Cold Wind

by C. J. Box

  Hollow-eyed mixed-breed ranch dogs came boiling out from beneath the front porch as Joe got out. He quickly jumped back in his pickup next to Tube, who was alarmed but not exactly motivated to protect him from the snarling pack. The dogs circled his pickup as if they’d treed it, snapping their teeth in the air and yapping. It was obvious there were people around; the lights were on inside and five vehicles—two battered ranch pickups, a later model Jeep Cherokee, and two low-slung restored muscle cars from the 1970s—were parked around him. Joe waited for someone inside the house to come out and call the dogs back.

  Finally, a woman pushed through the front screen door and held it open, as if unsure if she wanted to come all the way out or go back in. She was old and heavy, wore a faded tent-like dress and bright yellow Crocs on her feet and her iron-colored hair was in curlers. She squinted at Joe’s pickup with her mouth clamped tight, and Joe slid his window down and said, “Mrs. Lee, can you call off your dogs so I can talk with you and Bob?”

  He saw Dode Lee turn to someone inside and mouth “game warden” as if answering a question. To Joe, she said, “They won’t hurt you, those dogs. They haven’t bit anyone in years.”

  “I believe you,” Joe said cheerfully, not sure if he believed her but reminding himself that one-third of his job description fell under the heading Landowner Relations, “but I’d appreciate it if you’d call them back.”

  Again, Dode Lee turned to address someone inside. “He’s scared of the dogs,” she said, rolling her eyes. Then back to Joe, “What is it you need?”

  “Just to talk to you for a minute,” he said. “It won’t take long.”

  “He says he wants to talk to us,” Dode reported. Then back to Joe: “What about?”

  A large man with shoulder-length black hair and a basketball-sized beer belly shouldered past Dode and yelled angrily at the dogs. He was wearing greasy denim jeans and a black Aerosmith T-shirt. He also wore Crocs, which Joe thought odd. The dogs cringed at his voice, one yelped as if struck, and they crawled back to the house. Joe knew how dogs behaved around someone who had severely beaten them, and this pack was a case study. He swung out and shut his door on Tube, who, now that he was safe and the dogs were gone, started barking at them. That was the corgi part in him, Joe thought with regret.

  “Thanks,” he said to the man. “They’re obviously scared of you.”

  “Good reason for that,” the man said.

  The big man was much younger than Dode, although Joe could see some resemblance in his rough wide face and unfriendly manner. He thought he must be her son.

  “Are you Wes Lee?”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “Joe Pickett.”

  “I know. I heard of you.” He said it in a way that suggested Wes wasn’t impressed at all.

  “Mind if I talk to your folks for a couple minutes?”

  Wes glanced at his mother, who looked back without expression. “Make it quick,” he said. “We’re kind of busy today.”

  Joe nodded. He didn’t question what it was they were busy doing. “Mind if I come in?”

  “If it’s about Earl Alden,” Dode said, “we don’t have much good to say.”

  “It’s about him,” Joe replied, trying to see past Wes, who hadn’t moved his bulk from the top of the porch steps to let Joe by. “Your neighbor.”

  “Couldn’t have happened to a better guy,” Dode Lee said.

  “Mom,” Wes said to Dode, while eyeing Joe suspiciously, “the less you talk to law enforcement, the better. They can twist your words around and use it against you.”

  “So you’ve had some experience in that regard,” Joe said breezily, stepping around Wes, trying not to show he was wary of the son’s bulk, size, and attitude.

  “That was years ago,” Wes said, fully aware of his effect on Joe and only reluctantly letting him by.

  Joe nodded and made a mental note to himself to look up Wes Lee’s rap sheet after the interview. Joe had spent years trying to read people the first time he encountered them in the field, and he had the strong impression Wes owned a mean streak a mile wide.

  The home was dark and cluttered and smelled of cigarette smoke, motor oil, and dogs. The reason for the oil smell was obvious. An engine block sat on a stained tarp in the middle of the living room. Tools were scattered around it. Joe wondered why the work wasn’t being done in one of the three outbuildings, but he didn’t ask about it. People’s homes were people’s homes.

