Endangered

by C. J. Box

  “Is that it?” Liv asked, pointing out her driver’s-side window.

  A weathered roof peeked over the tops of the trees to the west. Nate noted that the tire tracks they’d followed went in that direction.

  “I think so,” he said.

  Liv backed up and took the road.

  The massive old log horse barn was actually closer than it had seemed—less than a hundred yards from the lodge, but the timber was too thick in between for them to have seen the structure in full from the ranch yard. The barn was dark and weathered and the rain had temporarily stained the logs a deep brown. Hitching posts that looked a hundred years old stretched across the front of the building. A huge sliding barn door was partially open.

  On the left side of the structure was a rusting GMC Suburban with Twelve Sleep County plates.

  “There’s his car,” Nate said.

  “There’s someone in it,” Liv said as they got closer to the Suburban. “It looks like a woman. Probably his wife.”

  Liv parked on the right side of the barn and waved toward the woman in the SUV. The woman, who looked stout and immobile, waved back.

  “So do we get the birds out?” Liv asked Nate.

  “Not yet,” he said. “First I need to scout out the place. I need to see how many problem birds there are inside and where they’re nesting. I probably won’t put the falcons up tonight as it is. I don’t want them flying around in the dark in unfamiliar terrain. I’d rather release them in the morning when we know what we’ve got here.”

  “You’re the falconer,” she said cheerfully. “I’m the businessperson. While you’re looking things over inside, I’ll go talk to our client over there and ask her to sign a contract. We agreed to seven hundred and fifty dollars per day with a maximum of three days, unless there are still starlings around. If that’s the case, they’ll only pay us two hundred and fifty dollars for two more days until all the problem birds are gone. If it goes beyond five days, it’s gratis.”

  “Oh, they’ll be gone,” Nate said with a cruel smile.

  He turned in his seat and found a long Maglite flashlight to take into the barn with him.

  “Meet you back here in a minute,” he said to Liv.

  —

  LIV SHOULDERED on a light rain jacket, looped her violet scarf around her neck, and, grabbing her clipboard, approached the old Suburban. The bulky woman in the passenger seat watched her with hooded eyes. She looked like a tough old ranch wife, Liv thought.

  The woman rolled down her rain-beaded window and arched her eyebrows as if to say, What?

  “Hello. I’m Liv from Yarak, Inc. Are you Mrs. Wells? The one who sent me the email that you needed some falconry services done?”

  The woman nodded. She seemed placid and stoic. There was no smile. Her eyes seemed intelligent, though.

  “I didn’t realize there would be two of you,” the woman said.

  “We cover our own expenses and accommodations and such,” Liv told her. “You don’t have to worry about that.”

  The woman tipped her head back slightly in a way that indicated Liv’s answer hadn’t addressed her statement. She said, “My husband is in the barn. That’s where the birds are.”

  Liv looked over her shoulder to see Nate pause at the open barn door, test the flashlight, and walk inside.

  “Well,” Liv said. “Do you want to look over the agreement before you sign it?”

  “We always do that,” the woman said. “But this is my husband’s deal. He’s the one with the key to the gate. He watches over the place in the winter when the owners are away. I’m just along for the ride.”

  Liv said, “So should I go inside and find him?”

  “In a minute,” the woman said. “Let’s let your guy talk with him first. Let them get their business out of the way.”

  Liv was slightly puzzled. The woman wore a plastic rain bonnet to cover her hair and an old dark green coat. Liv knew style, and guessed the coat may have been fashionable in the mid-sixties.

  Liv said uncomfortably, “Well, we’ll have to get these contracts signed before any work can be done.”

  “You’ll have to take that up with John,” the woman said. “Like I told you, I’m just along for the ride.”

  The woman had penetrating eyes, Liv thought. They were the same eyes she saw when she took the hoods off Nate’s falcons to feed them.

  “We don’t see a lot of Negroes around here,” the woman said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You’re very pretty. I can see why he took up with you.”

  “Do you know Nate?” Liv asked, confused.

  “I just know of him,” the woman said.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t get your name,” Liv said, trying not to sound as offended as she felt.

  “Kitty,” the woman said. “Kitty Wells.”

  Liv cocked her head, thinking. The name was familiar, but she couldn’t place it.

  —

  INSIDE, Nate swept the beam of his flashlight across the high rafters. He saw old splashes of white excrement from birds who’d inhabited the building years before, but no starlings.

  The barn smelled pleasantly of decades of horses. Hay and manure lingered in the air. The dirt floor was packed down to the consistency of cement. A series of empty stalls lined both walls of the barn. Obviously, the owners hadn’t brought the guest horses to the ranch yet for the season. In the rear of the barn was a closed-up tack room.

  “Are you Nate Romanowski, the falcon guy?” a harsh male voice asked from inside one of the closest stalls.

  “I am,” Nate said. “Where are your problem birds?”

  “Oh, they’re here,” the voice said.

  “Where?”

  “Keep lookin’.”

  Nate lowered the flashlight until the beam illuminated the lantern-jawed face of an old man wearing bib overalls and a crumpled straw hat. Nate could see only his face and the top of his shoulders above the uppermost rail of the stall.

