Endangered

by C. J. Box

  “Why?”

  “Oh, it’s a long story,” Brenda said. “Dallas did something he shouldn’t have done. I had to figure out a way to keep him out of it. See, I’m the only one who does any thinking around here.”

  “I believe it,” Liv said. “So why was injuring Dallas a good thing for him?”

  “Wasn’t just him. It was for the whole family. I look after my whole family and keep ’em on the right path. I don’t let anyone get in our way. Anyone. I saw when they sent Timber away to Rawlins what happens when I don’t stay on top of ’em. Timber’s my middle son. He’s the wildest of them all and he got out of prison this morning.”

  There was a pause. Brenda pulled the brush through and Liv mewed. It was a false emotion, but to Brenda it sounded genuine.

  “You like that, huh?” she asked softly.

  “I do,” Liv said. Then: “It’s too bad you didn’t have daughters.”

  “Yeah,” Brenda said wistfully. “Boys is all I know. It was the same growing up. I had two brothers and I was the only girl. I don’t even know how to talk to other women—they always seem too soft and emotional to me. Most women, it seems to me, should get the crap kicked out of them by a couple of brothers like I did to toughen ’em up.”

  Liv lied and said, “My brother did the same thing to me growing up.” In fact, she had no brothers.

  Brenda said, “My dad bounced around between being a miner and a logger in the Ozarks. That’s where my people are from: Jasper County, Missouri. A lot of the time he didn’t work at all. But I was the apple of his eye.”

  “I thought I heard a little of the South in your accent,” Liv said.

  “Yeah, and I’ve never been back. I left when I was sixteen. I came to Wyoming to see Yellowstone Park with my uncle Harold. I’m still surprised my folks let him bring me out here, but they did. Uncle Harold raped me a few times and left me in one of those cabins they’ve got in the park. That’s where I met Eldon. He was driving through Yellowstone to go hunting on the other side. He picked me up on the road. We caught up with Uncle Harold in Cody, and Eldon beat him half to death with a rifle butt near Heart Mountain. We’ve been together ever since.”

  Brenda’s tone was calm. Liv swallowed hard.

  “But back to my dad. When he was home, we’d listen to records together.”

  “Is that where you heard Kitty Wells?”

  “Oh, that,” Brenda laughed. “I must have been a sight back then, singing that song about cheating when I was just a little girl.”

  Liv hummed the tune, and to her surprise Brenda joined in.

  “What the hell is going on down there?” Bull said from above.

  Liv faked a laugh. “My mom used to sing it around the house.”

  “Did you have a daddy?” Brenda asked. She sounded curious.

  “He worked on shrimping boats,” Liv said. “He died when I was five.”

  “Mmmmm.”

  “I don’t remember much about him.”

  “Better that,” Brenda said, her voice hardening, “than him showing up whenever he felt like it. My brothers were animals, and they needed a man around to set them straight. He wasn’t there when he should have been. He was mean when he got drunk and he knocked Mama around. Then he’d feel bad about it, but instead of making it up to everyone, he’d take off again.

  “I swore back then that if I found a man, I’d make him stay close to me and his kids. I thought I could tame Eldon of his wild hairs, but over the years I’ve learned how to handle him instead. I’m close with my boys, and Eldon is . . . there. I wish he’d take more interest in them, but he’s not much for ambition in any department except hunting and fishing. So I wore him down, which is the next best thing to having a good man in the first place. He doesn’t even know how to think for himself anymore, which is a good thing, because I do it for him and I do it better. I know that sounds harsh, but it’s the best for the family.”

  Liv thought: She’s proud of her boys?

  And she realized right then that Brenda was even crazier than she’d realized.

  —

  “MEN ARE SUCH SIMPLE CREATURES,” Brenda said, keeping her voice down so that Bull couldn’t overhear. “You and me, we have a thousand things going on in our minds at all times. It gets noisy in there. But men are different. They can’t hold more than one thought in their brain at a time. It’s ‘I’m hungry,’ or ‘I’m horny,’ or ‘I need to fix the transmission or this truck won’t run.’ If they could ever get inside our brains, the hullabaloo going on would probably kill ’em in a few minutes. And if we could ever get inside theirs, I suspect we’d get bored real fast with all the peace and quiet.

  “But you probably know that, because you’re pretty and they fall all over themselves to get next to you. But when you’re plain and you look like me and don’t know fashion from cow plop, you learn to appeal to other base instincts, like food.

  “If you look like me, you learn to cook. You find out what they like and you give it to ’em—and plenty of it. If you do that, they’ll do anything you want. Fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, chicken-fried steaks, pot roast—whatever. Waffles and fried chicken will be enough to convince them to go into a barn and gun down Nate Romanowski. It’s simple, girl. Do you cook?”

  “A little.”

  “Of course, you have other ways, don’t you?”

  “Like what?” Liv asked.

  Brenda bent closer. “Like luring Bull down here.”

  “He did that himself.”

  “Sure he did.”

  —

  “SO WHY DID BULL and Eldon beat up Dallas?” Liv asked. “I don’t understand.”

  The question was met with silence. When Brenda spoke, her tone was flat.

