Prey

Chapter Ten

Given the proximity of Bozeman to several first-class Montana ski resorts, the arrival of a Lear jet at Bozeman Airport wasn't exactly a media event. Still there were at least a dozen people in the terminal who turned to watch Len Ruebottom bring the incredibly agile aircraft in for a near-perfect touchdown landing.

Two of those people were Butch and Sonny Chareaux.

As the Lear taxied to a stop about fifty yards from the main terminal building, Butch Chareaux focused a pair of camouflaged binoculars on the jet's small windshield.

Chareaux, who was dressed in hunting clothes and looked as though he had spent every day of his life in the woods, waited patiently for the man in the copilot's seat to remove the headset so that he could see his face clearly.

After a few moments, he muttered something to his brother, who immediately walked to a nearby telephone and dialed a long-distance number.

"Yes?"

"He's here."

"What type of plane?"

"A Lear jet."

At the other end of the line, Alex Chareaux tapped his index finger on the table as he considered this new bit of information.

"What is the registration number?"

Sonny Chareaux, the largest of the Chareaux brothers at six-five and two hundred and fifty-five pounds, looked out across the terminal through the large, sound-absorbing plate glass. He saw the side door of the Lear pop open and then drop down as he noted the number painted on the base of the airplane's horizontal stabilizer.

"There's an 'N,' a dash, the numbers three, three, five, and then a 'C' and a 'P,'" he said as Alex Chareaux quickly scribbled in his notebook. "They are getting out of the plane now."

"Can you see the pilot?"

"Yes."

"Do you recognize him? Is he one of the charter pilots on your list?"

"No."

Alex Chareaux frowned.

Sometime within the next few hours, he was going to have to make a decision that might easily destroy his business and put his brothers and himself back on the run; or, if all went well, make their illegal enterprise many times more profitable.

What it amounted to was one magnificent, yet ominous, roll of the dice.

And Chareaux couldn't do anything more about it now because there wasn't enough time to make any other arrangements. All he could do was either say yes, or say no.

"Is there any sign of surveillance outside the terminal?"

"No, we have seen nothing."

"You've checked the parking lot?"

"Yes, many times."

"What about inside?"

"Only a few travelers, people with luggage and tickets, and the ones who are always here," Sonny Chareaux said. "It is not very busy today."

"What about the rental-car people? The porters? The people at the airline counters? Do you seg anyone you do not recognize? Anyone who is not on your list?"

"No, they are all the same."

It was an extremely difficult decision. Alex Chareaux cursed the one who had caused him this problem: the wealthy client who always talked with so much courage on the phone, boasting of his ability to stand his ground in the face of a charging record trophy animal, and eager to spend his money freely for the privilege. And yet also the one who might freeze at the critical moment when the huge bear turned in his direction, Chareaux reminded himself.

Which was why they would need the extra set of skilled hands. Someone with the nerve, and the resources, and the underlying greed to do whatever it took. Someone they could trust. Perhaps Henry Lightner could function as that extra set of hands. But Lightner's trustworthiness had to be proven beyond a doubt.

And that, of course, was the essence of his problem.

"What about the plane? Can you see anyone else in there with them?"

"One moment. We will look again to be sure."

Impatient to set it all into motion, but yet still uneasy for reasons that he didn't clearly understand, Alex Chareaux continued to shake his head slowly and tap his finger on the tabletop.

He realized that his instincts were telling him to play it safe and call the hunt off, and he was sorely tempted to do just that because the risks on this one were significant.

But in this particular case, the payoff-and the potential for future payoffs-was even greater.

Alex Chareaux understood as well as anyone that successful conquests were almost invariably based on opportunity and risk. He had always despised the cowards who played it safe. The timid ones who could only look forward to dying peacefully in their beds once their hands became too feeble to work the remote controls of their TV sets. Alex Chareaux, the oldest of the three brothers and their natural leader, knew with absolute certainty that he would never die that way. But he had also sworn a blood oath that neither of his brothers would ever die in prison, no matter who or what stood in their way. Because to rot away slowly in a cage like a trapped animal was the worst thing that could happen to men like Alex Chareaux and his brothers.

