by C. J. Box
“Yes, sir, we’re doing a thorough job before we bag up the body and bring it down. The scene’s taped off and photographed, but it’s also deteriorating fast with this snow. It’s a real cowboy crime scene at this point. There’s already too much accumulation to find tracks or footprints . . .”
“Great,” Spivak said before signing off.
He announced that Sheriff Reed was issuing a county-wide APB for Dallas Cates and two unknown males and an unknown female.
—
JOE BENT OVER to help Norwood and Deputy Steck roll the body into the body bag that Norwood had laid out on the ground. Disturbing a body was frowned upon, but when it was in the forest, it was necessary to get it out before more predation occurred or a bear or mountain lion dragged it away. Joe kept his eyes averted and did it by feel. Farkus’s feet were stiff within his boots.
He heard Spivak shout from somewhere in the trees on the other side of the small clearing where the body had been found. The snow was falling too hard for Joe to see the undersheriff.
“Brass here,” Spivak said, meaning shell casings. “Brass all over the place. This is where they ambushed him. Norwood, get over here. Let’s get these casings bagged up before the snow covers them all.”
“Sorry, guys,” Norwood said as he stood up. He stripped two pairs of blue medical gloves from a box in his kit and tossed them to Joe and Steck. The body was half in and half out of the body bag. Entrails snaked from the body cavity across the snow. “Push all those guts inside the bag and zip it up.”
“I’m gonna be sick,” Steck said.
Joe chinned toward the woods behind him and said, “There’s a place I know right back there in the trees . . .”
Spivak said to Steck, “Yeah, don’t worry about the body. I’ve done this enough, I don’t get sick anymore. Step aside and gather up that brass and any other evidence you can find.”
Steck stood and left eagerly.
Spivak looked at Joe, then at the body. “I can handle this,” he said.
“You sure?”
Spivak nodded. He seemed to be waiting for Joe to leave before he began the grisly work.
Joe nodded back. He was grateful.
But he thought it odd how eager Spivak seemed to be to dive in.
5
Later that afternoon, Randall Luthi pressed his back against the southwest corner of the log house and stared straight ahead. The five-shot Savage .17 bolt-action rifle was pointed muzzle-down along his right leg.
Beyond a crude lean-to built of two-by-four framing with corrugated metal sheathing, the snow fell lightly on the treeless bench. Clumps of snow stuck to the tips of the sage, making it look remarkably like the blooming cotton fields of his youth in Hale County, Texas, and for a moment he was transported back there to Plainview, smack in the middle of the panhandle, which was smack in the middle of nowhere.
This was like the panhandle, he thought, in that it was in the middle of nowhere as well, but much farther north and much higher in elevation. And it was cold snow out there and not cotton.
Above the rolling sagebrush vista and beneath the heavy storm-cloud bank that had brought the snow was a thick blue band of mountains, their peaks obscured. The band of mountains was dark and it was damned cold up there, too, and probably snowing much harder.
If he never went back into those mountains again, it was fine with him. He’d discovered that mountains only looked good from a distance or in a painting. When a man was actually in them, it was elemental and brutal and there were animals there who could eat him.
There was a reason why all the towns up here were on the flats.
People shouldn’t live in the mountains, Randall Luthi had decided.
—
HE INCHED CLOSER to the corner of the house and slowly, slowly peered around it.
The small herd of pronghorn antelope were less than a hundred yards away, the closest they’d been all afternoon. Seven does and one nice buck. The buck lorded over his harem and steered them with twitches of his head, as if he were herding them in slow motion to Luthi.
Luthi had been observing them, watching them graze closer, for the past two hours. It had tested his patience, and he’d thought about raising the rifle and taking a long shot, but he didn’t want to miss and spook them. He’d seen antelope run and they were damned fast. He’d heard they were the second-fastest mammal on earth and he believed it.
It was the buck he wanted, but he’d make do with a doe if that was the only good shot he’d get. He didn’t care that much because he was hungry and he wanted fresh meat.
