Cold Wind (37 page)

Joe pulled into a space out front and killed the engine. He recognized a few of the vehicles and was pleased to locate the one he was looking for: a 1992 Ford pickup with a cracked windshield that had primer painted on the top of both rear fenders.

He got out and strode toward the bar and instinctively patted himself down to make sure he was geared up. Cuffs, pepper spray, bear spray, digital camera, digital recorder, notebook, pen, citation book, radio, cell phone, .40 Glock with two extra magazines in a holster. Not that he planned to pull his service weapon or, God forbid, try to hit something with it.

He paused outside the door of the bar, took a couple of deep breaths to calm himself down against anticipation, and pushed his way inside.

 

 

Timberman looked up,
his eyebrows arched slightly, which meant surprise. Joe hadn’t been in the place so late at night for eight years or so, and it was obvious the barman wasn’t expecting him.

Joe nodded to Timberman and took in the customers. He recognized all of them. The one he was looking for avoided his eyes.

He walked down the length of the bar and took the stool once occupied nightly by Bud Longbrake Sr. Keith Bailey, Bud’s friend and drinking partner and the gatekeeper for the Eagle Mountain Club, leaned slightly away from him, putting space between them. Bailey slowly rolled a can of Budweiser between his big hands and there was an empty shot glass sitting on the bar next to Bailey’s glasses and a copy of the Saddlestring
Roundup
. Bailey turned his head a quarter toward Joe, just enough to see him warily with both eyes. His expression was stoic.
Cop eyes,
Joe thought.

When Timberman approached, Joe said, “A bourbon and water for me. Maker’s Mark. And whatever Keith is having.”

“We got Evan Williams,” Timberman said.

“Fine.”

“None for me,” Bailey said. To Joe, he said, “You’re out late.”

“Past my bedtime,” Joe said.

When Timberman turned and went for the bourbon bottle, Joe said to Bailey, “I bet you wonder what took me so long.”

Bailey’s response was a slight beery snort.

“All this time I’ve been looking for Bud and I never even thought of asking the most obvious guy,” Joe said.

Bailey shrugged.

“Where have you let him stay up there? One of the maintenance buildings, the club itself, or did you give him the keys to one of the members’ houses?”

Timberman delivered the drink, and Joe took a sip of it. It was cold and smoky and good.

When Timberman turned around, Bailey said, “He’s under a shit-load of pressure and pain right now. He needed some time away. There’s no law against helping a buddy out unless he’s wanted for something. You got charges on him?”

“No,” Joe said. “I just need to talk to him. I’ve been trying to find him for days and you know that.”

Bailey turned away from Joe and turned his palms down on the bar. He stiffened. “You never asked.”

“No, you’ve got me there. So are you hiding him from the sheriff as well?”

“So you’re freelancing?”

“Yup.”

“I’m not hiding him from anyone,” Bailey said. “He’s hiding himself. I’ve got no stake in this thing that’s going on, other than helping an old friend. Back in the day when Bud owned the ranch, before that witch took it from him, he was a big man around this country. He helped out a lot of people, and he wasn’t a jerk about it.” He seemed to want to say more, but like so many men Joe had encountered of Bailey’s age and station, he didn’t feel the need to go on.

“He’s struggling,” Bailey said, ending it at that.

“With what? With what he’s about to do?” Joe asked.

“I’m not getting into the particulars. That’s not my business. I’m not sure it’s yours.”

Joe sipped his drink again and shook his head at Timberman when Timberman raised his chin with a
“Want another?”
look.

Joe said, “I’m not going to hurt him in any way. You know me. I used to work for him, and we always got along. I shouldn’t even have to say that.”

“I’m not worried about you,” Bailey said. “But Bud seems to think there might be some other bastards after him. Trying to get to him before he testifies.”

Joe said, “Who?”

“Don’t know,” Bailey said. “We don’t talk all that much. He asked for a place to stay and I helped him out. We don’t sit around and
share feelings
.” He said it in a way that made Joe smile and like Keith Bailey more than he’d thought.

