He’d known the end of this story as he approached him minutes ago. There was a hole the size of a fist in the man’s back, the exit wound. It was inches deep and pulsating. Cody dropped down to the trail and turned the man over. The victim had watched, his eyes clear and sharp. The entry wound was the size of a nickel and it was framed by a hole in the fabric of his shirt. The hole in the cloth, just below the breast pocket on the left side of the victim’s chest, was burned black on the edges in an outline that resembled a blooming flower. The reason for the pattern was powder burns-meaning that the shot had been made practically point-blank. The weapon had been of large caliber. Cody saw no other bullet wounds but there didn’t have to be any.
Cody said, “I’m not going to lie and tell you you’ll be okay.”
The man closed and reopened his eyes. Not out of disappointment, but a means of signaling Cody that he understood.
Cody could feel blood from the exit wound soaking into the denim of his trousers. It was warm.
“Can you hear me?” Cody said.
Again, the man blinked.
“Are you with the pack trip led by Jed McCarthy?”
Blink.
“Is there an older boy on the trip? Named Justin? Seventeen, eighteen?”
“Is he okay?”
“Man, I don’t know what to do. There’s no way to stop the bleeding.”
“Did you see who shot you?”
“Can you try to talk? Can you please try to tell me what happened and who did it?”
The man closed his eyes and swallowed painfully. Cody looked skyward for a fresh thought or a signal that would give him-and the gunshot victim-some kind of hope. Or something he could do to make this poor man more comfortable.
He felt the man die. It wasn’t a sound or a movement, but a sudden absence of firmness in his lap. Cody looked down. “Not now,” Cody pleaded. “Not before you tell me what happened.”
The man’s eyes were still open but there was nothing behind them. His mouth was slightly open and red inside, the color of candied cherries. Cody reached up and closed the eyes, pulling the lids and hoping they’d stay that way. They did.
* * *
Cody rolled the body off his legs. In death, it seemed twice as heavy as before. He stood unsteadily. His muscles ached from riding and he was covered with a man’s sacred lifeblood; his jeans were black and sticky and orange half-moon-shaped pine needles stuck to the denim. He bent over and dug through the victim’s clothing and found a wallet and flipped it open. Andre Alan Russell, resident of Manhattan. Cody remembered the name from the file he took from Jed’s office.
As he’d done earlier in the day, he photographed Russell’s body and wounds, knowing while he did it that the shooting had happened someplace else and this wasn’t the crime scene. He wondered how far Russell had come from where he’d been shot. He dragged Russell’s body off the trail. Before tucking it in beneath a massive fallen tree and covering it the best he could with heavy logs and branches, Cody looked skyward for a moment, then looted all of Russell’s pockets looking for a package of cigarettes that wasn’t there. Cursing, Cody then covered the body. The cover wouldn’t prevent predators from finding it-probably nothing would-but he hoped he could return with help to get the body out before it was torn up.
He kept Russell’s New York driver’s license but cached the wallet and the contents of the man’s pockets in the crook of the aspen tree he’d used to keep Gipper around.
Since Mitchell’s GPS was gone and he couldn’t get a reading of coordinates, Cody found a T-shirt in his saddlebag and ripped it up and tied one strip to the cover where the body was and another on a low overhanging branch at the trail to mark the location. He scribbled in his spiral notebook what he’d found and what he’d done with the body and Russell’s possessions.
When he was through he stood and wiped sweat from his face and took off his hat to cool the top of his head. He could see no trace of Russell’s body beneath the cover he’d put on it, but he knew it was there. And the image of Russell’s last attempt to speak would be with him forever.
* * *
Back on Gipper, Cody contemplated turning around to try and retrieve the packhorse, but he feared the animal was still running and was miles away. He couldn’t afford to let more time elapse between him and Justin.
He nudged his horse and Gipper reluctantly stepped back on the trail. As he walked his mount, Cody reached behind him into his saddlebag for the satellite phone. He’d thought long and hard about the situation he was in and had decided he couldn’t take any more chances on his own.
Because now there were two bodies, and he had no reason to think there wouldn’t be more.
