Stone Cold (2 page)

Nate asked them to back up to when they entered the main house.

“There was a keypad?” he asked, and slipped his notebook out from his pocket.

Nate asked D. Anita LittleWolf and Candy Alexander to close their eyes and recall what Thug One had done when he opened the door while it was still very fresh in their memory. LittleWolf said she couldn't see the pad from where she had stood on the porch, but Alexander smiled and described the scene. The keypad was metal and had three rows of numbers: one-two-three on top, four-five-six in the middle, seven-eight-nine on the third row, and a single zero button on the bottom. Nate had sketched out the sequence of the pad on a napkin and handed it over. Alexander closed her eyes in recall, and punched 4-2-2 and another button in the third row. It was either an eight or a nine, she said. She wasn't sure.

When Nate asked her how she could recall the sequence, she said she learned it by looking over the shoulders of rubes using the ATM
at the convenience store on the reservation across from the Custer Battlefield, where she used to work. Both women collapsed in laughter.

“It eventually got me fired,” Alexander squealed. “But not before I scored a few hundred dollars from
turistas
.”

Later, after two more rounds, LittleWolf invited him to follow them back to Crow Agency. “We've got a place where we can party,” she said. She looked into his eyes without a hint of guile, and for a moment he saw Alisha again.

“I'll have to pass,” he said.

“You don't like dark meat, either?” Alexander said, teasing him.

“Actually, I do,” Nate said. “But I don't like that term. There's no dignity in it.”

Chastened, they gathered their purses and shoes. He saw them to their pickup but didn't follow.

•   •   •

T
HE PREVIOUS
NIGHT,
Saturday, he'd stayed hidden with his spotting scope and noted the routine of the Scoggins compound. There had been no more women brought in, and there were no outside visitors. The three outside thugs went into the main house as the sun set, and apparently had dinner at the same time as Scoggins and Thug One. They remained there for an hour, then drifted away one by one to a guesthouse located between the main house and the gate. The lights remained on in the guesthouse until twelve-fifteen a.m.

Not surprisingly, there were two house staff who exited the main house after the three thugs had gone. A middle-aged man and woman crossed the grounds from the house to a tiny cottage on the edge of the property. Nate guessed by their dress that the woman was the
cook and the man was her assistant, and possibly an all-around maintenance staffer for the property. They held hands as they walked under an overhead light. Nate was charmed, and vowed to himself that no harm would come to them.

It took longer for Scoggins and Thug One to go to sleep. Light from the second-floor windows—Nate guessed it was Scoggins's room, since it took up the entire floor—remained on until one-thirty. A ground-floor light in the corner was off at midnight. It made sense that the primary bodyguard, Thug One, would be located between the front door and the stairs to Scoggins's floor. On the other corner of the main house opposite from Thug One, a dim light remained on the entire night. Nate guessed it was the security center, where someone sat awake with the CC monitors flickering from all the cameras on the grounds. He wondered about motion detectors, and assumed they were there somewhere.

With a choked-down mini Maglite clenched between his teeth, Nate drew a sketch on a fresh page of his notebook. He outlined the main house, the outbuildings, the guesthouse, the cottage, the wall, and the gate. Within the grounds, he drew circles with a
CC
inside to designate each camera. Then he scratched three large
X
's to symbolize the three thugs in the guesthouse, two more for Thug One and the security administrator in the main house, and a dollar sign for Scoggins himself.

•   •   •

N
ATE HAD
DETERMINED
by his surveillance there was no way to access the Scoggins property from the road without a small army, which he didn't have and didn't want. And there was no way to sneak
across it in the dark without being captured by video or confronted by bodyguards. If motion detectors were installed, Nate guessed they'd be concentrated between the wall and gate and the compound.

But like the other huge homes along the small strip of private land, Scoggins's home fronted the water. That way, he could sit inside with a drink behind car-sized sheets of glass and see the river as the sun set or rose. Guided fly fishermen could look at his place with envy and wonder as they floated by. The
ABSOLUTELY NO TRESPASSING,
DON'T EVEN THINK ABOUT GETTING OUT OF
YOUR BOAT
and
VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED
signs—plus the rotating closed-circuit video camera and five-strand razor-wire fence—kept them out.

Having the magnificent log house on open display to the river was an act of vanity.

And it was Nate's means of accessing the property.

Or, as his employer would say,
Go do some good.

•   •   •

N
ATE MANEUVERED
THE DRIFT BOAT
into the slow current that hugged the right bank of the river as he approached the Scoggins compound. Thick willows bent overhead and created a black shadow that he floated through. His senses were tuned up high, and he felt more than saw or heard the presence of the compound around the next slight bend to his right. He eased the boat against the willows until the hull thumped against the grassy bank and he reached up and grabbed a handful of branches to pull him in tighter. Slowly, quietly, he grasped the rope between his feet and lowered the anchor in back until it held and stopped the boat. He swung his boots over the gunwale and stood in the cold water. It was knee-deep.

He stayed hard against the wall of willows as he waded silently
downstream. After no more than a dozen steps, lights from the compound strobed through the brush and he knew that the stand of willows would end to reveal a long grassy slope all the way up to the log home. He was already behind the river fence. If he walked out in the clear, he could be seen by the closed-circuit camera that swept back and forth along the bank. It was mounted on the side of a river cottonwood and accompanied by a motion detector. Because of the roaming wildlife that hugged the river, Nate guessed the motion detector sounded off periodically throughout the night and would likely not alarm the technician inside. But a screen shot of him on a monitor certainly would.

In the shadows, Nate unbuckled his compression pack and reversed it so it covered his chest. He unzipped the top. For easy access, the items inside had been packed in the reverse order they were to be used.