  “Who are you?” Nate asked.

  “John Wells. I’m the caretaker.” He paused. “I’m the man who gets you out of our way.”

  Then, raising his voice, the man said, “Now, son.”

  The muzzle of a shotgun suddenly poked out from between two planks of the stall. Nate heard the unique snick sound of two safeties being thumbed off simultaneously.

  He thought: Ambush.

  Nate instinctively crouched and reached under his left arm for the handgrip of the weapon that wasn’t there.

  With a heavy boom, an orange fireball erupted from the hayloft over the old man’s head, followed closely by the discharge of Wells’s shotgun.

  Nate staggered back. The flashlight dropped from his hand. He’d been hit. It was as if he’d been whacked in the chest several times with a baseball bat by someone swinging for the fences. There was a hot stinging sensation in his cheek and on the right side of his neck.

  Wells fired again.

  Nate went down. His mind was sharp and he knew what had happened. Two men had fired on him with shotguns likely loaded with double-ought buckshot. Each shell contained at least eight pellets that were the equivalent of .33-caliber bullets. Most of the pellets had ripped into his flesh.

  He thought that, in the past, he would have drawn his weapon and taken out Wells before the first shot, and then put down the other man above him in the hayloft.

  But now, he was flat on his back. His arms and legs were dancing to their own rhythm. He could smell gunpowder in the still barn and his own hot blood coursing through hay on the floor.

  Outside, Liv screamed.

  He thought: I tried to tell you.

  Through what seemed like a tunnel, he heard the old man say, “Get down out of there, boy. We got to get the hell out of Dodge.”

  “That wasn’t so hard,” the so
n said with a surprised laugh. “I thought the guy was supposed to be tough.”

  “He don’t have that gun of his,” the old man said.

  A moment later, heavy footfalls thundered by Nate toward the open door.

  —

  LIV HAD FROZEN momentarily at the sound of the first shot. It seemed so loud and harsh in the quiet mountain air. She was too stunned to react when the woman reached out of the Suburban and grabbed a handful of her scarf and pulled her close. Kitty was remarkably strong, given her appearance.

  There were two more heavy booms from inside the barn, but Kitty had cinched the scarf tight and pulled most of it inside the vehicle. She rolled up the window to secure the scarf—and Liv—in place.

  Liv screamed, but she couldn’t twist away. Kitty had hardly moved, but she’d taken action. Now her hawklike eyes raked Liv’s face with smug triumph through the dirty passenger-side window.

  In Liv’s peripheral vision, she saw two big and rough men run toward the Suburban from the barn door. They each carried a long gun.

  Nate wasn’t with them.

  9

  That night in Billings, Marybeth Pickett tossed aside a magazine she’d been scanning in the waiting lounge of the ICU and rubbed her eyes. She’d realized she’d read the magazine before—twice—and she wished she’d thought to bring the charger for her iPad. Before it ran out of power, she’d answered a dozen library-related emails and had updated Joe, Sheridan, and Lucy on April’s condition, like she had every few hours since they’d arrived on Friday.

  April had looked peaceful as the propofol was administered via IV, Marybeth told them. Her shallow breathing and severely reduced vital signs were normal responses to a drug-induced coma. One of the doctors compared the procedure they were doing to April to a bear hibernating in the winter. Her metabolism and heartbeat slowed drastically as the beeps on the monitor came farther apart. Marybeth had held April’s limp hand and massaged her knuckles while she slept. Her daughter’s total lack of response was troubling and upsetting, but that was normal, too.

  The worst thing, she’d told her family, was how impotent she felt. There was nothing she could do now. She couldn’t really comfort April, but she wrote that she’d feel horribly guilty leaving the hospital. What if she was gone when April suddenly showed improvement? Or if April’s condition rapidly deteriorated? Marybeth couldn’t stomach the thought of her daughter somehow realizing she was alone in a strange room and in a strange city, even though she knew rationally it was unlikely April would be able to think those thoughts.

  Marybeth stood and paced. The hospital at night was a lonely and spooky place. The waiting lounge was empty except for her, and the low hum of medical equipment throughout the floor was like emotional white noise. She looked up every time a nurse or doctor walked down the hall and she’d come to recognize most of them. She knew their shifts, their speech patterns, and the way they walked. She’d gotten to know a couple of the staffers, particularly the night nurse. But Marybeth felt she could never get comfortable, that she was in the facility with nothing to do or offer while the outside world spun on.

  This was her new self-contained world. It was horrible.

  —

  SHE’D BEEN SHOCKED to learn from Lucy and Joe about the apprehension of Tilden Cudmore. Unlike Joe, she knew the man personally—she’d met him several times at the library.

  Cudmore was an unpleasant man who spent a good deal of time in the library to get on the Internet, read newspapers, and harass patrons. His body odor was the subject of pained jokes among the staff, and his sour smell lingered even after he’d left the building. He loved getting into political arguments with people, and Marybeth had been pulled out of her office several times to intervene. It was also suspected that he used the men’s room to shave.

  She’d heard there were library users who steered away from the building if they saw his Humvee in the parking lot.

