Back of Beyond

“I don’t know anything,” Jed said, shouting into the mouthpiece, “except you assured me you’d handle your end. What the hell is going on here? Can’t you control a single fucking cop?”

A long sigh. “He’s gone rogue. Nobody can control this guy. Believe me, I thought I’d put him out of the picture, but somehow he got away.”

Jed said, “So what do you want me to do? Do you want me to just turn around and forget everything? Do you want me to quit? Well, I can’t do that because I’m here. I see the glacier. This whole trip has fallen apart and I’ve got clients gone and angry and I’ll probably lose my business if any of ’em tells the Park Service.”

“Just calm down, Jed. I’ll handle my end.”

“You’ve fucked up your end, if you ask me.”

“Look, I’m here. I’m ten minutes away from his house. I’ve got to go inside and get some answers. I’ll call you back as soon as I know where Hoyt is. And I’ll send you that map and the GPS coordinates the minute I get back to the office. Just don’t fucking panic.”

Jed said, “You’d better make this right. The rest of my damned life depends on it.”

“I will. Don’t worry. Now keep your phone on.”

38

At the same time, two and a half miles away, Cody and Bull Mitchell hoisted Jim Gannon up over a high branch. They’d decided based on what Gannon had told them they had to move as quickly as they could to overtake the pack trip, and bringing along the wounded Gannon and four extra horses would slow them down. Using tape and bandages from Mitchell’s first-aid kit, they’d bound up Gannon’s knee the best they could and tied his hands and feet together. Mitchell had fashioned a seat harness out of rope they could use to lift him.

“Give me a couple of minutes,” Mitchell said, breathing hard from the labor of pulling on the rope with Cody. “I need to get these spare horses picketed so they’ll be okay.”

Cody nodded and unhooked the satellite phone and powered it up. He had a good clear signal and no messages. He started to key in the number for Larry’s secret cell phone, thought better of it, and called Larry’s ex-wife’s cell. She was a real estate agent and was never without it day or night.

“Cindy Olson.”

“Cindy, this is Cody Hoyt. I’m out of town and I need to reach Larry.”

“Oh, it’s you. The man who shot our coroner.”

It seemed like ages ago, Cody thought. “Yes, well, there’s a good story that goes along with that but I’ll need to tell you at a better time. Right now, it’s urgent I get ahold of Larry.”

“Ah,” she said, “you probably tried his office and his cell but he didn’t pick up.”

“Sort of.”

“Then you probably didn’t hear. I’m surprised you didn’t, since you two have such a deep bromance. Larry’s been suspended. You can reach him at home, I suspect. Suggest to him that he spend some of his downtime looking for work because he’s got a child support payment coming up.”

“Why was he suspended?”

“Guess, Cody.” And she hung up.

He called Larry’s house. He lived outside of Helena near Marysville on U.S. Highway 279.

“Larry,” Cody said.

There was a beat. Then, “It’s you, you son of a bitch. Where are you? Did you get my messages?”

“I got ’em.”

“Then why in the hell didn’t you call me back?”

Cody said, “I don’t have time to explain, but in a nutshell I got paranoid. I didn’t want you to know where I was because of that fire in Bozeman.”

“What are you saying?” Larry sounded hurt. “You thought I had something to do with that? Is that what you’re saying?”

“I don’t know what I was thinking,” Cody lied. “Blame it on the DTs. I’m fucking miserable, but we got the bad guy. Or at least one of them.”

“Who is it? And who the hell is ‘we’?”

Cody outlined hiring Mitchell, and the trail of bodies leading them to Gannon. “He’s here now,” Cody said. “We hung him up in a tree so the bears and wolves won’t eat him. The Park Service can cut him down and take him to a clinic. Not that I really care about that, but we’ll need his testimony to nail his partner, who is also on the pack trip.”

“His partner?” Larry sounded genuinely baffled. That made Cody feel better toward him.

“A woman.”

“Ah, Rachel Mina,” Larry said. Cody leaned into the phone, shocked Larry knew the name. “Although that’s not her married name, which is Rachel Chavez.”

“How do you know that?” Cody asked.

“You dumb shit, it was what I was trying to tell you when I called. I didn’t know about Gannon, but I did know about Rachel Mina Chavez. It’s called police work, and I think I connected all the dots. Of course, that’s before they suspended me for withholding what I knew about you.”

Cody felt his head begin to spin. “Tell me what you know,” he said.

Larry sighed. Cody could anticipate from that sound Larry was going to roll it out in the only way he could. He glanced up to see if Mitchell was still taking care of the horses and saw he was. And Jim Gannon swung slowly in a circle over his head, passed out. The late evening sun made a long shadow across the meadow of Gannon’s figure, and in silhouette it looked like the outfitter was hanging from the tree by the neck.