Out of Range jp-5

by C. J. Box

  Grub first, then ethics.

  Bertolt Brecht, 1898-1956

  TWENTY-SIX

  The sun was setting and the moon was rising and both anchored opposite ends of the cloudless sky when Joe turned his saddle horse and packhorse from the spine of the Continental Divide into what was unmistakably Two Ocean Pass. It was still and cold as he rode into the meadow, the only sounds the muffled footfalls of his animals in the thick, matted grass.

  He reined to a stop and simply looked around. It was as Susan Jensen had described it, he thought, only more so. He could see why Will had chosen this place. Two Ocean Creek flowed narrow and clean through the meadow and split at a lone spruce. One channel flowed east, toward the Atlantic, the other west, toward the Pacific. Over the lip of the pass was the vast Yellowstone drainage and the Thorofare, the wildest and most remote wilderness in the Lower 48. The vastness was stunning: a rough carpet of dark trees and startling blue mountains as far as he could see in every direction. Surrounding him were landmarks he identified from his map: Box Creek, Mount Randolph, Mount Leidy,

  Terrace Mountain, Jackson Peak. Joy Peak was called that because it looked like a nipple. To the south, the crystal blades of the Tetons sliced up at the sky.

  It had taken an entire day of steady riding to get there, and the light was fading. He had ridden through two snow squalls, a half dozen streams, and a surprise encounter with a skinny black bear who had not heard him ride up because she was so intent on extracting every last grub from a rotten log. The bear had thankfully run away, crashing loudly through the timber. Joe was pleased that his horses showed no fear and were, in fact, calmer than he was when it happened. The sight of the bear had reminded him to load his shotgun with slugs. The butt of the shotgun was now within quick reach in the saddle scabbard. Will may have preferred his.44 Magnum, but Joe felt much more comfortable with the shotgun. His bear spray was clipped on a lanyard that hung from his neck.

  He embraced the wilderness around him as he would his daughters and welcomed the real danger and beauty it presented. He felt alive, and alert, in contrast to how he'd felt since his arrival in Jackson. He could not completely remove himself from that world, but he tried to put it on a back burner to be dealt with later. But it refused to go away.

  There was Beargrass Village, and Don Ennis. Joe had no doubt, having reread Will Jensen's files and notations, that Will had planned to eventually turn down the project. Joe's own conclusions were the same, unless some new information came to light or Ennis agreed to radically alter his plans. Ennis must have known how Will was leaning, just as he must know how Joe would interpret the same data. Beargrass Village was not an inevitability carved out of the mountains by the sheer will of Don Ennis and his investors. It had major problems, and both Will and Joe recognized them. Whether Don Ennis would accept Joe's analysis remained to be seen. Joe doubted it, based on his meeting with the developer. A battle loomed. How far would Don Ennis go to win it?

  And then there was Stella. At the thought of her, Joe felt himself slump a bit in the saddle. Stella was an enigma, although she showed no waffling in regard to what she said she was after. While she said she was looking for authenticity, she had chosen the life of pretense-married to a man who possibly hated her and living with him in the resort town of Jackson Hole. He wondered what kept her there and why she had chosen Will. Had it been merely an attraction for a man in uniform? Joe didn't think so. It was more, much more. Almost as if she had passively accepted being categorized by others because of her beauty and circumstances (whatever they had been) and was only now realizing she could change them. When Will died, she found his replacement in Joe Pickett, or so it seemed.

  Why did she stay in his thoughts? Was the danger she offered as attractive to him as her manner and beauty? Susan Jensen had called her a predator. Maybe she was, Joe thought. So why didn't he mind being prey?

  He couldn't answer the questions, and wasn't sure he wanted to. Instead, he shook his head, trying to clear the thoughts away. Concentrating on the terrain and the sky, he breathed the cool mountain air as deeply as he could. He listened to the breath of wind in the treetops and the footfalls of his horses and the warm squeak of leather on leather from his saddle.

