Crazy Mountain Kiss (17 page)

She called her shot—“Ricardo Chicarelli, a.k.a. the Squid, third from the left”—the dart leapt from her hand and buried in the fugitive's right eye. She reached for the phone.

B
y ten in the morning they were six, seven counting Lothar. At first, Ettinger had been adamant about refusing Loretta Huntington's request to join the search party. If she was injured the department could be sued. But she'd finally relented on a purely practical point. Huntington could have six mountain horses trailered to the junction of U.S. 89 and the Shields River Road inside an hour, together with the tack and saddlebags packed with lunches and thermoses of coffee, against the two hours or more it would take to round up and trailer their own mounts. All Ettinger's party needed to do was bring clothing to brunt the weather—it would drop into the lower twenties by nightfall—and the emergency gear all members of search and rescue had at the ready. The team was gathered at the crossroads around a topo map of the western front of the Crazy Mountains, spread out on the hood of Ettinger's Cherokee, when two trucks from the Bar-4 arrived, the trainer, Charles Watt, pulling a four-horse trailer, Earl Hightower, the ranch manager, pulling a two-horse. Stranahan had not met Hightower and he looked the part of a ranch manager—black Wranglers belted under a comfortably ample middle, Carhartt jacket frayed at the cuffs, rancher-style hat pushed high on his forehead. He'd heard Sean wanted to interview him and said anytime.

The headlights of Etta Huntington's longbed Absaroka bobbed onto the road. Perfunctory handshakes all around, left-handed for Huntington, the men purposely not looking at the empty sleeve of her jacket.

“Largest gathering of non-tattooed individuals this side of Two Dot,” Walt said.

Harold Little Feather shrugged off his wool-lined jean jacket. He was wearing a flannel shirt with the arms cut off, elk tracks in blue ink circling his sculpted right biceps, weasel tracks his left.

“Our Native brother notwithstanding.”

Earl Hightower spoke up. “Charlie, don't you have a bit of jailhouse art here or there?”

“I might. I might not.”

“I got a heart on my boob,” Katie said.

“Thank you for sharing that with us,” Ettinger said. She rapped her knuckles on the hood. “Can we concentrate here?”

The truth was they were giddy. Manhunts brought up the heart rate. If your days were spent pushing a pencil, as too many of Ettinger's were, you lived for the open air and the track in the snow. It was one of the exhilarations of the job that attracted you to law enforcement in the first place, and that was experienced less often at every rung of the professional ladder.

“Here's what I'm thinking,” Ettinger said. “We'll trailer four horses to the cabin where Sean and Katie heard the shot. Four of us will mount up and take this trail here”—she pointed at the map—“up and over the bald ridge. Where it drops into the South Fork we split up, two heading downstream, two heading up. The other two horses we trailer to the Sunlight Creek trailhead, ride up that trail, then take the loop trail back under Black Mountain.” She waited for someone to object.

“The Sunlight road will be blown in.” The team's eyes turned to Huntington, who spoke from under the brim of an old felt Stetson. “Even if you can bust through, it's a downhill grade that last half mile, and with snow on the way, we got to think about getting out.” Her jacket was worn and her tin cloth pants had faded to the color of dirt. If you could ignore the sculpted planes of her face, she could have been any ranch woman of a certain type, long in the leg, broad in the shoulders, an inverted triangle in the saddle.

“What do you suggest?” Ettinger said.

“Take the other two horses up South Cottonwood, which is a better road, then ride them up to the divide that looks down onto the South Fork. That way you have riders strung out along two creeks and eight or nine miles of country. You'll never be more than an hour ride from each other if someone cuts track, and it's all good trail, so you can ride out at night if it comes down to that. There's water, tree belt shelter all along the route. That's where I'd camp if I had to survive a winter up there.”

“She makes a good point, Marth.” Walter Hess worked his Adam's apple.

Ettinger saw Harold nodding. In the mountains, he was her barometer.

“Okay then, we're agreed. How are your horses shod? I don't want to slide off a goddamn mountain.”

“They got snowball pads and tungsten grit shoes. All except my horse. He's got aluminum front shoes and nothing on the back. Does that answer your question?”