"There are only two of them on the plane," Sonny Chareaux said, finally coming back on the line.

"Has anyone gone out to meet them?"

"No, not so far."

He needed more. Something that he could dig his fingers into, and analyze. Something that he could examine, pull apart, and finally use for the crucial decision.

"What about a rental car?"

"We think he has a reservation with Hertz. There's a packet on the wall with the name 'Lightner' on it."

"Get a photograph of the pilot," Alex Chareaux said. "Find out who he is, and do it quickly. See what you can discover from the rental agency, too."

Sonny Chareaux motioned to his brother, who immediately exchanged his binoculars for a medium-format camera with a Polaroid back and telephoto lens.

After double-checking the settings, Butch Chareaux braced himself against the window frame and waited until Len Ruebottom stepped out onto the Lear's small stairway.

The loud click of the shutter was audible fifteen feet away in the small, uncrowded airport terminal.

Still at the phone, Sonny Chareaux watched as his brother quickly pulled the undeveloped photo out of the camera, set it aside, and then brought the heavy camera up again for a second shot.

Butch was the smallest, and the youngest, of the three Chareaux brothers; he was five-nine, one-eighty-five, and twenty-nine years of age. He was also the most technically adept of the brothers, with a knack and a feel for fine machinery like cameras and video recorders. But his true love was the 7mm Winchester Model 70 rifle with the adjustable Zeiss scope that his brother Alex had given him for his thirteenth birthday. The one he'd used to kill his first human being two weeks later, and the eleven others since.

Unlike his brothers, who preferred to be in close when they killed, Butch Chareaux liked to work from a distance, using hand-cast sabot rounds-projectiles with a thick coating of plastic that isolated the solid-core slug from the constraining grip of the barrel rifling but then split away in mid-flight to give the bullet additional velocity and stability. He liked the precision and the quickness of the kills, and the fact that there would never be a land or a groove on the bullets that could be matched back to his treasured rifle. But he really didn't need to worry about that, because his preferred target was the neck-actually, the larynx and one of the carotid arteries; the shock left the victim mute and rapidly dying, while the mostly unaltered bullet continued on its ballistic path to disappear into the forest.

"It's done," Sonny Chareaux said. "We have the photograph."

"Good. Check him out then, quickly, and use the radio to contact me as soon as you know."

"But if I can find out nothing about him easily, how far should I go?" Sonny Chareaux asked. "Or perhaps I should say, what are the limits? How hard should I push?"

Alex Chareaux hesitated for a brief moment. "There are no limits on this one," he answered finally. "Do whatever you have to do. We need to know before sunset."

"I understand."

After hanging up, Sonny Chareaux walked over to his brother and waited the remaining seconds until both Polaroids were ready. He examined each of them, taking extra time with the one that showed the pilot and the man they knew as Henry Lightner coming down the ramp.

"Do we get to kill them?" Butch Chareaux asked hopefully.

"I think so," his older brother said, looking out the terminal window at the two men who were unloading duffel bags and a rifle case out of the Lear's storage compartment. "We shall see."

"So what do you think?" Len Ruebottom asked in a low voice as they walked in through the wide terminal door, causing Henry Lightstone to wince. Fortunately, of the ten or eleven people that he could see inside the Bozeman Airport terminal, none of them were within earshot.

Lightstone had given Ruebottom the rifle case and one of the duffel bags to carry in the hope that the task would be sufficiently distracting. But the young rookie agent-pilot had already forgotten one of his primary directives.

"You've seen one small airport, you've seen them all," Lightstone observed as he paused to take in the entire waiting area in one long, appraising glance.

