Evolution loves death more than it loves you or me… We are moral creatures, then, in an amoral world. The universe that suckled us is a monster that does not care if we live or die-does not care if it itself grinds to a halt.
– ANNIE DILLARD
Keystone, South Dakota
MARSHALL AND SYLVIA HOTLE, WHO LIKED TO LIST THEIR places of residence as Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Quartzsite, Arizona, and “the open road,” were preparing dinner when they saw the dark SUV with Illinois plates drive by on the access road for the third time in less than an hour.
“There they are again,” Sylvia said, narrowing her eyes. She was setting two places on the picnic table. Pork cutlets, green beans, dinner rolls, iceberg lettuce salad, and plenty of weak coffee, just like Marshall liked it.
“Gawkers,” Marshall said, with a hint of a smile. “I’m getting used to it.”
The evening was warm and still and perfumed with dust and pine pollen particular to the Black Hills of South Dakota. Within the next hour, the smell of hot dogs and hamburgers being cooked on dozens of campground grills would waft through the trees as well. By then the Hotles would be done eating. They liked to eat early. It was a habit they developed on their farm.
The Hotles had parked their massive motor home for the night in a remote campsite within the Mount Rushmore KOA complex near Palmer Gulch, only five miles away from the monument itself. Because it was late August and the roads teemed with tourists, they’d thought ahead and secured this choice site-one they’d occupied before on their semi-annual cross-country trips-by calling and reserving it weeks before. Although there were scores of RVs and tents setting up within the complex below, this particular site was tucked high in the trees and seemed almost remote.
Marshall often said he preferred the Black Hills to the Rocky Mountains farther west. The Black Hills were green, rounded, gentle, with plenty of lots big enough to park The Unit. The highest mountain-Harney Peak-was 7,242 feet. The Black Hills, Marshall said, were reasonable. The Rockies were a different matter. As they ventured from South Dakota into Wyoming, both the people and the landscape changed. Good solid midwestern stock gave way to mountain people who were ragged on the edges, he thought. Farms gave way to ranches. The mountains became severe, twice the elevation of Harney Peak, which was just big enough. The weather became volatile. While the mountains could be seductive, they were also amoral. Little of use could be grown. There were creatures-grizzly bears, black bears, mountain lions-capable of eating him and willing to do it. “Give me the Black Hills any old day,” Marshall said as he drove, as the rounded dark humps appeared in his windshield to the west. “The Black Hills are plenty.”
Sylvia was short, compact, and solid. She wore a sweatshirt covered with balloons and clouds she’d appliquéd herself. Her iron-gray hair was molded into tight curls that looked spring-loaded. She had eight grandchildren with the ninth due any day now. She’d spent the day knitting baby booties and a little stocking cap. She didn’t have strong opinions on the Black Hills versus the Rocky Mountains, but…
“I don’t like to be gawked at,” she said, barely moving her mouth.
“I hate to tell you this, but it’s not you they’re looking at,” Marshall said, sipping coffee. “They’re admiring The Unit.” Marshall’s belly strained at the snap buttons of his Iowa Hawkeyes windbreaker. His face was round, and his cheeks were always red. He’d worn the same steel-framed glasses so long they were back in style, as was his John Deere cap. He chinned toward the motor home. “They probably want to come up here and take a look. Don’t worry, though, we can have supper first.”
“That’s charitable of you,” Sylvia said, shaking her head. “Don’t you ever get tired of giving tours?”
“No.”
“It’s not just a motor home, you know. It’s where we live. But with you giving tours all the time, I feel like I’ve always got to keep it spotless.”
“Ah,” he said, sliding a cutlet from the platter onto his plate, “you’d do that anyway.”
“Still,” she said. “You never gave tours of the farmhouse.”
He shrugged. “Nobody ever wanted to look at it. It’s just a house, sweetie. Nothing special about a house.”
Said Sylvia heatedly, “A house where we raised eight children.”
“You know what I mean,” he said. “Hey, good pork.”
“Oh, dear,” she said, “here they come again.”
The dark SUV with the Illinois plates didn’t proceed all the way up the drive to the campsite, but it braked to a stop just off the access road. Sylvia could see two people in the vehicle-two men, it looked like. And maybe someone smaller in the back. A girl? She glared her most unwelcoming glare, she thought. It usually worked. This time, though, the motor shut off and the driver’s door opened.
“At least they didn’t drive in on top of us,” she said.
“Good campground etiquette,” Marshall said.
“But they could have waited until after our supper.”
“You want me to tell them to come back later?”
“What,” she said with sarcasm, “and not give them a tour?”
Marshall chuckled and reached out and patted Sylvia’s hand. She shook her head.
Only the driver got out. He was older, about their age or maybe a few years younger, wearing a casual jacket and chinos. He was dark and barrel-chested, with a large head, slicked-back hair, and warm, dark eyes. He had a thick mustache and heavy jowls, and he walked up the drive rocking side-to-side a little, like a B-movie monster.
“He looks like somebody,” Sylvia said. “Who am I thinking of?”
Marshall whispered, “How would I know who you’re thinking of?”
“Like that dead writer. You know.”
“Lots of dead writers,” Marshall said. “That’s the best kind, you ask me.”
“Sorry to bother you,” the man said affably. “I’m Dave Stenson. My friends in Chicago call me Stenko.”
“Hemingway,” Sylvia muttered without moving her lips. “That’s who I mean.”
“Sorry to bother you at dinnertime. Would it be better if I came back?” Stenson/Stenko said, pausing before getting too close.
Before Sylvia could say yes, Marshall said, “I’m Marshall and this is Sylvia. What can we do for you?”
“That’s the biggest darned motor home I’ve ever seen,” Stenko said, stepping back so he could see it all from stem to stern. “I just wanted to look at it.”
Marshall smiled, and his eyes twinkled behind thick lenses. Sylvia sighed. All those years in the cab of a combine, all those years of corn, corn, corn. The last few years of ethanol mandates had been great! This was Marshall’s reward.
“I’d be happy to give you a quick tour,” her husband said.
“Please,” Stenko said, holding up his hand palm out, “finish your dinner first.”
Said Marshall, “I’m done,” and pushed away from the picnic table, leaving the salad and green beans untouched.
Sylvia thought, A life spent as a farmer but the man won’t eat vegetables.
Turning to her, Stenko asked, “I was hoping I could borrow a potato or two. I’d sure appreciate it.”
She smiled, despite herself, and felt her cheeks get warm. He had good manners, this man, and those dark eyes…
SHE WAS CLEANING UP the dishes on the picnic table when Marshall and Stenko finally came out of the motor home. Marshall had done the tour of The Unit so many times, for so many people, that his speech was becoming smooth and well rehearsed. Fellow retired RV enthusiasts as well as people still moored to their jobs wanted to see what it looked like inside the behemoth vehicle: their 2009 45-foot diesel-powered Fleetwood American Heritage, which Marshall simply called “The Unit.” She heard phrases she’d heard dozens of times, “Forty-six thousand, six hundred pounds gross vehicle weight… five hundred horses with a ten-point-eight-liter diesel engine… satellite radio… three integrated cameras for backing up… GPS… bedroom with queen bed, satellite television… washer/dryer… wine rack and wet bar even though neither one of us drinks…”
Now Marshall was getting to the point in his tour where, he said, “We traded a life of farming for life in The Unit. We do the circuit now.”
“What’s the circuit?” Stenko asked. She thought he sounded genuinely interested. Which meant he might not leave for a while.
Sylvia shot a glance toward the SUV. She wondered why the people inside didn’t get out, didn’t join Stenko for the tour or at least say hello. They weren’t very friendly, she thought. Her sister in Wisconsin said people from Chicago were like that, as if they owned all the midwestern states and thought of Wisconsin as their own personal recreation playground and Iowa as a cornfield populated by hopeless rubes.
“It’s our circuit,” Marshall explained, “visiting our kids and grand-kids in six different states, staying ahead of the snow, making sure we hit the big flea markets in Quartzsite, going to a few Fleetwood rallies where we can look at the newest models and talk to our fellow owners. We’re kind of a like a club, us Fleetwood people.”
Stenko said, “It’s the biggest and most luxurious thing I’ve ever been in. It’s amazing. You must really get some looks on the road.”
“Thank you,” Marshall said. “We spent a lifetime farming just so we…”
“I’ve heard a vehicle like this can cost more than six hundred K. Now, I’m not asking you what you paid, but am I in the ballpark?”
Marshall nodded, grinned.
“What kind of gas mileage does it get?” Stenko asked.
“Runs on diesel,” Marshall said.
“Whatever,” Stenko said, withdrawing a small spiral notebook from his jacket pocket and flipping it open.
What’s he doing? Sylvia thought.
“We’re getting eight to ten miles a gallon,” Marshall said. “Depends on the conditions, though. The Black Hills are the first mountains we hit going west from Iowa, and the air’s getting thinner. So the mileage gets worse. When we go through Wyoming and Montana-sheesh.”
“Not good, eh?” Stenko said, scribbling.
Sylvia knew Marshall disliked talking about miles per gallon because it made him defensive.
“You can’t look at it that way,” Marshall said, “you can’t look at it like it’s a car or a truck. You’ve got to look at it as your house on wheels. You’re moving your own house from place to place. Eight miles per gallon is a small price to pay for living in your own house. You save on motels and such like that.”
Stenko licked his pencil and scribbled. He seemed excited. “So how many miles do you put on your… house… in a year?”
Marshall looked at Sylvia. She could tell he was ready for Stenko to leave.
“Sixty thousand on average,” Marshall said. “Last year we did eighty.”
Stenko whistled. “How many years have you been doing this circuit as you call it?”
“Five,” Marshall said. “But this is the first year in The Unit.”
Stenko ignored Sylvia’s stony glare. “How many more years do you figure you’ll be doing this?”
“That’s a crazy question,” she said. “It’s like you’re asking us when we’re going to die.”
Stenko chuckled, shaking his head. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it like that.”
She crossed her arms and gave Marshall a Get rid of him look.
“You’re what, sixty-five, sixty-six?” Stenko asked.
“Sixty-five,” Marshall said. “Sylvia’s…”
“Marshall!”
“… approximately the same age,” Stenko said, finishing Marshall’s thought and making another note. “So it’s not crazy to say you two might be able to keep this up for another ten or so years. Maybe even more.”
“More,” Marshall said, “I hope.”
“I’ve got to clean up,” Sylvia said, “if you’ll excuse me.” She was furious at Stenko for his personal questions and at Marshall for answering them.
“Oh,” Stenko said, “about those potatoes.”
She paused on the step into the motor home and didn’t look at Stenko when she said, “I have a couple of bakers. Will they do?”
“Perfect,” Stenko said.
She turned. “Why do you need two potatoes? Aren’t there three of you? I see two more heads out there in your car.”
“Sylvia,” Marshall said, “would you please just get the man a couple of spuds?”
She stomped inside and returned with two and held them out like a ritual offering. Stenko chuckled as he took them.
“I really do thank you,” he said, reaching inside his jacket. “I appreciate your time and information. Ten years on the road is a long time. I envy you in ways you’ll never understand.”
She was puzzled now. His voice was warm and something about his tone-so sad-touched her. And was that a tear in his eye?
INSIDE THE HYBRID SUV, the fourteen year-old girl asked the man in the passenger seat, “Like what is he doing up there?”
The man-she knew him as Robert-was in his mid-thirties. He was handsome and he knew it with his blond hair with the expensive highlights and his ice-cold green eyes and his small, sharp little nose. But he was shrill for a man his age, she thought, and had yet to be very friendly to her. Not that he’d been cruel. It was obvious, though, that he’d rather have Stenko’s undivided attention. Robert said, “He told you not to watch.”
“But why is he taking, like, big potatoes from them?”
“Do you really want to know?”
“Yes.”
Robert turned and pierced her with those eyes. “They’ll act as silencers and muffle the shots.”
“The shots?” She shifted in the back seat so she could see through the windshield better between the front seats. Up the hill, Stenko had turned his back to the old couple and was jamming a big potato on the end of a long-barreled pistol. Before she could speak, Stenko wheeled and swung the weapon up and there were two coughs and the old man fell down. The potato had burst and the pieces had fallen so Stenko jammed the second one on. There were two more coughs and the woman dropped out of sight behind the picnic table.
The girl screamed and balled her fists in her mouth.
“SHUT UP!” Robert said, “For God’s sake, shut up.” To himself, I knew bringing a girl along was a bad idea. I swear to God I can’t figure out what goes on in that brain of his.
She’d seen killing, but she couldn’t believe what had happened. Stenko was so nice. Did he know the old couple? Did they say or do something that he felt he had to defend himself? A choking sob broke through.
Robert said, “He should have left you in Chicago.”
SHE COULDN’T STOP CRYING and peeking even though Robert kept telling her to shut up and not to watch as Stenko dragged the two bodies up into the motor home. When the bodies were inside Stenko closed the door. He was in there a long time before tongues of flame licked the inside of the motor home windows and Stenko jogged down the path toward the SUV.
She smelled smoke and gasoline on his clothes when he climbed into the cab and started the motor.
“Man,” he said, “I hated doing that.”
Robert said, “Move out quick before the fire gets out of control and somebody notices us. Keep cool, drive the speed limit all the way out of here…”
She noticed how panicked Robert’s tone was, how high his voice was. For the first time she saw that his scalp through his hair was glistening with sweat. She’d never noticed how thin his hair was and how skillfully he’d disguised it.
Stenko said, “That old couple-they were kind of sweet.”
“It had to be done,” Robert said quickly.
“I wish I could believe you.”
Robert leaned across the console, his eyes white and wild. “Trust me, Dad. Just trust me. Did they give you the numbers?”
Stenko reached into his breast pocket and flipped the spiral notebook toward Robert. “It’s all there,” he said. The girl thought Stenko was angry.
Robert flipped through the pad, then drew his laptop out of the computer case near his feet. He talked as he tapped the keys. “Sixty to eighty thousand miles a year at eight to ten miles per gallon. Wow. They’ve been at it for five years and planned to keep it up until they couldn’t. They’re both sixty-five, so we could expect them to keep driving that thing for at least ten to fifteen years, maybe more.” Tap-tap-tap.
“They were farmers from Iowa,” Stenko said sadly. “Salt of the earth.”
“Salt of the earth?” Robert said. “You mean plagues on the earth! Christ, Dad, did you see that thing they were driving?”
“They called it The Unit,” Stenko said.
“Wait until I get this all calculated,” Robert said. “You just took a sizable chunk out of the balance.”
“I hope so,” Stenko said.
“Any cash?”
“Of course. All farmers have cash on hand.”
“How much?”
“Thirty-seven hundred I found in the cupboard. I have a feeling there was more, but I couldn’t take the time. I could have used your help in there.”
“That’s not what I do.”
Stenko snorted. “I know.”
“Thirty-seven hundred isn’t very much.”
“It’ll keep us on the road.”
“There’s that,” Robert said, but he didn’t sound very impressed.
As they cleared the campground, the girl turned around in her seat. She could see the wink of orange flames in the alcove of pines now. Soon, the fire would engulf the motor home and one of the people in the campground would see it and call the fire department. But it would be too late to save the motor home, just as it was too late to save that poor old couple. As she stared at the motor home on fire, things from deep in her memory came rushing back and her mouth dropped open.
“I said,” Stenko pressed, looking at her in the rearview mirror, “you didn’t watch, did you? You promised me you wouldn’t watch.”
“She lied,” Robert said. “You should have left her in Chicago.”
“Damn, honey,” Stenko said. “I didn’t want you to watch.”
But she barely heard him through the roaring in her ears. Back it came, from where it had been hiding and crouching like a night monster in a dark corner of her memory.
The burning trailer. Screams. Shots. Snow.
And a telephone number she’d memorized but that had remained buried in her mind just like all of those people were buried in the ground all these years…
She thought: I need to find a phone.
Saddlestring, Wyoming
FIVE DAYS LATER, ON A SUN-FUSED BUT MELANCHOLY SUNDAY afternoon before the school year began again the next day, seventeen-year-old Sheridan Pickett and her twelve-year-old sister, Lucy, rode double bareback in a grassy pasture near the home they used to live in. Their summer-blond hair shone in the melting sun, and their bare sunburned legs dangled down the sides of their old paint horse, Toby, as he slowly followed an old but well-trammeled path around the inside of the sagging three-rail fence. The ankle-high grass buzzed with insects, and grasshoppers anticipated the oncoming hooves by shooting into the air like sparks. He was a slow horse because he chose to be; he’d never agreed with the concept that he should be ridden, even if his burden was light, and considered riding to be an interruption of his real pursuits, which consisted of eating and sleeping. As he walked, he held his head low and sad and his heavy sighs were epic. When he revealed his true nature by snatching a big mouthful of grass when Sheridan’s mind wandered, she pulled up on the reins and said, “Damn you, Toby!”
“He always does that,” Lucy said behind her sister. “All he cares about it eating. He hasn’t changed.”
“He’s always been a big lunkhead,” Sheridan said, keeping the reins tight so he would know she was watching him this time, “but I’ve always kind of liked him. I missed him.”
Lucy leaned forward so her cheek was against Sheridan’s back. Her head was turned toward the house they used to live in before they’d moved eight miles into the town of Saddlestring a year before.
Sheridan looked around. The place hadn’t changed much. The gravel road paralleled the fence. Farther, beyond the road, the landscape dipped into a willow-choked saddle where the Twelve Sleep River branched out into six fingers clogged with beaver ponds and brackish mosquito-heaven eddies and paused for a breath before its muscular rush through and past the town of Saddlestring. Beyond were the folds of the valley as it arched and suddenly climbed to form a precipitous mountain-face known as Wolf Mountain in the Twelve Sleep Range.
“I never thought I’d say I missed this place,” Lucy said.
“But you do,” Sheridan finished.
“No, not really,” Lucy giggled.
“You drive me crazy.”
“What can I say?” Lucy said. “I like people around. I like being able to ride my bike to school and not take that horrible bus.”
“You’re a townie.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Townie’s are… common. Everybody’s a townie. There’s nothing special about it.”
Lucy affected a snooty, Valley Girl inflection: “Yeah, I’m like, common. I should want to still live out here so I can curse at horses, like you. You’re the weird one, Sheridan. I keep telling you that but you don’t believe me.” She flicked a grasshopper off her wrist. “And I don’t constantly have bugs landing on me.”
“Stop talking, Lucy.”
Lucy sighed, mimicking Toby. “How long do you think Mom is going to be in there?”
“A long time, I hope,” Sheridan said.
