Chapter Three
Dorn Peddy and James Dale O’Bryan were the shooters, and they’d carried out the ambush at nine thirty-seven that morning.
It had gone without a hitch. A few minutes after ten, they’d returned to their cache on the shadowed side of a rocky hillside that overlooked Antler Creek Junction in the distance.
The ATV they’d used to access the location was parked over the hill out of view from the road.
Peddy was a large man with wispy ginger hair and acne-scarred cheeks. He had broad shoulders and big hands with stubby, tobacco-stained fingers. He was wheezing from the long hike back to the cache from the ambush location.
O’Bryan had a thin, ferret-like face and slicked-back black hair streaked with gray.
He was shorter than Peddy by six inches, and was missing his ring and little fingers on his left hand, the result of an accident involving improvised explosives years before when he worked for a homicidal mob boss in Albuquerque.
Back then, he was known as “Hillbilly Jimmy D.” because he was from Arkansas originally.
O’Bryan considered himself more careful and cautious than Peddy, who, it seemed to him, was irrationally confident in his own abilities, but inherently reckless.
Peddy was the wrong man to set up and execute the ambush, in O’Bryan’s opinion.
Although there was no doubt Peddy was proficient with firearms and his lethal abilities, he was too cocky.
Nevertheless, O’Bryan had followed Peddy’s directives that morning, and everything had gone smoothly. Except, he thought, for one nagging detail.
“We should have checked the body before hightailing it up here,” O’Bryan said. “We should have made sure he was dead.”
“He was dead,” Peddy declared, his face reddening. “I know where I aimed and I know where I hit him. I’ve got no fucking doubts about that at all.”
“Still…”
Peddy glared at O’Bryan and his face flushed further.
“How would it look if we was caught standing down there in the middle of the road with black rifles, staring into the cab of the pickup? If some ranch hand or tourist drove up? That would be a fucking disaster. No, we needed to get the hell out of there.”
O’Bryan let it go. He’d learned not to argue with “Dorn of the Mountains,” as Peddy liked to call himself. The name came from a book written by Zane Grey, apparently. O’Bryan had never heard of it and he doubted Peddy had actually read it.
—
Peddy had stashed a large canvas duffel bag beside the gnarled trunk of a cedar tree that held tight to the gritty soil.
He pulled out the bag, unzipped it, and removed two bulging white kitchen garbage bags and set them aside.
Then he unslung the scoped Bushmaster .450 semiautomatic rifle chambered in .
284 Winchester rounds from his shoulder and slid it into the bag.
O’Bryan did the same after making sure there wasn’t a round in the chamber.
“Did you get all your brass?” Peddy asked while digging into his front pocket for the spent cartridges he’d retrieved. He tossed them into the duffel as well.
“I’m pretty sure I got all of ’em,” O’Bryan said.
Peddy glared at O’Bryan. “You think you got them all? How many times did you shoot?”
“Seven, I think,” O’Bryan said. “It happened fast.”
“How many spent cartridges do you have?”
O’Bryan dug a handful out of his pocket and counted them. “Seven.”
“You’re sure you only shot seven times?”
“Pretty sure, I think.”
“Let’s hope you got that right, fuckwad.”
O’Bryan’s face reddened and he glared at Peddy. “Leave me alone, asshole.”
“We gotta do this right,” Peddy said.
In a huff, O’Bryan bent down and snatched his rifle out of the duffel bag. He removed the fifteen-round extended magazine and thumbed the remaining live cartridges out one by one. There were eight of them.
“I was right in the first place,” he said with triumph.
“We gotta do this right or we don’t get paid,” Peddy repeated.
“This isn’t my first rodeo,” O’Bryan grumbled while holding up his hand with the missing fingers.
—
They methodically brushed snow off their clothes and then stripped down and threw each item of the tactical clothing they’d worn into the canvas bag. The cold wind produced goose bumps on their bare skin, and O’Bryan hopped from one foot to the other to try and keep warm.
“Wipe yourself down,” Peddy said, handing O’Bryan a handful of antiseptic wet wipes from a container. “Get all that GSR off your hands and face.”
“Yeah, yeah,” O’Bryan said. He ran the squares over his skin and tossed the wadded-up remains into the bag. As he did, he looked up over Peddy’s shoulder and said, “Who the fuck is that?”
Peddy’s head snapped around. A man with a rifle on his shoulder was in the process of approaching the green Game and Fish pickup they’d just shot up.
The scene of the shooting was about five hundred yards away.
It was too far to clearly see the hunter’s face.
The man was slim and dressed in camo clothing. He wore a blaze-orange cap.
“Who is that guy?” O’Bryan asked again.
“Fuck if I know,” Peddy said. “I didn’t see him before.”
“Where is his vehicle?”
“How would I know that?” Peddy said, irritated. He swept his arm out to indicate the horizon to the west. “This is all public land before you get to the junction. He could be parked anywhere out there.”
The two of them stood there, nearly naked, looking in the distance at a strange hunter who had appeared out of nowhere.
