Butte, Montana, had been besieged by the same weather system that had settled over the Livingston area, a hundred miles to the east. Snow had fallen steadily for the past several hours; by the time Mitch got there at six-thirty in the morning, a four-inch blanket of white lay everywhere throughout the city and up and over the surrounding hills. The only traffic to speak of consisted of a few snowplows trundling over the pavement of city streets and roads. A police cruiser, its row of multicolored lights flashing atop its roof, was stopped alongside a black SUV that had slipped off into a ditch; the officer sat inside the cruiser, talking on the radio. As he came up on it, Mitch instinctively dropped below the posted speed limit.
The choice of motels left little room for a decision. He picked the first one he came to with a vacancy sign on and pulled into the parking lot.
The night clerk came out through the doorway of a back office and took down the necessary information. Mitch paid with a credit card, secured his key, and went down a covered walkway to a room at the far end of the building.
After a quick shower and a hamburger from an all-night diner, he turned on the television and flipped through the channels until coming to a local news station. Sitting on the end of the bed, he watched a few minutes of a cattlemen’s report, heard the weatherman update his forecast (more snow), and learned of a home-invasion robbery on the outskirts of Butte, being investigated at that very moment. But nothing at all out of the Livingston area.
He clicked off the television and dialed Lisa’s number on his cell. It rang six times, then went to voice mail.
Leaving out the details, he told her that everything had gone to hell and to call back right away, just as soon as she got the message. Then he went to bed.
Two hours later his cell phone, which he had left on the nightstand, rang. “Yeah?”
“Mitch, are you all right?”
“Tired…but otherwise okay. You got my message, huh?”
“It was on the early-morning newscast…They said everyone died in a gun battle…”
“Not everyone.” He told her about Peewee and of his own fortuitous accident. “I’m still wondering if I exaggerated the pain, though. It might have been more psychosomatic than real. But, you know what, Lisa? I don’t really care. With me, it was a struggle from the very beginning just to stay on board with it.”
“What are you going to do now, Mitch? Where are you, anyway?”
“Ever heard of Butte, Montana? Right now, it’s practically covered with snow, and I think I might be stuck here until they get the Interstate cleared. And I’ve got Heidi’s car. It might be a good idea to ditch it and get a rental.”
“Do you need any money?”
“No, I’ve got my card. But the thing I’m concerned about now, Lisa, is whether they can connect either of us to the others. Rick and his buddy Peewee were colluding with the Feds, though, according to Peewee, outta of necessity. Just how much they know about you and me, it’s hard to say.”
“I never met Rick. And I have no idea who Peewee is…”
“That wouldn’t matter. Heidi might have mentioned your name…and other things about you, as well. Rick might have passed on information, even incomplete information. It might have been enough to get you identified. And ditto for me…especially for me, because Heidi introduced us, and I spent some time with him over the last two or three days. There’s a possibility that, at whatever point he started cooperating, he identified the core group and never got around to anyone else. But that’s problematic, Lisa—we can only wait and see.”
“I’m not going to wait and see, Mitch. As far as anyone will ever know, I simply donated to an environmental group. I gave them money in the same way you give money to Greenpeace or the Sierra Club. I had nothing at all to do with their agenda, and, if necessary, Daddy will hire a busload of lawyers to challenge any contention to the contrary.”
“Sounds good to me, babe. But what about me?”
“Did you say they’re all dead?”
“According to Peewee, they walked right into a trap, and every last one of them was killed. Out of the whole bunch, he was the only survivor—but now he’s dead, too.”
“Well, there you go, Mitch—there’s nobody to challenge your story. You can account for yourself any way you like.”
“Not quite, Lisa…”
“What do you mean?”
Mitch told her about the evening the group had spent at Punch’s cabin. He couldn’t say with certainty, but he suspected the older man had been part of the scheme to entrap them.
“But he wasn’t there when it happened, when everybody got killed, was he?”
“After he got us to the backside of Art Jimson’s ranch, it was all he could do to put on a decent show of bidding us farewell and good luck. We all commented on it afterwards, and my impression was that he just wanted to get the hell outta there and back to his cozy mountain retreat. He never struck me as the type that would want to be mixed up in something like this, anyway.”
“There you go again, Mitch—first of all, how’s he going to know that everyone who was there that night in his cabin wasn’t killed? And secondly, if he wanted to get away so badly, now that it’s over, why would he even care? He’s probably happy enough just to be out of it altogether.”
“You may be right…Let’s just say he was a stooge, somebody they used as bait, and he went along for whatever reason—he probably knows there was some kind of skullduggery involved and would just as soon be out of the picture, now that it’s all over.”
“So you don’t really have anything to worry about, then, do you, Mitch?”
“Not unless they’re looking for Heidi’s car…”
“Walk away from it—get yourself a rental.”
Mitch looked at his watch. “I was hoping to sleep a couple more hours, but I guess that can wait.”
“Be sure to wipe off the fingerprints.”
“The fingerprints?”
“On the car—wipe it clean.”
“Yeah, that’d be the thing to do, I suppose. But what should I do with it afterwards? Just leave it?”
Lisa didn’t hesitate: “Drive it back here, Mitch, and we’ll dispose of it.”
“Dispose of it? Lisa, do you understand what you’re suggesting? And how are you gonna dispose of it, anyway? And even if you do dispose of it, they’re still gonna know somebody got away.”
“Didn’t you say Peewee said they’d been betrayed?”
“Yeah, he said that he and Rick had been used to set the group up. They were supposed to be led into a trap and, presumably, get caught in the act and arrested. But it sounds like they just got slaughtered. Peewee said the ‘poor bastards didn’t have a chance.’ That sounds to me like something the FBI would not want to talk about.”
“Okay, so there you go, Mitch…you’re in possession of knowledge they don’t want known. And if at some point they do get to you, you have a handful of aces, which puts you in a position to cut a deal. But it’s all premised on them knowing about you in the first place and then finding you. At this point, they may not even know you exist.”
“I like the sound of that, Lisa. That’s good thinking. But you think I should lay low for a time, maybe take a trip somewhere?”
“Europe, Mitch—we’ll go to Europe for a year or so…”
“I just got back from Europe, Lisa. How ’bout somewhere else? Africa? South America?”
“Daddy has a boat—a big sailboat. And you can go all over the world with one of those…”
“I don’t know how to sail.”
“I do.”
“It’s an idea. But I gotta get back to Portland first. Maybe I’ll just stick with the original plan—ditch Heidi’s car and rent one.”
“Okay, but don’t forget the fingerprints.”