C Box - Trophy hunt

He looked at the river, at its deceptive, muscular stillness. On the other side of the river, a high red rock face was dotted with tenacious clumps of sage. Then down river, where the channel began a slow bend away from him, he saw Eric Logue dragging himself out of the water on the other bank.

Eric pulled himself into a clump of willows, got to his hands and knees, and crawled out of sight into a small red rock fissure.

Stay with him until the EMTs get here," Joe told Sheridan, checking his loads and racking the pump on his shotgun. He had given her his first aid kit so she could use a sterile compress, as her sweatshirt was now heavy with Nate's blood. "You're doing a good job, honey."

Sheridan looked up, concerned. "Where are you going?"

"Down river."

Nate was watching him warily. He started to sit up.

"Nate, stay down," Joe said.

"Joe, you should know something. We've been waiting for Eric Logue to show up. We knew he would."

Joe hesitated.

"They're both vessels," Nate said. "Eric Logue and the bear. It's not even their fight, but you have to let it play out. It has to end here."

Joe looked at him, then at Sheridan.

"The next time you have a dream about bad things coming," Joe said to his daughter, "I'll listen."

She nodded, her eyes wide.

"It's about time," Nate said.

A quarter of a mile beyond where Joe had seen Eric emerge from the river, there was an old footbridge that had been built by a Hungarian hard rock miner named Scottie Balyo in the 1930s. Scottie had used the bridge to work a secret seam of gold somewhere in the foothills. The bridge was no longer safe, due to rotten and missing slats, but Joe labored his way across it by straddling the planks themselves and keeping his boots on the outside rails. The frame sagged and moaned as he went across, but it held. On the other side, he stepped down into soft, wet sand.

He kept to the sand as he crept downriver, walking as quietly as he could. As he neared the willows he had seen Eric crawl into, he turned and scrambled up the loose wall of the bank so he could see the fissure from above.

Never again, Joe thought, would he discount a dream Sheridan had. Like Nate, she was connected to this thing in a way that was real, if incomprehensible. Perhaps it was intuitiveness born of her age, that preteen angst that allowed her to tap into events that were occurring on another level, as Nate had described. Sheridan had seen the evil coming, and tracked it.

With Nate, it was his preternatural animal sense; his interaction with the natural world around him, that drew him to the bear. Joe couldn't explain either circumstance, and didn't want to. But it was there, had been there, and if nothing else he would now open his mind, if only a little, to accept it.

The fissure was narrow where Eric had entered it, but it widened into a brush-choked draw. The floor of the draw was dry now, in the winter, but in the spring it served as a funnel for snowmelt from the mountains into the river. The soft sand was churned up down there-Eric's track. Joe couldn't yet see him, but he couldn't imagine that Eric had gotten very far.

Joe heard him before he saw him; a low, sad moan from farther up the draw.

"Cleve?" Joe called. "Dr. Eric Logue?"

The moaning stopped.

"Joe Pickett," Joe called. "I'm going to arrest you." "You're going to kill me!" Joe dropped into the draw. "Maybe so," Joe said. When he found him, Joe was surprised to see that Eric had managed to stand up, using the help of an emerged root on the side of the draw as a handhold. He was bent forward, obviously in great pain. His head was slightly lowered, but his eyes locked on Joe as he approached. A thread of bloody saliva strung from his lips to the sand. Joe kept his shotgun pointed at Eric's chest. Joe was a notoriously bad shot, but he figured even he couldn't miss with a shotgun at this distance. Eric still held the scalpel in his right fist, which rested on his thigh, but he didn't threaten Joe with it. It was almost as if he had forgotten it was there. "I'm really busted up inside, man," Eric groaned, never taking his eyes off of Joe. "I'm not gonna make it." "Probably not," Joe said. Eric coughed, and the cough must have seared through him, because his legs almost buckled. "It hurts so bad," he groaned. He coughed again, then spit a piece of what looked like bright red sponge into the sand between his feet. Lung, Joe knew, having seen the spoor of lung-shot big- game animals many times before. Eric's ribs had probably broken and then speared his lungs when the pickup hit him. "Think you can walk across that bridge?" Joe asked. Eric just stared at him. Then: "Why don't you just shoot me? It's okay." Joe squinted, trying to determine if Eric was playing games with him. "Pull the trigger, you coward," Eric said. "Why?" Eric coughed again, then righted himself. "I'm really sick, man. And they're through with me." Joe felt his scalp twitch. "Who is through with you?" Eric tried to gesture skyward, but his arm wouldn't work. "They are. I thought there would be some kind of payoff, but they just used me. No one told me the other side would send something after me." Behind Eric was a dark wall of Rocky Mountain junipers. Joe thought he saw movement in the lower branches, but decided it must have been the cold wind. The wind did strange things in draws like this.

"Tell me," Joe said. "We know about Stuart Tanner and Tuff Mon- tegue. But why did you kill your brother?"

Eric's face twisted painfully. "It was Bob. Bob did that. I guess Cam tried to get away, and Bob whacked him on the head. Then Bob figured he'd mutilate him to make it look like the others. I wasn't in the room when it happened."

"You were carving on Deena in the other room at the time, I guess," Joe said.

"Who cares about any of this?" Eric said. "You got me. So shoot, you bastard. Give me some peace. Or I'll come over there and start cutting on you."

"What made Tuff Montegue's horse throw him?"

Eric twitched. "Bob said it was just dumb luck. Bob said he must have spooked the horse as he moved from tree to tree."

"Why the animals?" Joe asked, gripping the shotgun tighter. "Why did you mutilate the animals?"

Eric shook his head. "I didn't hurt any animals. Except for that stupid horse on that ranch, and I messed that up."

" What?" Joe asked, perplexed.

"I know who did it, though," Eric said, coughing. His eyes shined. He took a clumsy step toward Joe now, and raised the scalpel. " They did it."

Again, Joe saw a shiver in the junipers. This time, he knew it wasn't the wind. It was something huge, something big-bodied.

"They're gone now," Eric said, wincing but still lurching forward. "But they'll be back. And if you think I'm scary…"

The grizzly bear, the one Joe had once been chasing, the one Nate had made his obsession, blasted out of the junipers and hit Eric Logue in the back with such primal force and fury that it left Joe gasping for breath. The bear had waited, and Eric Logue had finally come.

Joe watched as the grizzly dragged Eric's wildly thrashing body into the shadows.

Sheridan still dreamed vividly, and one dream in particular stayed with her, subtly growing in meaning until she would later look back on it as the end of something. In that dream, one of many that took place the night after Eric Logue attacked Nate Romanowski, the roiling black clouds were back. This time, though, the tendrils of smoke or mist leached from the ground and low brush and rose upward, as if being withdrawn. The black horse-head snouts of the thunderheads rolled back, eventually clearing the top of the Bighorn Mountain, leaving big, blue sky.

She believed there had been a battle. The battle took place in plain sight, in front of everyone, but few could see or sense it. She wanted to believe that the battle was between good forces, with the bear as the agent, and evil, embodied by some other kind of beings who had recruited Eric Logue and Nurse Bob. Perhaps the good forces had engaged her dad and Nate as temporary foot soldiers as well. But she would never know that.