Below Zero

by C. J. Box

  —AL GORE, An Inconvenient Truth

  11

  Hole in the Wall, Wyoming

  HOLE IN THE WALL CANYON WAS ON PRIVATE RANCH LAND west of Kaycee. It was an abrupt and harrowing scalpel slice through the heart of the high country sagebrush steppe rising toward the Bighorn Mountains. The single rough two-track passed by a ramshackle log home in a stand of cottonwood trees outside the town limits occupied by Large Merle, a bearded giant who was outside splitting wood when Joe approached in his Game and Fish truck. Hearing the vehicle, Merle stood up his entire seven feet and rested the ax on his shoulder and squinted. His bearing was pure intimidation, as was the lever action Winchester leaning against a tree but within Merle’s reach. Out of habit Joe did a quick mental inventory of his weapons: .40 Glock on his hip, .308 carbine in the gun rack, 12-gauge Remington Wing-master behind the seat.

  Merle recognized him and nodded, and Joe waved back. To get to the Hole in the Wall, it was necessary to get Merle’s nod. A hooded prairie falcon sat on a stump near Merle, a perfectly still sentinel Joe might have missed if it weren’t for the rustling of feathers from the breeze.

  Joe was always taken when he neared the canyon, not by what he could see but what he couldn’t. From the road he couldn’t discern the lip of the canyon or its far rim, but he could sense a void in the rolling landscape itself. That’s where the canyon was. It couldn’t be seen from the highway, the road he was on, or even from the other side in the foothills except for a jagged dark line in the prairie. To get there, one had to travel across the wide-open treeless plain for miles under the big sky, not a tree in sight. As he drove through the sagebrush and knee-high cheater grass, a heavy-winged squadron of sage grouse lifted off on both sides of him with the rhythmic thumping of miniature overweight helicopters. In the distance, a herd of pronghorn antelope were grazing, three dozen auburn bodies splashed with strategic patches of white that made them nearly invisible on the prairie among scattered drifts of snow in the winter and spring. It was impossible to sneak up on Hole in the Wall, which was why it was the dedicated haunt of old west outlaw gangs, most famously Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Joe thought how odd it was that two days before he’d been in Baggs, where the old-timers swore that Butch lived among them into old age under an assumed name, and now he was at the place where Butch, Sundance, and the rest of his gang hid out between bank and train robberies with scores of other infamous Western outlaws.

  Recently added to the list was Nate Romanowski.

  THE TRAIL FROM the rim of the canyon was narrow, strewn with loose baseball-sized rocks, a sharp declination that switchbacked down. Joe carried the eagle in his arms like a baby, trying not to squeeze too hard when he misstepped on loose shale, lost his balance, and sat down hard with a thump that jarred his spine.

  He stood up gingerly and dusted himself off, picked up the bird, and continued. It was usually at this depth into the canyon when he felt eyes on him and knew he wasn’t alone.

  Tough junipers rose on either side of the trail, and in the windless still air of the canyon they smelled sharp and musky. The Hole in the Wall, because of its vertical walls and the angry stream that coursed through the floor of it and kicked up waves of moisture, was a lush green oasis in the middle of high country desert. The bottom was thick with pines, ash, and ferns, and there were birds, including bluebirds and cardinals, and reptiles he’d rarely seen in the mountain west.

  At a sharp switchback shadowed by a canopy of intermarried branches from a family of aspen, whose turning leaves were weeks behind those on the surface, Joe stopped, paused, and wiped the sweat from his face with the sleeve of his shirt. He studied the trail immediately in front of him until he saw it—the glint of the trip wire. He carefully stepped over it in an exaggerated movement. There was no way, he knew, he would have seen it if he hadn’t known it was there. He had no idea what the wire connected to—bells? someone’s toe?—but he didn’t want to find out.

  The unique feature of the canyon itself, and why outlaws loved it, was the naturally eroded caves in the opposite wall, their open mouths mostly hidden by brush. But from inside the caves looking out, the trail was in plain sight, a zigzag scar on the face of the canyon. In the daylight, no one could enter the canyon on the trail unobserved. And at night, there were the trip wires.

