Free Fire

by C. J. Box

  That stopped Keaton. His eyes narrowed until they were nearly shut. “We were there,” he admitted, “but not why you think.”

  “Then why?”

  “In a moment,” Keaton said. “I have to urinate. Which,” he said, sliding unsteadily off his stool, “if you take my philosophy to its logical conclusion so it applies to absolutely everything—like pissing your pants instead of going to the restroom after you’ve drunk too much beer—one would go mad while being stinky as well. But there is still something to be said for simple human dignity, despite all that.” And he staggered to the men’s room in the back.

  After a few beats, Nate turned to Joe. “I thought he might have been one of them. I heard him mention he came from the north this morning.”

  “I wonder what he wants,” Joe said.

  “My guess is it’ll surprise you.”

  “Meaning what?” Joe said, his mind still reeling.

  “If we want to understand motivation,” Nate said, “we might want to step outside convention and procedure. We might need to consider that some things happen up here because it truly is different.”

  “What are you saying?”

  Nate shook his head. “I’m not sure. But since dozens of people have studied this crime and come up with nothing, maybe we need to try and think about it differently. Maybe we need to consider that what happened was absolutely unique to this place, and for a reason we never even thought of before.”

  Joe nodded. “Maybe.”

  Nate drained his beer. The bartender pointed at the clock behind the bar, signaling it was time to close.

  “I didn’t like that bit about germs and me farting,” the bartender said. “Didn’t like it one bit.”

  As if on cue, the bartender reached out both hands to grip the bar and Joe felt suddenly unsteady but didn’t know why. Then he heard the tinkling of liquor bottles on the shelf behind the bar, and he saw ringlets form in the water in the sink. Just as quickly as it happened, it was still again.

  “Just an earthquake,” the bartender said. “Little one.”

  “My God,” Joe whispered, turning to Nate. “So that’s who you wanted me to meet, Doomsayer.”

  “No, not really.”

  “Then why did you bring me here?”

  Nate took a deep breath and his eyes flitted away for a second. Joe was confused.

  Nate walked over to Keaton’s companion, who was still sleeping on the bar.

  “You said you saw two men in the hallway up in Mammoth,” Nate said. “Two old guys. Doomsayer was one of them, I think we know now. Is this the other one?”

  He grabbed a fistful of thin hair on the head of the companion and pulled his face up. Joe felt as if a lightning bolt of bile surged up into his throat. His boots seemed spot-welded to the floor.

  Oh, how he recognized that face.

  “Dad . . .” Joe said, but the word croaked out.

  Two bloodshot, rheumy eyes cracked open, wobbled, focused.

  “Son,” George Pickett said thickly.

  “This is why I wanted you to leave your gun,” Nate said.

  14

  JOE AWOKE TO THE SOUND OF OLD FAITHFUL ERUPTING outside his window, which for an instant he thought was his stomach. Assured that it wasn’t, he threw back the sheets, padded barefoot to the window, and parted the curtains to watch the geyser once again, wondering if it would ever be possible to get tired of seeing it. He didn’t think so. He marveled at the furious churning of steam and water, the angry noise that accompanied the eruption, and was struck how some gouts of water punched through the billows into thin, cold air and paused at their apex, breaking apart into fat droplets that caught the sun, and plunged back down to earth.

  As he dressed he recalled the events of the night before and was still numbed from them. It was as if his world had tilted slightly to the left into unreality.

  His father had been too drunk to maintain a conversation and could barely stand. With Keating on one side and Joe on the other, they walked George Pickett home. Nate followed silently.

  “I see you haven’t changed much,” Joe said to his father as they cleared the dormitories and steered him toward a crooked line of rickety shacks hidden even farther in the trees.

  “I’m happy you’re here,” his father slurred, taking three tries to get it out. “I’d like to get to know you, Son.”

  “You had eighteen years for that,” Joe mumbled, knowing the conversation would likely be forgotten by George when he woke up the next morning.

  After they’d lowered George into a disheveled single bed in a coffin-shaped cabin strewn with papers and garbage, Keaton said something to Joe about organizing a get-together for the Picketts very soon, so they could talk.

