Cold Wind

by C. J. Box

  “Which agency’s got him?”

  “FBI.”

  “Good,” he said, putting his pen down. “Someone owes me a favor there.”

  Before he punched off, Joe said, “Ask your mother what she knows about Bud Jr. being back in town. I think she’s hiding something.”

  “Bud Jr.? You mean Shamazz?”

  “Yeah. I just had a run-in with him in town. I didn’t get the best of it and I lost him.”

  He resolved to tell more her about the encounter later. Much later.

  “Call me with what she says,” Joe said.

  “When will you be home?”

  “I won’t,” he replied, looking into the visor mirror at the swelling and bruises beginning to show on his cheekbone and jaw. “I’m driving all night to Cheyenne to talk to Orin Smith.”

  As he drove south out of Saddlestring, he scrolled through the contact list on his phone until he found the name for Special Agent Chuck Coon.

  26

  “Now, run,” Nate Romanowski said to Johnny Cook and Drennen O’Melia.

  “Man,” Drennen said, “you can’t make us do this. It’s cruel.”

  “You can’t,” Johnny echoed.

  Nate arched his eyebrows and said low and breathy, “I can’t?”

  He’d silently marched them a mile east from Gasbag Jim’s place, in the direction of the Wind River Range, with the informant, Lisa, the dark-haired girl who’d learned their names and made the identification, in tow. She was coffee-and-cream color with dark eyes and high cheekbones. Her large breasts swelled against her white tank top. Short, muscular but shapely legs powered her through the sagebrush. She dangled a pair of strappy high heels from her finger because they hurt to walk in.

  Nate guided Johnny and Drennen’s progress by gesturing at them with the muzzle of the .500 Wyoming Express the way a trainer instructs bird dogs with hand signals. The sun was behind them at eye level, minutes before dusk, and the four of them cast long shadows across the sagebrush and dried cheat grass. Johnny Cook was still in his underwear and boots.

  “What do you mean, run?” Drennen asked. “You gonna shoot us in the back?”

  Nate shrugged. He said, “I’m giving you more of a chance than you deserve. It’s an old Indian trick. You ever heard of Colter’s Run?”

  “Colter’s what?” Johnny said.

  “I have,” Lisa offered. “Blackfeet, right?”

  “Right,” Nate said to her over his shoulder. Then he turned his attention back to the two men. “Eighteen-oh-eight, at the site of the present day Three Forks, Montana. The Blackfeet captured John Colter, the first white man to discover Yellowstone Park. They didn’t know what to do with him: kill him like they’d just done to his partner John Potts, or strip him naked and let him run. They decided on the old Indian trick, and gave him a few feet head start before they chased him down. What they didn’t know was that Colter was fast. He managed to outrun all the warriors except one. As he got close to the river, the Blackfoot who kept up threw his spear at Colter but missed, and Colter snatched it up and used it on the poor guy, killing him.

  “Then Colter jumped into a river,” Nate said, “and over the next few days managed to elude the entire band by hiding in driftwood snarls along the banks while the Blackfeet searched for him. Eventually, Colter got away and worked his way back east over the next few years. In the end, he married a woman named Sallie.

  “So,” Nate said, “a happy ending for John Colter.”

  “Nice story,” Drennen said. “But this is stupid. I ain’t running nowhere.”

  Nate grinned at him and said nothing.

  “Oh, shit,” Johnny lamented, reading the malevolence in Nate’s cruel smile. He glanced up in the dusk sky that was deep powder blue except for the fiery puffball clouds lit by the evening sun. “I knew when I saw that damned bird . . .”

  Nate said, “Not my bird. But it worked out kind of nice, didn’t it?”

  “I thought that was your bird,” Lisa said. “Like it was your spirit or something. We believe in stuff like that, you know.” There was a particular musical lilt to her voice that reminded Nate of why he was there. As if he needed reminding.

  Nate smiled at her. “You go on believing that if you want.”

  “Yeah,” Drennen said, balling his fists and taking a step toward her. “Believe what you want, you snitch. You snitch whore.”

