Heaven's Keep (16 page)

Nightwind nodded to Rude in parting. “You know how to reach me, Jon.”

After Nightwind left, Rude said, “Look, that offer of dinner last night is still good. Diane told me she’s fixing a big pot of beef stew this evening. Don’t know about you, but I’m so hungry I could eat a horse. What do you say? Good home-cooked meal with decent company?”

Cork put his hand on his son’s shoulder. “What do you think?”

Stephen looked down the empty runway that pointed like a gray finger toward the mountains. “Stew’s okay,” he said quietly.

“It’s a deal, Jon,” Cork said.

“How about giving me a hand getting this chopper secured, Stephen? Then I’m guessing you guys might want to go back to your hotel, freshen up. We’ll expect you in an hour or so. Think you can find it? Straight out County Seventeen west of town, five miles till you come to Banning Creek Road. Follow that north a couple miles. You’ll see my place on the left.”

“Thanks, we’ll be there.”

While Rude and Stephen worked on the helicopter, Cork looked toward the mountains. Even at this distance the top of Heaven’s Keep was visible, a white crown on the Absarokas. From so far away, it seemed a regal, majestic formation. He knew on some level that this was beautiful country, but everything he saw here was coated in the possibility of utter loss and the promise of pain.

He hated Wyoming.

“Ready,” Rude called.

Stephen trudged to the Wrangler, and Cork joined him.

T
he ranch house was a green rambler with three towering cottonwoods in the front yard. A drainage ditch and a white rail fence separated the yard from the road. In back of the house stood a large barn with a connected corral and a couple of other outbuildings. Half a dozen horses browsed in a nearby pasture. A hundred yards to the west was an aluminum hangar and a landing strip. Hills rose above the southern side of the valley, chalk white with snow and barren as desert dunes. The sky above them was the faded blue of thrift-store jeans. Cork pulled up beside Rude’s pickup, which was parked in the yard in front of the barn. When he got out, the smell of hay and fresh manure filled his nostrils.

The door of the barn swung open, and Rude strode out. He was wearing an old jean jacket, a cowboy hat, scarred boots, and pigskin work gloves with the palms worn to a shine. He tugged off his gloves as he came and greeted Cork and Stephen with “Howdy!”

“Jon, your place is even prettier from the ground than it was from five hundred feet up,” Cork said.

“Come on in. Diane’s got dinner under way.”

They entered through the mudroom in back, where Rude removed his boots, which were caked with the residue from the barn floor. They went from there into the kitchen and the aroma of Italian spices. The room was large and bright, and at its center was an island, where a fine-looking woman stood with a long, sharp knife in her hand.

“Sweetheart, this is Cork O’Connor and his son, Stephen,” Rude said.

She put the knife down and smiled. Her hair was light brown and hung to her shoulders. She had a long, lovely face. She wore a pale blue sweater and jeans. She wiped her hands on a dish towel draped over one shoulder and greeted them with a cordial clasp. “I’m Diane,” she said. “Glad you finally let Jon talk you into dinner.”

The sound of small feet across floorboards preceded the entrance of a child. She ran to her mother, grasped Diane’s waist, and peered at the guests with shy interest.

“Anna, these are our friends. This is Cork and this is Stephen.”

“Hi,” Anna said. “I can dance.”

“Tell you what, sweetheart,” Rude said. “Let’s all go into the living room and you can show our guests a little ballet, but only a little, all right?”

“All right,” she agreed easily, turned, and danced her way out of the kitchen.

They ate a fine dinner, washed down with a good Chianti. Diane talked about her classes at the college in Lander and about her desire to teach. Cork told them a little about Aurora. The search for the missing plane was carefully skirted. Anna took a shine to Stephen and sat beside him and told him all about her stuffties. Stuffties, she explained, were her stuffed animal friends. After dinner she brought Stephen her favorites—a giraffe named Horace, a floppy-eared dog named Bop, and a unicorn named Uni. Rude asked Cork if he’d join him outside for a smoke, and the two men went through the mudroom, shrugged on their coats, and strolled out into the yard.

The moon was up, nearly full and flooding the valley with silver light that made everything look covered in frost. Yard lights from other spreads flickered up the valley. Rude walked to the fence that bounded the pasture. He brought out a pack of Marlboros and offered Cork a cigarette.

