The Highway

by C. J. Box

  The only room in the old house that was habitable was his own. Sure, it was dark and small. The things on the walls—his first set of mule deer antlers, his diploma from graduating from Livingston High, the curled and yellowing ripped-out photos of hot rods and pickups and Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders—hadn’t been updated in years. But the room itself gave him warm and familiar comfort. It was his place to gather his thoughts, to dream, to masturbate. In a brushed-steel lockbox under his bed were his keepsakes and souvenirs from his successful hunts. He knew he shouldn’t keep them, and especially not in a place so close to him. But he couldn’t help it. He’d tried to dispose of the box once—taking it out to the pasture to bury—but he couldn’t do it. The contents were too important, and nothing he’d yet encountered would arouse the feelings he got when he rummaged inside.

  He blamed the intense need he had for keeping the souvenirs on her. That evil wormlike trait had been passed on to him.

  Before she got really bad, she used to enter his room while he was away. He knew it because the sheets on his bed were occasionally changed. And once when he returned the pinups of women he’d put up on the walls were simply gone. She denied she’d removed them but of course it was her.

  Now he kept his door triple-locked and never left the keys. He never let her in there. Ever.

  He’d often wondered how it was possible to so bitterly hate someone he loved. He chalked it up to blood ties and left it at that.

  He slid through an opening in the stacks to enter the kitchen to turn off the light and there she was, glaring at him through her steel-framed glasses, a shapeless and massive woman in a flower-print housecoat the size of a mainsail. She was sitting at the table. Her elephantine ankles anchored her to the floor like tree stumps.

  Her face was wide and fleshy, framed in a silver-white helmet of tight curls. Every week, no matter what, she made her appointment with her longtime hairdresser in Livingston. Her hair had never changed in style or length since he’d been alive. Why she cared about her hair and nothing else was another thing about her he couldn’t understand.

  “It’s about time,” she said fiercely, biting off her words.

  She was at the ancient table shoved up against a wall. The table had a foot of open surface on it, where she sat behind a plate and a bowl with something brown in it. Her meaty hands were curled on either side of the place setting.

  “I didn’t know you’d be up,” he said.

  “Of course I’m up. I made you dinner hours ago and waited and I’m still sitting here waiting. Your stew is cold now. I suppose you can still eat it but it’s cold. It’s as cold as your heart.”

  “Stew?”

  “Dinty Moore,” she said, shifting slightly back in the chair and lifting her chin. “An entire can of Dinty Moore.”

  “How long has it been here?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, blinking.

  He paused. “I hate Dinty Moore stew.”

  “You didn’t used to,” she said sharply, defensively. “You used to love it.”

  “I never loved it. I never liked it. JoBeth loved the stuff—not me.”

  “Oh, how you lie. You even lie about JoBeth.”

  He shook his head. He thought again about getting the tractor and leveling the place. With her in it.

  His cell phone vibrated in his pocket—a message. He ignored her and drew it out, read the screen, and dropped it back into his shirt.

  “I have to go out again,” he said.

  “What about this stew?” Her tone was filled with outrage.

  “I don’t care,” he said, backing out, “Eat it. Put it in the refrigerator if you can find room. Store it in JoBeth’s room if you can even open the door.”

  “You’re going to waste it?” she said, angry. “Where are you going, anyway?”

  “To the shop.”

  “The shop is closed. It’s nearly midnight.” Then, “Are you up to something, Ronald?”

  “Just work.”

  “Just work,” she mocked. “You come home at midnight, you stay long enough to insult me and my cooking, then you walk back out the door.”

  “There are some loose ends,” he said.

  “We need to talk about Thanksgiving. It’s coming up.”

  “Let’s do what we always do,” he said. “Talk about it and then do jack shit when Thursday comes.”

  “That’s a cruel thing to say.”

  He shrugged.

  “This stew,” she cried from the kitchen as he pinballed his way through the stacks of collectibles toward the front door, “You’re just going to waste it?”

  WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 21

  Destiny picks flowers, know it’s just like this:

  Hardest part of dyin’, is knowing what you missed

  —Jalan Crossland, “Hard Ol’ Biznis”

  25.

  2:30 A.M., Wednesday, November 21

  CODY SWUNG HIS PICKUP INTO the near empty parking lot of the First National Bar of Montana in Emigrant. His tires popped through the gravel and he pulled up so close to the entrance the front grille of his pickup nearly kissed the gray and sagging hitching post. There were only two other vehicles in the lot—an ancient Willy’s Jeep with a ragtop and a gleaming Montana State Patrol car. This was the place. Cody glanced at his wristwatch. He was on time.

  When Trooper Rick Legerski had suggested the First National Bar as a place to meet and two thirty as the time, Cody had objected.

  “Isn’t there anywhere else?”

  “You have a problem with it?”

  “I don’t drink,” Cody said.

  “That’s not what I heard. Anyway, you don’t have to. It’s the only place open this time of night. Meeting there will give me time to patrol Yankee Jim Canyon into the park and back again and look for that missing car. If you keep your eye out on the way down to Emigrant, we’ll pretty much have seen the entire route you described and the First National is right in the middle.”

  Cody grudgingly agreed.

  He drove from Helena to Livingston via Highway 12 through Townsend, Three Forks, and Bozeman. The last time he’d taken the route was two years before on his way to Yellowstone to try and save Justin. He’d been held up in Townsend and nearly burned to death in Bozeman in the Gallatin Gateway Hotel, but he’d made it through. Mission accomplished.

  This time, it was to try to find his son’s ex-girlfriend. There was a huge difference in degree and motivation, but he welcomed the diversion the situation presented—and the timing. Otherwise, he’d have been back in Helena, probably drunk and shooting out streetlights or shouting and waving his pistol on Sheriff Tubman’s front lawn. That’s the way things progressed when he went on a bender, which was the path he’d been on before Justin showed up at the bar. In a strange way, Danielle and Gracie Sullivan had probably prevented him from completely going off the rails.

  But despite the ability to focus on something besides his own predicament, he couldn’t help but speculate about his future while he drove. What would he possibly do next? Where would he get a job that paid enough to maintain his house payments? Another job in law enforcement was probably out of the question because he had two strikes against him and a reputation the size of a truck. Private security jobs paid crap in and around Helena. As he passed through Townsend he recalled working on a ranch there as a teenager and knew he was too old and lazy and inept at physical labor to even consider it again.

  Provided Jenny chose to stay with him, she might have to try and find something to help make ends meet. She worked part time at the hospital as an administrator, and her current salary allowed them a few extras. Now, though, she might have to look for a second or different job. That would be a fun conversation to have with her, he thought sourly.

  He’d once kicked around the idea of becoming a private investigator after he’d been fired from the Denver Metro PD but he discarded it at the time. Now, though, he might actually have to look into it seriously, but he wondered if there was enough work out the
re to make it pay. The PIs he’d crossed paths with in Montana were all ex-LEOs, and lived hand-to-mouth because there wasn’t enough work to go around in a rural mountain state. And he knew that even if he could figure out a way to make a living—doubtful—the work would be unsatisfying. Cody’s primary motivation, the thing that made him stay sober up to now and get up in the morning, was to crush bad guys. It was the only reason he kept going. He had a special knack for it because he was bad himself and always had been, therefore he had special insight. He doubted he could transfer his blinding passion to photographing cheating spouses or tripping up insurance claimants. And deep within himself, he always knew that if he couldn’t smash bad guys the only career he could imagine that could provide the same rush and intensity was to become one of them. Rob banks, maybe. Kill for hire. Those were things he could do. The possibility was inside him like a sleeping viper. Deep down, he always knew he could out-bad any bad guy. And outthink any run-of-the-mill cop.

  Criminals he put away were incredibly stupid—like B. G. He wouldn’t be like that. He knew not only how criminals thought, but how cops thought, too.

  He took a deep breath and rubbed his eyes. Not now, he thought. He refused to take this train of thought any farther down the track. The viper would have to remain in its nest for now.