Marybeth Pickett, Sheridan and Lucy’s mother, had brought them both out to their old house on the Bighorn Road. Their mom owned a business-consulting firm, and she was meeting with Mrs. Kiner, who was starting a bath and body products company using honey or wax or something. Phil Kiner was the game warden of the Saddlestring District, the district their dad used to manage. Because of that, the Kiners took over the state-owned home that was once occupied by the Picketts when the family moved to their Grandmother Missy’s ranch for a year, and then to town to a home of their own. Toby had been one of their horses growing up, and when Sheridan saw him standing lazily in the corral, she’d asked if she could ride him around until their mother was done. Lucy tagged along simply because she didn’t want to wait inside and listen to business talk.
“I’m getting hungry,” Lucy said.
“You’re always hungry,” Sheridan said. “You’re like Toby. You’re like his lazy spawn.”
“Now you shut up,” Lucy said.
“Lucy Pickett,” Sheridan said in an arena announcer’s cadence, “Lazy Hungry Spawn of Toby! I like the sound of that.”
In response, Lucy leaned forward and locked her hands together under Sheridan’s breasts and squeezed her sister’s ribs as hard as she could. “I’ll crush you,” Lucy said.
“You wish,” Sheridan laughed.
They rode in silence for a moment after Lucy gave up trying to crush Sheridan.
Said Lucy, “I miss Dad. I miss his pancakes on Sunday morning.”
Sheridan said, “Me, too.”
“What’s going to happen? Is he ever moving back? Are we moving where he is now?”
Sheridan glanced at the house where her mother was and shrugged, “Who knows? He says he’s in exile.”
“It sucks.”
“Yeah.”
“It sucks big-time.”
“Mmmm.”
“It sucks the big one.”
“Okay, Lucy, I got it.”
“Ooooh,” Lucy said, “I see your boyfriend. I knew he was going to come out and stare at you.”
“Stop it.”
Jason Kiner, like Sheridan, was set to be a junior at Saddlestring High School. He’d come home from football practice a half hour before in his ancient pickup. He was tall, dull-eyed, and wide-shouldered with shaved temples and a shock of black hair on top, something all the players had done to show their solidarity to… whatever. He had seen Sheridan and Lucy when he drove up in his old pickup but pretended he hadn’t. Playing it cool, Sheridan thought, a trait in boys her age she found particularly annoying. He’d parked near the detached garage, slung his gym bag over his shoulder, and gone into the house.
He emerged now wearing a Saddlestring Wranglers gray hoodie, clean jeans, and white Nikes. He’d spiked his hair. Jason ambled toward the fence in a self-conscious, half-comatose saunter. Waved at them, nonchalant, and leaned forward on the fence with his forearms on the top rail and a Nike on the bottom rail. Trying to make an entrance of sorts, Sheridan thought. They were riding the horse toward the corner of the corral where Jason was waiting. It would be a minute before they’d be upon him.
“There he is,” Lucy whispered.
“I see him. So what?”
“Jason Kiner looooves you.”
“Shut up. He does not.”
“I’ve looked at his MySpace page and his Facebook page,” she whispered. “He looooves you.”
“Stop it.”
“Look at him,” Lucy whispered, giggling. “There’s loooove in his eyes.”
With the arm Jason couldn’t see, Sheridan elbowed her sister in the ribs, and Lucy laughed, “You’ve gotta do better than that.”
When Toby sleepwalked to Jason, Sheridan said, “Hi there.”
“How are you guys doing?” Jason said. “I didn’t see you when I drove up.”
“You didn’t?” Lucy asked, mock serious.
Sheridan gritted her teeth and shot a look over her shoulder at her sister, who looked back with her best innocent and charming face.
“It’s been a long time since I rode,” Sheridan said. “We asked your mom.”
Jason shrugged. “Nobody ever rides him anymore, so you might as well. I’ve been thinking about saddling him up, but with football practice and all…”
And the conversation went completely and unexpectedly dead. Sheridan could hear the insects buzz in the grass. She could feel Lucy prodding her to say something.
Finally, Jason’s face lit up with purpose. “Hey-did that chick call you?”
“What chick?”
“She called here a few days ago for you. She still had this number from when you lived here, I guess. I gave her your cell phone number.”
Lucy purred into Sheridan’s ear, “He has your cell phone number?”
Sheridan ignored her. “Nobody called. Who was it?”
“I didn’t know her,” Jason said, “She said she used to live here and still had the number for the house.”
“What was her name?”
Jason screwed up his mouth and frowned. “She said it, but I can’t remember for sure. It was a few days ago. Oh-I remember now. She said something like, ‘April.’ ”
Sheridan dropped the reins in to the grass. “What?”
Jason shrugged. “She said something like, ‘I wonder if she remembers a girl named April.’ Anyway, I gave her your number and…”
Lucy said to Sheridan, “Did he say what I thought he said?”
Sheridan leaned forward and felt Lucy grip her hard to keep her balance. “Jason, this isn’t very funny.”
“Who’s trying to be funny?”
“If you are,” Sheridan said, “I’ll kill you.”
Jason stepped back and dropped his arms to his sides as if preparing to be rushed by the two girls. “What’s going on? What’s wrong with you two? You act like you see a ghost or something.”
Sheridan pointed toward the yard in front of the house but had trouble speaking. Jason turned to where she gestured.
The three Austrian pine trees their dad had planted so long ago in the front yard had all now grown until the tops were level with the gutter of the house. At the time they’d been planted, he’d joked that they were Sheridan’s Tree, April’s Tree, and Lucy’s Tree.
“April was our sister,” Sheridan said, pointing at the middle one. “She was killed six years ago.”
The door of the house opened, and their mother came out. Sheridan noted how Jason looked over his shoulder at her in a way that in other circumstances would have made her proud and angry at the same time. But now her mother looked stricken. There was no doubt in Sheridan’s mind that Jason’s mom had just mentioned the call they’d received.
Baggs, Wyoming
WYOMING GAME WARDEN JOE PICKETT, HIS RIGHT ARM and uniform shirt slick with his own blood, slowed his green Ford pickup as he approached a blind corner on the narrow two-track that paralleled the Little Snake River. It was approaching dusk in the deep river canyon, and buttery shafts filtered through the trees on the rim of the canyon and lit up the floor in a pattern resembling jail bars. The river itself, which had been roaring with runoff in the spring and early summer, was now little more than a series of rock-rimmed pools of pocket water connected by an anemic trickle. He couldn’t help notice, though, that brook trout were rising in the pools, feverishly slurping at tiny fallen Trico bugs like drunks at last call.
There was a mature female bald eagle in the bed of his pickup bound up tight in a Wyoming Cowboys sweatshirt, and the bird didn’t like that he’d slowed down. Her hair-raising screech scared him and made him involuntarily jerk on the wheel.
“Okay,” he said, glancing into his rearview mirror at the eagle, which stared back at him with murderous, needle-sharp eyes that made his skin creep. “You’ve done enough damage already. What-you want me to crash into the river, too?”
He eased his way around the blind corner, encountered no one, and sped up. The road was so narrow-with the river on one side and the canyon wall on the other-that if he had to share it with an oncoming vehicle, they’d both have to maneuver for a place to pull over in order to pass. Instead, he shared the road with a doe mule deer and her fawn that had come down from a cut in the wall for water. Both deer ran ahead of him on the road, looking nervously over their shoulders, until another screech from the eagle sent them bounding through the river and up the other side.
Another blind corner, but this time when he eased around it, he came face-to-face with a pickup parked in the center of the two-track. The vehicle was a jacked-up 2008 Dodge Ram 4x4, Oklahoma plates, the grille a sneering grimace. And no one in the cab. He braked and scanned the river for a fisherman-nope-then up the canyon wall on his right for the driver. No one.
He knew instinctively, Something is going to happen here.
THE CALL THAT brought him to this place on this road in this canyon had come via dispatch in Cheyenne just after noon: hikers had reported an injured bald eagle angrily hopping around in a remote campsite far up the canyon, “scaring the bejesus out of everyone.” They reported the eagle had an arrow sticking out of it. It was the kind of call that made him wince and made him angry.
Months before, Joe had been assigned to the remote Baggs District in extreme south-central Wyoming. The district (known within the department as either “The Place Where Game Wardens Are Sent to Die” or “Warden Graveyard”) was hard against the Colorado border and encompassed the Sierra Madre Mountains, the Little Snake River Valley, dozens of third- and fourth-generation ranches surrounded by a bustling coal-bed methane boom and an influx of energy workers, and long distances to just about anywhere. The nearest town with more than 500 people was Craig, Colorado, thirty-six miles to the south. The governor had his reasons for making the assignment: to hide him away until the heat and publicity of the events from the previous fall died down. Joe understood Governor Rulon’s thinking. After all, even though he’d solved the rash of murders involving hunters across the state of Wyoming, he’d also permitted the unauthorized release of a federal prisoner-Nate Romanowski-as well as committing a shameful act that haunted him still.
Joe had called a few times and sent several e-mails to the governor asking when he could go back to Saddlestring. There had been no response. While Joe felt abandoned, he felt bad that his actions had damaged the governor.
And the governor had enough problems of his own these days to concern himself with Joe’s plight. Although he was still the most popular politician in the state despite his mercurial nature and eccentricity, there had been a rumor of scandal about a relationship with Stella Ennis, the governor’s chief of staff. The governor denied the rumors angrily and Stella resigned, but it had been a second chink in his armor, and Rulon’s enemies-he had them on both sides of the aisle-saw an opening and moved in like wolves on a hamstrung bull moose. Soon, there were innuendos about his fast-and-loose use of state employees, including Joe, even financial questions about the pistol shooting range Rulon had installed behind the governor’s mansion to settle political disputes. Joe had no doubt-knowing the governor-that Rulon would emerge victorious. But in the meanwhile, he’d be embattled and distracted.
And Joe would be in exile of sorts. He felt the familiar pang of moral guilt that had visited him more and more the last few years for some of the decisions he’d made and some of the things he’d done that had landed him here. Although he wasn’t sure he wouldn’t have made the same decisions if he had the opportunity to make them again, the fact was he’d committed acts he was deeply ashamed of and would always be ashamed of. The last moments of J. W. Keeley and Randy Pope, when he’d acted against his nature and concluded that given the situations, the ends justified the means, would forever be with him. Joe’s friend Nate Romanowski, the fugitive falconer, had always maintained that often there was a difference between justice and the law, and Joe had always disagreed with the sentiment. He still did. But he’d crossed lines he never thought he’d cross, and he vowed not to do it again. Although he owned the transgressions he’d committed and they would never go away, he’d resolved that the only way to mitigate them was to stay on the straight and narrow, do good works, and not let his dark impulses assert themselves again.
Being in exile could either push a man over the precipice or help a man sort things out, he’d concluded.
DESPITE THE REMOTE LOCATION, his lack of familiarity with the new district, and pangs of loneliness, the assignment reminded him how much he loved being a game warden again, really being a game warden. It was what he was born to do. It’s what gave him joy, purpose, and a connection to the earth, the sky, God, and his environment. It made him whole. But he wished he could resume his career without the dark cloud that had followed him once the governor had chosen to make him his go-to guy. He wished he could return home every night to Marybeth, Sheridan, and Lucy, who’d remained in Saddlestring because of Marybeth’s business and the home they owned. Every day, he checked his e-mail and phone messages for word from the governor’s office in Cheyenne that he could return. So far, it hadn’t come.
Life and work in his new district was isolated, slow, and incredibly dull.
Until the Mad Archer arrived, anyway.
By Joe’s count, the Mad Archer had killed four elk (two cows and two bulls whose antlers had been hacked off) and wounded three others he had to put down. He could only guess at the additional wounded who’d escaped into the timber and suffered and died alone. It was the same with the two deer and several pronghorn antelope off the highway between the towns of Dixon and Savery, all killed by arrows.
Then there was the dog-a goofy Lab-corgi hybrid with a Lab body and a Lab I love everybody please throw me a stick disposition tacked on to the haughty arrogance of a corgi and a corgi’s four-inch stunted legs-who’d suddenly appeared on the doorstep of Joe’s game warden home. He fed him and let him sleep in the mudroom while he asked around town about his owner. Joe’s conclusion was he’d been dumped by a passing tourist or an energy worker who moved on to a new job. So when the dog was shot through the neck with an arrow outside an ancient cement-block bar once frequented by Butch Cassidy himself, Joe was enraged and convinced the Mad Archer was not only a local but a sick man who should be put down himself if he ever caught him.
The dog-Joe named him “Tube”-was recovering at home after undergoing $3,500 worth of surgery. The money was their savings for a family vacation. Would the state reimburse him if he made the argument that Tube was evidence? He doubted it. What he didn’t doubt was that Sheridan and Lucy would grow as attached to the dog as he had. All Tube had going for him was his personality, Joe thought. He was good for nothing else. Was Tube worth the family vacation? That was a question he couldn’t answer.
Of course, the best Joe could do within his powers if he caught the Mad Archer would be to charge him with multiple counts of wanton destruction-with fines up to $10,000 for each count-and possibly get the poacher’s vehicle and weapons confiscated. Joe was always frustrated at how little he could legally do to game violators. There was some compensation in the fact that citizens in Wyoming and the mountain west were generally as enraged as he was at indiscriminate cruelty against animals. If he caught the man and proved his guilt before a judge, he knew the citizens of Baggs would shun the man and turn him into a pariah, maybe even run him out of the state for good. Still, he’d rather send the criminal to prison.
For the past month, Joe had poured his time and effort into catching the Mad Archer. He’d perched all night near hay meadows popular as elk and deer feeding spots. He’d haunted sporting goods shops asking about purchases of arrows and gone to gas stations asking about suspicious drivers who might have had bows in their pickups in the middle of summer. He’d acquired enough physical evidence to nail the Archer if he could ever catch him in the vicinity of a crime. There were the particular brand of arrows-Beman ICS Hunters tipped with Magnus 2-blade broadheads-partial fingerprints from the shaft of the arrows removed from an elk and Tube, a tire-track impression he’d cast in plaster at the scene of a deer killing, a sample of radiator fluid he’d gathered from a spill on the side of the road near the dead pronghorn, and some transmission fluid of particular viscosity he’d sent to the lab to determine any unique qualities. But he had no real leads on the Mad Archer himself, or even an anonymous tip with a name attached called into the 800-number poacher hotline.
Many of his nightly conversations with Marybeth took place in the dark in the cab of his pickup, overseeing a moon-splashed hay meadow framed by the dark mountain horizon.
JUDGING BY THE CALL from dispatch earlier, Joe immediately assumed the Mad Archer was at it again, and this time he’d claimed a bald eagle. Although bald eagles had finally been taken off the endangered species list the year before, it was still a crime to harm them. Plus, he liked eagles and it made him mad. So when the call came he checked the loads in the magazine of his Glock and chambered a round, moved his shotgun from behind the bench seat to the front, jammed his weathered gray Stetson on his head, and rushed up the canyon on the two-track, hoping the crime had taken place recently enough that there would be a chance of encountering the criminal in the vicinity. Since there was only one main road from the valley floor to the campground where the hikers had called in the wounded eagle, he thought he might have a chance.
HE’D FOUND THE bald eagle as described. The hikers-who’d asked a seasonal forest service employee to call it in once the worker cleared the walled canyon-milled about helplessly while the big eagle stood between them and their Subaru with Colorado plates (an inordinate number of complaints were called in by people with Subarus and Colorado plates). The eagle had her wings outstretched an imposing seven and a half feet. Her talons gripped the soft dirt parking lot like a scoop shovel biting through asphalt. Her screech was shrill, chilling, ungodly, as if intended to scare pinecones out of the trees. Her eyes were as dark, intense, and piercing as hell itself, he thought. He couldn’t lock eyes with her more than a few seconds before breaking the gaze.
There were three hikers, two men and a woman. College age, good equipment, scruffy half-beards on the men, the woman a brunette with her hair tied in a ponytail. They told him they’d spent three nights and four days hiking the trails and high-country lakes near Bridger Peak in the Sierra Madres.
The woman told Joe, “We’re tired, dirty, and hungry and we need to get out of here. We have a dinner reservation tonight in Steamboat Springs. At the rate we’re going, we’re going to be late.”
“Oh dear,” Joe said.
“I’m serious,” she said, miffed.
“Did you see anyone in the area other than the forest service guy? Any other hikers or vehicles?”
They all shook their heads no. Damn.
The eagle was big, Joe noted, probably fifteen pounds. Females were larger than males. The yellow arrow shaft went cleanly through her right wing and was lodged half-in, half-out, the familiar razor-tipped broadhead winking in the sun. He guessed by looking at the way she held the wounded wing that tendons had been sliced so she couldn’t get lift. She’d probably been ambushed while on the ground, he thought, likely surprised while feeding on a fish or roadkill.
As he stood there looking at the eagle with the hikers gathered behind him, admonishing him not to hurt the bird but to get her out of the way so they could get to their car, he felt a particular kind of bitterness he couldn’t give away to them. He knew he was probably looking at a dead bird.
Although there were several rehabilitation centers for raptors and birds of prey, the more reputable of the two being near Sheridan and Boise, there had been a recent departmental memo saying both facilities were filled to capacity. They could take no more birds, no matter the circumstances. Damaged eagles, falcons, and hawks would have to be placed privately or destroyed. Since Joe was in exile of sorts and five hours away from the nearest facility anyway, he knew what the likely conclusion would be. But he didn’t dare tell the hikers. So on the spot, he came up with a scheme: tackle the eagle, bind her wings to her body with his spare sweatshirt, tape it tight, and transport her out of there. To where he would determine later.
The hikers agreed to form a human shield to the side of the eagle and draw her attention (and vitriol) while Joe swooped in from behind her. It worked, except for the part where she slashed down with her hooked beak and ripped a gash the length of his forearm. Spurting blood and holding her wings tight to her body, he managed to slide the arrow out of her wing, slip the sweatshirt over her head, tie the sleeves together around her like a straitjacket, and finish the job with duct tape. Her screech seemed to reach down inside him and tug at primeval fears he didn’t even know he had, but he fought through them out of pure terror and eventually gained control of her thrashing body and sharp talons, wrapping the sweatshirt around her with a continuous strip of tape. Finally, as the hikers stepped away, he had her under control except for her screeching, and he picked her up and carried her to his truck. She was surprisingly light with her wings taped tightly to her side, and it reminded him of carrying one of his daughters as babies. It seemed a shame, he thought, to reduce this beautiful and regal creature to a shiny silver papoose. She seemed cowed and harmless-except for the talons, of course.
He used bungee cords to lash her upright to the inside sidewall of his pickup bed. She looked like an insurgent caught in the act and awaiting interrogation, he thought. He avoided looking into her murderous eyes, which pierced him through the curtain of his peripheral vision.
