by C. J. Box
“Thank God for that,” Brockius whistled.
Joe stood. Both snowshoes were secure. It seemed immensely quiet now. Snow still sifted through the trees, so fine that it cast halos around the lights.
“I really did think Spud Cargill was here,” Joe said. “The Reverend Cobb in town said that he had provided Spud sanctuary. I think he was looking for sanctuary here, too.”
Brockius looked puzzled for a moment. “This is not sanctuary.”
“But he said . . .”
“A church is a sanctuary. This is not a church. This is a way station on the road to hell.”
Instantly, Joe forgot the pain in his head and in his throbbing ribs, and the cold.
“I know where he is now,” Joe said, his voice rising. “It’s time to end this thing.”
A slow, sad smile broke across Wade Brockius’s face.
“Then you may need this,” Brockius said, handing Joe his weapon back butt first.
Joe nodded his thanks, holstered the pistol, and turned back toward the dark timber he had come from.
Thirty
It was four-thirty in the morning when Joe had a moment of panic and realized he might be lost. He was in his pickup, working his way down the mountain, fixated on the barely perceptible tracks in the road. He thought he knew where he was and expected to see the scattered lights of Saddlestring on the valley floor through his windshield, but he saw nothing. Had he somehow taken the wrong road? His sense of direction was confounded by the snowstorm and the darkness and the messianic swirl of huge snowflakes in his headlights. Only when he glanced down at the dash-mounted GPS unit did he confirm that he was going in the right direction, and he sighed, his short-lived panic subsiding. The glow of the town lights had been sucked up by the snowfall, leaving only a faint smudge of off-color in a black-and-white night.
Joe was exhausted, frustrated, and injured. If it weren’t for concentrating and driving precisely in the tracks he’d made previously when he went up the mountain, he wouldn’t have had a chance of getting back down. He drove much faster than he was comfortable with, given the conditions and his impaired field of vision, but whenever he slowed he felt the tires digging too deeply into the snowpack. Even while driving fast and staying in his already-cut trail, he had gotten stuck twice. Both times he was high-centered. The first time he dug out, clearing hard-packed snow from beneath the front and back differentials, his head hummed with thoughts of having seen April, the pounding he had taken, and Spud Cargill. The second time, he was so exhausted he could barely lift the shovel out of the bed of the truck, and he seriously considered climbing back in with the engine running and the heater blowing and going to sleep for the rest of the night. But when he considered the rate of snowfall, he calculated that the exhaust pipe would be covered up within a few hours. Carbon monoxide fumes would overwhelm him while he slept, and that would be that. There was something slightly inviting in the thought, but he fought it. He slapped himself awake, wincing when he did it because of his broken rib (he was sure of it now), and he dug himself out once again.
Hours were going by. The assault team would be assembling. But conditions and circumstances kept slowing Joe down. It reminded him of dreams he’d had as a pre-teen on nights when his parents were drunk and fighting and he slept between bursts of angry accusations and crashing glass. In his dreams, he would be running, or swimming, or riding his bike as fast as he could—but he could make no progress. The harder he ran, swam, or pedaled, the closer he seemed to be to the house he was leaving. He would wake up in tears, seized by the sense of futility and frustration. He recalled that frustration now, only this time it was much worse than anything he had ever dreamed.
Joe played the scene with April and Jeannie over and over again in his mind. If only Jeannie had misbehaved, or if April had tried to resist or run, things could have been different. Now, his only hope was to extend the time it would take to find a resolution, and the only way to do that was to find Spud Cargill and force a cancellation of the raid.
He finally cleared the timber and the deepest snow and broke out into the foothills. The wall of trees receded in his rearview mirror. The sagebrush that carpeted the hills was completely covered with snow, and the lack of trees and brush created a spatial lack of perspective. Joe felt the tires dig down through the snow and grip actual frozen ground for the first time in hours, and he gained a sense of control. Still, though, it was wide-open country, and solid white for as far as he could see. Any wind at all would sweep the deep powder into high ridges and crests and make the going impossible.
