Eye of the Wolf (25 page)

“Please don't leave me.” He couldn't conceal the panic. “Tied up like this. Don't, Vicky. Please. I'll go nuts tied up like this. I'm not an animal, Vicky. Don't leave me in a trap like this just waiting . . . waiting for them to come and kill me.”

“I'll send Burton,” she said. “Nobody's going to kill you.”

“It don't matter. They're gonna put me away, Vicky, and it's the same thing, 'cause I'm gonna die in prison. I didn't kill them Shoshones. I swear to you by all the ancestors. I swear it.”

“You assaulted Hunter and the Crispin brothers; then you shot them out at Bates. You called Father Nathan Owens with the first weird tape.”

“What are you talkin' about?” Alarm and questions mingled in the man's expression.

“You figured out that you'd called the wrong mission, because you made the second call to Father John. He was the priest you wanted to send the message to. You knew he'd understand the clues and go to Bates. You wanted the bodies found, didn't you? You wanted to gloat. What a big, smart man you are.”

“Tapes?” Frankie said. “I don't know nothing about tapes.”

“Come on, Frankie. The taped messages you made at the radio station. What? A buddy of yours let you in? Or did you keep a key?”

Frankie tilted his head back and blinked up at the ceiling. “You're crazier than I am,” he said. “Couple computers went missing when I was working at the station, so they fired me. Tol' me if I so much as drive into the parking lot, they're gonna sic the police on me. You think I got buddies there? They hate me there.”

Vicky gripped the knob and leaned into the door. The cold air had already penetrated her coat. She closed her eyes a moment against the dull throbbing in her head. She had it all wrong.

“Who, then, Frankie?” she said. “Who wanted the Shoshones dead?”

“I don't know. I don't know.” He was shaking his head so hard that she thought he might turn the chair over. “Somebody took my rifle at the bar, like I tol' you. You never listened.”

She was still gripping the knob hard. She could see the puffs of snow blowing off the trees, and beyond the line of trees, nothing but the shadows of boulders climbing the slopes. Somewhere in the distance, an animal was howling into the silence. A freezing gust swept past her that even made Frankie flinch. He was tied up, she told herself. Helpless.

Except that Frankie Montana wasn't helpless. He was playing for time. She could see his fingers curled up toward his wrist—working on the knots. He could burst free at any moment.

She buttoned her coat, pulled the collar up around her ears, and, gripping her bag close, trying to ignore the pain coursing inside her head, went outside.

“Vicky!” Frankie shouted behind her as she slammed the door.

ADAM LONE EAGLE
stood behind the fogged window in the entrance, a hulking presence in a sheepskin jacket, everything about him tense and impatient. Father John spotted the man as he pulled into the curb. Before he got across the sidewalk, Adam had flung open the door and stationed himself in front, half in and half out of the building. He squinted out into the wind gusting along Main Street.

“This better be good,” he said, stepping back into the building ahead of Father John, then reaching around to shut the door. His eyes were locked in a hard stare. “I was on the way to Bates when I checked my messages. If you dragged me back here when Vicky's out there with a madman . . .”

“They're not out there,” Father John said, wishing that he had the confidence he heard in his own voice. All he had was a logical assumption, but logic wasn't always the same as fact.

“Then where the hell did Montana take her?”

“I think he headed into the mountains to one of the houses he broke into.”

“You gotta be joking. There's a lot of snow up there, and another storm's coming in. The back roads'll be impassable.”

“That's why we have to get up there, Adam,” Father John said. “It could take hours before Burton digs out the information and sends a car. If the pickup they're in gets stalled, Frankie might force her to get out and walk. If the temperature drops . . .” He didn't have to finish the thought. The Indian was peering through the fog growing over the window, the mixture of warmth in the building and their own breaths and worry.

“Frankie was Vicky's client. The location of the houses is in her files,” Father John hurried on, but Adam had already turned and was starting up the stairs. Father John followed him. Doors to the offices on the first floor were shut tight against any weekend intrusion. So were the doors coming into view beyond the railing on the second floor. The thud of their boots rumbled through the emptiness.