  The roar of the stream increased in volume as he climbed down, and he could feel spray on his face and hands. There was a path through two-story boulders to the hissing whitewater, a crude footbridge, and the trail up the other side between the trunks of two massive ponderosa pine trees. Two hundred feet up the path, Nate Romanowski sat on a stump with his arms crossed in front of him, smirking.

  “I watched you the whole time,” Nate said. “That fall was kind of comical.”

  “I did it for your amusement,” Joe said.

  “Was Large Merle up there watching the road?”

  “Yes, he was.”

  “And what did you bring me?”

  “A bald eagle.”

  “Ah, that’s what I thought.”

  Nate Romanowski was tall, lean, with intense ice-blue eyes, a hawk nose, and long ropy muscles. He was wearing a gray flannel henley shirt and a shoulder holster for his scoped .454 Casull revolver, the second most powerful handgun in the world. As always, Joe felt the sense of calm Nate projected, a calm that could erupt into brutal violence swiftly and naturally, the way a soaring raptor would suddenly collapse its wings and drop to kill its prey in an explosion of blood and snapped bones. After Joe had cleared Nate on trumped-up murder charges years before, Nate had vowed to help protect Joe’s family. Their relationship had taken several odd and unsettling turns, but it held, and Nate was a man of his word.

  “You remembered the trip wire this time,” Nate said. “That’s good, because I armed it with a shotgun.”

  Joe shook his head. “Now you tell me.”

  “Watch it on the way out, too.”

  “I will. Do you have room for this bird?”

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  “A guy shot it with an arrow.”

  Nate’s eyes narrowed. “Is the guy still alive?”

  “I arrested him.”

  Nate mock spit into dirt beside his boots to show Joe what he thought of that.

  JOE FOLLOWED NATE up the trail and through a thick greasy stand of caragana. The mouth of Nate’s cave was obscured from the outside by curtains of military camouflage netting, and Nate pushed it aside so Joe could enter. Because the netting was translucent, the depths of the cave were lit in an otherworldly olive green glow, similar to what one saw through night vision goggles. It took a moment for Joe’s eyes to adjust.

  “Here,” Nate said, “let me see that bird.”

  Joe was grateful to hand the eagle over.

  “You want your sweatshirt back?” Nate asked, pulling a wicked-looking eight-inch knife from a sheath on his belt and slicing through the duct tape.

  “Yup.”

  “You want the sock back?”

  “You can keep it.”

  “What would I want your sock for?” Nate asked.

  Joe shrugged.

  Nate talked to the eagle, telling it she was a pretty bird, a beautiful bird, that everything was going to be just fine now. Slowly, Nate removed the sock from her head and stared into her brilliant yellow eyes. The eagle opened her beak to screech, but Nate said, “None of that, none of that,” and the eagle kept silent.

  Joe was amazed, said, “How did you do that?”

  Nate didn’t respond. He was running his hands over the eagle, talking to her, acclimating her to his touch, keeping her calm.

  “How do you know she’s a she, for that matter?”

  “I always know,” Nate said. “I could tell when you were carrying her.”

  Joe didn’t pursue it. He watched as Nate slipped the sweatshirt off the eagle, tossing it into a heap near Joe’s feet, and continued running his hands over the bird, smoothing her feathers, pausing to feel the scarred
-over entrance and exit wounds. From a bulging pocket in his cargo pants, Nate fished out leather jesses that he tied to her talons and a large tooled leather hood that he slipped over her head. He carried her to a heavy stoop made of branches with the bark still on and tied the jesses to the structure. Like a vintner slipping plastic webbing over wine bottles to keep them from clinking together in the sack, Nate gently fitted a sleeve of tight mesh over her body from her shoulders to her talons.

  To Joe, he said, “She’s going to be all right, I think. You did a good job binding her up like that so the broken bones could start to knit. We’ll see in a few weeks if she can fly. This mesh sleeve will keep her from flapping her wings and breaking the bones again. Whether she can fly again will depend on how much other damage there is. I can’t fix severed tendons.”

  “And if she can’t fly?”

  Nate used his index finger to simulate cutting his throat. “An eagle that can’t fly is a deposed king: humiliated and useless to anybody or anything.”

