Walt Longmire 07 - Hell Is Empty (21 page)

I aimed at the exact spot where I’d seen the four-point flare, squeezed the trigger, and the big-bore kicked. I was certain that if I didn’t kill him, I hit part of him. I jacked the lever action, replaced the round from the butt stock, and slammed it home, placing another round at the ready.

I held the sights on the exact spot where I’d fired. If he was still alive, he might try for another, but if he was smart and ambulatory, he’d move. There hadn’t been much of him revealed, but even a fragment shot off the edge of the rocks would’ve done the trick.

I lifted my head a little and became aware of the beer-barrel chest of the giant Crow rising and lowering. “Virgil?”

He coughed, grunted, and then strangled out a laugh. “I told you I saw something.”

“How bad are you hit?” I adjusted my weight so that I wasn’t lying on him, then reacquired my target as much as the whiteout would allow.

His voice was strange. “Bad enough—don’t let him shoot me again.”

“I promise.” I kept my eyes on the rimrock.

I noticed that my shivering had stopped and that my mind was now relatively clear, evidently the side effect of every bit of adrenaline in my body being dumped into my nervous system. I wondered abjectly how long the high octane would last.

His words were slurred. “Did you get him?”

“I’m not sure.”

There was a pause. “I would like to think that you got him.”

“Me, too.” There was no more movement on the granite shelf, and if I hadn’t gotten him, he’d moved to another spot or retreated. I thought again about the old maxim that had crossed my mind when Raynaud Shade had fired on me back at Deer Haven Lodge: “The first one to move is the first one to die.” Shade held the advantage in that I wanted to check Virgil’s wounds and possibly move him to the overhang ahead, but I had to be sure that we weren’t drawing fire while I did it.

So, I waited.

“How do you feel, buddy?”

He grunted again. “Not so bad; I think only one got me good. The other one deflected and climbed up my chest and face.”

The original 55-grain lead-core round had a propensity to fragment at the cannelure at certain ranges, but that was crazy. “A tumble round? I haven’t seen that since Vietnam—they haven’t made those since ’67. You must be imagining things.”

“It climbed over my face, so I think I would know.”

I suppressed a smile. “Sit tight, and I’ll take a look at you.”

He was breathing regularly, talking, and even joking, so I figured our situation must not be too bad. Trying to carry the monster to the overhang was going to be the hard part; as near as I could estimate, Virgil White Buffalo probably tipped the scale at almost four hundred pounds.

I hoped his legs worked.

I growled in my throat, knowing every passing minute wasn’t doing the big Indian any good. “Virgil, I’m going to check you and then try and move us to that overhang.”

“I would like to sit up.”

“Okay, here we go.” I lowered our only defense into my lap and turned, watching in amazement as the giant pushed off with one arm and rolled up to a sitting position. He turned to look at me, and the effects of the .223 round were evident. The bullet had ripped up over the surface of his jawbone, had continued across his cheek, and deflected from the ridge of his brow toward his hairline. The wound was deeper at the side of his face where the distended tissue was opened like a flap, and the majority of the blood was coming from there. The socket was already swollen but appeared operable. “Can you see out of that eye?”

“Yes. I have a matching set of scars now?”

“Like train tracks.” I yanked off a stiffened glove and attempted to lay the flesh back together on his cheek, but it wouldn’t stay. “Virgil, I need to see where the other round went, so I realize this is a pretty absurd situation, but can you hold your face?”

He gently nodded, and one of his enormous hands came up to press the skin back in place. I pulled the cloak open, revealing the moosehide shirt underneath, and could see two small marks where the slug must’ve fractured and split away into three separate pieces. I felt the spot where the round had hit and had to laugh. It was like a cliché from an old pulp western—the slug had struck the thick paperback. The book hadn’t stopped the bullet, but it had deflected it enough so that it hadn’t killed the behemoth—maybe it hadn’t been a tumble round after all.

I started laughing. “Jesus, Virgil, Dante saved your life.”

For obvious reasons, he didn’t smile but grunted.