Sean saw that she'd been offended. Etta Huntington knew more about shoeing horses than the rest of them put together.

Martha grunted. “Since you suggested Cottonwood, Etta, I'm going to have you pair up with Harold and go that route. The radios are synched, but in case anyone changes channel by accident, we're all on seventeen.”

 • • • 

I
t took a little less than an hour to climb to the ridge, the horses straining against their chest straps. Ettinger rode ahead, pulling a string that included Stranahan, Hess, and Sparrow, with the shepherd trailing, his tail curved above the snow. On top they stopped to drink in the country, the forested ridges backdropped by jack-o'-lantern teeth. “Where did the shot come from?” Ettinger asked Stranahan.

“Not sure.”

“If you had to say?”

“It was a dull echo, like from way off. I think if it was from here it would have been a sharper report. It wouldn't have had two walls to make the echo.”

Ettinger's “Hmm” sounded skeptical. She touched the ribs of the horse and they switchbacked into the bottom where the South Fork of the Shields tinkled under glassy banks. The horses left it muddy, clopping through the ice and then climbing through spindly Engelmann spruce to the trail T-junction. So far the only tracks they had seen were snowshoe rabbit and a lone wolf.

“Remember what I said.” Ettinger nodded toward Walt as they rested the horses. “You find a track, you radio it in before anyone follows.” Hess pinched the brim of his hat and he and Katie Sparrow turned south, heading upstream.

Ettinger waited until they were swallowed by the forest. She shook her head. “This country can't get more than two, three hours of sunlight at the solstice. You'd have to be crazy to spend a winter here.”

“You think we're wasting our time, don't you?”

“If McKutchen kidnapped Cindy and she escaped from him, you'd think he'd get as far away from the scene as he could. He'd expect us to come looking. He wouldn't know she had died in the cabin.”

“You think that's what played out here? He kidnapped Cindy and she managed to escape?”

“Or she ran away to live with him and changed her mind. This guy, what do you think the chances are he's had a woman in the last ten years? Suddenly there's this pretty young thing paying attention to him. Forget vision quests; here's his spirit animal standing right in front of him, ripe as an August cantaloupe. Men don't think with their brains—use your head, Stranny.”

Ettinger flexed her inner thigh and the horse turned north and clopped up the trail. The snow was deeper than they'd expected, the rivulets iced over—winter still had a few teeth in its head this high. The trail snaked through forest to ford a jump-across feeder creek, then left the bottom to follow that creek, climbing through solid
timber as the afternoon waned. Columns of steam blew from the horses' nostrils. A few flakes of snow sifted out of a leaden sky.

“Whoa there.” Ettinger drew her mount to a halt and leaned over the saddle. “What do we have here? Is this your bear hunter?”

The track, or rather the line of tracks, approached from the west and turned along the trail. Stranahan dismounted and put his boot inside one of the prints. It was a mite bigger than Sean's size ten hiking boot, which meant it was a mite smaller; the tracks looked to have thawed and refrozen several times over the past few days, growing a shoe size in the process.

Ettinger said. “That's not much of a foot for a man called Bear Paw.”

Sean grudgingly agreed. “Just because someone else was hunting here doesn't mean the shot Katie and I heard wasn't our man's.”

“No, but I think we're going to have to call it a day. By the time we get back to the junction it's going to be dark and anyone as green in the saddle as you are is a paraplegic waiting to happen. We'll come back up here another time.”

Stranahan's nod was glum. Another time meant never.

“Buck up,” Martha said. She dismounted to stand beside him. “Let's eat a sandwich before we turn around.” She rummaged through a saddlebag and cut a sandwich in half with her knife. It was elk meatloaf with ketchup and American cheese. They wiped snow from a log and sat down, chewing in silence.

“Damn that's good,” Martha said, wiping at her mouth. “You know why there's all those cooking shows on TV now, Stranny? Everybody polishing their knives?” She had just started calling him Stranny. It was meant affectionately, but Sean knew it was also a way of keeping him at arm's length.

“No, Martha, enlighten me.”

“It's because food's the new sex. It's just as good but without the mess. You don't wake up the next morning smelling some Neanderthal lying next to you, thinking, ‘What the hell was I thinking?' Nobody knocks on your door to tell you she's pregnant. Nobody calls a
month down the road to say, ‘I hate you.' You just brush your teeth and go to bed.”

