Breaking Point jp-13

by C. J. Box

  Hannah said, “He’s my dad. They talk about him like he’s some kind of animal.”

  Joe looked away as Pam, Hannah, Marybeth, and Lucy gathered together and began to cry. He rose and refilled his glass and wasn’t sure what to say. He certainly wasn’t going to join in the crying circle. There were many things wrong with Pam’s story, he thought, but it resembled what he knew of the Sackett case so closely it was remarkable. It made no sense to him that something like that could happen twice. But what if it were true?

  That was a possibility he had trouble accepting.

  “I’ll be back in a minute,” he said, slipping out through the back door.

  He found Sheridan in an empty horse stall under a hissing Coleman lamp, feeding strips of raw chicken to her kestrel. The bird was hooded and perched on a dowel rod she must have rigged up herself, he thought. The square rabbit cage she’d appropriated for the little hawk was sitting on a set of old sawhorses.

  The falcon was the smallest of all the falcons, barely larger than a mourning dove, but Joe could see its slate-blue wings, ruddy back feathers, and a glimpse of black-and-white marking beneath the edge of the hood.

  “A little male, then,” he said.

  “Nate once told me to start small,” she said, “but I didn’t want to. I wanted a prairie falcon or a red-tail, maybe even a peregrine. But I can see the sense in it now.”

  She nodded toward the falcon. “This guy is probably going to be a lot of work because he’s hurt and he wants to eat all the time. Will you help me build a real mews in here so I don’t have to keep him in a cage?”

  “Sure,” Joe said, “but what-”

  “Am I going to do with him when I go back to school?” she said, finishing the question for him.

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t know yet. I just got him today. A customer at the restaurant hit him with his truck and he was stuck inside the grille. I think he’s got a broken wing. I couldn’t just let them get rid of him somewhere.”

  “I sympathize,” Joe said, “but that kind of rehabilitation takes a lot of time and patience.”

  “I know that, Dad,” she said. “But what else was I going to do?”

  Joe shrugged. Twenty or thirty times a year, he was called to the scene of an injured animal or bird. The person who called was always happy to turn the cripple over to Joe and wash their hands of it. On rare occasions, Joe could find a shelter or volunteer who would accept the creature. Usually, though, he had to kill it. It was a necessary part of his job that he didn’t enjoy at all.

  “I’ll help you out when I can,” Joe told Sheridan. “I learned a little about falcons from Nate. But we’ll have to make a decision when it’s time for you to go back to Laramie.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  He walked over and gently ran the back of his hand down the length of the bird while it ate, then did the same along both of his wings. He felt a pronounced bump under the feathers of the right wing.

  “Yes,” he said, “I think it’s broken.”

  “Will it mend on its own? I know that happens sometimes.”

  “And sometimes it doesn’t,” Joe said. They both knew what would happen to the bird if the wing didn’t heal itself. No veterinarians in the area accepted wounded wild birds because there was little they could do other than stabilize them. There was a rehabilitation center in Jackson and another in Idaho, but Joe didn’t know when he’d have the time to get to either-or if either place would want the bird.

  “Be right back,” he said, and went out of the barn and around the house to his pickup. He came back with a thick roll of Ace bandage from his first-aid kit and asked Sheridan to hold the bird still. He carefully wrapped the elasticized tape around the bird so its wings were bound tight. The bird didn’t squawk while he did it, and Joe was pleased with the job.

  “Let’s keep this on him,” he said. “See if that wing mends. Who knows? Maybe he’ll fly again.”

  Joe put his hand on Sheridan’s shoulder. She was tough, and had grown up with a full awareness of the circle of life in the wild. She could deal with it, however this turned out.

  “I hope so,” she said. “I’m already kind of fond of him. Did Nate ever name his birds?”

  “No.”

  “I might.”

  He nodded and turned to go back to the house, when she said, “The EPA isn’t entirely evil.”

  Joe stopped short of the door. “I didn’t say they were,” he said. “They paid for my water guzzlers.”

  “I feel they mean well in most cases,” Sheridan said. “The good they do outweighs the bad, I feel.”

  Joe turned and nodded. “Probably,” he said, and no more.