I yanked at the shirt, even going so far as to pull the book from underneath, noticing the .223 had gone as far as page 305. I tossed the book aside and gently peeled the hide shirt back—it was then that I saw where the second round had gone. Dead center, but with the angle of deflection and the big Indian’s response, it must’ve traveled down and not into the heart or lungs. Where the hell did it go? Virgil had the unfortunate disadvantage of having the larger silhouette, thus being Shade’s primary target, but he also had the advantage of having more room for bullets.

The only thing left to do was check his back for an exit wound, so I leaned him forward against my shoulder. It was like bulldogging a steer, but I could hear his breathing and it was steady. I pulled at the bear fur cloak that fortunately wasn’t trapped underneath him, and then pulled the shirt and a thermal top away from his vast back. “Virgil, you may be the luckiest son of . . .”

The words caught in my throat when I saw the exit wound at his lower back.

The pack was lying next to him, so I snagged the first-aid kit that Omar had included from the bottom cavity. I put a number of pads over the wound, and then used the packaging as a seal to keep air out of the cavitated tissue. I tore open rolls of medicated gauze, which I wrapped around his chest and closed off in the front. “How are you feeling?”

He nodded.

“Breathing no problem?” He nodded, and I was pretty sure we weren’t looking at a sucking chest wound or any sort of lung damage. I pulled the thermal, shirt, and cloak back down; with the loss of blood, he’d be facing hypothermic symptoms soon enough without keeping him exposed. I concentrated on his face and packed snow on the wound to try to stop the bleeding. It worked, and I was able to get a gauze pad and medical tape to stick. “Can you move?”

He swallowed, and I could see that he didn’t like the idea.

“I wouldn’t ask, but there’s cover up ahead and I want to get you to it.”

His legs shifted, indicating that his core was intact, but he didn’t seem to be able to get them underneath himself.

“How about if I try and help?”

He nodded, but even between the two of us we didn’t get much lift. He looked at me, and there was something I’d never seen in the giant’s face before—just that little bit of panic.

“Virgil, can you move?”

He shook his head and slumped a little.

“Virgil?” Air escaped from between his lips, and more than a little panic now shot through me. “Virgil . . .” I placed a hand against his throat but couldn’t feel a pulse, which wasn’t unusual with the conditions. I moved my hand and felt along the side of his heavily muscled neck, still finding nothing.

“Lawman.” I glanced up and could see one large eye, the other now completely closed. “You must go ahead.”

“No.” I tried pulling at his arm, but he didn’t move; it was like trying to lift a grain mill. “C’mon, Virgil. I’m not going to leave you here.”

I pulled on his arm again, but his eye just stayed there, passive—almost as if I wasn’t there with him at all. Finally, he spoke in a soft but insistent voice. “You must go. The others are just ahead and you must save them—innocent people . . .”

“Shut up.”

He sighed a laugh. “Go. I will follow you very soon. Just let me sit here for a few moments and catch my breath.”

My voice broke as I lifted at his shoulders again. “Virgil, you’re going to die out here.”

He laughed again, softer this time. “Go, Lawman. I will follow, I promise.”

I stood and looked down at him and at the snow that had collected on the bear head. I tore into the pack, pulled out the sleeping bag, jerked it from the stuff sack, and then wrapped it around him.

As I started to leave, his hand came up and rested in his lap. He was holding the battered copy of
Inferno
. I looked at him, and he fumbled with the book. “This book . . . You know who the lowest ring of hell is reserved for?”

I kneeled back down. “Virgil, I don’t think you should be talking.”

“Traitors.”

I didn’t say anything at first, but the words were in my mouth, looking for a place to go. “I thought you said you hadn’t read this book?”

He tried to smile with a bunching of one of his cheek muscles. It must have hurt.

“Are you trying to tell me something, Virgil?”

He didn’t say anything more, but the smile faded and he looked sad. I glanced up the trail and then back to him. “I’m going to go up there and finish killing that son of a bitch, and then I’m going to come back with the others and get you under that overhang. Understand?”

He didn’t move, and his eye returned to the snow.

