Page 26 of Three-Inch Teeth

“You don’t think that bear is crazy enough to go after them both, do you?” Gordon asked aloud. Joe was startled to hear in Gordon’s voice what he was thinking to himself.

*

CRESS AND HOAGLIN didn’t find the grizzly, and they returned to the scene of the attack looking worn-out and frustrated. So was the pilot of the plane and his spotter. They’d radioed to say that they’d failed to get a visual on the bear and that they were forced to return to the Jackson airport before they ran out of fuel and sunlight.

“She’s gone,” Cress reported to Gordon. “We got on her track for a while, but she outran us.”

“The blood trail dried up,” Hoaglin sighed. “She must not be hit that bad.”

“Which means we need to find her tomorrow,” Gordon said. “And now we know we’re looking for a wounded bear who shows absolutely no fear of humans, and who wants to kill us before we kill her.”

“Not exactly the most optimal situation,” Cress deadpanned.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Hanna

THREE HOURS LATER, and two hundred and thirty miles away, as the dusk sun lit up the western flanks of sagebrush-covered but treeless hills, Dallas Cates pointed at an exit sign for Walcott Junction and said, “Turn here.”

They were on Interstate 80 driving east from Rawlins. The right lane of the highway was a stream of big rigs. They reminded Dallas of train cars that were inexorably linked together, but with no engine and no caboose. The hundreds of trucks all struggled up hills together and shot down the other side. It was the same scenario on the westbound lanes.

“Why here?” Bobbi Johnson asked. “Aren’t we headed the wrong direction?”

“No, ma’am,” he said.

“Okay, well, I need gas anyway,” she said. “I’m down to an eighth of a tank.”

“There’s a Shell station,” he said. “Pull in there.”

“I’m a little low on cash, Dallas. You’ll need to help me out here.”

He bit his lip. Johnson had all kinds of elaborate plans about picking up her sister and driving to California to start a new life, but she didn’t think very hard on the here and now. Of course she was a little low on cash. Of course she hadn’t brought a firearm with her when she picked him up. And of course she didn’t have a problem taking the desolate interstate highway across southern Wyoming with barely an eighth of a tank of gas.

“I’ll cover the gas,” he said.

“Where are we going, anyway?” she asked as she pulled up next to a bank of pumps.

“You’ll see,” he said as he climbed out.

*

HIS CREDIT CARD had expired while he was in the penitentiary, so in order to fill the tank he needed to go inside the lonely station and pay cash in advance. That was best anyway, he thought, because he didn’t want to leave a paper trail of his whereabouts. On the way in he noticed a hand-painted sign that read ARMED GUARD AFTER DARK.

Inside, it was claustrophobic and the racks were filled with candy, snacks, and automobile fluids. Yacht rock played from a tinny speaker—“Sailing” by Christopher Cross, a song Cates hated and that he wished had gone away during his time in prison. The man behind the counter was rotund with a mullet and shifty eyes. He wore a shoulder holster with the grip of a semiauto pistol in clear view. He glared at Cates in an unhealthy way, Cates thought.

“I’ll give you a hundred dollars and come back for the change after I fill the tank,” Cates said.

“That’ll work,” the attendant said. He had an airy, high-pitched voice. He was a strange one, Cates thought. The kind of guy who worked at a gas station thirty miles from the nearest town and probably slept in the single-wide trailer out back.

Eighteen hundred dollars seemed like a lot of money inside prison, but it wouldn’t last very long at this rate, he thought. Not at a hundred bucks a tank. He peeled off a bill from inside his roll and placed it on the counter.

“I know you,” the attendant said. “You’re Dallas Cates, ain’t ya?”

That was why he was looking at him so strangely.

“Who?”

“Dallas Cates. World champ rodeo cowboy.”

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