Endangered

by C. J. Box

  Joe said, “That’s right.”

  Raymer’s phone chimed from a pocket in her lab coat and she instinctively drew it out and looked at the screen.

  “How interesting,” she said. “I just got an email from Revis Wentworth.”

  Joe smiled.

  “He’s asking me to confirm that we received a box of evidence in an important case,” she said. “And he cautions me that, because of the magnitude of the crime, I may be contacted by local law enforcement attempting to influence our findings. I assume that would be you,” she said, looking up.

  “Yup.”

  “Does he know you’re here?”

  “Nope. He’s trying to run interference. He’s desperate.”

  She dropped the phone back in her pocket and looked at Joe squarely.

  “So you’re going to turn over every piece of evidence you have to me? The shells and the shotgun and the memory stick? How can you build your case if all of the evidence for it is here locked away in Denver?”

  He said, “Because I trust you to keep it until we need it.”

  She cocked her head. “Why?”

  “Because you’re from Montana and your dad was a game warden,” Joe said.

  —

  JOE HATED DENVER TRAFFIC and he kept both of his hands on the wheel and his pickup in the far right lane as cars zipped around him. It was as if every driver on the five-lane freeway had just downed three shots of vodka and had been handed the keys to Daddy’s sports car. When his cell phone rang, he ignored it until he was nearly ten miles north of the city and the traffic finally eased up.

  Marybeth.

  She said, “The hospital called and the swelling on April’s brain has gone down.”

  Joe blew out a breath of relief.

  “They want to try and bring her out of it tonight or tomorrow. I need to be there, Joe.”

  “Of course you do,” he said.

  “I’m taking Sheridan and Lucy with me,” she said. “They want to see their sister. They want to be there when she comes out of it.”

  Joe paused for a few seconds, trying to figure out how to frame his words, when Marybeth did it for him: “We talked it all out this morning. They know she may never be April again. They know that this may turn out to be one of the most difficult experiences of their lives, and so do I. But we have to be there, Joe.”

  He said, “I’m on my way, but you should all go now. I’ll meet you at the hospital.”

  “I’ll keep you posted after I talk to the doctors,” she said.

  Near Fort Collins, he called the governor’s office. He used the private number Rulon had given him and the call went straight to voicemail.

  Joe said, “We’ve got the goods on Wentworth. He slaughtered Lek Sixty-four and tried to cover it up.

  “On another matter, I might be out of touch for a few days. There’s news on my daughter’s condition. The news could be good or bad.”

  23

  Timber Cates refused to look back over his shoulder at the brick-and-glass front entrance of the Wyoming State Penitentiary in Rawlins. He vowed he would never look back at it, because he intended to never see it again for the rest of his life, and there was nothing good to remember about it anyway.

  Not even when the corrections officer called out after him, “We’ll keep the light on for you, Timber, my boy!”

  What an asshole.

  —

  WHILE HE WAS BEING processed out, the CO had kept up a one-sided monologue that seemed intended to agitate Timber, as if baiting him one last time so he’d explode and get himself turned around and sent back inside.

  “This seems like a whole lot of trouble when you’ll probably be back here in a few months anyway,” the CO said. He was short and stout, a fireplug, with a piglike face and a wispy goatee that looked unfinished. He had half-Asian features. Timber didn’t like it when an Asian talked to him that way. Or when Asians tried to grow beards like real men. They weren’t designed for it. He wished they would just give up and shave, for Christ’s sake.

  “It would probably save the taxpayers money if you just turned around right now and stayed inside. That way, we won’t have to mess with trials and lawyers and all of that when you come back. And you will come back. Believe me, I’ve seen hundreds of convicts come through here. I know the look of one who never reflected on what he did to get in here in the first place. You’re the type who thinks the only thing you did wrong was to get caught. You’ve been in here three years and you didn’t get smarter, or learn a trade, or find the Lord while you were in here. It was your choice to remain ignorant and not to take any of the opportunities offered here to better yourself. You look harder and meaner than when you came in. Which means you’ll be back, and some poor innocent people out there will pay the price. I can tell by your face. You’ve got that look, Cates, and you sure as hell have the wrong attitude.”