He knew that the .17 rifle he’d found inside the house in the gun case was made for varmint hunting, not big game. The bullet was smaller than a .22 round, but it shot flatter, faster, and was accurate at much greater range. If he placed the shot just right—right in the head—it should bring down a pronghorn.
To his dismay, the herd had pretty much stopped moving closer. The herd seemed to sense he was there, he thought. When the buck looked over in his direction, Luthi leaned back so his profile couldn’t be seen on the side of the building.
—
THE FIRST IMPRESSION he’d had of the abandoned Cates compound when they drove in was that it had been built in a stupid location. Back in the panhandle, small ranches were near rivers or bodies of water and surrounded by oak trees for shade against the brutal sun.
Why Dallas’s father chose to put up his house and outbuildings in the center of a saddle of rolling sagebrush hills without a single tree in sight seemed ridiculous. Especially when there were sharp draws bordered by mountain juniper and caragana bushes within sight on the sloping side of the foothills that marched toward the mountains themselves.
Why build a place so isolated, so exposed, so barren when he didn’t have to? There was nothing to break the wind, and the sun would pound the roof and yard without any shade.
But after observing the small herd of antelope eat their way closer for hours, he understood. There was no way to sneak up on those pronghorns, no way to drive to them or cut them off, because they could look up and see everything for ten miles in each direction. Unlike wild turkeys and feral hogs that stayed in heavy brush for concealment back in Texas, these animals did the opposite. They wanted to be in the open, where nothing could approach them without them knowing about it.
Eldon Cates apparently thought the same way.
—
RANDALL LUTHI WAS FIVE-FOOT-SIX and wiry, with close-cropped ginger hair and a five-day growth of beard that was coming in pinker than he wanted. He had gray eyes, a long thin nose that ended in a point, and an upswept jawline that, to some people, made him look in profile like a weasel. That’s what they’d called him behind his back in the Wyoming State Penitentiary—the Weasel—but never to his face.
The stupid Mexican who’d called him Weasel in that saloon in Rock Springs had found out that it wasn’t a wise idea after all when Luthi had grabbed a beer bottle by the neck, broken it, and ground the jagged edges into the man’s face, even after the Mexican went down. It took four men to pull Luthi off of him, but not before a bucket of blood had been spilled and the cops had been called.
The cops had searched his car and found the weed and the guns intended for some motorcycle guys in Sacramento and that was that. Randall Luthi’s first job as a courier had turned into a miserable failure. All because he’d stopped for a beer along I-80.
Luthi didn’t regret disfiguring Pedro Moreno’s face—the man was an illegal roofer, after all—but he did regret stopping in Rock Springs, because that meant that the Wyoming State Penitentiary would be his new home.
Rock Springs. He’d never go to that damned town ever again, that he knew. One of the prison tattoos on his back, done by an inmate he’d trusted not to screw it up or misspell the words, read FUCK ROCK SPRINGS.
—
HE KNEW I
F HE MISSED the pronghorn, there would be a good chance they’d be eating two-year-old Dinty Moore stew and canned green beans from the pantry again.
He craved fresh red meat and a lot of it. Back in Texas, he used to order his steak medium or well-done. But after two and a half years in the penitentiary eating processed food products that were the wrong color, he lusted for bloody meat that was barely cooked rare. He used to have dreams of eating a sixteen-ounce T-bone, throwing the bone aside, and lapping the greasy red juice from the plate.
This was his chance.
—
LUTHI LEFT HIS POSITION and walked behind the house. He thought if he put the house between him and the antelope and used the natural slope of the yard to remain hidden that he could get a closer shot. If he couldn’t see the animals, they couldn’t see him. He hoped the antelope couldn’t hear the tinny sound of digital gunshots from the PS2 inside—probably Grand Theft Auto again—and that they couldn’t see him when he bent over and duckwalked.
