Cover Of Night

The handguns inside the box were clean, the registration numbers filed off. Silently they checked the weapons, the routine just that – routine. Goss’s weapon of choice was a Glock, but in situations like this you took what was available on short notice. The two handguns provided were a Beretta and a Taurus, with a box of cartridges for each. Goss had never used a Taurus before but Toxtel had, so Toxtel took it and let Goss have the familiar Beretta. They transferred the weapons to their bags, then called the pilot of their rent-a-plane to tell him they were on the way.

Because they were flying on a private plane, they didn’t have to go through security at the airport. The pilot, a taciturn man with the weathered skin of someone who’d never bought sunscreen, grunted a greeting and that was that. They stowed their own luggage, which was fine, and climbed aboard. The plane was a small Cessna that had seen its best days maybe ten years ago, but it met the two most important qualifications: it flew, and it didn’t need a long runway.

Goss didn’t care for scenery, at least not the country kind. His idea of a good view was one from a penthouse. Still, he had to admit the sparkling, boulder-filled rivers and jagged mountains were pretty, as those things went. They were definitely best viewed from the air, though. That opinion was reinforced when, an hour later, the small plane was set down on a bumpy, dusty strip over which rocky, jagged mountains loomed like malevolent giants. There was no town, only a corrugated tin building; three vehicles sat outside it. One was a nondescript beige sedan, one was a rusty Ford pickup that looked older than Goss, and the last was a gray Chevy Tahoe. "I hope the pickup isn’t our four-wheel-drive," Goss muttered.

"It won’t be. Faulkner took care of us; you’ll see."

Toxtel’s stolid confidence in Faulkner never failed to irritate Goss, but he didn’t let it show. For one thing, he didn’t want anyone to have the slightest inkling that he despised Faulkner, but the main reason was Hugh Toxtel was the only one of Faulkner’s stable of hired killers that Goss wouldn’t want to go up against. It wasn’t that Toxtel was a superman or anything; he was just good at what he did – good enough that Goss respected him. And Toxtel had a good ten years of experience that Goss didn’t have, maybe more.

As they climbed out of the plane and began pulling their bags out of the storage compartment, a chunky guy in stained coveralls ambled out of the tin building. "You the guys wanting the rental?" he asked.

"Yeah," Toxtel said.

"They’ve been waiting for you."

"They" turned out to be two young guys from the rental company; one had driven the Tahoe out, followed by the other. Evidently patience wasn’t their strong suit, because both of them were irritated by the wait. Toxtel signed some papers; the two guys jumped into the beige sedan and were gone in a cloud of dust.

"Damn kids," Toxtel groused, glaring after them as he waved the dust out of his face. "They did that on purpose."

Toxtel and Goss put their things in the back of the Tahoe, then climbed into the big vehicle. There was a map folded on the driver’s seat, with the route to Trail Stop obligingly traced in red and the destination itself circled. After looking at the map, Goss wondered why someone had bothered to circle the name, since the road stopped there and they couldn’t go any farther. Trail Stop – wonder how it got its name, har-dee-har-har.

"Pretty country," Toxtel offered after a few minutes

"I guess." Goss looked out the passenger window at the sheer drop to the bottom of a rocky gorge. Had to be three or four hundred feet straight down, and the road wasn’t the best, a narrow, roughly paved two-lane with battered guardrails at some of the worst parts. The problem was, the places he thought needed guardrails evidently didn’t jibe with what the Idaho department of transportation considered dangerous. The sun was bright, the sky overhead a deep, cloudless blue, but when they passed from a sunny stretch of road to one shadowed by the mountain, he noticed that the temperature on the Tahoe’s gauge dropped a good ten degrees. He’d hate to get caught out in these mountains at night. They hadn’t seen a single structure or another vehicle since leaving the airstrip, and even though they’d been on the road fewer than ten minutes, that just struck Goss as deeply unnatural.

After half an hour they came to an actual small town, population four thousand and something, with streets and traffic lights – a couple of them – and everything, and he relaxed somewhat. At least there were people around.

Then they took a left turn onto the road indicated on the map, and all signs of civilization vanished again.

"Jesus, I don’t know how people live like this," Goss muttered. "If you run out of milk, it’s a damn day’s expedition to the grocery store."

"It’s what you get used to," Toxtel said.

I think it’s more a case of not knowing anything different. You can’t miss what you’ve never had." The next turn of the road brought them out into the bright sun again, and the glare on the windshield made him squint his eyes, which made him yawn.

"You shoulda got some sleep last night, instead of going out looking for pussy," Toxtel observed, a hint of disapproval in his tone.

"I didn’t just look, I found some, Goss said, and yawned again. "Weird chick. She looked like some small-town poultry queen, or something, but when I told her she shouldn’t take strangers home with her, it was too dangerous and I could have been some kind of psycho, she said that she might be the psycho. The look in her eyes right then gave me the shivers, like she might really be nuts. I put my clothes on and got out of there." He left out the part about the struggle, and the fake name.

"You’re gonna get your throat cut one of these days," Toxtel warned.