Free Fire (40 page)

Another turn of the hallway, and then a distinct smell of food cooking. Another turn, and they could see a band of yellow light from beneath a door at the end of Bat’s Alley.

Nate turned in the darkness, whispered, “We’ve got him.”

Joe nodded, his shoulders tense, heart thumping. He slipped his Glock out and, as silently as he could, worked the slide. From behind the door, he could hear hissing and something boiling or bubbling. And someone humming. Joe recognized the tune as “Mambo No. 5.” Joe hated that song.

At the door at the end of the hallway, Nate paused, mouthed, “Do we knock?”

Joe nodded yes, and Nate rapped on the door. Although he did it gently, the sounds seemed startling and rude. The hummingstopped.

Nate knocked again.

Joe heard shuffling and saw the knob turn and the door swing open.

A man stood there wild-eyed, his mouth agape. He looked like a well-fed yearling bear—short, stout, heavy, with long hair sticking out at all angles from a perfectly round bowling ball of a head. He wore a walrus mustache that had taken over most of his cheeks. There was a gun in his hand but it was pointed down.

“Bob Olig, I presume?” Joe said.

Olig worked his mouth but no sound came out. His eyes were fixed on the gaping muzzle of Nate’s .454, which was six inches from his eyebrow.

“Drop the weapon,” Nate hissed.

Olig dropped the gun with a clunk, and Nate kicked it across the room.

“You don’t get a lot of visitors, I’d guess,” Joe said.

“I get
no
visitors,” Olig said, his voice throaty, as if he hadn’t used it for a while. “Who
are
you?”

“My name’s Joe Pickett. I’m a Wyoming game warden. This is Nate Romanowski.”

Olig shifted his eyes from Nate’s gun to Joe. “I’ve heard of you. Cutler told me.”

Joe nodded. The connection was made.

“I’m making some moose stew,” he said. “Would you like some?”

“No, thank you,” Joe said, thinking that any other time he would have accepted because he liked moose.

They went inside, but there was barely enough room for the three of them. The room was narrow, with an extremely high ceiling. Two Coleman lamps hung from metal hooks, hissing. A camping stove burned in the middle of the floor, heating a dented aluminum pot filled with the bubbling dark moose stew. A cot and sleeping bag took up a wall on the inside, and there was a college dorm-like bookcase built with planks and bricks. Tacked to the walls were a map of Yellowstone, a laminated cover sheet of the Kyoto Accords with a red circle drawn over it and a slash through it, and several ripped and puckered magazinepages featuring the actress Scarlett Johansson.

“I get lonely,” Olig said, flushing. Then, “I don’t get it. What are you guys doing here?”

Joe said, “We came for you.”

“You need to come with us,” Nate said.

Something passed over Olig’s face, and he stepped back as far as he could in the small room. “I’m not going anywhere,” he said.

“Sure you are,” Nate said, growling.

“We’ve got Clay McCann,” Joe said.

Olig’s eyes flashed. “He’s here?”

“Downstairs,” Joe said.

“I want to kill that prick.”

Joe nodded. “I assumed that. Otherwise, I’d guess you would have been long gone by now.”

“Damned right.”

Nate shot a puzzled look at Joe.

“You were friends with Mark Cutler, weren’t you?” Joe asked. “He gave you the room up here while you two tried to figure out why McCann shot your friends from Minnesota, right?”

Olig nodded.

“And you two figured out that there were people in the Park Service in on the crime, right?”

He nodded again.

“So you stayed here until the two of you could get enough evidence on who was on which side and you could turn them in. But they got to Cutler, and you figured you were next.”

“I thought you might be them,” Olig said, gesturing to his gun on the floor.

“Nope,” Joe said. “We want to get them too. And we’ve set up a trap here tonight using McCann and you as bait. We want them to come in and incriminate themselves so we can throw the whole lot of them into prison.”

“This is a dream come true,” Olig said, rubbing his bear-cub hands. “But you need to leave me alone in a room with Clay McCann. Five minutes. That’s all I need. I’ve been dreaming of this for months.”

“You’ll need to stand in line for that,” Joe said.

“I should be first. He killed my friends.”

