The Best American Mystery Stories 2017

by John Sandford

  An hour later Rome sat in his living room. Across from him, on the other, lumpier couch, was this guy, this husband of hers, this Ted. Rome looked at his phone. Following Duhursts, Brian had texted earlier, and then, right that second, On mountain road. Rome finished repacking the bong. He sent the letter K.

  “What makes you any different?” he asked. “Your company?”

  “A fair question,” Ted said. He was so, so, so-so high, and it was pretty clear this Rome person didn’t care for him. But who knew, really? Maybe he did. Maybe he didn’t. Ted was so paranoid he couldn’t trust himself. One thing was certain: there was zero chance they were going to “be New England together,” as Kathy had suggested. This was actually impossible—because they weren’t from the same New England. Ted’s parents lived in Woodstock, Vermont, on the same road where Michael J. Fox kept a house. He’d attended Phillips Exeter, and not on scholarship. He’d skied! He’d skied all the time! That was the New England Ted belonged to. This Rome guy was from another one. It was written all over his sexily creased face. Enormous pickup trucks splattered with mud had rumbled through his childhood. Drunk uncles had thrown horseshoes at the pig roast. He clearly knew how to change his own oil. All that frightening reticence! Ted thought. How would he get his money?

  “We’re way better,” Ted said. “I think that’s the main thing.” As soon as he’d said it—he’d said nothing! he couldn’t think! why was he yelling?!? was he?!?—he wanted to crawl under the couch and hide there until morning.

  At that moment, as if to rescue him, the most beautiful woman in the entire world walked into the living room. She held a glass of water in each hand and had long dark hair, like Pocahontas. She was Pocahontas. She set the waters down on the coffee table, smiled at Ted, and then disappeared.

  “Who was that?”

  “Monarch,” Rome said.

  “Oh, yeah,” Ted said. “Monarch. Right.”

  Shit, Rome thought. Ted was stoned out of his mind. The poor idiot didn’t know what was going on. Rome wanted to help—he’d made up his mind to help—but they had to talk terms at some point. No matter how you looked at it, it was a lot of money. What would come back to him? How would percentages work? When would he get to see her again? Beyond logistics, Rome couldn’t launch Ted back into the world like this. He’d crash his car maybe, or get pulled over. Rome asked himself (he was high too—the Silverlight was headier than expected), did he like Ted? And the answer was no. He did not like Ted. He hated Ted’s guts. He wanted to smash Ted’s well-bred face in. But Rome got it. The guy was sort of sweet. He was nice. Good for her and all that shit. In any case, nice guy or not, Rome had to get this thing over with. The Duhursts were coming.

  “Why don’t we step out onto the porch?” Rome said. “Get some air?”

  “That sounds amazing,” Ted said.

  “Bring that water,” Rome told him.

  After a few minutes Ted was able to communicate more effectively.

  “It’s precision, basically,” he said. “That plot you mentioned, all those plants you lost—you could have saved them.”

  “Really?”

  “Really,” Ted said. “You would have known.”

  The air was nice up here. It cleared his head. While he was looking at the stars, he heard Rome’s phone go off.

  “Yeah?” Rome said. “How many?”

  Ted stepped down the porch steps to give him some privacy.

  “I don’t care who ran away,” Rome said. “Who’s in the hole?”

  Ted thought maybe he had him. He’d seen a look in Rome’s eye, one he’d witnessed before. It was the look of a man who believed in MicroWeather. Standing there among the jagged driveway rocks, Ted allowed himself a grin. After all, wasn’t this how it worked? Didn’t you come close to ruin? Didn’t success, like fame, reject you first? One day, years from now, he would look back upon all this hopelessness. He would look back upon a moment in time when the dream appeared to be lost . . .

  “Ted.”

  Rome took in the man’s face. What was this preppy asshole smiling about? God, he hated him. Did he not know anything? Did he only know the weather?

  “I wanna show you something,” he said. “Get in the truck.”

