Stone Cold

29

A half-hour before the first shafts of dawn sun would laser through the pine tops of the eastern hills, Joe watched the activity below through his spotting scope.

He’d taken the two-track road he’d discovered two nights before on the ATV and had parked his pickup in a heavy stand of snow-covered spruce overlooking the Black Forest Inn. From his perch, he was able to observe the structure lighting up window by window as hunters arose. Men eventually emerged, blowing clouds of condensation in the early-morning cold, and dozens of rigs sat idling as guns and gear were loaded inside. A haze of gasoline and diesel fumes hung over the lot. Occasionally, he could hear a shout or catcall from one of the hunters as they loaded up. The scene reminded him of a military deployment, but with dozens of private armies.

One by one, the hunters left the lot and went either north or south on the highway. Streams of taillights seemed to hang in the dark.

Joe could only sit and wait in complete silence. He was shut off from the world. He’d turned off the radio and powered down his phone an hour before, after responding to the two messages he’d received. If the local sheriff’s department was in fact monitoring radio traffic, he couldn’t risk connecting with either dispatch or Chuck Coon. And if Medicine Wheel County law enforcement were on their game, they would have procedures in place to monitor any cell phone calls made in the area, and with the help of the phone company they could triangulate his location. Joe found it disconcerting to be on the other side of the law and its technical capabilities. But he’d never encountered a thoroughly corrupt department before. The thought made him angry.

He speculated on the progress — or lack of progress — of his plan. He’d set it in motion with Latta on one end and Agent Coon on the other, and things would play out right in front of him — or they wouldn’t. Everything was now out of his control. He shivered from both the cold and from outright fear of what might transpire. One thing he’d learned about plans was they rarely worked as envisioned.

While he waited and watched, he imagined Coon and his team charging north while trying to reach him and coordinate the raid. He imagined Sheridan trying to return his call. And he imagined Marybeth trying to touch base, only to find out he was off the grid. So many things could be happening out there, and so many things could be going wrong…

Although he was getting colder — thank goodness for Daisy’s warm head on his lap — he didn’t want to start up his pickup and run the heater. Someone could hear the motor or see the puffs from his exhaust pipe and know he was up there. Plus, the vibration of the engine made it impossible to sharpen the focus of his spotting scope.

He watched the highway in the distance for approaching vehicles and the sky for FBI helicopters. The only sounds were from heavy clumps of snow falling from the pine boughs to the forest floor. That startled him every time.

Bill Critchfield’s pickup appeared on the highway approaching from the north, followed by Jim Latta’s green Game and Fish truck. Joe raised his spotting scope and focused on both as they slowed at the entrance to the inn and turned in toward the parking lot.

Critchfield was alone and behind the wheel of his vehicle. Behind him, Gene Smith drove Latta’s rig. Latta himself was slumped against the passenger window as Emily, between the two, comforted her dad.

At least he was still alive, Joe thought. And Emily appeared unhurt. He guessed Smith was driving because Latta was too beaten up. Joe felt a sting of guilt and hoped Latta had held.

The two pickups drove around the inn and parked nose-to-tail along the outside wall of the processing facility. They faced Joe’s direction, although he doubted they could see him up in the shadowed forest over five hundred yards away.

Critchfield jumped out of his pickup. He held his cell phone to his head and stomped around in a tight circle while gesticulating wildly with his free hand. Joe guessed he was furious about something, and figured it was probably that Joe himself was still on the run.

He sat back from the spotting scope and surveyed the highway. He thought, Where are the others? Where were Sheriff Mead and his deputies? He doubted big shots like Judge Bartholomew or other county officials would show up, but he hoped the law enforcement types under Templeton’s control would arrive. Joe’s hope was that all of the armed conspirators would assemble in one place — the Black Forest Inn — when Coon and his team arrived. The Feds could corral them all at once. Once the locals were in custody, it would be easy to send a couple of agents to pick off the judge and others who weren’t present in their homes.

Most of all, Joe wondered why Whip wasn’t there. Where had he gone?