  After picketing the horses in the meadow and setting up camp for the night, Joe dug the funeral urn out of a pannier and carried it down the slope to the creek. He'd been thinking about how to do this, and hadn't come to a decision. Should the ashes be scattered on the ground, in the water, or in the wind? He chose the wind, shaking the ashes out gently, watching as the last shaft of sun lit up the gray-white powder before it settled in the grass. "Rest in peace, Will. I mean that." He couldn't think of anything else to say.

  By mid-morning the next day, Joe had visited four outfitter camps and was working his way north toward the state cabin. Before riding into the camps, he had followed Trey's advice and straightened up the diamond hitches on his packhorse. The camps were clean and the outfitters pleasant and professional. There was a guide for every two hunters, licenses and permits were valid, and food was hung up away from the camps, as per regulations. The outfitters seemed pleased to meet him, and offered him meals and coffee. They were free with information about where they thought the elk were, the locations of other camps, and the quirks of other outfitters. Like most taciturn outdoors-men, who barely spoke in town, the outfitters couldn't stop talking. All agreed that snow was needed to get the herds moving south toward them.

  "Have you run across Smoke yet?" was the most common question. It was asked with combinations of amusement, condemnation, and awe.

  As Joe rode out of his sixth camp of the day, he noticed how much his head had cleared from the day before. Whether it was the air, the elevation, or the isolation, he didn't know. But he felt normal again, without the fog that seemed to have moved into his brain since his arrival in Jackson. Maybe he'd just needed to get into the mountains, be alone, do good work.

  The possibility that Will's death hadn't been a suicide never really left him, though. Neither did his feeling of being disconnected from Marybeth and his family. He thought how Marybeth and the girls, especially Sheridan, would love this, and he wished somehow they could be with him.

  At the rate he was going, he thought he could make it to the state cabin by late afternoon. His plan was to stay at the cabin for at least two nights and check out the rest of the outfitter camps in the Yellowstone drainage from there. When the trail split, he absentmindedly neck-reined his horse to take the right fork, and was two miles from the main trail when he realized his mistake. The path had faded into a narrow game trail as it switchbacked up through the trees. The timber was too thick to turn his horses around- especially the wide load of the packhorse-so he continued to climb in search of a clearing. The incline got worse as he climbed, the horses laboring with the pitch. He leaned forward in the saddle, waiting for a break in the dark timber to signal that he'd reached the top.

  When the trees finally thinned and the sky broke through, he stopped the horses on a small grassy shelf to let them rest. While they did, he took his map and walked to the top of the rise to figure out where he was. He noted the mountain landmarks he'd identified earlier. With his fingertip, he traced his location to the state cabin and found he had inadvertently taken a shortcut. If he continued down the other side of the mountain he could ride up Clear Creek drainage and approach the cabin from the side, shaving off at least eight miles and making up for the time he'd wasted on the wrong trail. The route would be rugged, as there wasn't an established horse trail, but his horses had shown they were more than up to the task.

  Climbing back into the saddle, he flinched with familiar pain in his knees caused by riding for a day and a half, and headed northwest.

  It was above the drainage, while he was still hidden in the timber, when he looked down and saw a man doing something he shouldn't be doing.

  At first, Joe couldn't figure out what he was seeing. He had dismounted and tied up his horses out of
sight in a thick stand of aspen, and was watching the man in the meadow through his binoculars. His digital camera with the zoom lens was at the foot of the boulder he peered over.

  The man was over five hundred yards away, moving around in a pocket clearing on the other side of Clear Creek. He was walking around in a circle, stopping at intervals to kick at the ground. There was something long and thin on his shoulder-a rifle, maybe. No, Joe saw as he focused in, it was a shovel. The man was big and lumbering, but he moved gracefully. His back was to Joe and he had yet to turn and show his face. As the man continued his circle and moved into shadow, Joe swung his binoculars toward the trees on the side of the clearing. Three sorrel horses stood motionless by the trunks of pine trees. One horse was saddled, the other two carried panniers that appeared to be empty. Joe surmised that the man had packed something up the drainage in the panniers and buried his cargo in the clearing.

