Stone Cold (12 page)

Whip looked up, and Nate saw his face for the first time. He was young, boyish, pale, with high cheekbones, brown hair brushed straight back, a red slash of a mouth parting to reveal perfect white teeth, and close-set, piercing eyes.

“Go,” Whip said. “Ease out and don't burn rubber.”

Nate started the van, pulled out, and drove the half-block through the green light on Columbus and beyond. There were no shouts, no sirens, no one peering out the apartment windows or gathering on the stoops of the brownstones.

He heard the sound of a body bag being unfurled, and felt the van rock slightly as the body was rolled into it. The zipper sang as it was closed, and within half a minute, Whip was in the passenger seat, reaching for the buckle of the seat belt.

“I got him into the bag before he bled on the floor,” Whip said. “Still, we'll need to wipe down every inch of this van.”

Nate nodded, and noticed Whip still had the gun in his hand, although it was resting on his right thigh.

“You can put that away now,” Nate said.

Whip reacted with a slight grin. “I will when I'm ready. You worried?”

“No.”

“Are you wondering about this weapon?”

“A little.”

“Ruger LCR double-action .22,” Whip said. “Hammerless, so it doesn't snag on clothes. Eight rounds in the cylinder. I load the first four with .22 smalls. Four through eight in the cylinder are .22 long-rifle hollow-points. Not that I've ever had to use four through eight.”

“Why .22 smalls?” Nate asked.

“No one ever uses them anymore, but they're deadly little rounds at point-blank range. Very little noise, as you noticed, so no need for a suppressor. And the bullets don't exit the skull, so there's no messy exit wound. The slugs penetrate and just bounce around in there through the brain like bees in a jar.”

He paused and looked down at his gun. Whip said, “No spent casings ejected, of course, because they stay in the cylinder.”

Nate grunted.

Whip said, “I hear you use a wheel gun as well, but a hell of a lot bigger.”

“Yup.”

“Bigger isn't always better.”

“No, just bigger.”

Whip seemed to be weighing what he said next, then apparently let it go. In a few minutes, he addressed the inside of the windshield without looking over.

“Do you know where we're going in Jersey?”

“Yes.”

Whip withdrew his cheap phone and pressed out a ten-digit number and brought it up to his ear.

“It's done,” he said. “We'll be there in an hour.”

He listened for a moment, then terminated the call.

“What did he say?” Nate asked.

“He said I just did some good.”

“Does he always say that?”

“Yes, he does,” Whip said softly, while he shoved the Ruger into his outside jacket pocket. “Because he believes it.”

“Do you?” Nate asked.

“Take the George Washington Bridge,” Whip said, gesturing ahead.

“I said I knew how to get there.”

“I've got one question,” Whip said after a few moments. “Do we want to get to know each other or not?”

Nate wasn't sure how to answer.

•   •   •

T
WENTY MINUTES
OF SILENCE LATER
—Nate was grateful Whip didn't mind silence, either—at the Hackensack exit onto I-80 from the New Jersey Turnpike, Nate noticed in his rearview mirror that Jonah Bank was sitting up in the back, listing unevenly from side to side inside the body bag, as if he were drunk.

“Hey,” Nate said.

“What?”

Nate chinned over his shoulder, and Whip turned around and said, “Oh shit.”

Then, without hesitation, Whip unbuckled his seat belt and drew the pistol and turned in his seat and extended his arm toward the swaying head inside the body bag. The single report was much louder than the previous four, and Bank's dead body flopped straight back and landed with a thump.

“That never happens,” Whip said, turning back around and
buckling his seat belt. “Really, it doesn't. We'll not speak of this again,” he said, shaking his head.

“That's why I use a bigger gun,” Nate said.

•   •   •

O
N THE
N
EW
J
ERSEY
state highway 208 North, Nate said, “Do you know who commissioned this?”

“No,” Whip said quickly. “I never ask, and I don't want or need to know. And, frankly, I don't care. Jonah Bank was the lowest of the low, the way he fleeced all those old Jews. He had a lot of enemies, and he probably had some friends who didn't want him talking.”

“So you never ask?”

“Never. I know by the time the job gets to me, it's been fully vetted. All I ask is to have enough time to do the recon properly and figure out the vulnerability. Once I'm satisfied I've done both, and only then, do I move.”

Nate asked, “Have you ever gone after someone who might be innocent?”

“No,” Whip said, as if the question were ridiculous. “Never. That's not what we do.”

Nate nodded, but he wasn't sure he was satisfied with the answer.

