by C. J. Box
“Who is the boy?”
“His name is Bo Simmons. He seems nice. He even came to the house to pick her up. He works at the western wear store with her. He’s nothing like Dallas Cates.”
“He better not be,” Joe said.
Dallas Cates was in the Wyoming penitentiary in Rawlins serving two to four years for wanton destruction of big-game animals, taking game animals without a license, using an unregistered snowmobile to harass wildlife, and several other misdemeanors that Joe and County Attorney Dulcie Schalk had cobbled together to put him away. The sentence by Judge Hewitt had been unusually harsh and Joe surmised the judge had wanted to put Dallas away also. Joe only wished they could have come up with more to charge him with. Dallas Cates was a time bomb who would likely go off after he was released. Every night he spent in prison was a good night for Joe and his family.
T. Cletus Glatt had further inflamed the situation when he wrote an editorial several months before titled “Will Dallas Cates Come Back for Revenge?”
Dallas’s mother, Brenda Cates, was a paraplegic in the Wyoming Women’s Center in Lusk, where she was going to spend the rest of her life after being convicted of kidnapping, conspiracy, assault with a deadly weapon, accessory to murder, and ten other felony charges. It was a good place for her to be, Joe thought. Even though Dallas might be a threat when he got out, Brenda scared Joe even more.
“And I got a text from your daughter Sheridan,” Marybeth continued. Joe knew when Marybeth said your daughter that bad news would follow. “She said since the weather is so nice she’s going camping with friends this weekend. She didn’t say where or how many friends, but I’m guessing it isn’t all girls.”
Joe moaned and closed his eyes.
“I know she’s twenty-one and she can do what she wants, but, well, you know . . .” she said, trailing off.
“I know. But I don’t think you should worry. She’s smart and tough like her mom.”
“Her mom was twenty-one once,” Marybeth said.
“Lucky I saved you,” Joe said.
“Very funny. So what are you up to?”
“I’m sitting by myself in the dark next to a stinky campfire in a desert in the middle of nowhere,” Joe said. “I ate beef stew for dinner out of the can.”
“Oh, Joe. Aren’t you getting a little old for that?”
“Yup. The ground gets harder to sleep on every year.”
“I’ll think of you tonight in my empty nest,” she said, flirting with him.
“Now you’re piling it on.”
She laughed. He liked to make her laugh.
He said, “I haven’t found Nate, but I may have a lead on him. I’ll let you know tomorrow.”
“Be careful.”
“I always am.”
“Ha!”
• • •
AT TWO-THIRTY IN THE MORNING, Joe woke up suddenly and for a moment he didn’t know where he was. Daisy was crowding him in the little tent and she was up because she’d been awakened by something, too.
He rolled to his side and unzipped the front tent flap. Cold seeped in. The campfire had burned down to embers.
It was still outside and the stars were hard and white. There were so many of them it seemed they were pressing down on his tent from above.
He thought he’d heard two distant shots in rapid succession, but he couldn’t be sure of it. Gunshots in the middle of nowhere weren’t that unusual anyplace in Wyoming, he knew, but he’d not seen a single other human all day except for the cigarette-smoking man in the shed. Perhaps, he thought, instead of gunshots it was one of those balanced rocks finally toppling over.
Then there was a third.
He sat up and simply listened.
Silence.
Then there was something else: a high whining sound in the distance. It sounded like motorcycles or snowmobiles, and it didn’t make sense.
The whine came from the south where the old sheep ranch was.
• • •
HE LEFT HIS CAMP as it was and he drove back down the two-track. It was too cold to leave his windows open to listen, but every few minutes he’d stop and power one down to confirm that the sound was getting louder.
Joe parked short of the top of the rise he’d been on earlier and he made Daisy stay in the cab. He kept low and crab-walked over the top until he could see into the swale again.
He eased down so he could lie flat, but a dozen cactus needles stung his belly. He cursed and moved to the side, then fitted binoculars to his eyes.
Small vehicles that he now identified as four-wheel ATVs were streaming across the desert floor toward the sheep ranch from the east. He counted five, then six. Their engines were loud in the still night, and their headlights pointed all over the ground. They were driving erratically.
He heard someone whoop, and he thought: They’re drunk or high. That’s why they’re driving like idiots.
The ATVs got to the ranch and the first one vanished inside the outer shed. The rest of the caravan followed, and finally all the motors were shut off. He heard someone laugh and there was loud drunken chatter—both male and female voices.
It took five minutes for them to quiet down.
They’d come from the northeast, he thought. They hadn’t used established roads but had gone cross-country.
From the direction of the Mustang Café.
• • •
JOE WATCHED THE SHEDS for a while, looking for lights being switched on or for people emerging from the shed where the ATVs had gone. Nothing. It was as if the riders had vanished into a black hole.
Then he saw figures in the shadows between the sheds. They were busy doing something: pitching small dome tents. They climbed inside the tents and it was silent.
It seemed like an odd place to camp, he thought.
Grunting, he pushed himself to his feet and he let the binoculars dangle from their strap on his chest. He brushed himself off, and as he started back for his truck he saw a flash of lights in his peripheral vision.
