Page 106 of Three-Inch Teeth

“Jesus,” Cates exclaimed. “Quit yapping like a couple of damned schoolgirls. Get on with it!”

Nate said, “I told you that bear was still here. I reached out to it and she answered and she guided me to your house. That is my world, Joe. Not this one.”

Cates hollered, “I’m going to die here waiting to die, for fuck’s sake!”

“Please, Nate,” Joe whispered.

Nate ignored Joe and focused on the controls. Joe turned his head away as the jaws fired out of the back of the truck and struck home with a terrifying crunch.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Double Diamond Ranch

TWO DAYS LATER in the midafternoon, Joe followed a Game and Fish Department SUV driven by Brody Cress and Jennie Gordon down a county road toward the Double D Ranch. The SUV was speeding and its wigwag lights were flashing red and blue. Joe kept his distance behind them in his pickup to avoid the dust cloud trailing the vehicle.

Clay Hutmacher had called thirty minutes before and reported that the grizzly bear was back on his ranch. He’d found it feeding on a freshly killed Angus heifer in a pasture just beyond the corrals. Hutmacher said he’d unloaded his .300 Winchester Magnum rifle at the grizzly and he was pretty sure he’d hit it at least once before it ran away.

Clay sounded both ecstatic and half mad as he explained what had just happened.

The day before, Bill Brodbeck had died in the hospital from his wounds. Somehow, Judge Hewitt was still hanging in there.

*

THEY FOUND HUTMACHER in the pasture next to the carcass of the disemboweled heifer. The rancher pointed to a rock outcropping halfway up a hill to the east.

“That’s where he went,” Hutmacher said, pointing with the muzzle of his rifle. “Up in those rocks. I’ve been glassing it since I called and I haven’t seen him come out.”

Cress raised a pair of binoculars and stood next to the rancher.

“I don’t see him,” he said.

“That don’t mean he’s not there,” Hutmacher responded.

Joe found Gordon looking not at the outcropping but at him. She had concern on her face.

“Joe, are you okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“I need you to be fully here with us when we go after that bear.”

“I said I’m fine.”

“You don’t look like it,” she said.

He didn’t respond.

*

JOE HAD BEEN in a kind of fugue state the thirty-six hours since he’d found Nate and Dallas Cates on the compound once owned by the Cates family. The scene he’d happened on still chilled him, and the peripheral events surrounding it puzzled him because they were filled with unknowns that may or may not be connected.

Why had it taken Jackson Bishop over an hour to show up at his home that night? According to Sheridan and Marybeth, Bishop had displayed no sense of urgency at the scene, and he’d arrived without backup. He claimed he couldn’t rouse the deputies quickly enough in time to respond, but that excuse came across as baffling to Joe. Wouldn’t eager, young Fearless Frank Carroll have jumped on the chance to confront the bad guys who had earlier eluded him? It didn’t jibe, and Joe had disturbing doubts about the man who would inevitably become the local sheriff.

Axel Soledad’s involvement had come as a shock as well. Joe was all but certain the man had bled out in an alley in Portland, the result of Geronimo’s and Joe’s fusillade of shotgun blasts, but it appeared he’d somehow survived and joined up with Dallas Cates. And now he was in the wind.

Marybeth had asked her board for a leave of absence while Kestrel settled into their lives. The little girl still wasn’t sure what had happened to her parents, and she looked expectantly at the outside door whenever it opened and she frequently asked for her mother. Marybeth put on a brave and cheerful face and she slipped easily back into the role of caretaker for small girls that she’d mastered dozens of years before.

Nate was gone, his house empty and his Jeep missing. He’d assured Joe he’d be in touch once he “worked things out.” But there had been no word from him and his cell phone had been apparently discarded.

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