I tucked the bag around him a little closer and stood. “I’ll be back, you understand?”

15

I cradled the rifle in my arms Indian-style as I walked, a fresh round in place and my underlying finger on the trigger.

We had been closer to the overhang than I thought, and it seemed to move toward me like some devilishly open mouth yawning from the snow, the frozen stalactites looking like teeth.

I continued to follow the tracks that Shade and the two hostages had made, Virgil’s words echoing in my head. Traitors. Was it a confession? An indictment?

My eyes kept drifting to the rim overhead. The spot where I’d tagged Shade was disturbed, and there was no snow there. The closer I got, the less chance there was that he could hit me from above, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t waiting in the relative gloom of the shelter straight ahead.

There were a few dislodged boulders that had fallen in front of the overhang a long time ago; I stepped between them, and it was like a curtain parting. A few flakes floated like fireflies following me in, but other than a drift that had sealed the western side, it was bare underneath the granite precipice.

From the light of a battery-powered lantern, I could see there were two of them toward the back, and the man jumped when he saw me. The FBI agent, Pfaff, was tied with nylon zip cords and a bandana tight around her mouth. She was leaning against the back wall with a sleeping bag underneath her and was evidently unconscious.

The Ameri-Trans guard was seated a little away with another sleeping bag hanging over his shoulders; he was apparently neither bound nor gagged. He leapt to his feet with his hands behind his back, a little unsteady. “Thank God.”

Some of the snow slid off of me and fell to the ground as I leveled the barrel of the Sharps. “Don’t move.”

He glanced at the woman and then back to me. “What?” He took a step forward, this one a little more composed. “Hey, I’m one of the good guys.”

I raised the barrel slightly, centering it on his chest. “I said, don’t move.”

He stopped, and I studied him, especially the way the sleeping bag seemed to hang up on something at his back. He was the one from the truck, the heavyset man who had been having trouble on the ridge when I’d spotted them through the binoculars. His nose had been bloodied, and it was probably broken, the swelling overtaking his eyes that shone in the darkness like wet paint.

The stocking cap on his head was pushed up but the rest of him looked normal—except for one thing: he still wore full ammo clips on his belt.

Traitors.

He tried to distract me by talking. “Hey, we need your help.”

“Why aren’t you tied up?”

He started to say something, realized it wasn’t something he wanted to say and certainly something he didn’t want me to hear, and then settled on something else. “I am. I mean, my hands are.”

“Show them to me.”

He started moving, and it was a little too fast for my taste.

“Slow.”

He hesitated, and there was that briefest of moments where I could see him trying to make up his mind. It all came down to judging—if you were a good judge of the man in front of you, you might survive; if not, then you were the honored dead. It’s never about who’s the fastest, strongest, toughest—it’s always about who, when everyone else would pause, will commit.

“I’m really tired, and I’ve already done this drill with the convict you left in the Thiokol. He made the right choice and is still alive—you make the wrong one, and I’m going to dislocate a couple of your solid organs.”

He remained motionless, and there was a dead silence as more flakes flickered to the ground in a semicircle behind me. “What do you want me to do?”

“Just drop it.”

“It might go off.”

I felt my finger maintaining a slight pressure on the trigger. “Well, then, bring it around carefully—like your life depends on it, which it most certainly does.”

I guess he thought he could make it.

I guess he thought I was in worse shape than I was.

I guess he felt like this was his only chance. In a way, I suppose he was right, but in another way, he was terribly wrong.

The Sig came around quickly in his left hand, but he could have been Billy the Kid and there was no way he could’ve aimed and fired in the time it took me to pull the set and final trigger. I had turned sideways for two reasons, the first to aim the long barrel of the rifle, which, unlike the short barrel on the semiautomatic, would place the bullet exactly where I wanted it. The other was to provide him with the smallest target I could—an old duelist and gunfighter trick.

Maybe I was still affected by my condition, or maybe it was that I simply didn’t want to take his life, but I paused and he fired first. The round went to my left as he overcompensated and drew the Sig’s barrel past me.

