by C. J. Box
The post was split cleanly down the middle. A wisp of smoke and dust rose from the top of the post. The barbed wire strands sang up and down the fence from the impact.
Nate smiled grimly. “A different attitude than the.454,” he said more to himself than Merle. “The.454 is snappy compared to this. The.500 pushes straight back like a mule kick.”
Then he counted out fifteen more posts and blew the top off one at a hundred yards. He let the gun kick back over his left shoulder near his ear, and as he leveled it, he thumbed the hammer on the down stroke. Another heavy boom, and a post a hundred fifty yards away shattered into splinters. He calculated, aimed down the fence line, and fired his last round.
“My God,” Large Merle said, taking his fingers out of his ears. “But you missed the last one.”
“No,” Nate said, “look farther down. At two-fifty.”
The post at two hundred fifty yards was blown cleanly in two, and the top half sagged near the bottom half, held aloft by the strands of wire stapled to it.
“It doesn’t need to be said, but that’s some shooting.”
“Then why say it?” Nate asked. “You did well, Merle. This will do the job. How much?”
“The.500 WE retails for twenty-three hundred dollars without the scope,” Large Merle said. “The shells alone cost three dollars each, so keep that in mind. But given the circumstances, you owe me exactly nothing.”
Nate said, “I don’t like being obligated.”
“Given the circumstances,” Merle said again, “it’s the least I can do. I really liked Alisha, you know. I know how you felt about her.”
Nate said, “Let’s not talk about her, please.” And he raised the weapon and aimed it between Merle’s eyes.
“Tell me again you didn’t know a thing about the people who killed her,” Nate said without inflection.
Merle’s eyes got huge. He was close enough he could no doubt see the half-inch round of bronzed lead seated in the long, dark end of the barrel and no doubt envisioned what it would do to his head.
“I didn’t know a thing,” Merle whispered.
“Okay,” Nate said, letting the hammer down easy and slipping the weapon into his new shoulder holster. “Just needed to make sure.”
Large Merle collapsed back on the grille of his pickup as if his legs had lost their strength. He put a big paw over his heart. He said, “I wish you wouldn’t do things like that.”
Before they left the grassy plateau, Nate withdrew two one-hundred-dollar bills from his wallet, rolled them into a tight tube, and shoved it into one of the empty.500 brass cartridges. He jammed the brass into a crack in the first shattered target.
“So the rancher can buy some new posts,” he explained to Merle.
As they drove slowly down the mountain, Nate said, “Have you heard how Diane Shober is doing in Idaho?”
Shober had been relocated via the growing underground network after what had happened the year before in the Sierra Madre with Joe Pickett. Nate hadn’t kept in contact with her, or with his friends who took her in.
Merle said, “Changed her name and her hair color. She’s gained a little weight since she’s not running anymore. But from what I can tell, she’s settled in.”
Nate grunted approvingly.
“Learned to shoot,” Merle said. “She’s just waiting for the revolution, from what they tell me. Nate, what do you think? Will there be one? Will they come and try to take away our guns and our freedom?”
“Don’t know,” Nate said. “I’ve only got one thing on my mind right now and it’s not that.”
“I’m worried,” Large Merle said. “Everybody’s worried. But we ain’t gonna let it happen without a fight. What the bastards don’t really understand is what it means to have an armed citizenry.”
Nate grunted again.
“How you gonna get the fingerprint and DNA identification you mentioned?” Merle asked as they neared Nate’s Jeep.
“I know a guy in law enforcement,” Nate said, looking away. “I’m pretty sure he’ll help.”
“Is it the guy I’m thinking about? The one you had the falling out with over Diane Shober? The game warden?”
Nate looked over and silenced Merle with a look.
After a few beats, Merle said, “You want me to go down in the canyon and clean it up a little? Make it habitable again?”
“No.”
“So you aren’t coming back?”
Nate shook his head. “If an angry woman and two yahoos can figure out where I am, The Five wouldn’t have any problem. No, I’m gone from there.”