In his fatigue, the dark form of the snow-covered Jeep that was stuck in the snow almost didn’t register with him. It was only when he pulled alongside it and rolled down his window did he recognize the Jeep, and notice that it was running.
The plastic windows were steamed from the inside, and snow had accumulated on the top where there weren’t holes or rips. Steam, looking like smoke from a chimney, rose from the top and dissipated into the cold night air. Joe rolled down the passenger window and leaned across his seat.
“Nate?” he called from his window, but there was no response. After a moment, Joe laid on his horn.
A gloved hand cleared steam from the inside of a plastic window in the Jeep, and was followed by two wide eyes that sleepily settled on Joe.
“Joe!” said a voice from inside the vehicle. “I didn’t hear you. I was sleeping.”
The door opened and Nate Romanowski grinned. An inch of snow, looking like frosting, crowned his watch cap. He held Joe’s note in his big hand, and waved it at him.
“Got your note. I stopped at your house and your wife told me this is where you were. I was able to get this far before I got stuck. So,” he said, “do you need help after all?”
“I do.”
But Joe wasn’t sure what help he needed, exactly, or what Nate’s role should be. Whatever he was going to use Nate for, though, it would be better to have him in the truck with him.
“Why don’t you get in my truck, then?” Joe called. “I’ve got all four tires chained up and I’m pointed downhill. I think I can make it to town. We can come back up and dig out your Jeep later.”
Nate nodded once, then retrieved a daypack from his Jeep and waded through the thigh-high snow to climb into the cab.
“What in the hell happened to you?” Nate asked, looking Joe over.
“I got pounded on by a couple of the Sovereigns,” he said. “I deserved it.”
Joe slipped the pickup into gear and rolled forward to a dead stop in the deep snow.
“Uh-oh,” Nate growled.
Not responding, Joe shoved the pickup into reverse and gunned the engine, backtracking a few feet. Then he rammed it back into drive and hit the snow again with jarring force. The truck broke through, and Joe kept going.
“I’m not stopping again,” Joe said. “For anything.”
“Joe, I learned a lot about Melinda Strickland and Dick Munker in Idaho. None of it is good.”
“That’s where you went? Idaho?”
“I didn’t know you needed me here,” Nate said defensively. “You said as much. And yes, Idaho. Seventy percent of the state is federally owned and managed. If there’s any place where the locals know about specific federal land managers, it’s Idaho. I’ve got some friends there, and I was curious about Strickland and Munker.” He paused for a moment.
“Go on,” Joe said. He wanted to hear the story, but he also needed Nate to keep talking to help him stay awake and alert.
“I don’t want to scare you, Joe, but the fact is you’re going to need all the friends you’ve got against these two.”
Joe grunted. That wasn’t very encouraging.
“You want some hot coffee?” Nate asked, digging into his pack.
Joe nodded.
“Melinda Strickland is even worse than I thought,” Nate said while he poured the steaming coffee into Joe’s travel mug. “The people I talked to down there think she’s evil and ins
ane. What they don’t know is if she started out evil and went insane, or started out insane so she doesn’t realize what she’s doing.”
Joe gulped the coffee, not caring that it was scalding his tongue. His body ached and his back was stiffening. He wasn’t sure how long he’d be able to tolerate the exertion it took him to keep the truck from bucking out of the tracks and off into a snowbank. He knew he should have asked Nate to drive, but it was too late for that; he wasn’t going to stop and run the risk of getting stuck.
“Just give me facts, Nate, not analysis,” Joe barked. “We don’t need psychobabble. We don’t have a lot of time, and I’m not sure I’ve decided how to play this yet.”
Nate refilled Joe’s cup and fitted it into the holder. As the cab finally began to warm up, he unzipped his parka.
“Melinda Strickland is the daughter of a senator from Oregon. She’s a trust-fund kid,” Nate said. “Her dad greased the skids for her to enter the federal government after she’d bounced around the Pacific Northwest and through various agencies in Washington, D.C. Apparently, she spent a few years in various institutions as well. Drug and alcohol problems. But the rumor is she’s a card-carrying paranoid.”
