Paradise Valley

by C. J. Box

  Raheem said he was impressed.

  The boat overtook the supply raft and soon the raft was behind them were it was supposed to be.

  The sirens got louder as they floated through Grimstad. Kyle caught glimpses of sheriff’s department SUVs with their lights flashing up on the bluffs. The column of smoke was now flattening out in the sky and it looked like a giant black T.

  He glanced at the few homes along the river as they floated by, hoping no one was looking out at them. He was glad they had waited until Monday, until school resumed, before they embarked on the adventure. There were fewer people out and about during the week.

  * * *

  AFTER HALF AN HOUR, the sirens faded although he could still hear them in the distance behind the boat. The quiet hush of the river took over: slow flowing water, the lap of it against the hull of the boat, a splash when he lowered one oar or the other.

  The sun broke out of the clouds and bathed them in yellow light. The river turned from dark gray to green in an instant. Just as fast, the temperature seemed to warm ten degrees.

  As they floated around the first big bend they encountered a dozen geese who paddled ahead of them in formation. When the boat got closer a secret signal was sent and they all took off in a noisy cacophony of honks and flapping wings.

  “That was cool,” Raheem said. “Where’s that .22? Maybe we ought to shoot one of ’em and have goose for dinner, bro.”

  “Do you know how to cook a goose?”

  “No,” he laughed.

  “Me either.”

  Kyle recalled the only time he’d ever seen a dead goose. It was two years before when his mother was alive and living with T-Lock, her boyfriend at the time. T-Lock’s pal Winkie went hunting and brought them a huge dead goose. Kyle had never seen such a huge bird up close before. He’d been fascinated with the depth of the feathers on its breast and the size of its stiff black feet.

  When Winkie left, T-Lock marched the carcass out to the dumpster and threw it inside.

  T-Lock, Winkie, and his mother. All dead.

  To Kyle, it sometimes seemed like he’d made them up in the first place.

  * * *

  KYLE COULDN’T GET over the feelings that grew within him as they floated further away from town. The river sounds came into sharper focus. The early fall colors of the trees seemed more vibrant. He could smell the musky vegetation on the banks and the cold metallic odor of the river itself.

  The whole world was opening up in front of him, it seemed.

  When he looked over at Raheem he could see that his friend felt the same way. He was beaming.

  “This is so fucking cool I can’t believe it,” Raheem said. He was lounging in the back of the boat with his feet propped up on the bench seat and his fingers trailing in the water.

  “Just think,” Raheem said. “We could have been in that school right now doin’ nothing. But look at us. LOOK AT US!”

  Kyle grinned and closed his eyes for a moment, drinking it in.

  CHAPTER

  SIX

  TWENTY MINUTES BEFORE and a half mile away from the industrial park, Amanda Lee Hackl was washing breakfast and dinner dishes in the sink of her kitchen when she heard a distant boom. Then another, bigger boom that shook the glass in the window over the sink and rattled the china in her hutch.

  With her hands in the warm water, she leaned forward and peered out the window and squinted. There was nothing much to see: empty lots in a subdivision on a bluff filled with wide empty streets and unfinished houses and lots stacked with building materials that were starting to gray and warp from exposure to the sun and the weather. It was obvious that the subdivision had been created rapidly, started, and then stopped.

  That she and Harold were the only actual residents on the block could be chalked up to her husband’s unerring gift for bad timing in all things financial. She was still bitter about it. He’d convinced her to pour their life savings into the down payment of the show home they now lived in before the developer finished the subdivision. That way, Harold said, “they’d be on the ground floor of something great!” So they sold their double-wide and moved. A month later, the bottom of the oil market fell out and the developer and his employees scattered into the wind.

  When asked where her home was located, Amanda liked to say that she lived in the “Subdivision of Sadness.” Especially when Harold was there to hear her say it.

  So hearing anything outside, especially two explosions that rocked the house, was unusual and, she thought, interesting.

  Because it gave her something to do.

  * * *

  AMANDA WAS A STOCKY BROWN-HAIRED woman wearing a Santa Claus sweatshirt, jeans, and Crocs. She loved the Christmas season so much that she decorated her house earlier every year and she wore festive clothing in the early fall because it made her happy. Now that she’d been laid off from her job at Walmart she had very little to do after Harold went to his job delivering parts in the Bakken. She’d tried to knit, quilt, sew, and do needlepoint, but she found out she hated them all. She’d listened to nearly every audiobook in the Bakken County Library, many of them twice.

  There were no neighbors to gossip with and there were only so many days she could drive downtown and funnel through Main Street with oil field traffic and not lose her mind.

  Today she couldn’t even do that because Harold’s truck wouldn’t start in the garage that morning—he’d left his pickup door ajar all night and the battery ran down—so he’d taken her 2009 Kia Spectra to work. So she was stuck, in more ways than one.

  She dried her hands on a towel while she walked through the living room and out through the front door.

  Amanda noted that the framed high school graduation photographs of her two children—stolid, married Brian and divorced, frowsy Tammy—were tilted at odd angles on the wall as a result of the explosions. She made a note to herself to straighten them later.

