Breaking Point jp-13

by C. J. Box

  Joe hadn’t called all afternoon or evening, and she assumed he was once again in a place with no cell service. Although she should be used to it by now, it was still tough to be completely out of touch with him. She hoped he felt the same way. He’d said he did.

  Throughout the day, Dulcie Schalk had kept her informed about what was going on in the mountains through texts to her phone. Marybeth knew that a command center had been established on the Big Stream Ranch, that Sheriff Reed had been marginalized (Dulcie was furious about that), and that Joe had been asked to lead a small team into the mountains where he’d last seen Butch Roberson. Butch claimed he had taken hostages, which ramped the entire horrible situation to a new level, not to mention that one of the hostages he had was ex-Sheriff Kyle McLanahan. There was some confusion about a report that an innocent hunter may or may not have been killed. Up until she heard about the hostages, Marybeth thought Joe might be able to concoct a way for it all to end peacefully.

  She tried not to consider a worst-case scenario where Joe and Butch would be at each other, trying to take the other out. If it weren’t for the worst-case scenarios she’d conjured up over the years that were subsequently dashed by events not quite as dire, Marybeth would have worried herself to death. She thought, as she often did, that wives who didn’t have husbands in law enforcement had no idea how wrenching it could be.

  It wasn’t supposed to be like this, she thought. Her mother, Missy, had married up five times and amassed a fortune in money and land. Missy had hoped her daughter would be practical and predatory, but instead she’d married Joe. Marybeth had steeled herself to defy Missy and her ways; to show that happiness and success could be achieved without guile and calculation. And for a while there, Marybeth thought she might win that argument.

  She imagined a life where she was back in business-a successful business-and Joe could change jobs. She knew how much he loved being a game warden, but frustrations with the bureaucracy and outright threats to their family over the years had taken a toll.

  Sure, the journey of their marriage and their prospects seemed to follow a pattern of one step forward, two steps back. But now, it seemed, they were backpedaling furiously. The Saddlestring Hotel project had offered hope and vindication.

  She sat up and rubbed her face with her hands. She hated to think like this. After all, she and Joe had two wonderful daughters they loved and who loved them, and a ward who might have recently turned the corner. The jury was still out on April, of course, and Marybeth hesitated to become too optimistic, but still. .

  When her cell phone lit up on the bedstand, she scrambled to it, hoping to see it was Joe. Instead, it read: MATT DONNELL.

  She didn’t want to talk to him, and assumed he was calling to console her with his slick realtor talk. He’d wrecked their lives a few hours earlier, and he was the last person she wanted to talk with again. He’d probably be scheming about ways to get around some of the regulations if she’d just hang tight, but she was still too devastated. She let the call go to voicemail.

  Marybeth put the phone back down on the bedstand, listened to the chime indicating he’d left a message, and lay back on the bed.

  The digital clock read 10:28 p.m.

  A minute later, she heard the sound of gravel popping on Bighorn Road and saw the sweep of headlights light up the curtains. The vehicle outside slowed, which piqued her interest, and she heard it pull off the road in front of their house. The engine revved for a few seconds and died as it was turned off.

  Marybeth stood and approached the window. She hoped it wasn’t a stray hunter or fisherman stopping at the house to talk to Joe about something. She could never get used to these men, often smelling of cigarette smoke and beer, thinking it was okay to simply drop by any hour of the night. Joe was usually patient with them, which was part of his job, but she wasn’t as patient.

  She parted the curtain to see the lights from Pam Roberson’s Ford Explorer go out. She was parked next to Hannah’s car. Marybeth waited for a few moments, expecting Pam to open her door and get out. But for whatever reason, she was just sitting there.

  Marybeth clicked on the lights and looked at herself in the mirror over the dresser. Her eyes were dark and gaunt, and she smiled, trying to make herself look and feel happy. She hoped it worked.

  LUCY AND HANNAH were huddled together under a light blanket on the couch, watching some kind of awful teen reality show featuring tattooed boys and pregnant sixteen-year-old girls. When Marybeth came down the stairs, Lucy expertly changed the channel to a nature show.

