Family quarrels are bitter things. They don’t go by any rules. They’re not like aches or wounds; they’re more like splits in the skin that won’t heal because there’s not enough material.
– F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
The great plain drinks the blood of Christian men and is satisfied.
– O. E. RÖLVAAG, GIANTS IN THE EARTH
Twelve Sleep County, Wyoming
WHEN RANCH OWNER OPAL SCARLETT VANISHED, NO one mourned except her three grown sons, Arlen, Hank, and Wyatt, who expressed their loss by getting into a fight with shovels.
Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett almost didn’t hear the call over his radio when it came over the mutual-aid channel. He was driving west on Bighorn Road, having picked up his fourteen-year-old daughter, Sheridan, and her best friend, Julie, after track practice to take them home. Sheridan and Julie were talking a mile a minute, gesticulating, making his dog, Maxine, flinch with their flying arms as they talked. Julie lived on the Thunderhead Ranch, which was much farther out of town than the Picketts’ home.
Joe caught snippets of their conversation while he drove, his attention on his radio and the wounded hum of the engine and the dancing gauges on the dash. Joe didn’t yet trust the truck, a vehicle recently assigned to him. The check-engine light would flash on and off, and occasionally there was a knocking sound under the hood that sounded like popcorn popping. The truck had been issued to him as revenge by his cost-conscious superiors, after his last vehicle had burned up in a fire in Jackson Hole. Even though the suspension was shot, the truck did have a CD player, a rarity in state vehicles, and the sound track for the ride home had been a CD Sheridan had made for him. It was titled “Get with it, Dad” in a black felt marker. She’d given it to him two days before after breakfast, saying, “You need to listen to this new music so you don’t seem so clueless. It may help.” Things were changing in his family. His girls were getting older. Joe was not only under the thumb of his superiors but was apparently becoming clueless too. His red uniform shirt with the pronghorn antelope Game and Fish patch on the shoulder and his green Filson vest were caked with mud from changing a tire on the mountain earlier in the day.
“I think Jarrod Haynes likes you,” Julie said to Sheridan.
“Get out! Why do you say that? You’re crazy.”
“Didn’t you see him watching us practice?” Julie asked. “He stayed after the boys were done and watched us run.”
“I saw him,” Sheridan said. “But why do you think he likes me?”
“ ’Cause he didn’t take his eyes off of you the whole time, that’s why. Even when he got a call on his cell, he stood there and watched you while he talked. He’s hot for you, Sherry.”
“I wish I had a cell phone,” Sheridan said.
Joe tuned out. He didn’t want to hear about a boy targeting his daughter. It made him uncomfortable. And the cell-phone conversation made him tired. He and Marybeth had said Sheridan wouldn’t get one until she was sixteen, but that didn’t stop his daughter from coming up with reasons why she needed one now.
In the particularly intense way of teenage girls, Sheridan and Julie were inseparable. Julie was tall, lithe, tanned, blond, blue-eyed, and budding. Sheridan was a shorter version of Julie, but with her mother’s startling green eyes. The two had ridden the school bus together for years and Sheridan had hated Julie, said she was bossy and arrogant and acted like royalty. Then something happened, and the two girls could barely be apart from each other. Three-hour phone calls between them weren’t unusual at night.
“I just don’t know what to think about that,” Sheridan said.
“You’ll be the envy of everyone if you go with him,” Julie said.
“He doesn’t seem very smart.”
Julie laughed and rolled her eyes. “Who cares?” she said. “He’s fricking awesome.”
Joe cringed, wishing he had missed that.
He had spent the morning patrolling the brushy foothills where the spring wild turkey season was still open, although there appeared to be no turkey hunters about. It was his first foray into the timbered southwestern saddle slopes since winter. The snow was receding up the mountain, leaving hard-packed grainy drifts in arroyos and cuts. The retreating snow also revealed the aftermath of small battles and tragedies no one had witnessed that had taken place over the winter-six mule deer that had died of starvation in a wooded hollow; a cow and calf elk that had broken through the ice on a pond and frozen in place; pronghorn antelope caught in the barbed wire of a fence, their emaciated bodies draping over the wire like rugs hanging to dry. But there were signs of renewal as well, as thick light-green shoots bristled through dead matted grass near stream sides, and fat, pregnant does stared at his passing pickup from shadowed groves.
April was the slowest month of the year in the field for a game warden, especially in a place with a fleeting spring. It was the fifth year of a drought. The hottest issue he had to contend with was what to do with the four elk that had shown up in the town of Saddlestring and seemed to have no plans to leave. While mule deer were common in the parks and gardens, elk were not. Joe had chased the four animals-two bulls, a cow, and a calf-from the city park several times by firing.22 blanks into the air several times. But they kept coming back. The animals had become such a fixture in the park they were now referred to as the “Town Elk,” and locals were feeding them, which kept them hanging around while providing empty nourishment that would eventually make them sick and kill them. Joe was loath to destroy the elk, but thought he may not have a choice if they stuck around.
The changes in his agency had begun with the election of a new governor. On the day after the election, Joe had received a four-word message from his supervisor, Trey Crump, that read: “Hell has frozen over,” meaning a Democrat had been elected. His name was Spencer Rulon. Within a week, the agency director resigned before being fired, and a bitter campaign was waged for a replacement. Joe, and most of the game wardens, actively supported an “Anybody but Randy Pope” ticket, since Pope had risen to prominence within the agency from the administrative side (rather than the law-enforcement or biology side) and made no bones about wanting to rid the state of personnel he felt were too independent, who had “gone native,” or were considered uncontrollable cowboys-men like Joe Pickett. Joe’s clash with Pope the year before in Jackson had resulted in a simmering feud that was heating up, as Joe’s report of Pope’s betrayal made the rounds within the agency, despite Pope’s efforts to stop it.
Governor Rulon was a big man with a big face and a big gut, an unruly shock of silver-flecked brown hair, a quick sloppy smile, and endlessly darting eyes. In the previous year’s election, Rulon had beaten the Republican challenger by twenty points, despite the fact that his opponent had been handpicked by term-limited Governor Budd. This in a state that was 70 percent Republican. Rulon grew up on a ranch near Casper, the grandson of a U.S. senator. He played linebacker for the Wyoming Cowboys, got a law degree, made a fortune in private practice suing federal agencies, then was elected county prosecutor. Loud and profane, Rulon campaigned for governor by crisscrossing the state endlessly in his own pickup and buying rounds for the house in every bar from Yoder to Wright, and challenging anyone who didn’t plan to vote for him to an arm-wrestling, sports-trivia, or shooting contest. The word most used to describe the new governor seemed to be “energetic.” He could turn from a good old boy pounding beers and slapping backs into an orator capable of delivering the twelve-minute closing argument by Spencer Tracy in Inherit the Wind from memory. His favorite breakfast was reportedly biscuits and sausage gravy and a glass of Pinot Noir. Like Wyoming itself, Joe thought, Rulon didn’t mind leading with his rough exterior and later surprising-and mildly troubling-the onlooker with a kind of eccentric depth.
He was also, according to more and more state employees who had to deal with their new boss, crazy as a tick.
But he was profoundly popular with the voters. Unlike his predecessor, Rulon reassigned his bodyguards to the Highway Patrol, fired his driver, and insisted that his name and phone number be listed in the telephone book. He eliminated the gatekeepers who had been employed to restrict access to his office and put up a sign that said GOV RULON’S OFfiCE-BARGE RIGHT IN, which was heeded by an endless stream of visitors.
One of Rulon’s first decisions was to choose a new Game and Fish director. The Board of Commissioners lined up a slate of three candidates-Pope included. The governor’s first choice was a longtime game warden from Medicine Bow, who died of a heart attack within a week of the announcement. The second candidate withdrew his name from consideration when news of an old sexual harassment suit hit the press. Which left Randy Pope, who gladly assumed the role, even declaring to a reporter that “fate and destiny both stepped forward” to enable his promotion. That had been two months ago.
Trey Crump, Joe’s district supervisor, said he saw the writing on the wall and took early retirement rather than submit to Pope’s new directives for supervisors. Without Trey, who had also been Joe’s champion within the state bureaucracy, Joe now had been ordered to report directly to Pope. Instead of weekly reports, Pope wanted daily dispatches. It was Pope who had nixed Joe’s request for a new pickup and instead had sent one with 150,000 miles on it, bald tires, and a motor that was unreliable.
Joe had been around long enough to know exactly what was happening. Pope could not appear to have a public vendetta against Joe, especially because Joe’s star had risen over the past few years in certain quarters.
But Pope was a master of the bureaucratic Death of a Thousand Cuts, the slow, steady, petty, and maddening procedure-misplaced requests, unreturned phone calls, lost insurance and reimbursement claims, blizzards of busywork-designed to drive an employee out of a state or federal agency. And with Pope, Joe knew it was personal.
“DAD!”
Joe realized Sheridan was talking to him. “What?”
“How can he tune out like that?” Julie asked Sheridan, as if Joe weren’t in the cab.
“I don’t know. It’s amazing, isn’t it?” Then: “Dad, are we going to stop and feed Nate’s birds? I want to show Julie the falcons.”
“I already fed them today,” he said.
“Darn.”
Joe slowed and turned onto a dirt road from the highway beneath a massive elk-antler arch with a sign hanging from chains that read:
THUNDERHEAD RANCHES, EST. 1883.
THE SCARLETTS
OPAL
ARLEN
HANK
WYATT
Julie said, “My grandma says someday my name is going to be on that sign.”
“Cool,” Sheridan replied.
Joe had heard Julie say that before.
EVEN THOUGH JOE had seen the Thunderhead Ranch in bits and pieces over the years, he was still amazed by its magnificence. There were those, he knew, who would drive the scores of old two-tracks on the ranch and look around and see miles and miles of short grass, sagebrush, and rolling hills and compare the place poorly with much more spectacular alpine country. Sure, the river bottom was lush and the foothills rose in a steady march toward the Bighorns and were dotted with trees, but the place wouldn’t pop visually for some because it was just so open, so big, so sprawling. But that was the thing. Because of the river, because of the confluence of at least five significant creeks that coursed through the property and poured into the Twelve Sleep River, because of the optimum diversification of landscape within a thousand square miles, and the vast meadows of thick, nutrient-enriched grass, the Thunderhead was the perfect cattle ranch. Joe had once heard a longtime rancher and resident of the county, Herbert Klein, say that if aliens landed and demanded to see a dog he would show them a Labrador, and if they demanded to see a ranch, he would skip his own and show them the Thunderhead.
It was also an ideal ranch for wildlife, which posed an opportunity for Hank, who ran an exclusive hunting business, and a problem for Joe Pickett.
“Look,” Sheridan said, sitting up.
A herd of pronghorn antelope, a liquid flow of brown and white, streamed over a knoll ahead of them and to the right, raising dust and heading for a collision with the pickup.
“They don’t see us yet,” Joe said, marveling, as always, at the graceful but raw speed of the antelope, the second-fastest mammal on earth.
When the lead animals noticed the green Wyoming Game and Fish pickup, they didn’t stop or panic but simply turned ninety degrees, not breaking stride, their stream bending away from the road. Joe noted how Sheridan sucked in her breath in absolute awe as the herd drew parallel with the pickup-the bucks, does, and fawns glancing over at her-and then the entire herd accelerated and veered back toward the knoll they had appeared from.
“Wow,” she said.
“‘Wow’ is right,” Joe agreed.
“Antelope bore me,” Julie said. “There are so many of them.”
For a moment he had been concerned that the lead antelope was going to barrel into the passenger door, something that occasionally happened when a pronghorn wasn’t paying attention to where he was going. That was all he needed, Joe thought sourly, another damaged pickup Pope could carp about.
That’s when the call came over the mutual-aid channel.
Joe said, “Would you two please be quiet for a minute?”
While the entire county was sheriff’s department jurisdiction, game wardens and highway patrolmen were called on for backup for rural emergencies.
Sheridan hushed. Julie did too, but with attitude, crossing her arms in front of her chest and clamping her mouth tight. Joe turned up the volume on the radio. Wendy, the dispatcher, had not turned off her microphone. In the background, there was an anxious voice.
“Excuse me, where are you calling from?” Wendy asked the caller.
“I’m on a cell phone. I’m sitting in my car on the side of the highway. You won’t believe it.”
“Can you describe the situation, sir?”
The cell-phone signal ebbed with static, but Joe could clearly hear the caller say, “There are three men in cowboy hats swinging at each other with shovels in the middle of the prairie. I can see them hitting each other out there. It’s a bloody mess.”
Wendy said, “Can you give me your location, sir?”
The caller read off a mile marker on State Highway 130. Joe frowned. The Bighorn Road they had just driven on was also Highway 130. The mile marker was just two miles from where they had turned onto the ranch.
“That would be Thunderhead Ranch then, sir?” Wendy asked the caller.
“I guess.”
Joe shot a look toward Julie. She had heard and her face was frozen, her eyes wide.