  “I just wanted to get that out,” Sheridan said, looking away. “I don’t want to get in a big argument about it.”

  “I’m not arguing with you. There are bad eggs in every bureaucracy, and the bigger the agency gets, the more there are. We have a few knuckleheads in the Game and Fish Department. But I can’t figure out how this could have happened twice.”

  “Well,” she said, “thanks for listening, anyway.”

  “Sure,” Joe said, reaching for the barn door.

  “Oh-I need to show you something else later.”

  “What?”

  “Are you investigating a case where some idiots shot an antelope buck about a million times and left it to rot in a field?”

  “Yes,” he said, taken aback.

  “I think I know who did it,” she said.

  “Did you hear something at the restaurant?” he asked.

  “No. They posted some photos on Facebook.”

  Joe smiled. “Yes, I’d like to see it.”

  “Is Mr. Roberson a murderer?”

  He hesitated, but when she looked hard at him, he said, “Probably.”

  “Poor Hannah,” Sheridan said, and fed her kestrel another piece of chicken.

  Joe lay in bed with his fingers laced behind his neck and stared at the dark ceiling. The curtains rustled slightly with a cool breeze coming down from the mountains, and he could hear the horses tussling in the corral. It was 2:30 in the morning.

  Pam had left, and Hannah stayed over again. While Joe was in the barn with Sheridan, Lisa Greene-Dempsey had called his cell phone and left a message saying she was in town and he was to meet her for breakfast at the Holiday Inn the next morning at 7:30. It wasn’t a request.

  Sheridan had shown him the Facebook pages for nineteen-year-old Bryce Pendergast and twenty-year-old Ryan McDermott, both of Saddlestring, both classmates of hers from high school. Pendergast’s page showed him cradling a used.223 Ruger Mini-14 rifle with a banana clip. McDermott’s had a short video of a full-grown pronghorn getting cut down by a series of shots and someone off camera hooting about it. The photo and the video had been posted the same night a week before. Joe recognized the buck by its curled-in ivory-tipped horns.

  “Can’t sleep either?” Marybeth asked, fully awake.

  “Nope.”

  “I can’t stop thinking about the Robersons,” she said. “How horrible it is what happened with them.”

  Joe grunted. He said, “Something about the story Pam told us doesn’t sound right.”

  “Do you think she was lying? Leaving something out?”

  “I want to hope that,” Joe said. “But it’s so similar to what happened in Idaho. There’s no way it can just be a coincidence.”

  Marybeth asked, “Is it possible it’s some kind of warped policy directive? To go after people in different states in the same way?”

  “Not likely,” Joe said. “The EPA is getting heat and bad publicity for the Sackett case because it was so outrageous. There’s no way they would encourage their people to do it again. No, this is similar, but it’s different. I just can’t figure out how. And I can’t figure out why Pam and Butch are in the middle of it.”

  Marybeth sighed and snuggled in closer to him. “I know what you mean,” she said. “It just always amazes me how you can kn
ow someone for years and then find out things about them you never even imagined. I never had a clue about their dispute with the EPA, or that Butch had left Pam for so long.”

  “They kept it in all that time,” Joe said.

  Marybeth placed her bare arm over his chest. She said, “Sometimes I think the most mysterious thing that exists is the interworking of a relationship. You can just never even guess the things that go on behind closed doors.”

  Joe said, “Nope.”

  “Hannah is the one I’m most worried about.”

  Joe said, “Yup.”

  Joe thought about the arrival of Batista and Underwood on the scene. Underwood seemed to Joe like a type he’d dealt with before: tough, cold, professional-doing a dirty job well if they had no choice. A little like his friend Nate Romanowski and Nate’s friends. Despite Underwood’s manner and innuendo, Joe thought he could deal with him.

  Batista was another matter. Batista unnerved Joe in a way he couldn’t put his finger on.

  But when he closed his eyes, he saw the haunted face of Butch Roberson, somewhere up there in the beetle-killed forest in the dark, no doubt listening for the first sounds of the men who would be coming to hunt him down.

