Force of Nature

by C. J. Box

  He turned to her, amazed. “Maybe I have.”

  Then he noted movement in his peripheral vision and sat up straight.

  “What?” she asked.

  Through the wet-streaked windshield undulating with moisture, he could see two men emerge from the side entrance of the Wort. Even without seeing their features clearly, he could tell by their bearing and presence they were heading for the Tahoe. They were both tall and without paunches, and they moved with an athletic grace not entirely affected by alcohol. One wore a battered straw cowboy hat and the other a ubiquitous billed trucker cap, as if they’d gone to a western store and said, “I want to look like a local yokel.” Cowboy Hat loped down the wood sidewalk and extended his hand toward the car. At that moment, the interior lights of the SUV came on as he keyed a remote.

  “Buckle up,” he said.

  “Oh my God,” she whispered. “We’re gonna do this, aren’t we?”

  Nate reached over and grasped her hand. “Last chance to get out. This could get ugly.”

  “Like I haven’t seen ugly,” she said.

  20

  NATE SAT STILL in the running Jeep in the alleyway while the Tahoe backed out onto Glenwood. When he realized the SUV would be coming in his direction, he slipped the gearshift into reverse and backed as fast as he could without losing control and clipping the outside walls of the brick buildings on both sides. At the far end of the alley, he stopped.

  “Get down,” he said urgently, as the Tahoe swung into the street and its headlights flashed on.

  She hesitated for a half second until he reached over toward her, then obeyed. Their heads touched each other in the space between the two seats, and a wash of light from the headlamps of the Tahoe flashed through the cab.

  He waited for a beat and said, “Okay.”

  When he looked up, the Tahoe was gone.

  He kept his lights off as he backed the rest of the way down the alley, and when his tires hit the pavement of the next cross-street he cranked on the wheel so they were pointed left.

  Assuming the Tahoe driven by Cowboy Hat was going north on Cache Street, he turned right onto Millward, which ran parallel to Cache through a residential neighborhood. As he crossed Gill Avenue, Nate gestured up the empty street to Haley, who looked out her passenger window.

  “We should see them now,” he said.

  And they did. The white Tahoe cruised through the intersection headed north and disappeared from view.

  Nate gunned his Jeep, keeping up with the Tahoe a block to his right. He turned right again on Mercill and paused until the Tahoe crossed their path and continued north.

  He gave it a count of fifteen before nosing the Jeep up Mercill to turn left and give chase.

  She said, “Nate—your lights?”

  Thinking he didn’t realize they were off.

  “Haley,” he hissed, “the thing about talking.”

  She blew out an angry stream of air.

  “But if the cops see us without our lights on …”

  “There are no cops,” he said impatiently. “They’re all over the pass in Idaho, helping out the sheriff over there with a murder. That’s how these small towns work.”

  “Oh. Clever on your part.”

  “Now, please, no more fucking help or advice.”

  She reached up and drew her closed fingers over her mouth in a zipping motion.

  NATE AND HALEY retraced their earlier route toward the airport, although this time there was a single pair of distant taillights a half mile ahead of them on the road. Nate still drove with his lights out, faster than he should.

  The heavy snowfall blanked out the stars and moon and made the night landscape two-tone: black above and dark purple below. He used the faint double set of tire tracks ahead to follow, as well as the distant taillights. He could see nothing in between.

  “Watch for wildlife on the road,” Nate said to Haley. “Warn me if you see anything.”

  The route from Jackson toward Grand Teton National Park was famous for grazing bison and elk alongside the two-lane highway.

  “Okay,” she said, tentative. He knew she was frightened. He didn’t blame her. He gently pressed harder on the accelerator, beginning a long process of closing the gap between the Tahoe and the Jeep in the dark.

  JACKSON HOLE AIRPORT was on their left. It was low-slung and obscured by the darkness and the storm, but several red warning lights shone through the snowfall. After they passed it, the darkness descended on them further. There were no houses and no lights. They were officially in Grand Teton National Park, headed north.

