Timber Line

Chapter Eight

LaRue's was an overstatement, Remo thought. There wasn't blood all over the place. It was only on three of the four white-painted walls, on the bed, on one of the chairs, on the nightstand, and one large puddle on the floor. Another chair, one wall, a desk, a chest of drawers, and the ceiling were untouched.

Chiun and Remo had led Joey and LaRue back into the small log cabin. Joey took one look and ran back to the A-frame to call Stacy at the base camp.

The Master and his pupil stepped cautiously about the room, looking, careful not to disturb anything, and walking gently so as not to disturb the air currents. LaRue watched from the doorway where he had been told to stay.

"There is a tale here for the nose," Chiun said.

"Heavy drinking," Remo agreed, with a nod of his head.

Joey was back now, and she was standing next to LaRue.

"Oscar," she said, "has been drinking heavily since Danny died. He kept saying that he was responsible."

"Was he?" Remo asked.

"No," Joey said vigorously. "How could he be? But he seemed to have this idea that he might have been able to stop it somehow."

"Did he know something you didn't know?" Remo asked.

"I don't know," Joey admitted. She looked again at the blood-splattered room and began to cry, long, loud sobs mixed with torrents of tears. Chiun touched her shoulder comfortingly and slowly the tears subsided.

"Thank you," she said. "I don't do that often."

Remo was looking at the bed. "Did Brack seem different in any other ways?"

Joey shook her head. "I don't think so," she said. "He always drank too much. He liked to go out and tie one on with Pierre's boys. But lately he's been drinking alone, by himself, just sitting and whistling that damn song."

"What song?"

" 'Danny Boy'."

But Remo wasn't listening. He had turned back to Chiun.

"Three men, Chiun?"

The old Oriental nodded.

Pierre LaRue asked, "How you know that?"

"The smells," Chiun said. "Different people smell different. There are three smells in here." He sniffed the air inside the room again, then looked toward Remo.

"There might have been a fourth," he said. "If so, the fourth only watched. It is a bad smell. It is like..." and he spoke a word in Korean.

"What is that?" Joey asked Remo.

"It means a pigsty," Remo said.

"Or a Japanese house of pleasure, which is the same thing," Chiun said.

The old man bent over the largest puddle of blood, dipped his fingertip in it, brought the finger to his nose, and sniffed deeply. He did the same thing with the stains on the rumpled bed.

"The blood on the bed is your friend's," he told Joey.

"Oh dear."

"But the big puddle is not his. It is someone else's," Chiun said.

"Again, how you know?" Pierre said.

"The man who bled on the bed, his blood stinks with alcohol. The blood on the floor stinks only with the smell of the red meat that all you white people eat. That is how I know."

Remo said, "I'm going to look outside to see if I can find anything."

He told LaRue to stay in the doorway until Remo found what he was looking for. It took him three circuits around the log cabin, each slightly wider than the one preceding it, before he caught the smell of the blood. There were two different scents: one was meaty and clean; the other was meaty and alcoholic, a mix resembling some suburban notion of gourmet cooking: Drop a hunk of frozen burger in a quart of ninety-eight-cent burgundy, and boil until the wine is a thick scum and the meat is black.

Remo came back to the cabin door and called for LaRue to join him.

"That direction," he whispered.

"Okay," LaRue roared.

"Pierre," Remo said. "Let's try this time not to sound like a runaway freight train. Try being quiet. Maybe we can sneak up on them."

"Sure thing," LaRue roared again.

Remo winced. It was almost as if the big lummox were trying to warn somebody off, he thought.

They started off across the snow at a trot, but both found it difficult going. Pierre kept slipping knee-deep through the occasional crust into drifts, and Remo had to concentrate on not just running along the top of the soft snow, but allowing himself to sink in a few inches.

The scents wafting through the unerringly air led Remo almost two miles through the woods. Then he and LaRue went downhill to an abandoned fire road and along it for several hundred yards before coming to a stop at a small cabin.

"What's this place?" Remo asked the big Frenchman.

"A supply cabin," he answered. "Peer put it up himself."

"Talk soft," Remo said. "You circle around the back."

Pierre was about to bellow okay, when he saw Remo's eyes and suddenly envisioned hanging the rest of the night in a tree. Instead, he just nodded.

Remo went in the front door. The cabin had been occupied within only the past few hours, but it was now empty.

Out back, Pierre had found tire tracks.

Remo looked at them.

"A bus," he said.

LaRue agreed. They set off along the fire road again, following the bus tracks. The snow had been plowed and the men were able to move at full speed, which meant that LaRue kept falling behind. After two miles, Remo stopped.

"What?" asked the puffing LaRue.

"Off to the side," Remo said. "I heard something."

"We go see." LaRue heard the noise for the first time himself and ran off to the side of the road.

A man lay there in a small hollow formed by the tangle of some tree roots. Or there was most of a man lying there. Someone had carved a fair-sized hunk out of his belly and he had lost much blood.

"Mon Dieu," LaRue said. "I know this man. He work for Peer. He one top-notch lumberjack."

Remo and LaRue bent over the man, whose eyes were open, staring sightlessly up at the night sky.

With a spastic burst of energy, the dying man reached up and grabbed Remo by the sleeves of his T-shirt and tried to raise himself from the ground. Blood bubbled from his mouth, choking him. Remo raised the man to a sitting position. The man strained to talk. Remo leaned over and closer to his bloody mouth. The man mumbled something and then died. Remo laid him back down.

Pierre LaRue made the sign of the cross over the body.

"He one helluva good lumberjack," he said. "What he say to you?"

"Nothing," Remo said.

"Nothing? He say something. I hear him say something. What he say?"

"Nothing that made any sense," Remo said. "Some sort of poem."

"Recite it. Maybe Peer know it. I know lots poems."

"He said, 'Trees are free. Free the trees.' "

"Moonten Eyes," LaRue said.

"The Mountain Highs?" Remo said. "Why them?"

"That, is their motto," LaRue said. "They always screaming that when they march on our land. They scream and yell 'Trees are free, free the trees,' over and over."

"And they're here," Remo said. "You told me that."

LaRue nodded.

"Where are they?" asked Remo. "How do we get to them?"

"This road. It goes up to the copa-ibas and then cuts off to the main entrance. The Moonten Eyes are there," LaRue said.

Remo was already moving off along the road at a brisk run.

"Wait for me," LaRue called. "I got score to settle with the Moonten Eyes. This was one damn good lumberjack."