“That’s just over the hill,” she said.
Joe had a decision to make. He could drive the remaining five miles to the ranch headquarters, where Julie lived, or take a fork in the road that would deliver him, as well as Sheridan and Julie, to the likely location of an assault in progress.
“I’m taking you home,” Joe said, accelerating.
“No!” Julie cried. “What if it’s someone I know? We’ve got to stop them.”
Joe slowed, his mind racing. He felt it necessary to respond, but did not want to put the girls in danger. “You sure?”
“Yes! What if it’s my dad? Or one of my uncles?”
He nodded, did a three-point turn, and took the fork. He snatched the mic from its cradle. “This is GF forty-three. I’m about five to ten minutes from the scene.”
Wendy said, “You’re literally there on the ranch?”
“Affirmative.”
There was a beat of silence. “I don’t know whether Sheriff McLanahan is going to like that.”
Joe and the sheriff did not get along.
Joe snorted. “Ask him if he wants me to stand down.”
“You ask him,” Wendy said, completely breaking protocol.
AS THEY POWERED up the two-track, Joe could see that Sheridan and Julie had huddled together.
“Can you keep a secret?” Julie whispered, loud enough for Joe to hear.
“Of course I can,” Sheridan said. “You know that. We’re best friends.”
Julie nodded seriously, as if making up her mind.
“You can’t tell your parents,” Julie said, nodding at Joe.
Sheridan hesitated before answering. “I swear.”
“Swear to God?” Julie asked.
“Come on, Julie. I said I promise.”
“Tighten your seat belts, girls,” Joe cautioned. “This is going to be bumpy.”
The scene before them, as they topped the hill, silenced Julie and whatever she was going to tell Sheridan. Below them, on the flat, there were three pickups, each parked haphazardly in the sagebrush, doors wide open. Inside the ring of trucks, three men circled each other warily, raising puffs of dust, an occasional wide swing with a shovel flashing the late afternoon sun.
Out on the highway, two sheriff’s department SUVs and a highway patrolman turned from the highway onto an access road, their lights flashing. One of the SUVs burped on his siren.
“Jesus Christ,” McLanahan said over the radio, as the vehicles converged on the fight. “It’s a rodeo out here. There’s blood pourin’ outta ’em…”
“Yee-haw,” the highway patrolman said sardonically.
Joe thought the scene in front of him was epic in implication, and ridiculous at the same time. Three adults, two of them practically legends in their own right, so blinded by their fight that they didn’t seem to know that a short string of law-enforcement vehicles was approaching.
And not just any adults, but Arlen, Hank, and Wyatt Scarlett, the scions of the most prominent ranch family in the Twelve Sleep Valley. It was as if the figures on Mount Rushmore were head-butting one another.
It was darkly fascinating seeing the three of them out there, Joe thought. He was reminded that, in a situation like this, he would always be an outsider looking in. Despite his time in Twelve Sleep County, he would never feel quite a part of this scenario, which was rooted so deeply in the valley. The tendrils of the Scarlett family ranch and of the Scarletts themselves reached too deeply, intertwined with too many other people and families, to ever completely sort out. Their interaction with the people and history of the area was multilayered, nuanced, too complicated to ever fully understand. The Scarletts were colorful, ruthless, independent, and eccentric. If newcomers to the area displayed even half of the strange behavior of the Scarletts, Joe was sure they’d have been run out of the state-or shunned to the point of cruelty. But the Scarletts were local, they were founders, they were benefactors and philanthropists-despite their eccentricities. It was almost as if longtime residents of the area had declared, in unison, “Yes, they’re crazy. But they’re our lunatics, and we won’t have anyone insulting them or judging them harshly who hasn’t lived here long enough to understand.”
Arlen was the oldest brother, and the best liked. He was tall with broad shoulders and a mane of silver-white wavy hair that made him look like the state senate majority floor leader he was. He had a heavy, thrusting jaw and the bulbous, spiderwebbed nose of a drinker. His clear blue eyes looked out from under bushy eyebrows that were black as smears of grease, and he had a soothing, sonorous voice that turned the reading of a diner menu into a performance. Arlen had the gift of remembering names and offspring, and could instantly continue a conversation with a constituent that had been cut off months before.
Hank, the middle brother, was smaller than Arlen. He was thin and wiry with a sharp-featured bladelike face, and wore a sweat-stained gray Stetson clamped tight on his head. Joe had never seen Hank without the hat, and had no idea if he had hair underneath it. He remembered Vern Dunnegan, the former game warden in the district, warning Joe to stay away from Hank unless he absolutely had the goods on him. “Hank Scarlett is the toughest man I’ve ever met,” Vern had said, “the scariest too.”
Hank had a way of looking coiled up when he stood still, the way a Brahma bull was calm just before the chute gate opened. Hank was an extremely successful big-game guide and outfitter, with operations in Wyoming, Alaska, and Kenya. His clients were millionaires, and he was suspected of using less-than-ethical means to assure kills of trophy animals. Hank had been on Joe’s radar screen even before Joe was assigned the Saddlestring District, and Hank knew it. All the game wardens knew of Hank. But Joe had never found hard evidence of any wrongdoing. Hank’s legend was burnished by rumors and stories, such as when Hank single-handedly packed a two-hundred-pound mountain sheep twelve miles across the Wind River Mountains in a blinding snowstorm. Or Hank crash-landing a bush plane with mechanical problems into the middle of a frozen Alaskan lake, rescuing two clients, amputating the leg of one of them while they waited for rescue. And Hank dropping from a tree onto the back of a record bull moose and riding it a quarter of a mile before reaching forward and slitting its throat.
Wyatt was the biggest but the youngest. His face was cherubic, without the sharp angles his brothers’ had. Everything about Wyatt was soft and round, his cheeks, his nose, the extra flesh around his soft brown eyes. He was in his early thirties. When people within the community talked about the historic Scarlett Ranch, or the battling Scarlett brothers, it was understood they were referring to Arlen and Hank. It was as if Wyatt didn’t exist, as if he was as much an embarrassment to the community as he was, no doubt, to the family itself. Joe knew very little about Wyatt, and what he had heard wasn’t good. When Wyatt Scarlett was brought up, it was often in hushed tones.
Joe was close enough now that he could see Arlen clearly. Arlen was bleeding from a cut on the side of his head, and he shot a glance over his shoulder at the approaching vehicles. Which gave an opening to Hank, the middle brother, to swing and hit the back of Arlen’s head with the flat of his shovel like a pumpkin on a post.
Julie screamed and covered her face with her hands.
Joe realized what he was thrusting her into and slammed on his brakes. “Julie, I’m going to take you home…”
“No!” she sobbed. “Just make them stop! Make them stop before my dad and my uncles kill each other.”
Joe and Sheridan exchanged glances. Sheridan had turned white. She shook her head, not knowing what to say.
Joe blew out a breath and continued on.
ARLEN WENT DOWN from the blow as the convoy fanned out in the sagebrush and surrounded the brothers. Joe hit his brakes and opened his door, keeping it between him and the Scarletts. As he dug his shotgun out and racked the pump, he heard McLanahan whoop a blast from his siren and say, in his new cowboy-slang cadence, “DROP THE SHOVELS, MEN, AND STEP BACK FROM EACH OTHER WITH YOUR HANDS ON YOUR HEAD. EXCEPT YOU, ARLEN. YOU STAY DOWN.”
The officers spilled out of their vehicles, brandishing weapons. The warning seemed to have no effect on Hank, who was standing over Arlen and raising his shovel above his head with two hands as if about to strike it down on his brother the way a gardener beheads a snake.
Joe thought Arlen was a dead man, but Wyatt suddenly drove his shoulder into Hank and sent him sprawling, the shovel flying end-over-end through the air.
“Go!” McLanahan shouted at his men. “Go round ’em up now!”
“Stay here,” Joe said to Julie and Sheridan. His daughter cradled Julie in her arms. Julie sobbed, her head down.
Joe, holding his shotgun pointed above the fray, stepped around his truck and saw three deputies including Deputy Mike Reed rush the three prone Scarlett Brothers. Reed was the only deputy Joe considered sane and professional. The others were recent hires by McLanahan and were, to a man, large, mulish, quick with their fists, and just as quick to look away if an altercation involved someone who was a friend of the Sheriff’s Department-or, more specifically, McLanahan himself.
Arlen simply rolled to his stomach and put his hands behind his back to be cuffed, saying, “Take it easy, boys, take it easy, I’m cooperating…”
Wyatt, after watching Arlen, did the same, although he looked confused.
It took all three deputies to subdue Hank, who continued to curse and kick and swing at them, one blow connecting solidly with Deputy Reed’s mouth, which instantly bloomed with bright-red blood. Finally, after a pepper spray blast to his eyes, Hank curled up in the dirt and the deputies managed to cuff his hands behind him and bind his cowboy boots together with Flex-Cuffs.
AFTER TWO YEARS as county sheriff, McLanahan still seemed to be somewhat unfinished, which is why he had apparently decided in recent months to assume a new role, that of “local character.” After trying on and discarding several personas-squinty-eyed gunfighter, law-enforcement technocrat, glad-handing politician-McLanahan had decided to aspire to the mantle of “good old boy,” a stereotype that had served his predecessor Bud Barnum well for twenty-four years. In the past six months, McLanahan had begun to slow his speech pattern and pepper his pronouncements and observations with arcane westernisms. He’d even managed to make his face go slack. His sheriff’s crisp gray Stetson had been replaced by a floppy black cowboy hat and his khaki department jacket for a bulky Carhartt ranch coat. Rather than drive the newest sheriff’s department vehicle, McLanahan opted for an old county pickup with rust spots on the panels. He bought a Blue Heeler puppy to occupy the passenger seat, and had begun to refer to his seven-acre parcel of land outside the city limits as his “ranch.”
McLanahan squatted down in the middle of the triangle of handcuffed brothers and asked, “Can one of you tell me just what in the hell this is all about?”
Joe listened.
“Mama’s gone,” Hank said, his voice hard. “And that son-of-a-bitch there”-he nodded toward Arlen-“thinks he’s going to get the ranch.”
McLanahan said, “What do you mean she’s gone? Like she’s on a vacation or something?”
Hank didn’t take his eyes off of Arlen. “Like that son-of-a-bitch killed her and hid the body,” he said.
“What?” McLanahan said.
There was a high, unearthly wail, an airy squeal that seemed to come down from the mountains. The sound made the hairs on Joe’s neck stand up. It was Wyatt. The big man was crying.
Joe looked over his shoulder at his pickup truck, to see if Julie had heard. Luckily, the windows were up and she was still being held by Sheridan.
“Mind if I stand up now?” Arlen asked the sheriff.
McLanahan thought it over, nodded his assent, and told Deputy Reed to help Arlen up but to keep him away from Hank.
Joe squatted down a few feet from Wyatt.
“Are you okay?” Joe asked. “Are you hurt?”
Wyatt just continued to sob, his head between his knees, his back heaving, tears spattering the ground between his boots. Joe asked again. Wyatt reached up with his cuffed hands and smeared his tears across his dirty face.
“Where’s my mom?” Wyatt asked, his words mushy. Joe noticed Wyatt had missing teeth. “Where did she go?”
“I don’t know,” Joe said. “She can’t be far.”
“But Hank says she’s gone.”
Joe said, “I’m sure we’ll find her.”
Wyatt’s eyes flared, and for a second Joe thought the man would strike out at him.
“Where’s my mom?” Wyatt howled.
“Pickett!” McLanahan yelled, “What are you doing over there?”
Joe stood uneasily, searching Wyatt’s upturned, tragic face for a clue to his behavior. “Making sure Wyatt’s okay,” Joe said.
“He’s not,” McLanahan said, and one of the deputies laughed. “Trust me on that one.”
Joe looked at Arlen, and Hank. Both brothers were turned toward Wyatt, but neither said anything. They simply stared at their younger brother as if they were observing an embarrassing stranger.
Joe walked over to Deputy Reed, who was holding a bandanna to his split lip.
“What do you think the deal is with Opal?” Joe asked, out of earshot of the Scarlett brothers.
“Don’t know,” Reed said. “But I do know that old woman’s just too goddamned mean to die.”
WHILE SHERIFF MCLANAHAN interviewed each of the brothers quietly and individually, Joe concluded that he was no longer needed and, by inadvertently bringing Julie, he had done more harm than good.
“I’ve got Julie Scarlett, Arlen’s daughter, in my truck,” Joe told Reed. “I don’t want her to see any more. I think I need to get her home to her mother.” Joe gestured toward Arlen.
“You mean Hank?” Reed asked.
“No,” Joe said. “I mean her dad, Arlen.”
Reed squinted. “Arlen isn’t her dad.”
Joe wasn’t sure what to say. He had dropped Julie off before at the big ranch house where she lived with Arlen, her mother, and Opal. As far as Joe knew, Hank lived alone in a hunting lodge on the other side of the ranch.
“What do you mean?” Joe asked.