  She stood on her concrete porch and continued to dry her hands while she looked around. The unfinished houses on either side of hers were framed but not yet covered by sheeting. The rest of the “houses” on the block were no more than concrete foundations set in the ground.

  There was no frost on the grass because there was no grass, only bare frozen dirt.

  She turned toward the south and was surprised to see a man standing with his back to her on the edge of the chalky bluff that overlooked the town of Grimstad. He was a block and a half away.

  There were no pedestrians in the Subdivision of Sadness. Not even door-to-door solicitors ventured up there. The only people Amanda ever encountered were drunk teenagers roaring around throwing empty beer cans on Friday nights and an occasional patrol by the sheriff’s department.

  Rather than call out to him, Amanda decided to see for herself what he was up to. Plus, the edge of the bluff would give her a very good view of what had happened in town.

  She walked across the dirt of her own property and over the “lawns” of the adjacent houses without using the sidewalk. She knew no one was going to object.

  As she got closer to him she could see a fist of black smoke punch from the distant industrial park into the pale blue North Dakota sky. She also noticed the tan Ford F-150 CrewCab pickup parked at the curb further up the bluff. It had North Dakota plates and it looked like a farm vehicle. There was a tangle of rusted baling wire in the back of it and a shovel poked out from a slot in the top of the bedwall.

  So he hadn’t arrived on foot after all.

  “Hey there,” she said when she was less than ten feet away from him, “did you see what happened?”

  He turned, startled.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to sneak up on ya.”

  He was an unremarkable man, she thought. Late fifties, early sixties. He was square-built but doughy and he had large hands and a wide pale Slavic face. Dyed jet-black hair and drooping mustache, thick plastic horn-rimmed glasses. Ball cap without a logo. He wore an oversized worn Carhartt parka with a hoo
d, denims stained with grease, and scuffed heavy trucker boots with thick crepe soles. He looked like a lot of the men around town: oil field workers, tool pushers, ex-farmers hustling for a job. He could be Harold, she thought.

  He said, “I saw it happen. I was driving down the road and I looked out. There were two explosions down there. I can still see them in my eyes—the flashes, I mean—but they’re just now starting to fade away.”

  As he spoke to her she noticed that he lowered a cell phone he was holding in his right hand into his coat pocket. And that a transmitter of some kind hung around his neck by a lanyard.

  “So what did happen?” she asked.

  “Some kind of explosion.”

  “Well of course it was an explosion,” she said, blowing out a puff of air and rolling her eyes. “I know what an explosion sounds like. They’re blowing things up in the oil patch all the time.

  “But where did it happen?” she asked. “It sounded close.”

  “Down there, I guess,” he said as he stepped aside so she could better see the plume of black smoke.

  “No kidding,” she said, approaching the lip of the bluff.

  He got close. Shoulder to shoulder almost. She continued to dry her hands by working them within the towel. She noticed he was watching her hands in the towel so she stopped moving them.

  “Looks like it was at the industrial park,” she said. “I thought that place was pretty much empty these days. Most of the service companies are long gone.”

  He grunted.

  “Hell of a bang,” she said. “It rattled the glass in my windows. It reminded me of a couple of years ago when some careless man drove his pickup head-on into that oil train over in the train yard. Were you here then?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “Then you don’t know what I’m talking about. That was a hell of a mess and it could have blown up the whole town. Too bad it didn’t happen,” she said with a bitter laugh.

  He said nothing.

  Sirens in town cut through the stillness. She saw a flash from the wigwag lights of an ambulance as it sped through Grimstad toward the industrial park.

  “Oh no,” she said. “It looks like maybe some people got hurt.”

  He nodded but didn’t say anything.

  “So you actually saw the explosion?” she asked.

  “Yeah. There’s a truck down there where the fire is. The truck was backing in and it blew up.”

  “What was it, an oil tanker?”

  “Looked like a normal trailer in back,” he said, shrugging.

  “I’m glad it didn’t happen out there in the oil patch,” she said, gesturing toward the flat yellow prairie that was laced with gravel roads connecting working oil rigs as far as she could see. “My husband works out there.”

  She thought it important just then to bring up the fact that she had a husband. Even if it was Harold.

  There were so many sirens going now that they merged into a high whine that hurt her ears. Emergency vehicles from every direction were converging on the industrial park.

  “I wonder if they’ll tell us what happened on the radio,” she said.

  “Maybe.”

  “So you were just driving by and you looked out and saw it happen. Maybe you should call the sheriff and tell him what you saw.”

  He didn’t look at her when he said, “I just seen two flashes of light. That’s not exactly unknown information, I wouldn’t think.”

  “But about the truck. You said you saw the truck blow up.”

  “I think they can probably figure that out,” he said.

  She nodded. No point arguing with that.

  “So, if you don’t mind me asking,” she said, “what were you doing up here that you saw the explosions happen?”

  “I do mind.”

  When she looked up at him he was glaring at her. His eyes were flat and he had no expression on his face. She felt a chill that started at the base of her scalp and rolled down her backbone.

