by C. J. Box
“And here I was thinking you cared about my health and welfare,” Joe said.
“Someone has to care about it,” she said. “You certainly don’t. Don’t you think you’re getting a little old for this sort of thing? Don’t you think maybe it’s time to grow up and settle down and get a real job that provides for your family? A job where you can come home at night and be there for your wife and daughters?”
Joe said, “Don’t beat around the bush, Missy. Tell me what you really think.”
“It needs to be said.”
“Not all of us can be media moguls. Or married to one.”
Her eyes flashed. “Earl Alden turned a million-dollar inheritance into a seven-hundred-million-dollar empire.”
“That first million probably helped,” Joe said.
“You’re over forty years old,” she said, “and your life consists of running around through the woods like a schoolboy—or a kid playing cowboys and Indians.”
She leaned forward and her eyes became slits. She said, “For the sake of my daughter, maybe it’s time to put away childish things.”
Joe didn’t have a comeback and he couldn’t say what he was thinking, which was, Maybe you’re right.
TALKING WITH THE GIRLS was awkward, he thought. He got the feeling they agreed with that sentiment because they seemed to look at everything in the room besides him. They didn’t like seeing him sick or injured in a hospital bed any more than he liked being seen by them in one.
“You look like you’re doing better,” Sheridan said.
“I am.”
“We’re all ready to go home.”
“Me, too,” Joe said.
“Did Mom tell you about basketball? Coach is mad at me already, and he said if I missed practice so I could come see you, I wouldn’t play anymore.”
“I’m sorry,” Joe said.
“I’d rather be here,” she said, and smiled sadly. Joe reached out and squeezed her hand.
“Billings sucks,” April said. “Billings is nearly as boring as Saddlestring.”
“Our little ray of sunshine,” Joe commented. April scowled at him.
Sheridan said to April, “Maybe you should have stayed in Chicago.”
“Maybe I should have,” April shot back.
“Girls, please,” Marybeth said, sadness in her eyes.
Sheridan huffed and crossed her arms and looked away. April narrowed her eyes and glared at her, reminding Joe of a rattler coiling to strike.
April looked older than she was, he thought, which was perfectly understandable given the life she’d led. Her Wyoming reentry had not gone smoothly. She was sullen, sarcastic, and passive-aggressive toward her foster parents. When Marybeth complained to Joe about her, Joe responded by reminding Marybeth that April was fifteen and her behavior was fairly normal for her age. When Joe complained to Marybeth about April’s sullen attitude, Marybeth defended her foster daughter with the same reasoning. Both wondered if they’d be able to wait her out, all the while hoping she’d become sunny and productive and not wreck the dynamics of the family in the meantime. Meanwhile, the process for adoption had begun but stalled due to the complexity of April’s legal status. According to their lawyer, the problems weren’t insurmountable, but they’d take time to sort through. It would be costly, and Joe and Marybeth had asked him to set the case aside until Joe returned permanently to Saddlestring and could help oversee the progress. Since then, April hadn’t asked about how the adoption was going, and Marybeth hadn’t brought it up. The silent impasse, Joe knew, would have to be broken soon.
“There’s a nice mall,” Lucy said about Billings, ignoring April. “Mom said she’d take us there this afternoon.”
“Good,” Joe said, winking at Marybeth.
“Wow,” April said, rolling her eyes, “A mall. These people in Montana have thought of everything.”
“April,” Sheridan moaned.
April gestured toward the television set mounted on the ceiling that Joe had yet to turn on. “They’ve even got television, but probably, like, one channel.”
Joe searched in vain for the remote control to prove to her Montana had cable, but he couldn’t locate it.
“I just want everyone to be happy,” Lucy said, grinning. “Starting with me.”
“It always starts with you,” April said.
“It’s got to start somewhere.” Lucy grinned, but her eyes showed a glint of triumph for the comeback.
“Nice one,” Sheridan said.
“Get me out of here,” April said to no one in particular.
Marybeth took them to the Rimrock Mall.