As he leaned forward into the lens of the spotting scope, he had a thought. Whip had shown his tactics as a hunter. Joe had spent hundreds of hours during his career doing what he did now: perching on high ground and patiently observing the landscape around him and noting the moving pieces, whether they were wildlife or hunters. And he realized Whip would likely be doing the same exact thing.

He scooted back on the seat and dislodged Daisy so he could have a better angle. He swung the scope up out of the lot into the heavy forest above it and directly across from him and readjusted the zoom to greater distance.

The terrain through the lens was a mirror of his own: dark, densely packed trees, shadowed hillside, pine boughs bent down as if offering their heavy payloads of snow for collection.

And there he was.

Partially hidden in a copse of spruce trees, Whip watched the activity in the parking lot far below him through a pair of long-barreled binoculars. The back end of the Range Rover was obscured from view by the forest as well as the front bumper, but there he was.

Joe knew that if he could see Whip, Whip could see him if he looked up. The realization shot through him, and he instinctively reached down for the key to start the truck and move it back out of view.

The second before he did, though, Joe caught a movement — a flash of color — on the other side of Whip’s vehicle. In a world of dark blue-green trees and pure white snow, that glimpse of light brown between two tree trunks was an anomaly.

He drew back his hand from the key and concentrated on Whip’s vehicle. Joe focused the scope beyond Whip, over his head, through the passenger window on the far side into the wall of trees where he’d seen the flash of color.

Nate Romanowski pushed himself through the pine boughs toward Whip, who was still scoping the valley floor through his binoculars. Nate looked to be dressed up for dinner, which was bizarre. He was wearing a sport jacket of some kind. Nate’s weapon was out, a hank of hair hanging from the long barrel alongside his thigh as he closed in on Whip. Then Nate threw open the passenger door and reached inside for something on the seat.

Whip had no chance. He’d lowered the glasses and turned toward the open door when Joe saw his head jerk back once, twice, three times. His grip on the binoculars gave way and they dropped to the snow outside. Whip slumped forward, his face resting on the steering wheel. As Whip slumped forward, it revealed Nate grinning his cruel grin and clutching a small pistol.

Barely discernible because of the distance, Joe heard a delayed pop-pop-pop.

Nate had apparently killed Whip with his own gun, because if Nate had used the .500, everybody would have heard it. Still, since Joe had heard the shots, he was afraid Critchfield had as well. Joe swung the scope back down to the parking lot. Critchfield was still pacing, still talking. If he’d heard anything, he didn’t react as if he had.

Joe was thrilled to see his old friend, even though he couldn’t put into context what he’d just observed. But no doubt Whip was now out of the picture.

Behind Critchfield, Alice Pulochova was assisting Latta around the building so he could go inside. Alice pushed Emily through the snow in her wheelchair. Gene Smith leaned back against the grille of Latta’s pickup with his arms crossed, waiting for marching orders from Critchfield — or whomever Critchfield was talking to on the phone.

Joe waited until Latta and Emily were safely inside before he said to Daisy, “Here we go.”

The pickup shot quickly down the mountain, the front bumper pushing snow, fantails of snow shooting out from the wheels on both sides. Joe had little traction and winced as he sideswiped a tree that dumped a heavy load of snow on his windshield, but he didn’t slow down and hit the wipers on high to clear it.

By the time he emerged from the trees and could see again, Critchfield and Smith were two hundred yards away.

Critchfield heard him and lowered the cell phone as Smith shouted and pointed toward Joe’s oncoming truck.

Joe gunned it.

While he closed the distance between them, Smith ran back to Latta’s pickup and backed out of the cab with a black rifle of some kind with a long magazine. Critchfield warned Smith off, and jogged to his own pickup and reached in through the open passenger window.

Instead of a weapon, Critchfield emerged with a new cell phone in his hand. He opened the passenger door and stepped behind it. Behind him, Smith scrambled and did the same.

Joe kept going, closing the gap to a hundred yards. He felt himself start to pucker…

He could see Critchfield duck down below the open window of the door. The cell phone rose to fill it, Critchfield’s thumb on the speed-dial button.