Of those ten or eleven people, he noted, at least a couple of the men looked big, mean, sinister, or vicious enough to be Alex Chareaux's brothers. Which meant that he had to get rid of Len Ruebottom as quickly as possible. "No, I mean…"

Deliberately ignoring the young pilot, Lightstone made a visible show of looking around and then finally managing to locate the large, bright-yellow Hertz sign that would have been easily visible a hundred yards away. He walked over to the counter, dropped his duffel bag, and turned to stare straight into Len Ruebottom's clear, innocent eyes.

"Really appreciate you're getting me up here on short notice, Len," he said, giving him a friendly employer-to- employee type of smile. "I'll give you a call when I need a pickup."

"Uh, yes sir," Ruebottom acknowledged, finally remembering his proper role. "Anything else I can do in the meantime?"

"Not a thing," Lightstone said firmly. "Just look after the plane, hang on to that paper, and stay near a telephone."

Then he turned to face the waiting Hertz clerk before Len Ruebottom had a chance to say anything else that just might get one or both of them killed.

"Hello," Lightstone said, smiling pleasantly at the attractive young woman. "The name's Lightner."

"Oh, yes, of course," she said, nodding in apparent recognition as though she had memorized all of the names on the displayed reservation packets. With barely a glance backward, she reached around for the one that was marked "Lightner" in big capital letters.

"First name Henry?" she asked before opening the envelope.

"That's right."

As he handed her Henry Lightner's driver's license and credit card, Lightstone turned his head just enough to see Len Ruebottom's broad back as he walked out the wide terminal-door access to the tarmac and the waiting Lear jet. He also noted that he couldn't see either of the two men who had seemed to resemble Alex Chareaux, but he really wasn't worried about the Chareaux brothers at this point.

Not as long as Len Ruebottom got the Lear and his rookie-agent ass back up in the air and out of Bozeman within the next few minutes.

God save us all from the nice guys. They're the ones who get you killed every time, he told himself as he returned his attention to the attractive Hertz clerk.

"Do you know where you'll be staying?"

Lightstone sensed the presence of a man behind him, but he didn't worry, because it didn't matter now if Sonny or Butch Chareaux were standing behind him or waiting for him out by the Bronco. He could deal with the Chareaux brothers on his own just fine. The only thing that he was really interested in right now was hearing the high-pitched whine of two powerful jet engines revving up as Len Ruebottom taxied the Lear back out onto the runway for takeoff.

"Somewhere between Big Timber and Lewistown," he lied reflexively. "Depends on how far I get."

"Okay then, Mr. Lightner, I think we have everything all ready for you," the young woman said cheerfully as she handed him the contract. After he had signed it, she took the multipage form back, separated out and folded his copy, then handed him the packet along with a set of keys. "I've marked the stall where it's parked, and it's filled with gas. You want to be sure to fill it up… but you know all of that, don't you?"

Lightstone nodded.

"Then just watch out for those storms, and have a nice trip." She smiled one last time before looking back at her dwindling row of reservation packets with an oddly forlorn expression.

Thirty minutes later, after having made a trip to the bathroom, buying a container of coffee to go, and stowing the duffel bags and rifle in the back of the Bronco, Henry Lightstone drove out of the airport en route to U.S. Highway 90.

In doing so, he tried very hard not to look at the sleek and shiny Lear jet that was still parked all by itself about fifty yards from the Bozeman Airport terminal building.

The eighty-mile drive from Bozeman to Gardiner wound down along the shallow Yellowstone River and through one of the more spectacular high-peak passes in the western United States. But the view was wasted on Lightstone, who was having trouble just paying attention to the road.

He kept thinking about the empty Lear jet sitting out on the Bozeman Airport tarmac with the U.S. registration number Three-Three-Five- Charley-Papa painted in nice readable block print on its side.

And a twenty-five-year-old rookie agent-pilot, with a pretty wife and two young kids, who had no business getting drawn into an undercover investigation with a freak like Alex Chareaux if he didn't know enough about covert work to do exactly as he was told.