Reed shrugged. “When it comes to the Scarletts, nothing is as it seems. Julie and her mother moved out of Hank’s place years ago, but from what I understand, Hank is her dad.”
Joe wondered if Sheridan knew this, if Julie had told her. Or if Reed was mistaken.
“Either way,” Joe said, “I think I should get her home.”
Reed nodded. “If you see Opal, give us a call.”
“I will. Do you really think she’s missing?”
Reed scoffed. “Do you really think those men would be out here beating each other with shovels if she was back home baking cookies? The whole damned county has been scared of the day when Opal passed on and those three would start fighting for the ranch. Now it looks like that day has come.”
As Joe turned toward his truck, he heard McLanahan shout at him. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“To the ranch,” Joe said over his shoulder. “It looks like you’ve got things handled here.”
“It’s okay,” Reed told his boss. “He’s got Hank’s little girl with him.”
“I’ll need your statement,” McLanahan said. “It sounds like you were one of the last people to see Opal alive.”
Joe turned, surprised. He had talked to Opal the day before about charging fishermen access fees. One of the brothers must have told McLanahan that.
“When do you need the statement?”
“Tonight.”
Joe thought of Marybeth’s last words to him that morning. She asked him to be home on time because she was cooking dinner and wanted to have the whole family there for a change. With her business thriving, that was a rarity. He had promised he would be home.
“Can it be tomorrow morning?” Joe asked.
The sheriff’s face darkened. “No, it can’t. We’ve got to jump all over this one, and what you’ve got to tell us may help.”
Joe looked up. He saw that Julie’s head was up, her eyes on her uncles and father. He wanted to get her away from there, and quickly.
“Tonight,” McLanahan called after him.
“Tonight,” Joe said, walking away.
He opened the door to his truck and said, “I’m so sorry you saw this, Julie.”
She cried, “Please, just take me home.”
ON THE MORNING OPAL SCARLETT VANISHED, A MUD-STREAKED green late-model SUV with Georgia plates pulled off I-80 at exit 214 and into the parking lot of Rip Griffin’s Truck Stop outside Rawlins, Wyoming. The driver left the car running while he climbed out, stretched, and dug through his army duffel in the back seat for a clean shirt. He had been driving all night and all morning, stopping only to fill the tank and buy pork rinds, bottled water, and cashews. The floor of the car was littered with the wrappers.
As he walked across the parking lot toward the store, he breathed in deeply and looked around him. It was high and desolate, this country, as if the prairie had been pushed from below the earth way up in the air. He thought of seeing the sign just an hour ago that read CONTINENTAL DIVIDE, thinking, That’s it? Not a single damned tree. The smell in the air was of diesel fumes from the trucks lined up on the far side of the lot and something sweet that he guessed was sagebrush. Even with the interstate highway humming behind him, there was an immense blanket of quiet off the road. The air was light and thin, and the terrain wide open as far as he could see. He felt exposed, like everybody who could see him would know why he was there, what he was up to. He thought of the herds of pronghorn antelope he had seen in the distance as the sun came up. Hundreds of them out there, red-brown and white, glowing when the sun hit them and lit them up. Unlike the animals he was used to at home who survived by hiding in the dark timber and the swamp, and moved only at night, these antelope stood out there in the wide-open plains, bold as you please, using the openness and long-range visibility as a defense measure. If you could see them, he thought, they could see you. Hide in plain sight, that was the way out here. He would learn something from that.
In the bathroom, he stripped off his greasy sweatshirt, balled it up, and tossed it in a garbage can. He filled the sink with water, splashed his face and rubbed it under his arms, across his chest, and dried off with paper towels. He stared at his reflection in the mirror, liking what he saw. Liking it a lot.
His blue eyes burned back from shadowed sockets. There were hollows under his sharp cheekbones, and his three-day growth of beard added an edge to his gaunt features that had once been described by the wife of his last hunting client as “haunted.” He didn’t know if that was good or bad, but he didn’t forget the word. He tilted his chin up and surveyed his pectorals, and liked the clean definition of them, and the blue, green, and red tattoo of a striking water moccasin that stretched from one nipple to the other. The way the head of the snake turned out with an open mouth and dead black eyes always gave him a little thrill. It scared some women, another thing that was all right with him.
He pulled the rubber band out of his long brown hair, combed it back with his fingers, and then snapped it back on. With his hair pulled back so tight, it looked as though he wore a skull cap, and his eyes appeared even more piercing. He liked that too.
Teeth bared into a half grin, he made his eyes go dead. This was his most fearsome look. He had showed it to the lady who said he seemed haunted, and it had the desired effect. She was terrified, her eyes so wide they looked about to pop out, her mouth forming a perfect little hole. That felt good, to have that kind of power over a rich, stupid lady who shouldn’t have been in his hunting camp in the first place.
The bathroom door wheezed open and a trucker came in. He was big through the shoulders but had a fleshy face and a big belly. When the trucker saw him standing there at the sink he started to say something smart-ass, something like “Doing a little primping, eh?” or “Did you forget your hair spray?” but when their eyes met in the mirror it was as if the fat man suddenly choked on a piece of meat. All the man did was nod, turn away, and pass behind him for the shelter of a stall.
He winked at himself in the mirror, pleased with the effect he had on a man outweighing him by at least ninety pounds, then pulled his new shirt on and walked out of the bathroom.
As he passed the counter, which was stacked with displays for all-natural amphetamines and cigarette lighters in the shape of cell phones and hand grenades, he asked the bored, washed-out clerk, “Is this the right road to get to the Wyoming State Pen?”
“The pay-un?” the clerk said, mocking his accent. He was so surprised by her insolence that he didn’t know what to say. His first instinct was to reach over the box of beef jerky and pull her tongue out by the roots.
“Yeah,” she continued, either too empty-headed or jaded to care about how he felt, “this is the exit. Just get back on the road and go over the hill and you’ll see it.” She gestured vaguely over her head, to the south. “You visiting or checking in?”
Again, she insulted him! He could feel the rush of blood to his face, feel his fists involuntarily clench. If only she knew what he was capable of, he thought. If only that clerk knew about what had happened to that hunter and his wife back in Mississippi, she wouldn’t be doing this. That couple should never have left Atlanta to go hunting in their green SUV.
THE SIGHT OF the prison complex, a bunch of low-slung gray buildings sprawled across a sagebrush-choked valley, cooled him down a little. As he passed the sign that read NO TRESPASSING: ALL VEHICLES AND INDIVIDUALS ARE SUBJECT TO SEARCH BEYOND THIS POINT, his mind focused again, his anger venting out like the kack-kack-kack of a pressure cooker releasing steam, the reason for his arrival coming back into prominence.
Not that he didn’t think about that woman behind the counter, how he could come back later and wait for her in the employee parking lot so that he could break her face-and that mouth!-open with an iron bar. But he had work to do, information to get, and it had been long in planning. He couldn’t let her insolence set him back, add an unnecessary complication. That clerk would never know how close she had come to… what? He wasn’t sure. He would have just let his rage take over, seen where it took him. One thing he was sure of: she was the luckiest woman in Rawlins, Wyoming. Too bad she didn’t know it.
The prison was close to the interstate, but a high rocky ridge separated the two. Every day, thousands of travelers took that interstate going either east or west, and few if any of them knew how close they were to a maximum-security prison just over the hill, a place filled with murderers, rapists, kidnappers, and other scum of the earth. He had known plenty of ex-cons. Some he’d grown up with, some he’d hired, some he’d gone drink for drink with at a bar. In fact, technically, he was an ex-con, although he didn’t feel like one. Five years in his state pen down South for aggravated assault. He’d spent most of his time observing the makeup of the general population. To a man, they were stupid. Even the ones with some intelligence had a stupid blind spot that later tripped them up. They deserved to go to prison. They didn’t think, they just did. They were nature’s mistakes, human bowel movements. Prison was too good for most of them. And he’d told a couple of them that right to their faces, because he didn’t care what they thought of him.
He cruised through the parking lot, looking at the cars. Half of the plates were from Wyoming, the rest from all over. He saw a flash of brake lights from a yellow ten-year-old Ford pickup with a camper shell and Wyoming plates. The truck had just pulled in. He parked the SUV two rows behind it. While he waited, he emptied all the metal from his pockets into a dirty sock and put it in the glove compartment. The occupants of the truck, an older man wearing red suspenders and a pear-shaped woman with tight gray curls, finally got out to go inside. They were no doubt the parents or grandparents of some stupid convict, and in a way it was kind of a sweet, sad thing to see. Were they wondering what they could have done differently? Did they ask themselves where they had gone wrong, to turn out a son like this, a human bowel movement? But, he said to himself, at least they have family.
He took a quick look in the mirror, smiled at his reflection, and followed. The old couple walked so slowly he overtook them at the entrance to the building. The man flinched a bit when he darted in front of them and grabbed the handle to the door.
The old man snorted, said, “What in the…?”
But instead of rushing inside, the man who had driven all night opened the door for them, stepped aside, and said, “Let me get this here heavy door for you.”
The woman looked from her husband to the man, and smiled. “Thank you,” she said.
“My pleasure.”
WHILE HE WAITED for the old couple to check in at a desk inside the waiting room, he read the notices on the bulletin board. The room was clean and light, built of cinder block painted pale lime green. The check-in desk was on one side of the room and a row of lockers was on the other.
The couple gave their names while the woman in uniform behind the desk found their names in her notebook.
The guard handed them a key and told them to remove all metal objects and to put everything in one of the lockers before going through the metal detector.
In order to visit, a sign posted on the bulletin board said, visitors shall be MODESTLY DRESSED to be permitted inside. The following will not be allowed: bare midriffs, see-through blouses or shirts, sleeveless shirts, shorts, tube tops, halter tops, extremely tight or revealing clothing, dresses or skirts above the knee, sexually revealing attire…
He glanced over at the old couple while they emptied their pockets. The woman seemed flustered. She clucked at her husband, asking him whether he thought her thick old nurse’s shoes would be okay. The old man shrugged. She wore a billowy print dress that did little to disguise her bulk. Thick, mottled ankles stuck out below the hem of the dress and looked stuffed into the shoes. Nothing sexually revealing there, he thought, and smiled.
… Visitors must wear undergarments; children under the age of ten may wear shorts and sleeveless shirts. No rubber slippers or flip-flops will be allowed.
It took the couple three tries to get through the metal detector. First, the old man had to remove his suspenders because of the metal clips. The second time, the woman had to confess that the bra she wore to hold up her massive breasts contained wire. Then, the man had to remove his work boots because of the hobnails in the heels. Finally, the guards allowed the old couple through provided the suspenders be put away in the locker.
He watched the old man close his locker door and noted the number: 16.
He approached the check-in desk, smiling.
“You are…?” the guard asked.
He said his name.
“Give me your ID so I can hold on to it here.”
He handed his driver’s license to her. She looked at it and matched up the photo.
“That’s quite a name,” she said, and the corners of her mouth curled up a fraction. Was she amused? Contemptuous? Flirty? He couldn’t decide.
He said, “It never bothered me none.”
“All the way from Mississippi. And you’re here to see…” She paused, following her finger across the page, then said it.
“That’s right.”
She handed him a key to locker number 31, and gave him a speech about metal objects she had memorized. He’d heard it before down South.
“All I got with me is this,” he said, digging in his pocket for a can of Copenhagen chewing tobacco. “I want to give it to him.”
She took the Copenhagen from him and screwed the top off. The strong smell of powdered black tobacco filled the room. He felt his stomach muscles clench, but he tried to keep his face expressionless. He could not smell anything other than tobacco, and he doubted she could either. So far, so good.
“I guess that will be okay,” she said, handing it back.
“Oh,” he said, smiling his warmest smile and letting his eyes drip on her a little, “and I ain’t wearin’ any underwear.”
This produced an amused shake of her head. “That’s just for women visitors,” she said.
“I shoulda figured that out,” he said. “You live around here?” He’d be willing to take her home, even though she was a little too heavy and plain in the face. Or at least he’d take her out to his car. She had a nice full mouth.
“Of course I do,” she said, sitting back in her chair, looking at him closely, making a decision. She voted no, he could see it happen. Maybe it was his beard. “Where do you think I’d live if I work for the Department of Corrections in Rawlins? Hawaii? Now please proceed through the metal detector.”
HE PLACED THE locker key in a plastic basket and showed the two guards at the metal detector the can of Copenhagen.
“She said it was okay,” he said, gesturing to the waiting room.
“She did, huh?” a guard wearing horn-rimmed glasses said, taking the can and opening it. Unlike the woman, the guard stuck his bare finger into it and swirled it around.
“What are you looking for?” he asked. “You’re getting your germs in it.”
The guard looked up, not sympathetic. “People try to smuggle things in here all the time,” he said. “How do we know you didn’t mix something in here?”
He felt his neck get hot. “But she said it was okay. It’s a gift.”
“Nope,” the guard said. “Leave it here. You can get it on your way out.” The guard replaced the top, and wiped his finger on his uniform pants.
