Cold Wind

by C. J. Box

  The eagle shifted its weight back and forth on the thick dowel it perched on. Its talons were black, long, and diabolical. Even through the thick welding glove Nate wore when he carried the eagle, she was capable of clamping down with power that practically took him to his knees. Now, he thought, is not the time for any foolishness.

  He raised the large hood to her head deliberately, so she could see what he was doing. “Come on,” he said gently, “come on . . .”

  Outside the mews, Alisha called to him. “Nate, another one of these boxes went off.”

  Sensor number two, he thought. Jesus. “Get back inside,” Nate called back. “I’ll be there in a second. Stay out of sight, Alisha, please.”

  “Okay,” she said, chastened.

  “Oh shit,” Drennen squealed. “I see somebody.”

  Johnny took a deep breath. He was both excited and more than a little nauseous.

  “Make sure,” Johnny said, raising the rocket launcher to rest on his right shoulder. He snapped the sights into place and leaned his cheek against the tube. He could see the top of the cave in the distance, and when he fit the scope against his eye, it leapt into view. There was movement, but he couldn’t make out what it was. Whoever had been at the opening had gone back inside.

  “I saw somebody move,” Johnny said.

  “I can see better,” Drennen said. “He’s in the shadow of the cave, but I can make him out. Long hair, Patsy said. Long black hair. It’s him.”

  “Are you sure?” Johnny asked, suddenly getting cold feet. “Are you fucking sure? Didn’t Patsy say he had blond hair?”

  “That was him, goddamn it,” Drennen hissed. “Shoot, shoot, shoot! Now!”

  “Fuck,” Johnny said. “I forgot the stupid cocking lever.”

  “I knew I shoulda done it,” Drennen said, now hopping from foot to foot, barely able to contain himself. As he hopped, he moved back farther on the trail but kept the binoculars up.

  “Okay,” Johnny said, raising the AT4 back up.

  “Dumb shit,” Drennen said, still moving back and inadvertently slipping behind Johnny. “Don’t forget those other two switches.”

  Then Nate realized how quiet it was outside. The birds and rodents seemed to be holding their breath. And almost imperceptibly, he heard a sound, a sharp if distant metallic click.

  He knew that sound, it was a sound from his past, and he roared in reaction and wheeled inside the mews and threw open the door as the roar and the whoosh filled the canyon.

  For Johnny, the muscular thrust of the rocket was exhilarating, and the flash and roar of the explosion inside the cave took his breath away. The heavy boom echoed back and forth from canyon wall to canyon wall, and the sheer power of it seemed to wash over and engulf him and open his pores. The vapor trail hung in the air as if frozen there, a white snail’s-track of smoke that extended from the juniper stand midair over a tumbling river far below and straight into the mouth of the cave.

  Nate saw it: a lightning bolt of smoke and light streaking his direction from a thick stand of juniper halfway down the trail.

  The rocket vanished into the opening of his cave. The explosion a split second later threw him back into the mews, flattening it, and he crashed to the ground in a sharp tangle of broken willows, broken skin and bones, and panicked falcons.

  Johnny jumped to his feet and threw the tube aside and howled, “Jesus! Did you see that? I got him, Drennen! I got that son-of-a-bitch with a perfect shot. Did you see that?”

  His ears rung and his hands shook and white-hot adrenaline shot through his veins and he thought it was better than sex, better than money, better than anything. He wished he had a camera with him to get a snap of that vapor trail and the huge gout of smoke rolling out of the cave. He’d put it on his Facebook page.

  Then he turned around and saw Drennen writhing on the trail. Drennen’s clothes were on fire, and so was his hair. Acrid black smoke haloed his head. His face was black and swollen and looked like charred meat. He’d stepped right in into the back-blast.

  “She told you not to do that,” Johnny said.

  Drennen squealed like a little girl, the sound coming from inside his throat. Johnny watched as Drennen rolled in the dirt until the flames were out.

