Stone Cold

20

It was late afternoon when Joe pulled off the highway and bounced down an untrammeled grassy lane that wound through an old apple orchard two miles from Wedell. As he stopped, hundreds of fat birds lifted from where they’d been feeding on dropped fruit. It was obvious it had been years since anyone tended to the trees or pruned them, and a third of the orchard was gnarled black skeletons. An ancient farmhouse had smashed-in windows and the open front door looked like a ghoul face saying Boo, he thought. But there was no one around.

Joe set up the ramps and backed the four-wheeler out of his pickup onto the grass. The fat tires crushed apples and made the air tangy. He hid the ATV even deeper in an impenetrable tangle of Russian olive bushes on the side of the abandoned house. Joe transferred his shotgun into the ATV’s saddle scabbard and filled the saddlebags with extra ammunition, a few bottles of water, binoculars, spotting scope, tool bag, Maglite, camera, evidence kit, handheld radio, a roll of topo maps of the county, and his Filson vest.

Then he climbed back into his pickup.

Anna B.’s face appeared at her office window as he drove into the parking area and stopped in front of cabin number eight. When he got out and looked over his shoulder, she was gone.

Again, he tried not to look up at the light fixture as he yawned and stretched theatrically and shuffled into the darkened bedroom. The bed was out of view from the light fixture, if indeed there was a camera in it. Joe fell back onto the bed, making the bedsprings creak.

He waited an hour, then checked his watch: five-thirty. Rolling silently off the bed, he opened the hasp on the rear window and tried to open it, but it wouldn’t give. Apparently, they’d painted the window shut when it was refurbished. Joe wondered if it had been intentional or a careless mistake.

He wedged the long blade of his Leatherman tool between the window and the wood frame and carefully sawed down the seam. He had to do it on the sides as well.

Finally, using his legs to give him more momentum, he pressed the palms of his hands against the bottom of the upper window frame and shoved. There was a wooden-sounding pop as it opened. Had it been too loud?

Nevertheless, he swung one leg across the sill and bent forward so he could squeeze his shoulders and head through the opening, and he dropped to the ground. His knees barked in pain as he landed, and he paused to let it recede. It did, somewhat. He thought to himself that he wasn’t yet used to aches and pains where they didn’t used to be. And, he thought grimly, it would only get worse.

When he looked up, he saw Daisy staring sadly down at him, her front paws on the sill.

“Stay,” he whispered. She moaned and dropped back into the cabin. He hoped she wouldn’t start whining. He hated to leave her.

Joe gathered himself and stood on his tiptoes to close the window behind him as quietly as he could. He left it open an inch in case he’d have to reenter his cabin the same way he’d left.

Then he turned and entered the copse of pine trees. His boots crunched on the carpet of dried needles. He had the key to the four-wheeler in his front pocket. His phone was muted, but he was aware of it in his right breast pocket in case he received a text or call from Marybeth or the FBI.

Or Sheridan.

There were hundreds of old logging roads through the spruce and ponderosa pine forest. He wasn’t even sure he’d need to consult his topo maps to find his way to where he wanted to go.

Joe mounted the four-wheeler and started it up and raced through the gears on an overgrown logging road in the general direction of the Black Forest Inn.

The terrain was steeper and more heavily wooded than he had anticipated. Deadfall blocked the old road in several places, and he found himself picking through brush around hazards on the ATV. The temperature dropped twenty quick degrees as the sun nosed over the western hills and the light choked off the dappling on the tops of the trees.

It took thirty-five minutes to navigate the wooded hills to the northeast. Twice, he emerged from the timber to note the distant ribbon of the state highway. He encountered no hunters or other ATVs on the old logging road, although as he neared the Black Forest Inn he saw day-old tire tracks on the trail.

As he wound down the trail through a thick stand of aspen, he sensed heavy forms within the trees to his right that weren’t trunks. A small band of elk — a bull, a spike, three cows, and a calf — stood like statues in the trees as he passed. He wondered how many other elk hunters had been down the trail that day who simply hadn’t seen them. He’d heard of some elk learning to freeze instead of run when being hunted, although he’d never encountered it before. To reward them for their adaptability, he didn’t slow down and gawk but kept his eyes forward until he could no longer see them in his peripheral vision.