“Where are you gonna be?”
“For now,” Nate said, patting the holster and the weapon, “I’m going hunting.”
“Let me know if you need anything,” Merle said, pulling up next to the Jeep. “Money, ammunition, a home-cooked meal. Anything. Just let me know. And keep in touch.”
Nate looked over. “Why?”
Merle said, “In case we need you. If things turn real ugly, you know? Or if The Five decide to start taking out everybody from our old unit who’re still around. I know there aren’t many of us left, but as long as we breathe, we’re a threat to them.”
Nate nodded, said good-bye with his eyes, and climbed out of Merle’s Power Wagon.
As Large Merle rolled away, Nate got out of his shoulder holster and placed it on the hood of his Jeep. He withdrew the.500 WE and reached into his jeans pocket.
He’d braided the three-inch length of Alisha’s hair into a stiff bolt and tied one end of it to a supple leather jess he’d last used on his murdered peregrine. Nate took the loose ends of the jess and knotted them to the end of the muzzle of his weapon, just behind the front blade site.
He lifted the revolver and aimed it. The length of hair tilted slightly in the breeze. It would help when it came to gauging wind velocity for long-range shots. And it would remind him-as if he needed it-of the only thing he cared about right now.
SEPTEMBER 2
Speak not evil one of another, brethren. There is one lawgiver, who is able to save and to destroy: who art thou that judgest another?
— JAMES 4:11-12
22
Friday evening, Joe and Marybeth took Joe’s pickup to dinner at the Thunderhead Ranch. Missy had invited them, and Joe had been dreading the event all week. Lucy couldn’t join them because of play practice, and when they raised it with April, she said, “If I’m grounded, I’m friggin’ grounded.”
“Family events can be an exception,” Marybeth said.
“One of the problems with you people is you keep changing the rules,” April said, stalking back to her room and slamming the door.
Her favorite new phrase, besides “frigging” was now the accusatory you people.
Joe held the front door open for his wife. As she passed him, she said, “Marcus Hand better be as good as they say, because if he isn’t, April gains in power.”
“Ouch,” Joe said, flinching.
“I don’t want to do this,” Joe said, as they turned onto the highway.
“I know,” Marybeth said. “I can’t say I’m very excited myself. But my mother needs to know she’s got some support, Joe. Can you imagine how she feels?”
He bit his tongue and drove. If the woman had made any effort at all to befriend the locals or even show some respect for them, he thought, she might have a few allies.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Marybeth said.
“Can’t help it.”
He’d taken a shower and changed into jeans and a Cinch shirt, but his face still burned from being outside in the wind and sun all day. Mourning dove season had opened on the first, and he’d spent the last two days in the field checking hunters and limits. There was no other season where all a successful hunter had to show for himself was a small bag of the soft gray birds that would barely make a single meal-even though it was a tasty one. But because mourning doves migrated out of the area as quickly as they arrived, it was a furious few days
of hunting and work and he’d not been able to pursue his investigation further.
Joe and Marybeth had not caught up because they’d been missing each other at home with his long days and her evening shift at the library.
As they turned off the highway and passed under the magnificent elk antler arches that marked the entrance to the Thunderhead Ranch, he said, “I guess this will give me the chance to ask Missy a couple of questions that have been nagging me since my talk with Bob Lee.”
“Like what?” she asked.
Joe chinned toward the north in the direction of the Rope the Wind turbine project. “The wind,” he said. “It blows.”
Dinner was served at the regal long table in the rarely used dining room. Jose Maria had been pulled from duty with the cows and dressed in a black jacket to serve ranch-raised beef tenderloin, asparagus with hollandaise, garlic-roasted sharp-tail grouse, and red-skinned new potatoes. Missy sat at one end picking, as usual, at tiny bits of food. She wore pearls and a black cocktail dress that showed off her trim figure and youthful legs, and Joe wondered if she could possibly be the same wan person he had seen in the courtroom.