The hikers thanked him and left in time to make their dinner reservation. He watched their taillights recede down the gravel road through the dust kicked up from their tires that hung in clouds and slowly sifted back down to earth. Their problem was now his problem, and they could tell their friends they’d helped saved a bald eagle.
Joe stood in the campground bloodied and breathing hard, unable to raise dispatch or get a cell signal because of the height of the canyon walls.
While he bound his bleeding forearm with a compress and medical tape from the oft-used first-aid kit in his pickup, he looked at the eagle and asked, “What am I going to do with you?”
JOE THOUGHT THERE might be enough room on the canyon-wall side of the pickup to get around the driverless pickup with the Oklahoma plates in the middle of the road, but he knew it would be close. The side mirrors of both trucks would likely hit each other if he tried to squeeze through.
Sighing, he put his vehicle into park, got out, and bent both of his mirrors in on their hinges.
“Hey!” he called. “Would you mind moving your truck?”
His words echoed back over the tinkling of the river. Clouds of caddis flies smoked up the river. An aggressive trout smacked the surface of a pocket-water pool to get one.
To be safe, he decided to bend the mirrors of the Dodge in as well so he could pass. It was never a good idea to touch another man’s vehicle, but he was sure the missing driver would understand.
As he pushed the driver’s side mirror in, he glanced inside the cab and saw a half-empty twelve-pack of beer, binoculars, a pint of tequila, torn empty packages for AA batteries, and a quiver of Beman arrows between the bench seats.
Joe backed away and instinctively rested his right hand on the butt of his.40 Glock semiauto. His senses sharpened, and he felt his heart beat faster. The rush of blood hurt the gash on his forearm, and dark red blood beaded on the side of the compress. He looked back inside the cab. No keys. He placed his palm on the hood of the truck. It was warm, as if the engine had been running just a moment before. Squatting, he looked underneath the pickup. Two drops of transmission fluid in the dirt and a pink bead of it poised to fall from a black rubber hose. A glance at the tires didn’t conclusively confirm the tread was the same as his plaster cast, but it was similar enough. And near the rear tires on both sides, in the loose grit of the road, were two sets of footprints headed down the road in the direction the Dodge had been coming.
He stood.
Flicking his eyes from the river to the canyon wall to the two-track behind the Dodge where the missing driver might walk up, he stepped backward until he was adjacent to the open driver’s window of his pickup. He reached in and plucked the mike from its cradle.
“Dispatch, this is GF-fifty-four.”
Static.
“Dispatch, this is GF-fifty-four.”
Nothing.
“Can anyone hear me?”
No. Still too deep in the canyon for a signal.
Joe withdrew his cell phone from the breast pocket of his red uniform shirt. No bars.
He guessed the scenario: The Mad Archer and his accomplice were coming up the two-track when they either saw or heard Joe’s pickup coming down the same road from the campground. Maybe the eagle screech alerted them. Since there was nowhere to turn around and driving the Dodge in reverse around the blind corners was impractical, they’d simply bailed out and run. Since it was approaching dusk, no doubt they hoped Joe would simply pass by their vehicle en route to town. When he passed, they’d come out from where they were hiding.
He ran through his options. None were very good.
Joe thought about the empty packages of AA batteries. And he smiled to himself.
HE GAVE THEM fifteen minutes to show up. They didn’t, which didn’t surprise him. The shadows within the canyon grew long and dark and the breeze stilled and the temperature dropped twenty degrees. The wounded eagle grew impatient and screamed. Every time she screeched, he flinched and the hair on the back of his neck bristled.
He had the feeling he was being watched, but he couldn’t see who was watching him, or from where.
He made a show of checking his wristwatch. Then, with the slumped shoulders of a man who’d just given up waiting, he climbed into his pickup with the pronghorn antelope decals on the door, gunned the engine, and drove slowly forward.
He made it past the Dodge with six inches of clearance to spare, although heavy brush clawed the passenger door and scratched at the window. Back on the road, he turned his headlights on and drove slowly, looking carefully-but not too obviously-from side to side for a flash of color or the dark form of a hidden man. The two-track rose to a crest, and once he dropped over the top, he could no longer see the Dodge in his rearview mirror. The river was less languid on the bottom of the hill, and rallied from its late-summer doldrums into a stretch of fast water that picked up in volume until, spent, it spilled over a small falls into a deep pool. When the rush of water overcame the sound of his motor, he let the pickup coast to a stop and he turned the lights out. There was a narrow meadow to his right-a break in the canyon wall-and he drove in it and did a three-point turn in the dark so he was pointed back the way he had come.
Joe kept a small duffel bag of spare clothes in the lockbox in the bed of his pickup and he dug through it until he found a pair of socks.
“Sorry,” he whispered, as he slipped one of the socks over the head of the eagle. He’d learned from his friend Nate, who was a master falconer, that raptors went into a state of quiet when their heads were covered by a falcon hood. He hoped the sock would serve the same purpose.
Back in the cab of his pickup, Joe turned on a small radio receiver under the dashboard and waited.
In recent years, the use of handheld two-way radios-mostly manufactured by Motorola-had become standard equipment for hunters, fishermen, and hikers. The radios worked well within a two-to-five-mile range and operated on commercial channels. They were powered by AA batteries. The receiver under Joe’s dashboard was designed to scan those commercial channels.
It didn’t take long.
“Is that asshole finally gone, Brad?”
“He’s gone.”
Joe noted the thick Okie accents-he’d heard a lot of them lately in the area.
“Are you sure?”
Brad said, “He’s long gone. I seen his truck go over that hill a while back and now I can’t even hear it.”
“Let’s give it ten minutes anyway. If you see his lights or hear anything, shout.”
“You bet, Ron. But you know I gotta get back. I’m so goddamned late now Barb’s gonna kill me.” A little bit of panic in Brad’s voice, Joe thought.
“She’ll live,” Ron said.
“Yeah, she’ll live. But she’ll make my life a living hell. She’s probably throwin’ my clothes out into the yard right now.”
“Heh-heh,” Ron laughed. Then, “What was he doing down there all that time? That game warden?”
“I don’t know. But you can bet he got your plate number and he’ll know who you are.”
“He can’t prove nothing, though. All we gotta say is the truck stalled and we walked out trying to get help. That’s our story, and we’re stickin’ to it.”
“Yeah.” Cautious.
“We’re okay.” Arrogant. “He can’t prove nothin’.”
“Yeah.” Unsure.
“ ’Cause he’s an asshole,” Ron said.
“Yeah,” Brad said.
Joe thought, Ron is the Mad Archer. Brad is his buddy along for the ride. Brad will turn on Ron. Ron is toast.
Joe felt strangely disappointed. For a month he’d tracked the man, studied his crimes, gathered evidence. In the back of his mind, he supposed he’d built Ron into something he was not. Ron was just a stupid redneck poacher with too much time, too much money, and too many arrows.
WHEN JOE BATHED THEM with the beam of his Maglite, Ron was reaching for his door handle with one hand while gripping the compound bow with the other. Brad was urinating on the road. Both were wearing full camo and face paint. They were in their early thirties, thick and hairy. Energy workers. Empty beer cans and energy drink containers littered the bed of the pickup.
“Hello, boys,” Joe said, the Glock lying alongside the barrel of the flashlight.
Ron and Brad looked nervous and scared. Joe was, too, but he feigned confidence. He knew the blinding beam of his flashlight was his best defense if either of them decided to go for a weapon. He could see them clearly, and all they could see of him was the intense white light.
“Drop that bow,” Joe said to Ron. “Toss it into the back of your pickup. The arrows, too.”
Ron did. The arrows clattered in the bed of his truck.
“Both of you, up against the truck, legs spread.”
“He did it all!” Brad shouted suddenly, reaching for the sky, his spray going everywhere.
“Shut the fuck up, Brad,” Ron hissed.
“I never shot once,” Brad said, “not a single damn time. I was just along for the ride.”
“Would you shut up!” Ron said, shaking his head. “Jesus Christ.”
“Up against the truck, fellows,” Joe said. To Brad, “Zip up first.” To Ron, “I’m kind of hoping you make a stupid move since you’re the guy who shot my dog.”
Ron turned quickly and assumed the position as if he’d done it before.
“That dog was the worst thing Ron done,” Brad said, also turning around.
Ron sighed, “That dog ain’t good for nothing.”
Joe jammed the muzzle of the Glock into Ron’s ear hard enough to make him wince. “And you are?” he asked.
JOE FOUND a.357 Magnum revolver under the pickup seat, but neither Ron nor Brad was armed. There was also a baggie containing two vials of crystal meth. He said to Ron, “I’ll stay right on your bumper all the way into town. Don’t even think about running. I’ve caught you boys cold and there aren’t enough roads around here to get away on.”
“You mean I’ve got to drive my own self into town to get arrested?”
Joe nodded. “Either that, or I cuff you and throw you in the back of my truck with that eagle you shot.”
“Can I ride in with you?” Brad asked Joe.
“Sure you can, Brad,” Joe said. To Ron, “Lead on, Mad Archer.”
BRAD TEARFULLY CONFESSED into Joe’s microcassette while Joe drove toward Baggs and Ron followed. Every crime had been committed by Ron Connelly, Brad said.
“Why’d he do it?” Joe asked.
“Ron claimed at first he was tuning up for archery season, but things got plumb out of hand. The problem is Ron is as horny as a three-peckered owl. There’s plenty of natural gas but there are no women here, you know. I got Barb, and she’s no treat, but Ron… Ron is a mess.”
“Ah,” Joe said. His hands were still shaking from adrenaline, but he hoped Brad couldn’t see them in the dark.
“Ron did it all. Every one. Ron should be in prison,” Brad said.
“Don’t worry,” Joe said, “I’ll do my best,” knowing jail time was unlikely for the game violations but the meth might be the ticket.
“Good,” Brad said.
After a few miles, Brad said, “Jesus, you’re that game warden, aren’t you? The one from up north?”
Joe didn’t respond.
“I heard about you,” Brad said.
When Joe cleared the mouth of the canyon in the dark, he heard his radio suddenly gush with voices. He was back in range. At the same time, the cell phone in his pocket burred with vibration.
He took it out, flipped it open.
Three missed calls from Marybeth.
Uh-oh.
IN THE THREE HOURS IT TOOK TO GET THE POACHERS BOOKED and processed into the tiny Baggs jail, the word got out within the community that the Mad Archer was in custody. As Joe hoped, the deputy sheriff added drug charges to Joe’s list of game violations, and a quick search of Ron Connelly’s history via the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) database showed outstanding warrants from Texas for additional drug-related charges and nonpayment of child support. In Joe’s experience as a game warden, the bad ones rarely just committed game violations. Behind the violation was usually a pattern of serious offenses in other fields. Ron Connelly, the Mad Archer, was a perfect example of the theory. Ron’s pal Brad, however, was clean except for a seven-year-old possession charge that had been pled out.
The deputy, a young former Iraq War vet named Rich Brokaw, was new to the job but had the weary old eyes of someone who’d seen things far beyond whatever life in Baggs could bring him. He said to Brad, “You’re free to go, but don’t even think of missing your court date.”
Brad refused to move. He, like Joe, had been noting the number of vehicles gathering outside on the street in front of the jail in the past twenty minutes. He, like Joe, could hear the rumble of men’s voices out on the sidewalk and the occasional shout. Apparently, the bars had emptied and the patrons were right outside wanting a piece of the Mad Archer and his accomplice. The new county building, financed with energy money, was under construction across the street. So the jail was located in a temporary modular unit on an empty lot. The modular was cheap and the walls quivered in strong wind. There was a single jail cell inside, open to the deputy’s office. The setup reminded Joe of the friendly small-town set for The Andy Griffith Show. If the men gathering outside stormed the door, they could be inside in seconds.
“If it’s all right with you guys,” Brad said, “I’ll spend the night in here.”
“Pussy,” Connelly jeered. “Assclown.”
“It’s like a damn cowboy movie,” Brad said to Joe, pretending he didn’t hear Ron. “The mob out there, Jesus. I wouldn’t be surprised if they come back with torches and pitchforks and shit.”
Joe said, “Neither would I.”
“Maybe we can sneak you out the back,” the deputy told Brad.
“No way,” Brad said, shaking his head. “I ain’t leaving tonight. If you want, I’ll pay you to stay here. There’s got to be a cost for staying the night, right? I’ll cover it so the taxpayers don’t have to.”
Brokaw looked at Joe and smiled, then went back to filling out the paperwork for Ron Connelly. Joe still clutched his cell phone. Three calls were akin to a home-front three-alarm fire, but when he’d tried to connect from the pickup, their home phone was busy. He’d left a message saying he had a man in custody and would call the second he had a moment of privacy. Marybeth knew the drill. He hoped that moment came soon, because he could feel his stomach start to roil. There were so many scenarios he could imagine involving Sheridan, Lucy, Marybeth, his crazy mother-in-law, Missy. Maybe his friend Nate had been apprehended by the FBI?
Someone pounded hard on the front door of the modular building, shaking the walls. Ron Connelly stared at the door, tried to act calm, but failed in his attempt. His hands gripped the bars of the jail door as if to milk them. Brad squirmed in a hardback chair as if he needed a bathroom.
Joe said, “If you guys would have shot somebody or robbed a bank or something minor like that, it would be calm out there. But you killed some nice game animals out of season and you shot that dog. So as far as those people out there go, it’s personal.”
Ron Connelly nervously raked his fingers through his long hair and chinned toward Joe and the deputy. “Those rednecks out there want blood and there’s just the two of you between them and us.”
“Yup,” Joe said. “And if it were up to me, I’d step aside.”
Ron’s face twitched. He didn’t know if Joe was kidding or not. Joe didn’t, either. He disliked Connelly more every minute he was exposed to him. What kind of man shot an eagle on the ground? Or Tube?
“I’ll up my offer to stay here tonight,” Brad said.
Brokaw finished the page he was working on, looked to Joe, said, “Okay. Let ’em in.”
Ron Connelly ran in terror to the back of the cell. Brad shrieked.
“Just kidding,” the deputy said, standing up and stifling a smile. “I’ll go outside and talk to ’em.”
Joe watched with admiration as the deputy stepped outside with a shotgun and told everyone to calm down and go home. When a man shouted that the Mad Archer should be released to them, the deputy racked the pump on his shotgun, said, “Go ahead, boys, I got nothing to lose. I don’t like this job much, anyhow.”
The crowd dispersed, and the deputy came back in, sighed, “Whew,” to Joe.
“Impressive,” Joe said.
“I learned in Basra that there is no sound in nature that makes men move along faster than the pumping of a shotgun. Except maybe a chainsaw, but we won’t go there.”
SIMULTANEOUS WITH the snap of the jail door on Ron and Brad, Joe opened his phone and speed-dialed Marybeth.
She was anxious. Someone claiming to be April had called their old house.
It took a moment to register. His stomach did a half-turn. Ron, Brad, the deputy, Baggs all faded from his consciousness. “Is this a sick joke?”
“I wish I could say for sure.”
“Impossible,” Joe said.
“Of course it’s impossible,” she said. But there was a hesitation-an opening he could sense that maybe she thought it wasn’t impossible.
“We paid for her funeral. We were at her funeral.”
“There was never an autopsy.”
“There was no need. I saw her, Marybeth,” Joe said. “She was there.”
“You saw her before. You didn’t see her after. None of us did.”
“Impossible,” he said again.
“All I can say is someone called our old house and asked to speak to Sheridan and Lucy. And whoever called identified herself as April and now has Sheridan’s cell phone number.”
“This is the sickest joke anyone’s ever played on us.”
“It’s depraved,” she said. “But Jason said the girl asked for ‘Sherry.’ No one has ever called Sheridan that except Lucy and April.”
He waited a moment, said, “Tell Sheridan not to shut her phone off tonight.”
“She’s a teenager, Joe. She never shuts off her phone.”
He tapped out an e-mail to his district supervisor advising him of his decision to take immediate personal time, knowing it wouldn’t be received until the next day when he was already gone. Being the governor’s unofficial point man had its privileges. He snapped the phone shut.
The deputy was looking at him. “You okay?”
“Not really.”
“Did somebody die?”
Joe said, “Just the opposite.”
HE DROVE NORTH on lonely state highway 789, where his headlights illuminated sudden herds of mule deer and pronghorn antelope along the road. The adrenaline rush that had surged through him during the arrest and arraignment of the Mad Archer was starting to wear off and a small headache, like a marble-sized ball of black, formed behind his right eye. Wildlife was everywhere, and they all seemed to be restless, on the move, as if anticipating full-fledged hunting season in two weeks. He had to slow down and stay alert. The night sky was clear and missing a moon and the only lights for the first fifty-one miles were the vertical twinkles from distant natural gas wells. Tube was in the front seat with his head on Joe’s lap, where he dreamed and drooled. The eagle was still lashed to the inside wall of his pickup bed with the sock on her head. He felt like he was piloting a traveling freak show in search of rubes who would pay admission.
Maxine, his Labrador who had once been scared white by something she saw in the timber, had passed on the previous winter. Her passing had been traumatic but also a relief of sorts because the old girl went deaf and blind in a remarkable hurry and suffered briefly from the liver condition that took her life. He’d buried her in a howling windstorm in the breaklands she loved, with Sheridan reading a eulogy that was whipped away by the wind. Her loss left a hole in their family that would likely never be filled. Tube might ease some of the pain, he hoped. If nothing else, it was impossible to look at the dog and not smile.
ON THE LONG top-of-the-world drive over the Shirley Mountains in darkness so complete that at times he felt he was in an outdoor tunnel, Joe recalled the incidents of six years before, where they’d lost April in the snow on Battle Mountain.
The Keeley family of Mississippi had played a significant and tragic role in Joe and Marybeth’s lives. Ote Keeley, the outfitter father, had turned up dead on Joe’s woodpile nine years before. Joe had interviewed his wife, Jeannie, as part of the investigation, and while he was talking with her was the first time he saw April, who was dirty, sick, poorly clothed, and six years old at the time. When Jeannie abandoned April, Marybeth swooped in and took the girl in as their foster daughter. She was nine years old and halfway through third grade at Saddlestring Elementary when Jeannie returned to the valley with the Sovereigns and took her back with a legal maneuver. The Sovereigns were a motley collection of Montana Freemen, survivalists, and conspiracy theorists lead by an old bear of a man named Wade Brockius who chose the Bighorns to establish a mountain outpost during the worst winter of recent memory and make their stand. Although the Sovereigns had really broken no laws other than overstaying their campground permit, a rogue Forest Service district supervisor named Melinda Strickland, with assistance from overeager FBI, BATF, and local police, surrounded the Sovereign camp and forced the issue.
