Vicious Circle Page 2

  Slaughter had told Joe the FLIR was sensitive enough to detect a still-warm fire ring or a lit cigarette if the surrounding temperature was cool enough—even from thousands of feet in the sky. It could even show which specific vehicles had just arrived in a parking lot full of thousands of them by the ghostly white glow of warm tires.

  —

  WHEN JOE SAW those white hash marks on the screen and asked, “What’s that?” Slaughter said, “Elk.”

  “Elk?”

  “Their coats insulate them so well they don’t put out enough heat for the FLIR to pick up,” Slaughter explained. “All you can see are their legs.”

  Joe leaned closer to the screen. Several of the chalk marks were moving. Then several of the animals broke into a run and peeled away from the herd. All he could see were disembodied white stick legs strobing through the trees.

  —

  “WE’VE GOT ABOUT ten more minutes of fuel before we need to head back,” Slaughter announced over the intercom.

  “Fine by me,” Joe said.

  “We’ve covered about sixty-four square miles around the elk camp,” Herdt said after checking their location against a topo map on her lap. She was using a yellow highlighter pen to re-create their pattern on the map.

  What didn’t need to be said was that, if Farkus was actually down there, he hadn’t shown up on the FLIR. Which meant he was no longer putting out any heat.

  Which meant . . .

  “Now what are we looking at?” Joe asked, pressing his index finger to the screen. “Another elk?”

  The image was thicker, taller, and a brighter white than the elk legs had been.

  Joe leaned over and looked out the side window. The timber was too thick to see anything on the ground clearly.

  Herdt said, “It looks like a man.”

  Not a man, exactly, Joe thought, but the negative white image of a man standing deep in the timber. Then he was gone.

  “What just happened?” Joe asked.

  “He stepped behind a tree,” Herdt said. As the plane turned left, a shoulder appeared on the screen, as well as a foot at the base of the trunk. “He’s trying to stay out of view.”

  Joe thought, Why?

  “He can hear us flying around him, right?”

  “You bet he can.”

  The screen went dark. “I lost him,” Joe said.

  Slaughter banked sharply, and Joe felt his weight shift until he was pressed against the left door of the plane. He hoped it had a really good lock.

  “There he is,” Herdt said with triumph. Joe heard the sound of screen captures being made on her iPad.

  But he still couldn’t see anything but black on the screen.

  Herdt twisted around and showed him how to use the side icons on the iPad to expand the field of vision, until he could once again see the ghostly form trying to hide behind a tree. He pressed an icon that looked like crosshairs in a rifle scope to lock in on the figure. Despite the angle of the plane and the constant vibration inside from the engine, the image was remarkably still and clear.

  “Okay, I’ve got him again,” Joe said. “Farkus, you idiot. Come on out.”

  “Coordinates,” Slaughter said to Herdt in a stern military voice.

  Herdt looked away from her iPad and called them out. Slaughter repeated them over the radio mike to the Joint Operations Center. That way, Sheriff Reed’s search-and-rescue team knew where to locate Farkus on the ground. If it was Farkus.

  “Why isn’t he trying to get our attention?” Joe asked. “If that was me, I’d be jumping up and down, waving my arms. What’s wrong with him?”

  Herdt said, “He might be injured.”

  “Sometimes,” Slaughter added, “lost people get so disoriented they try and hide from rescue attempts. It’s bizarre, but it’s happened before.”

  Joe shook his head, although he knew neither Slaughter nor Herdt could see him do it.

  “Our work is done here,” Slaughter said, and Joe felt the airplane level out and begin to gain altitude. Herdt was busy up front noting the coordinates in a spiral pad.

  Joe was transfixed on the screen as the ghostly white figure got smaller.

  At first, he thought there was a malfunction of some kind on the iPad when he caught a glimpse of four white smudges instead of just one.

  He reached out and expanded the field of view. The figure they’d first seen—whom they assumed was Farkus—was clearly in the foreground. But beyond him were three other human images. They were advancing through the forest and converging on the lone figure.

  “Look at the screen,” Joe said.

  “Come again?” Slaughter asked, irritation in his voice.

  “Look at the screen.”

  Joe glanced up to see that Herdt had stopped writing and had manipulated her iPad until the four images appeared as well.

  “What is going on?” Herdt asked.

  “Three heat signatures are closing in on the one we found,” Joe said.

  They were so far away now that the white smudges were tiny and faint.

  “Bill, we have to go back,” Herdt said to her pilot.

  “Negative,” Slaughter said. “We barely have enough fuel to make it back to Saddlestring.”

  “Please, Bill?” she asked.

  “Negative. I’m sorry. Maybe you’re looking at the search-and-rescue team as they found him.”

  Joe didn’t point out that Sheriff Reed’s SAR team was still at their command post at the base of the mountain. If they’d moved out, he knew they would have heard it on the radio.

  “If we could risk another pass, I would,” Slaughter said. He sounded like he meant it. “We’ve accomplished our mission and found the guy. But we’re in the danger zone of running out of fuel if we don’t beat it straight back. I haven’t seen any places in these mountains to try and land a plane.”