  * * *

  After cruising through Livingston on dark and silent streets, seeing no sign of a red Ford Focus downtown or in any of the motel lots, he took Highway 89 south toward Gardiner. He drove peering both ways for the Sullivan car. There were few houses or lights, and the moon was the only source of illumination.

  He saw no cars on the side of the road matching the description, and none passed him coming from the south.

  The highway was a lonely place after midnight in southern Montana.

  * * *

  Emigrant was one of those towns that was more a location on the map than a real town, since the only building was, in fact, the First National Bar, established in 1902, or so the hand-painted sign read outside. The bar sat just off Highway 89, thirty miles south to Gardiner and twenty-three miles from Livingston to the north. Across the highway, down a two-track asphalt road and out of sight from Emigrant, was Chico Hot Springs, an ancient sanitarium turned resort. It was a shambling, funky place with a big thermal hot pool, rooms, a restaurant, and a bar where Cody had once taken Jenny and gotten in a bar fight with two fake cowboys from Bozeman. He remembered it well. Jenny left him the first time after that.

  It was known as Paradise Valley. The Gallatin Range was west, the Absarokas east. To the north behind him were the Crazy Mountains. And straight south on Highway 89 through Gardiner and the northern entrance to Yellowstone National Park. Hollywood stars and hedge fund managers played rancher on small spreads throughout the valley and the Yellowstone River flowed through it. This time of year, though, the hobby ranchers were usually decamped for the winter and the valley was dark, silent, and cold. Espresso stands were closed for the winter, and the upscale eateries stopped selling The New York Times. Meanwhile, herds of elk and buffalo drifted northward from Yellowstone Park to reclaim the grass, with wolves and grizzlies shadowing the flanks of the herds, looking for opportunities. Ranchers fed cattle hay from flatbed sleighs and snow machines replaced horses and four-wheelers. If one didn’t know better, a visitor might think every human being in the area during the winter was named “Carhartt” because of the label on most of their clothing. During the winter, the Paradise Valley became western again.

  Cody checked his phone before opening his door. On the three-hour drive south from Helena, he’d checked in frequently with Justin, Jenny, and Cassie. Justin hadn’t heard a thing from the Sullivan girls, and he was starting to panic. Jenny had talked to Ted Sullivan and their mother, who was, as Jenny put it, “going back and forth from hysterical to murderous.” She wanted to kill Ted first, and Danielle second. Jenny said she talked her down and promised to stay in touch with any news.

  Cassie had opened the e-mail sent to Cody and had done some additional research on her own from her home computer. As she came across more information she’d e-mail the link to his phone with her own comments. Because he’d been driving, Cody hadn’t had a chance to read anything yet. But she’d called with one particular item that piqued both their interest, and Cody planned to ask Legerski about it if the opportunity presented itself. But first he wanted to hear Legerski’s thoughts. Local cops—especially longtime locals in small communities—were generally in touch with the mores and culture of their constituents. Too often, Cody thought, investigators from outside the community didn’t pay enough attention to the theories of the locals. It was a lesson he’d like to pass along to Cassie Dewell.

  Cody was impressed with Cassie since they had talked in the bar. Her guilt fueled her investigation, and he didn’t want to let her off the hook until the Sullivan girls were found. The situation—him in the field, Cassie working the phones and databases at home—reminded him of the successful arrangement he’d had with his former partner, Larry Olson. They’d been a great team. The two of them had the highest percentage of solved homicides in Montana.

  When they were working, Larry punctured holes in Cody’s enthusiasms and filled the vacuum with research and evidence. Cody kept Larry operating at a high level by challenging him and threatening to go off on his own tangents. Every case, it seemed, was a race between Larry’s brains and desire to contain Cody and Cody’s kick-the-door-in fieldwork. Maybe Cassie could be his new Larry, he thought. At least for tonight, as long as he needed her. After that, he thought, he’d cut her loose for what she’d done to him.

