“Going for a walk” did not translate into a four-hour-plus absence. Mitch had been gone the whole time; naturally the others had began to wonder, especially when Rick and Peewee came back and he still hadn’t returned. An uneasy suspicion that maybe he had decided to cut out had begun to take hold. Either that, or something had happened. He had fallen and injured himself or had gotten lost. He could be out there somewhere right now, unable to communicate, maybe with a sprained ankle or a broken leg, or wandering around in circles, not sure of his position or the direction to take. Earlier, before darkness had come on with a completeness that made searching for him out of the question, Carlos and Ralph had suggested they go out and look for him. But Heidi, feeling that Rick and Peewee had more experience in such matters, said they should wait until the two men came back; after all, they were both ex-military.
Her reliance on their former status as a measure of extraordinary ability proved misguided. When the two men finally did walk back into camp, neither offered much in the way of help. Peewee owned as how Mitch should have used a compass to track his movements from one spot to another and wondered why, anyway, he had obviously gone farther afield than warranted by just going out for a walk. His partner didn’t have much more to say about it either, except to comment that if Mitch had any sense, he’d be looking for the light from the campfire right about now.
“If he is looking for us, we could put more wood on it to make it easier for him,” he said.
“Well, amigo, if he’s hurt, I’d say we’d have to find him first to help him. But we’ll never do it in the dark, not out here.”
“We can’t just leave him out there, can we?” Heidi said, looking at the others.
“Yeah, we should make an effort, don’t you think?”
“I suppose so. But just what kind of effort do you and your buddy suggest, Tony?”
“We could walk out a ways and start hollering. And I have a whistle.”
“Yeah, we could do that, Tony…and we could wake up the neighborhood, too. A whistle carries, and a bunch of people hollering is bound to be heard by a dog or two.”
“Three miles is a long way to be heard by anyone, even by a dog, don’t you think?” Ralph wondered.
“And there’s a lot of hilliness in between, isn’t there?” Jody added. “How far did you guys go, anyway? All the way to the ranch?”
“That was the idea.”
Heidi looked at her watch.
“It’s a little after five. We’ve got a couple more hours.”
“It took me and Peewee a little over an hour to get there and about the same coming back. It’s dark now and, unless you wanna take a chance on jogging over country you’ve never been on, it’s gonna take us all of an hour or more just to get there. If we’re there only fifteen or twenty minutes, or long enough to shoot a couple of cows, it’s still gonna take an hour or more to get back. Say nine o’clock, anyway. And from the feel of things, it could very well be snowing.”
“Yeah, if Mitch can’t make it, for whatever reason, we’ll just have to consider him a casualty of the operation. Either that, or call off the whole thing…spend the time looking for him. Is that what you wanna do?”
Heidi looked at her watch again. “I say we give him another half hour. If he isn’t back, we’ll start. If he is out there somewhere, and presumably he is, he might see our flashlights, either coming or going.”
“Yeah, I suppose that’s a possibility,” Rick conceded.
The timing of Heidi’s decision couldn’t have been better; a few minutes later Mitch walked out of the darkness and into the firelight.
Carlos, the first to see him, asked, “Where the hell you been, amigo? We been worried about you, man, thought you might’ve got eaten up by a big, bad animal or somethin.’”
“Yeah, Mitch! My God, we didn’t know what to think!” Heidi exclaimed, wanting to give him a hug.
Mitch grinned. “I went the scenic route,” he said. “It’s a little longer, but it got me there all the same.
Rick had opened a can of chili and was stirring it over the fire in a saucepan. Pausing, he looked up. “Gotcha where?”
“The ranch. Where else?”
“You went to the ranch?”
“Why not. You guys did, didn’t cha?”
“Yeah, but we didn’t see you there…”
“My hope is that nobody did; otherwise, we’re all in trouble. But I take it nobody saw you, either.”
“Yeah, we were pretty sneaky,” Peewee said, throwing a quick glance at Rick. “We stayed in the tall grass the whole time.”
“So…what did you bring back for us?”
“We know how to get there. And we know what to expect when we do get there.”
“Did you see anything that looks like a cow?”
“A few.”
“I only saw a dozen or so, myself. Not very many for a guy with a six-thousand-acre ranch. I would’ve thought there’d be a whole herd.”
“Yeah, we saw them cows, too,” Rick said quickly. “And we wondered the same thing. But our guess is the guy has shipped ’em all off to market…”
“Yeah, it’s that time of year, you know. They fatten ’em all summer long and ship ’em out in the fall.”