  Bob Lee sat in a worn lounge chair at the back of the room next to a tall green oxygen bottle. Despite the yellowed tube that ran from the tank to a respirator that clipped under his nose, Bob held a lit cigarette between two stained fingers. Joe glanced at the decal on the side of the tank that read:WARNING: NO SMOKING

  OXYGEN IN USE

  NO OPEN FLAMES

  The television was on: The Price Is Right. Lee had a large frame but looked sunken in on himself, as if his flesh had collapsed over his skeleton. He had large rheumy eyes, thin lips, and folds of loose skin that lapped over his shirt collar.

  “What’s the game warden want with us?” Bob asked, his voice both scratchy and challenging.

  Joe removed his hat and held it in his hands. Wes came back in and sat on his engine block with his big hands on his knees and looked up at Joe expectantly. Dode hung back, not far from the door, as if she needed to be close to it in case she had to escape.

  Joe said, “I was just wondering if all of you were around last week. Sunday and Monday, to be specific. I was wondering if you saw anything unusual on the day Earl Alden was killed, since his place is next to yours.”

  Bob commenced coughing. It took a moment for Joe to realize the old man had started to laugh, but the phlegm in his throat made him cough instead. Wes looked over at his father, not alarmed by the reaction. Dode tut-tutted from her place near the door. Joe found it interesting that both wife and son deferred completely to the old man and waited for him to speak. Especially Wes.

  “Unusual like what?” Bob asked.

  “You know,” Joe said, “vehicles you didn’t recognize on the county roads. Strangers about, or even people you know who were out and about on a Sunday.”

  “Maybe like equipment trucks and construction vehicles?” Bob asked, sarcasm tainting his tone. “Like hundreds of goddamned wind farm people driving through our ranch raising dust and scattering our cattle? Like engineers and politicians driving through our place like they owned it? Like that?”

  Joe said nothing.

  “That’s just a normal day around here,” Bob said. “It’s been like that for a year. And now we have the noise.”

  Joe said, “The noise?”

  “Open that kitchen window, Dode,” Bob commanded.

  Mrs. Lee left her place near the door and entered the kitchen. The big window over the sink faced south, and she unlatched it and slid it open.

  Joe heard it: the distant but distinct high-frequency whine of the turbine blades slicing through the sky, punctuated by squeaks and moans of metal-on-metal.

  “The goddamned noise,” Bob said. “It drives the dogs crazy. It drives us crazy. Gives me headaches, I swear, and makes Dode crankier than hell. That odd sound you hear means the bearings are going out on one of the turbines. Eventually, I guess, they’ll have to climb up there and replace it. But until they do, we get to listen to it twenty-four hours a goddamned day.”

  Joe nodded. He was surprised he hadn’t noticed the high but constant whine before he entered the house, but concluded it had been drowned out by barking dogs and the gusts of wind.

  “That’s what we get to listen to all our damned lives, thanks to Earl Alden,” Bob said. “And that’s not counting all the heavy equipment on our roads. I suppose you saw the start of them transmission lines on the way in?”

  “Yup.” Tower after tower of gleaming steel coursing across the sagebrush, power cables sagging between them like super-sized clotheslines.

  “Earl was behind that. Because he owns the wind en
ergy company, he’s somehow considered to be a utility, which means he has the right to condemn that corridor across our ranch so they could put those up. That way, he can ship his power to the grid somewhere.”

  “You got paid, though, right?” Joe asked. “They have to pay you fair market value.”

  Bob sneered. “Which is next to nothing. Dry land pasture doesn’t have much value, they said. Breaking up the ranch that has been in my family for four generations don’t mean nothing when it comes to the state and the Feds on a goddamned crusade for wind power.”

  “Fucking windmills,” Wes said, practically spitting the words out. Joe glanced at Wes and was surprised by his vehemence. Definitely a mean streak, Joe thought. A big guy like that could easily hoist a body up the inside of a wind tower.

