by C. J. Box
“The one not turning,” Joe said. “They disabled it so the forensics boys could do their thing.”
She looked over, slightly miffed. “I know that,” she said. “I just wonder why Missy chose that particular windmill. It isn’t the closest one from where he was shot. There are eight towers in between.”
Joe rubbed his chin. “I never thought of that. Maybe because the one he was hung from was the most visible from out here. So the body would be sure to be seen.”
“But why?”
“That I couldn’t tell you,” he said.
After a moment, she said, “We really shouldn’t be talking like this. What if someone sees us?”
Joe shrugged. He was wondering that himself.
“I mean, you’ve got a built-in conflict in regard to this case. I’ve told you I can’t confide in you.”
“I know,” Joe said. “And I honor that.”
“I knew you would,” she said. “But I’d rather you were on our side.”
“I’m not on a side,” Joe said. “I’m trying to figure out what happened. What’s true. That doesn’t put me on a side.”
She shook her head and frowned. “I disagree, Joe. I’m the county attorney and I’m presenting a case based on the evidence. You’re trying to prove me wrong.”
He started to argue, but folded his arms across his chest and looked out. He realized they were both standing in the exact same posture now.
He said, “This reminds of a question Bob Lee asked me. What do you see when you look out at that wind farm?”
She started to answer flippantly, but decided it was a serious question. “I see the future of America,” she said. “For better or worse. I know that sounds corny.”
Joe pursed his lips, looked out, considered what she said.
“Do you think they’re beautiful?” he asked.
“The wind turbines?”
“Yup.”
“I guess so. They’re graceful-looking. They gleam in the sun, even if they make that annoying sound.”
He nodded. “If those same machines out there were pumping out oil or gas or if they were nuclear generators, would they still be as beautiful in your eyes?”
“Joe, what’s your point?” she asked, slightly exasperated.
“Like you,” he said, “I’m trying to get things straight in my mind. I wonder if things are beautiful because of where a person sits.”
She glared at him. “I don’t want to get distracted right now, Joe. I’ve got a murder case to win and I don’t want to have this discussion.”
“I know,” he said. “I’m just suggesting that it’s easy to look at something and see what you want to see when somebody else, say, could look at the same thing and see something else.”
“What’s your point?” she asked again.
He shrugged.
“Are you talking about windmills, or are you saying I might have blinders on concerning your mother-in-law’s guilt? That maybe we should be looking elsewhere for Earl Alden’s killer?”
Joe didn’t answer directly but nodded toward the wind farm. “A little of both, I guess.”
“No,” she said heatedly. “This is why you shouldn’t have come up here. This is why we shouldn’t have talked. You’re trying to steer me somewhere I don’t want to go.”
He said, “Dulcie, I’m just trying to figure out what happened.”
“You’re making me a little uncomfortable,” she said. “We should go.”
He said, “Yup.”
In the early evening, as Joe worked his way back home via back roads and two-tracks, he cruised up Main Street in Saddlestring toward the river bridge. The air was still and sultry, and a few revelers poured out of the Stockman’s as he passed by, beer bottles in their hands. He glanced over to see who they were but didn’t identify them as locals. They were thirty-somethings, three men and two women. The men had facial hair and baggy pants, and the women wore cargo shorts with river sandals.
One of the men, in a black oversized polo shirt with a ball cap pulled down low over his eyes, looked up as Joe drove by, and for a moment their eyes locked.
A bolt of recognition shot through Joe, and he tapped on his brakes.
The man broke off and quickly looked down. His companions called after him as he turned abruptly and walked stiff-legged back in the bar.
“Shamazz, what the fuck?” one of the women said. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost!”
24
Johnny Cook and Drennen O’Melia were outside of Farson and Eden in west central Wyoming doing meth and getting their ashes hauled. They’d been there most of the week. Their plan, for a while, was to go west to California or at least as far as Las Vegas. But they hadn’t even made it to the Utah border.
It was that green sign saying they’d entered the tiny town of Eden that held them up. Who, Johnny had asked, wouldn’t want to stop and have a beer in a place called Eden?
