Below Zero

by C. J. Box

  Waiting.

  SHE TRIED TO RECALL the events of the last half hour but they came to her in bits and pieces. She remembered the car rolling, her head either pressed against the inside of the roof as it dented down farther with every rotation or being slammed back again to the back seat. Robert was screaming the whole time, holding his hands in the air as if to stop the hood from collapsing on his head. The sounds of snapping trees were like gunshots and there were glittery jewels floating through the air. No, not jewels—tiny cubes of safety glass from the windows as they shattered. She’d picked some of the glass out of her hair and from folds of her clothing. Her leg had begun to bleed again.

  She’d faded in and out of consciousness, but she knew both Robert and Stenko had somehow survived the crash as she had. She remembered Stenko moaning—something about his ribs—and Robert pulling him out of the car through the open windshield. When Robert crawled back into the interior of car to get his computer case and Stenko’s daypack, she’d opened her eyes. He scowled at her but didn’t speak, as if she weren’t worth his words, as if he just wished she’d go away. She seemed to be floating in the air upside down, and she realized she was hanging suspended from the seat belt.

  Later—she wasn’t sure when—she heard Robert imploring Stenko to take more morphine.

  Robert saying, “Come on, Dad. We’ve got to walk. You can walk downhill, can’t you? They’re gonna find us here if we stay. And if they find us, they’ll butcher me. You need to take more of that stuff so you can function.”

  “What about April?” Stenko had asked, his voice slurred like he was drunk.

  She had wanted to answer, to call out. But she was in shock and nothing worked. The only words she could express were in her own head.

  “She’s dead in there,” Robert had said. “I’m sorry.”

  She remembered wondering if she was dead.

  Stenko started sobbing. The recollection of the sound brought tears to her eyes now.

  “It’s okay,” Robert had told him. “She couldn’t have walked out of here anyway with her leg and all. You never should have brought her, Dad. You never should have brought her. She isn’t Carmen and she never was.”

  Sloppy, racking sobs from Stenko.

  “Come on, Dad. We can’t stay. We’ll go downhill until we run into a road or a ranch where we can get a car.”

  Stenko said, “She was innocent. She never hurt anyone. I was trying to save her, Robert. Every time I try to do something right it seems like they end up getting hurt . . .”

  Robert: “Get the box of cash. We need to take that with us. And you still have that napkin with the account numbers on it, don’t you?”

  “Didn’t you hear what I said?” Stenko cried.

  Robert’s voice was shrill. “Yeah, I heard. Like you need to tell me you screw up the lives of those around you. Sheesh. Like that’s news to me. It’s a freaking wonder I’m so well adjusted, you know?”

  Then silence. They were gone.

  FROM A RESERVE she didn’t know she had in her, she managed to find the buckle of the seat belt and release it. When it opened, she dropped a few inches. Although she was hurting everywhere, no bones seemed to be broken, and she crawled out of the car through the gaping rear window. She’d found the cell phone a few feet away from the vehicle but not the card she’d need to load minutes.

  In the shade of the big pine tree, she tore at the packaging with her teeth and powered the phone. There was an automatic ten minutes of airtime on the phone to enable the user to call and load it with more time. Instead, she tried to call Sheridan, who didn’t answer, so she sent a text.

  SHE HEARD A VOICE.

  “Chase, down here.” She recognized the voice as Corey Talich, the oldest brother. It came from above in the trees and to her left. It was a whisper/yell. He was being cautious.

  “What do you see?” Chase asked in the same tone. He was above to her right. The brothers were descending the mountain on either side of the churned-up ground the rolling car had made.

  “An upside-down car. I can see the tires. It’s got to be them.”

  Then she heard something else. Either a rock dislodging or a car door slamming.

  She breathed deeply and closed her eyes. If she lay still, maybe they wouldn’t see her against the tree. Or, like Robert, they’d think she was dead.

  “D’you see anybody?” Chase asked, his voice low but bolder, as if he was starting to believe there were no survivors.

  “Nobody I can see.”

  “I hope Robert isn’t dead,” Chase said, “because I want to kill him.”