  Bob said, “This county sits right on top of natural gas, oil, coal, and uranium. I have the mineral rights, but no one’s interested because they all think that’s dirty and bad these days. But for some damned reason, they think wind power is good. So they got all this federal money and tax credits and bullshit. Anything that has to do with wind power just gets steamrolled through. Let me ask you something, Mr. Game Warden.”

  “Ask away,” Joe said, hoping to end the diatribe and get back to his questions.

  “When you look at a wind turbine, do you see a thing of beauty? Is it more beautiful than an oil well or a gas rig?”

  Joe said, “I see a wind turbine. Nothing more or less.”

  “Ha!” Bob said, tilting his head. “Then you need to get with the damned program, son. You’re supposed to behold the prettiest goddamned thing you ever saw. It’s supposed to make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside. The sight of it is supposed to give you a boner.”

  Wes barked a laugh and slapped his knees. Dode said, “Bob Lee!”

  Joe shrugged.

  “Earl Alden claimed he loved those windmills. He’d always talk up his wind farm while he was getting his government checks and getting the locals to condemn my land for the transmission towers. But you notice where he put ’em, don’t you? Right outside my window on that big ol’ ridge. He put ’em where he wouldn’t have to look at them or hear them all goddamned day, on a ridge where the wind never stops blowing. Right up against my property. They mess up my sky, son, and they mess up the quiet. I can’t take it. A man shouldn’t have to take it just so a gaggle of politicians back east can feel good about themselves.”

  “I understand,” Joe said. “But that’s not what I wanted to ask you about.”

  Bob leaned forward and removed the oxygen tube from his nose with one hand while raising the cigarette with the other in a well-practiced way. He inhaled deeply, sat back, and plugged the oxygen apparatus back in. Joe watched the exchange while holding his own breath, anticipating an explosion and fireball that did not come. Bob said, “So if you want to ask us if we feel bad Earl Alden got killed and hung up from one of his towers like a piece of meat, the answer is hell no.”

  “Hell no!” Dode chirped from the kitchen while closing and latching the window.

  “But you didn’t see anything unusual Sunday?” Joe asked again, trying to bring it back. “Anything you told the sheriff, or didn’t think of until now?”

  “The sheriff?” Bob said. “He ain’t been out here. You’re the first. And not that it matters, ’cause I don’t even look out anymore. I hear them equipment trucks and Rope the Wind vehicles, but I don’t even look out at them anymore because it makes me so damned mad.”

  “What about you, Dode?” Joe asked. “Or Wes? Did you see or hear anything?”

  Dode shook her head. “We keep the curtains shut most of the time anymore,” she said. “We never used to do that, but we do now. And we keep the windows shut on account of the dust those trucks kick up.”

  “Wes?”

  The son had an odd smile on his face, Joe thought. Almost a smirk. “I guess I was just working on my engine all day,” he said, unconvincingly. “I’m trying to get that ’69 Pontiac GTO Judge out there to run again. You probably saw it when you drove up. That’s from when they made real cars and Americans weren’t scared to drive them.”

  Joe was silent. He stood and let the silence become oppressive, hoping one of them would rush to fill it with something that might prove useful. But Dode stood kneading her hands, Wes stared at a spot on the wall, and Bob did his quick oxygen-for-cigarette move again.

  He stood up and said, “Do you have any idea who might have had it in for Earl Alden? Enough to kill him?”

  Bob snorted, as if to say, Who doesn’t?

  “Well,” Joe said, digging a card out of his uniform shirt, “I thank you for your time. If anyone thinks of anything, feel free to give me a call.” He crossed the room and offered the card to Bob, who wouldn’t reach out and take it. Humiliated, Joe placed it on a cluttered end table next to the lounge chair.

  “I heard Missy Alden did it,” Dode said, her eyes lighting up. “I wouldn’t put it past that stuck-up . . . well, I can’t say the word but it rhymes with ‘ditch.’”

  Joe stifled a smile, despite himself. He clamped his hat on and headed for the door. As he opened it, he turned back. The three of them hadn’t moved. There was something they weren’t telling him, he was sure of it.

  “I was wondering,” Joe said, “why you couldn’t take advantage of the wind opportunities you describe. You’ve got the land and you sure do have the wind, and it sounds like there’s big money in it.”