  He rode in Rome’s truck up the mountain. They passed a camp of homeless twentysomethings. He saw a pretty, short-haired girl throw a knife into a tree and then walk the ten feet to pull it out. Laid across the ground, a big sheet of black plastic caught the starlight. They drove up another, smaller road and parked outside a fence. The fence was twelve feet high and topped with razor wire. It was in the middle of the forest. The sky was down upon them. The stars were low. The angry voices of men came through the trees.

  He followed Rome down a path that went along the edge of the fence. Suddenly they turned. Were they going north? After a few more seconds, Rome’s flashlight app illuminated a man. Ted couldn’t believe it. It seemed impossible.

  “Over here,” Brian said.

  “For fuck’s sake. I know where I dug it,” Rome said. “Help me get the branches off.”

  The little Duhurst down in the hole had stopped talking shit. Rome had heard him shouting the whole way down from the truck.

  “The rest of ’em?” Rome asked Brian. Together they moved what was an entire felled tree to the side.

  “They took off,” Brian said. “I heard their truck. They’re gone.”

  “You hear that, you little fuck!?!” Rome shouted. “They left you! You came up here to rob me, and they left you alone!”

  “Fuck you, Rome!” the kid shouted. “My fuckin’ leg’s broke!”

  “That’s the least of your problems,” Rome said. “A broken leg won’t matter after I cut your head off!”

  “You won’t!” the kid shouted.

  “Watch me!” Rome screamed down into the hole. “Watch me kill you!” He could just make out Donny’s face. It was covered in dirt. What was he now? Sixteen? Seventeen?

  “This land was ours,” Donny moaned.

  “It was yours,” Rome said. “I bought it. Now it’s mine. That’s how property works. First one thing is one person’s, and then it’s another’s. Things change hands like that all the time. Something belongs to you for a while, and then it doesn’t. Isn’t that right, Ted? Isn’t that how it works?”

  Ted was over near the fence. He realized he was hanging on to it. He could hear the child crying down in the hole. Kathy and Rome: he got it. He didn’t want to live in California anymore.

  “I guess,” he said.

  Rome walked over to where Ted stood. He kneeled down in the grass in search of something.

  “You’re not really going to kill him, are you?” Ted said into the air.

  Rome stood up and looked into Ted’s face. They were close enough to feel one another’s breath.

  “No,” he said. “Of course not. Whaddya think, I’m some kind of lunatic?”

  Ted looked down at the bolt cutters in Rome’s right hand.

  “I’m gonna cut off one of his fingers,” Rome said. “Two maybe. Three at the most.”

  C. J. BOX

  Power Wagon

  FROM The Highway Kind

  A single headlight strobed through a copse of ten-foot willows on the other side of the overgrown horse pasture. Marissa unconsciously laced her fingers over her pregnant belly and said, “Brandon, there’s somebody out there.”

  “What?” Brandon said. He was at the head of an old kitchen table that had once fed a half-dozen ranch hands breakfast and dinner. A thick ledger book was open in front of him, and Brandon had moved a lamp from the family room next to the table so he could read.

  “I said, somebody is out there. A car or something. I saw a headlight.”

  “Just one?”

  “Just one.”

  Brandon placed his index finger on an entry in the ledger book so he wouldn’t lose his place. He looked up.

  “Don’t get freaked out. It’s probably a hunter or somebody who’s lost.”
r />   “What if they come to the house?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I guess we help them out.”

  “Maybe I should shut off the lights,” she said.

  “I wouldn’t worry about it,” he said. “They probably won’t even come here. They’re probably just passing through.”

  “But to where?” she asked.

  She had a point, he conceded. The old two-track beyond the willows was a private road, part of the ranch, and it led to a series of four vast mountain meadows and the foothills of the Wyoming Range. Then it trailed off in the sagebrush.

  “I saw it again,” she said.

  He could tell she was scared even though there really wasn’t any reason to be, he thought. But saying “Calm down” or “Don’t worry” wouldn’t help the situation, he knew. If she was scared, she was scared. She wasn’t used to being so isolated—she’d grown up in Chicago and Seattle—and he couldn’t blame her.