  DAY THREE

  9

  Early the next morning, Dave Farkus awoke from a dream about someone pounding on his door to realize that, yes, someone was pounding on his door. And when someone pounded on the door, the entire twelve-by-sixty-foot single-wide trailer-perched on cinder blocks and sheathed in peeling sheet metal-shook as if it were coming apart at the rivets. He could even hear dishes tinkling in the cupboards above the sink.

  “Hold on, goddamnit!” he shouted. “I’m coming, I’m coming. .”

  Farkus threw back the covers and the stray black cat that slept on his bed screeched and ran for the closet. He stood up, spine popping like a muffled series of demolitions, and rubbed his face with his hands. Pulling on a pilled pair of sweats and a T-shirt, he slid his feet into a pair of cowboy boots and staggered down the narrow hallway past the bathroom, using the walls on both sides for balance.

  Dave Farkus was fifty-seven and pear-shaped with rheumy eyes, jowls, thick muttonchop sideburns, and a bulbous nose. His top left incisor had a thin slot in it from biting off fishing line. He glanced at the digital clock over the stove. It was 6:29. He wondered who would be out and about so early. In his experience, if someone knocked on his door before seven or after nine at night, trouble of some kind was waiting on the porch.

  He could see a bulky silhouette through the louvered slat windows of the metal front door. The silhouette was wearing a cowboy hat, and Farkus thought, They’ve come for me.

  The trailer Farkus rented sat on an acre of sagebrush south of town, with a view of the municipal dump on one side and a gravel pit on the other. Someone had once attempted to plant a garden outside but had never progressed beyond making a rectangular outline in the dirt with river rocks. A 1953 Chevrolet pickup without an engine was propped up on its rims on the side of the trailer. Over the years, the trailer had settled so it listed slightly to the south. The high-altitude sun had faded the curtains to the point that they looked like parchment paper. The Formica tabletop was scarred with cigarette burns from a previous owner, and the floors were permanently gritty. But it had a satellite dish!

  “Who is it?”

  “Sheriff Kyle McLanahan,” the silhouette said, with a deep western twang.

  “I ain’t done nothing recently,” Farkus said. “Besides, you ain’t the sheriff anymore.”

  Farkus heard a heavy sigh. Then: “Just open the door. We’ve got something to talk about.”

  “It’s awful early.”

  “What-you’ve got to do your yoga? Open up, Farkus.”

  He hesitated. He’d been renting the single-wide for five months from a woman bartender at the Stockman’s Bar who had moved in with a local realtor. Too much of her stuff was still in boxes in the closet, even though she’d promised, over and over, to retrieve them. Farkus had told her he wouldn’t pay the five-hundred-dollar rent that month until she cleared her things out. So had she hired the ex-sheriff to shake him down?

  Or was it because of Ardith, his ex-wife, who demanded alimony payments even though she knew he’d lost his job? Had Ardith sent McLanahan to collect?

  Or maybe he was serving as the debt collector for Bighorn Fly Shop? Coming for the cash Farkus owed or the three-hundred dollars’ worth of natural cock ringneck pheasant skins, mallard flank wood duck sides, and peacock eyes he planned to use to tie flies to sell to tourists and local yokels? Farkus had once seen McLanahan loitering around in the Bighorn Fly Shop, he recalled. So maybe Travis, the owner, had sent the ex-sheriff along to collect.

  Farkus said, “I had no idea hackles cost so damned much these days on account of all the women braiding feathers in their hair. I’m a victim of fashion, and it ain’t fair!”

  McLanahan said, “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. I’ve got a proposition for you, so open the door.”

  Dave Farkus raked his fingers through his hair that was still pressed to the side of his head from the pillow, and reached for the handle.

  Kyle McLanahan was fatter than when Farkus had last seen him, and he’d grown a full rust-colored beard. It was easy to gauge how much the ex-sheriff had gone to hell in less than a year, because there was still a billboard just within the town limits of Saddlestring showing the sheriff with a carrot between his teeth feeding a horse and the words REELECT OUR SHERIFF KYLE MCLANAHAN. Farkus wondered if the man cursed every time he drove by it.