Headlights, two of them, coming out of the middle shed. The vehicle appeared to be coming up the access road beyond the locked gate.
Toward him.
Although he couldn’t believe anyone had seen him up there in the dark, Joe double-timed it over the top of the hill and threw himself into the cab of his truck and drove away quickly.
• • •
WHEN HE RETURNED to his camp, his headlights revealed that someone, or something, had been there in his absence. His tent was flattened, his sleeping bag balled up in the dirt, his cooking kit and stove smashed flat.
He said, “What have we gotten ourselves into, Daisy?”
• • •
IT HAD BEEN a stampeding herd of wild horses. Dozens, maybe as many as thirty or forty, had run through the camp in a tight enough bunch that they’d demolished everything in it. He could see their hoof tracks on the surface. Some of the horses had been so heavy, their hooves had broken through the hard silica into the dry clay below.
As he surveyed what was left of his camp in the headlights of his pickup, he thanked God he had taken Daisy and they hadn’t been there when the herd thundered through. He cursed under his breath and kicked at the shredded tent with the tip of his boot.
Then he heard the sound of an oncoming vehicle out in the darkness. He guessed it was the same one that had left the middle shed, coming his way.
• • •
JOE QUICKLY GATHERED UP his smashed cooking gear and threw it into a pile in the middle of the tent fabric, then carried the bundle back to his truck. He heaved the bundle into the bed and scrambled in.
Since he’d left the truck running, it took seconds to throw it into reverse to get out of there. The starlight was bright enough that he thought he could navigate his way out of Adobe Town by his sneak lights alone.
As he started a three-point turn, he saw the nose of a dark pickup truck appear on the southern horizon about two hundred feet away. The occupants had also shut off their headlights. Since they’d arrived so quickly, Joe assumed they’d deliberately followed him and he thought, Okay, let’s see what they want. He put the truck into park and didn’t begin his maneuver.
“Get ready, Daisy,” he said. He wasn’t sure if a confrontation was coming or if he’d feel compelled to race away. He could feel his throat constrict with fear.
Joe reached down and touched the receiver of his shotgun, which was wedged muzzle-down between the seats. He’d reloaded it with double-ought buckshot that was devastating at close range.
The truck on the horizon revved its motor and reversed, then appeared again with its rear end pointed at Joe. There was a camper shell of some kind on the bed of the vehicle.
Had they not seen him down there? Or had they decided to go back?
Then he saw the figures of two men get out of the truck and run to the back. One crawled inside and the other returned to the cab.
Odd.
What did they have in the back of the truck? Scenarios raced through his mind—a heavy weapon of some kind, a machine gun, artillery—and he reached for the gearshift again and shoved it into reverse and stomped on the accelerator while at the same time keeping his eyes on the black maw of the back of the pickup.
But there was no flash of gunfire, no projectile. Just a loud clicking sound, like an angry electrical short. He felt his cell phone vibrate in his breast pocket as if he were receiving a call, even though he knew there was no signal out there.
Then his truck went silent and died, although it still rolled back a few feet before clumps of sagebrush slowed the tires to a complete stop. The steering wheel became stiff. Somehow, he’d killed the engine.
He looked up at the open back of the pickup in a panic as he turned the ignition key. Nothing, not even the grinding of the starter. In fact, the interior lights and the instrument panel were dead as well.
His first thought was that they’d fired something into his engine block and disabled it. But that didn’t make sense: there had been no physical impact to the front of his truck.
As he twisted uselessly on the key, he saw a figure emerge from the pickup, close up the back, and return to the cab. With that, the truck drove away in the direction it had come.
• • •
WHEN JOE CLIMBED OUT of his vehicle, the silence and darkness were overwhelming. He noticed that the interior lights of the cab hadn’t come on when he opened the door. He also noted a bitter and slightly burned odor in the air, like ozone just before a lightning storm. But the sky was absolutely cloudless.
He shook his head. Although he was no expert mechanic, he’d been forced, over the years, to do minor engine repairs to his trucks, snowmobiles, and ATVs out in the field. On several occasions, he’d been in remote locations where it would have taken days for a mechanic to arrive. Usually, though, the problem was something he could handle: a flat tire, battery cables shaken loose by rough roads, getting his axle high-centered on a rock. But when it came to getting a motor started without a spare battery or computer diagnosis, he was lost.
Then he remembered the strange vibration he’d felt in his breast pocket. For a split second after it happened, he’d thought he’d been shot. But now when he reached up and patted his breast pocket, he felt only the solid square form of his iPhone beneath the fabric. Even though he knew he didn’t have cell reception, he dug it out. It was dead as well. He spent several minutes trying to reboot it. He knew there had been plenty of charge left in it, but it wouldn’t turn on.
Feeling panic start to rise, he tested his satellite phone, both the portable and dash-mounted GPS systems, and his digital camera. His wristwatch was frozen at three-eighteen in the morning. Everything was dead, dead, dead.
And he was at least thirty-eight miles from the highway.
Daisy sat down at his feet and looked up at the sky, no doubt wondering what Joe was searching for up there.
—— PART FOUR ——
THE RANCH
A conspiracy is everything that ordinary life is not.