Go wash your hands… Don’t put your finger in your mouth, he wanted to warn. But all he said was, “Oh, come on…”
The guard shook his head no. It was final.
“For Christ sake,” he said. His plan was already going a little awry. But he had a backup.
“Keep Him out of it,” the guard said. “Do you want to go inside or not?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then leave it here and go get in the van.”
He nodded, figured he’d better shut up. As he went down the hallway where another guard was waiting at an open door, he heard a metal clunk as the tobacco was tossed inside a metal waste can. He let out a breath and walked ahead. A van was outside.
He settled into the first seat behind the driver. He was the only visitor in the van. The driver climbed in after him, turned on the motor, shut the door, and did a slow U-turn. He looked outside the window at the bare, rocky hills. There were wisps of clouds in a high blue sky and nothing, absolutely nothing, else. Except some antelope, up there on the hillside. Hiding in plain sight.
IT WAS A mile from the Administration Building to the prison. The driver said, “First time?”
“Yep.”
“You want to know what you’re looking at?”
He really didn’t care, but to be friendly, he said, “Sure.”
“That’s the ITU,” the driver said, nodding in the direction of a boxy gray building behind a fence topped with razor wire. “Intensive Treatment Unit. Ultra-rehab. That’s where the drug addicts get sent when they arrive. Or if an inmate needs extensive psychological treatment.”
“That’s probably a lot of them, I’d guess,” he said.
“You’re right about that.
“This is a state-of-the-art prison,” the driver continued, saying it in a way that suggested he had repeated it a hundred times, like a tour guide at a theme park. “It’s a city unto itself. Everything is on premises, cooking, laundry, hospital, everything. It would continue to function if the rest of the world didn’t, at least for a while. We have six hundred and eighty inmates in A, B, C, and E buildings, or pods. The inmates are segregated based on their crimes and their behavior, and you can tell their status by the shirts they wear. Yellow means newbie, or rookie. Blue shirts and red shirts are general population. Orange means watch out, that man is in trouble or he’s dangerous. White means death row.
“The whole place is watched twenty-four/seven by two hundred cameras that are everywhere. I mean it, everywhere. There are also motion sensors everywhere, and I mean everywhere. No one moves in this place that somebody isn’t watching him.
“That includes visitors,” the driver said, looking at him in his mirror to make sure he had heard him.
“It’s slow today for visitors. Summer weekends, we get more than a hundred people. The average day is fifty. Are you meeting your inmate in the contact or noncontact area?”
He wasn’t sure. “Noncontact, I think.”
“Who is it?”
He told him.
The driver nodded. “Yeah. Noncontact. He’s in for murder, right?”
He said yes. Multiple homicide. Death row. He’d be wearing white.
“He doesn’t get many visitors,” the driver said, leaving it at that.
HE STOOD IN another waiting area. He wished the driver hadn’t told him about the cameras, even though he should have known. If he’d felt exposed standing in a parking lot, he really felt exposed here. He’d been told the conversation he was about to have wouldn’t be recorded. But how could he be sure of that? He’d have to keep his comments obscure, the way he had in his letters to the inmate. Get things across without actually saying them.
Beyond the waiting room, through three-quarter-inch glass, was the big visiting room with tables and chairs in it. A guard, a woman, sat at a desk in the corner, doing paperwork. On the desk was the biggest box of sanitizing wipes he had ever seen. He grimaced, thinking about what it was she had to wipe up out there, what kinds of fluids oozed out of these people, this scum. There was a table with an urn of coffee and columns of white Styrofoam cups. Bright plastic toys were stacked in a corner. A television was on with a game show on it. Jesus, the place is almost cheery, he thought. It reminded him of a modern high school without windows.
A guard came into the room with a clipboard.
“You’re John Wayne Keeley?”
“Yessir.”
“You’re here to see Wacey Hedeman?”
“Yessir.”
“Follow me.”
SIX YEARS BEFORE, Wacey Hedeman had gone crazy. Until it happened, he had been a game warden working for the Wyoming Game and Fish Department in northern Wyoming, near the Bighorn Mountains. He had a good reputation and was well liked; a former champion rodeo bull rider in the PRCA, star of the university rodeo team, state champion wrestler before that. He was gregarious, ambitious, and cut a wide swath. He was, in practically everyone’s opinion, paid the highest compliment a Wyomingite paid another: He was thought “a good guy.”
But that was before he got the urge to run for Twelve Sleep County sheriff. He had needed money and influence to win, and he hooked up with former supervisor and mentor Vern Dunnegan, who had reappeared in the area as an advance landman for a natural-gas pipeline. Dunnegan could deliver the office to Wacey because he had the goods on the current sheriff, if Wacey would clear the way and anyone in it for the pipeline project. The situation spiraled downward into places no one anticipated and in the end, Wacey murdered four men and shot a pregnant woman before he was stopped.
Keeley had been told some of the story, and had looked up the rest. Wacey Hedeman had been sentenced to die by lethal injection, but he was still waiting for it to happen. His partner in crime, Vern Dunnegan, was serving out his sentence in the same prison, but in the general population, not maximum security.
KEELEY WAS TAKEN through a door labeled NONCONTACT VISITS and down a narrow hallway. The guard opened another door and Keeley went into a narrow cubicle with a desk, a stool bolted to the floor, a foot-wide counter, and a thick piece of glass that revealed a setup on the other side that was similar. A half-inch slot was cut in the glass near the counter, enough room to pass papers through. A black phone was mounted on the wall.
He sat down, straddling the stool, his palms flat on the counter, his nose just a few inches from the glass.
The door in the other room opened, and Wacey Hedeman stepped in and looked at him.
Hedeman was smaller than he thought he would be, Keeley thought. The old newspaper photos he had seen of Hedeman made him look taller, and more than a little dashing. His drooping gunfighter mustache was still there, though, but streaked with some gray. He had a bantam rooster kind of cockiness to his step, and the way he looked at Keeley from beneath his eyebrows… he looked like someone you wouldn’t want to mess with. One of Wacey’s sleeves flopped around as he moved. That’s right, Keeley thought, his arm got shot off. Idiot.
The guard behind Wacey Hedeman said, “I’ll be right outside”-Keeley could read his soundless words through the glass by watching his mouth-and Hedeman nodded but didn’t look back at him. The guard withdrew and the door closed. Wacey sat down. Their faces were no more than eighteen inches apart, through the glass. They reached for the handsets simultaneously.
“Thanks for agreeing to meet me,” Keeley said.
“Did you bring me what you said you would?”
Keeley raised his eyebrows. “They wouldn’t let me bring it through security. I tried, though. The first lady let me but the guy at the metal detector took it.”
Wacey’s face started to turn red. He glared at Keeley through the glass, and lowered the handset from his face. Keeley thought for a second that Wacey might just stand up, turn around, and demand to be let out.
“I’m sorry,” Keeley said.
Wacey just stared at him.
“Don’t fuck with me,” Wacey said, after bringing the phone back to his face. “Do you know how much I crave that stuff in here? Do you have any fucking idea?”
“No.”
“Some of these guys have it,” Wacey said, nodding toward the inmates with visiting families in the open room. “How is it they get it and I don’t? Why is it okay to smoke but not okay to chew? It pisses me off. This is Wyoming. A man ought to be allowed to chew here.”
Maybe because you’re on death row? Keeley thought but didn’t say. “I don’t know. It don’t seem too fair. I’m sorry.”
“Quit saying that,” Wacey said, his eyes on Keeley. “You sound like one sorry son-of-a-bitch.”
Keeley felt his always-present anger flare up, and fought to stanch it. He would let this man humiliate him if it would get him the information he needed. Who cared if a stupid con treated him badly? It wasn’t as if he’d ever see the guy again.
“Let’s start over,” Keeley said. “Thanks for seeing me, putting me on your visit list.”
Wacey rolled his eyes and his mouth tightened. “Yeah. I had to bump twenty visitors to the bottom of the list just to get you in. And you didn’t even bring me what I wanted.”
“I said I was sorry. I tried. Maybe I can send you a roll of it.”
Wacey scoffed. “Everything gets searched. The guards would take it and use it themselves.”
While he talked, Keeley dropped one hand under the counter and unzipped his fly. He found what he was looking for, and raised it up so Wacey could see it. It was a can of Copenhagen, all right, but much thinner than a normal plastic can, with a plastic lid that wasn’t picked up by the metal detector.
“This is how they give out samples as you probably know,” Keeley said. “At rodeos and county fairs and such. It’s about a quarter the size of a real can. I picked it up last summer, and used it as my backup in case they took the real one, even though you said it’d get through. It’s better than nothing, I guess.”
Wacey’s eyes were focused on the can of tobacco. “Give it to me.”
Now Keeley felt in control. “I will. But I got a couple of questions for you first. That’s why I’m here.”
Keeley could see Wacey lick his lips, then raise his eyes back up, then back to the can. He was like a drug addict, Keeley thought. He needed the Copenhagen. But how could he need it so much if he’d gone six years without it? Then he remembered: Convicts are stupid. Even Wacey Hedeman.
Wacey looked up, eager to talk. Keeley thought, Pathetic.
Keeley said, “I think you know why I’m here. I got a big interest in you. See, my brother moved out here to Wyoming eight years ago. He was an outfitter up in Twelve Sleep County. Name of Ote. You remember him?”
Wacey seemed interested now. “I remember.”
Keeley watched Wacey’s eyes for a hint of guilt or remorse. Nothing.
“He got killed,” Keeley said.
Wacey just nodded.
“He used to send me letters. That’s when I first heard your name. And the name of the other game warden. You remember him, don’t you?”
Again, the nod. Keeley knew Wacey was wondering where this was going, since it had been Wacey who shot his brother in an elk-hunting camp. Keeley proceeded as if he weren’t aware of that fact.
“What I’m interested in is this other game warden.”
Wacey swallowed, said, “What about him?”
“You don’t like him much, do you?”
“He was the one put me in here,” Wacey said. “So no, I’m not real fond of him.” He spat out the word fond.
“You hear about what happened a couple of years ago up in that same country?” Keeley said. “A big confrontation where some good people got burned up in the snow? A woman and her little girl?”
“I heard.”
“She was my sister-in-law, and her child, God bless them. They was also Keeleys,” he said. “They was the last Keeleys, ’cept for me. And you know what?”
Wacey hesitated. Then, finally, “What?”
“That same damned game warden was involved in that too. Can you imagine? The same guy involved with the end of our family name.”
Wacey stared at him through the glass. “That wouldn’t be the end of it,” he said. “You got the same last name. Whyn’t you just go out there and make a bunch more? Isn’t that what you people do in the South?”
Now the anger did flare up. Keeley lashed out and thumped the glass with the heel of his hand. Wacey sat back in reaction, even though there was no way Keeley could have broken through.
The door behind Wacey Hedeman opened and the guard leaned his head in. “Knock off the noise,” the guard said, and Keeley could hear him through the handset.
“You don’t understand,” Keeley said, after the guard had left. Wacey looked back, wary. It was obvious he hadn’t expected that blow to the glass.
“Don’t understand what?”
“Just shut up, and answer a couple of questions. I drove all the way here for this, and I don’t need your mouth. I drove through Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska to meet you, Mr. Wacey. I don’t need to hear your shit-for-brains views of my people, or my name.”
Wacey swallowed again, shot a glance at the miniature can of Copenhagen.
“Tell me about him,” Keeley said. “Tell me what makes him tick. Tell me how to get under his skin.”
Wacey seemed to weigh the question, his head nodding almost imperceptibly. Then: “He’s not going to look or act the way you might expect. In fact, when you meet him, I predict that you’ll feel… underwhelmed. That’s his trick, and I don’t even know if he realizes it.” Wacey paused for a moment. “I take that back-I think he does. But that doesn’t mean he acts any different.”
“What are you talking about?”
“He likes being underestimated. He doesn’t have any problem with playing the fool. But just because he isn’t saying anything doesn’t mean he’s stupid. It means he’s listening.”
Keeley nodded, go on.
“The worst thing about him, or the best, depending on how you look at it, is that when he thinks he’s right, there isn’t anybody that can change his mind. The son-of-a-bitch might even act like he’s going along with you, but deep down, he’s already set his course. And nothing, I mean fucking nothing, will get him out of it. He’s a man who thinks he’s looking at everything for the very first time, like no one else has ever looked at it before so he’s got to figure it out for himself. You know what I mean? There’s some real arrogance there, but he’d never admit that.
“Once you set the hook in him,” Wacey said, “he won’t shake it out. Even if he knows you set it. He’ll see it through to the bitter end, no matter what happens. Just realize that. Once you start with him, you better be prepared to hang on.”
AFTER ANOTHER TWENTY minutes of talking, Keeley slipped the can of tobacco through the slot, and Wacey grabbed it before it was all the way through. Keeley watched Wacey twist off the top and plunge his nose almost into the black tobacco and breathe in deeply, his eyes closed. Without another word, he put the lid back on and stuffed the can in his pocket, then reached up and hung up his phone. His part of the conversation was over.