“Gave them up a few years back,” Cork said.

“Wish I could.” Rude lit up and shot out a cloud of silver smoke.

The horses in the pasture began to drift toward them.

“Fine place you’ve got here, Jon. Fine family,” Cork said.

“I’m a blessed man and I know it, Cork.” Rude studied the tip of his cigarette a moment. “Almost lost it all, though.”

“Yeah? How’s that?”

“Gambling. Never had a clue I’d be addicted. Then the Blue Sky Casino came along, and for a while I was spending all my time there. All my money, too. And finally money I didn’t have. The casino”—he shook his head—“it’s been okay for the Arapaho, I guess, but it’s done a lot of individual damage around here.”

“Still gamble?”

“Naw. Diane gave me an ultimatum. Told me to get help or she was leaving me and taking Anna with her.”

“Worked, huh?”

“I belong to Gamblers Anonymous. I haven’t set foot in that casino in over a year. Funny the things that can do a man in that he never saw coming.” He laughed and held up his Marlboro. “I know all the heartache these things promise, and I’ll stop one of these days. At the moment, I’m just real happy I was able to quit the gambling.”

One of the horses whinnied and was answered somewhere in the distance, far beyond Rude’s pasture. The sound made Cork sad, though he couldn’t say exactly why. The truth was there wasn’t much in the last few days that didn’t affect him in this way.

“I wish I knew what to hope for you, Cork. We get our hands on a magnetometer and find the plane tomorrow in Sleeping Baby Lake, well, you understand what that’ll mean.”

“I know.” Cork turned and looked back at the house, where the lights from inside shined warmly into the night. “I’ll take one of those cigarettes.”

Rude held out the Marlboros, and Cork pulled one from the pack. Rude snapped open his lighter and thumbed a flame. Cork bent and lit his cigarette. He drew the smoke into his lungs and closed his eyes. Whenever he smoked with Henry Meloux, it had nothing to do with the pleasure of the act itself. This was different. This was like running into a long-lost and very wicked friend.

“Feel like I’ve seduced you back to the dark side,” Rude said.

“Not your fault. It’s the circumstances.”

For a while they smoked and didn’t talk, then Diane called from
the house. Inside, Anna had brought out a whole family of stuffties and was introducing Stephen to them all.

“This one is Jasper,” she said, holding up a donkey. “He’s kind of a joker. He makes the other stuffties laugh. If you want to keep him for a while, you can. Maybe he can make you laugh because you’re probably pretty sad.”

“Do I look sad?” Stephen asked.

“Yes. You’re sad in your eyes. Here, take Jasper. He’ll help. And you can give him back to me whenever you want to.”

“Thanks.” Stephen took the stuffed toy from Anna, though it appeared to trouble him.

They sat at the table again, and Diane served them cheesecake. As they were finishing, the telephone rang. Rude got up and went to the kitchen to answer. When he came back, he said, “That was Dewey Quinn. He’s found a magnetometer.”

In their room at the hotel, Stephen got ready for bed while Cork called home and gave an update. When Stephen had finished brushing his teeth, he turned on the television and tuned in CNN. The stuffed donkey Anna Rude had given him he put at the end of his bed, and then he crawled under the covers. He stared at the ceiling, but when the news turned to coverage of the standoff in Kansas his eyes were glued to the screen. The situation had continued to worsen. Hargrove seemed to be raving like a madman, threatening to detonate the explosives and kill everyone in the rural compound even though the authorities had so far refrained from any aggressive action.

“Do you think he’d really do that, Dad?” Stephen asked.

“People who see themselves in desperate situations sometimes do desperate, incomprehensible things,” Cork said.

“Is everyone with him like that?”

“I don’t know. It’s hard to imagine that if you have children you’d be thinking that way.”

“Maybe he’ll let the children leave,” Stephen said.

“Maybe.” Though, in truth, Cork thought not. He wondered at
Stephen’s deep concern over these people—these children—he didn’t know. Maybe Stephen saw them as being a little like himself, caught up in something unthinkably horrific and over which they had no control. Maybe he thought that if the impossible situation on the plains of Kansas could somehow be resolved it would mean there was hope for the impossible in those rugged Wyoming mountains.

Cork went into the bathroom. By the time he came out, Stephen had fallen asleep.

It was just as well. He missed the breaking news from Prestman, Kansas. Gunther Hargrove had blown himself and his followers to kingdom come.

