Suspended Sentences

“Not especially, thanks. Tell me, Sam, why’d you take up this line of work?”

“I like to think of myself as a pioneer mountain-man type. It’s clean, you know. It keeps me outdoors.”

“Clean,” I said, “except when you have to go out with somebody like Charlie Cord.”

“Aeah.” He met my eyes and smiled. “Except then. Look, is this getting us anywhere?”

“Maybe. What was Charlie after? Specifically, what kind of game?”

“He said he wanted a bobcat and a mule deer buck.”

“But?”

“He kept asking me about Rocky Mountain goats.”

“They’re a protected species, aren’t they?”

“What’s left of them, yes.”

“But he wanted one.”

“One or a dozen. I think if he’d seen any goats he’d have killed them, yes.”

“How was he with a rifle?”

“Good. Not spectacular, but good enough.”

“Is it customary for the guide to stay in camp while the client goes out hunting?”

“Some hunters want you right with them all the time. But it wasn’t unusual. He was just scouting around. He said he didn’t want to waste his time sitting around watching me set up tents.”

I unfolded my county map. “Show me where it happened.”

He put his finger on it. “About there.”

“Near Goat Peak.” I folded it and put it in my pocket. “Anybody live up in that area?”

“It’s National Forest. You can’t own property up there.”

“Sometimes you tan lease it. Do you mind answering my question?”

For the first time Mallory looked uncomfortable. It was subtle — I wouldn’t have noticed it if I hadn’t been waiting for it. A knotted muscle rippled briefly along his jaw; that was all. He said, “There’s a sourdough who lives in a lean-to up there. Been searching for years — for the mother lode, I guess.”

“What’s his name?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Come on, Sam.”

He pretended to be thinking, exercising his memory. Then he snapped his fingers. “Collins, that’s it. Hugh Collins.”

“I don’t suppose he’s got a phone.”

Mallory laughed. “Up there?”

“I’d like to talk to him.”

“What for?”

“He lives on Goat Peak. He may have seen someone.”

“I doubt it. He lives on the far side of the peak.”

“Can you take me up there? I’ll pay for it.”

“Waste of money.”

“I want to talk to him,” I said gently. “It’ll go a little faster if you’d be willing to guide me.”

“Suit yourself. We can leave in the morning.”

“Make it ten o’clock. I’ve got something to do first.”

You didn’t put two jacketed .30-caliber bullets into a space smaller than a handspan at 400 yards without knowing what you were doing. That was what had stirred up my suspicions at first; it had been followed by improbabilities and too many coincidences.

The town didn’t have a library or a newspaper. I had to get the information by phone from Denver. It took more than an hour and I was a few minutes late meeting Mallory. He had an old Dodge Power Wagon — four-wheel-drive, winch, jerrycans, and canteens. A real wilderness rig. When I was a kid in the Southwest I’d known uranium prospectors who’d go out in Power Wagons and live out of them for months at a stretch and that was long before the fad for truck-mounted camper outfits.

We rolled out of town and Mallory put the truck up a steep dirt road through the pines. “Find out anything?” he asked.

I watched him while I spoke. “Seventeen hunters have died in this county in the past six years. Eleven of them in the vicinity of Goat Peak. Nine killed by 30-’06 bullets. Jacketed.”

“Not surprising. That’s what a lot of hunters carry. And Goat Peak’s where most of the hunters go to set up their base camps.” But he said it in a tight-lipped way.

I glanced at the carbine he had clipped to the inside of the door panel by his left knee. “What’s that, a .30-30?”

“Right. Saddle gun. For varmints.”

“Tell me about Hugh Collins.”

“Nice old guy. A gentleman. You’ll see for yourself.”

I said, “You didn’t like it much in ’Nam, did you?”

“Did anybody?”

“Some did. We had to arrest some of them. The ones who learned to enjoy killing. Got so they’d kill anybody — our side or theirs or just neutral.”

“Fragging?”

“Those. And others. Some of them just got bloodthirsty. Psychotic. They couldn’t stop killing — didn’t want to.”

He said, “We had one of those in my outfit. One of the other guys fragged him — threw a grenade down his blankets while he was asleep. We never found out which guy did it but we figured he probably saved all our lives.” He glanced at me. “It wasn’t me.”

“No. You never got into that bag, did you?”

Mallory said, “Too scared. And in the end I supposed I developed a respect for life. No, I never got to liking war.”

“That wasn’t war,” I said.

“Shook you up, did it?”

“It was a long time before I got pulled back together. I had to have a lot of help.”

He gave me a quick look and his eyes went back to the steep rutted road. “Shrinks? Psychiatrists?”

“Yes. And friends,” I said. I opened up to him because it might inspire him to share confidences. “Mostly it was the interrogations that did it to me. The ones we arrested. The way they could talk about committing grisly murders — and laugh about it. I couldn’t take it after a while. It was too grotesque. Terrifying. The bizarre became the commonplace. One day I just started screaming, so they sent me home.”

“Rough,” Mallory remarked.

I watched his profile. “Charlie Cord liked to frag animals, didn’t he, Sam?”

“You could put it that way,” he replied, giving nothing away.

“He didn’t have much respect for life.”

“Not for animal life, at any rate.” He turned the wheel with a powerful twist of his shoulders and we went bucking off the road up into a meadow that carried us across a rolling slope into a canyon. He put the Power Wagon into four-wheel-drive and we whined up the dry gravel bed of the canyon floor. I was pitched heavily around and tried to brace myself in the seat.

It was past two o’clock when we reached Hugh Collins’ lean-to. It was a spartan camp. A coffee pot and a few utensils were near the dead ashes of the campfire — he’d built his fireplace out of rocks. A cased rifle stood propped inside the lean-to. A bedroll, two canteens, a waterproof pouch with several books in it. No one was in sight, but we left the truck there and Mallory led the way through the forest. He was following tracks, although I couldn’t discern them.

After a half-hour hike we heard the ring of a hammer against rock and presently we came upon the sourdough. He had a black beard peppered with gray; he wore coveralls and a plaid work shirt; he was short and built heavy through chest and shoulders. His eyes gleamed with an intelligence that seemed almost childishly i

Mallory made introductions. “Mr. Stoddard’s investigating the death of Mr. Cord.”

“Who?”

“The hunter who got killed the other day over on the far side of the peak.”

We hunkered in the shade. Hugh Collins had been whacking away at a rock face with his pointed hammer. I said, “Finding any color?”

“You always find color. Enough for day wages. I pan out a few hundred dollars a month. You wanted to ask about this hunter?”

“Someone shot him. Looking at the map, I thought the man might have come from this direction. I wondered if you might have seen anyone that day.”

“What day was that exactly?”

“Sunday.”

“Nobody came through this way Sunday.”

“You didn’t hear a couple of shots that day, then?”

Collins laughed. He showed good teeth. “I hear shots all the time. This time of year these hills are alive with idiot hunters.”

An animal limped into sight and approached us hesitantly. It was a hardy-looking little creature; it had only three legs but it managed to hobble along with dignity and even grace.

Collins said, “All right now, Felicity,” and snapped his fingers and the delicate little creature came to him and nuzzled his hand. Its left foreleg appeared to have been amputated at the shoulder. Collins said, “Felicity’s a Rocky Mountain goat. You don’t see many.”