  Marybeth said sternly, “You two ought to get to bed,” as she passed them, her way of telling them she didn’t approve of what they’d been watching and hadn’t been fooled by the maneuver.

  Pam Roberson sat in the Ford, her hands on her lap, staring straight ahead. When Marybeth went out the gate in front of her, Pam seemed to snap to attention and quickly got out.

  “I’m sorry,” Pam said. “I know it’s late, but I didn’t know where to go. There are television trucks in front of my house and these people keep knocking on my door. Butch’s driver’s license picture-which is a really bad one-is all over the news. I just couldn’t stay there, so I snuck out the back and drove over here.”

  Marybeth took Pam by the arm and ushered her toward their house.

  “You can stay as long as you like,” she said.

  “I guess I wanted to see Hannah,” Pam said. “I wanted to be near her.”

  “I understand.”

  Pam paused before they went in. “Marybeth, did you hear about the hostages?”

  “Yes.”

  “I just can’t believe it. It’s so awful. It’s like I just don’t know Butch anymore. It’s like there’s some dangerous criminal up there in the mountains who has my husband’s name.”

  Marybeth nodded and led the way inside.

  Lucy and Hannah glanced up to see who was behind Marybeth, and Hannah looked stricken. The color had drained out of her face, and her eyes were huge. Marybeth was taken aback at first, and hoped one of her daughters never acted that way when she entered a room. Then she thought Hannah was likely anticipating bad news and assumed Pam was there to deliver it.

  “Hey, girls,” Pam said wearily.

  “Mom. .” Hannah said.

  “I haven’t heard anything about your dad,” Pam said, trying to put up a strong front-like Marybeth.

  “So he’s okay?” Hannah asked.

  “I just don’t know. But you know your dad. He’s tougher than the rest.”

  Marybeth recognized the phrase as one from a Chris LeDoux song, and it broke her heart.

  “Let’s have a glass of wine,” Marybeth said, leading Pam through the living room into the kitchen.

  After two glasses of wine, Marybeth sent Lucy and Hannah to bed and made up a spare bed on the couch in the living room for Pam. The wine seemed to have gone straight to her head, probably from being overtired and stressed, and Pam slurred her words while Marybeth showed her where the towels were.

  Pam went immediately to sleep and was snoring by the time Marybeth finished closing the house up for the night. While Marybeth tiptoed through the living room toward the stairs, the front door opened and Sheridan burst in.

  Sheridan instinctively began to toss her backpack on the couch when she realized someone was sleeping on it, and jerked it back before it hit Pam Roberson in the face.

  “Yikes,” she said.

  Marybeth shushed Sheridan and gestured for her to follow her out into the kitchen.

  Sheridan sat down at the table, obviously puzzled. Marybeth poured a glass of wine. Sheridan grinned and asked, “Do you mind if I have a glass?”

  Marybeth hesitated for a moment, then said, “Just one.”

  “You forget I’m in college.”

  “Yes, I do,” Marybeth said softly, placing another glass on the table. Sheridan filled it halfway.

  “What’s going on?” Sheridan asked. “Is Dad home?”

  Marybeth
spilled, telling Sheridan about Butch and the hostages, the collapse of the Saddlestring Hotel, the arrival of Pam Roberson. She didn’t want to speak loud enough to wake up Pam in the next room.

  “It’s been a bad day,” Marybeth said, not yet sure whether she regretted saying so much to Sheridan.

  Sheridan simply nodded and sipped at her wine. Although Marybeth knew it wasn’t Sheridan’s first drink-she was soon to be a sophomore at the University of Wyoming, after all-it was the first time they’d shared wine together.

  “I’m worried about your dad up there,” Marybeth said. “And I’m worried about what will happen to Butch, for Pam and Hannah’s sake.”

  Marybeth’s phone lit up, and she glanced at the display. The call was being made by an unknown number. She hesitated.

  “Might as well take it,” Sheridan said.

  She did.

  “It’s me,” Joe said.

  Marybeth said to Sheridan, “Well, speak of the devil.” To Joe: “Where are you calling from?”