Joe shrugged, conceding the point.

Nate turned from Olig to Joe. “We can’t stand here talking all night.”

“I know,” Joe said. “I want to make sure Mr. Olig is with us.”

Olig said, “You bet your ass I am.”

As the three of them went down the hallway, Joe asked, “Besides revenge, why did you stay?”

Olig sighed. “Guilt. Then fear. I should have been at Bechler with my friends that day, but I was pissed at Rick. I didn’t like his idea about going national with the bio-mining protest. Since I’ve been up here I’ve found myself thinking of things differently.The black and white I used to see when it comes to environmentalissues had turned gray. I figured, shit, we might find a cure for cancer with those microbes, or something. We shouldn’t automatically oppose everything. I mean, what makes us so fucking smart? We’re the beneficiaries of people before us figuring out shit that makes our lives better or helps us live longer. Why stop now, just because we think we know it all? The last thing I thought about, though, was that those microbes could be used for energy development.”

“So you figured that out, huh?”

“Not me,” Olig said. “Cutler had his suspicions. We all knew about the flamers, but Cutler was a geologist and thought about
why
they burned. He also told me he was going to show you. That was the night before he was killed.”

“So you saw the message to us?” Joe asked.

“Yeah,” Olig said. “I prowl around at night when everyone’s sleeping. Otherwise, I’d go crazy in that little room. I scared some guests a few times though,” he said, chuckling at the recollection.

“Do you know how far the conspiracy goes within the Park Service?” Joe asked.

“No. But Cutler was starting to think it went pretty high. At least to the chief ranger.”

“Bingo,” Joe said.

“And of course Layborn is involved, that prick. He spent
way
too much time asking about me around here after my friends got killed. He has informants, but luckily none of them knew to give me away. But I’ll tell you, I spent a lot of sleepless nights in that room back there.”

“Was this before or after your dates with Scarlett Johansson?” Nate asked.

“Hey,” Olig said, “that’s cruel.”

“I’m a cruel guy,” Nate said.

“So here’s what we need you to do,” Joe said, interrupting.

They were nearly to the lobby when Joe heard the radio crackle on his jacket. He plucked it off and turned up the volumeslightly.

“I see someone coming,” the FBI ranger stationed on the road said. “They’re driving one of those snow coach things they use in the winter up here. ETA is ten to fifteen minutes.”

“Joe, did you hear that?” Portenson asked from somewhere.

“Got it.”

“We need you down here now.” His voice sounded shaky.

“On our way,” Joe said. “And we’ve got Bob Olig with us. He’s agreed to help.”

“Jesus Christ,”
Portenson said.

31

In the darkness of the gift shop adjacent to the lobby, Joe crouched down behind shelves of stuffed bears and snow globes and watched through the window as the snow coach descended the hill from the highway interchange toward the Old Faithful Inn. The boxy vehicle ran on steel tracks and was lit up with red running lights. Its headlights illuminated the swirling snow in front of it. Soon, he could hear the motor and clanking of the tracks. He got a close glimpse of it as the snow coach maneuvered under the overhang, but he couldn’t tell how many people were inside. While he doubted there was enough snow accumulation outside to make the snow coach essential, he guessed they had erred on the side of caution when they chose to bring it.

Portenson, Nate, Ashby, Olig, and McCann also huddled in the gift shop. One of McIlvaine’s assault team crouched behind the front counter, watching the black-and-white video monitor, switching smoothly between cameras one, two, and three. Joe couldn’t see the snipers behind the railing on the second level, but he knew they were there. McIlvaine checked in with each of them, and they either whispered or clicked a response on their radios.

Joe thought,
The bad guys don’t have a chance in hell to get out of this one.

He looked over to see Olig glaring at McCann with naked hatred. McCann seemed oblivious to it. He looked bulky and nonthreatening in his parka. They’d both been briefed; both had agreed to perform their roles.

As if finally feeling the intensity of Olig’s death stare, McCannturned to him, asked, “You must be Bob Olig.”

“The only one you didn’t kill that day,” Olig said.

McCann shrugged. “It wasn’t anything personal.”

Olig started to reach for McCann but was stopped by Ashby. “Later,” Ashby said.