The memories were still painfully fresh because they’d never faded very far beneath the surface, and they came back and he was there again…
He had been slumped against the outside of the command Sno-Cat, but he now stood up. He rubbed his face hard. He didn’t know the procedure for a hostage situation-they didn’t teach that to game wardens-but he knew this wasn’t it. This was madness.
He reached into his snowmobile suit and found his compact binoculars. Moving away from the Sno-Cat, he scanned the compound. The nose of Brockius’s trailer faced the road. Through the thin curtains, he could see Brockius just as Munker had described.
Then he saw someone else.
Jeannie Keeley was now at the window, pulling the curtain aside to look out. Her face looked tense, and angry. Beneath her chin was another, smaller, paler face. April.
“Fire a warning shot,” Melinda Strickland told Munker…
The slim black barrel of a rifle slid out of blinding whiteness and swung slowly toward the trailer window. Joe screamed “NO!” as he involuntarily launched himself from the cover of the vehicles in the direction of the shooter. As he ran, he watched in absolute horror as the barrel stopped on a target and fired. The shot boomed across the mountain, jarring the dreamlike snowy morning violently awake.
Immediately after the shot, Joe realized what he had just done, how he had exposed himself completely in the open road with the assault team behind him and the hidden Sovereigns somewhere in front. Maybe the Sovereigns were as shocked as he was, he thought, since no one had fired back.
But within the hush of the snowfall and the faint returning echo of the shot, there was a high-pitched hiss. It took a moment for Joe to focus on the sound, and when he did he realized that its origin was a newly severed pipe that had run between a large propane tank on the side of the trailer and the trailer itself. The thin copper tubing rose from the snow and bent toward the trailer like a rattlesnake ready to strike. He could clearly see an open space between the broken tip of the tubing and the fitting on the side of the trailer where the pipe should have been attached. High-pressure gas was shooting into the side vents of the trailer.
No! Joe thought. Munker couldn’t have-
He looked up to see a flurry of movement behind the curtains inside the trailer a split second before there was a sudden, sickening whump that seemed to suck all of the air off the mountain. The explosion came from inside the trailer, blowing out the window glass and instantly crushing two tires so the trailer rocked and heaved to one side like a wounded animal. The hissing gas from the severed pipe was now on fire, and it became a furious gout of flame aimed at the thin metal skin of the trailer.
Suddenly, a burning figure ran from the trailer, its gyrations framed by fire, and crumpled into the snow.
Joe stood transfixed, staring at the open window where he had last seen April. It was now a blazing hole.
The Sovereigns had scattered on snowmobiles, Sno-Cats, skis, and four-wheel-drives. It was chaos. He’d chased down Munker and found him mortally injured.
When he returned to the Sovereigns’ camp…
He couldn’t even speak. He stared at the smoldering carcass of the trailer. It had scorched the snow and exposed the earth beneath it-dark earth and green grass that didn’t belong here. Melted snow mixed with soot had cut miniature troughs, like spindly black fingers, down the hillside. When he stared at the black framework, all he could see was the face of April Keeley as he last saw her. She was looking out of the window, her head tucked under the chin of her mother. April’s face had been emotionless, and haunted. April had always been haunted. She had never, it seemed, had much of a chance, no matter how hard he and Marybeth had tried. He had failed her, and as a result, she was gone. It tore his heart out.
Joe stood there, as the snow swirled around him, then felt a wracking sob burst in his chest, taking his remaining strength away. His knees buckled and his hands dropped to his sides and he sank down into the snow, hung his head, and cried.
And he cried now, six years later, hot tears dropping on Tube’s head and snout. Joe was always shocked by the appearance of his own tears, as if he’d forgotten he was capable of them. Angrily, he wiped them away.
When he recovered, he called Marybeth. It was after one in the morning, but he knew she’d be awake.
“Where are you?” she asked.
“Nearly to Casper,” he said. Which meant still three hours away.
“This won’t be like our usual reunion,” she said, as if in warning.
“I know.” The only good thing about the distance of his district from their home was getting back together. They missed each other and yearned for each other terribly, and seeing each other was still… wild. Not this time, though.
He said, “You know what’s always bothered me about that day on Battle Mountain? I’ve replayed that day over and over in my head for six years. But you know what’s always bothered me the most?”
“What?”
“If it had been Sheridan or Lucy in that trailer, I think I would have gone in after either one of them.”
“You could have been killed trying, Joe.”
“I know that. But I think I would have tried. I think something inside of me would have made me go into that camp after them, after my daughters. I wouldn’t have waited to see how the situation played out like I did with our foster child. That’s always haunted me…”
There was a long pause. “So what are you saying?”
“That if there’s even a remote chance-even a sliver of a chance-that April is alive, I don’t want to screw up again. I want to find her and save her. I want to set things right.”
“Joe… it’s time you let that go. I don’t think you did the wrong thing that day. You would have been killed trying, and where would that leave the rest of us?”
He didn’t respond, couldn’t respond.
After a long time, Marybeth said, “Joe, I can’t even imagine a scenario where she’s alive. But if she were, if she were…” her voice tailed off. He thought he was losing the signal.
Then she said: “What makes you think she wants to be saved?”
THREE YEARS AFTER the incident on Battle Mountain, a man named J. W. Keeley showed up in Saddlestring seeking revenge on Joe. J.W. was April’s uncle. He was also a violent ex-con suspected of murdering a rich couple from Atlanta in his hunting camp. The ending of that encounter still made Joe shudder with guilt.
BOTH EXPERIENCES stayed with him, messed him up, and made it difficult to concentrate on I-25 as he coursed north. He nearly forgot to acknowledge the memory of former Wyoming icon Chris LeDoux as he passed Kaycee.
But he snapped right back when his phone rang at two-thirty in the morning, when Marybeth said, “Sheridan got a text message an hour ago, Joe. From April.”
Aspen, Colorado
“WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” ROBERT ASKED HER. SHE QUICKLY jammed the phone between the arm of the overstuffed chair and outside of her leg so he couldn’t see it if he looked closely. She hoped her face wouldn’t reveal anything, but he’d startled her and she hadn’t seen him coming up behind her in the hotel lobby.
“Nothing,” she said, hoping she didn’t sound guilty.
“I thought I saw you doing something with your hands.”
She’d been texting. She was fast, a blur of thumbs. But because Robert was in back of her when he asked, she was fairly certain he couldn’t have seen the phone. All he could have seen, she thought, was her leaning forward in the chair, head bent forward, intent on something. Any kid would have known what she was doing, but despite what he seemed to think of himself, Robert was no kid. She doubted he’d ever sent a text message. Robert thought cell phones were for calls. That’s how old he was.
She held up her right hand. “My nails,” she said. “I hate my nails. I chew on them too much.”
She thought it was a pretty good lie. She did hate her nails.
Robert looked at her suspiciously, narrowing his eyes, darting them all over her and around her like a mental frisking. But he skimmed right over her legs and the arm of the chair where the cell phone was.
She’d had the phone for three days, and neither Robert nor Stenko knew she had it. It had been fairly simple to get. She’d asked them to stop at a Wal-Mart as they were passing through Cheyenne on the way to Colorado. She’d said she needed to buy some things. When Robert asked what she needed, she’d said, “Feminine things, if you gotta know,” and that shut him up. She knew they wouldn’t want to go inside with her to buy Kotex, or whatever else the two of them assumed were “feminine things.” She borrowed $50 cash from Stenko and he peeled it off the roll he had taken from the motor home.
The TracFones were located in the electronics section. While standing in line at the cashier’s, she bought a 120-minute Airtime card from a display.
She’d activated the phone in a restroom stall by calling an 800 number with the ten free minutes that came with the phone. Following the prompts, she loaded two hours of talk time onto the phone from the code on the Airtime card. Once it was loaded, she muted the ring and placed the call to the number she remembered from so many years ago to the house on Bighorn Road. She didn’t recognize the voice of the boy who answered, but he did give her Sheridan’s number, which she punched into the memory of the phone before powering it off. Then she threw away the packaging and the charger and slipped the phone down the front of her jeans. She knew that when the battery ran out she could buy another phone at any Wal-Mart or convenience store.
On the way out of the store, she gathered up a large package of Tampax, some nail polish and lotion, and her favorite shampoo. She’d learned years before from one of her many foster brothers that the best time to steal from Wal-Mart was early in the morning, when the employees were lethargic. So she bagged them all up at a self-service checkout and walked out past the staffer near the door who never looked twice.
Outside, she’d offered to give Stenko the change but he smiled and said, “Keep it.”
THEY WERE IN THE LOBBY of the nicest hotel she had ever been in. Such luxury! It was warm and comfortable with crowded couches and chairs, bowls of fresh fruit on tables, dark red wallpaper, hanging chandeliers turned low, exposed ceilings with thick wooden beams, deer heads on the walls. It was late, but she couldn’t sleep since she’d dozed so much in the car all day getting here. The key card to their suite was on a table in front of her. The sleeve for the card read: HOTEL JEROME. Outside, it smelled of pine trees.
Robert sat down in a chair across from her. He had a large tumbler of amber liquid on ice. He was dressed casually, but in a studied way, as if trying to fit in with the surroundings. Open-collar shirt, sports jacket, chinos, leather shoes without socks. And of course he carried his laptop case.
“Dad’s in the bar,” he said. “He’s likely to be in there a while.”
“I’d like to go to bed,” she said. “I’m really tired. It’s one in the morning.”
“I know what time it is. What, do you have an important meeting tomorrow or something? Besides, all you did all day was sleep in the car.” And he laughed.
She really didn’t like him at all, she thought. If it weren’t for Stenko and what he’d done for her, she would have thought of a way to get away already. In fact, the thought had crossed her mind in the Cheyenne Wal-Mart when she was alone from the both of them for the first time since they’d left Chicago.
“What’s he doing in the bar?” she asked, trying to divert the subject away from what she’d been doing previously.
Robert smirked. “Toasting the groom.”
“What groom?” she asked, although she knew.
“The groom. There’s going to be a big wedding in the hotel in a few days. But you don’t need to know anything more about it.”
“Why don’t you trust me?” she asked.
“Because,” he said, taking a sip from his drink, “I think you’re a devious little tramp.”
“I’m not a tramp.”
“Yeah, I forgot,” Robert said. “That was a nunnery Dad found you in, not a brothel.”
“He saved me,” she said. She was so angry she nearly forgot that if she stood up to slap his face he’d see the phone.
“Yeah, I know,” he said, rolling his eyes.
“Why are you doing this to him? Making him do these things?”
Robert sat back, steepled his fingers, and stared at her as if weighing how much to tell. “I’m actually helping him.”
“How does doing these things help him?”
“You wouldn’t understand, girlie.”
Oh, how she disliked him.
SHE’D OVERHEARD some of the conversation in the car earlier that day as they drove south from Wyoming into Colorado. Stenko and his son, Robert, spoke in hushed tones, but she sensed it when Robert would shoot looks at her in the back seat. She pretended to sleep so she could listen and they’d feel like they could talk freely.
Stenko had said, “So the name of the groom is what again?”
“Alexander Stumpf,” Robert said, reading off the screen of his laptop. “Son of Cornelius and Binkie Stumpf of La Jolla, California. Heir to the Stumpf shipping fortune. Reading this, he sounds like a snooty little bastard. The bride is named Patty Johnston. You know, Johnston Cosmetics?”
“I guess I’ve heard of it.”
“Everybody’s heard of Johnston Cosmetics, Dad. Sometimes you astound me. They’re one of the biggest of the multinationals. They make billions on the backs of Third World workers they exploit so rich women can smell good.”
Stenko didn’t reply.
“There’s a picture of Patty Johnston here. She’s kind of a looker. But now she wants to be known as Patty Johnston-Stumpf. Christ Almighty.”
“You don’t even know her,” Stenko said.
Robert snorted. “It sounds like a royal wedding. Guests are flying in from Europe and both coasts for it. Two trust fund babies getting together in Aspen to tie the knot. It’s one of the biggest society shindigs of the year, or at least the only one I can find online that’s close to us.”
“You’ve got a trust fund,” Stenko said.
Said Robert, “Considering what you put me through and the dying planet you’re leaving me with, it was the least you could do. And unlike Patty Johnston or Alexander Stumpf, I’m spending mine in a responsible way, aren’t I? At least I’m giving back, Dad. And because of the way the trust fund came about, I have a hell of a lot to account for, don’t I?”
Stenko sighed. “Don’t be like that.”
“How do you expect me to be? How would you expect different, Dad?”
“Maybe you could be a little nicer.”
“It’s too late for that.”
She didn’t like the way Robert spoke to his father, the man who had saved her life and been nothing but sweet to her.
“Is she still sleeping?” Stenko whispered.
“Yeah.”
“Don’t be so loud. You’ll wake her up.”
“Fuck her.”
“Robert, please.”
“You’re more considerate of her than you ever were of me,” Robert said. “Of course, Carmen was another matter. Carmen loved her daddy, and you called her Little Angel right in front of me. She was Little Angel and I was what? You never really got around to a nickname for me, did you? I mean, we hardly even saw you growing up. And when we did, you were too busy for us. Remember that time we went to the Wisconsin Dells and got that cabin? You left the first morning and didn’t show up for a week afterward.”
A long pause. “I had business. We were opening a new casino and there were labor problems. I’m sorry about leaving you kids with your mother for so long.”
“But you did,” Robert said, triumphant. “But you did. All I can remember about that place is being eaten alive by mosquitoes. It was hot and humid, and the crickets kept me awake all night. Do you remember when I told you I wanted to learn how to fish? Do you remember that?”
Stenko moaned with the memory.
“Right, you remember. So instead of you teaching me dad to son, you get that ape Charlie Sera to take me out on the lake. That goon didn’t know fishing from cathedral architecture! He told me to bait my own hook, and he spent the whole time drinking from a flask and shooting at rising trout with a thirty-eight. Boy, what a great bonding experience.”
“Sorry. I didn’t know about it until later.”
“Right, you were gone by then. And your Little Angel Carmen-that’s when she started hanging out with local losers. That’s when it started with her, you know. She missed her daddy so she found other males who liked her. And mom drowning herself in vodka every night. It was a living hell. But you wouldn’t know. You left us there.”
“It was a five-room vacation home, if I recall,” Stenko said patiently, “the best available. It wasn’t like you were in some shack with an outdoor toilet. Besides, I thought you liked nature. I thought that was what this was all about.”
“I despise nature,” Robert said, “thanks to you.”
“But…”
“I want to save the planet,” Robert said. “That’s different.”
“THERE SHE IS,” Robert said, taking the last gulp from his drink and gesturing at a woman checking in with his glass.
“Who?” she asked.
“Patty Johnston, the bride to be.”
Tall, very thin, thick auburn hair, and green eyes. She had a graceful way of moving and a quick smile. She sure had a lot of luggage, though: two bell-stands worth. The hotel staff hovered around her while she got her key. She was with another woman who looked like an older version of Johnston.
“She just arrived, and that must be her mother,” Robert said with a smirk. “She doesn’t know her future husband is in the bar with Stenko.”
“She’s pretty.”
“I could have her if I wanted to,” Robert said. “The easiest pickings in the world is a woman about to be married. They always want one last blast. And especially if they’re going to get married to a guy named Stumpf.”
She looked at Robert. His eyes were glassy, and she realized he must have had more to drink than she thought.
“What?” he said, noticing her staring at him.
You’re such a prick, she thought.
“Don’t look at me that way,” he said. “You’re just a kid. You shouldn’t even be here. And you wouldn’t be here if it were up to me.”
Robert stood up a little unevenly, smoothed his chinos with both hands and raked his fingers through his streaked blond hair. “Stay put and watch this.”
She watched. He shot out his cuffs and detoured on his way to the bar via the front desk. He succeeded in catching the eye of Patty Johnston. Robert flashed his brilliant smile, said, “You must be the bride because you’ve got a wonderful glow about you.”
Patty Johnston looked at him as if he had something in his teeth. Her mother put on a stern face and glared at him.
“I’d be pleased to buy you a drink later,” Robert pushed on.
Patty Johnston dismissed him with an embarrassed smile and turned back to the front desk.
Robert’s shoulders slumped and his neck turned red. He let a beat pass, then continued his way toward the bar. From her overstuffed chair in the lobby, she almost felt sorry for him. Almost.
When he came back to his chair, the bride-to-be and her mother were gone.
She said, “I guess that didn’t work out.”
He shook his head as if harboring secret knowledge. “You didn’t see how she looked at me. She looked me over, girlie, and Patty liked what she saw. I could have pursued it, and she would have let me. If she wasn’t with her mother, it would be a whole different outcome, believe me.”
He sipped his drink, trying to act nonchalant. “But I figure Stenko’s working the groom, so why bother?”
Then he did something she was getting used to: he withdrew his laptop from his computer case and opened it on his thighs.
“Stenko got all the numbers from the groom,” Robert said, as much to himself as to her. He handed her the spiral notebook opened to a page filled with scrawled words and numbers.
“Read this to me so I can input the data,” he said.
“It doesn’t make sense.”
“It doesn’t have to make sense to you,” he said, annoyed. “It makes sense to me. Now just start at the top and read out each entry while I put it into the database.”
She sighed. “Twenty international guests from Europe.”
Tap-tap-tap.
He said, “That’s eight thousand nine hundred fifty KM each. Seventeen hundred seventy-two KG of carbon per. Seventeen thousand nine hundred KM total, seventy tons of carbon total. Okay, next.”
“One hundred sixty guests from Chicago.
Tap-tap-tap. “Five thousand seven hundred KM. One point two tons carbon each. One hundred ninety-two tons total. Wow. Next.”
“Eighty from NYC and LA.”
Tap-tap-tap. “Ten thousand four hundred KM. Three hundred twenty tons of carbon total. Then the driving.”
“What?” She asked.
“See below where it says rental cars? What are the figures?”
She flipped the page back and found more entries. “Two hundred sixty guests driving three hundred twenty miles Denver-Aspen.”
Tap-tap-tap. Mumbled, “One hundred twenty-five tons of carbon.”
He hit enter with a flourish, then whistled. “One society wedding produces seven hundred and seven tons of carbon into the atmosphere to further choke our planet to death. The offset cost is $7,815.88.”
She thought about it for a moment. She was beginning to understand.
“What about the honeymoon?” she asked. “Wouldn’t you count that, too?”
He grinned.
She got it, and she felt her scalp crawl. “There won’t be a honey-moon.”
He waggled his eyebrows. “Our global honeymoon is over, girlie. All for the best,” he said.
Then: “Stop looking at me like that. Carmen used to do that, too.”