  Corey laughed harshly. He was very close. She cracked an eye and saw him as he pushed into the clearing through a pine bough on the other side of the car.

  “Jesus,” he said. “How many times did it roll over to get all the way down here?”

  “Not enough,” Chase said. “Are Robert and Stenko in there? Is our money in there?”

  She knew they wouldn’t let her live if they found her. She just hoped they’d just kill her and nothing else.

  She thought of her sisters and how much she’d like to see them again. How she never would. She wished Stenko would come back. Even Robert. No, not Robert.

  “The car’s empty!” Corey hissed. She couldn’t see him and she assumed he’d dropped to all fours on the other side of the vehicle to look inside.

  “You’re kidding!” Chase said, emerging from the trees on the right side. He had a gun in his hand.

  “No, man, I’m not kidding. There’s no Stenko, no Robert, no money. Even that girl is gone. Where in the hell did they go? How in the hell did they get out?”

  “Shit,” Chase barked. “This is why I hate seat belts.”

  Corey stood up and she could feel his eyes lock with hers. He raised his hand and pointed. “There’s the girl.”

  “What?”

  “I see that girl. She’s over against that big tree.”

  “Where?”

  Corey shook his finger at her. “There.”

  She’d never felt more helpless.

  “I bet she knows where those bastards went,” Chase said, walking around the car toward her. His face was expressionless, his eyes dark coals. The lack of feeling or emotion on his face scared her more than if he’d been snarling, because he approached her as if he had a routine job to do and wanted to finish it so he could go on to the next task.

  When he was ten feet away he raised his pistol and she could see the black O of the muzzle.

  “Where’d they go, bitch?” Chase said. Corey walked up behind him. It was obvious by the way Corey looked at her expectantly that he had no intention of stopping what was about to happen. Especially if she didn’t talk.

  She moaned and felt hot tears cut through the grime on her cheeks.

  And suddenly there was a red fist-sized hole in Chase’s chest accompanied by a massive BOOM that seemed to shake the earth. Blood, bone, and tissue spattered the grass. Chase’s eyes rolled up in his head and he dropped straight down as if he were a mountain climber whose rope had been severed.

  Corey cursed and wheeled around, fumbling at the back of his pants for a pistol grip.

  “Freeze and put your hands up where I can see ’em!” a man shouted as he came out from under the branches of a tree in a crouch. He had a rifle or a shotgun—a shotgun—and he wore a red shirt and a gray cowboy hat. There was a badge on his breast that caught a glint from the sun.

  Corey stiffened and slowly released his hold on his gun behind his back. He said, “Okay, okay, you don’t have to shoot.”

  The man with the hat and badge stood up and walked stiff-legged toward Corey, aiming at him down the barrel of his shotgun as he closed the distance between them. His face was white, and he looked determined. His eyes were hard, but there was something pleasant and a little sad about his face.

  “Get down on the ground on your belly,” he said to Corey, “hands on the top of your head, fingers laced.”

  “My broth
er,” Corey said, his voice a plaintive cry, “you killed my brother.”

  “Wasn’t me,” the man said. “Now get down like I told you.”

  At the same time a blond man appeared from the trees holding a giant silver revolver with both hands. He was bigger than the man with the shotgun.

  Corey dropped to his knees, then flopped forward with his hands on his head. The man in the hat was quickly on top of him, flinging Corey’s gun into the brush and yanking on one wrist at a time to snap on handcuffs.

  Only when he was done and he was sure Corey Talich had no more weapons on him did he pause and look up at her.

  She managed to say, “Thank you.” Her voice was a croak.

  The expression on his face was anguished. He said, “Who are you? Where’s April?”

  The blond man with the ponytail slowly shook his head.

  The heavy beat of helicopter rotors coming over the mountain drowned out any more questions.

  PART THREE

  People will kill their puppies to stop global warming these days.