At dusk, the trees thinned and he slowed his ATV to a crawl. On a massive grassy bench below him were the winking lights of the Black Forest Inn. The turrets on top looked oddly medieval against the burnt-orange sunset as he descended from the hills. It was almost dark enough for headlights, but he didn’t want to turn them on and draw any more attention to his arrival than necessary.

The parking area was filled with four-wheel-drive vehicles with license plates from states as far away as California and New York, as well as a kind of unofficial corral of muddy ATVs in the crushed grass on the north side of the inn. In the parking lot, a few scruffy hunters leaned against their vehicles, drinking beer. A bearded man raised his bottle in salute.

On the south side of the inn, three pickups waited their turn on the roundabout that served the meat-processing facility dock. Joe looked over as he passed. Two hunters in camo and blaze orange had backed their truck with Michigan plates to the loading dock. Meatcutters in bloody white aprons helped the successful hunters jam meat hooks through the back hocks of two big buck deer and swing the carcasses inside. The game had been gutted but not skinned, and Joe instinctively checked for white paper license tags on the bodies. They were there — wired to the tines of the antlers. Because he wasn’t in uniform and not on official duty, he was glad he didn’t have the dilemma of illegal deer being received right in front of his eyes.

Joe parked his ATV among twenty others on the north lot and climbed off. His inner thighs and palms tingled from the vibration of the two-stroke engine and he’d picked up enough road dust, pine dust, and mud on his clothing to appear as he hoped to appear — as just another hunter.

The air smelled of fall in a Rocky Mountain hunting camp: cool air, pine, mulch from the forest floor, gasoline and diesel fumes from the vehicles, and the metallic bite of spilled blood, wet hides, and raw meat.

Bathed in yellow neon light from a Coors beer sign in the window, he paused at the entrance to the saloon and breathed it all in and settled into its familiarity.

The saloon was dark, smoky, and raucous. Old dusty mounts of mule deer, elk, bighorn sheep, mountain lions, and pronghorn antelope covered the walls. Strings of tiny white Christmas lights were looped through the tines and curls of the horns and antlers, and gave the room the feel of being roped in by a twinkling lariat. Hunters still in their hunting clothes crowded the bar or stood together in knots throughout the tables. A few still wore holstered sidearms on their belts, and most had sheathed knives and saws. A harried waitress waded through them with a full tray of beaded beer cans and shots. Joe smelled cigar and cigarette smoke and fried hamburgers from a small grill behind the bar manned by a dour gnome-like man with three missing fingers on each hand. With the exception of the harried waitress, there were no women in the saloon.

His first concern on entering was the possibility of being recognized by locals he had met who could identify him, but he confirmed quickly the hunters in the saloon were from out of state. These men were on vacation, or, as he’d heard the term once in Saddlestring, on a “red holiday.”

A few hunters saw him enter and nodded hello, and he nodded back and went to the bar. He knew a lone hunter was odd but not unusual, although he glanced expectantly at the door several times to pretend he might be waiting for a buddy to join him. Behind him, he heard loud but good-natured ribbing about missed shots, getting stuck, and poor Ritchie from Indiana who had literally been caught with his pants down and his rifle out of reach when two large bucks broke from the timber right in front of him and continued on.

“Bob Pulochova,” the bartender said in greeting. “Everyone calls me Pulo.”

“Coors Light, please,” Joe said. Pulo was gaunt and toothless, and had a white inverted horseshoe of hair beneath his shiny bald head.

“Get your deer yet?” Pulochova asked as a greeting while reaching down into an ice-covered bucket and placing the unopened bottle on the bar.

“I’m an elk hunter,” Joe said. It wasn’t a lie.

“I don’t see blood on your hands,” the man said with a wry smile.

“Good reason for that,” Joe sighed, leaving it vague. “Say, are there any rooms in this place? It looks pretty full.”

“There might be, but you’d have to check up front with Alice. I think a couple of guys from Pennsylvania got their elk and cleared out today, but don’t quote me on that. This place fills up fast with hunters.”

Joe nodded to his beer. “I might leave this here while I go check.”

“You can take it with you. Want another one? Or a shot to go with it?”