  McLanahan squeezed into the vinyl bench seat on one side of the cluttered table but kept his hat on. It was a good hat with a Gus McCrae crease to it, which gave McLanahan a rakish frontier look. The beard helped, too.

  “Why don’t you make some coffee?” McLanahan said. “I like mine strong enough to pick up a cow.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind,” McLanahan said with a drawl.

  Farkus had heard that McLanahan was actually from West Virginia but while sheriff had become a frontier character actor. Farkus also knew him to be wily, ruthless, and ambitious. It was no secret that after McLanahan lost the election he went on a two-month bender that ended with him in the Meeteetse town jail, howling at the bitter injustice of it all. Rumors like that traveled fast in Wyoming.

  While Farkus filled the carafe of the Mr. Coffee and shoveled twice as many grounds into the filter than he usually would, McLanahan said, “Did you hear about Butch Roberson?”

  The name made Farkus jerk and splash water on his hand from the tap. He turned.

  “No, what about him?”

  “Looks like he murdered two federal agents in cold blood two nights ago and took to the hills. You really hadn’t heard?”

  Farkus shook his head. He hadn’t ventured from the single-wide for three days because there was no point going the two miles into town. His disability check hadn’t come yet, and he was cash poor. He couldn’t afford gasoline, beer, or anything else. So he’d just stayed put, tied flies, eaten out of cans the owner had left in the cupboards, and waited for the mail carrier to deliver his check and bail him out. Since he’d left his job, this had become a monthly ritual.

  “Did they catch him?” Farkus asked.

  “Not as of this morning. Feds are pouring in from Cheyenne, Denver, and Washington, D.C. But they aren’t organized yet. Word is they’ll get their marching orders later today and begin a full-scale search for Roberson in the National Forest where he was last seen.”

  Farkus shook his head. “That don’t make any sense to me,” he said. “Butch Roberson is a fugitive?”

  “You used to work for him, didn’t you?” McLanahan asked. He had not lost any of his cop stink-eye and tone, Farkus thought.

  “For a while.”

  “Until he fired you, I heard.”

  “I’m filing for unemployment,” Farkus said. “He asked me to do things I couldn’t do, on account of my
neck injury.”

  McLanahan grinned devilishly. It was hard to see his mouth because of all the whiskers, but basically his beard and mustache shifted a little.

  McLanahan said, “Yeah, nothing worse than a bad neck that can’t be found or detected by a doctor. It must get frustrating, always having to go on and on about how much your neck hurts when they can’t find anything wrong with it.”

  Farkus gestured at McLanahan with the half-full carafe so a little of the water splashed out of the top: “You said you had a proposition for me, but you’re just busting my balls.”

  “Sorry,” McLanahan said. “Didn’t realize you were so sensitive.”

  “My neck hurts,” Farkus insisted.

  “And I’ve got a huge pain in my ass,” McLanahan drawled. “His name is Mike Reed, and he’s the gimp wearing my badge and sitting in my office. I call him Wheelchair Dick, on account he’s in a wheelchair and he’s a dick who beat me by nine sympathy votes.”

  Farkus nodded, wondering where this was going.

  McLanahan shifted his weight so the edge of the table wouldn’t prod him in the belly.

  He said, “I heard you went hunting with Butch Roberson. Is that true?”

  Farkus nodded. His new employer had heard of Farkus’s exploits down in the Sierra Madre, when he’d been hired to guide a team of contract killers into the mountains to hunt for two homicidal brothers. Even though he’d spent most of the time lost, Farkus had embellished the story until he came out looking pretty good. Farkus even suggested to some guys at the Stockman’s Bar that he’d been known as “Pathfinder,” hoping the name would catch on. It didn’t. Despite that, Butch Roberson had wanted to show Farkus his mountains, and Farkus had agreed to go along mainly because his boss had asked him.

  “It was goddamned miserable,” Farkus said. “Five straight days of climbing mountains and crawling through down timber. Hardest work I’ve ever done in my life. Butch Roberson is a crazy man. He hunts from an hour before sunrise to an hour past sundown, and he knows every nook and cranny in those mountains. Worst of all, he passed up a half-dozen shots on elk because he wanted to keep hunting. He was like a man possessed by some kind of. . obsession.”