Johnny was taking a break. He slumped in a director’s chair someone had set up outside between clumps of sagebrush about fifty yards from the trailers and smoked a cigarette and drank a can of beer. Although the sun was moving in on the top of the Wind River Mountains in the distance, it was still warm out and Johnny didn’t know where his shirt or pants were, which trailer, so he sat there in his straw cowboy hat, boxers, and boots with a pistol across his bare knees. He knew he looked awesome without a shirt, so he didn’t mind.
Occasionally, he would raise and fire a Ruger Mark III .22 pistol at gophers that raised their heads up out of a hole. He’d hit a couple. When he did he’d shout “Red mist!” to the sky. He’d watch as other gophers rushed over to feed on the remains, and when they did, Johnny shot them for being such lousy friends. At one point he’d had a revelation about the nature of friendship in the cruel, cruel world, but he couldn’t remember now what it had been.
Johnny shivered, despite the heat. The tremor ran through his entire body and raised goose bumps on his forearms. Immediately afterwards, he was flush and felt sweat prickle beneath his scalp. Damn meth, he thought, trying to remember the last time he’d eaten something. Two days ago, maybe. He had a vague recollection of eating an entire package of cold hot dogs dipped one-by-one into a warm jar of mayonnaise. But he might have dreamed that, he conceded.
He heard a whoop from behind him and he turned his head to see Drennen emerging from one of the trailers. Drennen was telling one of the girls inside something, and he heard her laugh.
“Don’t go anywhere or get too comfortable,” Drennen said to the girl. “I’ll be coming right back after I reload.”
As he shambled toward Johnny in the dust, Drennen said, “Jesus, what a wildcat. Cute, too. I can’t get enough of that one. Lisa, I think her name is. Lisa.”
Johnny nodded. “Brunette? Kinda Indian?”
“That’s her,” Drennen said. “Like to burn me down.”
Johnny thought Drennen was lucky any girl would spend time with him, even for money. The burns on his face and neck from the back-blast of the rocket launcher on his face and neck looked hideous, Johnny thought. All red and raw and oozing. Drennen forgot how crappy he looked because he was high all the time, but no one else could possibly forget. He’d be fine after a while—the damage wasn’t permanent—but getting there was not sightly.
Drennen collapsed into the dirt next to Johnny, then propped himself up with his elbow. He reached up and plucked the pistol from Johnny’s lap and fired a wild and harmless shot at a gopher before handing it back. “Missed,” he said. “Where’d you put that pipe?”
“You weren’t even close.” Johnny gestured toward their pickup. “In there, I think. Let me know if you see my shirt or my pants anywhere.”
“I was wondering about that,” Drennen said, slowly getting up to his hands and knees. “We still got plenty of rock?”
“I think so,” Johnny said, distracted. “I can’t remember a damn thing, so don’t hold me to it.”
Drennen laughed, got to his feet, and l
urched toward the pickup to reload. Drennen said, “Man, I love this Western living.”
The collection of double-wide trailers hadn’t been out there for very long. They weren’t laid out in any kind of logical pattern and looked to Johnny as if they’d been dropped into the high desert from the air. The dirt roads to get to the trailers were poor and old, and there wasn’t a single sign designating the name of the place. An ex-energy worker named Gasbag Jim was in charge of the operation, and he had a small office in one of the double-wides where he collected money, assigned girls, and passed out from time to time from drinking too much Stoli or smoking too much meth.
Drennen and Johnny had learned about the place from a natural gas wildcatter at the Eden Saloon. They’d stopped for a beer or nine at the edge of the massive Jonah gas field before continuing on to California. When they found out Gasbag Jim’s operation was less than twenty miles out of Farson and Eden in the sagebrush, they thought, What the hell.
That was four days ago. Or at least Johnny thought it had been four days. He’d have to ask Drennen.