The explosion came from the outside wall of the processing plant next to Critchfield’s truck — the concussion like a thunderclap as the wall erupted in flame and smoke. Joe felt his pickup buck from the shock waves and ducked down to his right as chunks of the stone wall smashed into the grille of his vehicle. The windshield imploded and thousands of tiny cubes of glass, like ice, covered the inside of the cab.

Joe stomped on the brake and the truck slid to a stop in the snow. His ears rang from the explosion and all he could hear was a low humming sound inside his head. Daisy was covered with glass, and tried to shake it off as if it were errant beads of water.

He climbed out of his pickup with his shotgun but realized as the smoke cleared he wouldn’t need it. Critchfield had been cut in two. His bottom half was behind the open door of his vehicle. The blackened top half was fifteen feet away and smoldering, as was the driver’s-side door that had been blown through the cab like a giant scalpel. Somehow, Critchfield’s cowboy hat had gone undamaged and was crown-down in the snow.

Smith was writhing on the ground in his death throes, both arms and one leg severed completely from his body, bleeding out so fast that he’d be dead within seconds. Joe gagged at the sight. He turned and ordered Daisy back into his truck. He didn’t want his dog sniffing the body parts.

Despite the steady hum in his ears, Joe heard the thumping of approaching helicopters as they skimmed over the southern horizon. He looked up to see a convoy of speeding SUVs on the highway coming from the south with lights flashing.

Everything had worked according to plan, except there was no one alive to arrest. Except Nate, who was suddenly standing beside him. He hadn’t heard him walk up through the fog in his head.

“Are you all right?”

“Just great,” Joe said. “And you?”

“Dandy.” Then: “How did you know there was a bomb inside the wall?”

“I put it there. Critchfield thought it was still under my truck.”

“How did you know he’d park there?”

“I didn’t,” Joe confessed.

Nate said: “See that?”

Joe followed Nate’s outstretched arm. Most of the stone wall of the processing facility had collapsed in the explosion, revealing the contents of the locked-up room. Which was why Joe had planted the explosive there in the first place. The bomb had served as a kind of search warrant made up of C-4.

“Oh God,” Joe said. He’d suspected what he was seeing when he thought his darkest thoughts, which was why he’d hidden the bomb in the wall.

Two thick male human bodies hung head-down from meat hooks. They swung back and forth from the aftershock of the concussion. The bodies were naked but covered by stained white cheesecloth, the kind used by hunters to cover big game animals they’d skinned and hung from trees. Both corpses had visible wounds: one with five or more small gunshot wounds in his face and neck, the other a gaping chasm.

“The one on the left is Henry P. Scoggins the Third,” Nate said. “You know the other one.”

“Jonah Bank,” Joe whispered. “Anybody would recognize him.”

Nate shrugged. “I always wondered what they did with the bodies we brought back.”

Joe was speechless. But it hit him like a hammer. “They’re being aged,” he said in a whisper. “They sell sausage to the public and dole it out bit by bit to every hunter who gets his game processed here. Critchfield was the butcher.”

“I’ve always heard humans taste like pork,” Nate said with a whistle. “I guess that’s right. Damn, I kind of liked that sausage, too.”

Joe said, “Which means the Feds won’t be able to pin more murders on Templeton unless he confesses. The remains of all the other victims have been… consumed.”

He had trouble saying that last word. Then he looked straight at Nate.

“The only way you get out of this, maybe, is to become a state witness,” Joe said. “I know the Feds want to nail Templeton really bad. That’s why they sent me up here. Tell the Feds everything you know so they can build a bigger case against him. They might make a deal.”

Nate scowled but didn’t respond.

Joe squared up against Nate and raised his shotgun to parade rest. “If you don’t, I’m going to have to arrest you right here. I don’t like it any more than you do, but you really crossed the line this time.”

“You’d do that, wouldn’t you?”

“Yup.”

“That’s something I’ve always admired about you, Joe.”

Joe gestured toward the highway. The federal convoy was making the turn onto the road that led to the Black Forest Inn. Above, the helicopters were stabilized and lowering from the sky to land.

“So you trust them?” Nate asked.

