by C. J. Box
He sat alone in the departure lounge with his carry-on across his knees and a Bluetooth earpiece in his ear because it seemed like the Phillip Abbey thing to do. He watched the sun highlight different aspects of the Teton Range. When the plane he was to take landed, he watched the incoming passengers as they filed through the doorway. They were wealthy, white, and woodsy folks chattering happily, pointing out to their seatmates through the massive windows where they lived in the valley, discussing the moose on the highway they’d seen in the distance as they landed. Several were already talking on their cell phones or into their Bluetooth devices.
He sighed, and continued to look like Phillip Abbey on this way to Chicago.
29
“I can promise you nothing,” Joe said to Orin Smith, who sat across from him at a small table in a basement interrogation room in the Federal Building.
“Then why am I here?” Smith asked softly. “Agent Coon wasn’t clear with me other than to say you thought I might know something about your case—whatever it is.”
The room was small, close, institutional light green, and too brightly lit. Joe and Orin Smith were alone in it, although both were well aware of Coon’s invisible presence on the other side of the one-way glass on the south wall, as well as two closed-circuit cameras with glowing red lights mounted in opposite corners of the ceiling.
Smith looked Joe over skeptically. “I’ve never hunted or fished in my life,” he said. “I don’t even like the outdoors. I don’t see the point of going without a hot shower, a cold cocktail, and a flush toilet. As far as I’m concerned,” Smith said, “camping is just nature’s way of feeding mosquitoes.”
“I’m glad we got that cleared up,” Joe said. “But this has nothing to do with hunting or fishing.”
“But you’re what—a game warden?” Smith asked, after reading the patch on Joe’s uniform sleeve.
“Yup.”
“I think you may be in the wrong building,” Smith said.
“Nope.”
Orin Smith was in his mid-sixties and didn’t have an aura that hinted at charisma or confidence, Joe thought. Smith was short and soft with a blade-like nose and wounded eyes that never remained in one place very long. His skin was thin and pale as if made of parchment. Ancient acne scars dimpled his cheeks and fleshy neck. He wore an orange one-piece jail jumpsuit, and boat shoes with the laces removed. Only two things set Smith apart from any other inmate, Joe observed. Smith’s hair was long and swept back and expensively cut into layers designed to hide abnormally large ears, and his teeth were capped and perfect and reminded Joe of two strings of pearls.
“My questions have nothing to do with the charges you’re in here for,” Joe said. “I’m a lot more interested in your former life. Back when you owned a company called Rope the Wind.”
The mention of the name created a reaction in Orin Smith that resembled a mild electric shock, although he quickly recovered.
“I owned a lot of companies,” Smith said, finally.
“Let’s start with that,” Joe said, drawing his small spiral notebook out of his breast pocket. “What I can do, if you cooperate with me and answer my questions, is to put in a good word to the federal district judge. And, frankly, I can ask the governor to do the same. I’m not trying to incriminate you in any way.”
“The governor?” Smith asked. “You know him?” There was doubt showing by the way he cocked his head slightly to the side, canine-style.
“I work for him from time to time,” Joe said. “If you know him, you know there isn’t a person in this state who can guarantee what he’ll do or say, including me. But if you tell me the truth and help me out, I’ll tell him just that.”
“Interesting,” Smith said. “Will you put that in writing and send it to my lawyer?”
“No,” Joe said. “My word is my word. Take it or leave it.”
“I should call my lawyer,” Smith said. “I shouldn’t be talking to you without him in the room.”
“Suit yourself,” Joe said, sitting back. “I’ll wait until he gets here. But keep in mind I’ve got time constraints and I don’t live here in Cheyenne. I can’t guarantee the offer will still stand if you and your lawyer take your time making a decision to talk to me or not. I may not be able to come back here when you decide, and I may not want to come.” Thinking: Please don’t call your lawyer and delay this.
“I drove all night to get here,” Joe said.
“That’s your problem, not mine.”
Smith assessed Joe in silence, looking at him in a detached and quiet way that reminded Joe of a poker player trying to guess if his opponent was bluffing.
“I’ll have to get back to you on this,” Smith said as he stood up. The man walked across the room and rapped on the one-way mirror.
“We’re done here for now,” he said.
Joe cursed to himself as a U.S. Marshall opened the door to let Smith out.
“He’s wily,” Coon said, as they walked down the hallway toward the elevator. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he strung you along for a while and ended up saying nothing.”
“I wasn’t kidding about the time constraints,” Joe said. “I can maybe stay tonight, but not longer than that.”
“What’re you going to do while you cool your heels?”
Joe shrugged.
“If he hasn’t gotten back to you by tonight, you want to come over for dinner? I’ll grill you a steak or a burger or something. You bring beer.”
“Make it a steak,” Joe said. “I know how much more money you Feds make than lowly state employees.”
Coon snorted at that. At the door of the security entrance, Coon keyed the pad and the door whooshed open. “I’ll give you a call if he decides to talk to you,” he said. “Keep your cell phone on.”
