“You okay, sir?” Bell heard the sergeant’s voice as soon as he broke the surface of the icy water.  But he was in a panic and didn’t answer. Something was holding him against the body.

“I’ve fucking stuck myself on something,” Bell yelled. He ran his right hand down into the water and felt a small tree branch shoved into his side and puncturing his flight suit and skin. He pushed himself off the sharp point of the branch. A sharp pain ran down his legs. He backed away toward the bank to get the wound above the water line. He fought the current, which seemed to want to run him through again. He managed to turn around, the blood dribbling from a puncture wound in his side. The sergeant had jumped in the water and was coming toward him.

That was when they heard the first scream, like a hyena, a wild guttural howling, and screaming, somewhere above them.

“What the fuck was that?” Bell said, trying to stand up.

        *   *   *

       Patty looked at herself in the bathroom mirror. Bits of snow were caught in her hair. She’d come back from lunch and gone into her cabin just behind the station’s front gate. She examined the fine wrinkles around her eyes. Thirty-three years old, she told herself. Time to get out the Oil of Olay?

She heard a knock on her cabin door. She went out into the cabin’s small living room and opened it, expecting it would be one of the rangers she worked with.

“Well, sweetheart, how are you?” Dillon said.

“What are you doing here?” Patty said.

“I was in the neighborhood and I thought I’d drop in and say hello to my ex-wife,” Dillon said.

Patty stared at her ex-husband, shocked. “Why didn’t you write the lawyer?” she said finally.

“Cause I didn’t want a divorce,” Dillon said. “Are you going to make me stand out here in the snow?”

She didn’t answer. “Why are you here, James?”

“I’m collecting for the Red Cross,” Dillon said. “How about it, can I come in for a moment?”

“I wish you wouldn’t,” she said. “I have to go back to work.”

Dillon’s voice changed. “Look, I said a minute.”

She recognized the cold steel in it from years before. She didn’t want to mess with him when he used it. The edgy cold quality brought back all her fear of him, and she stepped back from the doorway into the cabin.

“Okay, a minute, James. Then I’m going to go back.”

“I just want to talk, that’s all. I’ll leave if you want me to,” Dillon said. “I wanted to see you. I was passing through, as they say. The lawyer told me where you were.”

“Okay, come on in,” his wife said.

He walked into the cabin and she closed the door behind him. They’d once been in love, and as he walked by her, she remembered how much she’d once cared for him.

“I came to ask you if you might want to—maybe try and—.”

“No, Jim, I don’t,” she said.

She’d left him when she found out he was a career criminal. They’d met in Las Vegas and gotten married almost immediately. She’d gotten pregnant almost immediately, too. He was arrested a week later for robbing a Brinks’ truck in the San Fernando Valley, wounding one of the drivers in a shootout that made the national news.

“Okay. I just wanted to hear it from you. I’ll sign the divorce papers,” he said. “How’s our daughter?”

“She’s fine. She lives with my mom. I can’t have her here at the station. I wouldn’t have gotten the job.”

She watched her husband shake his head. He wasn’t the angry young man he’d been when he went to prison. Something had changed in him. He was a hard man, yes, that was obvious, but something else had happened to him. He looked sad.

“I’m planning on going back east to see her,” Dillon said. “For Christmas next year.”

“Sure, that’s fine,” Patty said.

“I still love you,” he said.

She didn’t answer. There was nothing to say.

“Okay. I get it: it’s over. There’s one other thing. There’s something I have to tell you. It’s the other reason I came looking for you. You aren’t going to believe me, but you have to get out of here before it’s too late.”

Patty looked at her husband and burst out laughing.

Patty walked back out to her office from the hall of the ranger station and answered the phone. “Emigrant Gap ranger station.” Patty heard the clicking hiss of a cell phone connection, which usually meant trouble.

“This the ranger station?” a voice asked.

“Yes it is, can I help you?”

“Yes, this is the O’Brien party. We’re out on the north face of Mount Baldy and we need to be rescued.” Patty put the call on the office speaker phone and went to the map of the Emigrant Gap Wilderness Area that covered the operation’s desk.

“Mr. O’Brien, where on the mountain is your party?” She was still unnerved from seeing her ex-husband and thought it sounded in her voice. She hadn’t told Quentin about her daughter or her ex-husband, and regretted that.

“What?”

“I said, where are you on the mountain?”

“How the fuck—Oh my God ... . ”

“I said, where are you on the mountain?” Patty said.

The speaker on the desk went quiet, just the white noise of an open cell line. She waited a moment and then hung up.

“They’ll call back,” her boss said, not looking up from his desk. “They probably used their phone’s GPS and are on the way to the parking lot.”

She tried calling the cell number back, but got no answer; the call went to voice mail.

Twenty minutes later, while she and another ranger were deciding whether or not to send a second helicopter up to Mount Baldy, the lights in the office dimmed and went out. Her computer screen went blank. Patty heard one of the other rangers swear from his office down the hall.

She looked out her office window. The lights in the Denny’s, across the road, were out. She could see the stream of headlights on Highway 50 and snow, which was falling more gently now, but steady. She saw her husband’s face again and tried to forget it.

Just what I need right now, a felon in my life who says we’re going to be overrun by—what had he called them? Howlers? Jesus!

The Hotel De Ford had been built in 1932. The lobby smelled of dirty carpets that hadn’t been cleaned in years. The hotel’s lobby walls were the color of hot cereal. In the Sixties someone had bought plastic Danish furniture and set it down in the lobby. The once-white plastic chairs had turned a gray color. It was, Dillon had thought when he’d first walked into the lobby, the kind of place you saw in nightmares. He went to the front desk and got a single room.

“Is Mr. Kelloggs in room twelve?” Dillon asked the young desk clerk.

“I’m sorry, sir. You can ring if you want, but we can’t give out guests’ names or room numbers.”

Dillon picked up the white courtesy phone and punched in twelve.

“Hello,” a man’s voice said.

“It’s me,” Dillon said.

“Okay, we’re waiting,” the man said.

Dillon put down the phone and crossed the lobby to the elevator. The elevator was very small; a picture of a smiling piano player with a bad toupee was hung on the back of the elevator.

    The King of Croon, nightly, Hotel De Ford, Timberline

The three men, all with long criminal records, stood in the window of the hotel. It was the old-fashioned double-hung type window that you could open. A fire escape landing partially obscured the view of the gold-mining era town’s main street. From the room, the men could see a good portion of downtown Timberline.

“Hey, look at that kid,” one of them said. The men looked down. A pickup truck was forcing a cyclist off the street. The cyclist jumped the curb and almost hit an old lady coming out of the bank the men planned to rob in a few hours.