Hell Is Empty

15

I cradled the rifle in my arms Indian-style as I walked, a fresh round in place and my underlying finger on the trigger.

We had been closer to the overhang than I thought, and it seemed to move toward me like some devilishly open mouth yawning from the snow, the frozen stalactites looking like teeth.

I continued to follow the tracks that Shade and the two hostages had made, Virgil’s words echoing in my head. Traitors. Was it a confession? An indictment?

My eyes kept drifting to the rim overhead. The spot where I’d tagged Shade was disturbed, and there was no snow there. The closer I got, the less chance there was that he could hit me from above, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t waiting in the relative gloom of the shelter straight ahead.

There were a few dislodged boulders that had fallen in front of the overhang a long time ago; I stepped between them, and it was like a curtain parting. A few flakes floated like fireflies following me in, but other than a drift that had sealed the western side, it was bare underneath the granite precipice.

From the light of a battery-powered lantern, I could see there were two of them toward the back, and the man jumped when he saw me. The FBI agent, Pfaff, was tied with nylon zip cords and a bandana tight around her mouth. She was leaning against the back wall with a sleeping bag underneath her and was evidently unconscious.

The Ameri-Trans guard was seated a little away with another sleeping bag hanging over his shoulders; he was apparently neither bound nor gagged. He leapt to his feet with his hands behind his back, a little unsteady. “Thank God.”

Some of the snow slid off of me and fell to the ground as I leveled the barrel of the Sharps. “Don’t move.”

He glanced at the woman and then back to me. “What?” He took a step forward, this one a little more composed. “Hey, I’m one of the good guys.”

I raised the barrel slightly, centering it on his chest. “I said, don’t move.”

He stopped, and I studied him, especially the way the sleeping bag seemed to hang up on something at his back. He was the one from the truck, the heavyset man who had been having trouble on the ridge when I’d spotted them through the binoculars. His nose had been bloodied, and it was probably broken, the swelling overtaking his eyes that shone in the darkness like wet paint.

The stocking cap on his head was pushed up but the rest of him looked normal-except for one thing: he still wore full ammo clips on his belt.

Traitors.

He tried to distract me by talking. “Hey, we need your help.”

“Why aren’t you tied up?”

He started to say something, realized it wasn’t something he wanted to say and certainly something he didn’t want me to hear, and then settled on something else. “I am. I mean, my hands are.”

“Show them to me.”

He started moving, and it was a little too fast for my taste.

“Slow.”

He hesitated, and there was that briefest of moments where I could see him trying to make up his mind. It all came down to judging-if you were a good judge of the man in front of you, you might survive; if not, then you were the honored dead. It’s never about who’s the fastest, strongest, toughest-it’s always about who, when everyone else would pause, will commit.

“I’m really tired, and I’ve already done this drill with the convict you left in the Thiokol. He made the right choice and is still alive-you make the wrong one, and I’m going to dislocate a couple of your solid organs.”

He remained motionless, and there was a dead silence as more flakes flickered to the ground in a semicircle behind me. “What do you want me to do?”

“Just drop it.”

“It might go off.”

I felt my finger maintaining a slight pressure on the trigger. “Well, then, bring it around carefully-like your life depends on it, which it most certainly does.”

I guess he thought he could make it.

I guess he thought I was in worse shape than I was.

I guess he felt like this was his only chance. In a way, I suppose he was right, but in another way, he was terribly wrong.

The Sig came around quickly in his left hand, but he could have been Billy the Kid and there was no way he could’ve aimed and fired in the time it took me to pull the set and final trigger. I had turned sideways for two reasons, the first to aim the long barrel of the rifle, which, unlike the short barrel on the semiautomatic, would place the bullet exactly where I wanted it. The other was to provide him with the smallest target I could-an old duelist and gunfighter trick.

Maybe I was still affected by my condition, or maybe it was that I simply didn’t want to take his life, but I paused and he fired first. The round went to my left as he overcompensated and drew the Sig’s barrel past me.

I pulled the trigger, and the buffalo rifle delivered its package at a much shorter range than it had been designed for in one hell of a thunderous response.

Nobody flies backward when they’re shot; no matter how large the caliber and how close the shot, they just slump. You die falling down, which is a terrible way to die-it destroys the confidence before it destroys the body, and that must be a terrible thing to be left with in those last few seconds.

