The woman at register four had a blue streak in her hair, a brace on her knee, and was wearing a name tag that said LORI.
Seth put a rotisserie chicken, two bottles of water, and a bag of beef jerky on the belt. He didn’t need any of it. He had spent the drive down from Leadville working out which of the four registers to get in line at, and in the end he had picked hers because she was the only one who was talking to her customers.
“Find everything okay?”
“I did. What’d you do to the knee?”
She laughed. “Pickleball.”
“No.”
“Pickleball,” she said. “My sister made me. Forty-eight years old. I went for a ball I had no business going for.”
“ACL?”
“Meniscus. They want to scope it in October.” She scanned the chicken and weighed it. “You a doctor?”
“Nope. I’ve just torn a bunch of things at this point in life.”
He asked her whether it was busy with the hikers. She said it was always busy with the hikers in September, but the parking lot was jammed because of the police. The hikers came down off the trail looking like they’d been living in a ditch and bought forty dollars of Snickers and told her everything. Where they started. Where they were going. How many miles a day. What hurt.
“My nephew did the Collegiate two summers ago,” she said. “He lost a toenail and would not shut up about it. That’s every one of them. They come through here and tell me about their toenails.”
“All of them?”
“Almost all of them.” She bagged the jerky. “Saturday I had one who didn’t say a word. Big guy. Beard. Three hundred dollars of groceries, rice and beans and oatmeal and soup, like he was feeding a family, and he paid for it in twenties. Counted them out on the shelf one at a time.” She held up one finger and put it down on the counter, then another. “I asked him was he out on the Collegiate and he said ‘yep.’ I told him about my nephew. He said ‘huh.’ Swear to God, I thought he was going to cry.”
Seth stared at the food as Lori put it in a bag.
A Chaffee County deputy got in line behind him with two Gatorades and a phone. Seth could see the brown uniform at the edge of his eye without turning his head.
If Lori said the word twenties one more time with a sheriff’s deputy standing four feet away, it would be in a federal file by lunch.
“The October thing,” Seth said. “Is that here or in Denver?”
“Salida. There’s a guy everybody goes to.”
“Good. If everyone goes to him to get scoped, he knows what he is doing.”
“That’s what my sister says.” She took his card. The reader thought about it for a second and said APPROVED. “Have a good one.”
“You too. Good luck with the knee.”
He took his bag and went out past the deputy, who was reading something on his phone and had not looked up once.
In the car Cooper stood up on the passenger seat and put his nose in the bag with the chicken in it.
“No,” Seth said. “Sit.”
Cooper sat, with his nose still in the bag.
Seth backed out and drove two blocks and pulled over by a closed-up coffee shack and turned the engine off. He was excited for the first time in a week.
A big man with a beard. Three hundred dollars of food for a family, in twenties, counted out one at a time. The feds had four hundred people looking for a man and a woman, and they’d been looking for a week at the wrong photographs. Marcus had five days of beard by Saturday, and he would have been the one carrying the most weight.
Marcus answered his phone on airplanes. He answered it at the dentist. He had never in his life stood at a cash register and let a woman tell him about her nephew’s toenail without telling her about a toenail of his own that had been worse. For Marcus to say “yep” and “huh” and nothing else, somebody had told him to. Somebody had coached him, and he had been scared enough to do it. There was one person Seth knew who could do that to Marcus.
“Samantha,” he said.
Cooper dug his nose further into the bag.
Seth called Marcus’s phone, the way he had every day for a week, just to hear it not ring. It didn’t. A recording told him the mailbox was full.
He felt a little guilty about Lori. She had been nice to him. He had used her knee.
You out on the Collegiate? Yep.
Seth knew the Collegiate. He had done some of it with Cooper the summer before last. The Colorado Trail split north of here into two routes, and the western one — the Collegiate West — went up over the Divide and stayed up there, above treeline for days at a time. It crossed Cottonwood Pass Road at the top, twenty miles west of where he was sitting, and then it went south along the spine of the mountains into Gunnison County. There were almost no roads and it was a pretty empty stretch.
They had come down off the top of Cottonwood on Saturday, walked or hitched twenty miles into Buena Vista in the middle of a manhunt, bought three hundred dollars of food a few blocks from where the FBI had its trucks parked, and walked back out again.
And every one of the four hundred people looking for them was on this side of the mountains.
He sat in the car and laughed out loud. It was the stupidest, gutsiest thing he had ever heard of.
It was fifty miles of divide or a hundred and fifty, depending on where they came off it. Nobody could search that. He couldn’t walk it. He would not even know which drainage to drive up and he had already wasted a day on the wrong trail.
He drove down to the park by the river and let Cooper out. Cooper went straight into the Arkansas up to his shoulders and stood there looking pleased with himself. Seth sat down on a bench and looked at him. Cooper barked once and flung himself in that cute twisty way into the water.
He was not going to find them by hiking randomly in the wilderness. Instead, he just needed to pay attention. He was good at that. Somebody would see a truck that didn’t belong, or a guy who paid for something with too much cash, or a woman with a pack who wouldn’t look at anybody, and they would post it on Facebook.
He searched for Gunnison County first. The Gunnison Valley Community Board had eleven thousand members and a pinned post about bear-proof trash cans. He asked to join. Then the Gunnison County sheriff’s page. Then the community groups for Chaffee County, and Saguache, and Lake, and Park, and Fremont, and their sheriffs’ pages.
He sat on the bench and scrolled through the Gunnison board. Someone had found a blue heeler named Biscuit wandering near the Almont store. Someone wanted to know who was plowing their road this winter. Someone was selling a cord of firewood, split, delivered, cash only.
He turned on notifications for every new post on all six groups, which he had never done before for anything in his life.
Cooper came up out of the river and shook himself off next to the bench.
“You seem to have that mastered,” Seth said. It was something he occasionally said sarcastically to founders. It felt good to say it out loud to Cooper given the last few days.
He took the burner out of the front pocket of his pack, looked at it, and put it back. The groups were on his own phone, under his own name, which was the only way to get into them. He had been assuming for a few days that somebody was reading his phone. If they were, they now knew which six counties he cared about. That was going to have to be ok for now.
He drove home to Boulder by way of Denver, the long way, with the windows down to get some of the river smell out of the car. Somewhere around Fairplay he realized he had not eaten anything all day, and he reached into the bag for the chicken.
Half of it was gone. Cooper was asleep in the back with his chin on the cooler.