Joe shot a glance at Nate that he hoped reminded him to stick to facts.
“Even though she probably makes a good impression on some people at first, she’s a classic loose cannon, not capable of working with people. In a nutshell, she’s consistently treated her colleagues and co-workers like pieces of shit, saying things about them, playing one off of the other, and just general nastiness. She was involved in a bunch of lawsuits when she worked for the Department of Agriculture because of things she said and did to people. Her idea of management is to make subordinates cry. Oh, and she’s a pathological liar.”
Joe glanced over at Nate and could see that under his parka he was wearing his shoulder holster.
“Once she got into the Forest Service, she started bouncing all around the country. She left a mess everywhere she went. She’s the type that creates chaos out of order. No one knows what deep-seated problems make her the way she is, but the way the Forest Service handled it is how they generally handle things in the big government agencies.”
“Transferring her so she’s somebody else’s problem?” Joe asked. He knew how the game was played.
“Exactly,” Nate said. He spoke in a low, rhythmic cadence and rarely raised his voice. “She was in Oregon, Montana, New Mexico, Nevada, South Dakota, Idaho twice, and then somewhere in Colorado. You know how it works—we all do. Longtime federal employees—especially if they’re middle-aged women and they like to threaten lawsuits and they’re daughters of senators—just don’t get fired very easily. Her big bosses are political appointees who know that if they can bury the problem for a while, the next administration will have to deal with it. Meanwhile, local communities are subjected to her and her ways.”
“Specifically?” Joe asked.
“Well, in Nevada she became convinced that a couple of the local ranchers with grazing leases were out to kill her dog. So she had them followed twenty-four hours a day by Forest Service rangers. This was in a town of three hundred people, where there were, like, two places to eat. And everywhere these ranchers went, two uniformed Feds went with them. Finally, one of the ranchers got drunk and forced a shoot-out. Both ranchers went down, and one Fed.”
Joe shook his head sadly, and instantly regretted it as a throbbing pain burned into the back of his skull.
“Finally,” Nate said, “The Forest Service ran out of places to hide her, and they were going to bring her up on harassment charges—finally hold her accountable for something—because she called a Latino contractor a “fat spic” in front of witnesses. Then her daddy stepped in and they figured out this new job for her. They made it up just for her—a position with a nice title but no staff or budget. It was a perfect place to stick her where she couldn’t do any damage. My contacts said that even that was a mistake, because when the administration changed, she convinced somebody to shuffle the budget and get her some funding. All of a sudden she’s got a travel budget, and in her mind a star was finally born. By the time the agency figured out what she’d done in a vacuum, that Elle what’s-her-name had latched onto her to do a profile and their hands were tied. They couldn’t get rid of the woman while she was being lionized by a journalist, so they just sort of let it go.”
“And now we’ve got her,” Joe said. His eyes burned with lack of sleep, and he felt a heightened sense of tension rising in his chest as they neared Saddlestring.
“They take a woman who hates people and put her in charge of a task force to go after rednecks who hate the government,” Nate said. “This is what I love about the Feds.”
Joe asked Nate to give him a minute and quickly called Marybeth on his cell phone. When she picked up, she sounded as if she had been up all night.
“I’m off the mountain and I’ve got Nate with me,” he said. “Yes, I’m fine,” he lied.
“Dick Munker, ” Joe said. “What’s his story?”
Nate whistled. “It would be a good thing,” he said, “If Dick Munker went away.”
“Meaning?”
“The guy is a bitter, sadistic asshole,” Nate said. “They knew this guy real well in Idaho, because he’s one of the FBI sharpshooters the state was trying to put in jail for Ruby Ridge. He was one of the triggermen. The first guy to shoot, it was alleged. Unfortunately, the case got dismissed because of jurisdictional problems. Munker did get demoted, and like Melinda Strickland he’s been bounced around the country in the hope that he’d retire so they wouldn’t have to take administrative action. The FBI hates to call attention to itself and its problem agents—especially these days—so they do everything they can to keep things quiet when they have a psycho on the payroll.”