  Brandon found a pencil on the table and starred the entry he was on to mark where he’d stopped and pushed back his chair. The feet of it scraped the old linoleum with a discordant note.

  He joined her at the window and put his hand on her shoulder. When he looked out, though, all he could see was utter darkness. He’d forgotten how dark it could be outside when the only ambient light was from stars and the moon. Unfortunately, storm clouds masked both.

  “Maybe he’s gone,” she said, “whoever it was.”

  A log snapped in the fireplace and in the silent house it sounded like a gunshot. Brandon felt Marissa jump at the sound.

  “You’re tense,” he said.

  “Of course I am,” she responded. There was anger in her voice. “We’re out here in the middle of nowhere without phone or Internet and somebody’s out there driving around. Trespassing. They probably don’t even know we’re here, so what are they doing?”

  He leaned forward until his nose was a few inches from the glass. He could see snowflakes on the other side. There was enough of a breeze that it was snowing horizontally. The uncut grass in the yard was spotted white, and the horse meadow had turned from dull yellow to gray in the starlight.

  Then a willow was illuminated and a lone headlight curled around it. The light lit up the horizontal snow as it ghosted through the brush and the bare cottonwood trees. Snowflakes looked like errant sparks in the beam. The light snow appeared as low-hanging smoke against the stand of willows.

  “He’s coming this way,” she said. She pressed into him.

  “I’ll take care of it,” Brandon said. “I’ll see what he wants and send him packing.”

  She looked up at him with scared eyes and rubbed her belly. He knew she did that when she was nervous. The baby was their first, and she was unsure and overprotective about the pregnancy.

  During the day, while he’d pored over the records inside, she’d wandered through the house, the corrals, and the outbuildings and had come back and declared the place “officially creepy, like a mausoleum.” The only bright spot in her day, she said, was discovering a nest of day-old naked baby mice that she’d brought back to the house in a rusty metal box. She said she wanted to save them if she could figure out how.

  Brandon knew baby mice in the house was a bad idea, but he welcomed the distraction. Marissa was feeling maternal, even about mice.

  “Don’t forget,” he said, “I grew up in this house.”

  The old man hadn’t died at the ranch but at a senior center in Big Piney, population 552, which was eighteen miles away. He’d gone into town for lunch at the center because he never missed it when they served fish and chips, and he died after returning to his table from the buffet. He’d slumped forward into his meal. The attendants had to wipe tartar sauce from his cheek before wheeling him into the room where they kept the defibrillator. But it was too late.

  Two days later Brandon’s sister, Sally, called him in Denver at the accounting firm where he worked.

  “That’s impossible,” Brandon said when he heard the news. “He was too mean to die.”

  Sally told Brandon it wasn’t a nice thing to say even if it was true.

  “He left the ranch to us kids,” she said. “I’ve talked to Will and Trent and of course nobody wants it. But because you’re the accountant, we decided you should go up there and inventory everything in the house and outbuildings so we can do a big farm auction. Then we can talk about selling the ranch. Trent thinks McMiller might buy it.”

  Jake McMiller was the owner of the neighboring ranch and he’d always made it clear he wanted to expand his holdings. The old man had said, “Over my dead body will that son of a bitch get my place.”

  So . . .

  “Do I get a say in this or is it already decided?” Brandon had asked Sally.

  “It’s already decided.”

  “Nothing ever changes, does it?” Brandon asked.

  “I guess not,” she said, not without sympathy.

  Will and Trent were Brandon’s older brothers. They were fraternal twins. Both had left home the day they turned eighteen. Will was now a state employee for Wyoming in Cheyenne, and Trent owned a bar in Jackson Hole. Both were divorced and neither had been back to the ranch in over twenty-five years. Sally, the third oldest, had left as well, although she did come in from South Florida to visit the place every few years. After she’d been there, she’d send out a group letter to her brothers confirming the same basic points:

  The old man was as mean and bitter as ever.