Whip seemed agitated, though, by the question itself. He leaned forward in his seat and turned his head toward Nate. “What I can't figure out is just why you're even here.”

“Me either,” Nate said. “I guess because he asked me.”

“But why? We do three or four operations a year. Each one requires lots of time, money, and planning. This one took two and a half months. I've never botched a single operation and we've attracted zero attention or heat. The reason it's always gone so perfectly is
because the target is completely vetted and we don't try to do too much or rush things . . .”

Nate noticed that as Whip spoke more heatedly, his accent became more pronounced, and he said
thangs
.

“We keep our heads down, is what I'm saying,” Whip continued. “We stay under the radar and do good work. But all of a sudden he feels the need to recruit some kind of ponytailed nature boy . . . I don't know what is going on. No offense, of course.”

“Of course,” Nate said through gritted teeth.

Whip said, “Bringing you on means one of two things. One is that he thinks I'm losing my edge, but that doesn't make any sense. I
have not lost my edge
, as you can see from what happened back in the city. So if he's looking to replace me, he's got to have another reason than that.”

Whip raised his hand in the air with two fingers extended.

“The other possibility is he wants to expand operations, double or triple the number of jobs. But more people and more jobs means more chances of exposure. That's too many damned pots to watch over for anyone, and something's going to boil over, if you catch my drift.”

“I don't know the answer,” Nate said.

“I'm sure as hell going to find out,” Whip said, sitting back. “I liked it the way it was. I don't need help, and we don't need another operator. That's just what I think. If it comes down between you and me, well, it'll have to be you. No offense, of course.”

“Of course.”

•   •   •

H
ILL
T
OP
A
IRPORT
was three miles north of West Milford. It was a tiny, privately owned airstrip without a control tower or normal
nighttime operations. Nate parked the van on the shadowed side of a private hangar and they wiped down the interior and exterior of the van and stripped the vinyl
ABRAHAM'S FLORIST SHOP
signage from the sides. Both broke their cell phones into pieces and threw them inside the body bag along with the cleaning rags and zipped it back up. Whip checked for spots of blood on the pavement since he'd shot a hole in the bag's fabric, but said it was clean.

It was a cold night and moisture hung in the air to make it seem colder. Nate could see his breath, and his fingers and toes were starting to get numb.

They heard the airplane approaching at low altitude and it landed in the dark and taxied their way.

Nate and Whip grasped the opposite ends of the body bag and carried it toward the small plane.

Before they hefted the bag inside, Nate said to Whip: “It won't be me.”

Medicine Wheel County, Wyoming

Joe Pickett drove north on U.S. 85 with Daisy sleeping on the passenger seat and a huge crate filled with 150 full-grown ring-necked pheasants in the back. Daisy was exhausted because she'd spent the first hour and a half staring at them through the back window.

Delivering the birds was the excuse Director LGD and her management team had come up with for Joe to enter Medicine Wheel County without suspicion, once Rulon had briefed her on the special assignment. The northeast corner of the state had had a particularly harsh winter the year before that had annihilated the pheasant population, and it was necessary to supplement the Black Hills with birds so the hunters wouldn't gripe. Jim Latta, the local game warden, was in charge of releasing the newcomers that had been raised at the state bird farm in Hawk Springs; thus, it would appear legitimate for Joe and Latta to link up. That was the idea, anyway, Joe thought. Latta was unaware of the real reason Joe was coming.

Director LGD's brain trust had come up with two cover stories for Joe's sojourn. The first was under a departmental directive to double the number of public walk-in hunting areas on private land by the next fiscal year. Joe had established several in his district by working with local landowners, but there were none yet in Medicine Wheel County. Joe would supposedly use his experience to help Latta to further the directive.

Unfortunately, the second cover story meant he had to drive his truck four and a half hours southeast, load the crate of nervous pheasants with the help of the state biologists, and turn north again, skirting the eastern edge of the state.

The landscape changed character as he drove, from flat farmland to arid steppe. There had been an unusual cold spell and early winter snows the week before that still lingered under overcast skies. Skeletal cottonwoods in the eastern valleys had lost their leaves but were furred with frost even in the late afternoon. It was stark and white and rolling in every direction, and there was little oncoming traffic once he passed Mule Creek Junction and continued north. A single mangy coyote loped parallel to the highway for a while, but then turned as if it were ashamed of something when Joe slowed down to look at it.

Joe had never seen the vast stretches of Mongolia, but he guessed they would look similar under the pall of early winter. He knew the area consisted mainly of huge ranches that were once multigenerational but were now under out-of-state ownership. Scattered, frost-covered Angus cattle watched him drive past with dullards' eyes.