  —DAVE SNYDER, transportation policy director, San Francisco Planning + Urban Research Association, 2007

  26

  Rapid City, South Dakota

  MARYBETH WAS THE ONLY ONE ALLOWED BY THE HOSPITAL staff to go see the girl who had been admitted that afternoon under the name of Janie Doe. A nurse told Joe that unknown female patients under the age of eighteen received that moniker at Rapid City Regional Hospital.

  He sat with Sheridan and Lucy in the reception room. Not until he realized he’d read the front page of the Rapid City Journal for the fourth time without retaining anything did he toss it aside. His eyes burned with lack of sleep, and he was dirty, tired, depressed, and thoroughly flummoxed. Sheridan slept fitfully on a couch, overcome by exhaustion and emotion. Once, when she was crying in her sleep, Lucy went over and sat next to her and put her hand on her older sister’s head and stroked her hair.

  The late-summer sun was ballooning outside the west windows and throwing discordantly festive peach-colored light into the room. Joe refused to be impressed. As it got later and the sun went behind the Black Hills, the hospital seemed to rest as well. Others in the reception area left one by one after visiting whomever they were there to see.

  Joe smiled at Lucy. “Hungry? It’s past dinnertime.”

  Lucy, who was always hungry, shook her head no.

  “How are you doing?” he asked her.

  She shrugged and pursed her lips, the precursor to crying herself. “I’m sorry I got so mad at you and Mom,” she said.

  “It’s okay. You just wanted to help.”

  “I wanted to see April again,” she said, and the tears came.

  Joe said, “Come here,” and held out his hand. She slid away from Sheridan and sat next to him and burrowed into his side. He put his arm around her and his muscle memory told him it wasn’t Lucy at all but a much older girl. The Lucy he remembered was small, a thin stalk with downy white-blond hair. It was as if she’d grown into an adolescent overnight.

  “How can it not be her?” Lucy asked after a while.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Does it mean April is still out there somewhere? Is this the wrong girl you found?”

  He squeezed her tighter. “I don’t know who she is or why she said she told us she was April. I don’t know if the real April is out there or not. For whatever reason, she pretended to be April to all of us.”

  “It’s just so unfair,” Lucy said. “To make us believe like that.”

  Joe said, “There has to be a reason, but we don’t know what it is. Maybe your mom will find out something.”

  “I hope so. If anyone can, it’s Mom.”

  WHEN MARYBETH AND LUCY had arrived in Marybeth’s van, he’d had a few moments alone with his wife without Sheridan or Lucy. Marybeth’s first thought, that they’d simply located the wrong girl, was dispelled when Joe explained what had happened. How he’d called out the new cell phone number to Coon, how Coon had been able to get his people in Cheyenne to contact the phone company and track it under the original judicial authorization. “For once,” Joe had told Marybeth, “she didn’t turn her phone off right away after she sent the text. The FBI was able to pinpoint a tower. Luckily, there was only one road in the area and we were able to get there fast. Fifteen more minutes and . . .” he left the sentence to hang there with meaning.

  Coon and Portenson had loaded the girl on their chopper and taken off en route to the nearest large medical facility: Rapid City. According to Coon, Janie Doe had lost consciousness in the air. The Crook County Sheriff’s Department arrested Corey Talich and sent for a state helicopter to airlift Chase’s body to town. Joe had climbed back up the mountainside, dreading Sheridan’s reaction when he told her.

  “What about Nate?” Marybeth asked him. “Where is he?”

  Joe said, “As soon as the chopper came over, Nate vanished. He didn’t want Portenson to see him and grab him. He knew we had to get April—or whoever she is—out of there fast.”

  “Where is he now?”

  Joe shrugged. “You know Nate. He’s probably hiding out with some falconer buddy of his. Those guys take care of each other.”