  Behind him, a golden eagle lifted up from the smoking debris and caught a thermal and rose into the cloudless blue sky. Johnny turned and tracked it as it rose, mesmerized.

  11

  Nate Romanowski moaned and attempted to roll over to his belly in the debris, but he couldn’t make his arms or legs respond. He was on his back and he could see the eagle in the sky above him rising up and out of the canyon. His ears rang with a high whine, and his mind seemed to be disconnected from his body, as if his thoughts were a gas that had been released under pressure to form a cloud around him.

  He closed his eyes and tried to pull himself together, to reassert control over his limbs and will his thoughts back into his head. Oh, how his ears screamed.

  He wasn’t sure how long it took for his faculties to return, but he realized they had—somewhat—when he was able to reach up and rub his face with his hands. His skin was covered with a film of grit. Then, struggling, he managed to flop over to his side. Thin wooden slats from the decimated mews snapped under his weight and his head swooned. He threw up his breakfast and could smell it along with the sharp and familiar stench of the explosives and dust, and the combination made him remember where he was, although he was unsure what had happened.

  Through the sound in his ears, he thought he heard a whoop from the other side of the canyon. It was the whoop of a fan whose team had just scored. Painfully, he turned his neck to see, but his vision was fuzzy and he couldn’t focus well. What he thought he saw were two distant figures practically melded together on the canyon trail. They were so close together he thought for a moment they were embracing or dancing. But they were moving up the trail together, attached to each other in some way, for some reason.

  Even through his injury and confusion, he knew instinctively they’d attacked him and weren’t out of range if he had his weapon. A long shot, sure, but not impossible. Unfortunately, he didn’t have the hand and eye coordination necessary to make the shot, and he didn’t have his .454. He vaguely recalled taking off his shoulder holster and hanging it on a peg, but he couldn’t remember why. What he did have, he knew, was a serious concussion that made it difficult to think straight.

  And then, like a thunderclap, he remembered the reason he’d taken off his holster: Alisha. The sound that came from his throat was unfamiliar, but it sounded vaguely like a woofing bear.

  He lurched from smoking tree to smoking tree, burning the flesh on his hands, to the cave entrance. It was eerily quiet; the buzzing in his ears was competing with the pounding of his heart, and he took in the horrible scene with the sound off.

  Bits of clothing and hair. Shards of bed covering and chunks of electronic equipment. Her shoe, the foot still in it.

  The bear sound came again, low and rumbling, choked off at the end in a yelping sob.

  He reached out with a trembling hand and grasped a thick strand of her long black hair that was stuck to the cave wall, and he pulled it into his face and smelled it and it smelled like her.

  Nate turned slowly, still holding the hank of hair to his face. The figures he had tracked earlier were nearly to the top of the canyon rim, specks in the distance. The vapor trail of the rocket wasn’t entirely dispersed, and arched across the void. It all came back to him with sickening clarity.

  He searched in vain for his weapon inside. It was hard to see in the dust and smoke that hung there, and what he did see and touch enraged and nauseated him. Alisha had always been so much more than a sum of her parts, but that’s all she was now: parts. He felt hollow, as if they’d killed him as well.

  And he decided that if he didn’t go after them immediately, they would get away, weapon or not.

  He would tear them apart with his hands.

  He raced dow
n the canyon. His head pounded and he fought through it as he plunged headlong into the river, splashing through the icy thigh-high current, slipping on slick submerged river rocks, going under, nearly drowning, getting completely turned around by the time he broke through the surface twenty yards downriver from where he went in.

  But the cold water served to wake him up a bit, sharpening his senses a few clicks, and when he staggered up the other bank he imagined the two killers close to the top of the canyon now. He imagined them chuckling, high-fiving, patting themselves on the back for the fine shot, oblivious to the fact that he’d soon be on them.