Marcus Hand occupied the other end of the table. He wore a loose guayabera shirt over jeans and cowboy boots. His reading glasses hung from a chain around his neck. He ate huge portions and loudly enjoyed them and washed down each bite with alternate gulps of either red or white wine. Hand was well known as a gourmand, and he’d penned dozens of unapologetic essays about eating large quantities of rich food. In one piece Joe had read in a national magazine, Hand lamented that fried chicken was rarely offered in local restaurants and that elites should stop looking down on big eaters who enjoyed their food in quantity. Hand dismembered a grouse by pulling it apart and gnawed the meat off the carcass. Then he snapped the thighbones in two and sucked out the marrow.
Joe and Marybeth faced each other in the middle, shooting glances toward either end and exchanging puzzlement to each other when their eyes met. Joe had expected angst and gravity to accompany the meal, but not this. He couldn’t help but stare at the lawyer, who enjoyed his food with a kind of moaning passion that nearly made Joe feel like a voyeur.
“This grouse,” Hand swooned, sitting back and letting his eyes roll back into his head while a half-eaten thigh jutted out of his mouth like a fat cigar, “may be one of the most succulent dishes I’ve ever had. And I’ve eaten well all over the world, as you know.”
“It is good,” Missy said from the other end of the table. Her face beamed, and she seemed oddly relaxed. Marybeth obviously thought the same thing, and she had trouble hiding her agitation.
“Fresh grouse,” Hand said, “is like fine wine. You can taste the pine nuts and the sage they eat in the meat itself, as if master chefs infused it. Few culinary artists in the world can come close to replicating the savory flavor of freshly roasted grouse no matter how many fancy sauces they cover the fowl with, or what they stuff it with.”
“All these years,” Missy said, talking softly and directly to Hand as if Joe and Marybeth weren’t in the room, “I didn’t know how wonderful these birds could be. There they were, just flying around the place. I didn’t even know they were grouse. I thought they were just fat little birds.”
Hand laughed and shook his woolly head. He was charmed by her, or doing a very good impression of it.
“It’s like this dining room,” Missy said. “Earl never wanted to eat in here. He said it was too dark and he never liked to linger over fine food and wine. To Earl, food was just fuel. But it’s lovely, isn’t it? A lovely room to eat wonderful fresh grouse in.”
“Mom,” Marybeth said sharply, “are you okay?”
“I’m wonderful, honey,” Missy said, inflecting a slight Southern accent Joe had never heard before. He noted how the lilt made Hand smile in appreciation, as if she’d triggered something from his youth just the two of them understood.
Joe felt his scalp crawl. She was flirting with him.
“Marcus shot them,” Missy said. “He brought them to me this afternoon and said they would be as magnificent as they turned out to be.”
“I find upland shooting relaxing,” Hand said, still looking at Missy. “I take my Purdey side-by-side shotgun with me everywhere I go, just in case. Hunting and shooting helps me clear my mind and focus only on the things that matter.”
Missy turned her head slightly to hide her blush and her smile.
Joe said, “Grouse season doesn’t open for two weeks.”
“Excuse me?” Hand said.
“You’re poaching.”
It was suddenly very silent in the room. In his peripheral vision, Joe could see Jose Maria step backwards from Missy’s side into a dark corner.
“Those are my birds,” Missy said. “They’re on my ranch.”
“Nope,” Joe said. “They’re wild and managed by the state.”
“I didn’t realize we lived in Communist China,” Missy said.
Joe shrugged.
“Marybeth,” Missy said, an edge in her voice, “your husband is a kill-buzz.”
“That would be ‘buzzkill,’ ” Joe corrected. To Hand, he said, “I’ll drop off the citation later. Don’t worry. You can afford the fine.”
Marcus Hand grinned at Joe, but his eyes couldn’t completely hide his anger and resentment.