“Yeah, but nobody calls to say, ‘I love you,' either.”

Martha muttered, “Hopeless romantic,” and washed her sandwich down with a swig of water.

“Do you smell that?”

Martha replaced the cap of her water bottle. “I smell our horses.” Her nostrils flared.

“No, it's smoke. The wind shifted, it's gone now.” Stranahan pulled a tuft of old man's beard hanging from a spruce bough and let it fall, the dried moss sifting down the hill. Again, he smelled the smoke. “What's up there?”

Ettinger brought up the map screen on her GPS. “There's a bench of timber about six hundred feet above us. The trail switchbacks to the north of it.”

“Bench sounds like a place for a camp.”

Martha nodded.

“But if we ride any closer, he'll be able to hear the horses whinny.”

Ettinger nodded again. “We'll tie them off.” She unholstered her radio and turned the volume knob down before transmitting. Got Walt, waited while he punched in the coordinates. “We're all the way to the headwall, Marth. We can be there but it's going to be at least an hour.”

“We can't wait that long.”

“I don't like you going in alone.”

“I'm not alone.”

“No offense to Sean, but he doesn't have the experience. Remember what happened with old man Nichols? The guy he shot didn't make it. Let's not have any déjà vu.”

Ettinger said she'd be careful and signed off.

“Nichols?” Sean said.

“Self-described mountain man, abducted a girl to make a wife for his son. Things went sideways. I'll tell you another time.” She tried to
raise Harold, but got no answer. “On the other side of the divide,” she said. “They couldn't get here before dark anyway.”

She tied off the horses, marked the waypoint, and drew her .30-06 from the scabbard. Raised one eyebrow.
Here we go.

It took thirty minutes to climb to the bench, the snow patchy where the sun had its way, the smoke scent faint and intermittent, then heavy in their nostrils. Stranahan pointed a finger into the flanking pines, where smoke hung like a layer of fog over a thicket of second-growth lodgepoles. No flames visible, but he could see a shifting column of gray where a fire had burned out. Ettinger brought up her binoculars. “I can see a rifle leaning against a tree.”

“Is it a muzzle-loader?”

“It's got a long barrel. I think so.”

“He has to be close.”

Martha nodded. She unsnapped the strap over the hammer of her revolver and handed Stranahan the Ruger .357. “Only if he goes for the weapon. Stay three paces behind, step right in my tracks.”

Stranahan felt blood hammering at his left temple. He rubbed at it and nodded. Thirty yards into the thicket. Forty. A blur of wings as two jays fluttered into a tree. A shelter inched into view. It was a lean-to, the roof constructed from branches tilted against a ridgepole and thatched with pine boughs, the fire built in front, the fire out but the coals still had color. A sooty coffee can was suspended on a stick angled into the ground. Granite boulders the size of medicine balls had been piled up behind the fire to reflect heat. Martha and Sean exchanged a glance. Only someone of enormous strength could have moved such rocks.

The brass of the patch box on the rifle glinted dully in the evening gloom. Stranahan immediately recognized it as the muzzle-loader Cinderella had shot in the video. He joined Ettinger before the open front of the shelter, which was about twelve feet long and had elevated sleeping platforms, one twice the size of the other. A modicum of privacy was provided by an elk hide suspended from the roof,
separating the bedrooms, if that's what you could call them. The beds were quilted with layers of pine boughs for cushioning. Animal skins draped over them, mostly deer, but one white skin from a mountain goat, presumably the one the eagle had knocked off the cliff. Another hide had once clothed a cinnamon black bear.

Against the side wall of the larger room was a crude bench made from a slab of pine. There was a draw knife for working hides. Bits of leather and a lot of shaved wood curls about. Stranahan examined a box of various feathers, together with some small hooks and coarse thread that looked like it had been unwoven from a red sweater. Fly-tying materials? He looked up, saw half a dozen crudely tied flies with their hooks sticking into the underside of the roof thatching. Bear Paw Bill was a fly fisherman.

“It doesn't appear that they were sleeping together,” Sean said.