  When Timber didn’t react, the CO said, “There’s white trash and then there’s stupid white trash. I think we both know which category you fit into.”

  Recalling what his mother had said, Timber closed his eyes and breathed in and out, in and out.

  “Looks like you’re picking a perfect time to get on the outside,” the CO said. “They’re predicting a major winter event in the next couple of days. That’s what they call it now: an event. Like if they said ‘blizzard,’ we’d all throw up our hands and run around screaming like kids.

  “Ten to twelve inches in town, eighteen to twenty-four in the mountains. That’s what they’re saying, Cates. You’re getting out just in time to get your skinny ass buried in snow. And it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.”

  Timber had heard nothing of a big storm coming. And he didn’t care.

  —

  HE WEAVED through the cars in the parking lot with his possessions wadded up and stuffed into a blue-black plastic garbage bag that he clutched to his chest. It was amazing even to him how everything he owned could fit into a garbage bag. Plus, most of it was truly ratty and shitty: a couple of pairs of boat shoes; his kit containing a toothbrush, toothpaste, a comb and a brush; another change of clothing; and a box of letters he’d mostly never read from his mom about his brother Dallas. If he lost the bag there wasn’t much he would really miss. But since it was all he owned, all that was really his, he held it tight.

  He tried not to think about how much he’d thrived in prison. He hated it with every fiber of his being, but he loved it at the same time. It was an easy life. Meals were rote. Clothing was provided. His job in the infirmary was easy. No one breathed down his neck. In all, it wasn’t so bad.

  And he’d never tell a single soul that he thought that way. That the asshole CO was right. He just didn’t know how much he was right.

  —

  TIMBER WORE the same clothes—a black, extra-large Scorpions concert T-shirt, a torn denim jacket, jeans with grease spots—that he’d been arrested in three years earlier. The clothes didn’t fit anymore. He had lost weight.

  He picked up his pace as he weaved through the cars in the lot. He felt like he was getting away with something, that if he didn’t leave the place soon they’d realize they had made a mistake and come after him. He banged his knee on the bumper of a Dodge pickup and cursed, but didn’t pause to look at the bruise.

  —

  THE BLUE 1984 CHEVY CAVALIER his parents had left for him was parked in the farthest row from the front of the prison. It had a rusted roof, mismatched tires, and a cracked windshield. It was a crappy boxy car from a crappy era.

  “Thanks, Pops,” Timber said aloud to himself between epithets. “What—did you spend a whole four hundred fucking dollars on it?”

  As they’d told him he would, he found the keys under the fender on top of the driver’s-side tire. The car wasn’t locked—Who would steal it, anyway?—and he threw the garbage bag on the backseat. The fab
ric of the seats was stained and ripped, and it smelled of old people.

  Timber scooted in and put the key in the ignition. After a few seconds of a high-pitched grinding sound, the engine caught. In the cracked rearview mirror, he saw an ugly puff of black smoke blow out of the exhaust pipe.

  There was less than eighty-five thousand miles on the odometer, which confirmed to Timber that the people who had previously owned it were old folks who’d probably driven it from their home to doctor’s appointments and the mailbox and not much beyond that.

  But when he engaged the transmission, the Cavalier lurched forward. It was underpowered and the suspension was mushy, but it moved. He guessed that if he could find the maintenance record it would show that the old geezers had changed the oil every three thousand miles on the dot and rotated the tires every ten thousand.

  And that was all he could ask for at the moment.