North of Lusk, he'd pulled over to the side of the highway to wrap a canvas sheet from his gear box around the crate of birds. He secured it with nylon straps. The wind was cold and icy, and he feared
it would freeze the birds to death before he could deliver them. Daisy watched from the rear window with twin threads of drool stringing from her mouth to the top of the bench seat.

Ten miles later, the highway turned pink. He'd once heard the reason was because the early road crews had used burned underground coal for a base, but the pink wasn't cheery or bright—just strange and otherworldly.

He noted how pockets of isolated pronghorn antelope blended in perfectly in the terrain with its swaths of snow on sparse brown grass. It was almost impossible to see them unless the entire herd moved at once, because they seemed to be a part of the landscape itself.

After he crossed Hat Creek, he looked around for miles without seeing a single structure, and he felt like he was alone on the surface of a distant uninhabited planet. The radio station he'd been listening to began to crackle with static during the newsbreak—something about notorious New York financier Jonah Bank's disappearance after he failed to show up in court. It was one of those stories that seemed to consume the eastern media but had no impact or relation to anything in Joe's world. He'd not followed the story closely except to note that in Wyoming there was an actual Jonah Bank that was a bank. He reached down and shut the radio off.

He felt a pang of guilt for being lifted up by the pure solitude, with the open road and a new assignment out ahead of him. For brief stretches of time, he pushed aside the stress generated by Erik Young and Dallas Cates and thought about a certain Wyoming rancher and what he'd learned about him.

All around him was white isolation and vistas stretched out as far as he could see.

He loved it.

•   •   •

J
OE HAD
OPENED THE FILE
Coon lent him at three-thirty that morning because he couldn't sleep. He'd made coffee and sat at his desk in his tiny side office in his robe and had read through the pages in order, trying to make some kind of sense of them.

He found Wolfgang Templeton fascinating. What would cause a man who had it all—it seemed—to give up and move on when everything appeared to be going his way? And if the FBI speculation was valid, weren't there hundreds of other lucrative opportunities available to Templeton that didn't involve creating a murder-for-hire gig? Nothing Joe read about Templeton suggested recklessness or anarchy. In every way, the man seemed measured, honorable, and professional—an American success story. Joe liked those. He'd never envied successful people or wanted them brought down—unless, of course, they turned out to be poachers. Or worse.

As he thumbed through the file, he found a photocopy of a small story in
Investor's Business Daily
about Templeton's last days in finance. Coon
had not mentioned it during their meeting. It was called “CEO's Bitter Last Hurrah,” and it had appeared the week Templeton suddenly retired.

According to the item, quoting from an anonymous source on the inside of the firm, Templeton had called his senior executives and board of directors together for an emergency meeting, where he declared, “Our free enterprise system is broken and can't be fixed.” The source said Templeton was angry and blamed the state of the economy on “untouchable elites” and “crony capitalists working hand-in-glove with corrupt politicians.” There was no point anymore, he said,
of “competing fairly and with a well-tuned moral compass” because the deck was stacked. According to the insider, Templeton said he could no longer serve as chairman, but would “do the right thing” outside the system. He gave no clues what that meant.

Joe sat back and said,
“Hmmmm.”

•   •   •

B
UT THERE
WAS OBVIOUSLY A REASON
why Wolfgang Templeton had chosen to relocate in the most remote and economically depressed part of Wyoming—and it certainly wasn't because the cattle business was booming. If Templeton had a long-term reason for choosing Medicine Wheel County—and he might—Joe couldn't figure out what it was.

Unless, of course, Templeton simply wanted to be left alone. There was nothing wrong with that, and Wyomingites tended to give new people the space they desired and not stick their noses where they didn't belong. Joe felt a little uncomfortable doing exactly that on behalf of the governor.

Unless, of course, Templeton
was
a killer.

•   •   •

C
OON'S CASE
FILE
didn't reveal much more about the victims than Joe had been told.

Jonah Lamprecht had disappeared in Saint Louis in 2004.

Brandon Fonnesbeck had vanished off the coast of Long Island in 2008.

Henry P. Scoggins III had been abducted—or walked away—from his fishing lodge in Montana the month before.

Several threads connected them, but tenuously. All the victims were extremely wealthy and well connected, and ran with a certain elite international crowd. No traceable ransom demands were ever received by their families or loved ones. Most important, none of their bodies had ever been found. The only dubious connection was that the name Wolfgang Templeton had been brought up peripherally in each case.