I pulled the trigger, and the buffalo rifle delivered its package at a much shorter range than it had been designed for in one hell of a thunderous response.

Nobody flies backward when they’re shot; no matter how large the caliber and how close the shot, they just slump. You die falling down, which is a terrible way to die—it destroys the confidence before it destroys the body, and that must be a terrible thing to be left with in those last few seconds.

I stood there for what felt like a long time as the echoing sound of the .45-70 subsided in my head, finally stepping across the broken rocks and around his foot. I nudged the .40 out of his grip with the toe of my boot, bent over what was left of him, pulled off my glove, and placed my fingers at his neck. Nothing.

Must’ve been my day for it.

I looked at his eyes, hazel-green and staring at the granite ceiling, and then reached down with two fingers and closed them, completing the ritual.

The second jolt of adrenaline had produced no tremors, which told me that the surge was only enough to keep me going for a short time and get me back to barely operable condition.

I shrugged the pack off and turned to look at Kasey Pfaff, who, thankfully, was breathing. I could see that she had a monster of a goose egg at one side of her forehead, which might’ve explained why the sounds of the shots hadn’t awakened her. I remembered that I had put my old bone-handled case XX knife in the zippered pocket in my pants, so I took off my gloves, retrieved it, and reached down to cut her free.

I kneeled and propped her up enough to get the bandana out of her mouth. She still didn’t move but made a noise in her throat and then coughed, closed her eyes even tighter, and then opened them, looking up at me. As near as I could tell from the expression on her face, she had no idea who I was—after what I’d been through lately, I wasn’t so sure myself. Covered in soot, ash, soaked with snow and frozen hard with ice, I figured I looked like some sort of golem. “You’re okay, just relax.”

She swallowed, blinked, and continued to stare at me. “The sheriff.”

“Yep, the sheriff.”

She smiled and shivered. “Nice to see you.” Her glance went to the surrounding area, settling on the boot of the Ameri-Trans driver.

“He’s dead.”

“Good.”

I laughed. “Not a nice guy?”

She coughed again. “No, he’s the one who hit me. Besides, he made a deal with the devil for some money, which, by the way, turned out to be nonexistent.”

“Where is Shade?”

She rubbed her wrists where the zip cords had left ligature marks. “He went ahead to the top.”

“Do you know why?”

“No.” She sat up a little and stretched her back. “I’ve been lying here forever. I’m sorry. I think my ankle’s b-busted.”

“You want me to look at it?”

“No, it’s probably just sprained, but I don’t think I’d get very far out there.” She sat up a little more, coughed again, and looked at me with an odd expression. “He’s carrying the bones of that boy we excavated from behind the rock.”

“Owen White Buffalo. I know.” I patted my chest. “He left me a souvenir.”

She nodded and then glanced around some more. “Where’s your backup?”

My thoughts exactly.

She looked puzzled. “What?”

“Excuse me?”

She smiled a crooked smile. “You said something, but I didn’t catch it.”

I thought I’d said it to myself but evidently I hadn’t. I guess I was more tired than I thought. Talking with people was more confusing than being confused by yourself. “They’re coming, but right now I need to go get one of them and bring him in here.” I pushed off the rock. The driver was dead, and she was in no condition to help, so I was back to square one.

I reached over, picked up the .40 from beside the dead man, dropped the clip, and pulled the action, watching a round fly out, and was amazed when the federal agent snatched it from the air.

She held it in her palm and smiled at me. “My hands are all right.”

“I guess so.” I took the round, reinserted it into the magazine, and slammed it home. I handed her the sidearm and tossed the 9mm from the Junk-food Junkie onto the blanket at her feet. “A full mag in the .40, but only one round in the 9—I’ll be back in a minute with our reinforcements, so don’t shoot me, okay?”

I stood, readjusted my goggles, pulled my gloves back on, and started out.

He was gone.

Again.

The swale was still there where he’d fallen and where I’d left him, the sleeping bag was still in the semicircle where I had wrapped him, and even the paperback was still lying there in the snow.

No Virgil.