  There was something clearly off about him, she thought, but she’d never gotten a vibe from him that he was a predator. A nutcase, yes. A paranoid schizophrenic, possibly.

  She’d told Joe she would not have even thought of Cudmore in relation to April’s attack.

  That she’d misjudged the man so completely gnawed at her. Marybeth was perceptive when it came to judging others and to assessing potential threats, especially when it concerned her children. She couldn’t believe she hadn’t picked up on anything with Cudmore.

  —

  ALL THE DOCTORS could tell her was that it could be days, it could be weeks, it could be months. Marybeth had a long meeting with the hospital bookkeeper that morning and it had been both frustrating and fairly traumatic. Long-term care for April would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. No one knew how much. Marybeth made several calls to their insurance company and received few answers.

  “Things are so crazy right now,” one of the insurance staffers told her. “They change the rules on us every week. We don’t know which end is up. So at the moment, I can’t tell you for sure what we can cover and what we can’t.”

  “Then what am I supposed to do?” Marybeth asked.

  “I wish I could tell you,” the woman said with genuine empathy. “Health care right now is a nightmare. I hope you can be patient while we try and sort it out.”

  —

  “I CAN BE PATIENT while we go bankrupt,” Marybeth answered.

  She tried not to think about the enormous costs of keeping April alive, but she couldn’t help it. She was in charge of family finances, and she knew this could wipe them out. And no one seemed to be able to answer her questions.

  She tried not to think about a possible answer to their financial woes, if it came down to that, but she couldn’t help it. Her mother, Missy, was a multimillionaire. She was also on the run with Wolfgang Templeton. Missy had not been in contact in any way since they had flown away from Templeton’s Wyoming ranch in his plane. But even if Marybeth reached out to her, would Missy help out? She’d never really liked April, and she hated Joe.

  Missy would be her last possible option, Marybeth concluded. And it might be preferable to declare bankruptcy over that.

  The combination of Tilden Cudmore, April’s condition, and the insurance problems—plus being away from her home and family—were weighing her down mightily. After visiting hours the previous two evenings, she’d drunk a bottle of wine by herself in her hotel room so she could sleep through the night.

  —

  AS SHE PACED, she felt a tremor in the floor. It felt at first like heavy equipment being moved down the hallway. Then she realized the vibration didn’t come from inside the building, but from the roof. The Life Flight helicopter, likely the same one that had transported April and her a few days before, was landing on the helipad.

  Her observation was confirmed when the hallway came alive with emergency room doctors and technicians. An empty gurney sizzled down the hallway with nurses on either side.

  Curious, Marybeth stepped out into the hallway after they’d gone by.

  “Hi,” she said to the night nurse at the station. “What’s going on?”

  They’d gotten to know each other since Marybeth arrived. The nurse was named Shri Reckling. She had three daughters, and a husband who worked for the state of Montana. Because of their similar families and situations, Marybeth and Shri had bonded instantly.

  “Emergency landing,” Reckling said. “A gunshot victim in critical condition. He’s from Wyoming, just like you.”

  “Really,” Marybeth said. “My husband says that because the state has such a low population, there is only one degree of separation. If you don’t actually know a particular person, you know someone who knows him or her.”

  “Montana is the same way,” Reckling said with a sly smile. “Is that your way of asking who is in the helicopter?”

  “Yes,” Marybeth said.

  “I d
on’t have a name yet,” Reckling said. “When they do the admittance paperwork, we’ll know more. All I know at this point is the FBI is involved somehow.”

  “So he’s with the FBI? Or a fugitive?”

  She knew Joe had worked closely over the years with the FBI, particularly a special agent named Chuck Coon. So the one degree of separation would likely come to fruition.

  Nurse Reckling leaned back and shrugged. “I’m not supposed to release the names of patients, you know.”

  “I know,” Marybeth said. “I don’t want to get you in trouble.”

  Reckling looked up and down the hall, then whispered, “Stay in the lounge. I’ll drop by when I know something.”

  Marybeth winked at her. Waiting would give her something to look forward to besides deciding what kind of wine to buy on her way to the hotel.

  —

  LESS THAN FIVE MINUTES LATER, the team of emergency doctors rushed the gurney back down the hallway from the elevator. Marybeth looked up from her magazine—which she was reading again—to see a scrum of alarmed men and women clatter by. All she saw of the shooting victim was a glimpse of a man’s large and lifeless hand hanging down from under the sheets.

  The hallway went quiet again when the double doors to surgery wheezed closed.

  She waited another half hour, checking her watch every few minutes.

  Finally, Nurse Reckling leaned in the doorway.

  “He’s in emergency surgery,” she said. “He’s likely to be in there for hours.”

  Marybeth arched her eyebrows, as if anticipating more.

  Reckling raised an electronic tablet and said, “It says here ‘N. Romanowski.’”

  Marybeth went cold and the magazine slid from her hands and dropped to the floor.

  “Nate Romanowski?”

  “No first name given,” Reckling said. Then: “Oh no. Do you know him?”

  “God, yes,” Marybeth said, standing up unsteadily. She reached out for the back of the chair to steady herself. “Is it bad?”