They reached the top and started down the corridor. Father John was aware of the other man digging underneath his jacket and pulling a ring of keys from his jeans pocket. The keys clinked together like a ringing bell. He stopped at the third door, gave the key a quick turn in the lock, and, pushing the door open, went inside. Father John stayed with him, across the waiting room, through the opened door to the private office on the right.

Adam stopped in the middle of the room. He was surveying the cartons scattered about the floor, file folders bulging over the tops, a look of regret in the way that his eyes moved from one to the other. “We have to find the closed cases,” he said, dropping to one knee, both hands rifling through the files in the nearest carton.

Father John crouched beside another box and began looking through those files, checking the names on the tabs: Blackwater, Buttress. He reached the Ms. Many Horses. Menton. Miner.

He went to the next carton, aware that Adam had already moved on. He flipped through the files again, more slowly now.

“Montana,” Father John said, hauling out a thick file. He stood up and plopped it on top of the desk, smeared with a greenish powder.

Adam was at his side, opening the file, rummaging through the sheets inside. “A record of petty offenses as long as his arm,” he muttered, still rummaging. “Spent a month in the BIA jail for battery. Another four months in county jail on an assault charge. Would have been there longer if Vicky hadn't gotten the charge reduced. Here it is,” he said, pulling out several pages stapled together. “Breaking and entering charges dismissed on a technicality.” He glanced down the top page, then flipped to the next, talking and reading at the same time. “The bastard had the sense to ask for an attorney after he was arrested. The deputy ignored the request and continued firing questions.” He paused, still staring at one of the pages. “Three houses about a mile apart on a dirt road up in Sinks Canyon.”

“It'll take most of an hour to get there.” Father John could hear the anxiety in his voice. He headed back across the office, down the corridor, and down the stairs. Adam's boots thudded behind him. An hour! The thought banged in Father John's head like a drum. Frankie had taken her at least five hours ago. They'd been up there hours. People died in the cold. If they'd stalled, if they'd tried to hike . . .

Dear Lord. Let them be in a house.

“We'll take my pickup,” Adam said when they reached the sidewalk. “I've still got winter gear in the lockbox.” The Indian headed around the building toward the parking lot. Father John stayed in his footsteps.

VICKY WASN'T SURE
how long she'd been hiking. Time blurred, like the trees and snow and sky around her. It was starting to snow again, and darkness was coming on, metallic blue shadows dropping over the mountain slopes and sweeping through the trees. She'd kept to their
tracks, trying to step where they'd stepped, but sometimes the steps were too far apart. She couldn't reach the next one—how had she managed before?—and she had to tread through the unbroken snow, pain bursting through her head with each step.

She pulled the cell phone out of her coat pocket where she'd put it after the first time she'd tried to call out. “No service” had blinked red in the window and she'd tried again and again. Each time she came around a switchback, she punched in 911, and each time she got the same message. Her fingers kept sliding off the keys. She tried to grip the phone harder, feeling a wave of panic at the idea of dropping the phone and watching it disappear into a drift, but her hand had gone numb. She couldn't tell if she was gripping it hard enough.
She had to grip it hard enough.
She managed to press the three keys. Same message. She wrapped her other hand around the bottom of the phone and held on tight as she slipped it back into her pocket. God, it was her only lifeline. It might work as she got farther down the mountain. It had to work!

She reached the pickup and veered through the drifts. There was a chance that the owner had stowed a blanket or extra gloves, even fleece-lined boots, in the back. The lockbox was beneath the rear window—she could see it as she waded toward the rear. She reached over the metal edge, conscious of the deep, sharp stab of cold that cut into the flesh of her arm that touched the metal. She tried to lift the lid. Frozen in place, locked. It might as well have been welded shut. There was nothing else in the pickup bed: no loose tools, no hammer or crossbar that she might use to pry open the box, nothing but the ribbed floor of the bed under the snow. She felt the tears curling down her cheeks, warm at first—it surprised her—then a sharp sting of ice.

She started off again. An easier trek now, she told herself. Just stay in one of the tire tracks. One foot in front of the other, down, down. She could sense the elevation dropping beneath her and she tilted forward with her own momentum. Flecks of snow were sticking to her eyelashes, and she had to keep brushing them away. The snow-covered ground seemed to reflect whatever remained of the daylight, so that she was
moving through a double world: darkness pressing down on light, as if night and day had butted up against each other.