  He was still feuding with his neighbor Jake McMiller in court over water rights and road access.

  He was spending way too much time drinking and carousing in town with his hired man Dwayne Pingston, who was a well-known petty criminal.

  As far as the old man was concerned, he had no sons, and he still planned to will them the ranch in revenge for their leaving it.

  The brothers had been so traumatized by their childhood they rarely spoke to each other about it. Sally was the intermediary in all family business, because when the brothers talked on the phone or were in the presence of each other, strong, dark feelings came back.

  Like the time the old man had left Will and Trent on top of a mountain in the snow because they weren’t cutting firewood into the right-size lengths. Or when the old man “slipped” and branded Trent on his left thigh with a red-hot iron.

  Or the nightmare night when Will, Trent, Sally, Brandon, and their mother huddled in the front yard in a blinding snowstorm while the old man berated them from the front porch with his rifle out, accusing one or all of them of drinking his Ancient Age bourbon. He knew it, he said, because he’d marked the level in the bottle the night before. He railed at them most of the night while sucking down three-quarters of a quart of Jim Beam he’d hidden in the garage. When he finally passed out, the family had to step over his body on the way back into the house. Brandon still remembered how terrified he was stepping over the old man’s legs. He was afraid the man would regain his wits at that moment and pull him down.

  The next day, Will and Trent turned eighteen and left before breakfast.

  When their mother started complaining of sharp abdominal pains, the old man refused to take her into town to see the doctor he considered a quack. She died two days later of what turned out to be a burst appendix.

  When the Department of Family Services people arrived on the ranch after that, the old man pointed at Sally and Brandon and said, “Take ’em. Get ’em out of my hair.”

  Brandon had not been back to the ranch since that day.

  “It’s a car with one headlight out,” Brandon said to Marissa. “You stay in here and I’ll go and deal with it.”

  “Take a gun,” she said.

  He started to argue with her but thought better of it. Everyone in Sublette County was armed, so he had to presume the driver of the approaching car was too.

  “I wish the phone worked,” she said as he strode through the living room to the old man’s den.

  “Me too,” he said.
r />   Apparently, as they’d discovered when they arrived that morning, the old man hadn’t paid his phone bill and had never installed a wireless Internet router. The electricity was still on, although Brandon found three months of unpaid bills from the local power co-op. There was no cell service this far out.

  Brandon fought back long-buried emotions as he entered the den and flipped on the light. It was exactly as he remembered it: mounted elk and deer heads, black-and-white photos of the old man when he was a young man, shelves of unread books, a lariat and a pair of ancient spurs on the wall. The calendar behind the desk was three years old.

  He could see half a dozen rifles and shotguns behind the glass of the gun cabinet. Pistols inside were hung upside down by pegs through their trigger guards. He recognized a 1911 Colt .45. It was the old man’s favorite handgun and he always kept it loaded.

  But the cabinet was locked. Brandon was surprised. Since when did the old man lock his gun cabinet? He quickly searched the top of the desk. No keys. He threw open the desk drawers. There was a huge amount of junk crammed into them and he didn’t have time to root through it all.

  He could break the glass, he thought.

  That’s when Marissa said, “They’re getting out of the car, Brandon. There’s a bunch of them.” Her tone was panicked.

  Brandon took a deep breath to remain calm. He told himself, Probably hunters or somebody lost. Certainly it couldn’t be locals, because everyone in the county knew the old man was gone. He’d cut a wide swath through the psyche of the valley where everyone knew everybody else, and the old-line ranching families—who controlled the politicians, the sheriff, and the land-use decisions—were still royalty.

  As he walked to the front door, he smiled at Marissa, but he knew it was false bravado. She looked scared and she’d moved behind the couch, as if it would protect her.

  He pulled on one of the old man’s barn coats that hung from a bent horseshoe near the front door. It smelled like him: stale cigarette smoke, gasoline fumes, cows. The presence of the old man in that coat nearly caused Brandon to tear it off. He shoved aside the impulse and opened the door.