Keeley couldn’t detect the chew in his side of the room, but he tried to imagine it. He also tried to imagine the other odor, the one that was overpowered by the tobacco. The smell of almonds.
“I’m going to enjoy this,” Wacey said soundlessly.
Keeley smiled through the glass. Wacey didn’t smile back, but stood and knocked on the door so the guard would let him out.
AS HE RODE in the van back to the Administration Building, John Wayne Keeley thought over what Wacey had told him.
“Good visit?” the driver asked.
“Good enough,” Keeley said.
WHEN HE PASSED back through the security area, he fished the large can of Copenhagen he had brought out of the garbage can, and slid it back in his pocket. The guard saw him, and winked. They didn’t care a whit what you took out of the place, Keeley thought, only what you brought in.
At the desk he retrieved his driver’s license from a guard who had replaced the woman. He quickly cleaned his wallet and keys out of the locker, while noting that number 16 was locked. The old couple were still inside, visiting.
IN THE PARKING lot, he wiped down all the surfaces in the SUV with a soft cloth, then removed his duffel bag from the back seat and the sock of valuables from the glove compartment of the SUV. He carried them across the pavement to the old yellow Ford pickup and tossed the duffel into the back beneath the camper shell.
As he guessed, the cab of the truck was unlocked. He opened the door and tripped the hood latch. After a glance toward the Administration Building to make sure no one was coming, he leaned under the hood. It took less than a minute to locate the red coil wire, strip it, run half of it to the positive side of the battery coil and tie it off, and trigger the starter solenoid. The engine roared to life. These old Fords were easy to hot-wire, and he’d had plenty of practice on his own when some dumb-shit camp cook lost the keys. That’s why he’d targeted the truck right off, rather than any of the other vehicles in the lot that were nicer. He slammed the hood shut and slid behind the wheel. The steering wheel unlocked as he jimmied the locking pin on the column with the flat screwdriver blade on his knife. Easy.
He peered over the dashboard to make sure no one had watched him. No one had.
John Wayne Keeley backed up and drove out of the parking lot, up the service road, beneath the NO TRESPASSING sign. He steered with his left hand while he threw the old couple’s belongings out the passenger window: a thermos, some women’s magazines, sunglasses, cassette tapes of polka hits. Before he took the entrance ramp to the interstate, he pulled the can of Copenhagen out of his pocket, the one of two he had laced generously with potassium cyanide stolen from a jewelry store in Kansas, and tossed it out the window.
That was the difference, once again, between those stupid convicts in there and John Wayne Keeley out here. If one of those jokers had broken into a jewelry-restoration shop he would have walked right past the chemicals used to refurbish diamonds and gold-cyanide-and straight to the jewelry itself. And then he’d have had a bunch of worn trinkets to try and fence. Not John Wayne Keeley. Not J.W., as he liked to be called. Keeley stopped when he found the cyanide in a locked drawer of the little workroom. And he only took as much of the white powder as he needed, before reshelving the bottle. The proprietors would know they’d been broken into, of course, but would be flummoxed by their good fortune that the thieves had stolen nothing of value. They probably wouldn’t even notice the small amount of missing chemical.
He tried to imagine what was happening back there at the prison right now. Had Wacey filled his mouth with the Copenhagen right outside the door? Or had he tried to sneak it back to his cell, where he could smell and savor the tobacco, out of view of the two hundred cameras? Either way, it would kill within minutes of ingestion. Keeley remembered a hunting client, a forensic pathologist from Texas, telling him how it worked. The victim looks flushed, then has a seizure, like he’s had a heart attack. He collapses, fighting for breath. His skin turns pink, and his blood inside his veins has turned cherry red. Bright pink foam might burble out of his nose, looking like something… festive. Then, Sayonara!
“Have a good chew, Wacey!” he hollered. “That was for Ote!”
And he was thinking that he really hadn’t learned all that much from Wacey, because he already knew what he wanted to do to Joe Pickett-hit him where he lived. Make him hurt. Take him down. Make that son-of-a-bitch game warden find out what it’s like to feel lonely, worthless, unable to protect his own.
AT THE TWELVE SLEEP COUNTY SHERIFF’S OFFICE, THE Scarlett brothers sat in molded-plastic chairs, with an empty chair between each of them, across from the sheriff who was at his desk. Arlen was on one end of the line, Hank on the other, Wyatt in the middle. All three were still cuffed. Wyatt’s and Hank’s hands were bound behind their backs but Arlen had his cuffed in front, so he could dab his head wound with a cloth. Deputies stood close to the brothers. Joe had found them like this when he arrived, and was surprised emotions had cooled down enough that McLanahan had chosen to put them all into the same room. Joe sat on the edge of McLanahan’s desk, a gesture sure to annoy the sheriff. Fine, Joe thought. Arlen had apparently persuaded the sheriff to forgo the hospital for the time being, and he held a bloody cloth to the side of his swollen head. His eyes were alert, Joe thought, and his expression was mildly amused.
Robey Hersig, the county attorney, had been called away from dinner with his family to come to the sheriff’s office and interview the brothers.
“You asked what happened,” Arlen said to Robey. “I’ll tell you. As you know, the legislature broke for the session Tuesday morning. I stayed in Cheyenne that night to pack, and drove back to the ranch. Two nights ago, I had a nice supper with my mother and Wyatt at the Holiday Inn here in town, and we went back to the ranch.”
“They got good prime rib,” Wyatt interjected, then looked back at his big hands in his lap.
“Yes, well,” Arlen said, looking at Wyatt with an expression that wasn’t quite sympathy, wasn’t quite annoyance, but a kind of uncomfortable acceptance. “Anyway, we were home that night around ten, which is late for Mother. She’s an early riser. The game warden can attest to that,” he said, nodding at Joe.
Robey looked to Joe for an explanation of why he had been brought into the conversation.
“I saw her early yesterday morning when I floated the river,” Joe said. “I guess it was about seven.” But he wasn’t sure why Arlen had thrown it to him, other than to make the point, yet again, that Joe might have been the last person to see her.
“And why were you there, Mr. Game Warden?” McLanahan asked from behind his desk.
Joe bristled at the way McLanahan asked, knowing there was sarcasm in the question.
“Fishing access,” Joe said, and left it at that.
“How did she appear when you had your conversation with her about… fishing access?” McLanahan asked.
“She was fine,” Joe said, “her normal self.”
“Did you two have a dustup?” the sheriff asked.
“No more than usual.”
Joe was grateful when Arlen jumped back in. “As I said, she’s an early riser. Yesterday, we had a nice breakfast in the house, Mother, Wyatt, my niece Julie, and me.”
At the mention of Julie’s name, Hank suddenly sat up. His mouth was now pulled back into an ugly grimace. Joe noted that Arlen had confirmed what Reed had told him about Julie being Hank’s daughter.
“Yes, Julie,” Arlen said, aware of his brother’s reaction but pretending, Joe thought, not to notice it. “Such a sweet, sweet girl. She’s developed a real interest in political science and history, and she’s a good student. We talked about the legislature, how laws are made, how the system works. Things she never would have learned at home if she’d stayed with her father…”
At that, Hank twitched, and his neck and face got darker. His eyes were boring into Arlen now, as Arlen continued in a pleasant voice that was somehow grating.
“This morning, Mother wasn’t around, which was highly unusual. Nevertheless I assumed she’d gone to town so I made breakfast for Julie and myself and then took her out to the main road in my pickup so she could catch the bus to school. Then I went back to the main house, to my office on the third floor, and remained there all day catching up on correspondence and paperwork. You’d be amazed how many things pile up while I’m away at the session.
“I remember hearing a bit of a discussion outside near the bank of the river. I heard raised voices, one of them being Mother’s.”
Joe leaned forward, asked, “Who was the other?”
McLanahan cleared his throat, a signal to Joe that he’d intruded on the interview.
Arlen shrugged. “A local fishing guide. I’m not sure I know his name. They were having an argument about trespass fees. This wasn’t that unusual, really. It happened all the time. In the end, Mother always got them to pay up.”
“Then”-Arlen furrowed his brow, trying to recall something-“I believe it was about three when Wyatt pounded on the door. It was three, wasn’t it?” Arlen asked Wyatt.
Wyatt shrugged.
“It was three,” Arlen said. As he spoke, his voice lapsed into a bit of a singsong. Joe thought the cadence of Arlen’s speech was another way to get at his brother Hank. It was probably a way of speaking that had been established long ago specifically because it enraged Hank, who hardly talked at all. “Wyatt said our brother Hank called in a rage. Apparently Hank had been to the house and couldn’t find Mother, or her car. And, Hank being Hank-who isn’t really supposed to be on our side of the ranch in the first place-immediately came to the conclusion that Mother met with foul play…” Joe watched, amazed, as Hank’s face turned almost purple and a vein in his throat swelled to look like a writhing baby snake. “… and of course if there was foul play involved, then in my brother’s twisted mind, that meant I must somehow be involved with it. My brother needs professional help in the most serious way, which is obvious to all who meet him, and especially to those of us forced to, um, coexist with him. So, Hank being Hank, he assumed the worst and was ready to act out his own western movie. That’s pretty much what Hank told you, isn’t it, Wyatt?”
Wyatt didn’t look up, but said reluctantly, “Pretty much. Not all the movie stuff, though.”
Arlen chuckled in a condescending way Joe found irritating. “In an effort to stave off another violent confrontation, of which there have been many over the years, I decided to drive over to Hank’s side of the ranch and try to calm down the situation. Wyatt decided to follow me in his truck. I spotted Hank just across his side of the line…”
“Hold it,” Robey said, raising his hand. “You’ve made a couple of references to ‘his side of the ranch’ and ‘our side of the ranch.’ And now you say there’s a line. What’s that about?”
Arlen smiled paternalistically at Robey, as if graciously offering an explanation that should have been well known by all. “In order to keep the peace, Mother decided a few years ago that we should live on opposite sides of the ranch. Hank built a fine hunting lodge on the east side, and the rest of the family remains on the original homestead on the west side. There’s an old fence line that more or less cuts the ranch in two, and we’d all come to understand that it wasn’t to be crossed. Nothing legal, just an understanding until Hank decided to lock all of the gates. Julie and her mother moved down to live with us. I have adopted Julie as my own. Unofficially, of course, and much to Hank’s dismay. He would rather they both stay up there on his side, pining for him while he takes clients to Kenya to hunt for months on end. But Julie needs some stability.”
“Thanks,” Robey said. “Go on.”
“I saw Hank’s truck tearing across the ranch toward our side at the same time we were trying to find him. I pulled over and waved him down, so we could talk. After all, Wyatt and I are just as concerned about where Mother might be as Hank is. I thought, for once, we could put the animosity aside and try to work together and figure out where she was.”
Joe was struck by how Hank and Arlen used the word “Mother” when they spoke. Men their age should say, “My mom,” “my mother” or “our mother,” or “our mom,” it seemed.
“So I got out of the truck and went to talk to Hank. Wyatt came up behind us. But alas”-Arlen paused, and again took the rag away from his head-“instead of talking, Hank grabbed his irrigation shovel and started swinging. I grabbed mine in self-defense. I guess that’s when you were called.”
Arlen stopped speaking, and winced, as if a sudden jolt of pain had coursed through his head. Either that, or a conspicuous play for sympathy, Joe thought.
“Is that how it happened, Wyatt?” Robey asked.
Wyatt slowly nodded his head, but refused to look up.
“Hank, you agree?” Robey asked warily.
Instead of answering, Hank sighed and stood up, a movement so swift and unexpected given his previous stillness that the deputy beside him didn’t reach out. Joe slid off the desk, ready to step between Hank and Arlen if necessary.
“It’s pretty accurate,” Hank said, his voice tight. “I ain’t gonna dispute what he said about the fight. I think he left out the part about what he did to Mother, and where he hid her.”
Hank turned to Arlen, who was still seated. Arlen looked back calmly, knowing, Joe thought, he had already done as much damage as he could do. Wyatt took that moment to look up, see what was happening, and drop his head again, as if figuring that if he didn’t watch it nothing could happen.
Hank couldn’t raise his hand to point since it was cuffed behind him, so he set his shoulders in a way that seemed to point at Arlen’s face. Hank said, “And I don’t want to hear another fucking word about Julie coming out of your mouth.”
Arlen arched his eyebrows. “Why? Because she’s come over to my side? Just like her mother?”
That did it. Hank emitted a guttural, anguished sound and hurled himself at Arlen, head down, closing the space between them so quickly that neither the deputy nor Joe could stop it.
Hank head-butted Arlen square in the face, and the force of his body took them both backward, smashing into the filing cabinets. Framed photos fell from the wall and broke on the floor. Both deputies pulled at Hank’s bound arms and shirt collar, but his thrashing legs tripped Reed and the officer fell heavily on the pile. Joe and the other deputy grabbed Hank’s ankles and pulled him away, facedown along the floor, leaving a smear of blood on the linoleum.
