Ridley Pearson - Killer View

“You were paid to make the call.”

“Exactly. Then they time the search and rescue…” His voice trailed off. “What are you saying, exactly? This guy was for real, right?”

Walt removed his notebook from his uniform’s breast pocket. “Can you describe him, please?”

“I don’t know. About my height, I guess. Khakis. Coat and tie. Mustache. Kinda short hair. Your color-you know, kinda sandy and gray. Normal-looking dude.”

“He told you what to say,” Walt stated. Gray? he wondered.

“Yeah. Said it had to be done a certain way to make all the tests comparable. He had it typed out.”

“He had the message you were to read typed out?”

“Yeah.”

“And you read it exactly as he’d written it.”

“Yes.”

“And do you have that… I don’t know… card, sheet of paper, currently in your possession?”

“He took it back.”

“Of course he did,” Walt muttered.

“What’s that?”

“Nothing.”

“Did I fuck up or something?”

“How much did he pay you for this service?”

“A C-note.”

“A man offered you a hundred dollars to make a phone call and you didn’t question it?”

“I questioned it, all right. I demanded to see the money up front.”

Walt hurried out to the car and radioed in to call off the search. He took a minute to settle himself, reeling over the wasted manpower and the risk to the searchers.

When he returned inside, his voice was irrationally calm.

“How ’bout credentials? Did you demand or did he show you any credentials confirming he was with the government?”

“He flipped open some ID when he first came up to me. Not that I took that good a look or anything. I wasn’t going to blow off some government dude. And then when he got explaining it, it sounded good to me.”

“But not too good to be true?”

“What’s that?”

“Would you recognize him if you saw him again? A photo maybe?”

“I don’t know. I guess so.”

“Lay off the pot for a while, okay? I need your memory clear.”

If the boy could have dissolved into the chair, he would have. Eyes to the dirty carpet, chin down, he said nothing for a moment. Then he looked up. “I take it he wasn’t with the government.”

“Mr. Jones, you’re not to leave the county without my permission. You do so and you will be considered at flight. Is that clear?”

“Is that legal?”

“You want to involve the courts? I’m happy to do so.”

“It’s clear,” the boy said.

“I want a written statement from you. Exactly what happened. Where, when, who, what. Every detail you can recall: accent, clothes, mannerisms, expressions, shoes, car, glasses, gloves-I don’t care how insignificant you think it might have been. I want that on my desk, in Hailey, by six P.M. this evening. Is that clear?”

“Yes, sir.”

“No excuses. No delays. No makeups. Six P.M.”

“Does it have to be typed?” Jones asked.

Walt shook his head in frustration. “It has to be truthful. I don’t care if it’s a podcast; I just want to know what happened. In your words, to the best of your ability.” He dug himself out of the couch and made for the door. “And I’d lose the weed, if I were you. Ketchum police will be watching you now.”

He headed out the door and, as he did so, he tugged on his jacket against the cold. The process of pulling the jacket up onto his shoulders instantly took him back to Randy’s coming out of the pickup truck the night before. Randy and Mark had been throwing jabs about Randy borrowing the coat.

Walt recalled Randy’s complaining about the smell of the winter jacket and Mark’s chastising him for forgetting a coat of his own in the middle of a blizzard. It had been Mark’s coat that Randy had been wearing up on the mountain. A loaner. A coat carrying Mark’s scent, not Randy’s. Walt had all but proven that dogs had been involved-the prints found alongside the tire track.

What if Randy had been pursued by dogs meant to target Mark?

We never talk politics.

Mark had tried to discuss something. Walt had joked about it, had failed to listen.

The same complaint he’d gotten from Gail on her way out the door.

ROY COATS LEFT THE DOGS BEHIND THIS TIME. HE DIDN’T need to track some guy through a snowstorm. He didn’t need a cage to hide a girl.

Pulling a sled, he rode the snowmobile, a Yamaha Phazer, several miles up Sunbeam Road, pulled it into the trees, and locked and chained it. To some, this was the middle of nowhere-fifty miles past Galena Summit in a national forest of four million acres, so vast that it included the one-million-acre River of No Return Wilderness Area, the largest wilderness in the continental United States. He could have called upon the others to help him, but he was the best shot. He pursued this alone.

During the “work” on the girl, with the client in the other room cleaning himself up, Coats had made promises to her that he’d be gentler than the visitor had been. He’d won a moment of compromise on her part. She’d mentioned the doc’s frequent trips to a cabin in Challis. She didn’t know anything about any sheep but knew he’d been hauling mail-order gear up there. Coats had still done her, but he hadn’t yanked her hair or slapped her around the way the client had.

Now, he snowshoed the final mile, following nothing more than his internal compass, working from memory, having viewed a topographical map only once. He ascended a steep mountain ridge, holding just below the tree line, and then dropped down into thick forest, as the cabin came into view.

He picked up the fresh tracks of an elk herd and stayed among them for the sake of covering his own prints in the snow. He carried a CheyTac Intervention M-200 slung over his right shoulder. The weapon carried a Nightforce scope, which could be upgraded all the way to a digital device that plugged into a PDA and gave the weapon an effective range of twenty-five hundred yards-well over a mile-that accounted for wind speed and atmospheric pressure. The newspapers called it a sniper rifle. To enthusiasts like himself, it was an antipersonnel rifle, providing long-range, soft-target interdiction. He’d replaced the muzzle brake with an OPSINC suppressor. It wouldn’t scare a chickadee in the next tree over, if he had to use it.

His choice was not to use it, because it would be one hell of a tricky double shot. He had it sighted for two hundred yards. If needed, his target would never have a clue to his position. The target would not hear a thing until the wet thwack of his own shredded flesh. Thankfully, the contracted inventory included only the adults, and excluded any children. He didn’t have any desire to chalk a kid.

Tied onto the left side of his day pack was a D93S cartridge-fired rifle that he often employed in his private client work. With his special loads and the four-power scope, he could accurately project a dart from one hundred twenty-five yards. A single-shot rifle, it weighed eight pounds but was worth every ounce. The D93S was his weapon of choice for the work that lay ahead, but it was the CheyTac that made him feel secure.

He rubbed his sore knuckles through the glove, mulling over his recent mistakes. How he’d killed the wrong brother was beyond him- the dogs didn’t make such errors. He pushed that from his mind and stayed with the elk tracks, huge half-moons the size of horse hooves. As hard as it was to get past his mistakes, they had given him time to rethink his own priorities. He had his own uses for the doctor.