Joe shook his head. It was weak, very weak. So weak that he would never take the circumstantial evidence in the file to his own county prosecutor, Dulcie Schalk. Dulcie would hand the file back and tell him she needed more. There were
years
between the incidents—as long as five between Fonnesbeck and Scoggins, which certainly didn't lend weight to the idea of a busy hit man's schedule.

But the FBI, with everything they had on their plates these days, had invested time and interest to build the file. They must have reasons beyond what Joe could see, he thought. It was possible Coon didn't even know what the reasons were.

Joe wondered if there were additional disappearances of similar people that weren't included in the case file—maybe even scores of missing persons where the name Wolfgang Templeton simply hadn't come up. If the FBI's suspicions were correct, there likely were, he thought. And if the whole thing was a wasteful fishing expedition . . .

But there was the DCI agent, whose name had been redacted from the incident report. The man had been sent to Medicine Wheel County to find out what he could about Templeton, and within a few days there had been a fire in his room that killed him.

And there was that photo of the man who could possibly be Nate.

•   •   •

T
HERE WAS
A SMALL SIGN
vandalized by bullet holes that read
ENTERING MEDICINE WHEEL COUNTY
as Joe crossed the Cheyenne River. Within twenty minutes, the landscape changed once again. The flats began to fold into gently sloping hills and then fold again, as if they were a floor rug being jammed into a corner. The folds led into heavily wooded small mountains. The thick spruce that covered the hills was dark under the leaden sky—thus the name Black Hills—and sharp ravines knifed through the surface and chalky bluffs jutted out from the timber like thrust jaws.

It was beautiful and complex country, Joe thought, mountainous, but not severe and dangerous like his Bighorns. The terrain was oddly inviting and accessible, with wide meadows bordered by hillocks. The road itself changed from a straightaway into a winding pink road that hugged the contours of the foothills and sometimes plunged over blind rises.

He glimpsed some structures in the timber as he drove, mainly older houses tucked behind the first wall of trees. They were well situated but looked ramshackle and abandoned. The only homes he saw that were occupied were marked with collections of old vehicles and newer four-wheel-drive pickups scattered around their lots. Wood smoke curled from blackened chimneys and dispersed in the upper branches of the spruce trees before filtering into the close sky.

He didn't slow to read the old markers on the side of the highway as he drove—he could do that later—but he was left with the impression of a place that had once been vibrant and filled with energy and ambition but now held only testimonials to failed enterprise. He
did slow down, though, to let a clumsy flock of wild turkeys cross the road. They waddled like fat, drunk chickens.

•   •   •

M
EDICINE
W
HEEL
D
ISTRICT
game warden Jim Latta said he'd meet him two miles south of Wedell, one of three small communities that still existed in Medicine Wheel County, the others being Medicine Wheel itself and Sundance on the far western border.

Latta's green Game and Fish pickup was parked just off the highway on an old two-track trail at the bottom of a wooded grade. As Joe slowed to join him, Latta waved for him to follow.

The road was narrow and muddy, and twisted through the timber. At times, Joe couldn't see Latta's truck because the trees were so dense, but he knew the game warden was ahead of him because there were no other exit roads. Finally, after grinding up a sharp rise, he found Latta's truck parked in a grassy opening and Latta himself climbing out and pulling on a green wool Filson vest identical to the one Joe wore.

Joe parked next to Latta's truck and let Daisy out to romp and relieve herself.

Latta approached with his right hand extended and a sly smile on his face, and as Joe shook his dry and meaty hand Latta said, “Long time, Mr. Pickett.”

“It has been. When was it, the Wyoming Game Wardens Association dinner a few years back?”

“Seven years, I think,” Latta said. “That's the last time I went.”

“Seven years,” Joe echoed.

“Time flies,” Latta said. “So, you brought me some birds.”

“Yup,” Joe said, clamping on his hat. “Let's pull that canvas off so you can see 'em.”

Jim Latta was a few inches shorter than Joe, thick through the shoulders and chest, with a large round head, cherubic cheeks, and a gunfighter's sweeping handlebar mustache. His eyes didn't give much away as he spoke—he had the cop's deadeye down to perfection—and his voice was surprisingly high for his bulldog features. His badge said he was warden number six, and he had ten years seniority on Joe. Although he'd no doubt moved from district to district around the state as Joe had in his early years, Latta had been in the Medicine Wheel District since Joe had been hired. Latta was a fixture in the northeast corner of the state, and rarely ventured out.