12
TWELVE SLEEP COUNTY SHERIFF MCLANAHAN SAID, “KNOCK-KNOCK” but didn’t actually knock when he entered Joe’s hospital room with a deputy trailing. McLanahan was Joe’s age and the two had known each other for ten years, since Joe had moved to Saddlestring and McLanahan was a nascent deputy under the legendary Sheriff O. R. “Bud” Barnum. Barnum had vanished off the face of the earth five years before, and there had always been whispers that Nate Romanowski had had something to do with it. Unfortunately, McLanahan had run for sheriff and won as a protégé of Barnum. He’d adopted the same hamfisted, authoritarian approach to the job that Barnum had perfected. Nothing happened in the county that McLanahan wasn’t aware of or involved in, but at the same time he managed to keep an arm’s-length distance from the machinations, using intermediaries—often his team of four dull-witted cookie-cutter deputies—so if the situation went sour he could claim no knowledge of it.
Joe knew McLanahan disliked him and resented his presence, and he was aware that behind the scenes the sheriff had tried to get him reassigned or fired outright. The sheriff saw Joe as unwanted competition, and their clashes over the years had got more bitter, again a continuation of Barnum’s reign. Joe hadn’t seen McLanahan in the year he’d been in Baggs, but their relationship resumed where it had left off, when the sheriff said, “I’m startin’ to wonder if they’ve got you in the right kind of hospital here, Joe. I’m startin’ to think maybe it might be best to put you in one of those facilities with the rubber walls and elevator music because there’s a bunch of us fellers startin’ to believe you’ve gone crazy as a damned tick.”
He ended the sentence with a tinny uplift and a rural flourish, and the deputy behind him snorted a laugh of pure obligation.
Joe winced and fished for the control that powered his hospital bed so he could raise the head of it. He didn’t like the sheriff seeing him prone or in his stupid cotton gown. The fabric, he’d discovered to his horror, was decorated with a pattern of tiny yellow ducks. As the motor whirred and the head of the bed raised, Joe said, “I could have gone the rest of my life without seeing you again, sheriff.”
McLanahan clucked his tongue as if to say, Too bad for you, then settled heavily in a straight-backed chair to Joe’s right where Marybeth had been for two days. She’d left her sweater over the back, but McLanahan either didn’t notice or didn’t care.
McLanahan, originally from Virginia, had long ago completed a physical and mental transformation from a hotheaded deputy who spoke in a rapid-fire cadence to a slow-talking Western character who collected and used frontier folkisms that often made absolutely no sense to Joe. He wore a scuffed brown leather vest with a five-star sheriff’s badge, a big silver buckle, jeans, and crepe-soled cowboy boots. He owned three horses he’d never ridden that served as props for campaign posters and a twenty-acre parcel he referred to as his “ranch.” His huge mustache now stretched from his upper lip to his lower jaw and obscured his mouth, although his eyes were still sharp, small, and devious and gave him away as someone more into calculation and mythmaking than cow’s punching, Joe thought. The sheriff cocked a heel over the lower railing of Joe’s bed and removed his brown sweat-stained hat and fitted it on his raised knee. McLanahan was losing his hair, Joe noted, and he’d gained thirty pounds since he’d last seen him. The deputy, whose nametag read SOLLIS, was dressed in a crisp departmen
t uniform shirt and dark black jeans. He had a military buzz cut and dull, hooded eyes. McLanahan had long ago established a policy that the only Western character in the sheriff’s department would be the sheriff.
“Two hours ago, I got off the phone with the state DCI boys and Sheriff Baird down in Carbon County,” McLanahan said. “They’re coming down the mountain as we speak. What they told me made me climb in my rig and drive two hours north across the state line so I could tell you in person.”
Joe nodded. After Joe gave his version of events to the sheriff, Baird had quickly requested a team of investigators from the state to ride with him and his deputies into the mountains after the Grim Brothers.
“Does this have to do with some kind of inconsistency in my statements?” Joe asked. “An agent named McCue from DCI was asking me more questions earlier today.”
“I don’t know him,” McLanahan said. “And no, it has nothing to do with him, whoever the hell he is. Naw, what I heard I found out from the search team themselves.”