The rest of dinner proceeded awkwardly. Joe pretended not to notice. The grouse was delicious. Marybeth and Missy filled the vacuum with small talk about the girls, the library, the weather. Anything but the case.
Marcus Hand studied his wineglasses and filled them often. Joe could hear the rest of Hand’s Jackson Hole legal team in the small dining area beyond the door. He thought there must be six or seven people eating dinner in the other room, like the kids’ table at Thanksgiving. He doubted they were being treated to grouse.
As Jose Maria brought out small dishes of vanilla ice cream with bourbon sauce, Joe turned to Missy.
“How involved were you with The Earl’s wind project?”
Missy’s smile turned hard. “Why do you ask?”
“It’s one of the biggest in the state and it cost tens of millions to build,” Joe said. “It’s not like a new corral. I’m sure it was discussed.”
“What about it?” she asked, looking down the length of the table for her lawyer to step in. Since he was wrapped up with opening another bottle of rare red wine he’d found in the cellar, he didn’t respond. Neither did Marybeth.
“You asked me to help investigate the murder,” Joe said to Missy. “I’m on thin ice as it is, since I’m technically on the other team. So if I’m going to help at all, I need to have some things cleared up. I can’t be flying blind.”
“I thought that was your specialty,” she said. Then she noted Marybeth glaring at her and quickly added, “Not that I don’t appreciate what you’re doing, Joe. I know you’ve been spending quite a bit of extra time establishing that I had nothing to do with this.”
Missy filled the end of her spoon with a tiny bit of ice cream and stabbed the tip of her tongue at it. Her eyes closed slightly as she did, like her more delicate version of Hand’s food swooning. She seemed to know it would get his attention. It worked and he looked up, saw her, and appeared enchanted.
“He wants to know how involved I was in Earl’s business dealings,” she said.
“Why is it important?” Hand asked Joe.
“Because I talked to Bob Lee on the next place,” Joe said, thumbing over his shoulder in the general direction of the Lee Ranch. “He said The Earl approached him two years ago to buy his holdings outright, but Bob wouldn’t sell it all. So Earl negotiated a price for just the adjoining ridge. Bob didn’t mind selling that, since it was worthless for livestock or hay, and he thought he’d get the best of Earl since the price was twice what it had been appraised for. Then less than a week after the closing, Earl met some guy from Cheyenne and bought his company-Rope the Wind.”
Joe let that sink in. He checked Missy for a rea
ction, but she wore her best porcelain mask.
“Now Bob realizes the windy ridge was all Earl ever really wanted,” Joe said.
Missy said, “You are asking me about things that happened before we were married.”
“Right about the time you started sneaking around with him behind Bud Longbrake’s back,” Joe said. “I thought maybe he’d talked to you about his entry into the wind business.”
Her eyes became cold and hard, and she barely moved her mouth when she said, “We had other things to talk about.”
Joe nodded and said, “Rope the Wind was an established company at the time, from what Bob Lee told me. They’d gotten going before the current administration came into power and created the big boom in renewable energy. But apparently Earl could look ahead and see it coming, so he put everything into place before it did. He bought the company since they were up and running and he could move fast.”
Hand said, “Earl Alden was a kind of genius that way. He bought up depressed Iowa farms before the Feds started handing out ethanol subsidies, and it sounds like he had the same instinct when it came to wind.
“That’s something I’ve learned about the genius of Earl Alden,” Hand said, nodding his head, “and one of the three common categories of wealthy clients I’ve served over the years. The people who exist in a stratosphere outside of ours, although one could say thanks to them I’m now in it,” he chuckled. “But I digress. I’ve learned over the years there are three kinds of rich men, and only three. The first are those who had their wealth given to them. Those types generally get in trouble because they haven’t earned their wealth, although they certainly enjoy it. It gives them a skewed kind of entitlement, and they often step over the line because they think the rules don’t apply to them, alas. I’ve been hired by many of them. Even if they avoid prison-which they do thanks to me-they eventually spiral out. Many of them have such self-loathing that it’s contagious.”