—DON DELILLO, Libra
15
Earlier the night before, Nate Romanowski had followed the tire tracks of the fleeing vehicle driven by Man Number Three until he reached the locked gate with the sprawling old ranch below. He drove a short distance up the hill and pulled the staples from the fence post and lowered the rusted strands of barbed wire so he could drive over them in his Jeep. He’d decided not to approach the old ranch compound head-on, where he assumed Man Number Three had gone. There was too much open ground between the fence and the buildings, and therefore no possibility of getting down there unobserved.
Instead, he’d driven along inside the fence line to the west in four-wheel-drive low with his lights out, using the starlight to navigate by. While the structures in the far-off swale were in view, he nervously looked over his shoulder for lights or any sign of activity. He didn’t breathe easily until he’d driven four miles from the gate and had dropped over a large hill that obscured him from the buildings or anyone in them who might be watching.
The fence had been built decades before, and the farther he got from the locked gate, the more it deteriorated in condition. Rusted metal T-posts gave way to gnarled posts made of greasewood and long stretches where the wire had fallen to the ground. It had been a long time since the fence had been maintained, and whoever had built it in the first place appeared to have lost their enthusiasm the farther they got from the gate in the road. Eventually, the fence was no more than broken or leaning sticks of wood with barbed wire looped around them.
Nate assumed there was a story there somewhere, either a ranch hand who started slacking off once he got out of view of the ranch, or the rancher himself who realized the futility of fencing a desert.
• • •
HIS PROGRESS WAS STOPPED by a deep dry wash that had walls too steep to descend or to drive out of in his vehicle, so he killed the motor and climbed out to reconnoiter.
The wash fed an ancient, dry streambed that curled out into the valley and meandered east on the valley floor. The dry creek looked substantial, although there was sand on the bed of it instead of flowing water. It was likely, Nate thought, that the only time it functioned as a creek was during flash floods. Judging by the contours of the valley out in front of him, he surmised that it eventually passed through the old ranch compound. Whoever had owned the place, he thought, had probably hoped at one time that the stream would provide reliable water for the inhabitants and the stock.
Nope.
• • •
THE DRY STREAM was a good place to hole up, though, he thought. He was able to drive the Jeep down along the edge of the steep wash until it flattened out near the valley floor, then drive back up until the walls narrowed and closed around it. That way, his vehicle couldn’t be seen from either the valley floor to the south or from the north above where he’d come. Anyone peering across the broken treeless country from either the east or the west would look right over the top of it. The tattered beige canvas cover on the top of his Jeep was approximately the same color as the terrain, so it was unlikely it’d be spotted even from above by an aircraft or one of Tyrell and Volk’s spy satellites.
Nate wasn’t sure why he got so much pleasure out of confounding Tyrell and Volk and keeping them guessing as to his location and actions until he was ready to reveal both—but he did.
• • •
HE MOVED HIS HOODED BIRDS under a rock overhang in the wash and secured them by tying their jesses to ancient roots that curled out of the wall face like exposed steel cables. Then he sat with his boots on the sandy gravel of the streambed with his back to the wall. He covered himself with a ratty wool blanket he kept under his seat that smelled faintly of gas
oline and falcon excrement. Then he closed his eyes and tried to get some sleep.
• • •
AT TWO-THIRTY HE HEARD the far-off sounds of whining ATVs in the distance. The sounds were coming from the east—from the direction of the old ranch compound where the tire tracks had led.
He sat up, placed his .500 across his thighs, and waited to see if the vehicles would show up.
They didn’t, and fifteen minutes later it was quiet again.
Something, he thought, was going on at that old ranch. And whatever it might be was important enough to someone to dispatch two thugs, one with a sword and one with an automatic weapon, to rub him out.
He thought, I’ve got you right where I want you.
• • •
TWO HOURS BEFORE DAWN, Nate awoke to find himself face-to-face with a pair of pale yellow canine eyes.
The skinny coyote had been patrolling the length of the dry streambed, tail swishing from side to side, when it realized there was a vehicle blocking its route and the sharp, unfamiliar smell of a man and three birds in the air.
Nate opened his eyes when the coyote was two feet away to his right side, cautiously making its way up the wash wall toward the hooded birds.
He grasped the grip of his revolver and swung it in a tight arc through the air. The barrel struck the coyote between the eyes and the animal yelped like a domestic dog and tumbled down the incline to the dry streambed, where it scrambled unsteadily to its feet and loped away as if drunk.
“Hey, coyote,” Nate growled. “Leave my birds alone.”
He kept the coyote in his sights until it vanished among the scrub on the dark valley floor, but he didn’t cock his weapon or pull the trigger. There had been enough of that already, he thought. Coyotes did coyote things. No reason to kill it.
• • •
BUT THERE WAS REASON to secure his birds to their makeshift perches inside his Jeep so no more predators could get at them.
That’s how he left them in the predawn, when he set out on foot in the dry streambed with his .500 under his arm in its shoulder holster. He left the Ranch Rifle in his Jeep. He wore a small daypack containing two quarts of water, binoculars, ammunition, and the satellite phone.