Page 17 of The Boy Who Cried Bear
So we say nothing.
“Leave professional work to professional people,” he continues after a moment. “I get the sense that finding people is a specialty of yours.” He raises his hands, as if we were going to protest. “I’m not asking for details. What you do in your little hamlet is your own business. Just as mining is my business. But dealing with wild people in the forest is definitely not my business, and you both strike me as people who are better equipped for that sort of thing.”
“Uh-huh,” Dalton says.
“Not that I expect you to do it for free.” The man flashes his teeth. “Whatever’s going on in that little hamlet of yours, it doesn’t seem terribly profitable.”
Again, there’s no answer to this. Tell him it’s not about profit, and that narrows down the possibilities of what Haven’s Rock could be. Lie and say he’s mistaken, and he just might take a bigger interest in our “little hamlet.”
“If you’re offering to pay us,” Dalton says, “I don’t think you’d like our price.”
The man’s brows shoot up. “Well, well. I do appreciate a man with a good understanding of his own value. Never sell yourself short, boy. I admitted I lack your particular skills, and so you are, rightly, going to make me pay dearly for them.”
Dalton doesn’t react to the man’s patronizing bullshit. He only says, “I am.”
“Name your price.”
“The mountain.”
I bite my tongue against a laugh. Dalton’s throwing the guy’s game back at him. Say something seemingly nonsensical and make him ask what Dalton means.
“You want … the mountain?” the man says.
“I do.”
A false laugh. “You do ask for a lot. Mountain-sized, in fact. I’m presuming there’s a joke here I’m not understanding. Local humor?”
“No humor at all. We have established a border between our two settlements, complete with a strip of no-man’s-land. The problem is that we have not established a north and south boundary. Are we not allowed to head west at any latitude? Or is there a boundary? I’m going to suggest we make it easy. We each have two miles of the stretch between us. We should have the same distance to the north and south. Beyond that, it’s open to either group.”
“Reasonable.”
“The problem is the mountain. That’ll put it mostly on our side, but a little into yours. We’ll be hunting that mountain, and if our game heads into your territory?” Dalton shrugs. “It’s a problem.”
“So you want the mountain.”
“I do.”
“All right. Solve this little mystery and it’s yours.”
“Solve it?” I say. “Or resolve it?”
I’m pleased that it takes him a moment to work that out.
“Ah,” he says. “Do I want you to take care of this mountain man? That would be entirely up to you. Either you get rid of him—in any way that suits you—or you bring us what we need to track and get rid of him—in the way that will suit us.”
He could cast a glance at his two armed men. He doesn’t need to. I have zero doubt that “get rid of” means a permanent solution.
“You can deal with him if you’d prefer,” the man says. “As long as we don’t encounter him again, I don’t care how it’s handled.”
I open the envelope.
“May I presume we can take our leave?” the man says.
“Not until we see what you gave us,” Dalton says. “And decide whether we want the job.”
I skim the pages. There are two. One is a handwritten report and the other a map showing where this “wild man” was sighted.
“Is this it?” I say, waving the pages.