Indeed, Joe thought.
“Unlike a certain game warden,” McLanahan said, “the search team didn’t misplace their communications gear, so I’ve been getting updates every few hours for the past three days. There’s eleven men on horseback been all over those mountains. They been everywhere you described. Guess what they’ve found?”
Joe felt his mouth go dry.
“Nothin’,” McLanahan said. “Not a single goddamn thing to corroborate your tall tale.”
Joe shook his head. He remembered describing the saddle slope where he’d found the arrow, his ride with Caleb to their camp, and the location of Terri Wade’s cabin. Although it had been dark when he found the cabin and escaped from it, he vividly recalled the cut-back where it was and the distance from the creek.
“That’s impossible,” Joe said. “They couldn’t locate anything?”
McLanahan said, “Nope.”
“My horses and my tack?”
“Nope. Oh,” McLanahan said, raising a knobby finger, “let me take that back. They did find your campsite by some lake on the way up. All that proves is that you did go up there into those mountains, but as far as I know, that hasn’t been in dispute.”
Joe shook his head. “I don’t understand.”
“Neither do they, except maybe you’re completely full of shit on this whole deal.” He lowered his eyelids. “I always say if you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging.”
Joe looked away. “It makes no sense. I mean, I can see how it might be hard to find that little pup-tent camp of the brothers. It was deep in the timber and there wasn’t a good trail to it. I might not be able to find it myself right away. But on top they should have found the remains of my horses, and where that cabin was burned down.”
“Provided those things exist somewhere other than your imagination,” McLanahan said. He raised a large hand with his fingers out and used his other index finger to count out and bend the fingers down one-by-one. “No brothers. No burned-down cabin. No crazy woman. No long-lost girl runner. No damned wolves. No . . .” McLanahan stared at his fist in mock puzzlement, then said, “I plumb ran out of fingers. We got more lies here than I got fingers to count on.”
Sollis stifled a smile.
Said McLanahan, twisting the knife, “And no one can find your missing person named Terri Wade. As you can imagine, there are three or four women with that name around the country, but all of them are accounted for. But your gal—she doesn’t exist. And you know in this day and age, people can’t simply disappear without leaving a record.”
Joe said, “That’s the name she gave me. It’s not like I saw any ID. She could have been lying.”
“A lot of that going around,” McLanahan said, and Sollis chuckled.
“They must be in the wrong drainage,” Joe said, ignoring them both. “It’s easy to get lost up there. I couldn’t give coordinates because they took my GPS. . . .”
“No GPS!” McLanahan said. “I forgot about that. And no satellite phone, either. No nothing.”
“I’m not lying,” Joe said.
“I’m sure you’re convinced of that. Fabulists become convinced of their own stories.”
“Why would I make up a story?” Joe said. “Look around you, McLanahan. We’re in a hospital. These injuries are real. Do you think I wanted to be here?”
“It ain’t so bad,” he said. “I seen some of the nurses.”
“I need to talk to Sheriff Baird,” Joe said. “I need to hear this from him myself.”
“Feel free. He should be down into town tomorrow or the next day. I’m sure he’d love to talk with you, too. This search they just been on wiped out most of his discretionary budget for the rest of the year, payin’ all those men to go up that mountain to find a whole lot of nothing. Yes, Baird is a pretty crabby man right now.”
Joe wasn’t sure what to say. The news had taken the wind out of him.
“Well,” McLanahan said as way-all, sitting up in his chair and slapping his thighs, “I best be getting back to the office. I just wanted to make sure you heard the happy news straight from the horse’s mouth. In case the governor called or some reporter. If I was you, I’d claim chemical dependence and say you were checking into rehab. That seems to work pretty well for celebrity types such as yourself.”
McLanahan stood and clamped on his hat. His eyes sparkled. Joe realized how much McLanahan hated him for closing cases in the sheriff’s jurisdiction without involving his department. He remembered how angry the sheriff had been when Governor Rulon asked him to get out of the way two years before. He’d harbored his bitterness and could now unleash it.