“You got no idea what he’s capable of!” Hank shouted.
Arlen’s face was covered with blood from his broken nose, and he shouted: “THROW THAT ANIMAL IN A CAGE!”
Joe breathed deeply after the scuffle and watched the deputies carrying Hank through the door to a cell. While Robey helped Arlen to his feet, he looked at Wyatt, who had not moved. Wyatt sat still, his head hung low, his huge body settled into the cupped seat of the molded-plastic chair. As Joe watched, Wyatt reached up and covered his head with his huge hands, lacing his thick fingers through his hair.
Joe saw where the Flex-Cuffs had bitten into Wyatt’s fleshy wrists, and what remained of the cuffs on the floor under the chair where Wyatt had snapped them off during the fight. Joe had never encountered a man strong enough to snap cuffs before. Next to the shredded cuffs, Joe saw a splat of moisture. Then another. He realized Wyatt was shaking, his big shoulders heaving up and down as he sobbed.
TWO HOURS LATER, after Joe had finished giving his deposition to Robey concerning his recent encounter with Opal Scarlett, Deputy Reed stuck his head into the office.
“I thought you guys would want to know we’ve sent a couple of cars out to pick up a fishing guide named Tommy Wayman,” Reed said, glancing at his notepad. “His wife, Nancy, called it in. They had a fight and Nancy said Tommy told her he would do the same thing to her that he did to Opal Scarlett if she didn’t shut up.”
After a beat, Joe said, “Which was…?”
“‘Throw her in the river like fish guts,’” Reed said, looking at his pad to emphasize that he was quoting.
SO IT WAS Tommy Wayman, Joe thought. Tommy was a longtime local, a throwback, given to white snap-button shirts and stretch Wranglers. He ran three boats and two rafts on the Twelve Sleep River, his business doing well despite the fact that Tommy would much rather fish himself than tend to detail. The guided operation was flourishing now, though, due to MBP Management, Marybeth’s company.
Wayman had the oldest fishing service in the valley, and was the first to change from live bait to flies, flat-bottomed jon boats to beautiful McKenzie-syle drift boats, the first to preach catch-and-release instead of killing and taking caught fish. It had been a nod to progress and a realization that the resource was unique but limited. Joe encouraged Tommy and urged other guides to change their methods while he managed the river for quantity and quality of trout instead of meat in the water.
Tommy had contended with Opal Scarlett for years. Maybe he had finally snapped.
IT WAS AFTER TEN WHEN JOE DROVE TOWARD HIS home on Bighorn Road. Maxine was asleep on the passenger seat, tucked in on herself, her deep breathing punctuated by occasional yips as she dreamed of what? Chasing rabbits? Watching men beat each other with irrigation shovels?
The night was remarkably dark, the moon a thin white razor slash in the sky, the stars hard and cold. There were no pole lamps this far out of town, and it was one of those nights that seemed to suck the illumination out of the stars, rather than transmit the light, leaving pinpricks.
He had called Marybeth to tell her he’d be late.
“Sheridan told me what happened,” Marybeth said. “Julie, that poor girl. I wish she hadn’t seen her father and uncle fighting like that.”
Joe said, “My fault.”
Marybeth was silent, which meant she agreed with him that he’d screwed up. But at least she didn’t say it. For the past six months, since Joe returned from his assignment in Jackson, Marybeth had been unerringly patient with him, as if she were overcompensating for something that had happened while he was gone. While he wasn’t sure what that was, he knew it involved Nate Romanowski. He didn’t ask because he trusted her judgment more than his own and, frankly, he liked how things were going between them. Plus, he had a secret of his own-his surprising attraction to a married woman in Jackson. Nothing had happened, but it could have, which was nearly as bad. So things had been rocky for a while, like all marriages, he supposed, but the storm had passed over them without fatal damage. Now they were on smooth water again, which he preferred. He saw no good reason to dredge up past feelings with probing questions. She didn’t either. Life was good in general, as it should be, he thought. Except for his job, his boss, and now Opal Scarlett’s disappearance.
IN SPRING THE animals came out, so he was cautious as he drove. The deer, rabbits, badgers, elk, and occasional mountain lions were on the move, reestablishing their hierarchy and territory, having babies, kicking up their heels after a long winter. Joe imagined them puzzling over new human and natural developments on the land, processing the changes, and moving forward with slight instinctive variations. He slowed when two bright blue lights winked just beyond the arc of his headlights, and he stopped the truck while a badger, her belly fat quivering while she scuttled, crossed the two-lane blacktop. Her young one, which was sleek and shiny, froze in the roadway for a moment and displayed its attitude with a teeth-rattling display of juvenile aggression as it rocked from side to side, then followed her. Both vanished into the darkness of the barrow pit beside the road.
He was always grateful for the drive home, because it allowed him to wind down, to sort out the events of the day, to try to put them in a mental drawer for later.
Joe was still buzzing from what had happened at the sheriff’s office with the Scarlett brothers. Although the rift between them-especially Arlen and Hank-was the stuff of local fable, he had not seen it for himself in its fury.
TOMMY WAYMAN HAD been brought to the county building as Joe left. Before starting his truck, Joe watched as Wayman was pulled out of the car and steered toward the door by two sheriff’s deputies. Curiosity got the best of him, and Joe went back inside to hear what Tommy had to say.
Someone had tipped off the Saddlestring Roundup, and a reporter (who, to Joe, looked all of seventeen years old) had arrived with a digital camera. The flash popped and lit Tommy’s face in stark relief, freezing an image of tiny eyes set in a face of deep tan from spending so many hours on the river, and a bulbous red nose from drinking so many beers while spending so many hours on the river.
Tommy looked scared, Joe thought, as if he were ready to flinch from blows that could come from anywhere. Joe could see a bandage on Tommy’s neck. The adhesive strip holding on the gauze had pulled loose to reveal a wound that looked, at first, as if someone had tried to slit Tommy’s throat from ear to ear.
“What happened to your neck?” Joe asked.
“Opal Scarlett,” Tommy said. “Joe, she should have been stopped a long time ago.” His voice slurred with alcohol. Since his hands were cuffed behind him and he couldn’t point, Tommy raised his chin to indicate the wound across his throat. “This time, she just about cut my head off.”
Before he could say more, the deputies took him into the building to be processed.
Joe had watched Tommy’s thin back until the guide was taken into the building. Joe followed, pieces falling into place.
JOE HAD FIRST met Opal Scarlett three years before as a result of a complaint by the very same Tommy Wayman. Wayman had come to Joe’s office at his house and claimed Opal was blocking access to the river and charging fees for his boats to float through her ranch.
“She’s been doing it for years,” Wayman said, sitting down in the single chair across from Joe’s desk.
Joe said, “You’re kidding me, right?”
Wyoming law was long established and well known: it was perfectly legal for anyone to float in a boat through private land as long as the boaters didn’t stop and get out or pull the boat up to shore and trespass. The land belonged to the landowner but the water belonged to the public. While it was perfectly fine for a landowner to charge a fee for access to the river over private ground, it was illegal to charge for simply floating through private land.
“The rumor is that she collects enough money from float fees-as she calls ’em-to buy a new Cadillac at the end of every summer,” Tommy Wayman had said while cracking the top off a bottle of beer he had pulled from his fishing vest. “She’s been collecting money for years, but nobody turns her in because, well, she’s Opal Scarlett.”
Wayman told Joe that Opal collected her fee by standing on the bank near her house and calling to passing boats. Since Opal was white haired and tiny, most boatmen assumed there was something wrong when they heard her cries and beelined to help the old woman. When the boats pulled to shore, she pointed out to the passengers of the boat that they were now technically on her land and subject to fines or arrest. She would let it go, however, if the passengers paid a fee of $5 per person. Later, the fee was raised to $10, then $15, then $20. Word got around among fishermen to ignore Opal Scarlett when she hollered, no matter what she said.
Which led to more escalated measures on Opal’s part, and for a few years she got the attention of passing boats by firing a shotgun blast into the air and making it clear they were next if they didn’t pay up. That worked, Wayman said, for a while.
In order to avoid the embarrassment of paying fees in front of their customers, the outfitters and guides had learned to pay Opal up front and therefore pass through her ranch without trouble. Wayman told Joe he had done that for years, but Opal was getting forgetful and half the time couldn’t recall that he’d prepaid, so she would stand on the bank, shooting her shotgun in the air, demanding her tribute.
Joe noted at the time that Wayman had not brought the situation to his attention until it was literally out of control, only when Wayman was forced to double-pay Opal.
That was when Wayman first told Joe that Opal had threatened to string razor-sharp piano wire across the river, neck-high.
“If she does that she’s likely to kill somebody,” Wayman said. “She thinks everybody on the river is trying to shaft her by not paying the fee, even though most of us already coughed up. If she strings that wire, somebody’s going to get seriously hurt.”
After his meeting with Wayman, Joe drove out to the Thunderhead Ranch, feeling that his case against Opal Scarlett was remarkably cut and dried. It was his initial experience with the Scarlett mystique, his first real look into how deep the family roots were in the county and how something as straightforward and simple as river access turned out not to be that at all.
He found Opal working alone in her magnificent vegetable garden on the southern side of the massive stone ranch house where she lived. As he parked his pickup in the ranch yard and walked toward her, she leaned on her hoe and sized him up with a kind of interested, professional detachment that resided somewhere between a friendly greeting and a trespass warning. The set of her face seemed to say, “I’ve been dealing with your kind for sixty-odd years and have yet to be surprised.”
She had opened with, “So you’re the game warden who arrested the governor for fishing without a license?”
Joe nodded, already on the defensive.
She was small, trim, and wiry, dressed in a kind of casual western outdoor elegance that seemed reserved for people like her-faded jeans, Ariat boots, silver ranger set buckle, an open canvas barn jacket over a plaid shirt, silk scarf. Opal was a remarkably self-assured woman who had no qualms about charging a fee to boaters who passed through her ranch, and who seemed to make it clear without saying that she had thus far tolerated him being there in the county but there was a limit to her time and patience. She explained to Joe how her father-in-law and grandfather had established the ranch. Over the years, they had graciously maintained the flow of the river even though it was their right to divert as much of it as they pleased to irrigate their land, since they had the very first water right. By maintaining the flow over the years, she told Joe, the family had not only assured a supply of drinking water to the town of Saddlestring, but had preserved the natural ecology of the valley and also allowed for an extensive guided trout-fishing economy that would have otherwise not existed.
“In a way,” she said through a tight smile, “if it weren’t for us, you wouldn’t be here, and neither would Mr. Tommy Wayman.”
Without a hint of remorse, she led Joe down to the bank of the river and described the “tollgate” she wished to build in the future. She started by pointing across the river at an immense cottonwood.
“I want to tie a wire off over there on the trunk of that tree, and stretch it all the way over to my side. I’ll attach my end of the wire to a big lever I can work by myself, so I can raise and lower the wire as necessary,” she said, demonstrating how she would pull on the imaginary handle.
“What if you kill somebody?” Joe asked, incredulously.
She dismissed his concerns with a wave of her hand. “Don’t worry, I’ll tie orange flagging to the wire so all the floaters can see it plain as day. My objective is to collect my fee, not to decapitate my customers.”
“But you can’t do that, Mrs. Scarlett. It’s a public waterway.”
She turned from her imaginary tollgate, her eyes freezing him to his spot. “It’s a public waterway, Mr. Pickett,” she said, “because my family has allowed it to be so. The water in that river could just as easily be diverted, by me, to irrigate my ranch and turn this place into a Louisiana bayou and my home into Venice with all the beautiful canals. But I have chosen not to do that, but to instead collect a small fee in exchange for providing free drinking water and recreation to you and several thousand other residents of our sleepy little valley.
“This arrangement,” she continued, her unblinking eyes still on him, “has worked very well for three generations. Water in exchange for proper respect. I understand from others that you have a tendency to want to go your own way to some degree. I admire that in a man, generally. But I’d suggest this isn’t the best battle to choose to fight when there are other more worthy ones out there.”
Joe felt he’d been flayed by a rawhide whip. All he could think of to say in response was, “Nice to meet you, Mrs. Scarlett.”
So when Joe saw the wound on Tommy Wayman’s neck that evening, he was pretty sure he knew what had happened out on the river.
TOMMY WAYMAN CONFESSED that he had, in fact, tossed Opal in the river that morning. He said it happened like this:
He was scouting the Twelve Sleep River in his flat-bottomed Hyde drift boat, his first trip on the water since winter. After winter, there were always new hazards, new bends, new currents on the wild river to scout out. And it was a great time to fish for himself, before the spring runoff began and raised and muddied the river, before clients started to book, before he had to mess with the hassle of hiring guides and office help.