  Then the man stepped from the shadows into the sun, removed his hat and wiped his brow with his sleeve. Joe focused his binoculars on the face of Smoke Van Horn.

  Smoke was wearing a flannel shirt, a fleece vest, jeans, and a gun belt with a long-barreled revolver. He looked up and down the drainage, then swung his eyes to the trees where Joe was hiding. Joe slunk down behind the boulder so Smoke wouldn't see the glint of his lenses and unpacked his camera. He wondered if Smoke felt he was being watched, knowing how prescient that feeling could be.

  Rising again, Joe took five quick shots of Smoke as he took a last look at the sky, turned with his shovel, and lumbered back toward his horses. Joe gave Smoke twenty minutes to ride away before he emerged from behind the rock.

  The clearing was trampled down not only by Smoke's boots, but by what looked like hundreds of elk tracks. Elk pellets as fresh as the night before stood in clumps throughout the grass.

  Joe photographed the clearing, the tracks, and the nine fresh mounds of dirt in a sloppy circle in the clearing. He knew what he would find when he kicked the dirt clear on the mounds, and he found it: fifty-pound salt blocks. Violators had learned in the past few years not to place the salt aboveground, where it was obvious from a distance. If they buried it out of view with a thin cover of loose dirt, the elk would find it easily but the blocks would be almost impossible to spot without literally being on top of them.

  The toughest thing about arresting an outfitter who was baiting elk with salt was catching him doing it. The outfitter could always claim that it wasn't he who placed the blocks out. Even if the outfitter was caught with salt blocks in his panniers, he could claim they were for his horses. No, in order to arrest someone for illegal salting, or what the regulations called "hunting near an attractant," he would literally have to be caught in the act of putting the salt down. Just to be sure he'd gotten it all, Joe reviewed the photos on the screen display on the back of his camera. They were long shots, several not in sharp focus. But there was no doubt that the man with the shovel was Smoke, and what he was burying were salt blocks. Although Joe had blundered into the situation by taking a wrong trail, Smoke had been caught red-handed.

  Will Jensen had suspected Smoke of salting for four years, but could never nail him for it.

  "Now you can really rest in peace," Joe said aloud.

  He looked at his wristwatch, then at the sky. There were three hours of daylight left, and he figured it would take two to get to the state cabin. Smoke's arrest in his elk camp would need to wait until tomorrow.

  The state cabin was older, smaller, and more beat-up than Joe had imagined it would be. The setting was nice, though, and the cabin had a small front porch that looked out over a meadow and a small lake that had been named, without much imagination, State Lake.

  In the last half hour of dusk, he corralled the horses, dragged the panniers into the one-room cabin, unshuttered the two cracked windows, and got a fire going in the ancient woodstove. He worked quickly, his goal to enjoy a light bourbon on the front porch as the sun set. He was delayed when he had to sweep mouse excrement off the floor and counter, and clear a bird's nest from the top of the chimney pipe. By the time he poured warm bourbon from his flask into his metal camp cup, the sun had sunk into State Lake.

  While steak sizzled and potatoes fried in cast-iron skillets, Joe sipped and took measure of the cabin. The logs it had been built with were grayed and cracking with age, and they needed re-chinking. Rusted spikes driven into the logs served as coat and equipment hangers. A calendar from 1963 had never been replaced. The bed was an old metal-framed single, with a thin mattress, gray with age and dirt. He flipped through a puckered journal that listed the cabin's visitors and occupants for the last twenty years. He recognized the names of game wardens and biologists, and saw where Trey Crump had signed in fifteen years before. The last page and a half of entries were all by Will Jensen. Joe was surprised to see that the last entry by Will was made just three weeks before.

  Somehow, in the sequence of events that led to Will's death, he had missed the fact that the ex-game warden had used the state cabin. In fact, he had been up there for the week preceding his death.