“Look,” Joe said, “I’ll talk with Baird and the DCI when I can and try to figure out where they went wrong up there. It doesn’t make any sense, unless the Grim Brothers were able to wipe out all the evidence. I wouldn’t put it past them.”
“Yeah,” McLanahan said, smiling contemptuously beneath his mustache, “according to your statement they seem larger than life itself! Like supermen of the mountains. You shoot ’em in the face and in the chest and they still keep coming, like . . . mountain zombies!”
Which made Sollis laugh out loud.
“What are you saying?” Joe asked. “That I put myself in here for some reason and made it all up?”
McLanahan raised his hand and formed a pistol with his fist and fired it at Joe. “Bingo,” he said.
Joe shook his head, stunned.
“Do you remember a deputy I had once named Hayder?” the sheriff asked. At the sound of the name, Sollis rolled his eyes. Joe said nothing.
“Well, Ol’ Hayder was in his cruiser one night up on Bighorn Road. Somebody had reported high school kids drag racing up and down that road, so dispatch sent him up there to find out what was going on. He hid his unit in a bunch of trees and waited, hour after hour, for some of them speed demons to show up so he could make an arrest and get out of my doghouse. But he got real bored, because there was nothin’ happening, so he started fiddling around with his Taser. I don’t know what the hell he was thinkin’, but somehow he shot himself with it. Right in the neck!”
Sollis went, “Ha-ha-ha,” and wiped at the nonexistent tears in his eyes, even though he’d likely heard the story a dozen times.
McLanahan continued, “Well, if you’ve ever been hit by a Taser, you know what it can do to your bodily functions when that current goes through you, and Ol’ Hayder soiled his pants. He threw the door open and rolled around on the ground outside the car with muscle spasms. When he finally recovered, he was too damned embarrassed to tell anyone at the department what had happened, so he made up a crazy story about being jumped by three bikers who he claimed ambushed him and got his Taser out of his belt and used it on him while he bravely fought them off. He even named a couple of lowlifes in town we’d been after for a while as the assailants, and we had them arrested. Hayder almost got away with it, too, except one of those drag-racing kids had seen the whol
e thing and videoed it with his cell phone camera. It seems the speed demons knew all about Hayder in those trees, so they were gonna sneak up on him and slash his tires or some other kind of damned kid prank. The kid who took the video got picked up for careless driving a few days later and told Sollis here he’d show him something if we’d throw away the ticket. He got his phone out and we watched it and busted a gut. Ol’ Hayder didn’t show up for work the next day, and we ain’t seen him since.”
Joe said nothing.
“So what I’m sayin’,” McLanahan finished as he paused at the door, “is I can see a scenario where maybe you was intoxicated on liquor or your own ego and you dropped your shotgun. It went off, peppering your shoulder and neck. Your horses reared and dumped you and you injured your leg. I’m thinkin’ maybe you landed on a downed log and a sharp branch stuck through your thigh. Then the horses ran off and left you there with nothin’ at all. So being the big-shot celebrity you are in the middle of nowhere, you didn’t want to tell the governor what happened, so you made up one hell of a good story.”
“Get out,” Joe said. “You’re a damned idiot and an embarrassment.”
McLanahan’s eyes flashed and he started to come out of his chair. Joe didn’t back down. McLanahan apparently thought better of getting into a fistfight with a man in a hospital bed and said, “The easiest way to eat crow is while it’s warm. The colder it gets, the harder it is to swaller.”
Joe said, “It’s hard to believe the West was won with stupid sayings like that.”
“The only thing I don’t like about this whole deal,” McLanahan said, ignoring Joe, “is that I understand you’re coming back to Saddlestring. Everything else, though, just tickles me to no end.”
“Let me give you some of your own cornpone advice,” Joe said. “Never miss a chance to shut up. Now get out.”
“And give my best to the lovely Mrs. Pickett.”
AS A RESULT OF MCLANAHAN’S VISIT, Joe gripped the railings of his bed with both hands and stared at the blank screen of the television. There, he saw a distorted reflection of himself at what looked like the edge of an abyss.