Would they smell him? He didn’t know. He really didn’t know much about pronghorn antelope because those creatures didn’t exist in the panhandle. Someone—probably Dallas—had told him the meat was mild-tasting, like goat meat. Not that Luthi had ever eaten goat meat, but it sounded like something he’d like to try.
He crawled across the neglected yard with the rifle in the crooks of his arms. When he got to the far edge, he thumbed the safety off the rifle and rose up slowly.
The antelope were walking away. They were nearly two hundred yards from him.
He cursed and raised the rifle. It had a scratched-up scope mounted on it and he settled the crosshairs on the top of the buck’s head right between his pronged horns. At that moment, the buck stopped and turned his head, as if sensing what might be coming. But he didn’t run.
Luthi took a breath and leaned into the synthetic stock of the rifle. Moisture beaded on the plastic and fogged the lenses of the scope a little. He started to squeeze the trigger—
And Rory Cross came out of the house with a bang of the screen door that instantly made the antelope streak away. Apparently, he was done playing Grand Theft Auto.
Luthi fired anyway and a sharp crack rang out that was quickly swallowed by the sagebrush prairie. He had no idea where the bullet had hit.
“What in the hell are you doing?” Cross laughed. He had a big laugh, because he was a big man.
Luthi stood red-faced, and pointed to the northeast, where the white orbs of antelope hindquarters could still be seen bobbing through the distance.
“What does it look like I’m doing? I’m trying to get us some food, and you scared them off by banging that door open.”
Cross looked from Luthi to the retreating herd, then back to Luthi again.
“Dallas will bring us a bag of groceries from town anytime now. He said he knew a way to get in and get out without being spotted by anyone.”
“How’s he gonna do that?” Luthi asked.
“I don’t know, but Dallas is Dallas.”
Luthi knew what he meant. Dallas was capable of accomplishing things no other man could do. The more outlandish, the easier he made it look.
“Besides,” Cross boomed, “antelope tastes like shit, anyway.”
“How do you know that?”
“That’s what I heard. They’ve got big adrenaline glands from running all the time. The adrenaline taints the meat and makes it taste like shit.”
“That ain’t what I heard.”
“You heard wrong.”
“Dallas told me they taste like goat.”
“Goat?” Cross asked with another laugh. “Goat? Who wants to eat a goddamn goat?”
“I do. At least I’d like to try. That canned stew ain’t any better than prison food. I thought we were done with that.”
“I told you, Dallas is bringing real food. We’ll have a feast tonight.”
“What if he doesn’t?” Luthi asked, thinking Rory Cross was big, all right, but a well-placed .17 round between his eyes would drop him like a dry bag of Quikrete.
Cross said, “If he doesn’t, we’ll eat stew. Now, why don’t you come on inside? You heard him. Dallas asked us not to be out walking around, in case some local rube might see us and call the cops.”
Dallas had warned them: the local cops were corrupt as hell and they’d had it in for every member of the Cates family since he could remember. The cops used to pull his brothers, Bull and Timber, over anytime they felt like it, just to try to get them to overreact. Unfortunately, his brothers were prone to overreaction.
They’d harassed Eldon when he was driving from septic tank to septic tank, Dallas said, and they’d even pulled over his mother, Brenda, claiming her taillight was out. It was, but any other citizen of Twelve Sleep County would have gotten a warning. Brenda received a ticket.
The family used to say the only thing they were guilty of was DWC—Driving While Cates.
And if the cops got a tip that someone was occupying the old Cates compound, they’d make up a reason to raid it. Dallas didn’t want that. No one did.
Luthi sighed and started for the house. He said to Cross, “Just quit banging that screen door every time you go in or out.”
“Yes, Mother.”
“Fuck you, Rory,” Luthi snapped.
Cross laughed again. “Hey, I found a bottle of cheap whiskey hidden behind some cleaning crap under the sink. Ancient Age, it’s called. I’m thinking the old man was hiding it from Brenda and it’s been under there the whole time since they departed this place.”
Luthi stopped. “Whiskey?”
“Damn right.”
“Why didn’t you come out and say so?”
