Craig Johnson - Hell Is Empty

I came around and found myself now searching through a dark wood, the right way blurred and lost.

Boy howdy. I walked over and stood there looking out the windows for a second, then closed the Penguin Classic and popped it back in the pack. I picked up the Sig semiautomatic from the table, palming the clip and thumbing the remaining rounds into my pocket-body and soul, crime and punishment, law and order.

“How ’bout you give me that gun.”

I’d all but forgotten about him. I turned and gave my attention to Hector as I buttoned my sheepskin coat and slapped the mag back in the grip. “I’m not sure how they do things down Texas way, but we try to keep guns out of the hands of convicted killers up here in Wyoming.”

I came back over, sat in one of the chairs, and tossed the Sig onto the counter between us. He immediately snatched it up and pointed it at me.

“Besides, it’s empty.”

He pulled the action and then dropped the clip just to make sure. He tossed it back onto the counter. “What if that tiger comes back?”

I rubbed my face with my hands. “Hector, I don’t think a mountain lion is going to be bold enough to break down the door to get in here even if she feels like a little Mexican.”

“Fuck you.” He looked past me toward the fireplace. “Hey, give me that stick from over there, huh?”

I glanced behind me, and sure enough there was a walking staff with a leather loop on one end and tacked on the shaft a number of tiny, metal plates commending the places the stick and its owner had gone. I walked over and took it from the freestanding coat rack, behind which were hung an old pair of strung-gut willow snowshoes. There was also the outline of something that must have been hanging next to them, like a rug, maybe, or a skin of some sort.

“There was a buffalo thing or something hanging up there. Shade took it with him.”

Now, why would he do that? I looked at the bear-paw-pattern snowshoes again: waste not, want not. I pulled them off the wall and stuffed them under my arm, walked back, and handed the stick to Hector. “There you go.”

He slapped the thicker end of the five-foot staff against the flattened palm of his cuffed hand to test the weight and seemed satisfied. “Cool.” His eyes came back up to the antique snowshoes under my arm. “Are you really going after them in this friggin’ blizzard?”

“Yep.”

He paused but then blurted out. “You should wait for some help. I’m jus’ sayin’.”

I pulled the brim of my hat down to set it against the wind and started examining the buckles and leather straps on the snowshoes. “That seems to be the consensus.”

His voice became flat. “No, really. I seen some guys in my life, Sheriff, but that Shade-he’s crazy bad.”

I nodded and sat in the chair in an attempt to get the straps over my boots. As I rested my chest against one of my knees, I thought about just staying there like that and maybe taking a nap. Who was I kidding? I wasn’t in any shape to head out into a blizzard in the middle of the night after a bunch of homicidal maniacs. Then the other voice in my head got me to thinking that they wouldn’t make it very far, probably would choose to hole up in one of the cabins farther up the road or possibly at the Tyrell Ranger Station. I’d try not to be as conspicuous as I had been. I’d just keep an eye on them till the troops arrived, just keep an eye on them-at least that’s what I was telling myself.

I got up, smiling at his concern. “Thanks, Hector.”

Just for laughs, I hit the remote on the Suburban-the horn tooted and the lights flashed from under the collapsed porch. The left rear tire was flat, and the quarter panel had been pushed up into the wheel well. I could probably get it going if I had the Jaws of Life, parts, and a day to work on it.

I loped along on the surface of the snow against the blowing wind. It was a little tough, but I got the front of the snowshoe in the open back doorway of the DOC van and pulled myself up, glancing more than once at the alcove on the adjacent cabin where the cougar had appeared.

Nothing, just more snow.

I scrambled my hand around on the top of the Dodge till I found my 1911 and pulled it toward me, banging the collected snow off and returning it to my holster as I hung on to the back drip rail. My eyes clung to the mountain lion print closest to me, and I was reminded of just how big she was.

I was glad now that I’d moved one of the benches from the porch in front of the door of the lodge.

The sound of my snowshoes landing was muffled by the snow, and I turned toward Tensleep Road but froze. The big cat hadn’t gone far and stood in plain view underneath the lone light on the power pole, her eight-foot-long body pale in the halo of the falling snow. She looked at me from over her shoulder, and I was beginning to think that this was extremely odd behavior.

It was possible that she was just angry with Hector and me for driving her from her temporary lair, but it didn’t seem that way. It was almost as if she was saddened and, even with the reception I’d given her, unhappy to leave.

It was probably warmer in the little corner of the roof she’d found.

Pulling the. 45 from my holster, I waved it at her, but she just stood there looking at me.

A gust of snow blew from the collapsed roof, striking my face like sand and, ducking slightly away, I closed my eyes.

When I reopened them she was gone, and the flakes continued to float down in the circle of light like the spotlight on an empty stage, and it was as if she hadn’t been there at all.

They’d blown through the piled-up berm at the bridge. The dual tracks of the Thiokol Spryte were almost three feet wide leading up West Tensleep Road, but it was easier to just walk between the tread marks in my borrowed snowshoes.

That wasn’t why I was standing there, unmoving.

After they’d busted through, they had stopped. You could see where the snowcat had steered slightly to the right. I pulled my Maglite from my duty belt and shined it on the tracks, hoping I’d see an oil or fuel leak. There were a few drops, but nothing that was going to slow the behemoth. My eyes were drawn to something leading to the snowbank, what looked like a different kind of leak-possibly antifreeze.

I stood there looking at what was illuminated by my flashlight, which, like the light in the parking lot, provided a center stage spot for a curtain call or maybe a prologue.

Pissed in the snowbank was a single word.

ABANDON.

Raynaud Shade had pretty good handwriting, considering the instrument.

ABANDON.

He’d seen the Basquo reading the Inferno. He’d left the message for me and evidently hadn’t had the bladder capacity to finish the stanza: “… hope all ye who enter here”-the warning above the gates of hell in Dante’s opus.

Maybe he’d seen a similarity between our situation and that of the Italian poet. The wind pressed at my back and the flakes swirled around, but the impromptu calling card stayed there as if he’d written it in molten lead.

It was about a mile up to the Battle Park cutoff, where I assumed they’d turn west and try for the Hyattville Road that led toward the tiny town and eventually to Manderson, which was situated alongside the Big Horn River. Then what-north to Basin or south to Worland? Try as I might, I couldn’t see what they were gaining by going off-road. They, and by they I meant Shade, had to know that there would be an entire law enforcement army waiting for them when they got off the mountain in either direction.

There were no roads that connected the north side of the Bighorns with the south side, and the only substantial trail that led east was over Florence Pass near Bomber Mountain and Cloud Peak toward the Hunter Corrals. Florence Pass was more than eleven thousand feet, and if they tried that they were likely to solve society’s problems on their own, which was fine for the convicts but not for the two hostages.