“That means if we shoot half a dozen cows, we’re gonna practically wipe out the guy’s herd,” Carlos said.
The others laughed.
“He’s got a pretty big barn…there’s probably a few in there.” Mitch said.
He sat down and opened his pack. He took out a roast beef sandwich wrapped in wax paper and undid it.
“So you and Peewee got a good look at the place, then, huh?”
“We sure did. We can almost draw ya map of the layout.”
“I got a good look at the place myself, including the front of the house…”
“Oh, yeah? Whudja see?”
“Three parked cars and a big dog,” Mitch replied, and took a bite from the sandwich.
“I don’t know, Rick. I didn’t give myself a chance to find out. But how come you guys didn’t see it? Or did you?”
“We concentrated on the back…that’s where it’s all gonna happen. But, yeah, we saw it.”
Mitch took another bite of his sandwich; he said, “Damn, if you don’t work up an appetite. By my own calculations, I’ve covered seven or eight miles since I left, and most of it’s been up and down hills. But tell me something, Rick, did you guys happen to notice the road west of here when you looked at your map? I don’t suppose it would get us there any sooner, but I’m wondering why you didn’t decide to take it.”
“Yeah, we saw it,” Peewee said. “You can’t miss it if you know what you’re lookin’ at when you’re lookin’ at a topo. But that’s exactly why we didn’t take it—it’s the long way.”
“Yeah, Mitch, you should’ve gone the way we went—you’d have been back sooner.”
Along with sandwiches, Mitch had brought a container of tiny dill pickles. Opening it, he fished one out and popped it into his mouth. Chewing it thoughtfully, he said, “So how long did it actually take you guys?”
“Like we already said, ’bout an hour or so each way.”
“Plus some time looking things over,” Peewee added hastily.
“So, like about three or four hours altogether.”
“Yeah…about that…more or less. But is this going in your diary or something?”
Mitch ignored the hint; swallowing a bite of sandwich, he said, “This guy had a visitor, someone driving a newer black Oldsmobile or a Buick. It was parked next to a couple of cars that looked like they belonged…”
Rick had resumed stirring the chili; he stopped again.
“So?”
“Yeah, what’re you drivin’ at, buddy?”
“Not driving at anything, Peewee. Just that it was odd. I mean, there was a Grand Cherokee and a white Jeep pickup with some dents. Both were caked with dust and had mud up in the tire wells. The other one had hardly any dust on it and no mud. I wouldn’t have noticed, except I was making it a point to take note of things.”
“So? The guy had a visitor—what the hell does that mean?”
“Yeah, people have visitors—big deal!”
Heidi joined the other two in their apparent perplexity: “Yeah, Mitch,” she asked, “what’s going on in that head of yours?”
Finishing the last of his sandwich, Mitch wadded up the wax paper and tossed it onto the fire. He snapped the lid back onto the pickle container and tucked it into his pack.
“Well, this black car,” he said, “whatever make it was, had an extra long antenna on its bumper—you know, like a government car of some sort—and I just think it’s kind of curious. It got me to thinking about Punch and how he seemed in such a hurry to get away…”
“For God’s sakes, Mitch, stop being so paranoid!” Heidi said, wanting to shout at him.
“Yeah, you’re going to immobilize the rest of us with fear, Mitch!” Jody cried. “We’re already stressed as it is—we don’t need you to make it worse.”
“That‘s right, you’re making us all nervous, amigo, by being so suspicious. At a time like this, hombre, it’s not good to have such dark thoughts. We gotta keep positive.”
“But Mitch does have a valid point…”
The others looked at Ralph. He had folded up the blanket he and Misty had wrapped themselves in earlier as they sat by the fire. With a down jacket on now and his head covered in a wool stocking cap, he looked ready to set out along with everyone else. Still, like the others, he, too, had been troubled by Punch’s sudden departure, more so than he had let on before. Until now he had kept his real concerns to himself, but Mitch’s talk about a black car struck a disquieting note.
“I mean, what was that really all about, anyway?” he continued. “We never really did decide. Just that Punch didn’t approve of our methods and probably got a little too anxious to get away. We’re giving him the benefit of the doubt, when maybe we should be stepping back and taking another look at it.”
“A black car is a black car,” Peewee said succinctly, “just like a black cat is a black cat. Don’t necessarily mean anything, unless we start thinking it does.”
