Snow. Mike Bond
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for Weismann to get his crew up here. Then I’ll ride up that ridge and check where that guy on that blue snowmobile was, see if he’s still around.”
ZACK AND STEVE TIED the horses in thick trees by Highway 191. “We stash the kilos here.” Steve panted, “get a truck and disappear.”
Zack nodded, thinking that till now he’d never had a reason to disappear. His life had been constantly having to appear: TV football, charity shows, Vegas high tables, college games. Now all that seemed bizarre, artificial.
They piled the kilos on the two tarps and set the horses free to find their way back to camp. “If that snowmobile returns,” Steve said, “he’ll track us here, find the coke.”
Bent over with pain, Zack stared at him. “So we don’t have the time to get a ride into Bozeman, rent a truck and come back.”
Steve nodded at the trailhead where Curt’s big Ford 250 was parked, still hitched to the six-horse trailer. “We have to borrow that.”
“Curt’s truck? You nuts?”
“Otherwise we can throw this coke away. Plus still be prosecuted for having tried to take it. A lose-lose situation.”
Zack sat on the trampled snow. The pain made him dizzy, he couldn’t think. “This just gets crazier and crazier.”
“I remember where Curt keeps the spare key. We’ll leave him a note that you broke your arm and I took his truck to drive you to the hospital. We leave the truck in Bozeman and rent a U-Haul, like we planned. Curt’ll understand.”
Steve ran down the road toward Curt’s truck. In the distance Zack could hear a snowmobile, wondered if it was the guy on the blue machine who’d come up the trail. Out for a ride, maybe. Probably no danger.
If the snowmobiler kept going straight, he’d hit their tracks coming back from the cave. Hurry up, he told Steve, who was having trouble unhitching the horse trailer.
Maybe the snowmobile was one of the cops, Zack thought. And maybe Curt was with him, would arrive just as they were taking his truck.
What if they tried to give the coke back? Take it back up the mountain? No, the horses were gone. Where to put it, anyway? The cops would catch them. And if they left it here they’d be caught for that too.
Something vibrated against his chest, snakelike. His phone. Monica. “Hey you,” he said.
“How are you?”
“Good. I’m good. You?”
“I had this dream last night you were in trouble. Just checking it out.”
“You believe too much in dreams, Monica.”
“I’m missing you … When you coming home?”
“Wait!” he put her on hold, listening to the snowmobile come nearer. “Hurry up!” he yelled at Steve, who was bent under the truck’s front wheel well looking for Curt’s spare key.
When Zack switched back to Monica she was gone, and didn’t answer when he called.
“SOMEBODY burned this plane,” Kenny said, peering down the hole where the plane lay.
“No shit,” Deputy Lopez said, caught himself.
“Don’t touch anything,” Kenny said.
“I’m not even going in that hole,” Lopez said.
“We leave it for Weismann.” Kenny scanned the horizon. “Let’s spread out. I got a feeling we’ll find something. Maybe up on that ridge.”
Curt climbed on the back of the Arctic Cat and Kenny accelerated toward the ridge. When they got there they found the track of the blue snowmobile and followed it westward and down, joining the tracks of two men leading two horses.
“These are my horses!” Curt yelled. “Suzie and Tom. These are my dudes – what the Hell?”
“What are they doing up here?”
“I have no idea. This is crazy,” Curt leaned out from the snowmobile to check the tracks. “They’ve loaded down my horses.”
They followed the snowmobile down the mountain along the trail that Zack, Steve and the two horses had made with the paniers full of kilos.
“You give your horses white man names?” Kenny called back. “What’s with that?”
STEVE AND ZACK had piled half the kilos into the back of Curt’s truck when Zack raised his good hand: silence.
The snowmobile. Coming down the mountain. Toward them.
One-handed, Zack dumped more kilos into Curt’s truck. “It’s the blue machine, the guy we heard this morning. Who stopped below us.”
“Leave the rest!” Steve shouted as the snowmobile crested the ridge above them.
Zack glanced at the pile of kilos they hadn’t yet moved and ran to the truck, jumped in the passenger seat as Steve accelerated south toward Bozeman, a blue snowmobile racing down the road behind them, losing ground, then giving up.
“That’s him,” Zack said. “Who came up the trail. Then turned away below us.”
“You think I haven’t figured that out?” Steve said, crouched over the wheel, scanning the road.
“Yeah, yeah I forgot. You’re a fuckin genius.”
Steve checked the mirror. “So who is he?”
“The plane.” Zack doubled up as a spasm hit his broken arm. “Somebody from the plane.”
“There wasn’t any snowmobile trailer, just the cop truck.”
“So where’d he come from?”
CONTRA TODOS
CURT AND KENNY FOLLOWED the prints of the two dudes and two pack horses and the blue snowmobile back down the mountain toward camp.
Racing along on the back of Kenny’s Arctic Cat, Curt couldn’t figure why his dudes would have brought the pack horses up here. Unless one of them had shot an elk and was bringing the meat back to camp.
But why would they be hunting when he’d asked them to stay in camp in case the grizzly came back? And who was the blue snowmobile and why was he following them?
When they reached camp he saw with sudden fury that the corral had been broken down and his four other horses had vanished down the trail toward the highway. Grizzly tracks wandered the trampled snow. In the corner of the broken corral his two pack horses, Tom and Suzie, stood huffing, packsaddles askew.
They’d obviously just arrived, after the griz had left. And whatever they’d had in their packsaddles was gone.
Tom was holding up his left rear leg, hurt.
Fury rose like bile up Curt’s throat, the urge to kill. Zack and Steve hadn’t guarded the horses and the grizzly stampeded them. Then Zack and Steve had taken Tom and Suzie up the mountain, loaded them down, then brought them back empty? It didn’t make sense.
Then he saw that Tom and Suzie’s tracks went down the mountain loaded, but had come back up empty.
Why? This was crazy.
And where were Zack and Steve now?
Tom was truly hurt, holding his left rear leg up against his belly, the hoof hanging down. He danced away when Curt touched his fetlock.
Broken leg.
Curt walked in circles on the trampled snow, rubbing the back of his neck, trying to see through his anger to what had happened.