I stood there for what felt like a long time as the echoing sound of the. 45-70 subsided in my head, finally stepping across the broken rocks and around his foot. I nudged the. 40 out of his grip with the toe of my boot, bent over what was left of him, pulled off my glove, and placed my fingers at his neck. Nothing.

Must’ve been my day for it.

I looked at his eyes, hazel-green and staring at the granite ceiling, and then reached down with two fingers and closed them, completing the ritual.

The second jolt of adrenaline had produced no tremors, which told me that the surge was only enough to keep me going for a short time and get me back to barely operable condition.

I shrugged the pack off and turned to look at Kasey Pfaff, who, thankfully, was breathing. I could see that she had a monster of a goose egg at one side of her forehead, which might’ve explained why the sounds of the shots hadn’t awakened her. I remembered that I had put my old bone-handled case XX knife in the zippered pocket in my pants, so I took off my gloves, retrieved it, and reached down to cut her free.

I kneeled and propped her up enough to get the bandana out of her mouth. She still didn’t move but made a noise in her throat and then coughed, closed her eyes even tighter, and then opened them, looking up at me. As near as I could tell from the expression on her face, she had no idea who I was-after what I’d been through lately, I wasn’t so sure myself. Covered in soot, ash, soaked with snow and frozen hard with ice, I figured I looked like some sort of golem. “You’re okay, just relax.”

She swallowed, blinked, and continued to stare at me. “The sheriff.”

“Yep, the sheriff.”

She smiled and shivered. “Nice to see you.” Her glance went to the surrounding area, settling on the boot of the Ameri-Trans driver.

“He’s dead.”

“Good.”

I laughed. “Not a nice guy?”

She coughed again. “No, he’s the one who hit me. Besides, he made a deal with the devil for some money, which, by the way, turned out to be nonexistent.”

“Where is Shade?”

She rubbed her wrists where the zip cords had left ligature marks. “He went ahead to the top.”

“Do you know why?”

“No.” She sat up a little and stretched her back. “I’ve been lying here forever. I’m sorry. I think my ankle’s b-busted.”

“You want me to look at it?”

“No, it’s probably just sprained, but I don’t think I’d get very far out there.” She sat up a little more, coughed again, and looked at me with an odd expression. “He’s carrying the bones of that boy we excavated from behind the rock.”

“Owen White Buffalo. I know.” I patted my chest. “He left me a souvenir.”

She nodded and then glanced around some more. “Where’s your backup?”

My thoughts exactly.

She looked puzzled. “What?”

“Excuse me?”

She smiled a crooked smile. “You said something, but I didn’t catch it.”

I thought I’d said it to myself but evidently I hadn’t. I guess I was more tired than I thought. Talking with people was more confusing than being confused by yourself. “They’re coming, but right now I need to go get one of them and bring him in here.” I pushed off the rock. The driver was dead, and she was in no condition to help, so I was back to square one.

I reached over, picked up the. 40 from beside the dead man, dropped the clip, and pulled the action, watching a round fly out, and was amazed when the federal agent snatched it from the air.

She held it in her palm and smiled at me. “My hands are all right.”

“I guess so.” I took the round, reinserted it into the magazine, and slammed it home. I handed her the sidearm and tossed the 9mm from the Junk-food Junkie onto the blanket at her feet. “A full mag in the . 40, but only one round in the 9-I’ll be back in a minute with our reinforcements, so don’t shoot me, okay?”

I stood, readjusted my goggles, pulled my gloves back on, and started out.

He was gone.

Again.

The swale was still there where he’d fallen and where I’d left him, the sleeping bag was still in the semicircle where I had wrapped him, and even the paperback was still lying there in the snow.

No Virgil.

I looked around but couldn’t see any tracks other than mine leading in any direction. I stooped in the trough we’d made and picked up the book and sleeping bag. What if he had become confused and followed me? It was possible that the ever-falling snow had covered his tracks, but there still should’ve been something, anything, showing where the giant had gone.

Surely he hadn’t continued on after Shade; he couldn’t even walk when I’d left him. “Virgil, damn it, this is getting ridiculous!”

My voice echoed off the granite walls. “ Ridiculous! Ridiculous! ”

You said it, brother.

The snow continued to fall, and the faint glow of the late evening sun was opaque, lean, and dying. Sunday; it was still Sunday as near as I could remember-a good day for all of this to end. If I was going to make any time before it got really dark and visibility dropped from twenty feet to two, I needed to get going. I drew the sleeping bag over my shoulder, stuffed the book under my arm, and started tramping my way back to the overhang.