Gasbag Jim’s was an all-cash enterprise, which suited them just fine. That meant there would be no paper trail—no credit card receipts, no IDs, and no need for real names. They’d decided to call each other “Marshall” and “Mathers” because Drennen was a fan of the rapper Eminem, and Marshall Mathers was his real name, but Johnny had slipped and called Drennen “Drennen” when they were in bed with three women at once. One of the girls, Lisa Rich, the ravenhaired beauty with heavy breasts, had coaxed their real names out of them the night before. She seemed very interested in their real names, for some reason.
“Fuck,” Drennen said as he staggered back from the pickup holding the crack pipe. “We’ve been burning through cash like it was . . . money.”
“I know,” Johnny moaned, and rubbed hard at his face. He’d been noticing that his face didn’t feel like it was his, like someone had stitched it over his real face to fool him. “Does my face look normal to you?” he asked.
Drennen squinted at Johnny. “You look normal,” he said, “for an over-sexed tweaker with no pants.”
They shared a good laugh over that one. But Johnny still distrusted his face. He probed his jawline with his fingertips, expecting to find a seam.
Then Drennen said, “I was talking to Gasbag Jim a while ago. I can see where this is headed and we’re going to be broke on our asses in no time flat. So I made him a proposal.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah,” Drennen said, pulling the top off a cold Coors. He lowered the lid of the cooler and sat down on it so he was facing Johnny. He was so close their knees almost touched. “See, all his business except for you and me comes from Jonah field workers between here and Pinedale. You seen ’em this last weekend.”
Johnny had. Dozens of men, a parade of them, in new model four-wheel-drive pickups. Many of the customers lived in man camps put up by the energy companies. There were few women around. They talked of three things mostly: the prostitutes, hunting, and how the price of natural gas was dropping like a rock and might endanger their jobs and then they’d be out of work like everybody else. They wanted to spend their money while they had it.
“A bunch more layoffs coming,” Drennen said. “This place is going to look like a ghost town pretty soon. Those guys’ll get their pink slips and head home to wherever they came from. Gasbag Jim will have to send those girls away and sell his trailers, is what I’m thinking.”
“So what?” Johnny said, shifting his weight so he could see the prairie over Drennen’s shoulder. A gopher popped up twenty yards away and Johnny raised the pistol and fired. Missed. The pistol had gone off just a few inches from Drennen’s ear and Drennen flinched, said, “Jesus, you almost hit me, you ass hat.”
“Sorry,” Johnny said, looking past Drennen for more gophers.
“Anyway,” Drennen said, rubbing his ear and regaining his momentum. “So there’s always a need for whores somewhere. Maybe just not here in a few months. So what I was talking about to Gasbag Jim was you and me get an RV and load in a half-dozen whores and take’em to wherever there’s action. Like that big oil discovery up in North Dakota. Gasbag Jim says they found oil and gas down in southern Wyoming, too. Southern Wyoming and northern Colorado someplace. And all those fucking windmills going up everywhere. Somebody’s got to be building them. That means there’ll be plenty of desperate men in lonely-ass places like this.”
Johnny rubbed his eyes. They burned and he imagined they looked like glowing charcoal briquettes, because they felt that way. He’d need to go to the pickup and reload soon as well, and avoid the crash that was coming. It felt like there were a million spiders crawling through his body just beneath the skin. The rock would put them back to sleep. Johnny said, “Like a whorehouse on wheels?”
“Exactly,” Drennen said. “Exactly. We drive up to the well, get the word out among the workers, go set up somewhere on public land or some dumbass rancher’s place, and take our cut. Of course, we have to protect the whores and keep them productive, so we’ve got to be on-site and be alert and all that. I’ll handle the accounting and paperwork, and all you’ll have to do is stand around and look jumpy and menacing. I know you can do that.”
“I can,” Johnny said, pointing at the cooler. Drennen stood up and got him another beer.
“We need to make some money,” Drennen said. “We’re just about out and there is no work out there. We couldn’t even get on at a dude ranch since it’s September and the end of their season. Man, we burned through the whole wad in a couple a weeks.”
“Maybe we can kill somebody else,” Johnny said, patting his pistol and dropping his voice. “That’s easier than hitting the road in an RV.”