“He fades in and out,” Bailey said, “but you know about that.”

Joe nodded. He recalled Bud Sr. showing up in his backyard a year ago, waving a gun, looking for people who were out to get him. For some reason, he thought one of them would be Nate.

“He’s worse than that now,” Bailey said. “On account of his condition.”

“What condition?”

“You really don’t know?”

Joe shook his head.

“I’m not going to be talking out of school here. He can tell you what he wants to tell you. All I’ll do is let you know how to find him,” Bailey said. Then: “On one condition.”

“Shoot.”

“If you’re caught up there, you didn’t get the keypad code from me. I don’t care where you say you got it from—a member, maybe. Or that someone gave it to you so you could check out the wildlife on the place or something. But if you say I gave it to you, I could lose my job.”

Joe agreed, and Bailey tore off a corner of the Saddlestring
Roundup
and scratched out a seven-digit numeric code.

“You aren’t going to call him and tell him I’m coming, are you?” Joe said, taking the scrap of paper.

Bailey didn’t say yes, didn’t say no, but signaled Timberman for his check.

 

 

In the daylight,
the Eagle Mountain Club overlooked the Bighorn River valley from its massive perch along the contours of a rounded and high eastern bluff. The club had a thirty-six-hole golf course that fingered through the foothills of the Bighorn Mountains, as well as a private fish hatchery, shooting range, airstrip, and about sixty multi-million-dollar homes that had been constructed long before the economy turned sour. Because of the airstrip, most of the members could arrive and depart without ever venturing beyond the gates. Built in the 1970s, the club was separate and apart from the moods, rhythms, and culture of blue-collar Saddlestring below it, although a handful of its members ventured into the community and some were great patrons of the museum, library, and other civic groups. The Eagle Mountain Club had only two hundred fifty members, and new people joined only when old members died, dropped out, or were denied privileges by a majority of the members.

The locals who worked at the club signed employment agreements to keep quiet about who the members were—CEOs, celebrities, politicians, magnates, a few trust fund moguls—and what went on inside. Still, most people in town seemed to know both, including Joe. What had always impressed him was how un-awed the locals were about the famous people who ventured down from the club and shopped and dined among them. There were never any public scenes of gasping recognition or autograph requests. Joe attributed the phenomenon to a wonderful mixture of proprietary pride—
These rich folks could live anywhere in the world and they choose to live here with us!
—and a stubborn independence and the optimism that perhaps, someday, they’d be members, too.

 

 

Joe had been
within the boundaries of the club only a few times in his career. During his first year as district game warden, he’d located a rogue colleague holing up with a rich wife whose husband was away on business. Since then, he’d been on the grounds on calls where game animals had been found killed or local trespassers had been spotted. While he was there, he’d been shadowed by private resort security vehicles whose occupants had watched what he did and where he went through spotting scopes.

Access to the resort was via a guardhouse manned during the daytime hours by Keith Bailey. At night, members gained entrance by calling the security people at the front desk of the clubhouse. Closed-circuit cameras were hidden in the brush along both sides of the driveway and throughout the massive compound.

Joe drove up the driveway and punched in the numbers Keith Bailey had given him. The iron gates clicked and swung away. He eased his pickup past the empty guardhouse, looking both ways for security personnel who might swoop down on him any second. No doubt his entrance was being captured on videotape. Joe chose to believe that no security people were watching the monitors live, since it was September and most of the members had already left.

 

 

As the gates
wheezed shut behind him, Joe crept along the banked blacktop entrance to the heart of the club. The road ran along the rim of the bluff, and the lights of Saddlestring were splayed out below to his right. Subtle lights marked both sides of the road.

He crested the hill and turned left, past the turnoff for the main clubhouse up on the hill. There were a few lights up there, but no activity he could see. The road dipped slightly, with large set-back houses on both sides, and he strained to see the plaques with the names of the owners in the grass marking each driveway.