  Bob said, “You really want to know what’s going on?”

  “I’m curious.”

  “Then come back in here and sit yourself down, son. Wes, clear a place on that damned engine block for the game warden.”

  21

  Nate Romanowski stood deep in a grove of aspen on a mountainside in the Salt River Range. It was a cool fall day with a slight breeze that rattled the dry heart-shaped aspen leaves with a sound like a musical shaker. To the north was the town of Alpine and, beyond that, Jackson Hole. To his south was Afton. From where he stood in the shadows, he could see a distant silvery bend of the Grays River, and when he faced west he could see Freedom, Wyoming, just inside the Idaho border. He’d hidden his Jeep in an alcove in the dark timber above and hiked down the weathered two-track to the rendezvous spot.

  He was waiting for a man to deliver a gun.

  Nate checked his pocket watch. Large Merle was an hour late. Plenty of things could have happened to delay him, Nate knew, but he took a few steps farther back into the aspens and hunkered down just in case Merle had been intercepted by someone who was out there looking for him. Lord knew, he thought, there were enough people after him these days.

  The sound of the motor came with a gust of wind. A flock of gold leaves dislodged and fluttered to the ground like wing-shot birds. Within a few minutes, the sound became pronounced. It was punctuated by the grinding of the transmission as the driver missed a gear on the climb. Merle drove like that—badly—and Nate rose.

  The toothsome grille of Large Merle’s 1978 Dodge Power Wagon thrust through the brush below, and Nate didn’t move or blink until he could see there was only one occupant in the cab. One very big occupant.

  Nate raised a hand and stepped out from the trees. The dry leaves crunched underfoot like cornflakes. Through the windshield, Merle nodded in recognition and goosed the Dodge up the road. When he reached Nate, Merle killed the engine, jammed on the parking brake, and swung out. Nate watched Merle carefully, looking for the sign of a tell.

  Large Merle was seven feet tall and weighed about four hundred and fifty pounds, Nate guessed. Although he could afford a newer vehicle, the Dodge had been adapted to a man of Merle’s size by retrofitting the seat flush against the back cab wall and cutting lengths out of the brake and clutch arms. Large Merle left the keys in his Dodge all the time because, he’d once told Nate, no car thief was big enough to steal it.

  What Nate was looking for on Merle’s face was a nervous twitch or a refusal to make eye contact. Or if Merle started spou
ting small talk unrelated to the matter at hand. Any of those traits would be a sign of guilt and thus the end of Large Merle.

  Nate had always believed in justice even if he didn’t believe in many laws. And if Merle revealed anything besides remorse or blind stupidity, Nate would see that justice was done.

  “You’re a sight,” Large Merle said, stepping out of his truck. “Sorry I’m late.”

  “I was starting to wonder,” Nate said, watching Merle closely. So far, so good.

  “It took longer than they thought it would to mount the scope. We went with a Leupold 4X in the end.”

  Nate nodded. “Good scope.”

  “That’s what they said.”

  Merle was studying his boot tops. Not looking up. Nate felt something begin to swell inside him.

  Then Merle said, “I feel so goddamned bad about what happened. I blame myself for those yahoos getting through my place, Nate, and I’m just so sorry.”

  Nate let the words hang in the air until the breeze floated them away. He sounded sincere.

  “It was a girl that made me screw up, Nate,” Merle said, glancing up, his eyes begging for understanding. “A woman, I should say. She came into the café two nights before. She said she was from East Texas and she was going to visit her sister somewhere in Montana. Ekalaka, I think she said. Damn, she had pretty eyes and a nice figure and she asked me to come along.”

  Nate watched Merle carefully.

  “There ain’t that many girls who like a guy like me,” Merle said. “It wasn’t always like this, you know. Back when I went two hundred twenty, two hundred fifty, I didn’t have that many problems. Lots of girls thought I played basketball,” he said, chuckling.

  “I remember,” Nate said. “I was there.”

  Merle had been in Nate’s unit in black ops. They’d served together in Africa, South America, and the Middle East. He’d been there when the whole thing blew up.