Warren Murphy: Timber Line

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."

The Mountain High Society was prepared for anything from a border war to a briss. They had come a hundred strong in buses with a supporting network of trucks to carry their camping gear and field kitchens. In private cars came the persons of the media: some male, some female, and some none of the above.

The Mountain Highers were the first to disembus. Among them were a few left over hippies and back-to-the-earth types from the sixties and early seventies. A few more were trying to effect a working-class appearance by dressing in cast-off clothing they had found in thrift shops in Bel-Air and Pacific Palisades.

Most, though, had come for the occasion dressed in spiffy little snow outfits by Halston and St. Laurent and Anne Klein. The media was instantly recognizable; its fashions running to rumpled raincoats and ties that unwittingly advertised Burger King ketchup.

Remo wormed his way through a tangle of reporters and camerapersons and sidled up to a tall, dark man with short razor-cut hair and dark sunglasses on, despite the fact it was after midnight.

"Who's in charge here?" Remo said.

"Are you speaking to me?" the newsman asked.

"No," said Remo. "Actually, I was just checking to see if my vocal cords still worked. Of course, I was talking to you. Who's in charge here?"

The newsman raised one hand to the corner of his dark glasses and with the pinkie of his right hand extending defiantly into the air, slid his glasses halfway down his nose so he could peer at Remo over the tops of the frames.

"Do you know who I am?" he demanded to know.

"I thought you were somebody smart enough to tell me who's in charge here, but maybe I was wrong."

"Really?" said the newsman.

"Let's try again," said Remo. "I'll ask you who's in charge, you tell me, I say thank you, and I'll walk away. Okay?"

The newsman was silent.

Remo shook his head. He touched the newsman lightly in the center of his solar plexus. The man started to hiccup then began hicking harder and harder until he fell to the ground in a shivering spasm. Another newsman came running up. "Hey, you," he said to Remo. "I saw all that. You can't just come in here and do things like that. You can't just mess with the press and get away with it."

"Who's in charge here?" Remo said.

The newsman looked at Remo, then down at the other newsman rolling around on the ground, holding his hiccupping stomach, and said, "Over there. Honest. Over there. I've got a cat and canary at home, and I'm all they got. Over there." He kept pointing toward the front of the bus. "It's Cicely Winston-Alright. Mrs. Cicely Winston-Alright of the San Francisco Winstons and the Dayton Alrights."

The media man was pointing at a defiantly feminine woman in her early thirties, one who looked as if she had been sculpted by a straight Michelangelo inspired by the best parts of Sophia Loren, Raquel Welch, and Joan Collins. She was dressed in a flame-colored nylon snowsuit that had obviously been designed to show off each one of her many curves. Her hair was jet black, her skin rivaled the snow for whiteness, and her eyes were as blue as an afternoon mountain sky.

She was standing in the front of the bus, waving people about as if she were a general, and as Remo walked toward her, he noticed something strange in her motions. It took him several steps to realize what it was. From two inches below her waist to four inches above her knees, her body was as stiff as if she were a wood-and-plaster mannequin. The center spot of the whole region was suffer still. She gave him the impression of being a rusted spring, unused, unusable, but perhaps ready to unwind violently if the right rust spots were scraped away.

When he reached her, Remo looked back and saw Pierre LaRue where Remo had told him to stay: guarding the narrow pathway that led down to the road circling the copa-iba trees.

He turned back to Mrs. Winston-Alright, tapped her on the shoulder, and said, "Hello."

She turned to face him, slowly, haughtily. Her eyes met his, then locked on them. She smiled like a schoolgirl and apparently without thinking reached up to preen her hair.

"Hellooooooo," she said.

"I want to talk to you," Remo said.

"And I you," she said.

"Good," he said. "Can we do it now?"

"I'd like nothing better," she said.

"It won't take long."

"The longer the better," she said. "I've been waiting quite a while to have a good, long, meaningful intercourse with someone like you."

"Mrs. Winston-Alright," said Remo, "I think you've got me all wrong."

She laughed a deep, throaty laugh, a laugh that reminded Remo somehow of a lioness in heat.

"Oh, my dear man," she said. "You have me misconstrued. I hate to see that happen. I hate to be misconstrued, when it's so easy to be correctly strued. By intercourse, I merely meant a friendly chat. Discourse. Look it up in any dictionary. When I say I want to have a long, deep intercourse with you, all I'm saying — did anyone ever tell you what nice dark eyes you have? — is that I would appreciate a truly intimate, deep, probing conversation with you. See? There's nothing to be afraid of. I don't bite."