by C. J. Box
“Evenin’,” one of them replied.
Farkus looked up to see the square-cut face of a handsome young man in a sharply creased cowboy hat pass between the bottles on the mirrored back bar. The cowboy swiped two fingers along the edge of his wide-brimmed cowboy hat toward Wanda as he went by.
“Four draft Coors and four shots of Beam,” he said. His voice was high and twangy, but not unpleasant. “We’ll be sittin’ at one of those booths in the back.”
“I’ll bring them right over,” she said as she reached up and flipped her hair with the back of her hand. She was flirting with this man in a way she’d never flirted with Farkus.
“Appreciate it,” the cowboy said.
Farkus didn’t want to spin around and stare. He knew there were four of them—three men and a woman—and the worst thing to do late at night in a bar was to glare at newcomers who were younger and bigger than he was. He could almost hear What are you lookin’ at? in his ears. The cowboy who had obviously charmed Wanda seemed like the alpha dog of the pack. And he seemed familiar to Farkus, although he couldn’t quite place him.
“Do you realize who just walked in?” Wanda whispered to Farkus.
Before he could speculate, she was practically dancing away on the rubber bar mat to fetch the beer and pour the shots.
“I’ll take another one before you close out,” Farkus called to her.
She rolled her eyes with annoyance and cursed under her breath at the intrusive order. He was obviously distracting her from serving the cowboy and his friends.
—
FARKUS SAT RIGHT THERE on his magic eavesdropping stool with his back to them as Wanda delivered the tray of drinks to the group who’d taken over the farthest booth in the back. He looked under his armpit as she walked behind him and slammed his can of beer down on the bar (no tomato juice). He’d never seen her sway her hips like that before.
He listened as she asked them what they were in town for, which turned out to be elk hunting.
“Elk hunting?” she said. “I love elk steaks better than either moose or beef. I’d do anything to get a couple of packages for my freezer.”
She’d never told Farkus that.
“Well, maybe we’ll get lucky so you can get lucky,” the cowboy said.
“Maybe we’ll both get lucky,” she laughed. On his stool, Farkus rolled his eyes.
“You never can count on those elk being where you think they’ll be.”
She told them about going hunting with her dad when she was a little girl and how sad she was when he’d shot an elk and hung the carcass up in a tree. She said she tried not to think of that bloody body up there when she enjoyed elk steaks. The story went on for a while.
The cowboy did the talking, and he was polite but succinct with her. Farkus thought it was obvious he didn’t want to be rude to her, but he wanted her to go away.
“Well, wish us luck,” the cowboy said, signaling an end to the conversation.
“Wish us both luck,” Wanda said with that laugh again. “Let me know when you need another round. The first one was on the house.”
When she returned to the bar, her face and neck were flushed.
Farkus said, “You’ve never bought me a round even once.”
Instead of answering him, she said again, “Do you know who that is?”
—
THE CONVERSATION IN THE BOOTH was led by the cowboy, who had—deliberately, Farkus thought—lowered his voice. Still, Farkus could catch some of what was being said to the others.
“The plan is to be methodical, like we talked about,” he said.
“We come at them from all angles and hit ’em on the edges—hit ’em hard. I want to make him suffer.”
That got Farkus’s attention, but he tried not to show it. Instead, he sipped at the can of beer with his back to them. The beer wasn’t very cold. He thought Wanda had purposely given him a can that hadn’t been in the refrigerator very long.
Then the cowboy said, “Hold on a minute.”
The man got up, and Farkus could hear his boots clomp along the wooden floor, and he could see Wanda suck in her belly and look up in anticipation. But instead of coming all the way to the bar, the cowboy stopped and fed quarters into the jukebox.
Garth Brooks’s “Friends in Low Places” filled the saloon, followed by Blake Shelton’s “Came Here to Forget.”
After that, Farkus could only hear certain words and phrases during the pauses in the songs or between songs. But he heard enough to keep interested.