“That’s right,” his partner said, taking over, “there’s lots of black cars out there. And in range country like this, where things are far apart and not convenient, everybody and his brother’s got his car equipped with a CB radio and an extra long aerial. It just makes sense. It’s survival gear. I mean, for chrissake, people that live out here are five miles or more from their nearest neighbor and twenty miles from town. What do you think they’re gonna do if they run into trouble—send smoke signals? Hell, you can’t even get cell phone service out here.”
“That still doesn’t answer the question about Punch, though,” Mitch said.
“Punch was my buddy,” Rick said, his tone belligerent and accusatory. “Me and him went through plenty of shit together. We got some of the same memories. That’s good for a real tight bond. Ain’t no way he’d fuck me. Maybe he doesn’t really agree with what we’re doing, but he did help us out. He just didn’t come around to our way of doing something about it.”
“I think we oughta get going,” Heidi said. She had waited for Rick to run out of steam and for everyone else to say his or her part. Now, as far as she was concerned, the issue was settled. “It’s late and we’ve wasted time. Either we’re going to do this, or we’re not.”
Rick set the pan of beans off to the side. He stood up.
“Peewee, you got your gear?”
“That’s affirmative.”
“Heidi, can you shoulder that rifle okay for three miles?”
“I brought it this far, Rick. I think I can carry it the rest of the way.”
“Just keep switching shoulders if you get tired. Anybody else comin’?”
Jody stood up. She wore a padded down jacket and her black beret, and her long brown hair hung loosely onto her shoulders and down her back. The M1 rifle Rick had provided hung from her shoulder; she held it in place by its leather sling.
“Just lead the way, Rick.”
“Carlos, you’re comin’, right?”
Carlos got up from a small boulder he had rolled into place earlier to sit on and held up as a victory symbol the two-thousand-dollar lever action rifle he had purchased not long before. Its barrel band and brass receiver glinted in the firelight like burnished gold.
“This baby gets its baptism of fire tonight, amigos!” he proclaimed. “It’s gonna fire the shot that’s gonna be heard around the world!”
Peewee tapped the leather case he had earlier entrusted to Carlos and said, “That one’s already been claimed, amigo! And I got it right here. But I’ll let ya take second place.”
“You’re on, brother! We’ll see who gets a bull’s-eye!”
“Bad pun, Carlos.” Heidi laughed. Now that they were actually getting underway, right along with most of the others, she was happy.
Rick looked inquiringly at Mike and Tony. He’d pegged them both as far back as Cleveland for a couple of docile pretenders, more apt than not to go along with the majority, but he wanted them to feel they were making their own decision.
Mike took Rick’s glance as his cue.
“What are we waiting for?” he said gamely. He’d worn a herring-bone tweed sports jacket over a crewneck sweater and a pair of Doc Marten high-tops. He had also brought along his leather driving gloves and a wool scarf. He had purchased a U.S. Army-issue .30 caliber carbine from a pawn shop, but hadn’t yet fired it.
Tony got up and stood next to Mike.
“You can count me, too,” he said rather dramatically. He had his camera bag slung across his chest and had zipped the front of his hooded windbreaker up to his neck. The lens in his black horn-rimmed glasses reflected the light from the fire, as did the diamond stud in his left ear.
Rick turned to Ralph and Misty.
“I’d say we’ve pretty well gone over it, Ralph…answered all your questions. Unless you and Misty wanna stay here and tend the fire?”
“No, I believe it’s all been settled,” Ralph said. “We’re part of this team, Misty and I, and that’s why we’re here.”
“Good man, Ralph. You ever had any luck with that .06?”
Ralph smiled sheepishly.
“I’ve never actually fired it,” he said. “And it belongs to a colleague. But I believe I can handle it.”
“You bet! You’ll do just fine.”
The winnowing process had come down to Mitch. But, rising up from his place next to the fire, he didn’t give Rick the chance to ask the question.
“Does anyone seriously think that any of us would back out at this point? Come on—none of us came all this way just to chicken out at the end. We’ve all had our dark night of the soul here, but, in the end, we’re all gonna do what we came to do. Right? So, let’s go. Like Heidi said, we’re wasting time. And we’re waiting for you to lead the way, Rick. Hopefully, you can get us out there and back without getting us lost.”
“If you get lost, I get lost. And I don’t get lost.”
“Well, our life is in your hands then—lead the way.”