Savage Run

22

Northwest of Saddlestring, Wyoming

July 6

Driving four miles over the speed limit with the Mercedes SUV set on cruise control, the Old Man noticed a small tape recorder pressed upright between the seats and pulled it out. Lawyers liked to talk in these things, he thought, and later give their valuable musings to their secretaries to decipher. Then he remembered the microcassette tape they had taken from Hayden Powell’s telephone answering machine. With his left hand on the wheel he dug through his daypack on the passenger seat until he found the cassette, then inserted it into the player. It fit.

He rewound the tape and glanced again at the rearview mirror. He had been driving all night. The Old Man continuously watched for the black Ford pickup to come roaring up behind him. Every time a dark-colored vehicle approached, he reached for his handgun on the console. He had absolutely no doubt that Charlie Tibbs was somewhere behind him, and the two-lane highway he was on was the only southbound route. It could be later today, or tomorrow, but Charlie would come. The Old Man hoped like hell he would be in and out of town by then. If he wasn’t, the Old Man would be dead. It was as simple as that.

He listened to the tape from the beginning, getting insight into Hayden Powell’s life for the week prior to the night when Charlie Tibbs and the Old Man showed up to end it.

There were several messages from Powell’s New York editor asking for selections from Screwing Up the West so he could send them out in the hope of getting good quotes from other authors and environmentalists for the book jacket and publicity kit. The editor told Powell not to worry about having the entire manuscript complete and to send chapters that could stand alone and garner praise.

There was a message from Powell’s attorney warning Powell that the SEC had called and requested an interview because of the failing dot-com company. The attorney said he recommended delaying the interview as long as possible, but that the two of them would need to get together soon to decide on a strategy for dealing with the allegations.

There were several curt “Call me” messages left by a woman the Old Man guessed was Powell’s ex-wife.

It was near the end of the tape that Charlie Tibbs called. There was silence except for traffic sounds. The Old Man had been seated next to Tibbs when he made the call as they entered Bremerton.

Assuming that this was the last of the messages, the Old Man reached to stop the tape. But now he heard one more.

The last message was a bad connection, with static in the line. The voice was thick and slurred.

“You know who this is. You need to get out of here as fast as you can. First they tried to get me, now Peter Sollito is dead. These things work in threes, and who knows who might be next. Hayden, it might be you. We need to get together and think this thing out, come up with a strategy before it’s too late.”

The Old Man was stunned. That message could have been left only by Stewie Woods.

The Mercedes topped a hill on the highway. The Bighorn Mountains loomed ahead; they were light blue, peaked, and crisp in the morning sun. The small town of Saddlestring, from this distance, looked like a case’s worth of glinting, broken bottles strewn across the hardpan at the base of the foothills.