname gave him pause.

“Let’s say for conversation’s sake that you’ve got a Sig 9mm under that blanket, and that I’ve got a Colt. 45 in my right pocket aimed at your guts, and my finger on the trigger; we would continue to have this nice conversation without any rude interruptions, now wouldn’t we?”

Freddie “Junk-food Junkie” Borland blinked, but that was all he did.

“Now, I don’t know if your hand is already on that Sig, or that it’s aimed, or the safety is off-but I am ready to pull the trigger on you right now.” In the dim light, I could see his eyes widen just a bit and the glow at the end of the cigar flare a little brighter with his intake of breath. “Something else for you to think about is what’s going to happen afterward. You might shoot me and kill me, but I most certainly will get you-center shot, right in the guts.”

I tapped my boot against the door, and his eyes shifted to the noise. “The other thing I’ll make sure I do is kick this door open so that just in case the cold doesn’t get you, whatever carnivores might be out there roaming around looking for a little Bighorn buffet will smell the blood. I’ve had a cougar following me for the last few miles, and I’m pretty sure there’s a good-sized grizzly out there, too-and brother, when those professionals come in here they are not going to concern themselves with which meat is alive and which meat is dead.”

The last part was mostly horseshit, but I didn’t figure his Phoenix-born ass would know the difference any more than Hector’s Texas one did-besides, the abstraction of a bullet was one thing, but being eaten alive was something else.

“I figure that putting you in the Ameri-Trans driver’s uniform was Shade’s idea, but after seeing how the other flanking efforts had fared, especially with your buddy Calvin back there, you took exception. That’s when he cuffed you to the grating and left you here with a pistol that’s only got one bullet.” I shifted my weight forward. “What were you going to do after you shot me, hope that you could fish the cuff keys out of my belt?”

He still didn’t move, but the end of the cigar flared again.

“Well, I’ll make sure I fall out the back. Then you can sit here eating Funyuns and fattening up for what happens next.”

He finally swallowed and shifted; the semiautomatic pistol clattered onto the metal floor between us.