CHAPTER FOUR

I rode back and got off my horse. I could see Jack through the tamarack and wild rose, bending low in the shadows, looking at something on the ground. I watched him step down into one of the ponds and heard him sloshing along, talking to the dog that sat on the bank, alert but not moving. Bits of sunlight shone bright on the dog’s black hair, and he looked up a second when a Steller’s jay flew over him in the branches. Jack scanned the surface, then picked up a stick and reached out into the water with it, pulling out rotting branches and mats of leaves and pine needles. The dog cocked his head, watching. I tried to lead the horses closer, but Jack’s gelding was slow to move so I tied them both and waited. I told myself I didn’t want to distract the dog while he was working, but I really didn’t want to see that body. I’d seen more dead children than I could ever scrub from my nightmares.

“Hey, Tommy,” Jack said. “You better c’m’ere.”

From where I stood, I could see he’d snagged a bare arm out of the water with the stick. It looked thin and yellow and waxy even at a distance. Jack lost his purchase with the stick and the arm fell back into the water with a little slurp. I walked closer, staying on the trail as long as I could. I moved slow, checking the ground. A few feet from the trail I saw what looked to be a dollar bill in the wet grass. I bent down and picked it up. It was a hundred, faded and crumpled, but a Benjamin all the same.

“You gotta see this,” Jack said. He hove an armful of old vegetation on the grass and stared down into the little pond.

I pocketed the bill and walked up behind him. The dog hadn’t twitched a hair. I bent down and picked up another bill, a fifty that was torn across President Grant’s face. Jack turned back to me, looking just as confused as hell.

In the space Jack opened, there was a small body on its back in clear water, the face just under the surface, the light-colored hair all fanned out and moving back and forth ever so slight. The water was barely two feet deep, and the crushed granite sand under the body almost gold in the shifting sunlight cutting through the tamarack. A couple of pine cones floated on the surface of the freshly turned-up water, moving real slow as if they had all eternity to get downstream.

“The hell?”

“This ain’t right,” Jack said.

He turned to me and reached out his hand, and I pulled him out of the pond up onto the grass. I put the money I’d found in his hand. He looked down at it then back to the body. The face was sunk in and smooth like the features had been half washed away, and the eyes were bleached white and shrunk if you could even call them eyes anymore. The body looked to be a female, but it wasn’t the missing girl. It wasn’t Kayleeana. It was a small but full-grown woman, somehow familiar but as vague as a bad dream. Jack reached in his shirt pocket and pulled out two more hundreds.

“This is nuts,” he said. “Who the hell is this?”

Jack took out his phone and started taking pictures. I stood at the water’s edge just looking at the corpse, trying to remember. The dog came up behind me and sat, leaning against my leg enough for me to feel him quiver.

“Ain’t this maybe Erika Hornberg?” Jack said.

“The bank manager?”

“Yeah. You knew her, right?”

“I known her my whole life. When Dad ran Allison’s, her dad’s ranch was just south of us.”

“Pruney as this body is, it still kinda looks like her,” Jack said. “I recognize them big old gypsy earrings she always wore.”

“I haven’t seen her since before I signed up. Since the summer I got out of high school.”

Jack held up the four bills we’d just found. “All those stories about her getting away with the bank’s millions,” he said. “I guess they were all true.”

“If it’s her, how you figure she ended up here?”

Jack put the money and his phone back in his shirt pocket.

“No clue,” he said. “Hasn’t been a trace of her since last fall when they found her car at the trailhead above the pack station site and folks figured she was going to hide out in the high country, or maybe hike out to Little Meadows or Summers Lake. Like maybe she had another car waiting, or maybe an accomplice. It’d be a helluva hike either way, but Erika was a hiking fool. Real outdoorsy type. Hike, climb, the whole deal. She could hike to Yosemite Valley, she wanted to. Most folks thought she’d left a false trail then skipped down to old Mexico or Costa Rica or some damn place to start a new life.”

“Well, she didn’t get far.”

“It’s weird we went looking for one body and found another,” he said. “This one looks like a freakin’ alien.”

“Weird don’t begin to describe it.”