Joe nodded glumly.
His phone lit up while he was buying a fancy new wristwatch for Marybeth at a Western-wear store downtown. She’d accidentally dropped her last one in a water trough while grooming her horses. She liked Brighton watches. He stepped away from the counter and plucked his phone out of his breast pocket and saw it was coming not from Coon but from Marybeth.
“How’s it going?” she asked.
He cradled the phone between his shoulder and neck while he dug his wallet out of his back pocket to hand the clerk a Visa card.
“Not well,” he said. “I’m stymied in Cheyenne, waiting to talk to Orin Smith.”
“Sorry,” she said. “So where are you now?”
“In a store.”
“A sporting goods store?”
“No.”
“Joe, you don’t go to stores.”
“And I never will again, either,” he said. “I need land, lots of land under starry skies above.”
She chuckled, which was a good sound, but it ended abruptly. She said, “When my mother is cleared of this stupid murder charge, I think I want to kill her.”
“Sounds good,” he mumbled. He was distracted as the salesclerk behind the counter handed his card back and said, “Sorry, sir, but it’s been declined. Do you have another card we can try?”
He knew his face was flushing as he replaced the Visa with a debit card. He didn’t want to use the debit card because Marybeth kept close track of their checking account balance, and she might see he’d gotten her a gift before he had a chance to give it to her.
“Do you know why the Visa card won’t work?” he asked her. “This is kind of embarrassing.”
“I’m late paying bills this month,” she said. “You know how it’s been. I’m sorry. What are you buying, anyway?”
“Don’t ask,” he said.
“Joe, don’t get me anything. I don’t need anything, and we’re tight this month.”
“Don’t worry about it,” he said, trying to get her off the subject. He was relieved when the sales clerk swiped the debit card and it seemed to be processing.
“Did you even hear what I said?” she asked, annoyed.
“Yes. Let’s kill you
r mother.”
The sales clerk glanced up at that and Joe turned away, embarrassed again.
“She’s sashaying around town like a school girl on Marcus Hand’s arm,” Marybeth said. “She’s all giggly and silly and spending money like it was going out of style. Joe, she drove the Hummer—the very car they found the rifle in—and bought Hand an elkhorn chandelier display at the furniture store for fifteen thousand dollars. Just bought it outright and asked them to deliver it to the ranch. Then she took him to the country club and paid the golf pro to keep everybody else off the course while she and her lawyer played a round in private. She acts like she doesn’t have a care in the world, and everybody’s talking.”
“Don’t pay attention to them,” Joe said.
“It’s not about me,” Marybeth said. “It’s about her. She acts like she’s just above it all—above the law with her big-shot Jackson Hole lawyer. If she deliberately set out to make a bad impression around town—to taint her jury pool—she couldn’t do a better job.”
He sighed. “I don’t understand her,” he said.
“I don’t, either. But now even her country club set is turned against her. She’s not thinking.”
“Don’t be so sure,” Joe said. “Your mother never does anything that won’t benefit her in some way. She’s got something going—we just don’t know what yet.”
“That was a cruel thing to say.”
“But true,” he said. Then: “You know, I could just come home and, you know, let the chips fall where they may.”
Silence.
He said, “I didn’t mean that. I’m just frustrated. I drove all night and I’ve got nothing to do but wait for a call. Meanwhile, your mother is buying chandeliers for her lawyer.”
“I know,” she said. “She’s her own worst enemy sometimes.”
“I thought I was,” Joe said, as the sales clerk gestured to him asking if he wanted the watch wrapped. He nodded yes.
“No,” Marybeth said, “you’re the one who is going to save her skinny old ass despite herself.”
Joe thought about the forty-five miles over the mountains to Laramie from Cheyenne and looked at his watch. He didn’t know Sheridan’s class schedule, but he found himself driving south down Lincolnway toward an exit ramp to I-80 West. As he merged onto the highway he speed-dialed her cell phone.
“Dad?” She was clearly surprised. He could hear wind and other voices in the background, like she was walking along in a pack of students.
“Hi, honey.”
“Dad, is everything all right?”
“Fine. You sound frantic.”
“You never call me, okay?”
He started to argue but had to concede she was right. “I’m in Cheyenne. What’s going on?”
He heard her tell someone, “Just a minute, I’ll be right there.” Then to him: “Ah, nothing. I’m still trying to figure out my way around. It’s all a little confusing and I’m tired all the time.”
“Are you getting enough sleep?”
She laughed, “What do you think?”
He dropped it. “What’s your afternoon look like?”
The hesitation made him think for a moment the call had been dropped. “I’ve got class and then I’m meeting some friends for coffee. Why? Were you thinking of coming over?”
Joe said, “You drink coffee?”
“Daaad.” She lengthened the word out.
“Of course you do,” he said. His ears felt hot. He said, “No, I just had some time to kill so I thought I’d check on you. See how you were doing.”