I thought about some of the things that the big Indian had said about my daughter having a daughter. Could it be true? Could Cady have told Henry and Henry have told Virgil on his monthly grocery drops? Why would he tell Virgil? Why wouldn’t anybody have told me? I was used to the clandestine relationship that Henry Standing Bear had with Cady, but this? I had wondered why there had been such a rush to get married, and maybe even suspected, but why hadn’t she told me? Through the exhaustion and confusion, I was hurt.

And where the hell had Virgil gone?

Traitors. The last thing he had talked about was something about traitors-the final ring of hell, the ninth circle, surrounded by giants with sinners frozen at different levels in an icy lake that stretched to the horizons. Most thought that Dante’s hell was a flaming, superheated place, which was true for part of the Florentine’s journey, but in the Inferno, the real hell was an arctic, glaciated, and windblown place far from the warmth of God.

Traitors.

Was Virgil trying to tell me that he was involved or was he warning me about the Ameri-Trans driver?

I stumbled into the overhang, the sleeping bag dragging behind me, the distressed book in my hands. I looked at it again and noticed that there was something in it-a marker Virgil had left behind that looked like an owl feather from his lance. I shoved the paperback into my inside pocket with Saizarbitoria’s phone. I had enough to try and think about.

“Who is Virgil?” She had moved as far from the dead man as possible.

“He’s the Crow Indian who was with me. I don’t suppose you’ve seen a seven-and-a-half-foot man wearing a grizzly-bear headdress and bear cloak roaming around here anyplace?”

She looked at me, understandably worried. “No.”

I put the sleeping bag next to her along with the satellite phone and my backpack, took the ascent portion from the top, and detached the straps. “This is all I’ve got.”

She took the sleeping bag and covered herself. “The rest of the task force, the marshals?”

I looked at her, trying to decide what to say. She had nice eyes, smart and resilient.

I spoke looking straight at her, so that there wouldn’t be further questions. “McGroder survived. The last time I spoke with anybody they said that he was being transported down the mountain, but everyone else is dead.”

She was looking at me strangely again.

“What?”

Her expression changed from amused to concerned. “Did you know you’re talking to yourself?”

“I am?”

“Yes.”

I laughed through a yawn and nodded. “I have a tendency to do that, but we’ll be all right as long as I don’t start answering.” I yawned again. “Maybe I’ve been up here too long. Anyway, I’ve got to find sensible conversation somewhere.” There was a hip harness in a Velcro panel underneath the ascent pack, and I pulled the straps loose and connected the buckle. I sorted through the supplies I had, dropping the majority onto her lap. “I’ll take one of the water bottles and a little of the food.” I tossed the Fed phone where she could reach it more easily. “The reception on this thing has been going in and out. Strangely enough, it’s when I’m with Virgil that it doesn’t seem to want to work-maybe he’s tall enough that he’s causing interference. The battery is at about half, but keep trying and maybe it’ll work.”

She took the phone, glanced at the ascent pack and then up at me. “Where are you going?”

“After Shade.”

Her eyebrows collided over her bloodshot blue eyes as she leaned a little to the side. “Are you crazy?”

I turned my head and looked out into the gloom. “I’m beginning to wonder about that myself.”

A couple of moments passed as she tried to decide if she was going to argue with me and which point of attack on my lack of logic she was going to take. This was not a pause I was unfamiliar with in my dealings with women. “If you don’t mind me saying so, Sheriff-you look like shit.”

I placed the supplies in the ascent pack and zipped it. “Thanks.”

“I’m not kidding; do you know that the whole side of your head is covered in frozen blood? Did he hit you with one of those shots?”

I turned back to her, an old pro at hiding wounds. “No, I just fell.”

“Lean in here and let me look at your eyes; I think you’re concussed along with being hypothermic and who knows what else.” I didn’t do as she instructed, so she tried another line of attack. “I don’t know what the ambient temperature is or the windchill.”

I smiled at my boots. “Thankfully, the wind’s died down.”

Her voice took on a little edge. “What’s the elevation up here, something like twelve thousand feet?”

“Probably closer to thirteen.”

She shook her head at me. “It’s nighttime.”

“Yep.”

“You’ll die.”

I threw the strap over my shoulder, pretty sure it wasn’t going to fit around my coat. “ He ’s made it this far.”