  Joe looked at the last signature. Although it looked like Will's writing-Joe had seen so much of Will's cribbed style that he felt he was an expert on it-the name was written in a shaky, uncertain hand. There were loops in the letters where there normally weren't loops, and the pen had crossed over the lines. And something else, something so tiny that Joe had to lift the journal to the propane lamp to see it. At first, he thought that Will, for some reason, had jotted a period after his name, as if making some kind of statement. But it wasn't a punctuation mark, it was a single, tiny letter: "S." He recognized the scrawl from the invitation he had held in his hand two days before.

  Joe lowered the journal. Stella had come up here with him? How dare she? How dare he? Despite himself, he looked over his shoulder at the bed and imagined her in it. He was jealous of Will, and ashamed of himself.

  Then something occurred to him, and he quickly walked across the cabin and flipped up the old mattress. There it was: Will's last notebook.

  And something else. A nicker of a horse outside the cabin, followed by a deep, throat-clearing cough.

  "Hey, FNG! Something smells mighty good in there! And I brung along a bottle!"

  Joe's stomach clutched and his mouth went dry as he recognized Smoke's voice. He tossed the notebook back under the mattress and turned toward the door, noting that his shotgun was within quick reach in the corner. He wondered if Smoke had seen him coming down from Clear Creek and was there now to make sure Joe wouldn't be able to ever tell anyone.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Sheridan had overheard the plan her mother and Nate made regarding the 720 phone calls to their house. Despite the fact that it seemed like a good plan, she wasn't very happy about it. In fact, she wasn't very happy about anything at the moment.

  For the third time that week, Nate was eating dinner with them. Sheridan noticed the first night that her mother had used the nice plates from the pantry, the ones they usually used only on holidays or when they had special company. The playful way her mother and Nate talked with each other, adult-to-adult, bothered her. And she noticed- boy did she notice-how attentive her mother was when it came to Nate, asking questions and saying things like: "Would you like some more? I seem to have made too much" and, "I've never seen anyone enjoy my cooking so much"

  Maybe, Sheridan thought, if her mom cooked like that when her dad was home, and used the nice plates, her dad would enjoy it as much. When she had told her mother that earlier, before Nate arrived, she received a withering look.

  Sheridan had first noticed the friendship between Nate and her mother the year before and at the time couldn't process what bothered her about it so much. Now she knew. Her mother was mildly flirting, and Nate didn't mind. Because of her feelings for them both, and for her father, Sheridan's only way of dealing with it at the time, and now, was to be angry with her mother, to create disorder. This was becoming easier to do all the time.
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  "Nate is here to help us," her mother had said. "The least we can do is give him dinner."

  "He hasn't had time for a falconry lesson for two weeks," Sheridan countered, "but he sure has time to come over here"

  Sheridan couldn't believe what she felt-jealous of her own mother. But there was more to it than that. What about her dad?

  Lucy was oblivious to it all, which also angered Sheridan. Her sister made things worse by asking, "Is Nate coming over tonight?"

  After dinner, Nate and her mother waited for a call from 720, and Sheridan thought it was a pretense. Nate didn't need to sit in the living room after dinner drinking coffee for his plan to work.

  Nate had found out that area code 720 was from Denver. When her mother said they didn't know anyone in Denver, Nate replied that he didn't think the calls were coming from there.

  "I'm pretty sure it's the number from a calling card," Nate said. "The company that distributes it is based in Aurora, Colorado, which is a suburb of Denver. I think the calls are being made locally by someone disguising his identity by using a third-party number. I have an idea where the calls might be coming from, but I can't prove anything unless I catch him in the act"

  "What do you want me to do?" her mother had asked.

  "Next time he calls, keep him on the line. Don't hang up on him. Talk to him instead, ask him questions. I think that's what he wants, to get you upset. But while you've got him on the line, call me immediately on your cell phone so I know we've got him live and I'll know if he hangs up or not. That way, I can check out my theory."

  "Where do you think he's calling from?"

  Nate shrugged. "Didn't you say you can hear some background noises sometimes? People talking, even some music?"