What I remember next was five quick rifle shots. Maybe six. They seemed like they were coming from above us, across the trail and up the slope in the trees. They zipped and popped, some ripping and snapping branches just over our heads, some pinging against the granite. Jack gave a yelp. I saw him spin and fall into the pond on top of the body, and I heard a branch break and saw that damned yellow horse plunging and tugging, his head shaking back and forth as he pulled until something broke. Then that bugger crashed on out of there heading down the trail at a dead run. Sarah’s mare was spooked, and she danced but stayed tied. The dog was watching Jack just still as could be. Being a retriever, gunfire didn’t faze him a bit.

I ran over to Jack. He was face down in the water with blood pouring from the side of his head making oil-slick swirls on the ripply surface. I rolled him over and dragged him out of there as another burst of fire from down-trail ripped the trees and chipped the rocks, but not so close. Either the shooter was a sprinter or we had a second gunman. I checked Jack up close and could only see the one wound. A round had sliced his scalp across the side of his temple, taking a bit off the top of the right ear. I looked back for a second and saw the woman’s corpse rocking in the shallow water I’d stirred up like she was doing the backstroke. I untied the wildrag from my neck and wrapped it around Jack’s head and cinched it down. His ear was red, and he was covered with blood on that side of his head, soaking his shirt. I told myself even superficial wounds to the face and scalp sometimes bleed like crazy.

“What the hell is—” he said.

I dragged him behind a deadfall tamarack and we hugged the ground. I scanned the slope that rose up across the trail where the first shots sounded but the timber was too thick. I reached to my hip on pure instinct, but of course I had no weapon other than my skinning knife. I’d only been looking for a missing kid. I rolled Jack enough to take off his duty belt with the Smith & Wesson. The dog trotted over to us and checked Jack out.

“You gonna tell ’em to quit?” Jack said. He had his hand on the dog’s neck.

I shushed him.

“You gotta holler,” he said. “Tell ’em they coulda killed us.”

“That’s probably the plan.”

“Then who the hell is ‘they’?” he said. He looked bothered and confused.

I figured Jack’s duty belt was going to be too big for me so I just buckled it and slipped it over my shoulder. Then I pulled the .357 and checked the cylinder.

“We gotta get you out of here, pal. We can figure out who ‘they’ are later.”

He raised his head and his color drained. “My goddamn horse run off.”

I kept his revolver in my right fist and got my left arm around him and dragged him to his feet. I waited that way for a second, scanning the woods and rocks. The little pond had settled, and just below the surface the corpse of the missing bank manager still stared skyward with those shrunken white eyes. As quiet as I could, I walked Jack toward where the mare was tied, wary about the shots that came from that direction. Jack sort of whispered to the dog and patted his leg and the dog followed, staying close.

I saw something dark moving through the trees down-trail from Sarah’s mare. I motioned to Jack. He leaned against a boulder with one hand on the dog, but whoever it was saw us and kept coming. I could see some sort of long gun come up but it didn’t fire. Then the uphill gunman squeezed off another few rounds. Jack held up two fingers. I nodded and pulled him down so he could crawl a dozen feet to another deadfall, then collapse.

“Triangulation,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“They must be pros.”

“If they were pros, we’d be dead.”

They might be amateurs, but live fire is live fire, though only the one shot that creased Jack seemed to come close. I was worried as hell about Sarah’s mare. I thumbed back the hammer of the .357 and peeked over the deadfall and saw the second gunman walking closer, looking toward the spot we’d just left. He raised the weapon but still didn’t fire. Then he swung the barrel until he looked to be pointing right at Jack and squeezed off two rounds. They didn’t come close, either. A bit of tree bark drifted down on us. He must’ve shot six feet over our heads. I shot in front of him once before I even got a good look at him, just to back him off. The shot echoed in the canyon like a damn cannon, and the guy dropped.

“Stay put.”

I crawled toward the shooter, stopping behind a tamarack about thirty feet away to wait and watch for any movement. There was no way I could’ve hit the guy. I turned back toward Jack to look for anyone coming up behind him. All I heard was the rush of the creek just out of sight and the nice breeze in the pines. I stood up and walked to the shooter. He was on his back with one foot bent under him. His dirty black shirt looked shiny in the sunlight slanting through the tree canopy. It was Kayleeana’s dad. Or the gink who’d said he was. He had a head wound soaking down into his shirt and the wet grass. He wasn’t moving. I checked for a hint of a pulse, but he was gone. I kept my fingers on the artery for a bit longer than I needed to, just to be sure, then wiped my hand on my jeans. He’d been hit by a clean shot. It was a shot I’d have made—if I’d been trying to kill him.