She shook her head. “He’s certifiably insane.”

I stared at her. “Look, I don’t know what he’s thinking. I don’t know if he’s planning to sacrifice his life to finally stop those voices and visitations, or if he’s got some sort of escape in his head.” I sighed, pulled the strap of the rifle up, and settled my elbows on my knees. “You were his case psychologist.”

“Yes.” The. 40 and the phone were still in her lap. “I wish I knew what he was doing, Sheriff. I was just recently assigned as part of the task force, so I’ve only been familiar with him for about a week.” She reached down, and I imagined she was massaging her ankle. “I’d like to think that he was making progress in coming to terms with what he’d done and what was going to happen to him, but I don’t think he’s suicidal. He initiated the contact with us, no preconditions, nothing. He said he just wanted to show us where the boy, Owen, had been buried.” She took a breath. “Whatever he’s got planned, though, the boy’s remains are key.”

I stood, aware that depleting my reserves with even a short conversation wasn’t wise. “The fellow who was with me, Virgil? He’s got a knack for showing up at some of the most unpredictable places. He’s hurt, and if he appears, keep him here. He’s kind of scary looking but don’t let that put you off.”

She picked up the semiautomatic. “I could stop you by shooting you.”

I yawned again; a big one this time. “You could, but I’m so tired I’m not sure if I’d notice.”

She nodded and then translated it into shaking her head. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll look for your friend. What else have I got to do?” She pulled at the sleeping bag. “How am I supposed to keep him here if he shows?”

I thought about it. “Tell him stories; he likes stories.” I pulled the goggles down over my eyes and watched the world turn amber-glow again. I wondered how long I could wear them outside in the darkness. I pointed at some of the candy in her lap. “Give him a Mallo Cup; he really likes those.”

I took out my gloves, careful to keep the bone lodged in my jacket. “This whole thing with Shade, it’s kind of gotten personal.”

“Between you and him?”

I pulled up the balaclava, fixed the rolled collar of my jacket, and pushed my hat down on my head. “Well, yes, and between Shade and Virgil; Owen White Buffalo was his grandson, and even with a slug and a half in him, Virgil is some kind of formidable.”

She looked at me, incredulity playing across her face. “You’re worried about Raynaud Shade?”

“At this point…” I reached over to get the dead man’s snowshoes, unbuckling the more modern version of the ones Virgil had left upside down on the trail. “I’m worried about all of us.”

I smiled at her one last time, but with my frozen features, who knew what it looked like. I turned and walked out into the steadily falling snow.

I trudged up the mountain not expecting to find much, relatively sure that Shade had continued toward his final goal, which I assumed was the top of Cloud Peak. There was a slight depression in the snow where he’d made his way, but I couldn’t see any tracks where Virgil might’ve followed.

The spot beside the cairn where he’d lain near the edge was still evident. I knelt and brushed some of the snow away. There was blood, and I could see where the round from my rifle had hit the lip of the rock and had splintered it, effectively turning it into shrapnel. The majority of the frozen blood was near where his head and shoulders would’ve been.

I’d gotten him, but he was still moving.

I readjusted the goggles; it didn’t seem to make much difference with or without them. I knew that if I followed the cirque up the last scree field, I would finally get to the Knife’s Edge, a redoubtable spine about as wide as a city sidewalk that dropped off a thousand feet on either side.

I’d probably take my goggles off for that.

Then it would be a case of simply bulling my way up the incline that led to the lightning-hammered top of Cloud Peak. At that point, there would be nowhere else for Raynaud Shade to go, or me either, for that matter.

I rose, turned my back to kingdom come, and started up, steadying my rate into the mule pace that had gotten me this far. That’s how I was thinking about myself as of late, like some Marine mule that didn’t have enough sense to lie down and die. It wasn’t the most comforting of thoughts, but it got me up the hill.

Thankfully, the majority of the snow had been swept from the ridge, making it easier to spot solid footing. It was now fully dark, and the only good thing about that was that I couldn’t see the passes that led east and west thousands of feet below.

The wind seemed to have let up, and I was glad that of all the elements I was contending with, the ever-prevalent Wyoming wind had been the one to decide to give me a break. That was a miracle in itself.

Maybe the Old Cheyenne in the Camp of the Dead or the Crow from the Beyond-Country were holding back the wind for me with their arms outstretched, battered by the gusts and ceding none.