  “He had to look like a bull tore him up. He couldn’t just fake it.”

  “But why?”

  “I told you,” Brenda said with annoyance. “Dallas could have gotten in trouble. This way, he got hurt a little, but he didn’t get arrested or nothing. He’s still with us and he’s just about recovered.”

  Liv asked, “Why did Eldon and Bull ambush Nate? Did they have something against him?”

  “Not at all,” Brenda said. “In fact, I think they kind of liked him.”

  “Then why did they do it?”

  Brenda scoffed. She said, “Anyone around this county knows that when the game warden gets in a situation, Nate Romanowski shows up to help him out. No one wants Nate around on the other side. That guy is crazy.”

  “I’m not following you,” Liv confessed.

  “I told you. Dallas did something stupid. It involved the game warden’s daughter. We were able to handle the game warden—he’s by the book and not that bright. He even came out here and saw Dallas, and he seen for himself that the boy was injured after all.”

  Liv recalled the item she’d read in the Casper newspaper about Joe’s middle daughter being found beaten on the side of a road. Liv’s stomach suddenly turned, but she tried hard not to show any reaction.

  Brenda continued. “But Joe Pickett doesn’t let things go. I’ve watched him over the years and I know that about him. If he told his buddy Nate that he suspected Dallas, even though he couldn’t prove it, well, Nate may come a-calling. I didn’t want Nate after my boy. So we put the word out there and lured you up and took him out before he could get together with his friend Joe Pickett and hear the story. It was a precautionary thing. We bought ourselves insurance, is all. Any mother would do the same thing for their boy if they thought they had to do it to keep him alive.”

  “So it was all a preliminary strike,” Liv said. “You killed Nate just in case.”

  “Pretty much,” Brenda said. “And it wasn’t easy. I had to look my husband and son in the eye and say, ‘Get in that barn and get ready. He’s just a man. There’s nothing special about him.’ Finally, th
ey went in there and got set up. I wasn’t sure they’d go through with it until I heard the shots.”

  Liv boiled inside, but she tried not to show it.

  “I didn’t know you’d be with him,” Brenda said. “You were sort of a kink in my plans.”

  “What happened to the van?”

  “Eldon’s good for something,” Brenda said. “He knows every inch of this country out here because he guides hunters in the fall. He knows where to hide a vehicle where no one can find it.”

  “Why are you telling me all this now?”

  Brenda went back to brushing Liv’s hair. “Might as well.”

  Those words weren’t chosen at random, Liv thought.

  “You said you had a plan for me. Can you tell me what it is?”

  “I’m not sure you want to know.”

  Liv said, “You could let me out of here. I could help you around the house. I could be the daughter you never had. Or I could leave and never say a word to anyone.”

  “You know neither one of those is a good choice,” Brenda said. “If you stayed, somebody would see you and wonder why a black girl was living with us. They’d wonder where you came from and somebody would figure it out. And there’s no way you can convince me you’d keep this all to yourself. Women aren’t made that way.”

  “I am.”

  “Oh,” Brenda said, bending forward again and whispering a few inches from Liv’s ear, “if only that were true.”

  Liv closed her eyes. She thought about wheeling in her chair and plunging her thumbs into Brenda’s throat. If Bull wasn’t up there, she would have done it.

  “I want to know,” Liv said.

  “I’m waiting on Eldon,” Brenda said. “He’s got to go get his tank filled up. Then instead of dumping it at the treatment plant, he’s going to bring it back here.”

  It took a moment for Liv to realize what she’d just heard.

  “He’s going to dump sewage in the cellar?”

  “Pretty much,” Brenda said in a conversational tone. “Then he can fire up the Bobcat and fill the rest of the hole with dirt. If anybody ever gets a notion to dig it up, they’ll realize this hole is full of sewage. There’s no way they’d keep digging and eventually find a body. We’ll just tell ’em our septic tank must have leaked.”

  Liv closed her eyes.

  “So you were asking me about pork chops. Is that because it’s my last meal?”

  Brenda snorted, stopped brushing, and backed away.

  She said, “Bull, cover me. I’m coming up.”

  Dirt sifted into the cellar from the edge as Bull bent over and peered in. Liv saw that he was holding her handgun.

  She turned her head to see Brenda clumsily mount the ladder and start to climb. She grunted on each rung.

  Liv stood and approached the clay wall and grasped the stone and pulled. It didn’t budge.

  As Brenda awkwardly climbed the ladder out of striking distance, she said, “Oh, I don’t know about it being your last meal. I might bring you some breakfast, so put all those containers and the silverware back in the bucket tonight so I can pull it up.”

  When Brenda was out of the cellar, she said, “Thanks for letting me brush your hair. Maybe if it was different circumstances, we could have actually been friends, you know?”

  Then to Bull: “Close it.”

  Liv waited until the footfalls faded away, then turned back to the stone.

  It shredded her to know that she might have missed the only chance she’d ever have.

  26

  It made a warped kind of sense, Joe thought. If Eldon Cates needed to hide a vehicle fast, where better than an elk camp that was unknown to everyone, including the game warden?