Nate shook his head. “Melinda Strickland and Dick Munker are made for each other.”
Joe didn’t respond. The fear that had clenched his stomach for the past few hours was gripping harder. He held tight to the steering wheel and pushed on through the spinning snow, praying that he wasn’t already too late. He needed to come up with a plan and he didn’t have much time.
When they entered Saddlestring it was still dark, although there was now a gray morning glow in the eastern sky. The town was encased in snow and ice. The chains on the tires of Joe’s truck were singing because there was so much packed snow in the wheel wells. Joe was amazed they had made it without getting stuck.
Joe briefed Nate on the situation as he saw it, and went over the plan he had come up with. He told Nate that he needed him there for support and backup only. Nate nodded and smiled slyly, leaving Joe with a queasy feeling.
He didn’t go far into town. He turned off the road and into the parking lot of the First Alpine Church.
The church was sanctuary once again, Joe now knew, for Spud Cargill.
Thirty-one
As Joe pulled into the small parking area for the church and the Reverend B. J. Cobb’s trailer, he pointed out to Nate that there was no wood smoke coming from the tin stovepipe atop the church.
“It’s too cold,” Joe said, thinking aloud, “for someone to be inside the church without a morning fire. So if Spud is here, he’ll be in the double-wide.”
Nate grunted his agreement.
As they pulled to a stop in front of the trailer, something bothered Joe, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. Then he remembered.
“Yesterday when I was here,” Joe said, “there was a snowmobile parked out by the road. It’s not there now.”
“You think Spud took it?” Nate asked, zipping up his parka and preparing to open the truck door.
“We’ll find out, I guess,” Joe said, jumping out of the truck into the snow. He left his .40 Beretta in his holster and pulled the only weapon that he was comfortable with, his twelve-gauge Remington WingMaster shotgun, out from behind the bench seat. Turning toward the trailer, he spun it upside down in his gloves to make sure it wa
s loaded. The bright brass of a double-aught shell winked at him.
While Joe approached the front door of Cobb’s trailer, Nate Romanowski pushed though the deep snow around the back where there was another door. Joe gave Nate a minute to get around before mounting the steps.
He knocked with enough force to send a line of icicles crashing from the eaves. Toward the back of the trailer, yellow light filled a curtained window. Joe assumed it was the bedroom. He stepped aside on the porch in case Cobb or Spud decided to fire through the door.
Joe heard heavy footfalls inside and watched the door handle turn. There was a kissing sound as it opened and broke through a thin seal of snow and ice. Joe raised the barrel of the shotgun, the butt firmly against his cheek, and aimed it at eye-level where he expected Cobb to stick his head out.
The door opened and the Reverend Cobb’s cinder-block head jutted out into the half-light of dawn, his eyes squinting against the falling snow. The muzzle of Joe’s shotgun was six inches away from Cobb’s ear.
“Throw down your weapon if you have one,” Joe said quietly, as Cobb’s eyes swiveled toward the black mouth of the shotgun.
A nine-millimeter handgun dropped with a thud on the porch, vanishing into the snow but leaving a distinct profile outline.
“That’s not necessary, Joe,” Cobb said, keeping his voice even.
“Step outside where I can see you,” Joe ordered. He did not trust Cobb not to have another weapon on him, or not to jump back and slam the door shut.
“You can’t enter a man’s house without probable cause, Joe,” Cobb cautioned.
“I’m not,” Joe said. “I’m asking you to come outside. And if you don’t do it, we’ve got a problem.”
Cobb gave a slight smile and briefly closed his eyes. His face was pink and warm from sleep, and snowflakes melted on his cheeks.
“Okay,” Cobb said opening his eyes. “My hands are up and I’m coming out. Don’t do anything stupid.”
“No promises,” Joe said, immensely relieved that Cobb was cooperating.