  Nate raised the revolver and Drennen looked up to see the massive O of the muzzle. He stopped cold.

  “You know her as Lisa Rich,” Nate said softly. “I know her as Lisa Whiteplume. My woman’s stepsister from the res. My woman was named Alisha. You two killed her.”

  Identified, Lisa thrust her chin in the air and put her hands on her hips defiantly. Proudly. Drennen stepped back.

  Nate said to Lisa, “See what I told you about his type. He doesn’t really like you. Even when you’re in there thrashing around doing what makes him happy, he despises you for it. The more you please him, the more contemptuous he is of you, which is a pretty good indicator of what he thinks of himself deep down. Will you learn from that?”

  She sighed, but she wouldn’t meet Nate’s eyes. “I guess.”

  “Oh, shit,” Johnny repeated with even more emphasis than before. “Drennen, you need to shut up now.”

  “But, man,” Drennen said to Johnny, “he can’t prove anything. He says we did something to his girlfriend, but he can’t prove it was us.”

  “You don’t understand,” Nate said. “I don’t need to prove anything. It doesn’t work like that with me.”

  Johnny asked, “Then how can you be sure it was us? What if it was somebody else?”

  “Putting you two down is a net plus either way,” Nate said. “Honestly, I’m insulted anyone would send a couple of mouth-breathers like you after me, and angry you got so close. And for the record, you left fingerprints and DNA at the scene. I got the beer bottle you left checked out by some friends in law enforcement. The name ‘Drennen O’Melia’ came back. And it didn’t take long to find out he hangs with a loser named Johnny Cook.”

  Johnny turned on Drennen, accusatory, as if now remembering the beer bottle they left on the trail.

  Then, squinting at Nate, said, “You’re that guy, aren’t you? How’d you get away?”

  “I wasn’t in the cave,” Nate said. “But somebody I cared about was.”

  To Drennen, Nate said, “Looks like you got a faceful of that rocket launcher, pard.”

  “Please,” Drennen said, pleading with his hands outstretched toward Nate and Lisa, “I didn’t pull the trigger. It wasn’t me.”

  Johnny listened with his face twisted in anger and betrayal. He thought of the gophers. He said, “It wasn’t our idea. We were under the influence of alcohol and this lady we met in Saddlestring put us up to it. It was her idea. She hired us, and she drove us out there, gave us that rocket launcher, and paid us for the job. We were like”—he paused, thinking for the right word—“her puppets.”

  “Puppets,” Nate repeated in a whisper. Then: “Was she tall, good-looking, mid-thirties? Chicago accent?” He reached up with his free hand and drew a line across his forehead with his left index finger just above his eyebrows. “Black bangs like so?”

  “That was her,” Drennen said quickly. “Told us her name was Patsy.”

  “Yeah,” Johnny said, obviously still angry with Drennen but putting a priority on a possible new way to stay alive. “Patsy.”

  Nate said, “Like Patsy Cline?”

  “Yeah!” Drennen said. “Like that. Whoever she is.”

  “Idiots,” Nate grumbled. To Lisa, he said, “Her name is Laurie Talich. I had an altercation with her husband a couple of years back. I’d heard she wanted to close the circle, so I’ve sort of expected to hear from her one way or other. But I still can’t figure out how she knew where I was, or how to get to us.”

  “We don’t know, either!” Drennen shouted, trying to bond with Nate and share his concern. “She never told
us. She just drove us out there and said, ‘Here’s the rocket launcher, boys. The cave’s down there on the trail. Get to it!’”

  Nate shifted the weapon toward Johnny. “How much did she pay you?”

  “Not a whole hell of a lot, as it turns out,” Johnny said. “Barely enough for a week at Gasbag Jim’s.”

  “How much?”

  “Only fifteen grand,” Drennen said, as if the lightness of the number somehow shifted the blame away from them to cheap Laurie Talich.

  Nate took a deep breath and shut his eyes momentarily. He spoke so gently both Drennen and Johnny strained forward to hear.

  “You killed my Alisha for only fifteen thousand dollars.”