“Squeeze him in a vise . . .”
“Keep our stories straight . . .”
“Don’t do stupid shit . . .”
“Gay Mormon won’t know what hit ’im . . .”
Gay Mormon? Huh? Farkus was momentarily confused by the phrase. It addled his mind and he didn’t bother to excuse himself when he slid down from his stool to lumber back to the restroom again, because Wanda had forgotten he was still at the bar. Instead, she was excitedly talking to a girlfriend on her cell phone about who she’d just met.
Farkus nodded his head as he passed them. The cowboy was lean and hard and his face looked to be constructed of a series of smooth, flat white rocks—sharp cheekbones, wide jaw, heavy brow. There was a two-inch scar on his left cheek that looked like an inadvertent sneer. His neck was as wide as his jaw, and he projected raw physical power. He wore a crisp long-sleeved shirt, the kind preferred by rodeo cowboys.
He paused talking as Farkus walked by them.
Across the table from the cowboy were two other men, both with a hint of menace about them. One was big with wide shoulders, a round face, and dark distant eyes. He had black hair sprinkled with silver and a large nose that looked like it had been broken more than once. The other was leaner, with reddish hair and a five-day growth of beard. He had alabaster skin and was absolutely still except for the movement of his steel-gray eyes, which had flicked from the cowboy to Farkus.
Farkus couldn’t see the woman clearly because she had a dark hoodie pulled over her head and her face was in shadow. She’d pushed up the cuffs on her sweatshirt, though, and he noticed multicolored, sleeve-length tattoos on her forearms and even on the backs of her hands.
—
WHEN HE RETURNED from the toilet, Farkus didn’t sit back down on his stool. Instead, he waved down Wanda. She covered the mouthpiece of her cell phone and glared at him.
“I need to close out now.”
“Call you back in a minute,” she said to her girlfriend.
As Farkus dug cash out of his wallet and the opening guitar licks to Johnny Cash’s “(Ghost) Riders in the Sky” leapt out of the jukebox, he signaled for Wanda to get closer.
“Is that Dallas Cates back there?”
“Who else do you think it is?”
“I didn’t realize he was around.”
“Neither did I, or I would have put on my Spanx and dressed up a little.”
“Can I borrow your cell phone real quick? Mine’s dead.”
“Why don’t you learn to plug it in?”
“I’ll be real quick,” he said.
Reluctantly, she handed over her phone, with a warning that her battery was just about dead as well.
Then he walked straight outside. Farkus glanced at Timberman in the corner as he passed him.
Still sleeping.
—
ON THE SIDEWALK in front of the Stockman’s, it smelled like fall in the air, like elk-hunting season.
Although Joe Pickett’s phone went straight to message, he continued. “Some guys and a gal. I didn’t know any of them but Dallas Cates. I remembered what he looked like from them rodeo posters they used to have up in Welton’s Western Wear. Yeah, three guys, one gal—did I say that? Anyway, they were talking low, but really saying some shit, you know?
“Hel
l, I didn’t even know Cates was out of prison in Rawlins. Did you?
“When I heard ‘gay Mormon,’ I couldn’t figure it out. Then it hit me. They wasn’t saying ‘gay Mormon’ at all. They was saying ‘game warden.’
“So . . . call me. I’m going elk hunting tomorrow, but you need to know what I heard. If I don’t answer, come by our camp if you want to, but be sure to knock first. Ha! Bring a horse so you can help us drag out an elk if we get one. And bring whiskey. It’ll be my info for your whiskey, which sounds like a good deal for both of us.
“We’re up there on the South Fork of the Powder River—way up, maybe a quarter of a mile below tree line. Me and Cotton Anderson.
“Boy, they was really talkin’ shit about you. You’ll want to know, believe me. In general, they was planning—”
Wanda snatched the phone out his hand.
She said, “Okay, that’s enough, damn you,” and terminated the call.
“I wasn’t done,” Farkus said.