He looked for a sign that read SKILLING. Kimberly Alice Skilling, heir to Skilling Defense Industries of Houston. She owned not only a large house on the grounds but also two guest cottages. And she’d asked Keith Bailey to keep a special eye on her place, especially one of the cottages where the pipes had burst the winter before.

Joe gave some credit to Bud Longbrake. Hiding in plain sight all this time.

Nate nosed his Jeep
into a thick stand of tall willows on the riverbank, making sure his vehicle couldn’t be seen from the road. He spooked a cow moose out of her resting place as he drove up, and she scrambled to her feet, all legs and snout in his headlights, and wheeled away from him and high-stepped off.

He killed the engine and the lights and climbed out. As he strapped on his shoulder holster and darkened his cheeks and forehead with river mud, he could hear the moose grunting and splashing and crashing downstream. He’d hoped to proceed soundlessly. He hadn’t counted on the demolition derby-like grace of a wild moose in the same area.

When his eyes became adjusted to the darkness and the only ambient light was from the stars and the fingernail slice of moon, he stepped back away from the vehicle and surveyed the terrain all around him. The river was in front of him: inky and determined, lapping occasionally at pale, round river rocks that rimmed the bank as he passed by. Behind him were swampy wetlands created by beavers damming up the fingerlike tributaries of the river. He was lucky, he thought, to have found this dry spit of land to drive on.

To his east was a sudden rise. The cliff face was striated and pale in the starlight. Small, dark forms shot across the flatness of the face, either starlings filling up on an evening insect hatch or bats doing the same thing. On the lip of the cliff he could see brush and bunched thick grass.

Nate took it cautiously as he crossed the river. The water was cold and surprisingly swift and it came up to his knees. He stepped from rock to rock and sometimes couldn’t tell what was beneath him. It was shallow and wide here, but there might be hidden deep holes. He aimed for smudges of tan or yellow beneath the surface, hoping they were rocks, hoping he wouldn’t slip on them.

He made it to the other side, but found himself walled in by twelve-foot-high brush that was too thick and tight to get through. He paralleled the river for a while, but couldn’t find an opening. Then he dropped to his knees and crawled through the brush on a game trail. His presence spooked low-bodied animals that squealed and ran out ahead of him.

After thirty yards, the brush thinned and he was able to stand. He found himself closer than he thought he would be to the cliff wall. Hands on his hips, he leaned back and scouted a route to the top. There were lines of dark vegetation zigzagging up the face. Since the seams were level enough to host weeds and grass, he assumed they would be flat enough to climb up.

But before approaching the wall, he stood stock-still and simply listened and looked around.

It was a familiar quiet, like Hole in the Wall Canyon. But he’d learned how treacherous that kind of quiet could be if he wasn’t fully alert and engaged.

He saw no other people anywhere. No fences. But as he concentrated on a pair of tall cottonwood trees between him and the wall, he saw an anomaly. Nothing in nature had perfect lines, and he’d seen perfect lines. He squinted, and recognized two box-shaped pieces of equipment secured waist-high to the trunks of the trees.

Hunters called them scouting cameras. They were battery-powered digital cameras designed to be mounted near game trails. The cameras had motion detectors and either flashes or infrared nighttime capability. They could take up to a thousand 1.5- to 5.0-megapixel images from a single set of four D batteries.

The usual range of the cameras was forty to fifty feet. He was beyond that. But how could he possibly bypass them or get close enough to destroy them without having his photo snapped with every step?

He stayed still and thought about it.

There were so many moose, deer, elk, and antelope in the river bottom that no doubt the cameras got quite a workout at night. But was someone actually looking at each shot live?

He shook his head. This was the Eagle Mountain Club, not the Pentagon. What probably happened was some intern or maintenance guy was sent down the hill every few days to retrieve the shots and see if trespassers had entered the grounds, and who they were. Individual digital photographs stayed inside the camera and weren’t transmitted to a central control room.

Additionally, the trail cameras were mounted high, not at ground level. It was probably so the security guys wouldn’t have to stare at hundreds and hundreds of photos of rabbits and grouse.