  “Nothing to talk about,” Joe had said, turning for the door.

  “And it should be sooner rather than later,” Doomsayer intoned as Joe stepped outside. “We’re on borrowed time as it is, you know . . .”

  DEMMING WAS IN the dining room waiting for him at breakfast. He could feel her eyes on his face, trying to discern what was wrong. He ordered eggs from a waiter with the name badge “Vladimir—Czech Republic” and told her about meeting his father the night before in the Zephyr bar.

  “He’s one of the Geyser Gazers,” Joe said, trying to sound casual. “He lives in a hovel and drinks like a fish, waiting for the Yellowstone caldera to blow up.”

  After Vladimir brought breakfast and talked to them about how beautiful it was outside this morning—“a vision of a dream of nature”—in broken but charming English, Demming said, “So where is your friend Nate?”

  “Oh, he’s around,” Joe said, not wanting to tell her that Nate was staying somewhere inside the inn, likely in one of the sections that were officially off-limits to visitors. Nate had mentioned something about a tree house far up in the rafters, and Joe fought the urge to look up and see if he was there.

  Before separating the night before, Nate had told Joe he intended to spend the day talking to old Zephyr friends to see if he could learn anything about the Gopher State Five.

  “Around, huh?” she said, put off. “I’m beginning to think he doesn’t exist. Like he’s your special secret friend. My son has one of those too, Joe. He calls him Buddy.”

  JOE REVIEWED HIS notes and scribbled questions in his notebook while Demming went to find Mark Cutler, the area manager of Old Faithful. She returned with a cherubic and avuncular man about Joe’s age with a pillow of dark curly hair, red cheeks, and an air of cheery competence about him. He wore wire-framed glasses, a tie and a blazer, but looked as if he spent as much time outdoors as indoors, judging by his sunburned skin and the scratches on the back of his hands.

  “Mark Cutler,” he said. “I manage this joint.”

  “Joe Pickett. Nice to meet you.”

  “Judy said you have some questions, follow-up on Hoening and McCaleb.”

  “Yup,” Joe said. “Bob Olig too.”

  “Ah, Olig,” Cutler said, smiling at the name. “Quite the characters, those three.”

  “Do you have a few minutes?”

  Cutler looked at his watch. “If you want to sit down and talk, I really don’t, but if you’re willing to tag along with me as I do my work today, I’ve got all the time in the world.”

  Joe looked at Demming and she nodded.

  “We’ll tag along,” Joe said.

  “Good, good. You’ll see some really cool stuff,” Cutler said, turning on his heel and gesturing in a “follow me” wave.

  Joe instantly liked him for his affability and enthusiasm for his job. He guessed Cutler was a pretty good manager.

  “I’ve got a couple of things to wrap up in my office,” Cutler said, leading them outside on a wooden walkway that led, eventually, to some low-slung administration buildings painted Park Service brown and tucked into a stand of lodgepole pine. “We’re winding down the season, as you can see. It’s quite an operation. That means shutting down all the facilities and winterizing them, dealing w
ith the reassignment of employees, year-end reports, too many things to count. It would almost be easier if we just stayed open all year, but we don’t.”

  “So you knew the victims pretty well?” Joe asked.

  Cutler shrugged. “Pretty well. I mean, I was their boss, not their buddy. But I got along well with them. They were good guys, despite what you might have heard.” He nodded toward Demming when he said it, indicating the tiff they had had with particular rangers like Layborn. “They worked hard and they played hard. Hoening had a bit of an agenda, as you probably know, but a lot of new hires do. They come here to save the place, but the day-to-day work starts to make them forget that.”

  Cutler’s office was small and nondescript, nothing on the walls or his desk of a personal nature except for a photo of him smiling with Old Faithful erupting in the background.

  While Cutler fired off responses to e-mails, Joe turned to Demming.

  “The Pagoda is a palace compared to this,” Joe said. “Cutler manages hundreds of people, but his office . . .”