  “We didn’t know she was even there . . .” Drennen began to plead. “That Patsy told us you were some kind of badass dude—that the cops were after you but they didn’t know where you were hiding out. She said you murdered her husband, and offing you was like doing something good for society, you know?”

  “Fifteen thousand dollars,” Nate said again.

  “Look,” Drennen said, “we can help you find her. We don’t owe her nothing anymore. She obviously lied to us. Anybody can see you’re a good guy. We’ll even cut you in on our new business venture. Man, like Johnny said, we were just her puppets.”

  Nate let it just hang there. The shadows were longer now, almost grotesque in their length. The sun was directly behind him, and both Drennen and Johnny had to keep shading their eyes to see him.

  “It’s interesting how such small men cast such big shadows,” Nate said. “I’ve heard enough. Now run.”

  “Oh, man . . .” Drennen said, his shoulders slumping.

  “Run.”

  “We’ll do anything,” Drennen said. “I’ll do anything . . .”

  “Run.”

  Drennen was still moaning when Johnny Cook suddenly wheeled and took off. He was fast, and he put a quick ten yards between himself and Drennen. Drennen did a double take, glancing at Johnny then back to Nate, then started to backpedal. After five yards facing Nate, Drennen spun and ran away as hard as he could.

  Nate watched them go. They kicked up little puffs of beige dust that lit up with the last brilliant moments of the sun. He could hear their footfalls thumping on the dry ground and the panicked wheezing of breath.

  Drennen veered slightly to the left of Johnny’s path, but was still twenty yards behind him. Nate could hear Drennen shout, “Wait up, Johnny . . . wait up!”

  But Johnny didn’t slow down.

  After a minute, Lisa tugged on Nate’s arm. “Aren’t you going to chase them? You’re going to let them go?”

  The two figures were becoming smaller and darker as they receded; the sunlit Wind Rivers loomed over them.

  Nate said, “Johnny’s fast, but not Colter fast.”

  “What?”

  He stepped quickly across her a few paces to the left. The two runners in the distance still had space between them. He walked a few more long strides to the left, until Drennen and Johnny closed into one form in the distance, despite the gap between them as Johnny continued to pull away.

  Nate raised his weapon and cupped his left hand beneath his right, where he held the revolver. He looked down the scope with both eyes open, and thumbed the hammer back.

  One shot. Two exit-wound balloons of red mist.

  Both bodies tumbled down as if kicked by mules and lay still, more dust rising up around them from their fall. The fat clouds of pink hung in the light evening air.

  Lisa stood there openmouthed and wide-eyed.

  Nate peered through the scope to confirm there was no reason to walk out there. He said, “Like puppets with their strings clipped.”

  Nate spun the cylinder and caught the empty brass and dropped it in his pocket and fed a fresh sausage-sized cartridge into the empty chamber. He slid the .500 into his shoulder holster under his left arm.

  “These shells cost three bucks each,” he said to Lisa. “No need to waste more than one of ’em on men worth nothing at all.”

  She shook her head, unable to speak.

  He said, “I’m going to go get a shovel and then I’m gone. I can drop you back home on my way to Chicago.”

  She started to argue, but when she saw the look on his face, she decided it wasn’t a good idea.

  SEPTEMBER 6

  He who does not prevent a crime when he can, encourages it.

  —SENECA

  27

  Joe hit the northern city limits of Cheyenne at dawn. He’d taken I-25 South all the way, stopping only for gas and a two-hour nap in his pickup outside Casper along the bank of the North Platte River. Radio activity during the night had been light, consisting mainly of sign-ons and sign-offs of law enforcement personnel, and he’d had plenty of time to think. He tried to connect the facts he knew about Earl Alden’s death and Missy’s arrest into some kind of logical scenario, hoping the disparate parts—the wind project, Bob Lee, the sudden appearance of Bud Jr.—would fall into place. He failed to make sense of it all, and he wondered to himself if he was chasing his tail.

