C. Box - Free Fire

Nate thrust the three-inch blade between the edge of the door and the jamb, levered it down, and pulled back sharply. There was a click and the door opened an inch.

“Somebody’s oiled it recently,” Nate said, handing the knife back to Joe.

Before they opened the door and continued, Joe turned the volume down on his radio and unsnapped his holster. Nate alreadyhad his.454 out, loose at his side. The last thing Nate said before opening the door was, “Don’t shoot me.”

The hallway was narrow, twisted, completely dark. Joe’s shoulders almost touched both walls in places. The ceiling was low and the floor uneven. This was Bat’s Alley, the mysterious passageway built for no apparent reason by the architect of the inn at the turn of the last century. Nate dimmed his headlamp and Joe did the same.

Joe followed Nate twenty yards until the hallway took a forty-five-degree turn to the left and the floor rose slightly. There were several closed doors on either side now, the openingsmisshapen and heights uneven. A single small porthole alloweda blue-tinged shaft to fill the hallway with just enough light to create dark shadows. As they passed the porthole, Joe stopped to stick his head into the opening and look out through an oval of thick, mottled glass.

The scene outside was dark and haunting. The snow on the ground far below was tinted blue, the timber black and melded with the black sky. There wasn’t a single light outside, only the falling snow. In the distance, in the geyser basin, rolls of steam punched their way into the night like fists.

Another turn of the hallway, and then a distinct smell of food cooking. Another turn, and they could see a band of yellow light from beneath a door at the end of Bat’s Alley.

Nate turned in the darkness, whispered, “We’ve got him.”

Joe nodded, his shoulders tense, heart thumping. He slipped his Glock out and, as silently as he could, worked the slide. From behind the door, he could hear hissing and something boiling or bubbling. And someone humming. Joe recognized the tune as “Mambo No. 5.” Joe hated that song.

At the door at the end of the hallway, Nate paused, mouthed, “Do we knock?”

Joe nodded yes, and Nate rapped on the door. Although he did it gently, the sounds seemed startling and rude. The hummingstopped.

Nate knocked again.

Joe heard shuffling and saw the knob turn and the door swing open.

A man stood there wild-eyed, his mouth agape. He looked like a well-fed yearling bear-short, stout, heavy, with long hair sticking out at all angles from a perfectly round bowling ball of a head. He wore a walrus mustache that had taken over most of his cheeks. There was a gun in his hand but it was pointed down.

“Bob Olig, I presume?” Joe said.

Olig worked his mouth but no sound came out. His eyes were fixed on the gaping muzzle of Nate’s.454, which was six inches from his eyebrow.

“Drop the weapon,” Nate hissed.

Olig dropped the gun with a clunk, and Nate kicked it across the room.

“You don’t get a lot of visitors, I’d guess,” Joe said.

“I get no visitors,” Olig said, his voice throaty, as if he hadn’t used it for a while. “Who are you?”

“My name’s Joe Pickett. I’m a Wyoming game warden. This is Nate Romanowski.”

Olig shifted his eyes from Nate’s gun to Joe. “I’ve heard of you. Cutler told me.”

Joe nodded. The connection was made.

“I’m making some moose stew,” he said. “Would you like some?”

“No, thank you,” Joe said, thinking that any other time he would have accepted because he liked moose.

They went inside, but there was barely enough room for the three of them. The room was narrow, with an extremely high ceiling. Two Coleman lamps hung from metal hooks, hissing. A camping stove burned in the middle of the floor, heating a dented aluminum pot filled with the bubbling dark moose stew. A cot and sleeping bag took up a wall on the inside, and there was a college dorm-like bookcase built with planks and bricks. Tacked to the walls were a map of Yellowstone, a laminated cover sheet of the Kyoto Accords with a red circle drawn over it and a slash through it, and several ripped and puckered magazinepages featuring the actress Scarlett Johansson.

“I get lonely,” Olig said, flushing. Then, “I don’t get it. What are you guys doing here?”

Joe said, “We came for you.”

“You need to come with us,” Nate said.

Something passed over Olig’s face, and he stepped back as far as he could in the small room. “I’m not going anywhere,” he said.

“Sure you are,” Nate said, growling.

“We’ve got Clay McCann,” Joe said.

Olig’s eyes flashed. “He’s here?”

“Downstairs,” Joe said.

“I want to kill that prick.”

Joe nodded. “I assumed that. Otherwise, I’d guess you would have been long gone by now.”

“Damned right.”

Nate shot a puzzled look at Joe.

“You were friends with Mark Cutler, weren’t you?” Joe asked. “He gave you the room up here while you two tried to figure out why McCann shot your friends from Minnesota, right?”

Olig nodded.

“And you two figured out that there were people in the Park Service in on the crime, right?”

He nodded again.

“So you stayed here until the two of you could get enough evidence on who was on which side and you could turn them in. But they got to Cutler, and you figured you were next.”

“I thought you might be them,” Olig said, gesturing to his gun on the floor.

“Nope,” Joe said. “We want to get them too. And we’ve set up a trap here tonight using McCann and you as bait. We want them to come in and incriminate themselves so we can throw the whole lot of them into prison.”

“This is a dream come true,” Olig said, rubbing his bear-cub hands. “But you need to leave me alone in a room with Clay McCann. Five minutes. That’s all I need. I’ve been dreaming of this for months.”

“You’ll need to stand in line for that,” Joe said.

“I should be first. He killed my friends.”

Joe shrugged, conceding the point.

Nate turned from Olig to Joe. “We can’t stand here talking all night.”

“I know,” Joe said. “I want to make sure Mr. Olig is with us.”

Olig said, “You bet your ass I am.”

As the three of them went down the hallway, Joe asked, “Besides revenge, why did you stay?”

Olig sighed. “Guilt. Then fear. I should have been at Bechler with my friends that day, but I was pissed at Rick. I didn’t like his idea about going national with the bio-mining protest. Since I’ve been up here I’ve found myself thinking of things differently.The black and white I used to see when it comes to environmentalissues had turned gray. I figured, shit, we might find a cure for cancer with those microbes, or something. We shouldn’t automatically oppose everything. I mean, what makes us so fucking smart? We’re the beneficiaries of people before us figuring out shit that makes our lives better or helps us live longer. Why stop now, just because we think we know it all? The last thing I thought about, though, was that those microbes could be used for energy development.”

“So you figured that out, huh?”

“Not me,” Olig said. “Cutler had his suspicions. We all knew about the flamers, but Cutler was a geologist and thought about why they burned. He also told me he was going to show you. That was the night before he was killed.”

“So you saw the message to us?” Joe asked.

“Yeah,” Olig said. “I prowl around at night when everyone’s sleeping. Otherwise, I’d go crazy in that little room. I scared some guests a few times though,” he said, chuckling at the recollection.