“The Feds? Not at all,” Joe said. “Not one bit. Too many of ’em these days are no better than government thugs. But I trust Agent Coon. He’s always been straight with me.”

Nate said, “It won’t be the first time I worked with the Feds.”

Joe closed his eyes briefly in relief. The last thing he wanted to do was try to arrest Nate if Nate didn’t want to be taken. Joe said, “I know about Whip. I saw what happened up there. But where are all the others? The cavalry is here and they don’t have anyone to arrest. All I can figure is someone must have tipped them off.”

“Probably.”

“So where are they?”

Nate said, “The sheriff, judge, and chief of police were all manacled together the last I saw them. But they’ve probably cut themselves free by now.”

“Who cuffed them together?”

“Moi.”

Joe was stunned. “I’m glad you didn’t…”

“I’m not a murderer, Joe.”

“Glad to hear that, Nate.”

The roar of the first helicopter landing drowned out any more conversation. Joe reached up and clamped his hat on his head so the rotor wash wouldn’t send it away.

Agents in black tactical gear and helmets poured out of the helicopter before it settled on the grass on the skirt of the parking lot. They carried Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine guns and shotguns and jogged to where Joe and Nate stood.

For a moment, Joe thought the agents might start firing, and he threw his shotgun aside and raised his hands. Nate did the same with his revolver.

The lead agent paused and made a hand signal for the agents to swarm the inn around him. As the second helicopter landed, more black-clad agents ran across the parking lot into the inn. When they were dispersed, the lead agent raised his face shield. Coon.

Joe noticed that Coon glared at Nate with obvious contempt.

The conversation was heated and held mostly in shouts. Joe shouted that Critchfield, Smith, and Robert Whipple were dead, Latta and his daughter were inside, and as far as he knew the violence was over. The sheriff and judge were likely on the run. Then he gestured toward the missing wall of the processing facility.

“Jesus Christ,” Coon said. His face blanched white as he recognized the bodies. “We’ve broken this thing wide open. But Jesus, that’s disgusting.”

“You don’t know the half of it,” Joe said.

“What about him?” Coon asked.

“He’s working with us,” Joe shouted to Coon. “He’s going to help you build the case, same as Latta. You’ll need them.”

Joe insisted Nate had inside information and had in fact saved his life by confronting Whipple and taking him out. Coon yelled back that Nate was as bad as Whip, and just as guilty. Nate didn’t say a word.

Finally, as the helicopters wound down and they could speak normally, Coon turned suspiciously to Nate and asked, “Will you help us throw Templeton into federal prison for the rest of his life?”

“I’ll tell you what I know,” Nate said. “The throwing-into-a-cage part is up to you.”

Coon stepped back and shook his head, as if having an argument with himself. Then he looked up and asked Joe, “You’ll vouch for him?”

“I trust him with my life and the lives of my family.”

“I can’t promise anything,” Coon said to Nate. “You know that, right?”

Nate nodded.

“We’ll see what we can do. The U.S. attorney will make the final call, not me. Now, if you’ll both just hang tight, I’ll go inside and set up a command center and coordinate a raid on the ranch to get Templeton, and a couple of more teams to go after the sheriff and the judge. Then we’ll all have a real long talk.”

The morning air smelled of smoke from the explosion and the exhaust fumes of two helicopters and a dozen SUVs. It was warming up nicely, though, and snow was sliding off the pitched roof of the inn to the ground below.

Joe leaned against the damaged front of his pickup as the adrenaline dissipated. He felt suddenly exhausted, and tried to count the hours since he’d last slept. He couldn’t.

He didn’t even note the high-pitched sound of an airplane overhead in the sky until he saw Nate had his head back, looking at it with interest.

“There he goes,” Nate said.

“Who?”

“Wolfgang Templeton and his new squeeze, Missy Vankueren.”

Joe nearly lost his footing. “What?”

Before Nate could explain, Joe felt a vibration from the phone he had just turned back on in his pocket.

It was Sheridan, and she was panicked. “Dad, someone just saw Erik Young going up the stairwell to the roof with a rifle.”

Joe said with anguish to Sheridan, “I’m five hours away.”

Nate asked, “What’s going on?”