Another hesitation. When her voice came back it was soft, as if she was trying not to be overheard. “It’s not like I wouldn’t love to see you, Dad, but . . . it’s hard. I’m just starting to feel like I’m really at college and not at home. It would kind of be tough right now to change plans and see you. It would set me back.”
“I understand,” he said. “Really.”
“Remember what the orientation lady said. Six weeks. Try to go six weeks before seeing your parents and it will be easier.”
“I remember.”
“Are you on the way over?” she asked.
“Not at all,” he said, pulling over to the side of the highway. He cleared his throat, and said, “So you’re doing okay? Eating well? Getting along with folks?”
“Yes, yes, and yes,” she said. She sounded relieved.
“You know what’s going on with your grandmother?”
“Mom keeps me well briefed.”
“We miss you,” he said.
“I miss you guys.”
“Remember,” he said. “Keep in touch with your mother.”
“I will, Dad. And thanks for calling.”
He squinted and dropped his phone into his pocket, then drove slowly along the shoulder for a place to turn around to go back to Cheyenne. In his mind’s eye he pictured her drinking coffee with students her own age.
His heart wasn’t broken, he thought, but it was certainly cracked.
After steaks and three beers with Chuck Coon and his family, Joe sat at the desk in his hotel room and sketched out a time line from the murder of Earl Alden to the present time, bulleting each fact as he knew them. He hoped that by writing everything down, something would jump out at him.
He was wrong.
For the fiftieth time that day, he checked his cell phone to see if he’d missed a call from Coon or Orin Smith’s lawyer. He hadn’t.
As he was once again punching in the number for Nate’s satellite phone, just in case, he had an incoming call.
Coon said, “Surprise, surprise. Orin Smith will talk to you first thing in the morning.”
30
Nate Romanowski drove slowly down South State Street in a rental car on the South Side of Chicago with his windows down and his carry-on within reach on the passenger seat. The air was a warm stew of humidity: gasoline fumes, cooking food, and ripe garbage from Dumpsters. The sun had sunk and the last of it danced on the waves of Lake Michigan, igniting the sky and the west-facing sides of the downtown buildings, and now it was dark enough that the lights came on.
Simple things, he thought. Simple things that were so different. For one, it wasn’t cooling down just because night had come. It was still as warm and sticky as it had been when he landed at O’Hare. And he’d lived so long in the awesome and immense quiet of Hole in the Wall canyon that the cacophony of pure urban white noise dulled his senses and pummeled his ears. There were still canyons, but these were walled by brick and steel and the sidewalks teemed with people. That, and when he looked up, the sky was muddy and soapy with city lights and he couldn’t see through it to the stars.
Simple things. Like grabbing today’s Chicago Tribune as he walked through the terminal and sitting down inside a crowded bar and flipping through the pages until he found: Two Killed, Two Wounded in Drive-by Shooting at South Side Party
SEPTEMBER 6, 2010 7:13 P.M.
Two men were killed—one of them an expectant father—and two others wounded early Monday morning in a drive-by shooting in the South Side’s Stony Island Park neighborhood, according to police and a family member of one of the deceased victims.
One person was being questioned in connection with the shooting, but no charges have been filed.
About 2:40 a.m., four men were near a party at East 84th Street and South State Street when they were shot from a passing vehicle.
J. D. Farr, 22, of the 9000 block of South Evans Avenue was hit and later pronounced dead at Advocate Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn, according to the Cook County medical examiner’s office . . .
So that’s where he was headed.
And he was starting to get some looks. He could see them from the shadows behind buildings and grouped up in alleyways. As it got darker, they came out under the overhead streetlights, and there were knots of gangbangers gathered in certain places: twenty-four-hour convenience stores, eateries, bars. The sharp-dressed businesspeople in a hurry down on Michigan Avenue had b
een replaced by the people of the night in oversized shirts and coats and trousers on Nate’s southern journey, and he wondered if they ever even encountered each other day-to-day.
Here he was, he thought, a white guy wearing Jackson Hole outdoor sports clothes driving a new rental very slowly, looking off to the side instead of through the windshield, windows down. He was sending a signal and some of them were picking it up.
The intersection of South State Street and 71st had the right feel to him, he thought. There was a well-lit BP station there, lights so bright and blazing in the dark neighborhood that it was hard to see anything else. Nate noted the young clientele inside the BP convenience store, and the high counters and Plexiglas that had been installed inside to act as a barrier between the clerks and their customers. He backed in on the side of the station, out of the harsh light. He couldn’t see inside the station, and the employees couldn’t see him. Nate scanned the light poles and roofs of adjacent buildings for security cameras. They were there, all right, but he knew as long as he stayed in the rental in the low light, he couldn’t be identified.
It was a noisy intersection. Vehicles streamed below the State Street overpass, and he heard snatches of heavy bass from open windows. But on top it was a different level of darkness and mood.