WYLIE FRYE WAS USED TO SMELLING OF SMOKE AND THAT WAS LONG before he became a criminal of sorts.
Wood smoke permeated his clothing, his hair, and his full black beard to the point that he didn't notice it anymore. He was only reminded of his particular odor when drinkers on the next barstool or patrons standing in line at the Kum-N-Go convenience store leaned away from him and turned their heads to breathe untainted air.
But he didn't mind. He'd smelled worse at times in his life, and wood smoke wasn't so bad.
On cold nights like this, after he'd used the front-end loader to deliver bucket after bucket of sawdust to the burner from a small mountain of it near the mill, he could relax in the burner shack and let the warmth of the fire and the sweet blanket of smoke engulf him.
Wylie sat at a metal desk under a light fixture mounted in the wall behind him and stared at the dark screen of his cell phone. It was two-forty-five in the morning and his visitor was fifteen minutes late. Wylie was starting to fidget.
He watched the screen because he knew he wouldn’t hear the phone chime with an incoming text over the roar from the fire outside. In the rusting shack where Wylie sat, fifty feet from the base of the burner, it sounded like he was inside a jet engine. The west wall—which was made of corrugated steel and faced the burner—radiated enough heat that he couldn’t touch it with his hand. In the deep January winter of the Upper North Platte River Valley, Wylie had the warmest blue-collar job of anyone he knew. So there was that.
If he had to stink in order to stay warm on the job, it was a trade-off he was willing to make. He still had nightmares about that winter he’d spent working outside on a fracking rig in North Dakota where he’d lost two toes and the tip of his little finger to frostbite.
Every minute or so, Wylie looked up from the phone on the desk to the small opaque portal window that faced the road outside, expecting to see headlights approaching. He couldn’t see clearly because the smoke left a film on the glass that distorted the view, even though he wiped it clear nightly with Windex.
There was nothing to see, though.
It wasn’t just the heat from the fire that was making him sweat. He tapped the top of the desk with his fingertips in a manic rhythm. He felt more than heard his belly surge with acid and he tasted the green chili burrito he’d eaten for dinner at the Bear Trap in Riverside. It was going to be a long night.
THE CONICAL STEEL STRUCTURE, known alternatively as a “beehive,” “tipi,” or “wigwam” burner for its resemblance to each, roared in the dark and belched a solid column of wood smoke into the frigid night sky of Encampment, Wyoming. The burner was fifty feet high and its fuel was sawdust from the mill.
Its biggest fires took place at night by design—when sleeping residents couldn’t see the volume of smoke and complain about it. The flames often burned so hot that the walls of the wigwam glowed red like the cherry of a massive cigar and errant sparks drifted out of the steel mesh at the top like shooting stars. When the base was filled with sawdust and fully aflame, the temperature inside exceeded a thousand degrees Fahrenheit.
THERE WAS A WINDOW of time to do what they wanted to do, he’d told the men who would be texting him. Even though it was rare when anybody was up and around in the middle of the night in Encampment, a tiny mountain hamlet of barely four hundred people at the base of the Sierra Madre range, there was a very specific window of time when their plan would work. It lasted from two-fifteen to around three-thirty.