Drennen grunted. “Nobody we know needs anyone whacked,” he said. “So there’s no business there, either.”
Johnny said, “Maybe we can get unemployment from the government. I heard one of those gas guys saying you can collect for something like two years now before you have to even look for a job. That sounds like a sweet deal to me.”
Drennen rolled his eyes. “That’s subsistence level, man. We can’t do that. We’ve got to live higher on the food chain.”
“So where do we get an RV?” Johnny asked. “Those mothers are expensive.”
“I haven’t figured that one out yet,” Drennen said, dismissing Johnny’s concern.
“And if we do somehow get one, why would Gasbag Jim trust us to lend us his whores and give him his cut? He don’t know us from Adam. And along the same lines, if this is such a great idea, why won’t Gasbag and his buddies just do it? Why do they need us?”
Gasbag Jim was always shadowed by two large Mexicans named Luis and Jesus. Luis openly wore a shoulder holster. Luis had a trickedout tactical AR-15 he sometimes used to shoot at gophers using his laser sight. The Ruger also belonged to Luis.
Drennen had a blank expression on his face that eventually melded into petulance. “I didn’t say I had the whole fuckin’ thing figured out,” he pouted. “I said I had a concept that I’m working through. One of us has to think ahead farther than the tip of our dick, you know.”
Johnny looked down at his lap and smiled. At least that felt like his. “Wish I could figure out where I left my pants,” he said. Then: “I’ve been thinking, too. What about that Patsy? I bet she’d part with a whole bunch more if we got to her and said we might have to talk. Hell, she got that bag of cash from somewhere. I bet there’s a hell of a lot more where that came from.”
Drennen shook his head and said, “I’m ahead of you on that one. But all we know is she’s from Chicago. We don’t have an address, and we don’t really even know if that was her real name. It’s not like she gave us a business card, bud.”
“I went to Chicago once,” Johnny said. “You’re right, it’s big. And I think Patsy knows people, if you know what I mean.”
When Drennen didn’t respond, he looked back at his friend. Drennen was sitting in the dirt, legs cros
sed Indian fashion, head tilted back. He was squinting at something in the sky.
“What?” Johnny said. “You’re not gonna ask me what animal a cloud looks like again, are you? Because I’m not interested.”
“Look,” Drennen said, gesturing skyward with this beer can.
Johnny sighed and looked up. It seemed like a lot of effort.
“See it?” Drennen asked.
“What?”
“That bird. An eagle or whatever, going around in circles?”
Johnny squinted and finally found it. It was a long way up there.
“Remember when we got that job done in the canyon? Remember we saw a bird like that?”
“Yeah.”
They both got the same thought at the same time, and they looked at each other.
“No waaaay,” Drennen said, forcing a smile.
“Hell no,” Johnny said, feeling a little sick after looking at Drennen square in the face.
25
Joe entered the dark and windowless Stockman’s Bar. After he had spent all day outside in the bright September sunshine, the sudden gloom required a momentary hitch just inside the front door. As he waited for his eyes to adjust, his other senses took over: he heard the click of pool balls from the tables in back, the thud of a beer mug being put down for a refill after the ranch hand ordered a “re-ride,” and smelled the piquant combination of sweat, dust, and cigarette smoke. The sound track for the emerging scene was the jukebox playing Lucinda Williams’ “Can’t Let Go.”
Neither can I, Joe thought.
Most of the stools were filled. Half by regulars deep into the last stages of a three-day bender before going into extra innings of the holiday blues. Keith Bailey, the part-time Eagle Mountain Club security guard, was there again at his usual place, cradling a cup of coffee between his big hands. There were a few tourists Joe didn’t recognize, mixed in with the locals but still standing out from them, and a bumptious gaggle of college-age cowboy and cowgirl wannabes clogging up the far end of the bar. But not the man he wanted to find. Joe felt sorry for these people who chose the dark solace of a cave when a bright, crisp, and multi-colored almost-fall day was exploding outside all around them in every direction.