Sacred lands for the Cheyenne and the Crow, we whites had been in the Bighorns for only a couple of hundred years-they had been here for thousands. There is a knowledge that comes of a place you’ve lived in for that long. These high mountain canyons that had served as highways for the indigenous peoples, allowing them passage from one hunting ground to another and relief from the summer heat below and the gathering of medicines, are their most hallowed grounds. At the center of all this grandeur and history was the mountain that I was climbing-Cloud Peak, 13,167 feet of geologic event.

But right now, it was just cold as hell.

I tried to distract myself by thinking of other things; I thought about the story that Virgil had told me about how he had lost his grandson that sunny October afternoon. I’d wondered about the animosity that seemed inherent in the relationship that he had with his son, a man who, after not seeing his father for so many years, had responded by spitting in his face. I could only imagine the panic that must’ve overtaken Virgil when he’d returned to the truck to find only the indentation in the saddle blanket seat cover. To not know what had happened to the boy-it was almost as if the gods themselves, the ones from the giant Crow’s stories, had come and whisked Owen White Buffalo away.

The boy stands, and there was no fear in him; he could see the other that would welcome him and make him whole again. He dreams of the truck from which he was taken, silent now without his breathing. It is almost as if it is as it was meant to be, in that he never saw himself as a man; never saw himself as tall and broad-shouldered.

He sees the knife the almost-man carries at the side of his leg and worries for his grandfather, the one who has blamed himself for so many things. The one who will sit in the tin shack, the television the only voices to hold the silence of lost battles away-one more tragedy to take the place of all the others. The sound of breaking glass thrown against the thin walls as the boy’s memory stands before him, eagle-armed, waiting to be lifted by his grandfather and the gods.

Shade’s bullet had detoured at the thirty-fourth canto, which described the lowest ring of hell, the ninth circle, reserved for those who would betray. Traitors-Virgil’s last remark. He had warned me about the driver, just as he’d taunted me with the words innocent people, over and over again.

Granddaughter.

Had Virgil developed shaman tendencies since cloistering himself in the mountains? He’d made those prophecies with so much certainty, just as he’d predicted the death of someone close to me as we’d crossed the frozen surface of Lake Marion. I don’t think he’d meant his own death or mine-but then, whose?

Granddaughter.

I was glad it was a girl, if it was at all. I continued to cultivate the fantasy. She would look like my daughter; she would look like my wife. I held that thought since it comforted me above all the others.

I tripped over something, stumbled and caught my balance. I looked to see what it was and saw that I’d angled toward the very edge of the cliffs between Cloud Peak and Bomber Mountain and almost stepped blithely into the limitless void.

The ice water that ran through my bowels wasn’t figurative.

There were swirling masses of snowflakes that changed direction with the brief gusts that moved the air-and then nothing-blackness, farther than I could see, a thousand feet at least.

I breathed in and consciously told my feet to step back. I must’ve been getting close to the Knife’s Edge; as a matter of orienteering, it should’ve been just to my left.

Pushing the goggles up, I glanced in that direction but everything was still invisible. It was as if the world fell away from me in all directions.

I was feeling disoriented and dizzy, so much so that I was afraid I might fall down and a hell of a lot farther than I wanted. I planted the butt of the rifle stock in the snow and kneeled in front of the raised lip at the precipice. My stomach surged, and I felt nauseous, almost as if I had fallen.

My lungs burned as I forced air in and out, and I finally laughed at myself for coming so far to almost end like this. The laugh echoed across the divide and bounced back at me again and felt so good, I did it a few more times.

It was a good thing I’d stumbled over the stones at the edge, or I’d have joined the Thunderbirds of Crow legend. I thought about how it would’ve felt flying for those few brief seconds before I dropped like a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound side of beef.

I reached out and patted the rocks piled at the edge that had up to this point resisted the urge to follow their brethren below. The flat of my hand thumped against their raised surface.

It didn’t feel right.

The snow was stubborn where it had melted from the warmth of something underneath and then frozen again. The rifle fell to my side and clattered in an attempt to throw itself over the edge, but I slapped it still and pulled it back to me. I finally pushed the chunks of ice and snow away, revealing what appeared to be the great, silver-humped back of a grizzly bear.

“Oh, Virgil.” My voice sounded strange in my mouth, and my eyes risked tearing; I could feel them freezing in the stubble on my face. “Even dead you find a way to save me.”