  Nate charged up the rough foot trail, his knees pumping, his breath coming in labored honks. He strode through the brush from which he was sure the rocket had been fired and paused to turn and look. He could see the top of his cave from there. A curl of smoke came out of it, like a child’s drawing of a chimney. He noted a Coors beer bottle that had been tossed aside, as well as a couple of bottle caps in the dirt. There would be fingerprints. Even DNA left behind. This confused him, but didn’t slow him. It made no sense that any of the people from his past who were after him would be so sloppy. The Five were professionals, as he had once been. They wouldn’t leave evidence.

  Near the top of the canyon, when he could see the rim and the light blue sky with fat-bellied rain clouds scudding across it, he stopped for a moment to catch his breath. It would do no good to be exhausted when he found them. He’d need all his speed and strength to rip their throats out.

  They were gone.

  He walked unsteadily on the trail, stepping in their footprints to and from the canyon. He saw a spatter of dark blood from one of them beading on the dust and he ground it into the dirt with his heel. Heat shimmered over the sagebrush flat, and he could see the back bumper of their pickup retreating at least a mile away. Dust from the tires still hung in the air.

  Nate stood up tall and straddled the trail. He lifted his right arm and placed his left hand beneath the right fist that still clutched Alisha’s hair. He pointed his right index finger and cocked his thumb like a hammer and sighted down his forearm. The thumb fell.

  He said, “You’re dead.”

  Halfway back down the canyon, Nate sat and put his head in his hands. One of the lone thunderclouds settled over the canyon and plunged it into shadow, and errant raindrops smacked onto the dry ground and freckled the rocks in the trail. He lifted his face to the rain, knowing nothing would ever wash this day away. To Alisha’s spirit, he said, “I’m so sorry.”

  12

  Joe Pickett was finishing his statement across the desk from Deputy Sollis in the County Building when Marcus Hand arrived. Dusk painted the windows and, despite the furious activity that had gone on throughout the day, the squad room was oddly silent. Most of the sheriff’s department was at dinner, except for Deputy Reed, who was still at the crime scene assisting the DCI forensics crew as well as the crane operators who, as far as Joe knew, were still trying to figure out how to lower The Earl’s body from the windmill without dropping it.

  Joe’s cell phone was backed up with three messages from Marybeth, no doubt wondering what was going on, and he held the phone in his hand as if to alleviate his guilt at not responding sooner. Sollis was a two-fingered typist, and his fingers were as thick as his neck, and they’d spent most of the previous hour going over the circumstances related to the discovery, the climb up the tower, and the condition of The Earl’s body that Joe could recall. Every other word Sollis typed, it seemed, was misspelled or wrong, and he was constantly leaping backwards in the text and correcting his errors. When Joe offered to key it in for him, Sollis shot him a murderous glare.

  “You say his boots looked big,” Sollis said. “What do you mean by that?”

  “Centrifugal force,” Joe said. “He’d been up there spinning so long and so fast that the fluids in the body were driven toward his extremities . . .”

  “So you’re a forensic scientist as well,” Sollis sneered, rolling his eyes. “I thought you were just the game warden. Turns out you’re an expert on centrifical force, too.”

  “Centrifugal,” Joe corrected. “I’d suggest you look it up, but it would take an hour for you to Google it using your sausage fingers.”

  “Look, buddy,” Sollis said, turning in his chair away from his monitor and thrusting his meaty face halfway across the desk, “that’s about enough of that crap from the likes of you . . .”

  Joe leaned forward as well, fed up, nearly but not quite wanting Sollis to start something, when he noticed the deputy’s attention was elsewhere, his tiny eyes squinting over Joe’s shoulder.

  “This is the sheriff’s department,” Sollis said over Joe’s shoulder. “Can I help you with something?”

  The voice that responded was deep and smooth, like thick syrup: “Sir, I’m well aware of my location. I’m also well aware that you currently have a sweet, beautiful, and innocent woman—my client—sitting like a common criminal in your jail. I wish to speak with her immediately. My name is Marcus Hand.”