  —

  THEY’D TOLD HIM to avoid the interstate highways as much as he could. No reason, they’d said, to draw any more attention to himself than necessary. So it was north to Lamont, then Three Forks. Jeffrey City, Moneta, Big Trails, Ten Sleep, Greybull, then Winchester, the back way. He knew the little towns and highways from when he was a high school athlete and they’d take the bus from town to town, to play football games. Wyoming was all like a small town with incredibly long streets.

  After Winchester, he’d have to jump on Interstate 90 into Montana. Crow Agency, then Hardin, then his destination.

  He’d been there a few times. But never like this.

  His infirmary scrubs were on top of the pile of clothing in the trash bag in the backseat.

  —

  OUTSIDE OF JEFFREY CITY, which wasn’t a city at all, he pulled over to the side of the highway after checking his mirrors. He couldn’t shake the feeling that the Asian CO was following him. But he wasn’t.

  He kept the Cavalier idling and leaned over in his seat and popped open the glove compartment.

  The sheet on top was a Google map of where he needed to go. He studied it and shook his head and folded it neatly in two. He’d pay more attention when he got closer. There was a printout of the face of a girl. She was a hottie. But at least he knew what she looked like.

  On the bottom of the glove compartment was a bright green ceramic knife with a four-inch blade. It was a familiar knife, and he remembered his mother using it to slice onions and carrots in her kitchen. It touched him that she would give up that knife.

  It looked battered, but it wouldn’t show up if he had to walk through a metal detector. He wished it was bigger, but he knew it would work.

  He placed the knife next to his right thigh and put the directions and the photo back into the glove box. He’d study them when it was time to study them.

  Timber eased back out onto the old highway. In front of him, above the northern horizon, was a thick black band. The storm the CO had told him about was gathering.

  —

  SOUTH OF MONETA, in the middle of nowhere, in a high steppe desert of sand and thigh-high sagebrush, Timber tapped his brakes because a herd of sheep was up ahead on the road. The rancher on horseback driving them waved a sort of apology, but kept his herd trotting up the bad two-lane highway.

  It had been years since Timber had seen sheep in Wyoming and he’d never liked sheep in the first place. Who ate sheep? Why did they even exist? He thought: Range maggots.

  The rancher in charge rode a handsome buckskin and wore a wide-brimmed straw summer cowboy hat. He had a toothbrush mustache and a squared-off jaw and wore a pink scarf around his neck. Timber hated him immediately because of his good humor and attitude. Of course there are sheep on the road, he seemed to say, but no one who takes the old highway south of Moneta would expect otherwise.

  There were other cowboys on the drive, but they looked Mexican or worse, Timber thought. He resisted the urge to plow through the herd of sheep and leave dozens of them writhing on the road.

  After inching along for twenty minutes behind the sheep, he pulled to the side and let the herd get ahead of him.

  But not all of them did.

  Although the rancher and his Hispanic cowboys had moved the herd over the next rise, there was a single ewe struggling to keep up. Timber watched her and narrowed his eyes. She was obviously old and lame, and she had no fluidity to her gait. She pitched up and down with every step. The rancher and his hands probably didn’t know they’d lost one.

  —

  IN PRISON, Timber had learned never to take revenge without really thinking it through. On this, his mother didn’t have a clue. She only knew about the times he’d gotten into trouble. She didn’t know about the times he’d carefully planned something.

  He’d wait for the perfect scenario to occur. That involved making sure the COs weren’t in the yard or were looking elsewhere. He’d do it where the closed-circuit cameras couldn’t see him. He made sure his weapon was honed and reliable so it wouldn’t snap in two on the initial impact.

  So he eyed that straggling ewe.

  When he didn’t see either the rancher or the Mexicans come back for her, he leaned over and popped the button on the glove compartment.

  —

  THERE WAS DUST in the air from both the herd and the sheep cowboys. It just hung there.

  The ewe was bawling, calling ahead, saying, Wait for me.