  AS NATE BREWED cowboy coffee in an open pot on a Coleman stove, Joe took in the cave. It was as he remembered. Gasoline-powered generator, satellite Internet, bookshelves filled with battered tomes on falconry, volumes on warfare and world history, newer books on American Indian culture and spirituality. A table and ancient four-poster bed had been left by outlaws. Near the entrance of the cave were stacks of scarred military footlockers containing clothes, equipment, food, explosives. In an alcove near the cave entrance a skinned pronghorn antelope carcass hung from a hook, the backstraps and most of a hind-quarter sliced away. Nate followed Joe’s gaze and waggled his eyebrows.

  Joe said, “At least you could have pretended you weren’t poaching.”

  Nate said, “My life is an open book. You just don’t want to read it.”

  Joe thought, He’s right.

  Nate handed Joe a cup of coffee, and Joe told Nate about the text messages. Nate had been there backing up Joe at the Sovereign camp that winter afternoon. As Joe talked, Nate’s expression never changed.

  Nate said, “I’ve always wondered about that day. I was pinning down the feds, as you know, but in my peripheral vision I saw maybe a dozen snowmobiles take off into the trees. A couple of them had two or three people on them, and I remember one in particular that had some small people clinging to it.”

  Joe paused. “Why didn’t you tell me that before?”

  “I never really thought about it,” Nate said, shrugging. “You told me you saw April in the first trailer that burned down. I knew they had kids in that camp besides her, so why would I assume she was one of them on that snowmobile?”

  Joe conceded, took a sip.

  “Now that I think about it,” Nate said, letting the sentence drift away.

  “Yeah.”

  “You feel guilty,” Nate said. “You’ve always felt guilty. That’s why you were crazy with rage and almost killed that FBI agent who fired the shot. It wasn’t about him—it was about you.”

  Joe stared into his coffee cup, studied the film of oil on the top of the liquid. “What’s your point?”

  Nate said, “It isn’t April out there. But you want it to be. You want to apologize and make things right. That’s how you are, Joe. You’re a good man.”

  “Shut up, Nate,” Joe said wearily.

  “I was there. You wanted to trust the system and the government. You wanted to believe the authorities would do the right thing. You never thought they’d fire and torch the Sovereign compound with all those people in it. You didn’t realize then that the scariest thing on earth is a bureaucrat with a gun.”

  “Enough.”

  “HOW’S ALICIA DOING with the new baby?” Joe asked after a long while. They’d both been silent, each with their own thoughts about that afternoon in the campground.

  Alicia Whiteplume was Nate’s woman, a schoolteacher on the Wind River Indian Reservation, and the mention of her name produced a goofy, sloppy grin from Nate. Joe was still not used to seeing Nate’s face light up.

  “Still smitten, I see,” Joe said.

  “With both of them. I just don’t see them enough, you know?”

  “Believe me, I know.”

  “I hate having to hide out, Joe. I’m never turning myself in, but I hate hiding out. I’m starting to consider my options.”

  “You mean moving?” Joe didn’t blame him, but Nate was a part of him now and he’d saved Joe’s life more than once. And he was Sheridan’s master falconer.

  “Either that,” Nate said, lowering his voice, speaking in his breathy Clint Eastwood cadence, “or taking out every damn one of them who is after me.”

  Joe groaned. “Nate, you forget I’m a peace officer who took an oath. I take that oath seriously. You just can’t say things like that around me.”

  Nate smiled. “Sorry, I forgot.” Then: “I’ve no plans yet. I won’t just vanish.”

  “Good.”

  “Because it sounds like you might need me on this one.”

  Joe nodded.

  “You want me to come with you now?”

  “No, not yet. I’m going to be working closely with the people who want to throw you back into jail. You don’t want to be around. I don’t want you around.”

  “But you’ll let me know if you need help.” It was a statement, not a question.

  “Yup. What’s the best way the contact you? When I need your help, I might be too far away to come down and get you in this canyon.”

  Nate dug into his cargo pants and pulled out a satellite phone.

  “You get a signal all the way down here?”