  He’d been on the road many times before and tried to recall the landscape, the features, and the turns. The Gros Ventre Range was to his right, the Snake River Valley to his left, and beyond the river the jagged sawtooths of the Teton Range. The highway was on a flat bench skirting the river valley.

  Nate guessed the Tahoe would continue to Moran Junction, then take U.S. 26/287 over Togwotee Pass via Dubois and on to the Bighorn Mountains.

  Before the road crossed the river and wound through pockets of timber, there was a long straightaway of three to five miles. Long enough to make sure there was no one coming, or behind them. Long enough, if he gunned it, to make his move. He didn’t want them to leave the park and get as far as the junction, where the route over the mountains became narrow and heavily wooded. Plus, it would likely be snowing harder.

  Nate pried the fingers of his right hand from the wheel and reached across his body for the grip of his .500. He drew it out of the shoulder holster and laid it across his lap.

  He said to Haley: “Hold on, roll down your window, keep your eyes open, and duck when I tell you.”

  He could tell she wanted to question him, but she swallowed her pride and cranked down the window. Cold air and whirling snow filled the cab.

  “Here we go,” he said, flooring it. His rear tires fishtailed slightly, then gripped through the snow to the asphalt, and they shot forward.

  THE TAILLIGHTS ahead of them started to widen. His engine howled, but he doubted Cowboy Hat and Trucker Cap would hear him coming before he was on top of them. In his peripheral vision, he saw Haley dig back in her seat and grasp the handhold on the dashboard as if it would cushion an impact.

  But just twenty feet before he plowed into the back of the Tahoe— he could suddenly see the smudge of white from its back hatch—Nate hit his headlights, clicked them to bright, and swung his Jeep to the left into the oncoming lane.

  The brake lights on the Tahoe flashed quickly—no doubt Cowboy Hat was temporarily blinded—and Nate roared up beside the SUV so they were rolling down the road side by side.

  “Duck!” he yelled to Haley.

  She went down.

  He extended his revolver straight out away from his body, aimed at the Tahoe, and looked over.

  Cowboy Hat turned his face to him as well. He was blinking from the unexpected blast of light and his mouth was slightly open, as if he was about to say something. Nate saw a face that was chiseled by bone and fashionably stubbled. His view within the scope trembled crazily, but when the crosshairs paused for a half second on a spot between the brim of the cowboy hat and the man’s left eye, he squeezed the trigger. The roar of the gunshot was deafening inside the cab of the Jeep, and a four-foot ball of orange flame leapt between the two vehicles.

  And just as suddenly, the Tahoe dropped away.

  “Oh my God!” Haley screamed into her arms.

  “Stay down.”

  Nate pumped his brakes to slow the Jeep and prevent an icy skid in the snow, while at the same time noting the sweep of errant headlights in his rearview mirror as the Tahoe left the road.

  After a three-point turn, Nate sped back to the scene. He found the Tahoe on its side in the sloped bottom of a sagebrush-covered swale, the top tires spinning in the air and the moist ground churned up behind it. Nate switched the Jeep into four-wheel drive and drove through the fresh gaping hole in the right-of-way fence, his headlights
on the underside of the Tahoe. There was no movement from inside. The rear hatch had popped open in the rollover, and the gear bags, the suitcases, the plastic tubs, and the unsheathed Barrett rifle were slung across the snow.

  He drove around the vehicle until his lights framed the dented hood. The inside of the front windshield of the Tahoe gleamed bright red, as if it had been painted with a large bucket of blood. He hoped the slug hadn’t taken off Trucker Hat’s head as well.

  Keeping his lights on the Tahoe, Nate stomped on his emergency brake and leapt outside the Jeep with his weapon in front of him. Snow stung his eyes and gathered on his coat and hair. He could smell the sharp odor of leaking gasoline mixed with the sweet smell of crushed sagebrush.

  As he approached the Tahoe, he heard a thump from inside, and suddenly there was a heavy-soled footprint in the blood on the inside of the windshield. Then another thump, and another footprint. A football-sized star of cracks appeared on the glass. He waited.

  It took two minutes for Trucker Cap to kick his way outside.