“I just did,” Cross said, turning and going inside. He let the screen door bang behind him.
Luthi felt his hand grip the Savage tighter.
—
SINCE THEY’D RETURNED from the mountains, Luthi had wandered down the halls and into the rooms of the old Cates place. No one had been inside for almost two years.
The old fading family photos in the hallway were a revelation. Ninety percent of the shots were of Dallas from rodeos across the nation. Dallas riding saddle broncs and bulls, Dallas winning saddles and buckles, Dallas holding up his state wrestling championship ribbon while in high school. There were a few background images of Bull and Timber, and Eldon appeared only in full-family photos standing uncomfortably next to Brenda.
Luthi stared long and hard at the few shots of Brenda. She had short iron-gray hair that was coiled close to her squared-off face. In some shots, she wore rectangular metal glasses, but no lipstick or makeup. She was unexceptional, with wide hips in floral dresses. Her legs and ankles were thick, her feet stuffed into heavy brogans. There was nothing about her to suggest that she was like what Dallas had said about her—that she was a kind of genius—except her eyes. They glared at the camera with an intensity that suggested deep levels of awareness and anger just below the surface. But if one covered her eyes with their pointer finger, as Luthi had done by raising his hand and pressing it against the cheap glass of the photos, the woman was homely, overweight, and plain.
Five days before, Dallas had unlocked the front door and led them in and showed them around before assigning Luthi to Bull’s bedroom and Rory to his parents’ room. Luthi hung back while Dallas, in a barely controlled rage, pointed out how the county had let the house he’d grown up in go to shit.
The plumbing was wrecked, the landline phones didn’t work, no one had bothered to empty the refrigerator or freezer, and the clothes hamper in the hallway was still full of dirty clothes that had been shredded by mice. Mouse excrement dotted the kitchen and bathroom floors, and feral cats had been sleeping on the living room couch, which stank of urine.
Not only that, some locals had broken in and spray-painted words on the walls, including CATESES CAN BU
RN LIKE THE TRASH THEY ARE and DIE IN HELL, BRENDA, and even HELTER SKELTER.
Dallas stood there, shaking, with balled fists, and said if he ever found out who had entered the house and done that, he’d tear them apart limb by limb.
Luthi felt Dallas’s embarrassed rage deep inside him and empathized, thinking that if anyone had done this to his mother and daddy’s home, he’d likely feel the same way. Except that he hated his daddy and had zero respect for his doormat mother, who’d looked the other way when Daddy beat him and locked him in that closet. Still, if he’d grown up with normal people, he could imagine feeling the sense of outrage and invasion Dallas did.
—
ON HIS FIRST DAY IN PRISON, Luthi had been assigned to cell 27-A with Rory Cross and an effeminate Canadian hipster named Jason Pinder from Jackson. To impress Luthi, as well as intimidate him, Rory had beaten Pinder to a pulp with his fists in the hallway after lunch and left the man bruised and bleeding. When the infirmary released Pinder, Rory pounded the man’s head against the cinder-block walls inside the cell until he could no longer speak.
Rory made it clear he wasn’t to be messed with and that he could protect Luthi from predators because he was the biggest and most vicious predator on the block. Although he’d intimated that Luthi would acquire additional insurance against others, that Luthi could be his bitch, Rory had never actually followed through on his threat after Dallas was assigned to their cell on a trumped-up Game and Fish Department violation.
That’s when the three of them bonded: three white guys with persecuted blue-collar backgrounds in a sea of brown, red, and black. One of the trio, though, was a rodeo star who could do fifty perfect push-ups and a couple hundred sit-ups. COs even asked him to sign rodeo stills.
It was clear by the second day who the leader would be.
What a story he had to tell, and what a proposition he had to make them.
—
THE THREE OF THEM had been in the minimum-security block because they were doing short time and their release dates were staggered. Rory Cross was the first one out. As he’d promised, he hung around Rawlins to wait for the other two: Dallas, then Luthi, a week apart.