Back of Beyond полностью

Mitchell clucked his tongue and his horse stepped out. He said, “I’m not sure I’m getting paid enough money to come out here into the wilderness with a desperate man withdrawing from alcohol and cigarettes.”

“Please shut up,” Cody said.

Mitchell laughed. “First you chew my ass for not talking, and now it’s shut up,” he said. “Make up your damned mind.”

“I know one thing,” Cody said twenty minutes later, as they descended toward the valley floor. “If I can’t find some cigarettes pretty soon I’m likely to rip the heart out of the guy we’re chasing with my bare hands and feed it to him.”

Mitchell said, “So who are we chasing, anyway?”

“Hell if I know.”

* * *

Cody rode in silence, consumed by the maelstrom in his head. He recounted the conversations he’d had with Larry and the information Larry had conveyed. The pieces of the puzzle had been laid out on the table by Larry, along with a few more he’d added himself, so the logical sequence should have been for the two of them to start assembly and come up with a viable theory or conclusion or at least to be able to discard unworkable scenarios. But if Larry had been working against him, could he count on anything his ex-partner had said? Were there even other victims at all? Was Larry the puppet master pulling his strings, leading him to where Larry wanted him to go? Or was it simply a matter of Larry getting Cody out of the picture and out of the way? There was no place in the country more isolated than where he was right now, Cody thought. If Larry’s plan had been to get him out of the way, he couldn’t have succeeded better.

So was there any validity at all to Larry’s information? Was it even true that the last Web site Hank Winters had looked at was the one for Jed McCarthy’s pack trip? Or was that all part of Larry’s misdirection, too?

He weighed the possibility of turning around and going back. That way, he could wring Larry’s neck and blow up whatever game Larry was playing.

* * *

They were in the middle of Camp One before Cody even realized it. Only when Bull Mitchell stopped his horse and swung down to the ground did Cody notice there were rough squares of flattened grass on the plateau where tents had been and an alcove in the trees with a fire pit.

“Jed’s doing a good job,” Mitchell said, with a lilt of admiration. “He’s running a low-impact outfit. You wouldn’t even know they were here last night except if you knew the exact location. No garbage or human sign except where they flattened the grass.”

Cody dismounted as well. He thought he knew why real cowboys liked to sit their horses so long: it hurt too much to get off.

He leaned against Gipper while the blood flowed into his legs and the pain receded. He watched Mitchell roam the campsite and thrust his hand into the fire pit. When he came back wiping the ash on his jeans, he said, “Yup, they were here this morning. The rocks are still warm and the ash is moist from when they put the fire out.”

“Any idea how long they’ve been gone?”

Mitchell said, “It’s hard to get everybody up, fed, and get an entire camp packed up. My guess is that they were probably on the trail by nine. So four or five hours is all.”

Cody swallowed. He tried to imagine his son in the camp just hours before. He hadn’t seen him since last Christmas. He wondered how tall he was now, and how long his hair was.

Cody started to ask Mitchell how long it would take for them to catch them when he noticed Mitchell looking down toward the shore of the lake and squinting.

Cody turned, and said, “What are you seeing?”

Mitchell said, “I thought I caught a glimpse of something down by the water. Something moved. You see it?”

Cody couldn’t see well enough through the trees so he shifted to his left. Branches were parted enough for him to get an unimpeded view all the way down the slope to the shore of the lake.

“Wolves,” Cody said. “At least three of them.”

One wolf was jet-black, another was silver, and the third was mottled gray. Cody could see they were feeding at the water’s edge.

Gracie lagged behind her sister on the trail, putting distance between Strawberry and Danielle’s horse. It seemed odd to her there were four fewer riders ahead on the second day.

Despite his friend James Knox’s disapproval and Jed’s pleading, Tony D’Amato had decided the only way he could live with himself was to track down Tristan Glode and try to persuade him to come back. Drey Russell thought D’Amato was on a fool’s mission, but agreed to ride with him. Their plan, they said, was to rejoin the group at Camp Two. Grudgingly, Jed had given the two his maps and told them to look for a marker on which trail to follow when they came back.

Gracie noticed how Dakota watched the exchange in silence, shaking her head.

* * *