“I haven’t even opened this yet,” Joe said.

“It’s happy hour,” the bartender said. “Two for one for the next twenty minutes until seven.”

“That’s okay,” Joe said.

“Suit yourself,” Pulochova said, rolling his eyes. “Want to know the menu?”

“Sure.”

“Hamburger or cheeseburger, single or double,” the bartender said, chinning toward the gnome. “That’s the menu, unless you want to go into the restaurant down the hall. They got everything in the damn world to eat down there, as long as it’s beef.”

Joe smiled and said he wanted a double cheeseburger.

“Double cheeseburger coming up!” Pulo shouted out without looking over his shoulder.

The registration desk was no more than an ancient knotty pine lectern in the main lobby. The lobby had high, tin-lined ceilings and smelled of hundred-year-old woodsmoke. A flinty woman with bleached yellow hair stood behind the lectern, sucking on a cigarette and squinting through the smoke. She wore a name tag that read ALICE PULOCHOVA.

“Do you have any single rooms available?” Joe asked, nodding toward the open ledger in front of her.

“Did my better half send you here?” Alice asked, meaning the saloon. Apparently, the bartender was her husband.

“Yup.”

“Well, we got a room on the top floor that just opened up, but it ain’t cleaned out yet, so I can’t rent it to you.”

“I’ll take it,” Joe said.

She looked put-out. “My housekeeping folks have left for the night.”

“I’ll still take it,” Joe said, reaching for his wallet. He could tell by the set of her mouth that she was about to turn him away. “Do you take cash?”

Her eyebrows arched conspiratorially, and she said, “Yes, that would be fine.” Meaning: she could keep him off the books and pocket the cash and not enter the rental in her ledger, and there wouldn’t be a credit card trail to tie either one to the transaction.

“It’ll be a hundred,” Alice said.

Joe counted out five twenties, leaving only thirty dollars in his wallet.

“This means I’m gonna have to go up there myself when I get a break and take care of it. So the room won’t be available for a few hours.”

“That’s fine.”

She gave him a registration card. He filled it out and handed it back.

“Here’s the key,” she said, reading the card. He wondered if she’d ball it up and toss it in a garbage can the second his back was turned. “Welcome to the Black Forest Inn, Mr….” She struggled with the pronunciation of the last name.

“Romanowski,” Joe said. “Nate Romanowski.”

“Like I said, give me a few hours to get up there. Unless you want to wallow in the empty beer cans and assorted filth from the last guests.”

“No thanks.”

“How long are you staying, Mr. Roma-nooski?”

Joe shrugged. “Maybe just tonight.”

She cackled at his answer. “You must be pretty sure you’ll kill something tomorrow, then.”

He nodded, and said, “I think I’m on their trail.”

An hour and two Coors and a double cheeseburger later, the south interior door of the saloon opened inward and three men shuffled in. Joe glanced at his watch — eight-thirty. It was a half-hour after the wild game — processing facility had closed to receiving, and the men were obviously employees just off the clock. They looked exhausted. Joe recognized two of them from when he entered the lot before nightfall as the workers who assisted the Michigan hunters with their deer. One large man with a full red beard still wore his blood-covered apron. Small bits of bone, like cracker crumbs, nested in his beard from sawing off limbs and cracking through pelvises and rib cages. The red-bearded man and a second meatcutter took two adjacent barstools, and the third wandered Joe’s way, looking for a place to sit.

Joe had empty barstools on both sides of him, and he nodded toward the approaching meatcutter that it was okay for him to have a seat. The worker nodded back, sat down on Joe’s left with a heavy sigh. He was short and round, with thinning black hair and had the bulbous red nose of a drinker.

“Want a beer?” Joe asked, gesturing toward the five full cans and three whiskey shots sitting in front of him. “Guys keep buying rounds for the house and every time I look up, there’s another one in front of me. I don’t even want to try to drink ’em all.”

The worker looked over, assessing Joe’s intentions. Free beer from a stranger? “Are you kidding?”

“Nope. Somebody back there came up with a rule where anyone who got his deer or elk today had to buy a round for the house. I was just sitting here minding my own business, and the drinks started piling up. Feel free to have one… or two.”