  Trucker Cap crawled out into the snow on his hands and knees. His face and clothing were covered in blood, and it took him a few seconds to realize headlights were on him, and that Nate stood between the headlights of the Jeep with his gun out.

  “Oh, fuck me,” Trucker Cap said. “I didn’t think I’d ever get out of there. His head just … blew up.”

  Nate kept his eyes on Trucker Cap as he called over his shoulder, “Stay down, Haley.”

  From behind him, he heard her say indignantly, “I’m not a dog.”

  He ignored her and gestured with the muzzle of his gun toward Trucker Cap. “Don’t move.”

  “Are you the guy?” Trucker Cap asked. His voice was thick with shock as he stumbled to his feet. “Are you the guy who did this?”

  Nate could see his bright teeth through the gore on his face.

  “I told you not to move,” Nate said, and lowered his revolver and blew Trucker Cap’s right knee away. The man shrieked and fell straight down in a heap, moaning and writhing in the snow.

  “You’re going to answer a couple of questions,” Nate said, approaching the wounded man, hoping Haley had obeyed and wasn’t watching what was going to happen from the Jeep behind him. “I’m not asking you to answer questions,” he said. “I’m telling you what’s going to happen.”

  Trucker Cap groaned from pain and rolled to his back. He grasped his shattered knee with both hands, and blood pulsed out from between his fingers.

  “You should have known this was coming when you went after my friends,” Nate said.

  Nate thought of what Haley had said earlier: Like I haven’t seen ugly.

  He quickly closed the gap to the man and rolled him over with his boot. As he did, Trucker Cap’s jacket hiked up and Nate saw the grip of a .45 Heckler & Koch semiauto tucked into this belt. He snatched it out and tossed it over the top of the Tahoe.

  “Any more weapons?”

  “God, no,” Trucker Cap moaned. His eyes were closed tightly.

  Nate dropped to one knee next to Trucker Cap and patted the man down with his free hand through his clothes. His hand came away sticky with blood, and he wiped it clean in the snow before reaching back and gripping Trucker Cap’s left ear. He gave it a vicious twist, and the man’s eyes shot open.

  “I’m going to bleed out,” the man said.

  “And what’s the downside?” Nate asked. Then: “Three things, or I rip your ear off.”

  Trucker Cap’s eyes narrowed on Nate’s face.

  “One: how many operatives were on your team? Two: why is Nemecek coming after me now?”

  Trucker Cap’s mouth twisted into a defiant leer. “Why should I tell you? I heard what you did over there, you fucking traitor. When he gave us a chance to come after you, we jumped on it, you son-of-a-bitch.”

  Nate ripped his ear off and tossed it over his shoulder like an apple core. Trucker Cap howled, and Nate waited for the man to catch his breath. While he did, he reached across the man’s face and grasped his other ear.

  Nate said, “Everything Nemecek told you is wrong, but it doesn’t surprise me, and I don’t have the time or inclination to convince you otherwise. But now I know how he convinced good men to go rogue with him. Now back to the three things….”

  Trucker Cap said, “But you only asked two.”

  “Oh,” Nate said, “the third. I want you to make a call when we’re done here. If you do exactly what I say, you might survive this. If you don’t, I’m going to pull you apart with my bare hands until you’re begging me to kill you. Got that?”

  Nate became aware that Haley must have watched, because behind him he could hear her sobbing.

  21

  AT THE SAME TIME, 360 miles to the east, Marybeth Pickett left her counter at the library, walked back behind the new acquisitions display to the business office, and picked up the hand microphone and made an announcement: “The library will close in ten minutes.”

  As she cradled the mic, her own voice echoed through the near-empty building and sounded severe and tinny. The acoustics in the old building were awful. To complete the protocol for closing the building, she doused the lights and quickly turned them back on so patrons who were wrapped up in whatever they were doing—or wearing earbuds—would get the word. It was 8:50 p.m.

