C. Box - Savage Run

A crooked smile formed on Barnum’s face. “I’d sure miss that half a beef at Christmas,” he said. “But something tells me I don’t have much to worry about in that regard.”

Joe ignored the insult. “And when I bring him in I’m going to ask him how he knew about that exploding cow before I told him about it.”

There was a “closed” sign in the front window of Wolf Mountain Taxidermy and a hand-lettered sign taped to the inside of the front-door window.

Joe stopped to read it.

GONE FISHING UNTIL SEPT. 1.

CAN’T WAIT UNTIL HUNTING SEASON!

FOR RATES AND ORDERS, SEE

WWW.SANDVICKTAXIDERMY.COM

Joe slumped against the doorframe and looked down the empty Main Street of Saddlestring. At the end of the street, on the bridge, a knot of teenage boys were cheering on a buddy who was underneath them in the river. The boy had tied a rope to the railing on the bridge and was waterskiing in place on the fast summer runoff of the Twelve Sleep River. Joe suddenly felt very old.

Marybeth was at the master bathroom sink, cleaning her face for bed and thinking about the day, when Joe came and flopped down on their bed. He was in a foul mood.

“Finotta outmaneuvred me,” he said bluntly. “He was ten steps ahead of me all the time, and he got to Sandvick. I really screwed that one up by not getting that photo from Sandvick on the spot.”

Marybeth sighed inwardly. Sometimes her husband was a little too quick to take people at their word and it frustrated her. She hated it when he got taken advantage of. “You’re too trusting, Joe.” She looked at him in the mirror. “You’re not cynical enough sometimes.”

“I’m working on that.”

She turned, the washcloth still poised near her cheek. “Finotta is a reptile, but you need to give up on him right now, Joe. He could buy and sell us if he wanted to. And if he’s as bad as we think he is, you’ll get another crack at him some day.”

Joe grunted.

Marybeth thought of Ginger Finotta and about their aborted conversation in the library. She thought about the Tom Horn book, which hadn’t yet been returned.

Thermopolis, Wyoming

July 1

Through billows of sulfur-smelling steam, the Old Man watched and waited for Charlie Tibbs. The Old Man reclined on the mineral-slick steps of a very hot pool and closed his eyes. He willed the muscles in his neck and back to begin to loosen up and untie what he imagined as a series of complicated, technical knots. He sighed heavily, and slid forward another step so the hot water lapped at his chin.

They were in the Central Wyoming town of Thermopolis, hard against the border of the Wind River Indian Reservation. Thermopolis claimed to have the “largest hot springs in the world,” a claim based not on the number of spas or facilities but on the volume of hot water that poured from the earth.

The Old Man slid forward on the step and leaned further back. His mouth was now under water, then his ears. Total submersion created a static whooshing sound. He breathed slowly through his nose. He was big and white and the hair on his legs and chest riffled beneath the water like a bed of kelp. In addition to helping his sore back, the Old Man hoped the water would somehow purge his wracked, tormented soul. But that was a lot to ask of Thermopolis.

It had been the Old Man’s idea to drive to Thermopolis and he had been mildly surprised that Charlie had agreed. The Old Man had limped from the pickup, rented a suit at the counter, and located the hottest and calmest water. In another part of the complex, children and families splashed and shrieked and funneled down a water slide. The pool he sat in was for old people. The Old Man’s only company was an ancient Shoshone woman with jet black eyes and droopy, chocolate-colored skin. Occasionally, she coughed wetly. After half an hour, she left the pool and the Old Man was alone.

From the corner of his eye, the Old Man saw the black Ford pickup come into view through the chain-link fence that surrounded the pools. The truck parked against the curb. Afternoon sunlight penetrated the smoked windows enough that the Old Man could see Charlie inside the cab talking on the cell phone. The Old Man had not expected that Charlie would join him and was relieved that he hadn’t. They had been spending too much time together and the Old Man couldn’t even imagine what Charlie would look like in a swimsuit. Charlie had said he would try to contact their employers, and apparently he had. The cell phone was a technologically advanced model that scrambled voices so that eavesdroppers, or innocents with FM-band radios, could not overhear the conversation.

The pickup truck was a wonder and a virtual weapon in itself. Although from the outside it simply looked like an intimidating late-model four-by-four, the truck had been customized to serve as a rolling armory capable of “taking on an entire police department if necessary,” as Charlie had put it. Even though the job was nearly finished and they had so far accomplished what they had set out to, they hadn’t used even one-tenth of their available firepower and equipment. Apparently, Charlie said, their employers had listened to him when he told them he believed strongly in the old Western maxim about never being caught outgunned. And they hadn’t been.

In addition to the pickup truck, they were also armed with shotguns and hundreds of rounds of double-ought buckshot shells, a MAC-70 machine pistol, plastic explosives with both altitude-sensitive and remote-control detonation devices, a 400-pound crossbow with telescopic sites, night-vision goggles and scopes, remote audio transceivers, nerve gas, and concussion grenades. Charlie Tibbs was especially proud of the custom-made, machine-tooled Remington Model 700.308 sniper’s rifle with the Leupold 4 x 14 scope. The rifle had been built to his specific demands and specifications. It used custom match.190 grain boattail bullets that were accurate beyond 1,000 yards, even after the slug began to flip end over end. The rifle could be steadied by bolting it to a special pole-mounted stand in the bed of the black Ford pickup. The stand itself was connected to a small atmospheric theodolite computer that gauged wind, altitude, trajectory, and distance to enable incredibly long-range shots.

Under hidden panels beneath the bed of the pickup was a shoulder-fired rocket launcher as well as an armored pod of pressure-sensitive and frequency-activated land mines.

The cab of the pickup had the scrambled cell phone, handheld wireless e-mail, and a pager, as well as an experimental computerized GPS directional mapping system loaded with American backroads and routes. They had only used the road-map computer once, and that was on the streets of Washington, D.C. Both the Old Man and Charlie Tibbs knew the Rocky Mountain region well enough that the computer was not necessary.

Their employers had supplied them with a lockbox of cash-thousands of dollars in used bills. Charlie kept track of their expenditures, but there was nothing they were prevented from buying at any time. They paid for everything with cash and cashiers often acted as if they didn’t know what to do when, for example, Charlie counted out $400 in bills to pay for hotel rooms. They left no paper trail, no credit card receipts anywhere in the United States.

Originally recommended for this job by Charlie Tibbs himself, who had already been hired to oversee the field operations, the Old Man had been contacted late at night by a man who wouldn’t leave his name. When the Old Man stated that he was interested in hearing more, a meeting with Charlie Tibbs was arranged at a local Denny’s Restaurant to fill him in on the details. Tibbs told him that their employers had recommended at least six operatives, and possibly two different teams, but Charlie had convinced them that everything could be accomplished by two experienced men. Since then, only Charlie Tibbs had been in contact with their employers. The Old Man was not included in these conversations by design, to minimize the number of people involved in the planning of the operations. It was understood that Charlie would speak to the intermediary, who would then speak directly with their employers. The Old Man was kept in the dark except for the details of the operation most immediately at hand. The Old Man had agreed to this, but now wished he had a better idea, overall, of what was going on. Obviously, they were targeting high-profile environmentalists. But how many? And for how long? He had expected their work to take about two weeks going in, and they were now into their second month.