  “Okay,” Herdt said, resigned. “Let’s go home.” She turned off her iPad and returned to her report.

  Joe didn’t want to get between them. And he couldn’t wait to get back on solid ground.

  That’s when he saw a star-shaped flash on the screen. Then another. Then a staccato burst of flashes that were faint and distant but distinct.

  Joe thought, Flashlights? But why would rescuers blink their beams at the man they were trying to save?

  Then it hit him and he went cold. They were muzzle flashes.

  “I think I just saw a murder,” he said.

  Herdt looked sharply around, and Joe felt the wings waver slightly when what he’d said registered with Bill Slaughter.

  Joe looked up from the screen and stared at nothing. In all his years in the field, he’d never witnessed a murder. There was a lump in his throat and he felt guilty for cursing Farkus earlier. Farkus—or whoever he was—hadn’t been hiding from the Cessna. He’d been hiding from the three men who were after him.

  He knew there was little they could do—or have done—given the circumstances. He also knew the images he’d just seen would stay with him for a very long time.

  And he doubted he’d ever see Dave Farkus alive again.

  2

  Two nights earlier

  Dave Farkus sat on the farthest stool from the door in the Stockman’s Bar in Saddlestring and poured Clamato juice into a mug of draft Coors until it was coral red, and then completed it with four dashes of Tabasco.

  He admired the drink for a moment—the new bartender, Wanda Stacy, was watching him out of the corner of her eye—then he tipped it back and swallowed nearly half of it in five big gulps with his eyes closed. He placed the mug back on the bar and moaned with pleasure.

  Farkus was sixty-one and shaped like a fat bear. He had rheumy eyes, jowls, thick muttonchop sideburns, and a veiny, bulbous nose. His snap-button shirts, it seemed, kept getting smaller. He wore heavy lace-up o
utfitter boots because he wanted folks to know that he used to be one. Pink foam covered his upper lip.

  “Perfect,” he said. “A fucking perfect red beer.”

  “I can’t see how you can drink those things,” she said with her hands on her hips.

  “You don’t understand. Red beer is medicine. We used to drink it for breakfast every morning when I guided elk hunters. It cures hangovers, headaches, whatever. You should invite me behind the bar so I can show you how to make one.”

  “No, thanks,” she said.

  Farkus was the only customer still in the bar, except for two hipster tourists who were finishing up a game of eight ball on the pool table in the back. He always chose that particular stool for a lot of good reasons, not least of which because it was closest to an ancient diorama behind glass of dead ground squirrels in little cowboy outfits playing pool on a miniature table. The display was getting old, though, and it bothered him that the squirrel leaning across the table to make a shot had lost both of his little dried ears, which now lay on the felt table. They looked like tiny dried leaves.

  The best reason to choose that stool, though, was when he found out why ex-sheriff O. R. “Bud” Barnum had always chosen it, even for his morning coffee: the acoustics.

  Although the people who had constructed the Stockman’s back in the 1930s—with its knotty pine, burled posts, and low ceiling—had likely not designed it any way in particular, all of the sounds inside the bar were somehow funneled to that last stool. He heard the loud click of pool balls striking, the muttering of the players, even the wet snoring of the owner in the corner near the door.

  That last stool was the catbird seat for a man who liked to know the local gossip. And that man was Dave Farkus.

  —

  THE HIPSTERS HAD PLAYED nervously for the past two hours, their heads snapping up every time the front door opened. They seemed to think a redneck cowboy would walk in and pound them into jelly for no good reason, Farkus thought. When he walked past them several times on the way to the toilet, he growled at them like an angry dog, and he could tell it unsettled them.

  “Did I tell you I was going elk hunting tomorrow morning?” Farkus asked Wanda.

  “Only about four times,” she said.

  He drained his mug and held up two stubby fingers. “Another Coors and another can of Clamato, barkeep.”

  “Don’t call me barkeep.”

  “My charm offensive doesn’t seem to be working.”

  “Oh, it’s offensive all right,” she said. But there was a little bit of a smile there when she said it. Whether it was at him or at her own joke remained to be seen. Probably her own joke, he concluded. Wanda had been around the area for years and she wasn’t known for her quick wit.

  Wanda was being trained to be the head bartender by Buck Timberman, the longtime owner of the Stockman’s, who was nearly ninety years old. That was Timberman slumped and sleeping in the back corner of the bar with his chin on his chest and his glasses perched precariously on the end of his nose. The old man was still lean and ropy and everyone’s trusted confidant. He’d always been that way, Farkus knew, but he was even more revered now that he’d lost his hearing and simply nodded sympathetically at customers who told him about rotten ranchers, deals gone wrong, and cheating spouses.

  Wanda was a big woman who had been described as voluptuous forty pounds ago. Despite that, the twice-married former rodeo queen still wore tight jeans, pointy cowboy boots with the pants tucked into the shafts, wide bejeweled belts, and scooped long-sleeved tops that showed a lot of cleavage. Farkus had been tempted to tuck a dollar bill between those breasts more than once when she delivered the makings for red beer, but if he did it she’d likely break his jaw.