"God damn you, MeNulty," Lightstone swore to himself, over and over again.

He almost pulled off the road at Miner to find a phone and warn MeNulty to get Carl or Larry or Dwight out to Bozeman to find out what the hell was going on with that plane. But he knew that if he did something like that, the word would immediately get back to Alex Chareaux.

And besides, Lightstone reminded himself, there were at least six vehicles behind him, any one of which might be driven by Sonny or Butch Chareaux. He really didn't want to have to explain a sudden phone call.

So he kept driving and tried not to think too much about all the little mistakes that a novice investigator like Len Ruebottom could have made. And it didn't help that every time he thought about Len Ruebottom and his family, he saw the ravaged face of Bobby LaGrange, his ex-partner from San Diego, bruised, beaten, and near death in that hospital bed.

Thus by the time Henry Lightstone finally pulled into the parking lot of the Best Western Motel in Gardiner, he was seriously considering taking Alex Chareaux out into the woods with a. 38 shoved into the base of his skull, and to hell with the investigation.

Lightstone drove around to the back side of the motel and pulled into the parking space in front of 101, the first ground-floor room to the right of the manager's office. Leaving the driver's-side door unlocked as a precaution, because he wasn't sure of what would be happening in the next few minutes, Lightstone walked around to the rear of the Bronco. He opened up the back door, pulled out the rifle case and his duffel bags, relocked the door, and slid the keys into his pocket.

Then he turned around and found himself staring directly into the piercing, red-streaked eyes of Alex Chareaux.

"We have a problem, Henry," Chareaux said without preamble, the cold, somber expression on his bearded face giving away nothing at all.

"Oh, yeah? What's that?" Lightstone asked, standing there with the rifle case in one hand and the duffel bags in the other as he instantly switched his mind into the full role of Henry Allen Lightner.

"We need to talk," Chareaux said, gesturing with his head to his left. "I think we should go to my room, where we can be more private." He started to turn away in the direction of the motel, but Lightstone stood firmly in place.

"What exactly is the problem, Alex?" he asked in a cold, quiet voice, having no intention of allowing himself to be trapped in a small hotel room until he knew a lot more about what was going on.

"It is better not to talk of such things in public," Chareaux said insistently.

The expression in Alex Chareaux's reddened dark eyes was completely unreadable, and Lightstone didn't like that. The image of Len Ruebottom sitting in Chareaux's room, tied upright in a chair, gagged, and most likely beaten half to death, flashed through Lightstone's mind.

"What do you mean, in public?" Lightstone demanded, putting on all of the frustration and impatience of a wealthy businessman and sportsman who wasn't the least bit accustomed to being hassled. He made a deliberate show of looking around the parking lot. "For Christ's sake, Alex, we're standing in a goddamned parking lot, out in the middle of nowhere, and there's nobody around. What the hell's the matter with you?"

If Len Ruebottom was in that room, Lightstone knew that Sonny and Butch would be there, too; and that would make it three to one, with Ruebottom as a hostage. There wouldn't be any chance at all.

Chareaux just stood there, looking equally frustrated and impatient and about ready to explode.

That's it, Alex, Lightstone smiled to himself. Go ahead and get upset. Yell, scream, and throw a fit. Give me an excuse.

"Look, man," he said, deciding to see how far he could push Alex Chareaux, "I just spent a half-hour bouncing around the sky in a goddamned airplane because you're the one who called and said it was now or never. And now I'm here, and I'm in no mood to-"

Focused on Alex Chareaux, and standing with his back to the motel, Lightstone never heard the door to Room 102 open. Thus he became aware of their presence only when one of the camouflage-dressed individuals came up behind him and spoke.

"Alex," Dr. Reston Wolfe demanded as he stared down at the rifle case in Lightstone's hand, "would you be so kind as to explain what the hell is going on out here?"