  He got out and took a deep breath of the cold night air. The moon was bright and lit up the snowcapped, eleven-thousand-foot Emigrant Peak. The Absarokas dominated the eastern night horizon like a buzz saw that was switched off. At the foot of the mountains the river serpentined through the valley floor flanked by twin columns by massive skeletal river cottonwoods, their leaves gone. The river reflected the moon on treeless stretches. It was always ten degrees colder near Yellowstone than in Helena, and Cody noticed the difference.

  He slipped his phone into the breast pocket of his jacket and one of the .45s into the back waistband of his jeans. He tugged the hem of his jacket down to hide it.

  Then he pulled on a L&C Sheriff’s Department baseball cap with an emblem on the front and turned toward the ancient bat wing doors that lead to the alcove of the First National Bar of Montana.

  * * *

  Montana Highway Patrol Trooper Rick Legerski sat alone drinking coffee at a small table in the middle of the bar. There were no other patrons. Cody stifled a smile when he saw him: Legerski looked exactly like he’d thought he would, although thicker through the chest and bigger through the belly. He looked up with warm blue eyes.

  “Cody Hoyt?”

  “Yup.”

  “Welcome to Emigrant.”

  “Thank you.”

  The First National Bar was ancient and inviting, with pine paneling, low lights except over the pool table, and dozens of elk, moose, deer, and antelope trophy heads mounted on the walls. Local cattle brands were burned into the tabletops and plank wood floor. It smelled of sawdust, cigarette smoke, spilled beer, manure, and greasy food. Cody kind of fell in love with it.

  “Got some coffee brewed in the back,” Legerski said, nodding toward the bar. Cody followed his eyes. A large-framed bald man wearing a Carhartt vest over a red plaid hunting shirt nodded his head slightly. Cody thought the man didn’t really want to be there spinning his wheels with two customers who drank coffee. He got the impression Legerski and the bartender were old friends by the way they communicated without words.

  “Black,” Cody said to the bartender.

  Cody sat down opposite Legerski. The trooper raised his eyebrows.

  “See anything on your way down?”

  Cody shook his head. “You?”

  “Sorry. Nothing.”

  “Shit.”

  “Word is out
everywhere,” Legerski said. “I heard the description of the vehicle and the girls over the radio. They’re looking for them in four states, but nobody’s found ’em yet. Edna really got the word out fast. She’s a good one, that Edna. Tomorrow the word will get out around here by breakfast and who knows?”

  Cody nodded.

  “They just opened I-90 again,” Legerski said. “I was up there helping out for a while. But before they opened it back up the patrol up there inventoried all the cars waiting in line. No red Ford Focus with Colorado plates.”

  The bartender brought Cody a heavy mug and set a thermal carafe on the table for the both of them, then hovered. Cody read in Legerski’s expression he expected Cody to pay, which he did.

  “Extra ten bucks in there,” Cody said to the bartender, “For keeping the place open.”

  The bartender nodded in silence and clumped back over to the bar. By the way he started wiping down the counter and running water into a sink it was obvious he was closing down for the night. But his body language suggested he was listening in on them and trying not to be obvious about it.

  Cody said, “I do appreciate you taking a run down to Gardiner and checking for that car. And getting out of bed to do it.”

  “No problem.”

  “Do you have any kids?” Cody asked.

  Legerski shook his head. “Not technically,” he said. “My second wife had a couple of future wards of the state, but we’re divorced. But no, none of my own.”

  Cody sipped the coffee. It was strong and bitter and hot and it burned the tip of his tongue. “Jesus,” he said.

  “I should have warned you,” Legerski said. “Jimmy’s not known for his coffee.”

  Legerski produced a detailed Montana Department of Transportation map, unfolded it, and spread it across the table. For the next few minutes he pointed out all the side roads and wrong turns the girls could have taken between where they last communicated as they entered the park to Livingston. Cody listened patiently but found the speculation to be of no value. He’d already gone over it all in his mind. Sure, they could be anywhere within the park or in Wyoming, Idaho, or Montana. But that wasn’t the point and it didn’t help explain why they’d stopped communicating or why their distinctive car hadn’t been located.