  “I know,” she said, rolling her eyes. “That’s how it is. Government employees are the royalty and the contractors are our serfs. Discussion over, Joe.”

  “Sorry.”

  She smiled to show she wasn’t angry. Then: “I talked to Ashby for an hour last night. He’s not happy. The news about Darren Rudloff is getting out, and he’s gotten some calls already. Apparently, some reporters are asking him questions about the Zone of Death, like are there a bunch of armed outlaws in it, why isn’t the Park Service patrolling the area, those kinds of things. He doesn’t like it one bit and he’s meeting with Chief Ranger Langston this morning to discuss the situation. I may get called back to Mammoth to help out.”

  “How can you go back and keep an eye on me at the same time?” Joe asked slyly.

  She shook her head. “I’d rather stay here. I don’t know where we’re going, but it seems like we’re headed somewhere.”

  “Story of my life,” Joe said.

  “If I get called back, you may be asked to leave.”

  “Oh.”

  “They don’t trust you,” she said, lowering her voice. “They think you’ll do something to bring the whole Clay McCann/Zone of Death thing back into the headlines. In fact, it’s already happening, isn’t it?”

  “I hope so.”

  Cutler tapped the keys on his keyboard with efficient violence and fired off the last e-mail, saying, “There! Chew on that, Park Service weenies!” As he did so, he glanced at Demming and said, “Sorry, ma’am. No offense.”

  “None taken,” Demming said coolly.

  Cutler leaned back. “I’m going off my shift here now and putting on a different hat. Follow me.”

  Cutler launched himself out of his chair and was out the door in a shot, Joe and Demming struggling to keep up. Cutler explained that his primary interest in life was geology, specifically geothermal activity. It was the reason he came to Yellowstone in the first place, twenty years before. Although he was area manager, his degree and background were in science, and he’d published scientific papers in international journals and kept a regular and ongoing correspondence with geologists around the world, wherever there were geysers. He had personally mapped more than two thousand geothermal sites within the park, and served as the secretary for the loosely organized Geyser Gazers, the volunteers who watched and recorded eruptions and hot-spot activities.

  “So that’s what brought you out here,” Joe asked, “the geysers?”

  Cutler nodded. “I originally wanted to join for the Park Service, but that didn’t work out.”

  “Why not?” Demming asked, a little defensively.

  Cutler stopped, smiled gently. “This is the most active, unique, and fascinating geothermal area in North America. Everything is visible here because the center of the earth is closer to the surface than anywhere else. It’s like a doctor meeting someone who has all his organs on the outside of his body—everything is right there to study. Do you know how many geologists are employed by the National Park Service in Yellowstone?”

  Joe and Demming shook their heads.

  Cutler raised a finger. “One. And he’s too busy to get out in the field. Not his fault, just the structure of the bureaucracy. So,” Cutler said, spinning on his heel and continuing to lead the way to a cabin compound where he lived, “without volunteers, without the Geyser Gazers, there would be no ongoing study of the caldera in the park. But it’s not a chore, it’s a passion. I love what I do, both at Old Faithful and especially out here in the field.”

  “Are you married?” Joe asked. “Kids?”

  “Engaged, sort of,” Cutler said. “It’s hard to convince some ladies to live here, believe it or not.”

  “Kids would love it,” Joe said, smiling. “Imagine being raised in this place. I wanted to live here, once.”

  Cutler nodded with instant kinship. “Takes a special kind of person,” he said. “Or an outright fool.”

  “Which are you?”

  “I straddle the line.”

  Joe said he’d met Dr. Keaton the night before.

  “Doomsayer?” Cutler asked, squinting.

  “Is it true what he says?”

  “He never stops talking,” Cutler said, “so that’s a hard one to answer.”

  “That Yellowstone could blow up in a super volcano any minute?”

  “Oh sure, that part’s true,” Cutler said cheerfully, pausing outside his cabin. “Give me a minute to change and we can go.”

  Joe and Demming looked at each other. Joe thought she looked pale.

  “You haven’t heard this before?” he asked.