  “Did I ever show you my front tooth?” he asked Wanda.

  She looked up from where she was plunging dirty glasses into the sink. She paused and squinted.

  “What about your tooth?”

  “You’ll have to get closer so you can see it,” he said.

  He could tell she was really thinking about it. She didn’t want to come down the length of the bar to satisfy him, but her curiosity had gotten the best of her.

  “See what?” she asked, getting closer while she dried her hands on a bar rag.

  He bared his teeth and fit the nail of his little finger into a vertical slot on his top left incisor.

  “You’ve got a slot on your tooth,” she said, disappointed.

  “You know how I got it?” he asked, waggling his eyebrows.

  “No, how?”

  “Biting off fly line on the river.”

  She just stared at him, not getting it.

  He said, “I’m a hell of a fly fisherman, you know, but I’m an even better instructor. I could teach you. Women are better natural fly casters than men, because you don’t overpower the rod and act like you know everything when you don’t. I’ll have to take you sometime.”

  She shook her head and walked back to her dirty glasses. “Not if it means I’ll get slots in my teeth.”

  He momentarily dropped his head at her rebuke. He would never tell her he got that slot in his tooth by sawing furiously back and forth with a thin nail file, thinking it might impress potential female fishing clients, but it had never worked and wasn’t working now.

  He wished Wanda wasn’t as dumb as a chicken, because the later it got the better she looked to him.

  —

  THE HIPSTERS FINISHED THEIR GAME and put up their sticks. On the way out, they asked Wanda if she could recommend a good cheap motel with clean rooms, a gluten-free breakfast, and free Wi-Fi.

  “You might try Denver or Seattle,” she said.

  Farkus got a laugh out of that—two Wanda witticisms in one night!—but after they left, she went back to scowling at him.

  Nothing worked on her, it seemed. Flattering her, telling her stories, laughing at her jokes, trying to make her laugh—nothing.

  He’d tried to tell her about his trip to Hollywood to sell his story about how he and Joe Pickett had escaped death by bullet, fire, and a dangerous whitewater river a few years back as the forest burned down around them, but she wasn’t interested in the least after she’d found out he hadn’t met Leonardo DiCaprio or Larry the Cable Guy out there.

  He’d told her about guiding some mercenaries into the mountains in search of a couple of mountain-man brothers and barely living through that, and it hadn’t impressed her, either.

  And he’d told her about the time he was literally hit by a drift boat in the river that contained three murdered men in the bottom of it.

  Nothing.

  In fact, he could tell by the tilt of her head that she hadn’t believed him even when he’d implored her to look it up or, better yet, ask Joe Pickett.

  His problem, he decided, was that his life had been filled with too many exciting adventures for someone as dumb as Wanda to believe him.

  He looked at his wristwatch. He’d been in the bar since eight and now it was midnight. He knew it was Buck’s custom to close down after twelve instead of two if there weren’t enough customers to make it worthwhile to stay open.

  Although he’d already had ten red beers, he couldn’t be expected to fund Timberman’s retirement all by himself.

  —

  FARKUS STARED into the bottom of his mug at the last inch of his beer. He felt sorry for himself, which had once been a new experience for him but was now occurring with more and more frequency.

  Without actually recognizing the day, month, or year that it had started, he was cognizant of the fact that he was on the downhill side of his life and that he had very little to show for it except for those odd adventures, usually involving Joe Pickett. And even with those on his résumé, and despite his retelling of them to people like Wanda or the bored Hollywood “producers” he’d met, Farkus had actually been more of a b
ystander than a participant. No one would remember him except as the man who always seemed to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. That wasn’t much of a legacy.

  His daughter had moved to Missoula to become a professional lesbian and she’d no longer talk to him, and his ex-wife called only when she was drunk and needed money. There would be no grandchildren to remember him and to listen to his tales. Even his dog had run off.

  He looked up from his mope when he realized Wanda had made her way down the bar and was standing right in front of him on the other side of the counter. She leaned in toward him and he stared at the top of her freckled breasts. He’d had enough beer that there were four of them, and he had no objections to that at all.

  “I’m up here,” she said.

  His gaze rose to her face.

  “You’ve run us out of Clamato.”

  “Oh.” Maybe that would be his legacy, he thought sourly.

  She had full plump cheeks and there was a smear of lipstick on her front tooth.

  “So if you want another red beer, you’ll have to make do with pure tomato juice.”

  “I’m probably going to call it an evening,” he said. “I’m going elk hunting—”

  “—in the morning,” she said, finishing his sentence. “I’ll ring you up.”

  As she said it, the door opened and he felt a puff of cold air from outside and heard the clumps of footfalls on the wooden floor behind him.

  He started to turn on his stool to see who’d come in, but he was transfixed by the look on Wanda’s face as she beheld the new customers. Her eyes had narrowed and her mouth had formed into a smile both provocative and predatory that she’d apparently kept locked away in a vault until then. Farkus suddenly felt like he was now a hundred miles away from her—an afterthought in her rearview mirror.

  “Hello, gentlemen,” she said over his head as the new customers walked behind him toward the pool table.