  Revis Wentworth had given Joe an all-important clue to the location of the elk camp simply by describing which direction the two vehicles were going on the two-track road across the sagebrush bench. Joe had been on the road before, of course, when he’d found Lek 64. He’d taken a more established county road to the two-track, and when he intersected it, he’d turned east.

  Several years ago, Joe had taken the road west through the foothills of the Bighorns and on into the timber. At the time, he was looking for a promontory, or high-altitude point, where he might “perch” and glass the terrain with his spotting scope. The road was little used, and Joe had given up looking for an opening in the timber as he ascended the mountain. It was difficult even finding a place to perform a three-point turn because the lodgepole pines were so thick.

  His district was 1,800 square miles of mountains, plains, and broken country. There were hundreds of ancient two-tracks running through it, most leading nowhere in particular. If they didn’t lead to an obvious destination or were rarely used by hunters or fishermen, he simply forgot about them, like he had with this nameless path.

  The western direction of the two-track from the sagebrush bench into the mountains would be convenient for an elk outfitter like Eldon Cates, he thought. Eldon could access it from his compound down below in the valley and never cross a highway or county road, therefore not likely to be seen by hunters or anyone else. The land the two-track crossed was a confusing mix of BLM, U.S. Forest Service, and private land. It was a baffling checkerboard on the map and likely to deter visitors. So it was perfect for Eldon.

  If Joe was guessing right, anyhow.

  Something else made sense, now that he thought about it. He’d wondered how it was that April’s possessions had been found at Tilden Cudmore’s place and in his vehicle if Cudmore wasn’t responsible for her attack. Or how Nate’s assailants had accessed the HF Bar Ranch through a locked gate and not been seen.

  Although he had to first confirm the existence of the secret elk camp and that the Yarak, Inc. van was hidden there, dots were suddenly connecting.

  —

  HE HIT THE SPEED DIAL on his phone as his tires sizzled on the wet highway.

  “County Sheriff’s Department,” the receptionist said.

  “I need to talk to Sheriff Reed.”

  “Joe?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s in a meeting.”

  “Get him out, please.”

  The snow was sticking to the green shoots of grass on the side of the highway, and the storm was moving over the tops of the mountains and coming down the western side like rolls of smoke. Joe had his windshield wipers on low and the defroster on. He thought he could find the camp and get out before dark and before the storm enveloped the Twelve Sleep Valley.

  “Reed here. What is it, Joe? I’m in a budget meeting with the county commissioners.”

  “I got a lead,” Joe said. “Revis Wentworth was at Lek Sixty-four last Tuesday and he said he saw two vehicles crossing the sagebrush into the mountains. One fits the description of Eldon Cates’s old Suburban. The other fits the description of the white van Nate was driving the day he got ambushed.”

  Reed paused. “What are you saying exactly?”

  “That the Cateses were involved in the shooting. Either they did it on their own or somebody hired them to remove Nate’s van from the scene. They’re implicated one way or another. Moving that van made everyone wonder where Olivia Brannan had gone after the shooting and made people think she must have been in on it. But it doesn’t sound like she was there when Wentworth saw the two vehicles. The descriptions he gave me of the drivers sound like Eldon and Bull.”

  Reed said, “Why would they go after Romanowski? What’s the connection there?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve been trying to figure it out myself.”

  “This is coming out of left field,” Reed said. “How are we going to prove anything? Do you need a couple of my guys?”

  “Not yet,” Joe said. “But you might want to let them know what’s going on so they’ll be ready. I’m on my way up the mountain to see if I can find that van in Eldon Cates�
��s elk camp. If I find it, we can go after Eldon.”

  “In this storm?”

  “It’s just snow, Mike,” Joe said. “It doesn’t look to be as bad as they were predicting. If we only worked in good weather, we wouldn’t get much done around here, would we?”

  Reed snorted.

  “There’s another thing,” Joe said. “I’ve been thinking about Tilden Cudmore.”

  “What about him?”

  “We all wondered how he could possibly be innocent in regard to April’s attack after her stuff was found on his place and in his car, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I want you to think about something,” Joe said as he turned off the highway onto the county road that would lead him to the Lek 64 two-track. No one had driven on the road since the snow started, and it was untracked. “Think about patrolling this county every day. You—and me—always keep an eye out for anything unusual. We notice cars we’ve never seen before, or out-of-county plates. We notice out-of-state plates, or pickups with two or three men inside—that kind of thing. But what we don’t notice is normal activities. We just kind of shunt them aside.”

  “I’m not quite getting what you’re saying,” Reed said.

  Joe continued. “We don’t even see the propane truck making its rounds. We don’t notice the mail carrier on her route or the garbage service. We see them so often, they turn invisible, because we’re only tuned to people and activities that aren’t part of the day-to-day. They hide in plain sight.”

  Reed said, “Like a sewage-service pump truck.”

  “Exactly,” Joe said. “Like C&C Sewer and Septic Tank Service. I probably see that truck, or trucks like it, five times a day and never even think about it. You probably do, too. They’re all over, but we just don’t see them.”

  Reed said, “Hold on.” Joe could hear the sheriff speaking to someone while he held the phone away from his mouth. “Tell the commissioners it’s going to be a minute.”