Aspen
WHEN PATTY JOHNSTON HEARD A SCRATCH ON THE KEYCARD entry on the outside of her door and saw the tiny yellow dot of the peephole blink out indicating someone was outside in the hall, she propped up on her elbow in bed and shook her hair so it cascaded into place but not entirely. When a strap from her nightgown didn’t fall casually over her shoulder as intended, she squirmed so it did. She tried to imagine what she would look like to Alex when he opened the door, but she was pretty sure she’d look sleepy, soft, warm, inviting-but not too hungry for him. The bathroom lights were dimmed and the door slightly ajar, so there was a soft glow of gold reaching across the bedroom. But not too much. It annoyed her that Alex shut his eyes when the lights were on, that he’d only look at her furtively in casual asides while they made love. She hadn’t been working out and dieting until her belly was rock hard for their wedding for him not to look at her.
She was still trying to get over the realization she’d had recently when they were having sex: that Alex closed his eyes because he was a kind of performance artist auditioning for the lead role in his own private movie about himself. The thought still haunted her, but like his tendency to tell his friends and relatives, “I’m getting married,” not “We’re getting married,” it was just one of these quirks she’d eventually grind out of him.
She’d almost fallen asleep waiting. It had been over an hour since she’d slid her extra key under the door of his room so he’d find it when he came in. She’d gone to bed without taking out her contacts, without removing her makeup. Waiting. Her eyes burned but she knew he didn’t like her in glasses.
The key card slipped into the lock, was withdrawn, and there was a dull click indicating it was unlocked, but he was too slow grasping the handle-wasn’t he always?-and she rolled her eyes in the semi-dark while he fumbled with the latch. She breathed in deeply while he did it again. Fumbling, trying to fit the key into the slot. Wasn’t he always?
Then she heard a deep male voice, not Alex’s, say: “Step aside. Let me do it.”
She shot up in bed, eyes wide, thinking the front desk had given someone a key to her room.
The door opened and there was Alex’s profile. Tall, square shouldered, bad posture, spiked hair. Wearing, as always, an untucked oversized Brooks Brothers shirt so starched it crackled like a wind-filled sail when he moved.
“Alex, is there someone with you?” she asked, making her voice rise toward the end.
Then she saw the profile of the other man in the second it took for the two of them to enter her room and shut the door behind them. The man with Alex was tall as well, but beefy, rounded, thicker, older. His face, illuminated briefly by the hall lights, was jowly. Deep-set eyes, mustache-he looked like that famous writer she never liked. What was that guy’s name?
“I’m sorry,” Alex said. “This is Stenko.”
She dug her heels into the mattress and rocketed back in the bed until her back thumped the headboard. She pulled the comforter up, clutching it under her chin.
Stenko said, “If you scream, you’ll both die.”
His voice was deep, harsh, but somehow apologetic. It took her a moment to believe what she’d heard.
She said, “Alex, how could you bring someone with you? What in the hell are you thinking?”
“I’m sorry,” he said again. The second word was slurred, shorry.
“You’re drunk,” she said. To Stenko: “Get out now. Whatever he told you is not a possibility.”
“Patty…” Alex said, stumbling forward in the dark as if pushed, “it’s not like that.”
“Sit down on the bed, Alex,” Stenko said. To her: “I have a gun.”
“He has a gun,” Alex repeated, bumping into her bed clumsily, then turning and sitting down hard. She barely moved her leg in time to avoid the weight of him.
“What’s this about?” she asked Alex. “I can’t believe you brought a man in here with you.”
“Keep your voice down, please,” Stenko said. “I don’t want either one of you to get hurt.”
“Hurt?” she asked. “What does he want, Alex?”
“He’ll tell you,” Alex said.
She wanted Alex to stand up and protect her, to charge Stenko, to knock him down to the floor. But Alex just sat there, heavy, his head down and his shoulders slumped more than usual and his hands between his knees.
There was so little light from the bathroom that she could barely make out Stenko as he grabbed a chair from the desk, turned it backward, and sat down with his legs spread. Stenko rested his arms on the back of the chair and leaned forward, putting his chin on his forearms. He held a long-barreled pistol in a big fist, but it was pointed away from them.
“What do you want?” she asked Stenko directly.
“You’re not going to believe it,” Alex said, slowly shaking his head from side to side. He smelled of alcohol and cigar smoke. “We met in the bar.”
“Obviously,” she said, anger starting to replace fear.
Stenko said, “I need you to listen carefully to what I have to say.”
She reached out from beneath the covers and hit Alex in the shoulder with her open palm. “Alex, do something!”
Alex didn’t move.
But Stenko sighed and swung the pistol over, pointed it vaguely at both of them. She saw a smudge of white thumb in the murk and heard him cock the revolver.
“I said listen,” Stenko said in a whisper.
She found Alex’s biceps, squeezed it hard and not affectionately.
Stenko said, “With the size of the wedding, the number of guests, how far they’re all traveling here… Wow. It’s quite a big operation.”
She shook her head, puzzled.
Stenko said, “When I got married-the first time, I mean-we did it before Judge Komicek at the courthouse. Marie’s parents and her best friend, Julie, were there, and I had my mom and all three of the Talich Brothers. That’s all-less than ten guests. This was Chicago. The whole thing was over in fifteen minutes. No big deal. Then we moved into a little two-bedroom bungalow off Division Street. And when it was over, we were just as married as you two will be. But it was simple. No impact.”
After a beat, she asked, “So?”
“Marie is the mother of my son, Robert, by the way. I’ve had other wives and other kids, but Marie, Robert, and my daughter Carmen were my first and best family. Marie knew what I did, but she didn’t want to know any details, and now that I think about it, that was the happiest time in my life. We were struggling, Marie was pregnant with Carmen, and I was happy but I just didn’t realize it at the time. I was too damned impatient.”
She cleared her throat. “What does that have to do with us?”
“I’m getting there,” Stenko said. “Alex, does she always talk this much? It doesn’t bode well, if you ask me.”
“No one asked you,” she snapped.
“Here’s the deal,” Stenko said, ignoring her. His voice was soft but flat, midwestern. “Here’s the deal. I was a hard-charger. Ambitious, ruthless, I guess. I had a certain affinity for Chicago politics and business, and all the guys I grew up with went into one or the other. Except for the ones who became cops, but they’re still friends of mine. So what I did those first few years after marrying Marie was I bulldozed anyone in my path. I fuckin’ ran over ’em, is what I’m saying. I was a force of nature: Stenko. No one was safe unless they were on my side helping me get what I wanted. I figured there were two kinds of people-those who supported me and those that needed to be bulldozed.
“But then I got the word from my docs. And I looked up and thought, Where is Marie? Where is Carmen? Where is Robert? Hell, I liked Marie. She’d sing to me and she was pretty good. Robert, he was always a little too melodramatic, but he was my first. So when I got the word from my docs, I thought, What a selfish bastard I am. Like you two. I took and I took and I never gave anything back. I consumed. Now I’ve got this deficit I’m trying to pay down. I’m trying to get below zero, but I’m in a time crunch and my friends and associates all cheated me, kicked me when I was down. So the reason I’m here is to help us both out.”
She said, “Below zero?”
“You can do it, too,” Stenko said. “This is your chance. If only I’d had this opportunity early in life. If only somebody would have shown me how to do it.”
Stenko sighed and got quiet. As the seconds went on, her fear returned.
“Anyway,” Stenko said finally, his voice still hushed, “that’s why I’m here. My son figured it all out. That’s what he does. He cares. Eight grand-that’s how much you owe the planet, and I’m here to collect. Let’s start with the eight grand to offset the carbon produced by all the people attending this wedding.”
She dug her nails into Alex’s arm until he winced and pulled away. She said to Stenko, “What right do you have to say that? This is extortion. You’re insane.”
Stenko said, “I’m only getting started, Patty. The average American produces twenty tons of carbon a year. I spent a lot of time with my pal Alex tonight and he filled me in on both of you. According to your fiancée, between the two of you, you’ll have three homes and an extravagant lifestyle. I got all the particulars from Alex and fed them to my son, Robert. It’s pretty amazing. With the homes, the travel you people do on commercial and private jets, your fleet of vehicles at each place, you two will produce seven thousand tons of carbon a year. Robert says there are entire villages in Africa that won’t produce that much over a decade. To offset that, it would cost over thirty-five K per year helping the environment.
“My God,” Patty said. “This is ridiculous. My family contributes to all kinds of environmental causes. My mother hosts the Think Green fund-raiser in San Diego every year! Have you ever heard of Think Green?”
Stenko said, “No, I haven’t. Robert didn’t say anything about that. But he did figure that with your seven tons a year and a life expectancy of sixty more years for Patty and fifty more for Alex, that you two alone will do $2.1 million in damage in your lifetime. That’s more than some pissant countries,” he said. “I can’t remember which ones. They have goofy names I never heard of. Sierra Leone? Burma? Maybe-hell, I don’t know which countries. Robert’s the expert, not me.”
“What is your point?” she asked. “I mean, if you’re here to make us buy some of those carbon credit things, I’m sure we can. Will you go away and leave us alone if we do?”
She could see his smile in the light of the bathroom. “Yes,” he said. “That’s exactly why I’m here.”
“We’ll do it,” she said. “We’ll pay the eight thousand for the wedding tomorrow. I swear. Now would you please go away?”
“You’ll do it now,” Stenko said, his voice hardening. “And you’ll have to do the entire amount. Alex has the paper with the wire transfer numbers on it. You can use the phone and call it in.”
She shook her auburn hair and rubbed her eyes. “Alex,” she said, “Send the money.”
“From my account?” Alex said, hurt.
“For Christ’s sake,” she said, “you have eight thousand fucking dollars you can part with if it’ll make him go away.”
Alex stared at her. “He wants the whole $2.1 million.”
“My God,” she said, closing her eyes tightly as if it would make it all go away. “He told you already, Alex? And when he told you, you brought him to my room?”
Stenko said, “The place you’re sending the money is a legitimate enterprise. From what Robert tells me, they’ll use the cash to buy up rain forest, plant trees and shit. And take farmland out of production. They invest in windmills and solar panels. Things like that. It’s a wonderful investment in the future of our planet. It’s the best thing you could possibly do for yourselves, for me, for all of us.”
“You’re not kidding, are you?” she said, eyeing him, looking at a ghost in the dark. But one with a gun. And he raised it, straightened his arm, and pointed it at her eyes. The black muzzle was rimmed with silver.
He shook his head. “You owe us,” Stenko said. “You owe the world.”
“You’re crazy,” she said.
“Worse than that,” Stenko said, “I’m desperate.” Was that the glint of tears in his eyes?
“What if we did it in payments?” she asked.
“I don’t have the time.”
“That’s too much,” she said with finality.
“Tell that to all of those Third Worlders who died in that tsunami caused by global warming,” Stenko said, speaking the words as if by rote, “or those poor stupid polar bears clinging to their last piece of melting ice. What are their lives worth?
“I’ll tell you what Robert tells me,” Stenko said. “It isn’t about you. It’s about all of us. We all have to do what we can, not what we want to do.”
“But we do so much,” Patty said, tears in her eyes. “I told you about Think Green. We recycle, don’t we, Alex? And we replaced all of our lightbulbs. You know, with the ones that don’t work very well? And one of my cars is a Prius. It’s not like I don’t care.”
“Then show me how much you care,” Stenko said. “You’ve got two minutes to make the wire transfer.”
They stared at each other in silence for the first minute. She wanted Alex to help her, to agree with her out loud. To stomp the living shit out of this Stenko.
“Do something,” she said to Alex.
He sighed.
Through gritted teeth, she said, “Send the goddamn money, Alex. You’ve got it. It’s not like you won’t get more.”
She leaned forward until her lips brushed Alex’s ear, whispered, “Do it. There have to be ways of canceling a wire transfer after its been made. We’ll call the police and my dad and get it canceled.”
Alex snorted, looked away.
“Alex, you’ve got the money,” she said.
“So do you,” Alex said, sullen.
She was shocked, and she sat back and glared at the side of Alex’s head, thinking that perhaps she hated him.
“I don’t care which of you does it,” Stenko said, “we’re running out of time.”
“It’ll have to be you,” Alex said to her.
She looked at him, openmouthed.
Alex said, “Sorry, Patty.”
“My God,” she said, “you’d actually choose your money over our marriage? Over me? That’s why you brought him in here?”
“Don’t forget the planet,” Stenko said helpfully.
“I’m sorry, Patty,” Alex said again.
Stenko said to Patty, “This is the man you want to spend your life with?”
She laughed harshly, more of a bark. “Exactly what I was thinking.”
“So,” Stenko said to her, “it’s up to you. You want the phone?”
She looked from Alex to Stenko and back to Alex.
Stenko said, “Sorry kids. I’d hoped we could come to an understanding, but like I said, I’m impatient. Time’s up.”
Saddlestring
JOE ROLLED INTO TOWN AT THREE-THIRTY IN THE MORNING as the fingers of morning mist began their probing ghost-creep from the river into Saddlestring and the single traffic light at First and Main blinked amber in all directions. There were no lights on yet downtown, and the traffic consisted of a single town cop spotlighting a raccoon in an alley. The only people up, it seemed, were the bored clerk reading a newspaper on the counter of the twenty-four-hour Kum-And-Go convenience store and the morning cook at the Burg-O-Pardner starting on the biscuits and sausage gravy for early rising fishermen.
His street was dark as well except for the porch light burning at his house and the kitchen light next door at neighbor Ed Nedney’s, a retired town administrator who’d no doubt arisen early to get a jump-start on late-fall lawn maintenance or putting up the storm windows or plucking the last few errant leaves from his picture-perfect lawn- completed tasks that would make Joe’s home look poorer by comparison and Joe himself seem derelict. This is what Nedney lived for, Joe thought.
Joe didn’t like his house, and every time he came back, he liked it less. It wasn’t the structure or the street; it was simply that he didn’t like living in town with neighbors so close, especially after years of waking up on Bighorn Road to the view of Wolf Mountain and the distant river. But it was where his family lived, and that fact far outweighed his dislike of the location.
His neighborhood was new in terms of Saddlestring itself-thirty years old-and had grown leafy and suburban. The Bighorns could be seen on the horizon as well as the neon bucking bronco atop the Stockman’s Bar downtown. The houses seemed to have been moved a few inches closer together since the last time he was home a week ago, but he knew that was just his tired eyes playing tricks on him.
He flipped a U-turn and parked behind Sheridan’s twenty-year-old pickup-her first car!-leaving the driveway open for Marybeth’s van. Tube bounded out as if he knew he was home at last, and Joe unstrapped the eagle from his pickup wall and picked the bird up to take to his shed in the backyard. It squirmed when he lifted it up but relaxed as he carried it, either resigned to its fate or calmly looking for an opportunity to blow up and escape. He carefully avoided the talons, aware that if the eagle gripped his hand or wrist it could take him down to his knees in pain. The eagle turned its sock-covered head from side to side as he carried it toward the house.
He didn’t hear Ed Nedney come out and stand on his front porch in his robe smoking his morning pipe. And he didn’t see him until Ed cleared his throat loudly to indicate his disapproval of Tube, who’d wandered from Joe’s lawn onto Nedney’s perfect grass to defecate. The pile was huge, steamy.
“Geez, I’m sorry,” Joe said. “I’ll clean that up.”
Nedney snorted, as if to say, Of course you will. Then: “So the game warden returns. How is life in Baggs?”
He said “Baggs” the way a rich San Franciscan would say “Iowa”-with disdain.
“Fine,” Joe said, regretting what Tube had done.
“What do you have there all wrapped up in swaddling clothes?”
“A bald eagle.”
“My God. Does it screech?”
“You should hear it. It can wake the dead.”
“As long as it doesn’t wake me.”
“I didn’t think you slept,” Joe said, “with all the lawn maintenance and all.”
“Well, I do. What’s wrong with that dog? Why does she look so… ridiculous? She looks like a sausage.”
“He’s a he. His name is Tube.”
“Going to be home for a while?”
“Yup,” Joe said, thinking, Probably not.
“Maybe you’ll get a chance to get the house painted before the snow hits,” Nedney said casually.
“It’s not that bad,” Joe said, wishing he hadn’t sounded so defensive.
“Check out the north side under the eaves. The wind is starting to chip away at the paint. Believe me when I tell you this,” Nedney said, sighing, the weight of the unkempt world on his shoulders. “I have to look at it every day.”
Joe thought, Tube, go over on Nedney’s lawn and take another dump…
When Marybeth opened the front door, saw the eagle in his arms wearing Joe’s sweatshirt and sock and the huge frankfurter-like dog at his feet who instantly fell in love with her, she said, “Joe, come inside.” Then: “So this is Tube. He’s very unusual.”
Joe nodded, “Did I tell you I caught the Mad Archer of Baggs?”
“Yes, twice on the phone. Congratulations, Joe. And welcome home.”
AFTER SETTING UP the eagle in the shed with water and rabbit roadkill he had picked up from the highway outside of town, Joe entered the house from the back to avoid seeing Nedney. It was warm and dark inside and smelled of cooking and his family. He was suddenly tired.
Marybeth was sitting on the couch in the front room with her laptop and Sheridan’s cell phone. She said, “Do you need to get some sleep? I’ve been dozing the last couple of hours waiting for you.”
“I do,” he said. But when he looked into her green eyes and saw the way she was curled up on the cushions of the couch, he said, “But first I need you.”
She smiled cautiously and shot a look toward the darkened hallway that lead to Sheridan’s and Lucy’s bedrooms. “Joe…”
He took her hand, she squeezed back, and he guided her to the bedroom.
For a few minutes they forgot about the text messages, Nedney, what time it was, and even Tube, who curled up on the rug at the foot of the bed like he owned the place.
“ I WAS UP a long time after the text-message exchange last night,” Marybeth said at the breakfast table, after Joe had slept hard for three hours but awakened only an hour past his usual time of six o’clock. She had made a fresh pot of coffee, and she poured a mug of it for him. She said, “I read and reread it and I’ll walk you through it. Then I got on the Internet and started plugging in the place names April mentioned in the past couple of weeks. You’re not going to like what I came up with any more than I do,” she said.
He was jarred. “You said April. You said her name. Not ‘whoever was contacting us’ or whatever.”
She returned the carafe to the coffeemaker. When she sat back down she said, “It’s her, Joe.”
He shook his head.
“You can decide for yourself, then,” she said, plucking Sheridan’s phone from the table and opening it up.
As she scrolled through the menu Joe said, “Two thousand text messages? How is that possible?”
Marybeth smiled. “Where have you been, Joe? Teenagers don’t talk. They text.”
“But two thousand? In a month? That’s crazy.”
She shrugged.