For seven full minutes, Nate stood hidden in the river with his eyes closed, going over his plan. Not that something wouldn't go wrong—it always did. The trick was to try and anticipate the surprise problems as best he could and come up with options on the fly. His assignment was to kill Henry P. Scoggins III, but with a twist of his own. The twist was important to him.

And if his plans blew up once they were under way, he had to keep the endgame in mind. Even if the result was a bloodbath he hoped to avoid.

•   •   •

W
HEN HE
OPENED HIS EYES,
the night seemed lighter, brighter, and suddenly charged with anticipation. The river sounds behind him were louder and more full-throated. He could distinctly smell
the odors and perfumes of the world around him: the tinny smell of the moving river, the decayed mud that swirled in the current he'd stirred up along the bank, sage from the hills beyond the river, even cooking smells that lingered from the log house itself. He took a deep breath, held it, and slowly expelled it through his nostrils.

It was then he realized he was not alone in the stand of brush.

Less than three feet away was a heavy-bodied mule deer doe, her big eyes fixed on him and her large ears cupped in his direction. He instinctively reached across his body for his weapon, but paused as his hand gripped the butt of his revolver. Now that he saw her, he noticed he could smell her as well; musky, dank, sage on her breath. His movement had not spooked her out of the willows.

In falconry parlance, the state of
yarak
is defined
as
:
“full of stamina, well muscled, alert, neither too fat nor too thin, perfect condition for hunting and killing prey. This state is rarely achieved but a wonder to behold when observed.”

Nate was as close to
yarak
as a human could be.

The mule deer could help him. She could be his partner. He noticed she was trembling, ready to spring away.

He whispered, “Go.”

She did, and with a crash of snapped willows the deer bounded from the brush into the clearing.

Nate moved swiftly, emerging from the brush right behind her, keeping the trunk of the tree between him and the CC camera. The boxy snout of the camera was pointed downriver but rotating in his direction as he approached it. The deer veered away from the tree and continued bouncing—
boing-boing-boing
—along the fence. As Nate ran straight toward the camera, he reached into the top of his pack and unfurled a black cloth sack that he threw over both the camera
and mount before it could view him. It was like placing a hood over the head of a falcon, and he cinched the drawstring tight and stood back. The camera still rotated inside the sack, and it resembled the head of a man looking from side to side.

There was another distant snapping of willows and cattails as the mule deer vanished into the brush on the other side of the clearing. No doubt the motion detector had signaled the intrusion. Perhaps the camera had caught a fleeting look at the doe—his partner—as she bounded through its field of view.

“Thank you,” Nate said to the deer.

Then he stepped back into the shadows of the willows and checked his watch and waited.

•   •   •

I
T TOOK
TWENTY-TWO MINUTES,
much longer than he had estimated, before he heard the slamming of a door at the log house and heavy footfalls on their way down to the river. That it had taken the technician so long to realize his riverside camera was out confirmed to Nate that the man wasn't anticipating trouble. Or he was simply incompetent.
That bodes well,
Nate thought to himself. He hoped the other thugs would be as thick.

A harsh orb of white light from a flashlight moved down the sloping grass lawn in front of the technician. Nate squinted and turned his head and followed it in his peripheral vision. It was a trick he'd learned years before in the Third World for maintaining his night sight. A blast of the flashlight in his eyes would blind him momentarily if he let it happen, and he couldn't risk it.

He heard the footfalls stop less than twelve feet away, and heard a man say to himself, “What the
fuck
?”

Meaning the technician was illuminating the black hood covering the camera with the beam of his flashlight and probably wondering what it was.

Nate hurled himself from the willows like a blitzing linebacker going after the quarterback on his blind side. He dived low so his full weight would take out the legs of the technician.

The man made an
umpf
sound as he was hit and his flashlight flew into the air. The butt of a shotgun grazed Nate's shoulders as he took the man down, and he quickly turned and swarmed him and wrenched the long gun away and threw it aside.

Before the technician could cry out, Nate jammed a spare black hood into his mouth with his left hand and chopped hard across the bridge of the man's nose with his right. He heard the muffled crack of bone and smelled the hot metallic flood of blood.

The technician didn't put up much of a fight—that usually happened from the immediate result of a broken nose—and he went suddenly limp with shock and pain. Nate rolled the technician over on his stomach and bound his hands behind his back with one of the plastic zip-tie cuff restraints he kept in the side pocket of his pack. He pulled it tight. He did the same with the technician's ankles, and used an additional thirty-inch zip tie to hog-tie the man so he couldn't move. Nate had done it all very quickly, he thought, and with the speed and panache of a steer roper used to winning money at the rodeo.

Nate rifled through the technician's cargo pants and baggy shirt. There weren't any more weapons, and Nate found a cell phone, a small walkie-talkie (turned off), loose change, a billfold, two loose marijuana joints—
the reason it had taken him so long to respond?
—and tossed it all into the willows. The technician's clothing and thick hair smelled of weed.

Nate rocked back on his haunches and surveyed the slope up to the log home and the outbuildings beyond it. There was no sound or movement, no lights suddenly coming on from Thug One's level or from the guesthouse.

He dragged the limp body of the technician out of the moonlight and left him in the shadows of the willows, then ducked inside the cover to circumnavigate the compound from the wooded right side.

•   •   •

W
HEN
N
ATE
REEMERGED
from the tangle of downed timber and river cottonwoods, the guesthouse was before him. He paused and let his breathing slow, noting the lack of movement, sound, or lights from within the building. It was a log-constructed home in the same style of the main house, only much smaller and on one level. He kept the guesthouse between himself and one of the lawn-mounted cameras he'd noted during his reconnaissance and flattened himself against the exterior wall on the left side of the front door. It was a steel door in a steel frame but had been painted to look like wood. He could hear rhythmic snoring from inside.