“Hell of a deal,” the worker said with a grin, and quickly drained half of a Coors in a long pull. “Damn, that’s good after the kind of day I had.”

“Lots of work back there?” Joe asked.

“Jesus, you have no idea,” the man said, shaking his head. “I think we took in something like thirty deer and seven elk today. I’m worn out from lifting those things from the back of pickups and carrying quarters to the butcher tables, I’ll tell you. I couldn’t wait until closing time.”

“I’ll bet,” Joe said as the worker finished the beer, crushed the aluminum can as if pronouncing it dead, and started to reach for another.

He paused: “Are you sure?”

“I’m sure,” Joe said. “I’m going out early tomorrow and I don’t want to be hungover.”

“I wouldn’t come to work any other way.” The man laughed as he slid another beer toward him from Joe’s collection.

His name was Willie McKay, he told Joe over the next half-hour and three beers. An unspoken deal was struck: he’d keep talking as long as Joe provided the free alcohol. It was a part-time job, he said, that supplemented the limits of his EBT card, and it was a good deal for him, tax-wise, because he and the other meatcutters were paid off the books in cash. He’d once been a logger, McKay said, before that industry went “all to shit.”

Joe brought the conversation back to the facility. He said, “I’m considering bringing my elk here if I kill it tomorrow. Between you and me, if it were you, would you bring game here to be processed? I’m real particular about how it turns out.”

“Shit,” McKay said, “I’d bring my kill here in a heartbeat, and I don’t even hunt. You can’t do no better than this place, I swear it.”

“What about keeping track of my elk?” Joe asked. “It wouldn’t get thrown in with someone else’s animal?”

“Not a chance in hell,” McKay said, slightly offended at the question. “Part of my job is to tag the quarters of every carcass that comes in. We make damned sure we never mix the meat — even the hamburger. You get back what you brought in, one thousand percent.”

“That’s good to hear,” Joe said. “So your hours are from six in the morning to eight at night?”

“Long fucking day,” McKay said, sighing and reaching for Joe’s last spare beer. He didn’t feel the need to even ask anymore. As he did, Joe signaled the bartender for two more.

McKay said, “If you want one-inch steaks and chops, that’s what you’ll get. If you want the steaks butterflied, well, it’ll cost you a little more in labor, but that’s what you’ll get. And if you want some of the trim ground into burger, sausage, or jerky, well, we make the best there is.”

“Is it just the three of you?” Joe asked, nodding toward the other two meatcutters who had set up a few stools down.

“Sometimes there’s as many as seven,” McKay said. “We were supposed to have more help today, in fact, but the guys they hired didn’t even bother to show up. That’s why I’m so beat. What is it with young people anymore?” he asked. “Don’t none of them have a work ethic at all? They’d rather play video games or jerk off to their iPads or whatever it is they do, because they sure don’t want to work hard.”

Joe shrugged.

“Hey,” McKay said suddenly, as his new beer arrived, “you want to see the shop? You’ll see I’m not blowing smoke.”

“You mean a tour?” Joe asked.

“Like that,” McKay said.

Not really, Joe thought. But when he saw through the crowd of milling hunters that Bill Critchfield and Gene Smith had entered the saloon by way of the lobby, he said, “Let’s go.”

“Now?” McKay asked, with the beer halfway to his mouth.

Critchfield and Smith seemed to be very well known among the hunters, and several stepped forward to shake their hands and tell them about their day — as if seeking approval from them. Joe realized why: most of the men in the room had booked their hunting trips through the two local men who had access to Templeton’s game-rich private land.

“Now,” Joe said to McKay, quickly turning on his stool so his back was to Critchfield and Smith. He didn’t think they’d recognize him without his uniform shirt but couldn’t afford to take any chances. “Bring your beer along. I’ll pop for another one when we come back.”

“Hell of a deal,” McKay said, turning and dismounting from his stool. He hopped down with more energy than he’d shown when he entered the saloon, Joe thought, as if the beer had served as nutrition.

Joe kept his back to Critchfield and Smith as he followed McKay through hunters toward the south door. The red-bearded meatcutter raised his eyebrows as they passed by, and McKay said to him, “He wants a tour.”