He did a quick calculation. “That’s nearly seventy texts a day. I don’t think I’ve sent that many in my life, I don’t think.”
“Are you through?”
“So this isn’t unusual?” he asked, thinking that the more time he spent away from his family, the more removed he was becoming from the day-to-day. He didn’t like the way it was going. He vowed to see the governor and either be reassigned back home or have to quit. Sheridan’s and Lucy’s lives were streaking past him, and at this rate he would someday look up and realize they were gone and he’d missed it. Sheridan was seventeen! Lucy was in middle school. In the blink of an eye, they’d be gone if he didn’t reconcile his situation.
Marybeth said, “Not at all. In fact, and I hate to tell you this, I’ve talked to other mothers and two thousand text messages in a month is actually quite low.”
He whistled.
“Anyway,” she said, scrolling, “Here it is. The first text came in at eleven-eighteen last night. Sheridan was in bed but she heard her phone chime. Remember, we told her to keep her phone on.”
She handed the phone to Joe, showed him how to scroll up through the thread:
From: AK
Sherry, is this U? I got your # from a dude named Jason at the old house. U R not gonna believe who this is. Reply by txt but DON’T CALL. DO NOT CALL.
ak
CB: 307-220-5038
Aug 24, 11:18 pm
Erase REPLY Options
He read it three times. “No way,” he said. “It’s a joke.”
“That’s when Sheridan came out and got me,” Marybeth said. “We sat down together on the couch and had a cry. Sheridan was beside herself, and she wasn’t sure what to answer or even if she wanted to. But we decided she should answer it for no other reason than to draw her out, to see if she-or he, or whoever-would reveal herself more.”
Joe noted the callback number with a Wyoming area code, as well as the exact time and date of the call. He wondered if text messages could be traced like calls could be.
“Scroll up,” she said. Joe did.
Sheridan replied:
From: Falconette
I give. Who RU?
sp
CB: 307-240-4977
Aug 24, 11:32 pm
Erase REPLY Options
Joe said, “Falconette?”
“It’s her user name, I guess.”
“Blame Nate,” Joe said. Nate Romanowski had taken Sheridan as his apprentice in falconry years before. The lessons had been stop/ start, but she’d embraced the cruel and beautiful art of falconry and Nate called her a natural. Since Nate had escaped federal custody a year ago, their lessons had ceased, but Sheridan continued to study up on the sport through books and falconry Internet forums.
“I wonder why she doesn’t want Sheridan to call her?” Joe said.
“Read on,” Marybeth said.
sherry, this is april. remember me?
You can’t be. Come on, who is this?
april Keeley no shit.
april’s gone. i’m gonna turn this phone off.
this is no joke. ive been away a long time but ya its me.
is this jason? this is NOT funny i’m gonna block yr #.
i don’t know jason.
then who R U really?
I told you april.
prove it.
ok. yr 17. yr birthday is May 5. lucy is 12. birthday december 8. howz that?
Joe felt a flutter in his stomach and looked up at Marybeth.
Said Marybeth, looking into the living room as if placing herself back there, “Imagine Sheridan and me sitting on the couch when that came up, the birthdays. Sheridan looked at me with tears in her eyes. We both wanted to believe, but at the same time we didn’t. I can’t remember ever feeling quite like that before. Remember what it was like when we lost April, Joe? My God, those days are still a blur, like being in a car wreck where your mind blots the worst parts out so you won’t go crazy recalling the details. And it all came back to me last night-cleaning out her bedroom, the funeral, relearning to say ‘the two girls’ instead of ‘the three girls,’ setting one less place at the table.”
Her words rushed out. “The mom in me wanted to believe, but I didn’t dare allow myself to do it yet. But Joe, I did. And I do. It’s like God is giving us a second chance with that poor girl, and I just want to believe even though it doesn’t make any logical sense. I wasn’t sure what to say to Sheridan.”
Joe reached across the table and took her hand. She turned her head, fighting tears.
“Anyone could find out their birthdays,” Joe said. “It just means whoever this is has done some homework. I mean, can’t anybody get this kind of stuff from MySpace or Facebook or someplace like that? Any kid in their school could know this stuff. After all, it’s a Wyoming phone number. It’s probably somebody local.”
“That thought crossed my mind,” Marybeth said, nodding toward the phone. “But we’re just getting started.”
Joe took a deep breath and continued.
tell me something only april would know.
ok. u used to scare me & luce by saying there was a witch in the closet.
Luce for Lucy. Only April called her that. Just as she called Sheridan Sherry.
“What’s this about?” Joe asked, his mouth dry.
Marybeth said, “I asked Sheridan. Remember when Lucy and April used to share the same bedroom? For a while-I think it was the November before we lost April-they started asking me to get specific clothes for them to wear in the morning. I remember questioning them why they couldn’t get the clothes themselves and they’d just look at each other and neither would tell me why. I knew something was going on but I didn’t know what. It wasn’t a big deal, and I’d forgotten about it. But now I find out it’s because Sheridan told them there was a witch in the closet and that was the reason she moved out of the bedroom and gave it to them. Sheridan also told them that the witch would stay in the closet and not come out to get them unless either they opened the doors or they told anyone about her. That’s why they were so secretive.”
“That was mean,” Joe said, frowning.
Marybeth shrugged. “It was mean, yes. But its what big sisters do to little sisters. And Joe, Lucy’s never told me about it to this day. So how could anyone know about it except April?”
“Sheridan or Lucy probably told someone in school about the witch in the closet,” Joe said, warming to his schoolmate theory. “Hey-we’ve been thinking this was someone Sheridan knows. But maybe it’s someone Lucy knows?”
Marybeth’s lack of response was her signal for him to keep reading.
tell me something else only april would know.
how about the 3 trees? 1 for each of us. r the trees still there? do U still have Maxine? Is lucy still pretty?
the trees are still there. but maxine died. lucy thinks she’s pretty. she is I guess.
that makes me sad about maxine.
me too. I miss her.
howis yr mom?
she’s great.
hows yr dad?
he’s great. he’s gone a lot.
Joe cringed and tried to swallow. No luck.
is lucy there now?
she’s sleeping.
wake her up. I wanna say hi.
just talk 2 me now.
ok.
Where r u?
“At this point,” Marybeth said, “Sheridan is pretty sure she’s texting back and forth with April. I am, too. But Joe, it just can’t be, can it?”
“No it can’t,” he said, his stomach roiling.
aspen
is that where u live?
no.
where do u live?
noplace really. in a car I guess. lol.
W/yr family?
w/a man & his son. not family. its weird. we’ve been all over theplace.
where?
chicago madison mt rushmore aspen. some places I dont know. cheyene.
do U have a real home?
not rly. for 2 weeks its been this car. i used to live in chicago.
what r u doing?
im along for the ride. its weird. They r doing bad things but im not.
what kinds of bad things?
rly bad things.
like what?
some pple died.
omg, April! R u ok?
im OK.
Joe sat back, rubbed his eyes. “This can’t be true. This can’t be happening.”
shld i call the cops? dad knows cops everywhere.
no. 2 complicated.
u shld call the cops.
do u still have toby?
yes. R u safe?
i think so.
Why did u take so long 2 call me?
2 complicated.
Why can’t i talk 2 u?
they’ll kno I have a phone.
call ME
cant. robert will get mad.
who is robert?
the son. i don’t like him. i like his dad. hes nice to me. he saved me.
Why r u in aspen?
Wedding & footprints.
who? what?
G2G. bye.
Joe looked at the time stamp: 12:58 A.M. He sat back, his mind racing, trying to put together what he’d just read. There was a lot there; locations, names (Robert), disjointed facts. “I’m tempted to call the number.”
“Don’t!” Sheridan said from the hallway. She was in her nightgown and her feet were bare. “If you call they might hurt her, Dad.”
“Hurt who?” Lucy asked, looking from her sister in her nightgown to Joe and Marybeth in their robes at the kitchen table. Lucy was dressed for school in a denim mini, a white top, flip-flops. She narrowed her eyes and put her hands on her hips. “Hey, what’s going on? Why isn’t Sherry dressed for school?”
Sheridan said, “April’s alive.”
“I CAN’T EAT,” LUCY SAID, SITTING BACK IN HER CHAIR AND dropping her fork on the table in front of her with a deliberate clatter. “I just keep thinking about April.”
They were at the breakfast table. The morning was dawning crisp, clear, and cool outside. Sheridan and Lucy had met Tube and thought he was sweet and hilarious. Tube showed his astute political instincts by curling up equidistant between their chairs. Joe had never been around a dog that was so self-assured and manipulative. Tube’s acceptance was instantaneous, and Tube knew it.
“You need to eat something,” Marybeth said. “I can’t send you to school without breakfast.”
Lucy crossed her arms over her chest and tilted her chin up. “I’m not going to school. Sheridan isn’t going, so I’m not going.”
“She was up half the night, Lucy,” Marybeth said softly.
“And I didn’t sleep the other half,” Sheridan said.
Joe and Marybeth exchanged a quick look. Had she heard them when they went to bed? Sheridan gave no indication she had. Joe breathed again.
“April calls and no one tells me,” Lucy said, looking from Marybeth to Joe to Sheridan, accusing them all.
“It’s not like that,” Marybeth said.
“It’s exactly like that. Sheridan told me she wanted to talk to me.”
Sheridan turned from her sister to Joe. “I wonder what she meant by ‘footprints.’ Do you think she remembered what you always tell us when we go camping?”
Said Joe, “Leave only footprints, take only memories.”
“Yeah-that. Do you think she remembered it?”
Joe was cognizant of Lucy’s smoldering at once again being left out of the conversation. He said, “I don’t know. What do you think, Lucy?”
She sat back and crossed her arms over her chest and refused to be drawn in by such a transparent ploy.
“Honey,” Marybeth said to Lucy, looking to Joe for help, “we weren’t sure it was April at the time. We still aren’t completely sure.”
“Sheridan is. Right, Sherry?”
Sheridan looked away, confirming Lucy’s statement.
“Lucy,” Joe said, treading into dangerous waters, “we aren’t sure. It doesn’t make any sense. We’re still trying to figure out what’s happening.”
“You people always leave me out,” Lucy said, her face a mask as she fought back her emotions. “My foster sister calls and you don’t wake me up.”
There was the silence of the guilty.
“She was my sister,” Lucy said. “I think about her every day. Nobody else does. I never really believed she died.”
“Lucy!” Marybeth said, raising her fist to her mouth.
“It’s true. I never believed it.”
Said Marybeth, “Don’t talk like that.”
Joe and Sheridan watched the exchange in chastised silence. Lucy had always been happy-go-lucky, fashionable, pretty, and very observant of Sheridan’s mistakes so she wouldn’t make them herself. In many ways she chose to make herself peripheral. She kept her own counsel. And she was so rarely righteously angry that Joe was slightly stunned.
“I want to talk to her,” Lucy said.
Sheridan said, “You can’t call. She said not to call.”
Lucy glared at her sister and reached across the table and snatched the phone.
“Lucy!” Sheridan said, looking to her mother for help.
“I’m not calling,” Lucy said, opening the phone, finding the text thread in an instance, and writing a message so quickly-a blur of practiced thumbs-that she pressed SEND before Sheridan or Marybeth could wrest the phone away. Then she handed the phone back to her sister and gave one last spiteful deadeye to all of them in turn before grabbing her backpack on the way out the door.
There were a few beats of silence.
“Wow,” Joe said.
“This will take some work,” Marybeth said. “She’s got a point. We’ve got to consider the fact she’s growing up. She’s not that little girl anymore.” She looked blankly at the kitchen window. “Lucy’s growing up whether we want her to or not.”
Sheridan snorted as she read aloud the message Lucy sent:
april come back. still scared of closet. we need revenge. love, luce.
LUCY’S BLOW-UP seemed to hang within the walls of the house like a scorching odor long after she left for school. While Sheridan slumped down the hall to take a shower and get dressed-a process that would rarely take less than an hour, Joe knew-Marybeth listlessly cleared the dishes, something on her mind.
When the sound of the shower coursed through the wall, she turned to Joe and said, “Let’s go for a drive.” He nodded. By her tone and her choice of words, he knew where they were going.
They took her van to the Twelve Sleep County Cemetery, ten minutes away, in complete silence. The cemetery was on the east bank of the river, overlooking a bluff and a shallow bend. During the flash flood three years ago, the river had swollen as if suddenly hungry and had eaten into the soft dirt wall like a beast. The horrified citizens of Saddlestring formed a sandbag brigade that diverted the wall of water before it ate too deeply into the bluff and devoured the coffins. The sandbags were still there, scattered and broken and sunken into the embankment, six feet above the current benign level of the river. Looking at the river, Joe saw violence in remission, a sleeping brute capable of rearing up whenever it wanted if for no other reason than to remind them who was in control.
April’s grave was one of those nearest the bluff above the river. The headstone was small and thin, a wafer of granite, all they could afford at the time. It used to be shaded by river cottonwoods, but the trees had washed away in the flood and so had the shade, and the high-altitude sun burned the grass and whitened the stone itself, aging it well past its six years. All it said was:
APRIL KEELEY
WE HARDLY KNEW YOU
And her birth and death dates.
“We used to come here every month,” Marybeth said. “Remember? Then it turned into every few months.”
“Yup.”
“Joe, we haven’t been here for over a year. I feel really guilty about that.”
Joe nodded.
“Did we forget about her?”
“No,” he said. “Life went on, I guess. Let’s not beat ourselves up.”
They stood in silence. The only sound was a whisper of breeze high in the remaining treetops that sounded more like the river than the river itself.
She said it: “Is it possible there is someone else in the grave, Joe?”
“I was thinking about that.”
“An unknown child? It’s too painful to even consider.”
Joe said, “I didn’t see any other children in that trailer, Marybeth. Only April.”
“But we know the Sovereigns had other children with them. We don’t know what happened to them after the fire.”
Joe remembered the week after the raid when the county coroner and the team from the state Department of Criminal Investigation dug through the charred trailers in the campground. The snow had finally stopped, but in its place an incredible blanket of cold-day after day of twenty, thirty below zero-had descended on the mountains as if to punish them for what had taken place. He had purposely looked away when the investigators cleared blackened sheet metal from the site of Brockius’s trailer, when the coroner shouted out that he’d located three bodies-two adults and a child. Joe had no doubt at the time who they were: Jeannie Keeley, April’s birth mother; Wade Brockius, the leader of the camp; and April. Joe never looked at the bodies, didn’t need to. All he saw were the body bags-one stuffed full like a sausage (Brockius), one stiff and thin (Jeannie), and one with a body so small it seemed empty. The body bags were carried by investigators to an ambulance and taken away. The autopsies of Jeannie and April were cursory-neither had dental records to match up, and the state chose not to run a DNA confirmation because at the time the process was slow and expensive and no one doubted who the bodies were. The decision was made in no small part because of Joe’s own eyewitness testimony.
“We could have the body exhumed,” Marybeth said. “I don’t know how to go about it, but I can find out.”
Joe shook his head. “It could take months. We’d need a court order. To get the order we’d need to go to a judge and explain what this is all about. We’d need to try and convince the judge that April might be out there somewhere. We’ll need more than those text messages, Marybeth. Even I can’t completely convince myself she’s alive. We need more.”
“We need her to text again,” Marybeth said.
“At the very least.”
“Joe, there’s something else.”
He knew there was. She’d alluded to it the night before, when she said she’d been doing an Internet search using the place names from the text thread.
“I DID AN ADVANCED Google search,” Marybeth said, seated at her desk in her office. She wore her reading glasses that made her look serious and thoughtful, Joe thought. She tapped the monitor of her computer with an index finger. “I did several combinations of the words Chicago, Madison, Cheyenne, Mount Rushmore and words like crime, murder, killing, police. I got thousands of hits, of course. Then I narrowed down the search to the last two weeks, because April said she’d been on the road for two weeks, right?”
“Right.”
“So since she said she used to live in Chicago, I assumed the two weeks in the car started there. Of course, we don’t know for sure, but that’s what I’m guessing. So I narrowed it down to the second week of August. Guess how many murders took place that week?”
Joe shrugged.
“Eight. It’s a big place. Of the eight, four were ‘gang-related,’ but I guess we can’t rule them out until we get more information from April. The others run the gamut, from the murder of a doctor-wife arrested-to a truck driver in a suspected road-rage incident. And a brothel owner got shot in the head but nobody saw anything. So who knows?”
Joe agreed. “All we’re going on is that one line she wrote-some people died. We just don’t know enough. We need to get her to tell us more.”
“Right,” she said, doing another Google search. “But let me see if I can find what I found last night. Madison is smaller than Chicago, of course, and there was an unexplained murder there eleven days ago.”
Joe’s antennae went up because of the way she said it.
“Here,” she said jabbing the screen. “From the Capitol Times. I’ll print it out, but here’s the headline: CONTROVERSIAL BLOGGER SLAIN.”
It meant nothing to Joe, and he shrugged.
The printer purred, and she snatched out the sheet that slid out and handed it to Joe.
By Rob Thomas, Staff Writer
MADISON-Madison Police are looking for suspects in the alleged slaying of controversial anti-environmentalist blogger Aaron Reif, 38, author of “PlanetStupido.com.” According to MPD Spokesman Jim Weller, Reif’s body was found Tuesday night in his studio apartment at 2701 University Avenue slumped over his computer. According to Weller, Reif had been shot twice in the head with a small-caliber weapon at point-blank range. Because there were no signs of forced entry, the police assume the alleged assailant may have been an acquaintance of Reif, according to police sources who asked to remain unnamed.
PlanetStupido.com attracted national and international notoriety last year when Reif publicly accused the proprietors of several international carbon-offset brokers of fraud and corporate malfeasance. Police sources refuse to speculate whether the alleged murder was connected with the website or Reif’s high-profile activities.
Weller stated in a hastily called press conference at police headquarters that Reif’s body was discovered at 9:47 P.M. by a pizza de liveryman who arrived at the apartment to deliver a pizza that Reif allegedly ordered, leading the police to believe that Reif was killed between 9:20 P.M. when the order was received and the time of delivery. The Madison Police Department urges citizens who may have been in the vicinity of 2701 University Avenue between 9:15 and 10:00 P.M. to report any suspicious persons, vehicles, or activities…
“Interesting,” Joe said. “I’ve never heard of this website, have you?”
“No, but when we get done here, I’m going to spend some time on it,” she said. “But first I’ve got to show you something else.”
She found no major crimes in Cheyenne or at Mount Rushmore, she said. But when she looked at the road atlas for South Dakota, she noted how many small communities there were around the monument. Hill City, Custer, Keystone, and Rapid City, the only city of any size.