It was an unseasonably warm day and there was a mayfly hatch on. Tommy said he was alone on the river, and never saw another boat. The trout were hitting his flies so hard they were mutilating them, and he was hauling the fish in and releasing them in a steadied fury. It was an angler’s wet dream, he said, the kind of day that reminded him of why he loved to fish, why he loved the river.
He was putting on a dry fly and a dropper, concentrating on tying the tippet knots, as he floated through the Thunderhead Ranch. He never saw the silvery band of wire stretched across the river until it sliced through his leader and caught him under his chin, lifting him briefly off his boat seat. He felt the wire bite into his flesh and saw blood fleck down the front of his shirt, but was able to reach up and grab the wire with his hands before the momentum of the boat carried him forward even farther and cut his throat wide open. After plucking the wire out and ducking under it, Tommy grabbed the oars and took the boat to shore. Just as Opal Scarlett came out of her house, drying her hands on a towel.
“Damn you, Opal!” he shouted, hurtling out of the boat once he reached the shore. “You just about cut my head off with your damned wire!”
Opal just stood there regarding him with what he called the look of ownership. “Like she was disappointed in the behavior of a hired hand-or a slave.” Finally, she told Tommy if he had paid his river fee up front this year, as he knew he should have, he could have avoided the problem.
“There is no such thing as a river fee!” Tommy yelled.
“There is on my ranch,” Opal said, arching her eyebrows.
And with that, he rushed her, grabbed her by the collar with one hand and by the belt with the other, and swung her through the air and into the river.
“Damn, she was light,” Tommy said. “Like there wasn’t really anything to her, just clothes and a scowl. It was like tossing my nieces and nephews around the pool or something. She didn’t even struggle. I think that was the last thing she expected, to be thrown into the river like that.”
Tommy said he watched her floating away in the river. She was treading water, and howling at him saying, “Next time, Tommy Wayman, you’ll have to pay me a hundred dollars a trip!”
“Nuts to you, Opal,” he called after her. He said he watched her bob in the river, heard her curse at him, until she was carried around a bend two hundred yards from where he stood. He never once thought she didn’t simply swim to shore, he said later. He never even considered that she had drowned. That part of the river was too shallow and slow. And she was too mean to die, he said, which was something Joe had also heard from Reed.
No, Tommy said, he never saw her climb out on shore after he got back in his boat and floated downriver.
No, he never saw her body wedged in debris or trapped under the surface by an undertow. Besides, he said, in April the river was barely moving. The dangerous currents would come later, when the snow started to melt and the speed and volume of the river would increase two to three times.
No, he didn’t feel any need to turn himself in at the time because, well, Opal deserved to be thrown in the river.
“I’m surprised that river didn’t spit her right out,” Tommy said to Joe and Robey.
Proud of his feat, he’d immediately bragged about it to his wife, Nancy, not knowing that she had spent the entire day at home fuming over photos she had found: Tommy with his arms around attractive female clients and one shot in particular-a group of flight attendants in the boat who bared their breasts to the camera with Tommy at the oars-grinning like an idiot. She was angry enough that after he fell asleep in his lounge chair with a beer, she called the sheriff’s office and reported what Tommy had said. Nancy felt horrible about it now, though, since at the time she had no idea that Opal was missing.
So what had happened to Opal Scarlett’s body? Or had Opal simply climbed out, had an epiphany of some kind, gotten in her Caddy, and driven away?
JOE PARKED IN front of the garage, stirred Maxine awake, and entered the house through the mudroom.
The Picketts lived in a small state-owned two-story house eight miles out of Saddlestring. Joe was thankful for darkness, so he wouldn’t have to see how tired the place was looking, how it appeared to sag at the roofline, how the window frames and doors were out of plumb. It sat back from the road behind a white fence that once again needed painting. There was a detached garage filled with Joe’s snowmobile, gear, and supposedly the van, but the vehicle space was now occupied by his upturned drift boat needing repair. Behind the house was a loafing shed and corral for their two horses, Toby and Doc.
The house was quiet and everyone was in bed. He left his battered briefcase on the desk in his home office off the mudroom. He left his blinking message light and unopened mail for later.
Joe thought of how things had changed for them in the past year. Marybeth’s business, MBP Management, had taken off. She now managed eight Saddlestring companies, doing their accounting, inventory management, employee scheduling, federal and state compliance. The owners had gratefully ceded control to her, and told their colleagues at morning coffee at the Burg-O-Pardner how much easier their lives had become since hiring her. She had filled a void none of them knew existed when she showed up with her laptop, spreadsheets, and no-nonsense practicality. She even had affiliate offices in Sheridan and Cody, manned by women much like herself who were mothers who knew what time management and prioritization really meant and could walk into a small business, dissect it, and make it run like, well, a business. Her income to the family now exceeded what Joe brought in as a state employee for the Game and Fish Department. The money helped.
College funds for Sheridan and Lucy had been opened. All four burners worked on the stove. They had a new mini-van, and a television that revealed, for the first time, that most actors’ faces were not actually shades of green.
They had discussed the fact that MBP Management had quickly reached the point in business where Marybeth would need to make the choice to maintain what she had or expand. Maintenance, Marybeth explained, was the first step to stagnation, something she saw all the time with the businesses she managed. But expansion-hiring employees, finding bigger office space, changing her role from hands-on consultant to full-time executive of the business itself-was not what she thought she wanted to do. She enjoyed working with her clients, and expanding would mean more time away from the family and additional strain on the marriage. It was a difficult decision that faced them, she said, and one they needed to make together. Joe just wanted her to be happy, and said he’d support her in whatever she chose to do.
Before going upstairs to bed with his wife, Joe tiptoed into Lucy’s room and kissed her good night (she rolled over and said “um”), then rapped lightly on Sheridan’s door because he saw a band of light underneath it.
“Come in,” she said.
Joe stuck his head inside. Sheridan was reading in bed, wearing her glasses instead of her contacts. She smiled at her father, but then arched her eyebrows in a “do you need something?” way.
“How are you doing?” he asked.
“Fine. I feel sorry for Julie, though.”
Joe said, “Me too. I feel terrible about taking her out there. I hope she’ll be okay.”
Sheridan nodded.
“Has she ever told you about the situation out there?” Joe asked. “What the deal is with her father and her uncles?”
Sheridan shook her head. “I don’t think she really knows what is going on. I thought she’d call tonight, but she didn’t.”
Joe told Sheridan how the fight continued in the sheriff’s office, and that Tommy Wayman confessed to throwing Opal in the river.
“That’s just crazy,” she said.
“I’m curious about the Scarlett brothers,” Joe said. “How well do you know them? Does Julie talk about them much?”
Sheridan looked suspicious. “Some,” she said. “And I’ve met them all. Her dad, Hank. Uncle Arlen and Uncle Wyatt.”
“What do you think of them?”
“Dad, I don’t feel comfortable being your spy. Julie is my best friend.”
Joe held up his hand. “Okay, not now. I understand. But I’ll probably want to talk with you about them later, okay?”
Sheridan said, “Good night, Dad.”
MARYBETH WAS ASLEEP in bed with her table lamp on and a book opened on her chest. She was breathing deeply, so Joe tried not to wake her as he padded across the room. He changed out of his red uniform shirt and Wranglers and pulled on old University of Wyoming Cowboys sweats. Before he went back downstairs, he marked the page and closed Marybeth’s book, putting it aside. He hesitated as he reached to shut off her lamp, and took a moment to look at her. In sleep, her face was soft and relaxed, and there was the hint of a smile on her mouth. She was a beautiful woman, better than he deserved. She’d been so busy lately that she was dead tired at night. It had been over two weeks since they’d made love, and Joe scratched tonight off his list as well.
He missed the time they used to have together, before her company took off and before the girls required nonstop shuttling among school, home, and activities. And with his schedule and the problems at work, he knew he wasn’t helping the situation much.
Joe brushed her cheek lightly with the tips of his fingers, shut off the light, and went back down to his office.
He had never enjoyed the paperwork associated with his job, but considered it necessary-unlike some of Wyoming’s other fifty-four game wardens, who complained about it constantly. He viewed the memos, reports, requests for opinion, and general correspondence as the price he paid to spend the majority of his working day out in the field in his pickup, astride one of his horses, in his boat, or on his snowmobile. Joe Pickett still loved his job with a “pinch me” kind of passion that had yet to go away. He reveled in his fifteen-hundred-square-mile district that included haunting and savage breaklands, river lowlands, timbered ridges and treeless vistas, and landscape so big and wide that there were places where he parked his truck and perched where he could see the curvature of the earth.
He even used to get pleasure from writing his weekly reports, coming up with a well-turned phrase or making an argument that could persuade higher-ups. But things had changed, and he now dreaded entering his own office.
Joe listened to his telephone messages. There was a complaint from a local rancher about a vehicle driving around on his land at night, possibly a poacher. The next message was from Special Agent Tony Portenson of the FBI, asking Joe to call him. Portenson was heading up the investigation into the murder of ex-sheriff O. R. “Bud” Barnum and another still-unknown male the year before. Both of their badly deteriorated bodies had been found in a natural spring the year before. Joe had reported the crime. The prime suspect in the murders was Nate Romanowski,the falconer whom Joe and the rest of his family had befriended years before. Nate had vanished before the bodies had been discovered, and Portenson was trying to track him down. The agent called Joe every month or so to find out if Joe had heard from Nate, which he hadn’t. Joe felt no need to tell Portenson that he and Sheridan still went to Nate’s place to feed his falcons, and that they would continue to do so until Nate returned or the birds flew away for good.
JOE YAWNED WITH exhaustion as he tapped out a terse recounting of his long day to send to Randy Pope at headquarters in Cheyenne. Pope read his reports very carefully for errors that he enjoyed pointing out.
When he completed the report, he used his slow dial-up modem to send the e-mail. As the connection was made, his in-box flooded with departmental e-mails. The volume of mail had increased fivefold since Pope took over.
Joe perused the subject lines, deciding most could wait until tomorrow morning. The only one he opened was a press release from headquarters entitled GOVERNOR RULON NAMES NEW GAME AND FISH COMMISSIONERS.
Joe read the short list. One name punched the breath out of him. The new governor had made his second mistake.
The new commissioner for Joe’s district was Arlen Scarlett.
JULIE SCARLETT WASN’T ON THE BUS OR AT SCHOOL for the next two days, and when Sheridan dialed her number at the ranch the call went straight to voice mail. The news of the shovel fight as well as the disappearance of Opal Scarlett swept through both the school and the community so fast that it was almost unnecessary to include it in the Saddlestring Roundup, but it appeared there nevertheless, with the photo of a startled Tommy Wayman exiting the sheriff’s department car.
On Friday afternoon, after Sheridan finished track practice and waited inside the entryway for her dad or mom to pick her up, a muddy three-quarter-ton pickup swung into the alcove. THUNDERHEAD RANCH was painted on the door of the truck, and when it opened, Julie jumped out. Sheridan could see that it was Julie’s Uncle Arlen who was driving.
Julie looked pale and tired, Sheridan thought. Her friend wore old jeans, cowboy boots, and a too-large sweatshirt. It was unusual to see her dressed down that way, and Sheridan felt sorry for her.
Sheridan was relieved when Julie’s expression changed from distraction to joy when she saw her in the doorway. Julie broke into a quick run, opened the door, and threw her arms around her friend.
“I missed you!” Julie said, beaming. “I know it’s only been, like, a couple of days, but it seems like a friggin’ month.”
Sheridan said, “I know. I’ve tried to call you because I was getting worried…”
Julie dismissed Sheridan’s concern with a wave. “Sorry about that. My uncles forget to tell me I’ve got messages since my grandma always did that. Hey, walk with me, Sherry. I’ve got to go pick up my missed assignments so I can get caught up this weekend.”
Sheridan turned and strode down the empty hallway with Julie.
“I’m glad school is out for the day,” Julie said, speaking softly. “This way I don’t have to face anyone and answer all of the questions right now. That’ll have to wait until Monday. So, is everybody wondering where I’ve been?”
“Sure,” Sheridan answered, knowing Julie wanted to find out she was the topic of all conversation, even though some of the kids had said cruel things about her and her family. “Me, mainly.”
“Oh, you’re sweet,” Julie said.
Sheridan stood near the door of Julie’s math classroom while Julie got her assignments from her teacher. She listened as Julie told her teacher how rough it had been the last few days with her grandmother missing, and with her uncles fighting. The teacher eagerly drank it in. If Julie was going to repeat the story to every teacher, Sheridan thought, they’d never get out of there. While she liked Julie and was relieved she seemed okay, her friend reveled in being the center of attention.
Finally, Julie finished and left, Sheridan beside her.
“I may not be able to stay,” Sheridan said. “My ride should be outside.”
Julie stopped. “Are you sure? We’ve got some catching up to do.”
“I know,” Sheridan said, thinking she would much rather do that instead of listen to Julie explain what had happened at the ranch seven more times to seven more teachers. While she had the opportunity, Sheridan asked Julie something that had been on her mind since the other day. “Remember, you were just about to tell me something in the truck before we saw the fight? Remember that?”