“Don’t mess anything up,” the bearded man said. “And make sure the lights are off and everything’s locked back up when you leave.”

As the door wheezed shut behind them, Joe let out a long breath of relief.

The wild game — processing facility was larger than he had anticipated, and as clean and sterile-looking as advertised. Long stainless-steel counters ran along the side walls, and a stout steel table stood in the middle. A worn but spotless butcher block bristled with knives and cleavers, and an assortment of bone saws hung from hooks on the wall. It smelled of ammonia from being wiped down, and there was an absence of the metallic meat and blood smell in the air that lingered in similar shops Joe had experienced. The large accordion door to the receiving dock outside was closed tight and locked with a chain and padlock, Joe noted.

“What do you think?” McKay asked with pride as he lowered his beer.

“Impressive,” Joe said. “You guys seem to take a lot of pride in your work.”

McKay shrugged. “We don’t have a choice, really. It gets crazy during hunting season sometimes. But somebody complained to Mr. T. himself, and he showed up here one night a couple of years ago and he ripped each one of us new assholes and fired the foreman. He said he wanted this room to look like a surgical suite in a hospital from then on, and we never know when he might pop in and start firing people — or worse — if we screw up.”

“That would be Wolfgang Templeton?” Joe asked.

“Yeah, he’s the owner of this whole operation: the rooms, the restaurant, and the wild game — processing facility. Like I said, he pays in cash and he pays well. I don’t want to lose this gig and neither do the others, so we keep the shop spotless.”

“What did you mean when you said or worse?” Joe asked.

McKay leaned close enough to Joe that Joe could smell his beer breath. He said, “Did you happen to notice those two guys who just came into the bar out there a minute ago? Guys wearing cowboy hats and acting like fucking lords of the manor or something?”

“I saw them,” Joe said.

“They work for Mr. T., running the guiding and hunting operation, and throw their weight around. I don’t think Mr. T. knows what assholes they are.”

“Like how?” Joe asked.

“They’re thugs,” McKay said, shaking his head. The alcohol had loosened his tongue. “It ain’t unusual for them to take somebody outside and whip their asses if they think he ain’t doing his job or if he gives them any lip. That’s one reason, I think, it’s getting harder and harder to get new employees. The word is out that if you screw up, you might get your ass kicked.”

Joe shook his head in sympathy.

McKay said, “I keep my nose clean around those yay-hoos, I’ll tell you.”

“Probably a smart plan.”

“You bet it is. Hey, do you want to see the whole plant?”

Joe figured Critchfield and Smith were likely still in the saloon, so he agreed.

He followed McKay through the refrigerated meat-hanging lockers while the cutter kept up a nonstop dialogue. Joe was astounded at the quantity of hanging skinned carcasses. There were so many, and they were packed together so tightly, that he couldn’t wade through them without thumping his shoulder into meaty hindquarters, which bumped into adjoining quarters and set them all rocking slightly. The exposed meat and tallow had taken on a veneer like translucent wax due to exposure to air, but beneath the dry exterior the lean muscle had plenty of give. He noted the multiple tags on each carcass indicating who had brought it in, just as McKay had said.

As McKay explained the process, Joe noted another large steel door on the back wall. As McKay shifted his weight during his monologue, Joe could see a sophisticated keypad near the doorjamb behind him.

“What’s in there?” he asked.

McKay paused and turned. “Oh, that room is reserved for the ranch.”

“What does that mean?”

“They don’t want their beef mixed up with all this wild game,” McKay said. “So they hang beef in there.”

“And they need a keypad lock?” Joe asked.

“I guess they don’t want none of the employees pinching any of it,” McKay said with a shrug.

“This place is quite an operation,” Joe said.

McKay finished his beer and crushed the can. “You still buyin’?” he asked.

“Yup,” Joe said.

He paused at the south door after McKay went through it to confirm that Critchfield and Smith had left. Then he bought McKay another beer, excused himself, and went outside.

Joe walked along the loading dock to the east side of the facility, re-creating in his mind where the freezer room was, and where the hanging lockers were located. There, on the other side of the stone exterior wall, was Templeton’s private meat locker. There were no windows or openings to indicate what was there.

He squinted and rubbed his chin.