  Joe craned around to the criminal defense attorney filling not only the doorframe but somehow the entire room. Marcus Hand was a big man in every respect. He stood six feet four and a half inches, according to the height scale mounted to the left of the door itself, and he had wide shoulders made wider by the shoulder pads of his thighlength fringed buckskin jacket. Hand had long silver hair that curled up neatly at his collar, and piercing blue wide-set eyes. His face was broad and smooth, his lips rubbery and downturned, his nose large and bulbous on the tip. He wore coal-black jeans, roach-killer ostrich skin cowboy boots, a large silver buckle, a black mock turtleneck under the leather jacket, and a tall black flat-brimmed cowboy hat adorned with a band of small silver and jade conchos. He carried a worn leather coffee-colored pouch that looked more like a saddlebag than a briefcase.

  Joe had heard—but couldn’t confirm—that on the wall behind Hand’s desk in his law office in Jackson there was a rough barn-wood sign burned with:RATES (PER HOUR)

  INNOCENT WYOMINGITES: $1,500

  OUT-OF-STATERS: $2,000

  “And you are?” Hand said, taking a few steps into the room.

  “Deputy Jake Sollis.” The answer was quick and weak and, to Joe’s ear, surprisingly submissive.

  “Deputy Sollis,” Hand said, “I wish to speak to my client immediately. As in right now.”

  Sollis swallowed, intimidated and flushed, and said, “I need to ask Sheriff McLanahan . . .”

  “Ask anyone you wish,” Hand said, “as long as you do it in the next ten seconds. Because if you keep me from consulting with my client any longer than that, it’s the first of many grounds for immediate dismissal of all charges.

  “My God,” Hand said, raising his arms and modulating his voice even deeper so it sounded more stentorian and God-like to Joe. “You ridiculous people have actually taken into custody—into custody!—the grieving widow of a brutally murdered man—the love of her life—and put her on display in the press as if she possibly had something to do with the crime. I’m personally and morally outraged. OUTRAGED. This will not stand, Mr. Sollis.” The last words were shouted.

  The deputy snatched his phone from its stand and fumbled with the buttons. Joe looked from Sollis to Hand.

  “And who are you?” Hand asked, still accusatory but slightly less so.

  “Name’s Joe Pickett. I’m a Wyoming game warden. I found the body.”

  Hand quieted for a moment, his eyes taking Joe in the way a wolf assesses a calf elk. “I’ve heard your name before,” Hand said in almost a whisper. Then he snapped his fingers with recollection. “You’re the one who arrested Governor Budd for fishing without a license! I don’t think I’ve ever laughed so hard as when I read the story in the newspaper. I determined then you were either naïve or a zealot.”

  “Neither,” Joe said. “Just doing my job.”

  “Ah,” Hand said, “one of those. But if I recall, you now work for Governor Spencer
Rulon. You’re his secret agent, of sorts. An unofficial range rider dispatched to do the governor’s bidding.”

  “Not anymore,” Joe said.

  He had not spoken with Rulon in a year. The governor had taken a liking to Joe several years before and used the machinations of state government to work outside the lines and assign him to locations and give him directives that would have normally been far beyond his scope of work. He’d been the enigmatic governor’s point man, a range rider of sorts. Rulon had been in his corner although he’d always maintained an arm’s-length distance from Joe, so if Joe screwed up, Rulon could claim ignorance.

  But the nasty business that had taken place in the Sierra Madre with the twin brothers the year before had resulted in total and complete silence from the governor’s office. Joe had done what he was assigned to do—sort of—but the end result no doubt angered Rulon. Since then, the governor had neither reached out to help nor to manipulate circumstances so Joe would be hurt. And Joe had moved somewhat comfortably back into his role as game warden for the Twelve Sleep district. But when the phone rang at home or his cell phone danced, he still felt the tingle of anticipation and dread, wondering if would be the governor on the other end.

  “We’ve tangled a time or two,” Hand said. “I can’t claim we’re the best of friends. But this is Wyoming and there aren’t enough people around to avoid anyone, so we put up with each other.”

  “You’ve defended some guilty folks I wanted to put in prison,” Joe said more calmly than he thought capable. “Remember the name Stella Ennis?”