The man cautiously circled the green pickup, then approached it and peered into the driver’s-side window and quickly stepped away.
The hunter held his hand up to his face in a motion that was unmistakable.
“Oh shit,” O’Bryan said. “He’s making a call.”
“That’s not good,” Peddy said.
“Do you think he saw us?”
“I don’t know. I hope to hell he didn’t.” Then: “We need to take him out.” As Peddy said it, he was bending back over the duffel bag and hastily retrieving his rifle.
“That would be a hell of a shot at this range,” O’Bryan said. “You probably can’t hit him.”
“Bullshit—I’m gonna try it,” Peddy said. “I’m rock-solid up to eight hundred yards.”
O’Bryan made a skeptical face at that, but he didn’t say anything and Peddy didn’t see it.
Peddy said, “We can’t leave any witnesses. If he saw us, we can’t have them looking for a couple of guys with high-powered black rifles wearing tactical gear.”
O’Bryan fretted with a worried look on his face while Peddy dropped to his knees so he could aim and fire from a prone position. When Peddy flopped forward, he recoiled immediately and grimaced.
“Ouch—fuck,” Peddy said, rolling onto his back. “I laid down in cactus.”
In fact, O’Bryan could see a dozen or so thin cactus needles protruding from Peddy’s chest and white belly.
“Throw me them clothes bags,” Peddy ordered while he plucked out most of the cactus needles and tossed them aside. O’Bryan did, and Peddy slid the bags beneath his body to cushion it from the cactus plants. Then he leaned forward into the rifle scope.
“I’m not so sure about this,” O’Bryan said. “We don’t know who he’s calling. Maybe he’s calling his wife.”
“Shut up.”
“I’m freezing and you’re lying on top of my new clothes.”
Peddy didn’t respond. O’Bryan watched the man steady his aim and go still.
The boom of the rifle was snatched up quickly in the wind. O’Bryan watched as a plume of dirt erupted from the hill on the other side of the pickup. The impact was at least three feet to the left and a foot high from where the hunter stood.
“You missed him bad,” O’Bryan said.
“Goddamn wind,” Peddy spat.
The hunter didn’t appear to know what had just happened. He lowered the phone from his ear and looked around, apparently confused.
Peddy fired again. The second shot was wider to the left, although it was approximately head-high to the hunter. The man definitely saw the dirt kick up on the opposite hillside this time, and he ducked and started running back up the road.
Peddy fired four more times. The bullets blew up mini-geysers of earth and rocks all around the hunter, but none of them found their mark. The targeted man ran up the road until he vanished behind a small hillock between the cache and the pickup.
Peddy rolled over again and got to his feet. He was seething.
“Should we follow him, or what?” he asked.
“Let him go,” O’Bryan said. “He doesn’t know who was shooting at him, and he didn’t know where the shots came from. We just need to get the hell out of this valley.”
Peddy agreed without saying so, and both of them went into action. They threw on the clothes that had been stored in the plastic bags as quickly as they could.
As planned, they dressed as local ranch hands, or at least what Peddy had decided local ranch hands looked like.
The idea was to blend in with the locals if anyone spotted them.
They dressed in snap-button western yoke shirts, Wranglers, lace-up outfitter boots, belts with buckles, and Carhartt barn coats.
Peddy handed O’Bryan a wide-brimmed cowboy hat that was at least two sizes too large for his head.
“I’m not wearing this,” O’Bryan said. “I’ll look ridiculous.”
Peddy snapped, “Wear the fucking hat,” and grasped O’Bryan by his collar.
O’Bryan didn’t snap back, although he was furious.
Instead, he wrenched himself away and stuffed a red bandana into the sweatband of the hat to expand it and he crammed the hat on and vowed to himself that he wouldn’t forget this latest humiliation.
—
As they trudged over the hill carrying the duffel bag, Peddy retrieved a disposable cell phone and punched the only number that was stored in it. O’Bryan listened to Peddy’s side of the conversation while holding his hat on with his free hand so it wouldn’t blow away.
“We got him,” Peddy said. “It’s done.”
Then: “I said we got him. It’s probably hard to hear me with this damned Wyoming wind.”
Then, after a beat: “That’s right. No problems, no complications at all. It was as smooth as a baby’s butt. Just as I planned it.”
After Peddy signed off, he said to O’Bryan, “We made the boss very happy. Now let’s go get paid.”
“What about that hunter?” O’Bryan said. “You didn’t mention him.”
“And you aren’t going to, either,” Peddy said, turning and fixing O’Bryan with a murderous glare. “You got that?”
O’Bryan nodded, but in his mind he added the latest insult from Peddy to his private vengeance list.
“We should have checked the body,” O’Bryan said as they approached the ATV. Peddy tossed the duffel bag into the back of the vehicle and settled in behind the wheel.
“Would you fucking shut up about that?” Peddy said, reaching for the key.
O’Bryan didn’t respond, and he quietly added another item to his list.