Portenson said to McCann, “Don’t fuck this up or I’ll do more than rip your ear off.”

Again, McCann shrugged. Joe watched him carefully. If anything, McCann looked calm, which unnerved Joe. Was the lawyer planning something, trying once again to stay ahead of everyone around him?

McIlvaine’s voice came over the radio: “Everybody ready? My guy in the woods says they’re getting out of the vehicle. He counts four men.”

McCann smiled at Olig. “Showtime,” he said.

With that, the lawyer sauntered across the lobby toward the blazing fireplace. Olig walked stiff-legged behind him. Joe guessed Olig was scared out of his mind, as Joe would be in the same circumstances.

The lawyer turned one of the big rocking chairs around and sat down, his back to the fire, framed by it. Olig stood nervouslyoff to the side where, if necessary, he could duck and hide behind a stone column.

Joe felt his heart race and tried to keep his breathing steady. He flicked his eyes from the monitor to the lobby outside the window, as if trying to decide whether to watch what was about to happen for real or on TV.

The heavy front door squeaked as it opened a few inches. A curl of snow blew in.

“Come on in,” McCann called. “It’s warmer in here.”

The brain trust of EnerDyne Corporation entered the Old Faithful Inn.

Layborn was first, slipping through the door rapidly and flatteninghimself against the wall near the door, weapon drawn and aimed at McCann with two hands. The ranger flicked his eyes around the room, trying to see if anyone else was there. As planned, he could see no one else in the dark.

“Clear,” Layborn barked. James Langston, Layton Barron, and Chuck Ward followed. All wore heavy winter suits. All glanced around suspiciously. When Langston recognized Bob Olig standing near the fireplace, he cursed.

“Yeah,” Olig said, “I’m still here.”

“So,” McCann said, “did you finally bring my money?”

Barron said yes at the exact same time Ward said no. Joe cringed at their lack of coordination.

“What was that?” McCann said.

“We brought it,” Barron lied, as Ward deferred. “Does this mean you haven’t contacted the FBI?”

“Oh, I contacted them,” McCann said. “They’re on their way. I was hoping we could come to terms before they get here.”

The FBI microphones were good, Joe thought. These guys were good at this kind of technical stuff. He could even hear Langston mumble to Ward out of McCann’s earshot, “Not in this storm they aren’t.”

“It can all still work, gentlemen,” McCann said cheerfully. “It’s not too late to come to terms.”

“What do you mean?” Ward asked. Ward looked anxious, scared, looking for a way out, something he could grasp. Joe stared at him with morbid fascination. It seemed so odd to see him in this light.

“You pay me what you owe me and let me run the operation from here on out,” McCann said. “You guys have really screwed everything up with your endless plotting and meetings. You’re like the worst kind of mid-level managers trying to launch some crappy brand of soap. You overthink everything and make poor decisions, like isolating me. I’m your best asset, and always have been. That you couldn’t see that shows you’re a bunch of amateurs, that you’re out of your league in a game played for keeps. None of you has ever faced a jury or a judge when it’s just you, naked, standing there. None of you knows how to think on your feet.”

The four of them were momentarily entranced by him. Joe was too. McCann had decided to take this in another direction.

“That bastard,”
Portenson whispered.
“He’s out of control.”

In the lobby, whorls of fire roiling behind him, McCann said, “If we’re going to get all of this behind us and make a lot of money, which is all I’ve ever cared about and the only reason I associated with dolts like you, I need you idiots to shut up, quit having meetings, and listen to me. We’re going to do things differently,which means smarter. For once.”

He paused to let his words sink in. Joe tried to read the four men both through the glass and on the monitor. Langston looked angry, defensive, struggling with his first impulse to pull rank and ream someone out. Barron tried mightily to distance himself from Langston without physically moving, and appearedready to concede. Ward stared at the floor, confused and resigned to the bad choice he’d made. Layborn sneered at Mc-Cann’s words.

“He’s fucking us,” Portenson moaned.

“Hold on,” Joe said, “I think he knows where he’s going.”

Clay McCann said, “No more accidents like Mark Cutler.”

“We had no choice,” Langston said. “He was about to—”