  It wasn’t his face, tone, or expression that scared her. It was something else she couldn’t explain. Maybe how still he was.

  “Well,” she said, trying to keep the lilt in her voice, “I guess I better get back to the house so I can listen to the radio.”

  She stepped back to turn around and he stepped back as well to keep even with her.

  “Are you the only people up here?” he asked. “I didn’t see any cars. I thought all the houses were under construction.”

  “Oh, there’s a few people around,” she lied. She had the urge to run, but she hadn’t actually run in years. And even then she wasn’t very fast.

  “I was maybe thinking of buying a place up here,” he said to her. “So I was looking around.”

  So he was telling her why he was up there after all.

  She thought he was lying. She wanted to run, but it would be embarrassing and absolutely not polite. She was from Deer River, Minnesota, where a house was a “hOWse” and you said “yah, yah” while someone spoke and “you betcha” when you agreed with them. If you disagreed, you said nothing at all. She’d grown up polite.

  “Are you looking for a place to run your dogs?” she asked, inching away but not trying to look like she was. “I see you’ve got an electronic training thingy around your neck. My brother is a bird hunter and that’s how he trains his dogs. With those electric dog collars, ya know.”

  The man reached up and grasped the transmitter and looked at it like he was seeing it for the first time. He said, “You saw that, then.”

  “It’s around your danged neck,” she said, forcing a smile that she hoped wasn’t maniacal. She had to raise her voice over the sirens down in town. “Well, good luck,” she said, backing away. “I hope you find something up here that suits you. Some of the lots have some real big yards that’d be good for dogs. It’s a good neighborhood and all the people here are real friendly. I’m in a group of ladies who go down to the range and shoot our pistols together since we all have them concealed carry permits. They’re probably looking out their windows at us right now just wonderin’ what we’re jabberin’ about.”

  Too much, she thought. Amanda wished that she was capable of not talking so much when she was nervous or scared. But she wasn’t wired that way.

  She looked from the column of smoke to the man next to her and suddenly asked, “Did you have something to do with that?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Well, that thingy you have around your neck … never mind,” she said quickly. “Just never mind me. My husband always says I don’t have a governor. Things that come into my head come out my mouth.”

  He said, “Now you’re forcing me to make a decision about you.”

  She pretended she didn’t hear what he said and turned toward her house. It was a long distance away and she began to power walk toward it.

  * * *

  WHEN HE RUSHED HER FROM behind and threw a strap over her head Amanda thought: Yes, dang it, he’s going to choke me to death. I knew it.

  It tightened around her throat and she heard the sound of a buckle and she braced herself … and he let go.

  She staggered a few feet and reached up. There was a thick vinyl collar of some kind cinched tight in between folds of fat on her neck. Amanda was still touching it when she turned around.

  He was backing up away from her with the transmitter in his hand.

  Why was he backing up?

  “What’d you do?” she asked. Her voice was thin because the strap was so tight. “What did you put on me? Don’t tell me it’s one of those dog collars.”

  “Okay, I won’t tell you.”

  “Please, mister, this isn’t funny at all.”

  He said, “Now would be the time to pull that pistol you hinted about.”

  She didn’t move.

  “Yeah, that’s what I figured,” he said.

  He brandished the transmitter.

  “There are three signals on it. The first one does this,” he said as he pressed
a button with his thumb.

  She closed her eyes tight, anticipating the shock. But instead of an electric jolt there was a sharp vibration. It jiggled the flesh of her neck and didn’t hurt like she thought it would.

  “That’s a warning signal,” he said. “It vibrates to tell you that the next signal will hurt if you make me push the button.”

  He paused for a beat. She didn’t run. She didn’t know what to do.

  Amanda ran her fingers along the strap on her neck until she found the buckle. It wouldn’t be that hard to undo it, she thought …

  Electricity coursed through her and the charge weakened her legs and she collapsed to her knees.

  He said, “Now don’t try to take that off. I see that I need to lock it. I’m still working on the design.”

  “You hurt me,” she said.

  “That was just a nick at low power,” he said. He seemed pleased with himself. “It was at level forty-five. I can go up to one-forty.”

  To demonstrate, he twisted a knob on the top of his transmitter. She flinched, but he didn’t press the button again.

  “So don’t try to take off that collar again,” he said. “Because if you do, I won’t even mess with higher voltage. I’ll go straight to button number three.”

  While he talked she felt around the receiver on her neck to find a second oblong container right next to it. It was smooth and hard on the outside.

  “Inside that little box is C-4. Do you know what C-4 is?”

  She shook her head.

  “It’s plastic explosive. It looks just like the modeling clay you used when you were in school. But when there’s a detonator stuck into it and I push the third button an electric charge will ignite the detonator and it’ll blow up. I don’t know if it’ll take your head clean off or what. I’ve only tried it on a goat and believe me the results weren’t pretty. The collar is still kind of a work in progress, like I said. If you want to, you can get up and run for your house. That way, I can find out if button number three really works.”

  The man seemed genuinely curious and it seemed like he expected her to be curious as well.

  “Go ahead and run if you want,” he urged.

  “Not if you’re going to kill me.”