“Keystone,” Joe said, sitting up. “Wasn’t that where-”
“Yes,” she said, leaping in. “That’s where that old couple from Iowa were found murdered a week ago in that RV park. Remember that they thought those poor old people had died because their motor home caught fire while they were sleeping, but they later found they’d been shot first?”
“With a small-caliber weapon,” Joe finished for her.
He sat back, his head swimming.
“This proves nothing, I know,” Marybeth said, spinning in her chair to face Joe, whipping her glasses off. “But you’re right-we need to ask April more questions.”
As they looked at each other they both came up with the same thought.
Marybeth returned to the keyboard and the Google home page, typed ASPEN + MURDER, and directed the search within the last twenty-four hours.
Joe observed her as she read the screen. Suddenly, she gasped, sat back in her chair, and covered her mouth with her hand.
He stood up and leaned across the desk. There were only four hits.
The first one, from the Aspen Times said:
MURDER IN ASPEN: COUPLE SLAIN ON EVE
OF WEDDING WEEKEND
Chicago, Two Weeks Before
STENKO HAD SAVED HER. SHE OWED HIM; SHE WAS LOYAL. Her journey from that frozen campground on fire in Wyoming to Chicago had been cruel and difficult, consisting of movement with no destination in mind. Until Stenko.
As Stenko and Robert argued back and forth in the front seat of the SUV as they drove north toward Wyoming again, she reviewed how she got to this place at this time and let their voices become nothing more than a discordant background soundtrack.
After the fire, after the raggedy soldiers of the Sovereigns had thrown her across the back of a snowmobile and raced away from that campsite under cover of smoke, confusion, and automatic weapons fire, she’d been bounced around the Midwest to family after family. Indiana, Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, finally Illinois. All were Sovereign sympathizers, but that didn’t mean they were necessarily sympathetic to her. She’d learned to expect nothing from anyone and to have no aspirations. She became what each family expected of her, which was a nonentity attached to a monthly check issued by the social services people. She’d had twenty or more “brothers” and “sisters” along the way. She matured early and was taller, softer featured, and more voluptuous than her mother had been, although when she looked into the mirror and squinted or made an angry face she saw the hard, flinty, cold-eyed face of her mother looking back, as if Mama were inside her trying to break out.
She’d smoked her first joint at age eleven and had sex for the first time at age twelve with foster brother Blake in Minnesota, who’d also taught her how to shoplift from Wal-Mart. The act took place in her basement bedroom while Blake’s friends watched through the window well and hooted. It hurt, she hated it, and afterward she found out quick that most boys despised what they said they wanted most, and that was an important thing to learn. When her foster parents found out what happened they blamed her, called her names, shipped her out of there to the next family.
That’s how she wound up with the Voricek family on the South Side of Chicago. The Voriceks supplemented their income by taking in foster children. She was one of ten. Ed Voricek, her foster father, was a pig-like man with a slight mustache and a comb-over, and he smelled of cigarettes, motor oil, and bacon. He held a series of jobs in the short time she was there, which turned out to be his pattern. He had so many jobs that if anyone at school asked her what her father did, she had to stop and think for a moment what uniform shirt he’d been wearing last. Midas? Grease Monkey? Jiffy Lube? He was chronically in and out of work. His wife Mary Ann was as stout as Ed but meaner, and the children lived in absolute fear of her. Any transgression-not making their beds, not eating every bit of food on their plates, talking back to her, sulking-was greeted with a threat to send them back to the agency. So she learned to do what she had to do, not talk, and live in her own head. Her only companion was a foster sister the same age who had come from the same place, and they used to sneak into each other’s rooms and whisper about running away together. Her foster sister had stuck by her when she screwed up and protected her when a drunk Ed Voricek hovered outside their bedroom door one night when there was no good reason for him to be there. Not that Ed suggested anything or made any moves, but the fact that he was there, leaning against the wall next to their door, said enough in itself. She could still recall the stand her sister took when she opened the door, stared the man down, said, “Why don’t you get the hell to bed?” Ed slunk away.
Ed Voricek was a gambler. She didn’t understand very much about it at the time, but she and all the other children heard the furious arguments between Ed and Mary Ann about his losses. Mary Ann would scream at Ed, beat him with her fists, threaten to leave him if he ruined them, if the social workers found out that he’d lied about his employment status and took the children away.
She was surprised the evening Ed knocked on her bedroom door and told her to get dressed. “Wear something nice,” he said. “Something cute.”
So in her best second- or third-hand dress and sandals, she followed him out to his car. Although he’d told her not to pack a bag or bring anything along, she took a small leather pocketbook with a few papers and one-dollar bills-her savings. She knew Mary Ann was out for the evening-Thursday was her bingo night-and when she reached for the handle of the back door, Ed had said, “What’re you doing? You can sit up front with me.”
She thought she knew what would come next. She was wrong. But it turned out to be worse.
They drove through downtown Chicago and out the other side in Ed’s rattletrap station wagon. They crossed the river to the west side, and she saw a battered street sign that read DIVISION and she thought about that. She turned around in her seat and watched out the back window as the sun dropped and the buildings downtown burst with color, the glass and steel towers lighting up fire orange and magenta. The vibrancy of the colors reminded her of sunset in the mountain west and how long it had been since she’d seen one like that. Then, as suddenly as it started, the light and colors doused as if a curtain had been pulled and the buildings became buildings again. Dark, metal, and cold.
Ed was saying, “This is all for the best, all for the best.”
“Are you taking me back to the agency?”
“Something like that,” Ed said.
She was scared but resigned to whatever would happen next. She wished her foster sister were with her. But, as always, she was alone.
He parked on a street of old buildings. There were women in revealing clothes on the corners and knots of young black and Hispanic men on stoops and playing basketball on a cracked court with chain nets that sang when a ball passed through them. When she and Ed got out of the car, a couple of the boys saw her, stopped playing, and hooted like those friends of her “brother” outside the window well.
“Follow me,” Ed said, taking her hand.
They went through a heavy door and up narrow stairs. At the top of the landing was a single bare bulb. She detected a new smell on Ed to go along with the cigarettes, motor oil, and bacon: whiskey. He held her hand too tightly, and she tried to jerk away.
He turned on her, his eyes blazing. “Follow me,” he said.
“You hurt me.”
“Don’t try to run,” he said.
“Where would I run?”
“And cheer up. Try to look cute, like I told you. Wet your lips.”
She licked her lips.
“Okay,” he said.
At the top of the stairs Ed rapped out a series of taps on a door that could only have been some kind of code. She heard locks being thrown and the door opened.
“I’m Eddie V,” Ed said. “I’ve got her with me.”
A tall man in a suit with shallow, badly pockmarked cheeks ignored Ed and peered around him to look at her. But he didn’t so much look at as size her up, the way a man looks at a car he might buy. His eyes narrowed and he nodded to himself, humming. Then, “Come in.”
The tall man shut the door behind them. The room was nothing like what the building and the hallway suggested it might be like. There were soft lights and empty chairs and couches upholstered in buttery leather. There was a desk with a green shade. Music played in the background from invisible speakers. A bar in the corner had dozens of bottles on it and the liquid in them looked warm and delicious.
The tall man continued to look her over. He walked around her, appraising.
“We can do business,” the man said to Ed.
Ed let out his breath, obviously relieved. He turned to her and bent forward, lightly grasping her arms, and stared into her eyes.
“You’re going to be staying here for a little while, do you understand?”
She nodded.
“We’re doing this to protect you,” Ed lied. “Mary Ann was going to send you back to the agency anyway. She feels threatened by you-she told me that a bunch of times. She doesn’t like the way you look at her. This is for you. Do you understand? This way you can make some money and go on with your life.”
She nodded.
“If anyone asks, you ran away,” Ed said. “That’s what we’ll say, too. Do you understand? We’ll even file a report with the agency people and the police to make it official.”
She nodded.
“So don’t even think of turning yourself in,” Ed said, showing his yellow teeth. “Don’t forget, we still have that special ‘sister’ of yours. You wouldn’t want any harm to come to her, would you? Like sending her back so you’d never find her again? You wouldn’t want that, would you?”
“No.
“Well, neither would I, kiddo.”
Ed left her standing there in her dress and sandals while he and the tall man went through a door behind the desk. In a few moments, Ed came back out patting his breast through his jacket, as if he’d just put something there. She saw the corner of a thick white envelope as he passed by her. He said, “Take care of yourself, kid,” and left.
“What’s your name?” the tall man asked after the door closed and Ed went home with his pile of money.
She couldn’t bring herself to speak. Her legs felt weak and her mouth was dry.
“Can’t you talk?” the man asked her.
“Yes.”
“Then what’s your name? Don’t worry, we can always change it.”
She refused to say the name Voricek, or use the name they’d called her.
“April Keeley,” she said.
“Nice,” the tall man said. “And you’re what, eighteen?”
She was confused. “No, I’m…”
The man stepped forward shaking his head. “You’re eighteen,” he said with finality. “You just look younger. You have nice legs for your age, you know. And a good face. You need a manicure, though. We’ll take care of that, don’t worry.”
She quickly hid her hands behind her back.
“That’s a good look,” the tall man said, “it makes your breasts stand out and makes you look all innocent.” Then he chuckled and put his arm around her shoulders.
“We’ll take good care of you here,” he said. “We take good care of our girls. Ask them if you don’t believe me. You’ll be part of the family. And we take care of our family.”
A door on the far wall opened and a man came out, adjusting his tie. He was heavy and his face was flushed. When he saw her, he stopped and looked her over.
The tall man said, “How was everything, Mr. Davis?”
Mr. Davis said, “Fantastic, Geno. Great as always. And who is this fresh-faced young flower?”
“Meet April Keeley,” Geno said to Davis. “She’s just joined the family.”
Davis said, “Welcome aboard, April.” Then to Geno, “They just keep getting younger, don’t they?”
FOR THE FIRST WEEK, she lived with the women in their rooms upstairs, which were nothing like the rooms down the hall from the reception area. Upstairs, the sleeping rooms were cozy, messy, personal, and feminine. There were posters of rock and rap bands on the walls and stuffed animals on the beds. During the daytime, they were a kind of family. They cooked for each other, went shopping, gossiped. Two of the women took a particular liking to her and bought her clothing and ice cream. One of them, a beautiful tan/black woman named Shawanna, did her hair and nails and told her to insist on protection no matter what and to never back down on that despite what the man said or offered or threatened.
“You’re a sex worker,” she told her, “you’re not a whore.”
Geno took fully clothed photos of her for the Internet site. He told her to wet her lips like Ed had and to pout and to pretend she was hungry. Shawanna urged her on, and the photo session was kind of fun as long as she didn’t think ahead to how the photos might be used.
On the night of her debut-they called it her “debutante ball”-she wore a tight maroon dress and new high heels and she followed Shawanna out into the reception area with four other girls when the buzzer rang. She wondered if she would be chosen. They emerged to find a man squaring off with Geno. Shawanna whispered to her that the man was called Stenko. “He’s a big man,” Shawanna said. “He’s one of the owners of this place.”
The six girls were to lounge in the chairs and couch, see if Stenko was interested, let things develop from there. She stuck close to Shawanna. But Stenko barely looked at any of them.
Stenko said to Geno, “Why did you call them out? I didn’t ask to see them.” He sounded exasperated.
“I thought it might be a nice distraction,” Geno said. There was a line of sweat that showed through his mustache. “I thought we could have our discussion afterward, when you’re more relaxed.”
Stenko was obviously worked up about something. His movements were stiff but sudden. His eyes darted around the room. At first, she was scared of him. He was big, his hands were huge, and his face was wide and fleshy. He kept running his hand back through his thin hair in an angry way.
Stenko said to Geno, “I don’t need to be relaxed. I want to cash out. I told you that, and I told the Carriciolis that. That is the only reason I’m here, Geno.”
Geno looked nervous. She hadn’t known him long, but she’d never seen him so pale, so furtive. Geno said, “Have a drink, relax. You look pretty good, Stenko. When I heard you were sick, I expected you’d look, you know, sick.”
“I’m on meds,” Stenko said, “and some days are better than others. But no matter what day it is, I can kick your skinny ass out that window if you don’t cash me out of this operation.” When he said it he gestured toward the girls without looking at them.
“I can’t, Stenko,” Geno said softly.
She could tell that the other girls were getting tense. There were no false smiles or purring, just quickly exchanged glances back and forth. She saw Shawanna mouth, “Oh my God.”
Stenko said to Geno, “What do you mean you can’t? I have an investment in this operation. I want it back. I’m not asking for principal plus profit, which is my due. I just want the principal back. Now.”
Geno shook his head. “Stenko, you know what’s going on. The feds are on us, too. We’re not liquid right now. You know that.”
Stenko said nothing, but his rage was building. It was as if he were getting larger. His presence seemed to fill the room, dominate it. She watched him clench and unclench his fists and stare down Geno. His stillness was more frightening than his words earlier.
Geno said, “What about your guy? The accountant? Is it true what I heard about him taking your money and the Talich Brothers and hitting the road? Maybe you should be going after him instead of trying to shake me down.”
Stenko just stood there, swelling in size. She found herself pressing back further into the couch. She thought, Shut up, Geno. Can’t you see you’re making him even angrier?
“Get them out of here,” Stenko said through clenched teeth.
The girls didn’t wait to hear from Geno. They were up and rushing the door they had came through, stiletto heels snapping on the hardwood floor like castanets. Shawanna reached back and pulled her up by the hand, said, “Let’s git, April.”
She was nearly through the door when she heard Stenko say, “Who is that one?”
It was as if a bolt of electricity shot through her.
“April!” Geno shouted harshly. “Stay here.” He seemed happy to change the subject.
Shawanna let go of her hand at the shout, and April stopped short of the open door. Before the door shut ahead of her, Shawanna said, “Sorry, girl,” and sounded like she meant it. Alone again.
“Turn around,” Stenko said. His voice was soft.
She turned, blinking through tears. She wished she could stop them. Geno was looking at her, angry, imploring her to stop crying.
Stenko looked at her and gently shook his head. There was something soft in his expression. Sympathy, pity. Or… recognition. As if he knew her.
Geno said, “You want her? We can make a deal. She’s absolutely fresh-the freshest. Inexperienced, though. No skills at all I know of. I just want you to know that up front.”
“How old are you?” Stenko asked her, ignoring Geno.
“She’s…” Geno started to say.
“I’m fourteen,” she said.
Geno stared daggers at her.
Stenko said to Geno, “Fourteen?”
Geno held his hands out, palms up. “Hey, she claimed she was eighteen earlier. I believed her. She looks like she could be eighteen.”
“Look away, darling,” Stenko said to her.
At first, she thought he was asking her to turn and pose. She hesitated.
“Avert your eyes,” Stenko said. She turned. But in the reflection of a glass picture frame, she saw him reach behind his back under his jacket. That was the first time she saw the pistol. Stenko wheeled on Geno. There were two loud pops and Geno slapped his forehead like he’d just gotten a major idea instead of two bullet holes. Then Geno pitched forward onto the hardwood floor.
“Don’t look,” Stenko said, approaching her and taking her by the arm. “We’re leaving, and I don’t want you to see him.”
THEY WENT OUT of the building the same way she’d come in, being pulled by her hand by a man saying, “Follow me.”
There was a big dark SUV out front, double-parked. Some of the street boys had gathered around it, and they parted as Stenko came out with her. One of them said, “Nice ride, dude.”
Stenko flashed his pistol, said, “None of you ever saw me here.”
The boys scattered. She could hear a couple of them say, “That’s fuckin’ Stenko!” Recognizing him. Making her feel special despite her tears, despite the circumstances.
She climbed into the passenger seat and Stenko roared away. As he drove, she stole looks at him. He looked purposeful, determined. Like a man who knew where he was going and would stop at nothing to get there. She was scared, but only because she didn’t know what would come next. And even though she’d seen what he could do, she wasn’t sure she was in danger. For some reason, her intuition told her to calm down. But why else would he single her out, take her like that?
He drove for a half an hour through the city, down streets she’d never seen, finally off the street into a park where there were dark leafy trees and a huge rounded ancient building with a sign reading GARFIELD PARK CONSERVATORY. He pulled over to the curb on the farthest corner of the lot from the conservatory. She looked around: they were completely alone. Whatever was going to happen, she thought, is going to happen now.
He turned toward her in his seat. She could feel his heat.
He said: “Don’t worry. Don’t be scared. Here, dry your eyes.” He handed her a handkerchief from the breast pocket of his jacket. As she dabbed at her face, trying not to ruin her makeup, he said, “When I saw you in there it was like I was looking at a ghost-the ghost of my daughter. Her name was Carmen. What an angel she was. You could be her twin, I swear to God. Poor Carmen-she got mixed up with the wrong people. She ended up in a place like you just came from, but I wasn’t there to rescue her. And on her last day on earth she called me twice on my cell phone, but I was in negotiations and I couldn’t break free to call her back until that night. It was too late by then. She was gone.”
She saw moisture in his eyes, and the corners of his mouth twitched.
He said, “We’d been on the outs and I was getting tired of her calling me only when she needed money. I blame myself for what she did that night, because I know in my heart if I would have been there for her, I could have saved her. I could have checked her into rehab again…” His voice trailed off. He stared out the window for a full minute before he turned back to her with a crooked smile. “But when I saw you there tonight I thought, Damn! There she is again. It’s like I’m being given a second chance.”
She didn’t know what to say.
Said Stenko, “I’m going to treat you right. I’m going to feed you whatever you want to eat and buy you clothes you want. Like you’re my daughter come back to earth, that’s how it’ll be. You’ll stay in nice hotels and you’ll never have to see the inside of a place like that”-he chinned in the general direction of where they’d come-“for the rest of your life.”
She shook her head quickly, as if she’d imagined what he said, that he’d actually said something different.
“Really?” she asked.
He smiled. He had a nice smile. She thought if what he said was true-and it probably wasn’t-the first thing she would want to do would be to rescue her special stepsister from the Voriceks. With money and a place to live, they could be together, care for each other.
“I will never touch you,” Stenko said. “It isn’t like that. I don’t want you in a sexual kind of way.”
“What, then?” she asked. Her voice sounded weak to her.
“I want to be kind to you,” he said simply.
“Why?”
It took him a moment to answer, and he glanced outside at the trees, at the conservatory. “Because I haven’t always been kind. I’ve hurt a lot of people-innocents, like Carmen. I didn’t really think about what I was doing most of the time. But now I think about it every minute.”
She asked, “Why now?”
He said, “I’m dying fast. It focuses the mind.”
She didn’t know what to say.
“Look,” he said, “I know I can’t really redeem myself. I don’t have enough time. But when I die, I want someone to say, ‘He was a kind man to me.’ Believe me, it will be a lonely voice in the room. But it’s one I just gotta know I might hear.”