“Yes.”
“Do you want to tell me now?” Sheridan asked.
Julie laughed bitterly, and suddenly seemed much older than her fourteen years, Sheridan thought.
“It’s not really news so much anymore,” Julie said. “I was going to tell you how weird my family is. I was thinking about your mom coming to pick you up, and your sister, and your dad. It’s so friggin’, like, normal compared to what I’m used to.”
“That’s what you were going to tell me?” Sheridan asked, a little let down.
“Yeah. It’s just that I didn’t know how strange it was until pretty recently. I guess I thought everybody lived like I do-I didn’t realize how screwed up it is.”
Sheridan shook her head, not understanding.
“You need to come out and see it for yourself,” Julie said, grasping Sheridan’s arms. “You won’t believe it until I show it to you. Wait until you see the Legacy Wall.”
“What do you mean?” Sheridan asked, genuinely rattled by what Julie was saying.
“Well, you know that term ‘nuclear family’? Meaning, you know, a dad, a mom, some kids, a dog? Like your family? Well, mine’s like, a blown-up nuclear family. Like somebody dropped a bomb on us.” Julie giggled when she said “blown-up nuclear family,” which made Sheridan smile.
“I mean,” Julie continued, “I don’t even live with my dad. He lives on the other side of the ranch, on the east side, all by himself. My mom lives in a cabin on a creek, and she never talks to my dad. I mean never. I grew up in the big house thinking my grandma was my mother because she took care of me. My mom drinks, I guess. Anyway, so it’s like my grandma is my mother and my uncle Arlen is my father. Uncle Wyatt-he sometimes seems like he’s more my age or my little brother than anything. I’m very fond of my uncle Arlen and my uncle Wyatt, and they’re on our side of the ranch…”
Sheridan shook her head. “Julie, this is getting complicated.”
“I know,” Julie said. “That’s what I wanted to tell you, how complicated it is. But I don’t want anybody else around here to know, because it’s embarrassing, you know? At least I hope Grandmother is back soon. Then it will feel more normal.”
“What do you mean?”
“Her car is gone,” Julie said. “We think maybe she took a trip somewhere. We hope she comes back soon. It’s a weird situation, but it would at least be more normal if she came back. She’s a good cook.”
Sheridan felt even more sorry for Julie, how naked she seemed to be, how pathetic she sounded. But Julie’s situation also gave her an odd, cold feeling about her friend that made her feel guilty.
“Oh-oh,” Julie said, pointing over Sheridan’s shoulder. “I see your dad’s truck outside.”
Sheridan turned and looked down the hall. The green Game and Fish truck was out there, and she could see her father’s silhouette, his hat brim bouncing up and down. He was probably talking to someone. Then she could see Julie’s uncle Arlen leaning out of his window, talking back.
“I gotta go,” Sheridan said, relieved that she had an excuse to depart.
“I know, but thanks for hanging with me,” Julie said.
“Always, Julie.”
“That’s why I love you the most,” Julie said, smiling. There was mist in her eyes. “Come out for a sleepover. I’ll show you just how… fucked up my family is.”
Sheridan had never heard Julie say “fuck” before, and it startled her. It seemed to startle Julie as well, who covered her mouth with her hand.
IT WAS A SECTION OF FENCE OUT IN THE MIDDLE OF nowhere that made J. W. Keeley think, This is not only another world, it’s another goddamned planet.
The fence was there when he woke up. He was parked alongside Wyoming Highway 487 headed north. The Shirley Mountains loomed over the horizon like sleeping reptiles, miles across a moonscape still covered with snow, feeling as if he were absolutely alone on the top of the world. The fence was unique in that it was only a section of a fence, parallel to the highway, but not connected on either end with anything else. It was a tall fence, made of fresh lumber. The morning sun fire-bronzed the planks, made it look as if it was lit up by electricity.
Because it was another planet, and there was no electricity. Or trees. Or power lines. Or anything resembling human presence or activity, except for that section of fence, which was obviously placed there to drive men like Keeley out of his mind, this Wyoming version of Stonehenge, as if to make him think he was hallucinating or seriously hungover.
Right on both counts, he thought. But this fence, he had to go look at it up close, prove to himself that it was real, and try to figure out why it was there.
ON THE BENCH seat of the old Ford pickup next to J. W. Keeley was a scoped rifle with a banana clip. It was a Ruger Mini-14, a carbine that shot.223 rounds. The night before, the coyote hunter at the bar in Medicine Bow told Keeley the rifle was used mainly for killing coyotes and other vermin because the cartridges shot nice and flat. The thirty-round clip was a vestige of the pre-assault rifle law days, back when some federal lawmakers still had spines, the coyote hunter said, back before they all started wearing frilly little skirts and drinking lattes and passing laws against gun owners. In fact, the hunter said he’d spent the day out in the sagebrush between Medicine Bow and Rock River, working a wounded-rabbit call and popping four coyotes, missing a few others. The dead ones were in the back of his truck as he spoke, the hunter said. Their fur was worth $90 for a good pelt, he told Keeley, plus there was a $15 bounty on account of the coyote was considered a predator.
The coyote hunter told Keeley his name was Hoot.
Keeley told Hoot his name was Bill Monroe, hoping Hoot had never heard of the bluegrass picker.
Keeley had said “coyotes” in the way he’d always heard, emphasizing the middle syllable, “kye-oh-tees,” but Hoot had made fun of him, asked him good-naturedly where in the hell he was from, because in the Northern Rockies the creature was pronounced “kye-oat” without that fruity Hollywood flare on the end. Keeley repeated “kye-oat, kye-oat, kye-oat” as he followed the man outside to see the dead animals.
Hoot the Coyote Hunter was a local with a bloodstained Carhartt and a trim goatee. He liked to talk, and told Keeley in the time it took to leave the Virginian Hotel bar and arrive at his pickup that he’d grown up on a ranch near Elmo, graduated from UW with a degree in social work, come back to the area he grew up in to work in the coal mines, which paid a hell of a lot better than social work, bought a small place and got married to a wench named Lisa, lost his job in the coal mine and got divorced, now he drove a school bus and trapped and popped a few coyotes in his spare time.
When Hoot asked, Keeley said he was headed north to Casper to look for work because he’d heard there was plenty there, with the coal-bed methane boom and all.
“Pinedale,” Hoot had said once they were back inside from seeing the dead coyotes while he graciously accepted another double bourbon from Keeley “that’s the place to go for jobs and gas. I hear a man can pull down sixty K just for showing up, seventy K if he can fart and walk at the same time.”
Keeley bought Hoot drinks until the coyote hunter finally lowered his head on the bar and went to sleep. Then Keeley went back outside and stole Hoot’s Mini-14 and an army cartridge box filled with over five hundred rounds.
He had driven north in the dark until he began to imagine he was on the surface of the moon, and realized it had been over an hour since he had seen even a single set of oncoming headlights. So he pulled over to the side of the road, covered himself and the rifle with a blanket he found behind the bench seat, and went to sleep.
IT WAS WHEN he awoke that he looked out over the sparse, open, endless vista and saw the fence.
Now, as he drove toward it off the highway, on a rough two-track still choked with dirty snowdrifts that meandered across the top of two hills, he saw a real cowboy astride a real horse, and J.W. Keeley thought he had awakened in the middle reel of a western movie.
The cowboy wore a long heavy coat and a wide-brimmed hat, and a dog tailed him. In the distance, toward the Shirley Mountains, Keeley could see a pickup and horse trailer parked on the side of a hill, glittering in the early-morning sun.
There were cows on the bottom of the basin, and the cowboy was probably headed down the slope to gather them up or count them or something. Whatever real cowboys did. Keeley wasn’t sure. In movies, cowboys were always in town, having just come from somewhere else.
The real cowboy stopped his horse and turned when he heard the sound of a motor coming.
Keeley drove up and got out of the truck, but the dog started yapping at him, barking so hard it skittered stiff-legged across the ground. Keeley jumped back in the cab and closed the door, opened the window, and heard the cowboy say, “Sorry about that, mister. Pay no attention to him. He don’t bite.”
Keeley looked at the cowboy. Except for the heavy coat, scarf, and hat, the man looked normal, like anybody, like a shoe clerk or something. The cowboy wore round wire-rimmed glasses and had a brushy mustache. His cheeks were flushed red from the early-morning cold.
Keeley rolled down his window but didn’t get out.
“What can I help you with?” the man asked.
Keeley gestured toward the hill. “I was wondering about that fence up there. Ain’t they ever going to finish it?”
The cowboy looked at him for a moment, then burst out laughing. Keeley felt his rage shoot to the surface. The fucking cowboy kept laughing, and even raised a gloved hand to his stupid shoe-clerk face to wipe away a tear.
“You’re kidding me, right?” the cowboy said.
“I guess I’m not,” Keeley said, much more calmly than he thought himself capable of.
“…‘Ain’t they ever going to finish it?’” the cowboy said. “Pardon me, but that’s one of the funniest things I ever heard. That there’s a snow fence. This must be the first time you seen one.”
“A snow fence?” Keeley said. “But it’s made of wood.”
Which got the cowboy laughing again, and the rage boiling up in Keeley, as much at himself as at the shoe-clerk cowboy for saying that, as if the fence would be made of snow, which was stupid.
“Yer killin’ me, mister,” the cowboy wheezed, between belly laughs.
Keeley looked off into the distance at a single cloud that was hardly a cloud at all, just a wispy white stringer across the light blue, like egg whites dropped in hot water. He asked, “Hey, you got family around here?”
“What?” That stopped the guy.
“You work for some rancher, or is this yours?”
The cowboy’s eyes narrowed. The question had obviously thrown him off stride. “Talk about apropos of nothing,” he said, then: “It’s a corporate operation. They hire me and a half dozen other men to manage the place.”
“But you have family, right?”
“Yeah, my wife and a couple of kids, but what does that have to do…?”
Keeley said, “Glad I made your day,” and turned the wheel sharply and floored the accelerator. He could see the cowboy watching him-still shaking his head with profound amusement-in his rearview mirror as he drove up the hillside toward the snow fence.
At the top, he parked and got out near the fence-it was practically ten feet high-and survyed the hillside he had driven up. The cowboy had finally turned his horse and was continuing back down the hill, toward the cattle on the bottom of the basin.
Keeley got out and took a moment to look around. He had never seen country so desolate, and so mean. It reminded him of one of those old western movies, but worse. The movies always showed desert as being hot and dry. This was high and rough, with dirty snow. He preferred desert, he thought; at least it was warm. And except for that laughing cowboy down there, Keeley was the only man on earth for as far as he could see. There were no cars on the highway.
Keeley snapped back the bolt of the rifle, saw a flash of bright brass as the cartridge seated, and aimed the rifle across the hood of his pickup. He leaned into the scope, putting the crosshairs just below the nape of the cowboy’s neck, on a band of pink skin between the scarf and the collar, and pulled the trigger.
The shot snapped out, an angry, sharp sound, and the cowboy slumped to the side and rolled off his horse. Keeley watched as the dog trotted over and started licking the cowboy’s face, which almost made Keeley feel bad until he realized the damned dog was tasting blood, so he shot it too.
Keeley got back into the stolen pickup with his stolen gun, said, “Fuckin’ cowboy, anyway,” and turned the vehicle toward the highway, to drive north, to find that game warden.
TWO DAYS LATER, MARYBETH PICKETT THREW OPEN the front door after her morning walk and shook their copy of the Saddlestring Roundup. Joe and the girls were having breakfast.
“Wacey Hedeman is dead, that bastard,” she said, showing Joe the front page.
Sheridan said, “Good!”
Lucy said, “You probably shouldn’t say ‘good,’ Sherry.”
“But I mean it,” Sheridan said fiercely. “I hate-hated-that man.”
Joe glanced at his wife and saw that Marybeth had the same reaction as Sheridan. Because Wacey had been the man who had shot her, causing the loss of their baby.
“You know how you wish things, bad things, on people?” Marybeth said. “I have wished harm to Wacey ever since he shot me. But to read now that he’s really dead… it’s strange. I feel sort of cheated. I wanted him to know how much I hated him.”
Joe was not surprised at Sheridan’s and Marybeth’s reaction, but it was disconcerting to see such mutual anger on display.
Joe looked at Lucy, trying to gauge what she was thinking of all this. Lucy shot her eyes back and forth between her mother and her sister. She had been three at the time, while Sheridan had been seven. Lucy seemed to take the comments in stride, probably since she’d grown up with the whole Wacey Hedeman thing-it was part of the family history.
“It says he had some kind of seizure,” Marybeth said, reading the story. “They’re still investigating. He might have been poisoned.”
“Poisoned? By another inmate?” Joe asked.
“It doesn’t say,” she said. “But I guess I really don’t care, considering what he did to us.”
“But we’re tough!” Lucy said, repeating something she’d heard over the years. It made Marybeth smile, and wipe a tear from her cheek.
“We’re tough, all right,” Marybeth said.