Dark Sky (Joe Pickett #21)(38)

Joe unzipped his parka and slipped his right hand inside his coat to where his empty holster was. It was a ruse, but he hoped it would make Boedecker think twice.

“Don’t make me do something I don’t want to do,” Joe said. “You showed your hand back at the camp. I’d suggest you keep moving.”

“It isn’t like that, Joe,” Boedecker said. “I didn’t know how things would go.”

“You were in on it,” Joe said. “What did you do, tell Earl where we’d be camping?”

Boedecker’s eyes darted several times to where Joe’s hand was concealed beneath his coat. He obviously wasn’t sure that Joe wasn’t armed, although the chances of it were unlikely.

“I never told him, Joe. Because I didn’t know where we’d camp for sure when we set off. You were the guide, remember?”

“He knew when we left. He knew which trailhead. And you allowed them to listen to us through the radio in your gear.”

Boedecker didn’t deny anything and, to his credit, Joe thought, he didn’t try to come up with a lie. Instead, he said, “I never thought it would go the way it did. You might not know it, but Earl has a right to be on the warpath. I knew he’d want to confront Steve-2 in person because he couldn’t get near him any other way. But this . . .” Boedecker widened his eyes in disbelief.

He continued. “When Earl sent me away without my horses or my guns, I knew what was going to go down. But I didn’t expect it until it happened.”

Joe didn’t reply. Instead, he gestured for Boedecker to move along.

“I ain’t going by myself, Joe. Come on, man.”

“You got yourself into this.”

Boedecker said, “They’ll kill me.”

“Why would they kill you now? You helped them.”

“Because they can’t leave any witnesses,” Boedecker said. “There’s something you don’t know.”

“What’s that?”

Boedecker pointed toward the east. “After I left camp I ran like a son of a bitch. I heard the shots and it spooked the hell out of me, so I deliberately went in the wrong direction. I figured I’d put as much distance as I could between them and me before I started down the mountain.”

Joe nodded for him to go on.

“I found a dead hunter lying facedown in a little meadow,” Boedecker said. “Lots of blood, and he wasn’t completely stiff, so it happened just last night, I think. I rolled him over and saw the stab wound in his ribs.”

Joe shuddered and recalled the knifepoint at his side just a little over an hour ago. Kirby.

“Who was he?” Joe asked.

“Don’t know,” Boedecker said. “But he looked like one of those millennial types. Long beard, wearing all camo. Young guy. I figured he might have stumbled on the Thomases last night and they took him out. Poor fucker.”

“And you left him there?”

“What the hell else could I do?” Boedecker asked. “It came clear to me right then that Earl doesn’t want anyone to talk about what happened up here. The only people he trusts are his sons. They’ll kill me, and you if they have to. That seems like a good reason for the two of us to stick together. We’re not involved in this dispute.”

Joe thought about it. Boedecker didn’t push him.



* * *



—

Do you have a cell phone on you?” Joe asked.

“Nope. Didn’t even bring it with me.”

“Any weapons?”

“Earl made me drop my .44. I’m unarmed and defenseless. I’ve got a skinning knife and fencing pliers in my backpack, but that’s it. I don’t even have bear spray. I can’t remember the last time I was in these mountains with no way to defend myself. How’d you get to keep your gun?”

Joe kept his hand where it was. He didn’t want to reveal the truth.

“They took your weapon away, didn’t they?” the rancher asked. His eyes twinkled.

Joe let his right hand drop away from the empty holster.

“Yup.”

“You had me going there for a minute, though,” Boedecker said with a chuckle. “Of course, if I would have thought about it more, I’d remember you can’t hit a damned thing with a handgun.”

It was true.

“They were pretty thorough,” Boedecker said. “They had this thing planned out. Earl has been thinking about it for close to a year.”

Joe wondered how Thomas had known about it that long.

“Hey,” Boedecker said, “where’s Steve-2? Did they get him? Was that what all the shooting was about?”

Again, Joe didn’t respond. He recalled that Boedecker hadn’t been there when he and Price had made their run for it.

“The bodyguard made a break for it,” Joe said. “Brad wounded him with his shotgun and finished him off.”

“Jesus.”

“That created a distraction,” Joe said. “I hit Kirby and Earl with bear spray and took off.”

“So Steve-2 got away, too?”

“I reckon.”

“They want him, not us,” Boedecker said.

“What’s your point?”

“If they have him, they might not come after us for a while. If he somehow got away from them during the confusion, I wouldn’t think a guy like that would get very far.”