  WHILE THEY WAITED for Marybeth to return, Joe looked up at the silent wall-mounted television and was surprised to see a visual of Leo Dyekman’s ranch house. He didn’t need to turn up the volume to follow the story. A local correspondent did a stand-up on the front lawn of the ranch house and theatrically gestured behind him. The camera zoomed in on the front door and panned across the crime scene tape. The initial on-the-scene report was followed by a clip of Portenson, flanked by local law enforcement, speaking behind a podium. Coon was at his left, avoiding the camera lens and looking uncomfortable. There was a photo of a handsome older man in a tuxedo identified as David Stenson, aka “Stenko,” who looked remarkably like Ernest Hemingway, Joe thought. Then came a grainy, poor-resolution photo of Robert standing in what looked like a rain forest. Joe guessed the image had been taken from the ClimateSavior .net website. A graphic read ARMIED AND DANGEROUS. Joe guessed “armied” instead of “armed” was a result of the news staff’s hastily assembling the report.

  The reporter on Dyekman’s lawn threw it back to the anchor, an attractive brunette who looked all of twenty-five years old and was obviously reading from a teleprompter by the way her eyes tracked across the screen. The face of Leo Dyekman filled the screen, followed by a Chicago Police Department booking photo of Nathanial Talich.

  There was a long-distance helicopter shot of the mountains that zoomed in on the overturned vehicle on the floor of the canyon. Under the graphic IN CUSTODY was an old booking photo of Corey Talich.

  Joe waited, hoping there would be news of the arrest of Stenko and Robert. Instead, the local news switched to an interview with a rancher complaining about his fences being knocked down by buffalo from Custer State Park.

  MARYBETH FINALLY came back shaking her head, her face ashen.

  Joe and Lucy looked up expectantly.

  “She could almost be April,” Marybeth said. “She’s fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, it’s hard to tell. But she’s blond, tall, and attractive. I tried to convince myself that it might be her, that her looks had just changed as she got older. But no, it’s not her. Not at all.”

  Joe said, “Is she awake?”

  Marybeth was stoic. “No. She’s just out of surgery for her leg injury so she’s still under. But it isn’t the bullet wound that’s the problem. It’s the loss of blood. The doctor said blood loss was severe.”

  Joe waited for a beat, said, “Is she going to be okay, then?”

  Marybeth’s face twitched and her eyes filled with tears. “Maybe. Doubtful. They don’t know for sure. The emergency doctors said the blood loss could create something called hypovolemic shock. That’s when not enough blood flows through the organs. It made her heart beat too quickly and made her blood pressure drop. It could have long-term effects on her brain. When s
omeone loses that much blood . . . they just don’t know what kind of internal damage was caused. It could be days before she wakes up, if she wakes up at all. And if she does, well, they just don’t know.”

  Sheridan stirred and sat up rubbing sleep from her eyes. She said, “Who is she?”

  “We don’t know,” Marybeth said. “She had no identification on her of any kind.”

  Said Sheridan, “Why did she chose me? Why did she even start sending me texts?”

  There was no answer to that.

  “I mean, she knew all about us. Our pets, Lucy, everything. How could she know all that if she isn’t April?”

  Joe and Marybeth exchanged looks. Joe hoped Marybeth had an answer.

  Marybeth said, “I’ve been thinking about it. April wasn’t the only child in the Sovereign Camp that day. Maybe this girl knew April. Maybe they were friends and April told her all about us.”

  Sheridan hugged herself, unconvinced. “Okay, but why would she text me? Doesn’t this girl have family of her own? Why me? Why us? And why would she wait so long after April told her about us to contact me?”

  “There’s only one way we’re going to find out,” Joe said. “She’ll have to tell us.”

  Lucy had listened to everything but said nothing. Finally, she declared, “April is still alive. This girl knows where she is.”

  Marybeth sat on the couch next to Joe and Lucy and ran her fingers through Lucy’s hair. “If only it were so,” Marybeth said sadly.

  JOE AND MARYBETH sent Sheridan and Lucy to the cafeteria so they could get dinner before it closed. It also gave them a chance to talk without the girls around.

  Marybeth said, “One thing I do know is this girl, whoever she is, is all alone. Maybe someone somewhere has reported her missing, but we don’t know that. I have a feeling she’s been on her own for quite some time, though. I can’t ascribe her contacting Sheridan as some kind of malice on her part. I never even considered the possibility. She needs our help, Joe. Maybe this was her very strange way of asking.”