“Crazy!” she said out loud, and the sound of her own voice, oddly enough, was almost comforting. She had to think straight, stay rational, keep moving. Her head was now a concentrated mass of pain. She could no longer feel her feet. Her legs were like fence posts that she dropped into the snowy track, one after the other. So heavy, the weight of them—these fence posts, dragging her down with them.

She made her way around another switchback, scarcely aware that she'd made the turn, only that the shadows had gotten deeper and that the snow had turned blue. She fumbled again for the cell phone and dragged it out of her pocket. Then, cradling it in both gloves, she pushed in the keys. No service. No service. No service. She could feel the warmth trickling down her cheeks again, then the swift change to ice. Ice against ice, she thought. She managed to stuff the phone back into her pocket and kept going. Waves of exhaustion had started moving through her, the weight of the fence posts bigger and heavier with each step. Each breath cut like a blade into her chest. She cupped her hands around her nose and mouth and made a pocket of air, warmed by the exhalation of her own breath, which she tried to suck back in.

Another switchback—a wide, wide curve that took so long to work around. She would rest here, she thought. Sink into the snow just for a moment. It struck her that the snow would be warm, a thick blanket in which she could wrap herself against the cold. Just for a moment, until the exhaustion passed and the heavy weights became lighter.

She would die then. The truth hit her like a blow that she hadn't seen coming—a blow from another world, a world of warmth and sunshine. If she let herself stop, she would die within minutes, that was the truth.

She would not die here. Not on this mountain in the darkness and blue snow. She would keep going and keep going until the cell started to work, until she reached the highway and caught a ride. For a moment, the exhaustion seemed to fade and the weight became lighter before they returned with a force that crashed into her. She had the sense that
she was folding downward, floating with the snow, and there was nothing she could do.

THEY'D DRIVEN MOST
of the way in silence. There was no need for words. Father John felt as if their thoughts were tethered together, the same thoughts running in both of their heads, the same dread coursing through them, watching the gray dusk sink into darkness and snow starting to fly in the headlights.

He smoothed out the map folded on his thigh and traced Highway 131 with his index finger in the dashboard light. Another mile and they would start into the sharp curves. “The road should be up ahead,” he said. What was he trying to prove? Adam knew where the dirt road intersected the highway. Still, Father John had dragged the map out of the glove compartment, folded it down into the slice of Sinks Canyon and the little dotted lines that represented the maze of dirt roads. What was that all about? A pathetic attempt to reassure himself, a thick, gloved finger tracing their progress, as if the tracing itself would hurry them on.

“There it is,” Adam said, and in the sense of relief sounding in the man's voice, Father John realized that Adam had also been trying to reassure himself, gripping the wheel as if he could push the pickup forward, staring into the headlights for some sign that they were right, that the tan pickup was ahead.

There they were—parallel tracks veering to the right onto a narrow road that snaked upward through a dark corridor of pines. Father John could feel the pickup begin to slow as Adam steered into the tracks. They started climbing immediately. The snow was coming down harder; the trees were thicker, with snow mounded around the trunks. Branches tipped with snow knocked against his side of the pickup. The engine growled through a switchback, then another. They bumped over a boulder hidden under the snow, and Father John gripped the dashboard to keep from being pitched into the windshield. He stared ahead at the mountain looming over them, the gray sky pressing down. If Vicky were
out in this—Dear Lord!—how would they ever find her? He struggled to push the thought away, forcing himself to concentrate on the parallel line of tracks running ahead, as if he were the one driving, gripping the steering wheel, pushing on the accelerator.

They'd come around another switchback when Father John saw the hump in the middle of the road, black strips, like the fur of an animal, poking through the snow. Adam had seen it too because he was pumping the brake pedal. The rear tires were whining and spinning, the bed of the pickup shimmying sideways.

Father John was out of the cab before the pickup came to a stop. It was no animal—he could see that now. It was a human shape in the snow. There was an absolute stillness about it, like the stillness about the bodies at Bates.