  She didn’t like closing the building at night and wished she hadn’t made a deal with the other senior librarian to switch shifts. Part of the negotiations for coming back to work was her insistence that her shift conclude by three so she could be home when the girls got out of school. But once a month or so, she traded shifts for the sole reason of maintaining a good working relationship with her colleagues.

  Both Lucy and April were at home—they’d sent texts asking if they could heat up some frozen pizza—and Joe was still out in the field and hadn’t communicated his whereabouts or when he’d be getting back to their house on Bighorn Road. She was anxious to hear from him how the multiple investigations were going. Three homicides and three missing-persons cases within the span of a week had unnerved every local she’d talked with. Things like that didn’t happen here, she knew, and never all at once. Although someone driving through the town of Saddlestring would see a sleepy community hugging the banks of the Twelve Sleep River as winter approached, they would have no idea that the people who lived there were filled with anxiety and it felt on the streets and in the shops like the wheels were coming off the place. The weekly Saddlestring Roundup had a story in it just that day featuring residents who said they were openly carrying weapons and locking their doors at night for the first time in their lives.

  The pressure growing on Sheriff Kyle McLanahan to restore order was immense and more than a little unreasonable, she thought. Locals directed a hefty part of their fear and frustration toward him, and talked about the incompetence of the department. Several of the small business leaders who gathered for morning coffee at the Burg-O-Pardner—Marybeth’s former clients who were struggling in the down economy and barely holding on as it was—discussed circulating a recall petition for McLanahan if he somehow won reelection. Although she’d never liked McLanahan and wanted him to lose, Marybeth thought most of the criticism recently to be over the top and unfair. Though, she thought, it couldn’t happen to a more deserving guy.

  THE OLD COUNTY LIBRARY was a wholly different place at night, Marybeth thought. It was an original Carnegie library built in the 1920s, and added on to. Outside, the classical Greek architecture, columns, and scrollwork were impressive in the floodlights that shone back on it. But inside, the high ceilings and corners weren’t lit well, and sounds carried in odd ways, like her announcement had. It was too cool in the winter and too warm in the summer, and the ancient boiler sometimes shuddered with enough force to rattle the windows and scare children in the children’s section. At night, the original hardwood floor produced moans and squeaks she never heard in the daytime. The layout of the building was outmoded and crowded, with high shelv
ing that prevented her from seeing who was at the study tables or reading area in the back of the building from her counter.

  Outside, clouds had been drawn over the moon and stars. She could see from the wet windows it was spitting snow. The valley was due for the first serious winter storm of the season, and she hoped it didn’t roll in until later that night, after she was home safely. After Joe was home safely. The closeness outside and the water-streaked windows added to the overall gloom of the building—and her mood.

  She listened for the sounds of books being snapped shut or patrons gathering up their possessions on their way out, but it was quiet inside. Marybeth walked over to a side window and looked at the parking lot. There was only one car besides her own—a dark new-model crossover she didn’t recognize. So there was at least one person still in the building, maybe more.

  Marybeth usually noted and greeted each patron as they entered, but she’d been busy all night with library work as well as her own project. At the time the patron entered, she guessed, she’d been entranced in reading accounts of the murder in Colorado Springs on the Internet on the website of the Colorado Springs Gazette. About the unidentified victim found in Nate Romanowski’s father’s home. According to the sheriff, there were no suspects yet, but they were hoping the analysis on the forensic evidence obtained might shed light on the identity of the victim or the killer. Neighbors were quoted saying what neighbors always said, that Gordon Romanowski was a friendly man who kept to himself and would never be capable of such an act, as far as they knew.

  She was curious about Nate’s father. She wondered what he looked like and how he’d raised such a son. Nate himself had rarely mentioned his family, and had made only one passing reference to his father years ago that she could recall. He’d said, after observing Joe with his daughters, “So that’s how it’s done.”

  She was also drawn to a separate story on the newspaper website that appeared unrelated to the body found in the Romanowski home but that set off alarm bells within her: two unidentified male victims had been found as the result of a rollover on Pikes Peak Road. Unrelated but similar in Marybeth’s mind to the “accident” in Montana years before involving a vehicle remarkably similar to Nate’s Jeep.