  Nate shook his head. “Of course not. I don’t even think the eyes in the sky can see down into this place. But twice a day I hike up the trail to the top to check for messages. And if for some reason I don’t respond right away, call Large Merle and he’ll let me know.

  “Just send a text,” Nate said. “You know how to do that, right?”

  AS JOE PARTED the camo netting to leave, Nate said, “I never really thanked you for what you did for me last year, Joe. I bet your life has been hard since then.”

  Joe said, “If I trip over that wire on the way out and the shotgun goes off and I never find April, I’m really going to be pissed at you.”

  12

  Craig, Colorado

  THREE HUNDRED MILES FROM HOLE IN THE WALL CANYON, hours after Joe cleared the rim and hiked toward his pickup to drive to Cheyenne, she leaned against the stall of the gas station bathroom in Craig, Colorado, and listened to Stenko retching horribly in the men’s next door. The sounds were awful, and she was frightened.

  It had already been a long day. Stenko had awakened her deep into the night and hurried her out of the hotel in Aspen into the SUV. Robert was already inside the car. He was anxious, jittery, super-charged, thumping a rapid-fire beat with his hands on the dashboard like a drummer. “Go man go,” Robert said to Stenko, “Go-go-go-go-go . . .”

  They drove north until dawn came pink and glorious, through still-sleeping Glenwood Springs and Rifle. Robert was still jazzed and had been talking incessantly about the need to change vehicles and tactics, but she tuned him out and went back to sleep. At a convenience store in Meeker, Robert pointed out a local Chevy Suburban parked and running while the driver was inside getting coffee. Stenko pulled to the side of the building while Robert got out, duck-walked to the Suburban, and drove it away. Stenko followed, cursing under his breath. A half hour out of town, when the terrain emptied of homes and buildings, Robert took a beat-up old dirt road and they bounced along it for what seemed like forever. Finally, the Suburban brake lights flashed and Stenko slowed to a stop.

  Stenko addressed her by looking in the rearview mirror. “April, you’ll need to gather up all your things and take them to the Suburban. We’re making a change.

  “This isn’t a hybrid, son,” Stenko said as he climbed into Robert’s car.

  “I know,” Robert grumbled. “These people out here give us no green options, but you’ll just have
to make it up on the other side.”

  The morning was cool and smelled of dust and sagebrush. After climbing into the far back seat of the Suburban, she watched with fascination as Robert sprayed lighter fluid on the seats of Stenko’s SUV and tossed in a match. With the new Suburban, they pushed the burning vehicle over a cliff into a deep arroyo. The crash on the bottom was fantastic.

  Their only other stop before arriving in Craig was at a roadside rest area, where Robert stole the plates off a car and replaced them with the plates from the Suburban.

  SHE WAS STARING VACANTLY out the window when a cell phone burred and for a moment she thought it was hers, thought she’d been betrayed. Had she forgotten to turn the ringer off?

  But Robert didn’t even turn around. To Stenko, he said, “Are you going to get that?”

  “I forgot I even had it,” Stenko said, slapping absently at his shirt pockets, then finally digging it out of his trousers. He looked at it for a moment, said, “One of my friends in blue . . .” and opened it up.

  Stenko said very little, prompting the caller to continue with several “uh-huhs.” Then he closed the phone and tossed it on the seat next to him.

  “Who was it?” Robert asked.

  “Like I said, one of my friends in blue.”

  “What’s up?”

  “Leo’s wife called the station. She doesn’t know where he is and she wants him found. She thinks he’s taken up with a chippie and relocated to Wyoming.”

  Robert said, “Wyoming? What the hell’s in Wyoming?”

  Stenko said, “My ranch.”

  Robert did a dry spit take and the car weaved until he jerked it back into his lane. “You own a ranch?”

  “I think I do, anyway. The more I think about how things went down with Leo, the more I become convinced I own a ranch.” Stenko sat up in the seat and smacked his forehead with the heel of his hand. “That damned Leo. He always wanted to be a cowboy—he told me that once. Here’s this little mousy guy who grew up on the South Side getting his lunch money stolen from him every day on the way to school, but he secretly wants to be a cowpoke. It used to crack me up.”