“I don’t give a rip,” she said, and turned on her heel and strode toward the front door.
Which opened before she got there. The doorframe filled with Dallas Cates and the larger of the two men.
Farkus froze on the sidewalk.
Cates stepped aside to let Wanda in, but he gracefully plucked the phone out of her hand as she went by. When she turned to object, he said, “I’ll bring it back to you in a minute, darling.”
She went back inside, but not before the big man squeezed through and shut the door behind him.
Farkus knew he couldn’t outrun them, but he thought he might be able to talk himself out of it.
Cates held the phone up and scrolled through the screen. The dim light illuminated his features and made him look diabolical, Farkus thought. The large man stepped out to Farkus’s left on the sidewalk, blocking an exit that way.
“I know who you are,” Cates said. “I know you were trying to overhear us talking in there. Dave fuckin’ Farkus. My dad used to clean out your septic tank, and sometimes you even paid him for it.”
Farkus recalled the early-morning arrivals of Eldon Cates in his C&C Sewer and Septic Tank Service truck. The predawn beep-beep-beep of that truck backing up outside his double-wide had awakened him from many a hangover.
“There,” Cates said. “I’ve memorized the number you called and I’ll look it up later, but I’m pretty sure I know who it was.”
“I called my wife to tell her I was coming home,” Farkus lied.
“When I was here last, you were single as hell and trying to score anyone you could find who’d fall for that fly-fishing scheme,” Cates said with a laugh. “Nobody’s dumb enough to marry a loser like you, Farkus.”
“Please, I—”
The big man reached for something tucked into the back of his belt and started to move in, and Farkus raised his arms in order to ward off any blows.
That’s when Cates said “Rory” with an urgent tone.
Rory stopped two feet away from Farkus, and Farkus opened his eyes slightly. Rory quickly morphed from reaching for a weapon to pretending he was pulling up his trousers.
A Twelve Sleep County Sheriff’s Department SUV was cruising down Main. It slowed in front of the Stockman’s Bar, and Farkus recognized the driver as Deputy Lester Spivak. Spivak had recently been named undersheriff for the department. He’d replaced Edgar Jess Boner, he of the unfortunate name, who had taken a better-paying job in North Dakota.
Farkus had never been as thrilled to see Deputy Spivak as he was at that minute. Spivak was squinting through the passenger window at the three of them out on the sidewalk.
Cates reached over and clapped Farkus on the shoulder as if he were saying good night to an old friend.
Under his breath to Rory, Cates said, “Let’s go finish our beers after walking our old buddy Farkus out of the bar.”
To Farkus, he said, “Wave to the nice officer and show him everything’s all right.”
Farkus did as he was told.
Spivak waved back and the SUV sped up and continued down the street.
As he opened the door to go back inside, Cates said to Farkus, “We’ll be in touch sooner than you think.”
Farkus’s hand was trembling so hard it took half a minute to slide his key into the truck ignition and pull away.
He couldn’t wait to disappear into the mountains and away from Dallas Cates.
3
Joe was still unsettled by what he’d witnessed on the iPad when he rolled his green Ford F-150 pickup to the front gate of his home and shut off the motor.
The scene down below in the timber ran through his mind in a continuous loop. Even during his briefing with Sheriff Reed at the airport, he’d watched the white figure emerge from behind the tree and flee while starbursts flashed on the black screen. He wasn’t even sure it had been Dave Farkus down there, he’d reported to Reed, or even that the three figures who moved through the forest had assassinated someone. But it sure felt like that.
Also unsettling was that the only illumination from inside his house was from the living room and Lucy’s bedroom. Now it looked lonely. When he’d drive up the mountain road while all the girls were there, his home was lit up at night like a steamboat on a dark river.
That was when his oldest daughter, Sheridan, twenty-two, was briefly back at home after graduating from the University of Wyoming the previous spring. And when April, twenty, was still there, before she’d enrolled at Northwest community college in Powell.