His rifle was a beat-up Ruger Mini-14. The magazine only had two .223 rounds left so I tossed that toward the creek. For two rounds, the rifle wasn’t worth the weight of the carry.

I walked back to Jack.

“Gimme your radio. I’ll get us some help.”

“The radio was on my horse,” Jack said. “Who the hell is the guy you shot?”

“Cody Davis. Father of the missing girl.”

“Tommy, that makes no goddamn sense. We were trying to help him, for chrissakes.”

There was no phone service so deep in the canyon, so with no radio we were on our own. I walked up the trail another dozen feet and stopped, standing quiet, watching and listening for some sign of the original shooter. When I didn’t catch a trace, I hustled to where Sarah’s mare was tied and led her to Jack and got him mounted. He was mostly dead weight so that wasn’t as easy as it sounds.

“What’s the plan?” he said when he was aboard. He leaned forward with his left hand on the horn and his right hand clamped around my coiled rope on the saddle-fork, his feet dangling loose in my stirrups.

“We cross the creek and pick our way down the canyon, keeping off-trail through the tall timber in places you wouldn’t ride if you didn’t have to. Stick to terrain a four-wheeler can’t go.”

Jack whistled for the dog and I started leading the mare. We passed the gink I’d tried to miss, twisted on the ground. I watched Jack looking down at the guy’s town shoes. The dog checked out the fake dad, too. That probably wasn’t what the guy had in mind when he asked for a dog the day before.

“You steady up there?”

“So far,” Jack said. He reached up and touched the wildrag wrapped around his head. His fingers came away sticky from blood.

“I must look like a damn pirate,” he said.

“You look like Keith Richards.”

In twenty minutes I’d led the mare across the crotch-high, hard-flowing, slippery-bouldered creek. I only fell twice, but the mare stopped with better footing than me and let me lean on her till I got upright. I reached the shallows wet to my armpits, and cold from the snowmelt creek even in the warm morning. Jack would’ve laughed if he wasn’t so groggy. A few minutes more and I’d stranded us in aspen thickets and deadfall. We waited there, listening for anyone on our trail. After a minute or two I could just make out the faint buzz of a motor. The dog had liked swimming the creek, but when he whined once Jack spoke sharp and he was quiet.

“If the dog gives us away, you can kill him,” Jack said. “That’s how the Comanche useta do it so the dogs didn’t give away the location of the people.”

“Whatever you say, pal.”

The motor had sounded closer for a second then began to fade. It could have just been county search and rescue. I pulled my riflescope and scanned the far side of the creek. I thought I saw movement but couldn’t be sure. Could’ve just been the wind. We heard a voice shout way off in the distance, then the whinny of a horse. The voice sounded high-pitched, almost like a woman’s voice or somebody singing or yodeling.

“Sounds like somebody calling your name,” Jack said.

“You’re loopy.”

We got moving again until I managed to high-center the mare on an avalanche-downed aspen. I thought she’d have a come-apart with Jack on her, but she managed to jump her hind-end over the trunk once she calmed down. I’d never been on this side of the creek so far back in the canyon. If Jack was in better shape, I’d have led him back to the trail and let him make a run for the pack station by himself. After another forty-five minutes we came to some beaver dams and I knew we were opposite Blue Rock, so we were making tolerable time even with bad terrain. I stopped and pulled Jack down from the horse to check his wound and let him rest. I dabbed his head and ear with betadine from my drugstore first-aid kit and could see the bone of his skull exposed by the bullet furrow.

“You look half scalped.”

“I feel like a bad hangover,” he said. “I know you. I bet you got whiskey in your saddlebag. Gimme some whiskey.”

I pulled my flask, and he sipped a little. I was stowing it in my saddle pockets when I heard another far-off motor that almost sounded like the putt-putt of a Harley, but I figured I must have Harleys on my mind since that morning. I listened and it faded out. Then we got moving again. I didn’t want to say so, but Jack was right. The voice we’d heard did sound like it was calling my name, kind of faint and eerie, and it sounded like the voice of a woman.