T
he man from Luger Oil and Gas was named Harmon Bolt. He had enormous ears, a three-day shadow, the look of a hangover, and the smell of cigar smoke in his clothing. He was brusque and coarse, but he’d brought the magnetometer, so Cork forgave him everything. Bolt took the seat next to Rude. Cork and Stephen sat in back. Nightwind flew ahead, once again leading the way over the Absarokas. The flight out was quiet, except for Bolt, who kept hacking up junk that he spit into a dirty handkerchief. The magnetometer was stored behind Cork and Stephen. It was a yellow tube constructed of PVC, approximately four feet long and maybe two feet in circumference. Its rounded head and sleek body gave it the look of a torpedo. Bolt had explained that though he’d used it only on land, it was also designed for use underwater. “Treasure hunting and that kind of bullshit,” he said.

They were all conscious of the weather. The storm front out of the northwest was barreling through Idaho. By late afternoon it would slam into the Absarokas, and heavy snowfall was predicted.

Though neither he nor Stephen had spoken of it, Cork understood that they were no longer thinking of finding Jo alive. Over the six days since her disappearance, with all the planes in the air and the search yielding nothing, they’d gradually left that hope behind. There was no moment, no event he could look back at and say, “Here. Here, I lost hope.” There were even times when he wondered if he’d ever really had any hope. Now, staring at the back of Bolt’s head, at the
greasy hair badly in need of a cut, at the ridiculously large ears, Cork realized that what he’d been reduced to was a concern that, in a way, was almost pointless: Would they find her body?

They neared Heaven’s Keep, and Cork saw that the towering wall of rock and snow and ice cast a long black shadow west across the Absarokas. It reminded him of the dark of an open grave.

Twenty minutes later, they swept through Giant’s Gate. As soon as they entered Baby’s Cradle, the chopper plummeted, caught in a sudden, powerful down current. Bolt hollered, “Oh shit!” and grabbed the passenger assist handle on the cockpit frame. Cork felt like he’d left his stomach a hundred feet above.

Rude seemed unruffled. “Going to be a little rough today,” he said.

Below them, Baby’s Cradle was a white fury. Rude gradually brought the chopper to a difficult hover a couple of feet above the surface of the snow near the northern end of the lake. Near whiteout conditions surrounded them, the result both of the wind and of the tempest caused by the chopper blades. Bolt had put a pair of snowshoes in the space between Cork and Stephen. Now Stephen passed them to him. Cork pulled the magnetometer from the storage area behind his seat and held it while Bolt zipped himself into his down parka.

“This is how it’s going to go,” Bolt said. He wasn’t wearing a flight helmet, and he shouted to be heard over the noise of the chopper. “I’m going to open the door and situate myself so that I can get these snowshoes on. Then I’m going to drop down onto the snow cover. O’Connor, you’ll hand me the magnetometer. I’m going to make two passes the length of the lake. That instrument’ll pick up any variation in the magnetic field for a thousand feet around it. If the plane’s under the ice, we’ll know. Rude, you stay above me, far enough you don’t add to this goddamn mess of blowing snow. Lose me in this shit, you son of a bitch, and I’ll kick your ass from here to Arkansas. Got that?”

“Loud and clear,” Rude said.

Bolt opened the door, and wind and snow screamed into the cockpit. He leaned down and spent a couple of minutes getting into his
snowshoes, swearing a blue streak the whole time. Finally he hollered over his shoulder, “Ready with that instrument, O’Connor?”

“Ready!” Cork yelled.

Bolt tugged his mittens on and disappeared from the doorway. Cork opened his own door, and the wind struck him like a fist. He squeezed his eyes shut against the needles of ice and held out the magnetometer, which was snatched from his hands.

“Shut the door!” Rude called. “I’m taking ’er up.”

The chopper rose a couple hundred feet above the lake. Below, they could make out Bolt, a figure in a dark green parka plodding south.

“You know him well?” Cork asked.

“Not really,” Rude said. “He used to prospect for himself. He’s been working for Luger for quite a while, but like most Wyoming men, he’d rather be independent. If it came down to it, he wouldn’t think twice about telling the Luger people to go fuck themselves. Hard as a branding iron and nobody you’d want to spend time with. But it’s a hell of a thing he’s doing down there.”