Sheridan was “taking a break” after college and had landed a job as a hostess at an exclusive high-end guest ranch outside of Saratoga, Wyoming. Neither Joe nor Marybeth knew exactly what “taking a break” meant, and Joe suspected Sheridan didn’t know for sure herself. Nevertheless, she seemed to enjoy the job despite the long hours and sometimes unreasonable demands from guests, who paid more than $1,500 a night to ride horses, fly-fish, and explore mountains and valleys away from civilization. Sheridan joked that she’d spent her formative years enjoying those activities and it hadn’t cost her a dime.
April had surprised them both by applying for and receiving a scholarship on the college rodeo team, specializing in breakaway roping. Breakaway roping was a timed event that was a gentler hybrid of calf roping—the rider roped a calf but the animal wasn’t jerked to the ground or tied up. April had saved enough money working at the local Western-wear store to buy a competent roping horse, and she was participating in college rodeos throughout Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, and the Dakotas.
Eighteen-year-old Lucy, a senior at Saddlestring High School, was seven months away from moving on as well and leaving Joe and Marybeth with an empty nest. Lucy was the most sensitive and intuitive of the three girls, and she seemed to be almost embarrassed to be the last one still at home, as if her presence were keeping her parents from their next stage of life. She seemed to be in a hurry to join her sisters out in the world. Marybeth was resigned to the future, although she wasn’t excited about it. She’d told Joe that her relationship with Lucy had gotten closer and more full since the two older girls had left. She’d miss Lucy terribly.
Joe opened his truck door and swung out. His Labrador, Daisy, who was no doubt put out that he hadn’t taken her along in the airplane, was inside the living room on her hind feet, watching him through the window and steaming up the glass.
—
“ROUGH NIGHT?” Marybeth asked as Joe removed his boots and jacket in the mudroom and placed his Stetson crown-down on a shelf.
“Yup.”
She sat at the dining room table stacked high with piles of paper and three-ring binders. She’d changed into sweats, and her blond hair was in a ponytail. She looked remarkably youthful in her smart glasses. He could tell she’d already fed the horses because there were stray stalks of hay stuck to the fabric of her pants.
“I bought a
bucket of chicken on the way home tonight and most of it’s in the fridge,” she said. “I thought you might want some for your lunch tomorrow.”
“Thank you.” Joe never turned down fried chicken. “You’re working late.”
She sat back and sipped at a glass of red wine. “I’ve got to. I spend all my day trying to do my job and dealing with all the construction guys, and the bureaucrats who want to keep the construction guys from constructing anything.”
Joe nodded as he opened the cabinet and closed his hand around the neck of a bottle of bourbon. As the director of the Twelve Sleep County Library, Marybeth was running day-to-day operations and coordinating the construction of a new library building funded by a bond issue the county voters had passed the previous summer. It was the culmination of an effort to which she’d devoted years: convincing citizens that a new library was needed. After two unsuccessful tries, the bond issue had finally passed, and now she felt she owed it to the voters to do everything she could to make sure the library was finished on time and under budget.
“Let me clear some room,” she said, reaching out to sweep aside some of the paperwork on the table.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said while pouring the bourbon over ice in a glass. He fished the bucket of chicken out of the refrigerator and took a bite out of a thigh as she watched him warily.
“Really?” she asked. “For dinner you’re going to eat over the sink and drink bourbon? Has it come to this?”
She was kidding, but only a little.
“Takes me back to my single days,” he said.
“You couldn’t afford bourbon.”
“True enough.”
“So tell me, were you able to locate your buddy Dave Farkus?”
“I think so,” he said.
“Well, that’s good news.”
“Not really.”
—
AFTER JOE RECOUNTED the flight and what he’d seen via the FLIR, she shook her head sadly and got up and poured a second glass of wine. A second glass was rare, he knew. She was as troubled now as he was.
“Do you think the shooters located him because you were flying a circle around him in the plane?”