I looked around but couldn’t see any tracks other than mine leading in any direction. I stooped in the trough we’d made and picked up the book and sleeping bag. What if he had become confused and followed me? It was possible that the ever-falling snow had covered his tracks, but there still should’ve been something, anything, showing where the giant had gone.

Surely he hadn’t continued on after Shade; he couldn’t even walk when I’d left him. “Virgil, damn it, this is getting ridiculous!”

My voice echoed off the granite walls. “
Ridiculous! Ridiculous!
”

You said it, brother.

The snow continued to fall, and the faint glow of the late evening sun was opaque, lean, and dying. Sunday; it was still Sunday as near as I could remember—a good day for all of this to end. If I was going to make any time before it got really dark and visibility dropped from twenty feet to two, I needed to get going. I drew the sleeping bag over my shoulder, stuffed the book under my arm, and started tramping my way back to the overhang.

I thought about some of the things that the big Indian had said about my daughter having a daughter. Could it be true? Could Cady have told Henry and Henry have told Virgil on his monthly grocery drops? Why would he tell Virgil? Why wouldn’t anybody have told me? I was used to the clandestine relationship that Henry Standing Bear had with Cady, but this? I had wondered why there had been such a rush to get married, and maybe even suspected, but why hadn’t she told me? Through the exhaustion and confusion, I was hurt.

And where the hell had Virgil gone?

Traitors. The last thing he had talked about was something about traitors—the final ring of hell, the ninth circle, surrounded by giants with sinners frozen at different levels in an icy lake that stretched to the horizons. Most thought that Dante’s hell was a flaming, superheated place, which was true for part of the Florentine’s journey, but in the
Inferno
, the real hell was an arctic, glaciated, and windblown place far from the warmth of God.

Traitors.

Was Virgil trying to tell me that he was involved or was he warning me about the Ameri-Trans driver?

I stumbled into the overhang, the sleeping bag dragging behind me, the distressed book in my hands. I looked at it again and noticed that there was something in it—a marker Virgil had left behind that looked like an owl feather from his lance. I shoved the paperback into my inside pocket with Saizarbitoria’s phone. I had enough to try and think about.

“Who is Virgil?” She had moved as far from the dead man as possible.

“He’s the Crow Indian who was with me. I don’t suppose you’ve seen a seven-and-a-half-foot man wearing a grizzly-bear headdress and bear cloak roaming around here anyplace?”

She looked at me, understandably worried. “No.”

I put the sleeping bag next to her along with the satellite phone and my backpack, took the ascent portion from the top, and detached the straps. “This is all I’ve got.”

She took the sleeping bag and covered herself. “The rest of the task force, the marshals?”

I looked at her, trying to decide what to say. She had nice eyes, smart and resilient.

I spoke looking straight at her, so that there wouldn’t be further questions. “McGroder survived. The last time I spoke with anybody they said that he was being transported down the mountain, but everyone else is dead.”

She was looking at me strangely again.

“What?”

Her expression changed from amused to concerned. “Did you know you’re talking to yourself?”

“I am?”

“Yes.”

I laughed through a yawn and nodded. “I have a tendency to do that, but we’ll be all right as long as I don’t start answering.” I yawned again. “Maybe I’ve been up here too long. Anyway, I’ve got to find sensible conversation somewhere.” There was a hip harness in a Velcro panel underneath the ascent pack, and I pulled the straps loose and connected the buckle. I sorted through the supplies I had, dropping the majority onto her lap. “I’ll take one of the water bottles and a little of the food.” I tossed the Fed phone where she could reach it more easily. “The reception on this thing has been going in and out. Strangely enough, it’s when I’m with Virgil that it doesn’t seem to want to work—maybe he’s tall enough that he’s causing interference. The battery is at about half, but keep trying and maybe it’ll work.”

She took the phone, glanced at the ascent pack and then up at me. “Where are you going?”

“After Shade.”

Her eyebrows collided over her bloodshot blue eyes as she leaned a little to the side. “Are you crazy?”

I turned my head and looked out into the gloom. “I’m beginning to wonder about that myself.”