She was confused.
He said, “I don’t expect you to understand all of this. I’m still sorting things out myself. I mean, it isn’t unusual for a sixty-year-old man who can pound down an entire deep-dish to have digestive problems. But when you find out it isn’t the pizza but advanced bladder cancer that’s spread to your liver and you maybe have a month to live, well, like I said, it focuses the mind.”
“That’s why Geno said you were sick.”
He nodded. “He never thought he’d see me again, either, that jerk. He never thought I’d show up at his place like I said I would.
“Anyway,” he said, shaking his head, shaking away his thoughts about Geno, “forget what happened. I’m a little… volatile. The morphine and the meds keep me going, but I have the feeling that if I slow down and think about it, that’ll be the end. So I gotta keep moving. And I gotta do things right, make things right with the Big Guy,” he said, glancing upward.
“So,” he said, “when that doctor told me nothing would help, that it was time to make peace with the world, I thought of two things right away. The first was to reconcile with my only son, Robert. That’s step one. After we leave here, we’re going to pick up Robert in Madison, Wisconsin. He has some kind of crazy-ass environmental foundation there he pays for through his trust fund…” She couldn’t see that well in the dark, but she thought he rolled his eyes when he said it. He said, “I was a little surprised he agreed to see me, so I’m excited. I haven’t even talked with him in a coon’s age. But he said right away he’s got a way for us to get back together. To become father and son again. And you-you’re like Carmen. The three of us will do it all over again, and this time I’ll make it right. This time there will be a happy ending. Ain’t that cool?”
She nodded.
“You bet it is,” Stenko said. “And the second thing is what we’re doing now. Like I said, I want to be kind to you. I want to help you. No strings, April. Just let me be kind to you, okay?”
She nodded.
And he was.
Saddlestring
A MASSIVE BLACK FULL-SIZED HUMMER WITH DARKENED windows blocked their driveway when Marybeth and Joe returned home. “Oh no,” Marybeth said in an uncharacteristic whine. “Not now. This is not a good time.”
Joe nodded toward his mother-in-law’s vehicle with new vanity plates reading DUCHESS, said, “There never has been a good time.”
The driver’s window of the Hummer whirred down and there she was, on her cell phone, her free hand flapping at them, gesturing at them to park behind her, oblivious that she was blocking their entrance.
“Ram her,” Joe said.
“That’s not helpful…”
Missy had never liked Joe, and the feeling was mutual. She thought her daughter could have done better for herself. Joe agreed with that, but didn’t necessarily want to hear it from his mother-in-law. For a while, after he’d been fired from the Game and Fish Department, they’d lived in an old homestead on Missy and Bud Longbrake’s ranch. The close proximity had driven a wedge between Marybeth and her mother that had never healed. Joe had not discouraged the rift as it formed, grew, and hardened.
Marybeth said, “I’ll try and get rid of her.”
Joe said, “You’ll need a cross and a wooden stake. I think I might have them in the garage.”
“Joe, please. You’re being worse than usual.”
Missy terminated her call and tossed her phone aside and climbed out.
Missy was an attractive woman-sixty-three but looked forty, a tiny, slim brunette with a heart-shaped porcelain face and perfectly highlighted and coiffed hair. She may not look it, Joe thought, but she was the most relentless and challenging adversary he had ever encountered. Missy was a shark; she never stopped moving forward and she was always hungry, but not for food. In fact, Joe had been around her on the ranch when she ate no more than carrot sticks and celery for days if she gained a single pound. Missy was hungry for power, influence, and status. Her lifelong ambition to trade up, replacing husbands with those of greater power and means, had recently reached a new level that stunned the entire valley. He had not seen her since the coup took place several months before, and Marybeth was still beside herself with embarrassment and anger.
As she approached their van, Missy saw Joe, and she paused for a second, her eyes narrowing into slits, threatening to create a network of hairline fissures in the varnish of makeup on her face.
Joe got out, said, “Good to see you, too.” He determined that a good part of his animosity was due to the after-effects of an astonishing dream he’d had one night in Baggs featuring… Missy. The recollection of the dream made his scalp crawl, and he’d forgotten about it until he saw her in person.
Missy ignored him and said to Marybeth, “I was just calling your house. I knocked but nobody answered, even though I could hear loud music.”
“Sheridan’s home,” Marybeth said, her voice chilly. “She gets dressed and listens to the radio. She probably couldn’t hear you.”
“I just got back,” Missy said. “I’ve got some presents for the girls.”
“Got back from where?” Marybeth asked without enthusiasm.
Missy went to the Hummer and gathered two packages wrapped in exotic foil wrapping paper. “Bali! It was wonderful.”
“Bali?”
“Earl had a conference. We stayed in a hotel on the beach that was the most magnificent place I’ve ever been in. Who would think a Muslim country could be so wonderful and romantic with all that chopping off of heads and hands and all? But I miss it already.”
Marybeth rolled her eyes.
Joe said, “I saw Bud a few weeks ago coming out of the Stockman’s Bar. He looks like he’s aged twenty years.”
Missy fixed her coldest look of disapproval on him. “Was he with his friend?”
Joe shook his head, not understanding.
“His friend Jack Daniel’s. The two are rarely apart these days. In fact, I think they’re in love.”
Six months ago, Bud Longbrake had returned from a bear-hunting trip to Alaska to find all the locks on their ranch house changed and his clothing in a steamer trunk on the front lawn. Missy had traded up again in breathtaking fashion.
They called Earl Alden the Earl of Lexington. Alden was a Southern multibillionaire media mogul who had owned what used to be the Scarlett Ranch. For several years, he’d divided his time among the ranch and three other residences in Lexington, Kentucky; New York City; and Chamonix, France. In an effort to be civic-minded, Alden had joined the library board, where he met its chairwoman, Missy Longbrake. From that moment on, Bud Longbrake’s days were numbered, only he didn’t know it.
“Duchess,” Joe said, looking at her license place. “The Earl and the Duchess, got it.”
Missy waggled her fingers. “One might as well have fun with it, right?”
“Who’s next,” Joe asked, “the president of France?”
Missy actually laughed. Then she composed herself and leveled her ice-blue eyes at him. “That would be going the wrong direction, my dear. Earl could buy and sell the president of France.”
The divorce battle had been vicious. Missy had produced a prenuptial agreement signed by both parties that said in the event of a divorce the Longbrake Ranch would be divided evenly between them, even though the property had been owned by Longbrakes for three generations. Bud claimed he couldn’t remember signing the document, and besides, if he had, he thought it was something else. Bud now lived in a log cabin that was once used for winter cowboys six miles from the main house. He lived there with his friend Jack Daniel’s. Between the Earl and the Duchess, who had consolidated their holdings, they were now the largest landowners in northern Wyoming.
Joe shook his head. To Marybeth, he said, “I need to do some work inside.”
He turned and headed for the front door.
Behind him, he heard Missy say, “Aren’t you going to invite me in?”
“I’m really busy, Mom.”
“Of course you are. But I have these gifts for the girls. Wait until you see them-they’re beautiful. Hand-painted Indonesian batik boho skirts. You’ve never seen anything like them before. Lucy will look great in hers. She looks good in anything.”
He heard Marybeth sigh.
“Eight hundred dollars each,” Missy said, following Marybeth up the walk, “in case you were wondering.”
Said Marybeth, “I wasn’t.”
Once inside, Joe quickly darted for their home office so he wouldn’t have to see Missy when she came inside. He closed the door and reached for the road atlas.
He opened the book to the relief map of the U.S., tracing a route from Chicago to Madison on I-90, then continuing on the same interstate through Minnesota and across South Dakota to Keystone. It was a long drive, and there were hundreds of towns and cities en route. He wondered if there were other incidents besides the ones Marybeth had found.
From Rapid City he followed U.S. 18 south to Hot Springs, South Dakota, then south all the way to Cheyenne on U.S. 85. They could have stayed on 85 or jumped onto I-25 south through Denver to I-70 west, south on U.S. 24 past Vail, west on U.S. 82 to Aspen.
He sat back. A hell of a journey, he thought. But where were they headed next? What were they driving?
He hoped he would be present if April contacted Sheridan again so he could feed his daughter questions to ask. He made a list:
• Who is Robert?
• What is the name of Robert’s father?
• Are there any others with you?
• What kind of car are you in?
• What do you mean when you say people died? How? When? Why?
• Where are you now?
• What is your destination?
• How did you get away from that compound six years ago?
• Are you willing to meet with me?
Through the door, he heard Missy say, “… and you need to quit telling people in town we’re estranged. I hate that word. It makes it sound like I’m strange or something. It’s not a good word.”
Then, and he could visualize her gesturing toward his closed door, “Him I wouldn’t mind being estranged from. But not you, Marybeth. You’re my daughter.”
He smiled grimly to himself. Sheridan had the right idea, he thought. He clicked on the radio to the local country station. Brad Paisley. He turned it up loud.
HIS FIRST CALL was to Duck Wallace, chief investigator for the Wyoming Game and Fish Department in Cheyenne. Wallace was good, and he was sometimes loaned out to other agencies, departments, the Division of Criminal Investigation, and local police departments because of his skill, knowledge, and rock-solid reputation. Duck was a Shoshone from the reservation, and so dark-skinned he was sometimes mistaken for black.
“Wallace,” he said, answering on the first ring. He sounded bored and bureaucratic.
“Duck, Joe Pickett.”
“Ah, Joe,” he said, the inflection indicating he was already interested in what Joe would have to say and a little cautious because Joe only called when a situation was critical.
“Duck, I’ve got a situation. Without getting into specifics, can a text message be traced?”
“You mean to a certain number? That’s easy. Look at the message, Joe.”
“No, that’s not what I mean. What I’m wondering is can a phone be traced to a physical location from a text message? Like a voice call can?”
Duck was silent for a long time. Joe knew it meant he was thinking, and he had no need to make conversation while he was thinking.
Duck said, “We can’t take an old text message and determine what the location was it was sent from. That just can’t be done, I don’t think. Of course, the feds have all sorts of tricks these days, especially Homeland Security, so I can’t completely rule it out.
“Now if we’re talking about tracing a phone to its geographic location when it’s turned on or while it’s being used, yes, that’s possible.”
Joe sat up. “How?”
“It’s not easy. There’s a way to do it, but it’s beyond my capacity, Joe. I don’t have the expertise. You need to go to the feds with this one. The FBI.”
Joe winced. The agent in charge of the Cheyenne office, Tony Portenson, was still furious at Joe for letting Nate walk the year before. Portenson had threatened federal charges against Joe and would have had him arrested if the governor hadn’t personally gotten involved and recruited the state’s U.S. senators and congresswoman to lean on Homeland Security.
“Yeah, I know about your relationship with the FBI,” Duck said. “But if you want this thing figured out, you’ll need to go to them. They’re the only ones with the expertise, equipment, and ability to get a quick subpoena from a judge to make it happen.”
“Crap.”
“Well put.”
“Is there any way to do this, um, unofficially? Any equipment I can buy, anything like that?”
A long silence. “The only way to do it unofficially is to get many billions of dollars and buy up all the cell phone companies. That’s the only way I can think of.”
“Gee, thanks, Duck.”
“You asked.”
“Yeah.”
“Can I ask why you’re being so close to the vest with this? If it’s an official investigation, I can run interference for you, maybe.”
“It’s not official, Duck. I really don’t want to say any more than that.”
“Okay,” Duck said. Joe could almost feel the shrug through the phone. “I won’t ask any more because I don’t think I want to know.”
“I appreciate that.”
“Why is it I get the feeling that I may see the name Joe Pickett in the newspaper again? Why is it that I have that feeling?”
This time, Joe shrugged. Then Duck asked: “How’s Marybeth and the girls?”
Joe said fine and asked about Duck’s four kids. After ten minutes of trading family information, debating how well the Wyoming Cowboys football team would do this year (not well, they agreed), and discussing where and when each planned to hunt elk in a month, Joe hung up.
He sat back, tried to think of a way around the FBI to get what he needed. But there was no choice.
“Crap.”
HE GOT UP and cracked the door. Missy was still out there, and Sheridan had joined them, standing in a robe with a towel on her head and looking uncomfortable. Missy was explaining, in the sweeping but definitive generalizations she used whenever she visited a new city or country and took a two-hour scenic motor coach tour given by a guide in native dress, everything there was to know about Bali. How the people were simple, content, and spiritual, telling them it was beautiful and the food was good and the staff at the hotel treated her like she was royalty, “like a real Duchess.”
When Missy unveiled the painted skirts, Sheridan saw them and scowled, but Joe shut the door again and called the FBI office in Cheyenne.
He’d met Special Agent Chuck Coon several months earlier, when Coon was in the Little Snake River Valley investigating a cattle-rustling operation. Over beers in the cinder-block saloon once frequented by Butch Cassidy, Coon told Joe that since food prices had skyrocketed so had incidents of large-scale cattle rustling. “And this isn’t like Western movie rustling,” Coon explained, “where a couple of local outlaws change some brands. In terms of dollars, this is like stealing a whole damned street of houses.”
The rustlers specialized in isolated areas like south-central Wyoming, where cattle were grazed on forest service and Bureau of Land Management land far from any town or highway where suspicious activity might be seen. Using eighteen-wheelers and commercial cattle movers, the rustlers stole entire herds, hundreds of thousands of dollars of beef, in quick nighttime strikes. Coon was new to the job, new to Wyoming, boyish but enthusiastic. He wasn’t aware of Joe’s history and apparently had not been briefed about his supervisor Tony Portenson’s animosity to Joe.
A few nights after meeting Coon, Joe was doing an antelope count in the Sierra Madre foothills when he saw a semi-truck on a remote two-track road in the distance, heading toward a series of forest service mountain meadows where cows grazed on leased grass. It seemed an odd time of year to move cattle, he thought, since the summer grass was lush and bad weather was still months ahead. Using his spotting scope, he was able to get the make and model of the truck as well as a partial plate. He called Coon with the info, and Coon was able to track the vehicle down to a used-truck outfit in New Mexico, who provided the name of the purchaser, who turned out to be an undocumented Mexican national suspected of cross-border rustling. The case was made, six men and two women were arrested, and Chuck Coon was responsible for nailing his first major case.
Coon was at his desk, and Joe ran through the same scenario he had with Duck.
Coon said, “Yeah, we could do it. We’d have to get subpoenas for the cell phone providers, and we’d have to move fast because the companies only keep texts on their servers for a few days before they delete them because the volume is unbelievable. Blame teenagers. But yes, we could do it. When I say could that means we have the capability. That doesn’t mean we will.”
Joe said, “So you talked to Portenson, then?”
“Your name was in the warrant for the rustlers, Joe. Portenson saw it. When we finally scraped him off the ceiling, he told me his version of events. He doesn’t exactly like you, Joe.”
“I know.”
“And I really can’t get a procedure going like the one you’re describing unless I’ve got more to go on,” Coon said. “Somehow, we need ownership in this, a reason to go down the hall to see the judge. Judge Johnson doesn’t go for fishing expeditions.”
Joe knew telling Coon anything meant risking the chance the FBI might move in, take over, make him marginal. He thought of the last time the feds got involved in a situation that involved April and what happened. He didn’t dare put her into harm’s way again.
So he said it: “You owe me, Chuck.”
He heard Coon sigh. “I was hoping you wouldn’t play that card, Joe.”
“Me, too. But believe me, I’d never bring it up if it weren’t the most important thing in my life right now.” He surprised himself-he’d said too much.
“Look,” Joe said, “I’ll work with you if you’ll work with me. But I can’t give you any details just yet. How about we have a meeting to discuss it? Outside your office, of course.”
“Meaning away from Portenson,” Coon said. “I understand. Yeah, I can do that. When?”
Joe said, “How about tomorrow afternoon? In Cheyenne?”
“You’re in a hurry,” Coon said.
“Yes, I am,” Joe said, trying to figure out a way to give Coon something to go on without including the name April Keeley.
MISSY WAS OUTSIDE, starting up her Hummer, when Joe came out of his office.
Marybeth said, “Good timing.”
He nodded. Sheridan was holding up the Indonesian skirt, turning it one way and the other, with bemused puzzlement. “Where would I possibly wear this?” she asked rhetorically. As if to answer her own question, she dropped the skirt over the back of a chair and went down the hall to her room to get dressed.
To Marybeth, Joe said, “I need to go to Cheyenne and see the governor.”
Marybeth nodded. “Well, it was good to see you.”
That hurt. But she softened quickly. “Go,” she said.
AS HE EMERGED from the shed with the eagle bound once again in his sweatshirt with duct tape, Sheridan came outside, and asked, “Where are you taking the bird?”
“Eagle rehabilitation center,” Joe said, not meeting her eyes. “I can’t get it to eat.”
“She’s stressed,” Sheridan said. “There are stress lines in her feathers from the day she got shot. Feathers are like the rings in a tree-you can tell all sorts of things from them. She won’t eat until she feels safe. So tell Nate hi for me.”
Joe flinched.
“I’ll keep my phone on,” she said, “and I’ll call you if I hear from April. I have a feeling it might be tonight.”
“I’ve got a list of questions I want you to ask her,” Joe said. “It’s in on my desk. Of course, you’ll need to do it casually, in that text-speak language you use. That’s why I can’t ask her. I don’t know the code.”
Sheridan nodded, keeping her eyes on him. “Dad?”
“Yes?”
“If you’re going to go find her, I’m going with you.”
Joe took a step back. The eagle screeched, sensing his angst. “You’ve got to be kidding,” he said.
“Think about it,” Sheridan said. “She’s texting me on my phone. If I’m with you, we might be able to find her.”
He started to object, but he knew she was making sense.
“Talk to your mother,” he said. “We’re talking about you missing some school, not to mention what else might happen.”
She beamed. Her smile filled him with joy. “You’ll need to talk with her, too.”
“I will,” Joe said.
“She wants you to find her more than anyone.”
“Yup,” said Joe.
Sheridan said, “I’ve been thinking about something, Dad. The last thing you guys told me the day April’s mom came to school and took her was to watch over her. I didn’t do it. I really feel bad about that.”
“Don’t,” Joe said. “No one knew that would happen.”
Sheridan shrugged. “Still…”
“Look,” Joe said. “April called you, Sheridan. Not your mom. Not me. She’s doesn’t blame you.”
Sheridan looked at him, bored into him with her green eyes. “Do you realize what you just said?”
Joe shrugged.
“You said April. You didn’t say ‘whoever sent you those messages’ or something. You said April.”
“Slip of the tongue,” he said, flushing. “You know what I meant.”
“Yes,” she said. “I know what you meant.”