  She paused when Timber walked up next to her. She looked at him with a blank expression only domesticated farm animals like cows and sheep are capable of, one of pure blind trust and incredible stupidity. She was large, nearly two-hundred pounds, all of it wool and mutton and dead dumb eyes.

  Timber stabbed her with the knife behind her front shoulder, then he did it again. He stabbed her like a manic jackhammer, so many times and so quickly that he was out of breath.

  The ewe collapsed, then rolled to her side. Her last breath rattled out in a sigh and she was still. Better that, he thought, than coyotes tearing her apart.

  That’s the secret, he thought as he backed away. It wasn’t like the movies when a single knife thrust did them in. The more stab wounds, and the deeper they were, the better. It was exactly as he’d done in the yard to that son of a bitch who’d called him out for being white trash. Twenty-seven stab wounds in less than half a minute. There was no way that guy would live and identify his assailant. It had been so sudden and so violent that Timber would never have to worry about that guy again.

  —

  TIMBER WALKED BACK to the Cavalier with his entire right arm greasy with ewe blood and lanolin from the wool. The ceramic green knife was red.

  He paused at a spring seep in the ground and plunged his right arm into it and watched curlicues of red form at the surface. When he withdrew his arm, there was no more sheep’s blood on it and the green knife was clean.

  He thought: Do it fast and go home.

  —

  WHEN TIMBER CATES got back into his car, he opened the Playmate cooler that Brenda had left for him. In the distance, the dust cloud formed by the herd of sheep was moving to the right, away from the highway. He’d have a clear shot now.

  He found a large package of fried chicken wrapped in aluminum foil and he gleefully ate it all and threw the bones out the window. Even though it was cold, it was the best fried chicken—the best food—he’d had in three years.

  She’d told him: Don’t forget to put on your scrubs.

  He reviewed the map to the hospital and the photo of the girl whose death would free Dallas once and for all, as she put it, and he thought:

  Who loves his mama the most?

  24

  Light rain was changing to snow when Joe reached his home on Bighorn Road.

  Spring storms in the Rockies always had the most impact. Unlike the powder snow that came down in the winter, spring snow was heavy with moisture. It piled up quickly and broke tree branches
and downed power lines. Although it usually melted down within a day or so, the heavy wet blanket seemed like a cruel ending to a harsh winter, especially when the trees were starting to bud and baby animals had just been born.

  His plan was to feed the horses and Daisy, grab a change of clothes, and head to Billings to meet up with the rest of his family before the storm hit.

  A text from Marybeth and an unexpected visit from Revis Wentworth changed all that.

  The text read:

  We made it safe and sound to Billings and the hospital in front of the storm. The doctors have postponed bringing April out of the coma until tomorrow or the next day. We’re getting two rooms at a motel, but no need to try to get here tonight. Word is the highways may close anyway. I’ll call when we get settled.

  xoxoxoxoxo,

  MB

  —

  WENTWORTH’S WHITE PICKUP was parked at an odd angle in front of Joe’s house, but Wentworth didn’t appear to be inside. Joe parked in front of his garage and approached the pickup cautiously with his hand on the grip of his Glock. The cab was unoccupied except for an empty Wild Turkey bottle on the passenger seat.

  Puzzled, Joe pushed through his front gate and walked across the lawn. The snow was starting to stick to the grass, big thick flakes of it, and he could feel it melting through his uniform shirt.

  Several scenarios went through his mind when it came to Wentworth. He could imagine the man sitting in his lounge chair with a shotgun across his lap, waiting for Joe to come in the door. Or he was there with Annie Hatch and a new story to try and get Joe off his trail.

  Or . . .

  He was drunk and passed out on their couch. Which he was.

  Joe sighed and mounted the porch steps and entered his house. As he walked through the mudroom, he heard Daisy whimper from behind his closed bedroom door.

  He stood over Wentworth, who had obviously found Joe’s bottle of bourbon and had drunk a quarter of it, judging by the level of liquor in the bottle, and Joe said, “Hey, wake up.”