  He wondered if he, like Dulcie Schalk and Sheriff McLanahan, was stubbornly pursuing a theory at the expense of other plausible scenarios? Did he have blinders on? As he had since the discovery of The Earl’s body, he felt uncomfortably disconnected. Joe was operating on the margins of a legitimate—if possibly too-narrow—investigation, trying to derail charges brought forth in good faith. He was used to operating without backup nearly every day he was out in the field. In this instance, his normal doubts were stronger than usual. He felt like he was operating without a net, and with spectators booing him.

  But he’d promised Marybeth, and he wouldn’t renege. He had no doubt there was more to the story of Earl Alden than he knew, and certainly more than the county attorney was aware of. Whether following his shaky instincts would shed doubt on Missy’s guilt—who knew?

  He needed coffee.

  It was too early for the federal offices to open downtown, so Joe cruised by the new Wyoming Game and Fish Department headquarters—which were also still closed—and took Central Avenue past Frontier Park and into the heart of old Cheyenne. He’d found a Styrofoam cup of coffee and a microwave breakfast burrito at a Kum & Go convenience store helmed by an overweight Goth woman pierced a dozen places he could see and with full-sleeve tattoos. The coffee was bitter.

  The golden dome of the capitol building was blinding with the opening salvo of the early-morning September sun. He took 24th Street and pulled over at a curb and was surprised to see Governor Spencer Rulon striding across the dew-sparkled capitol lawn toward the side entrance to his office. Rulon was alone and apparently deep in thought because his head was down and he was single-mindedly charging toward the entrance like an elk in rut. Joe checked his wristwatch: six.

  He got out of his pickup, clamped on his hat, and followed. The door the governor had used was unlocked and Joe entered the capitol building and let it wheeze shut behind him. Only in Wyoming, he thought, would the governor travel around without bodyguards and the statehouse doors be open with no security personnel about.

  As he walked down the silent and poorly lit hallway, Joe took off his hat and held it in his left hand while he rapped on an unmarked door. “Good morning,” he said.

  On the other side, he heard Rulon curse under his breath, but a moment later the governor pulled the door open and stood there, larger than life and squinting at his visitor. Governor Rulon was big and ruddy with a head full of wavy rust hair turning silver. He was brash and brusque and barrel-chested. A former federal prosecutor, Rulon was halfway through his second term. He knew thousands of his constituents by name and they called him “Gov Spence” and often phoned him (his number was listed in the local phone book) at his home at night to complain or rant.

  Joe owed Rulon his reinstatement and a small raise in salary, and despite the governor’s sometimes-slippery methods and their clashes, he felt a profound loyalty to the man.

  �
��Good morning, sir,” Joe said.

  “What happened to your face?”

  “Someone hit me.”

  “I’ll say.

  “You’re at it early.”

  “I’m up to my ass in alligators, that’s why,” Rulon said, motioning Joe to an empty chair across from his desk. “What the hell brings you down here into the heart of darkness?”

  Joe sat down and nodded his appreciation when Rulon poured him a cup of coffee from a Mr. Coffee set on a credenza. “I’m here to interview a prisoner,” Joe said. “Orin Smith. He’s in federal lockup. The FBI and our friend Chuck Coon put him there. I happened to see you, so I thought I’d say howdy.”

  “Howdy,” Rulon said sourly. “I hope this won’t take long. I’m here early these days because Eastern Time is two hours ahead of us, which means those bastards in Washington have a two-hour jump on us in their never-ending effort to screw us or tell us how to live our lives. I need the extra time just to chew out federal asses. I can’t afford to do it for just six hours a day anymore.”

  He flashed his teeth in a poor excuse for a smile to show he was kidding—sort of. “When the people of this state hired me, it was to go to work for them, not our federal overlords in D.C. But that’s how it’s turned out, and I’m getting damn sick and tired of it.”

  “Okay,” Joe said. He’d heard Rulon on the subject several times before. Everybody had. It was one of the reasons the governor’s popularity remained at record-level highs in Wyoming. That, and his penchant for challenging federal officials to bare-knuckle fights or shooting contests to resolve disputes.

  “And you caught me on a particularly bad day,” Rulon said. “A whole shitload of new federal rules just came down on our heads about set-asides and minority hiring and environmental crap. I’ve got to get on the phone and start yelling at these bastards.”