  “I’ve heard it,” she said. “I just didn’t believe it.”

  “Doomsayer says drink up, for tomorrow we die.”

  WHILE CUTLER CHANGED clothes and gathered his equipment, Joe and Demming looked idly through five-gallon plastic buckets filled with tourist debris Cutler had fished out of geysers and hot springs. Most of the collection was of coins, tossed in, no doubt, to bring luck. There were American coins by the thousands, but also Euros, yen, pence, pesos, Canadian coins. Another bucket contained nails, hats, bullets, batteries, lug nuts, and, interestingly, a 1932 New York City Police Department badge and an engagement ring.

  “I’d love to know the story behind that ring,” Demming said, holding it up.

  “I want to know who walks around with lug nuts in their pocket,” Joe said.

  Cutler emerged in ranger green with a radio on his belt. He loaded a long aluminum pole with a slotted spoon on the end into a pickup, along with metal boxes containing electronics.

  “Thermisters,” Cutler explained when Joe looked at the boxes. “We hide them in geyser and hot springs runoff channels to track the temperature of the water. We learn a lot about which geysers are getting active and which ones are shutting down by the temps.”

  “What’s with the pole and spoon?” Demming asked.

  “I use that to pick the coins and crap out of the geysers to keep them clean.”

  Joe and Demming climbed into the truck and Cutler roared off.

  “Hoening, McCaleb, and Olig were all proud members of the Gopher State Five,” Cutler said. “Since I’m from Minnesota, we hit it off right away. They were just big old Midwest erners. They worked hard, loved their beer, loved the park. They used to come along with me sometimes to check geysers and clean out hot springs, like we’re doing now. They’d come on their days off, when they could be screwing around. When Ranger Layborn came around to ask me about them, it was as if he was describing entirely different people. He seemed to think they were big into drugs and crime, that they were some kind of gang. I never saw that side of them.”

  “Were they illegal hot-potters?” Joe asked.

  Cutler smiled. “I’m sure they were. We frown on it when it’s our employees, but it’s just about impossible to stop. We can’t watch everyone twenty-four/seven, even though the rangers think we should. No offense, ma’am,” he sa
id to Demming.

  “None taken,” Demming said, tight-lipped.

  “Any other problems with them? What about the drug allegations?”

  “Nothing I know of, and I mean that. That’s not to say all of my people are clean. It’s like any other work situation; there’s a percentage of bad apples. But no more than any workplace in the outside world and less than some. Hell, I went to school in Madison, at the University of Wisconsin. Ranger Layborn could really ply his craft there.”

  “Not even marijuana?” Joe asked. “There seemed to be drug references in the e-mails he sent. ‘Flamers,’ he called them.”

  Cutler shrugged. “Again, I can’t swear he wasn’t smoking, but I never saw or heard anything that would confirm it. As you know, there’s a certain attitude and culture that goes with drug use, and he didn’t seem to be a part of it. He was pretty tightly wound at times—kind of naively idealistic about environmental issues. But drugs, that would surprise me.”

  Cutler turned the pickup off the highway at the Upper Geyser Basin and parked it in the empty lot. Joe trailed him while Demming remained in the pickup to report to the Pagoda on the truck radio. The smell of hot sulfur and water was overwhelming. Cutler explained that the pools on either side of the boardwalk were 190 degrees, and the water temperature could be gauged by the color of the bacteria in the runoff—white being hottest, green and blue cooler but still too hot to touch. Using the slotted spoon, he carefully picked up coins that had been tossed into the thermals and handed them back to Joe, who juggled them from hand to hand until they cooled off enough to inspect. Three pennies and a dime. The pennies were already gray with a buildup of manganese and zinc from the water, Cutler said, but the dime, being silver, was unblemished.

  Cutler swung over the side of the railing and landed with a thump on the white-crust surface. He urged Joe to follow him.

  “What about the ‘Stay on the Boardwalk’ signs?” Joe asked, knowing the ground was unstable near geysers and the crust was brittle. Horror stories abounded of pets and visitors who wandered off the pathway.