C Box - Blood Trail

Joe shrugged. He was wondering the same thing.

“I like it,” Lothar said, patting his weapon. “If he’s become sloppy, we have a better chance of taking him down.”

“That’s what you want to do?” Joe asked. “Take him down? How about we try to arrest him first?”

Lothar snorted. “Do you think he’ll let us?”

“I say we try.”

Lothar grinned wolfishly. “I say we light him up and smoke his ass.”

IT WAS difficult to walk without making any sound, Joe found. There was too much downed, dried timber and finger-thick branches that snapped when stepped on. Joe felt remarkably uncoordinated, and it seemed like he made twice as much noise as Lothar, who had a way of walking deliberately and silently by leading heel first and shifting his weight forward into each step. Joe tried to mimic the technique, stepped on an errant twig, whispered, “Sorry!”

Lothar stopped in the shadows, and Joe could tell by the angle of the tracker’s head and the set of his shoulders he was about to receive another lesson in the art of man tracking.

“You’ve got to be quieter,” Lothar said in an urgent whisper.

“I’m trying,” Joe said.

“If he hears us he could set up an ambush.”

“I know that.”

“If we can maintain silence we might hear him first.”

“You don’t need to tell me that,” Joe hissed back.

“Sound travels at a speed of seven hundred and twenty miles per hour, or about eleven hundred feet per second. The forest will slow that down a little, but if we hear something we can estimate distance. And if we see a flash of light like from a headlamp or flashlight, we can use sound and light to determine how to close in on him.”

“So we can light him up and smoke his ass,” Joe said with sarcasm.

“That would be correct. So step lightly.”

WHILE THEY moved through the dark timber, Joe recalled his call to Marybeth. When he told her about seeing Earl Alden’s jet land at the airport and Alden being greeted by her mother, there was a long silence until Marybeth sighed and said, “Here we go again.”

When Marybeth asked when he’d be back, Joe said, “Early tomorrow,” with a kind of heavy sigh he hoped would mislead her into thinking his assignment was benign. As usual, it didn’t work. Under sharp questioning, he told her what had gone on, from seeing Klamath Moore and his throng at the airport to Randy Pope going back to town, leaving Joe up there with Conway, Robey, and Lothar the Master Tracker.

“There are so many things wrong in what you just told me,” she said, “I don’t know where to start.”

“I know,” he said sourly.

“What is Randy Pope up to?”

“I don’t know.”

“I wish you could just come home.”

“Me too,” Joe said. “I operate best on the margins, not in the middle of a team.”

“Having Nate around hasn’t hurt either,” she said.

“True.”

“Joe, be careful. Something about this doesn’t sound right.”

Joe agreed, and asked her to contact Sheriff McLanahan’s office or Phil Kiner and request backup, whether Robey said he needed it or not.

NOW, AS HE shadowed Lothar through the shafts of moonlight in the trees, he wondered whether the shooter was just as aware of them as they were of him. Given the skill and experience the killer had shown (at least on his initial stalk and kill of Frank Urman), Joe didn’t doubt the shooter was fully capable of making a stand and possibly even leading his pursuers into a trap. Maybe, Joe thought, the shooter’s sloppiness was deliberate in order to make his tracks easy to follow. To lure them in. And despite Lothar’s bold talk, Joe had no idea how the tracker would really react in a situation, whether he’d stand and fight or panic.

Joe wished he’d spent more time with Sheridan and Lucy that morning, wished he’d made love to Marybeth rather than inventorying his gear for the fourth time. Wished he wasn’t on a dark mountainside with a man he didn’t trust tracking a killer he couldn’t fathom.

“WANT A piece of jerky?” Robey asked Wally Conway in Joe’s pickup.

“No thanks,” Conway said. “I don’t think I could eat anything right now.”

“I’m just the opposite,” Robey said. “I can’t stop.”

“I guess people react to fear in different ways,” Conway said.

The moon had risen over the treetops and was bathing the top of the pines and the mountain meadows in a ghostly blue-white. Although it was getting colder, Robey hadn’t yet turned on the engine. He kept his window a quarter open as well, so he could hear shouts or shots if there were any. The truck radio was set to a channel Joe fixed for the handheld he had taken with him two hours before. There hadn’t been a report from Joe and Lothar since they walked down the saddle slope. Lothar had told Robey not to expect one until they decided to head back. Lothar also asked him to try not to call them and break radio silence unless it was an emergency.

The longer it went, the more excruciating the wait became for Robey. He wanted to be home in his leather recliner watching television with a fire in the fireplace. He did not want to be in a freezing pickup in the dark with a friend of Randy Pope’s whom he didn’t know.

Finally, Robey said, “Wally, since it looks like we’ll be here awhile, can I ask you a question?”

He could see Conway smile in the dark, see the flash of teeth. “Sure.”

“Why are you here?”

Conway chuckled. “I was wondering that myself. I kind of feel like I’ve been thrust upon you guys, and it’s an uncomfortable place to be, let me tell you.”

Robey appreciated Conway’s candor. He wondered how far it would go. “How long have you known Randy Pope, then?”

“It seems like forever,” Conway said. “Jeez… thirty years, I guess, although that’s hard to believe. Growing up, I never thought I’d know anybody thirty years. I met Randy at the University of Wyoming in Laramie. Heck, we were in the same fraternity and then we hunted together for years after that. I’d like to say we kept in touch but you know how guys are. I wouldn’t hear from him for five years but I’d see him at a Cowboys game or something and we’d pick up the conversation we were having the last time we talked. That sort of thing drives my wife crazy, you know. She thinks men don’t know how to be friends properly, and I think we do it exactly right. Why talk when you have nothing to say? I suspect it drives most women crazy, the way men do that.”

Robey said, “So you haven’t talked to him for a few years?”

Conway shook his head. “Nope, but like I say, that isn’t all that unusual.”

“What did he do-just give you a call this morning and say, ‘I’m in the area, let’s go on a manhunt’?”

Conway chuckled again. “That’s not too far from what happened.”

“I can’t believe you came.”

“I guess I didn’t know all the circumstances,” Conway said. “I thought it might be a chance to catch up with Randy, you know? But he’s a busy man now that he’s the director of the game and fish department. Today, he spent almost the whole time on his phone. But I’d like to do my part to catch the bad guy as much as anyone else. We can’t have someone like that around.”

“Nope.”

“So you’ve known Joe Pickett for a while, eh?”

Robey nodded. “Yes. We fish together. There’s no greater friendship.”

“Did you know the game warden before Joe? Vern Dunnegan?” Conway asked. “He was quite a character.”

“I knew him,” Robey said without enthusiasm.

“He was a throwback. He kind of made his own law, if you know what I mean.”

“That’s one way to put it,” Robey said. “That’s why he’s still in the Wyoming state pen.”