  “I borrowed a satellite phone from a guy and I don’t have much time before he wants it back. Do you have something to write down a couple of names? I really need your help with some research.”

  “The girls and I are fine,” Marybeth said, motioning to Sheridan to hand over the pad and pen she used at the Burg-O-Pardner for taking orders. “Thanks for asking.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” she said, clamping the phone to her shoulder with her cheek and flipping the pad open. “Okay.”

  She wrote down Juan Julio Batista.

  “Got it.”

  “I really appreciate it,” Joe said. “Find out everything you can about him and call me back at this number. See if he links up somehow with the Sackett case. I won’t be home tonight, and who knows when tomorrow. But this may be important.”

  “You said ‘names,’ plural.”

  “The second is Pate. John Owen Pate.”

  “Gotcha,” Marybeth said. “By the way, I looked up the Sackett case today, and it’s exactly like you said. I can’t find a connection, though, with Pam and Butch. So maybe it’s this Batista.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  “I have the time to do this,” she said, “since I don’t have to spend any more on that stupid hotel.”

  Joe said, “Don’t worry about it. We’ll get ’em next time.”

  She could tell by the way he said it there was something else.

  “Joe?”

  “I got offered a new job today by the new director.”

  As he described it to her, Marybeth jotted down Cheyenne, desk, and $18K.

  “I’d become a bureaucrat,” Joe said sourly.

  Before she could ask for more detail, she could hear another voice in the background.

  “The guy wants his phone back,” Joe said. “He’s waiting for a call.”

  “Have you found Butch?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Is it true about the hostages?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “What happened to him, Joe?”

  “He broke. Now I’ve gotta go. .”

  At five to midnight as she got ready for bed, Marybeth remembered the call from Matt Donnell on her phone. She sighed, then punched it up to listen.

  Matt said, “Marybeth, I may have a line on something. We might be able to unload that piece of crap after all. I’ll give you a call tomorrow and tell you more. I just hope you don’t completely blame me for what happened. It’s just this damned fire marshal. There’s too many of those types out there. They want to be involved in every aspect of what we do. .”

  So, she thought, they’d gone from building something good to trying to “unload it.”

  He went on, but she didn’t want to listen to the rest.

  Instead, she padded downstairs in her bare feet in the dark. She could hear rhythmic breathing all around her-a house filled with anxious, sleeping females.

  Marybeth slipped into Joe’s tiny office off the living room and closed the door and turned on his desk lamp. She sat down and opened the browser of his computer and called up a website called themaster falconer.com.

  It was an old site, and rarely used. She was surprised it was still up. Joe and Nate had used the comment threads to communicate surreptitiously the previous year. She knew Joe still checked it from time to time to see if there was any word from Nate, but he reported that there had been nothing.

  She called up a discussion thread on the training of kestrel hawks, which was the thread they had used. There had been no new comments posted for months.

  When she’d been doing her inventory of her family and where they were at that time, she’d also thought of Nate. He wasn’t related to them by blood, but he’d certainly been an oddball part of the family for years until all of the violence had happened and he’d gone away. She knew federal law enforcement was still looking for him, and that Joe occasionally got calls or visits to ask if he’d heard anything.

  On the end of the thread, she wrote:

  This is Marybeth. Do you still check this site? If so, please tell me you’re doing okay, wherever you are.

  She waited for a moment to see if there was a reply, then castigated herself for it. Did she really think Nate Romanowski was hovering by a computer somewhere, just waiting for her to post something?

  And if he was, what would she ask him? He couldn’t bail them out of the hole she’d dug, and Joe wouldn’t want him around in a county filled past capacity with federal law enforcement officers.

  She thought herself foolish for even posting the question, and shut down the computer.

  But tomorrow, she knew, she’d check it.

  As she climbed the stairs to her bedroom, she heard a faint sound outside that was unusual. They were used to natural sounds: the cries of coyotes, the huffs of elk and moose from the willow-choked riverbed across the road, and assorted whistles and screeches from falcons and owls. And certainly the roar of a vehicle using Bighorn Road.

  This was different. It sounded like a pair of lawn mowers in the distance. But they came from the sky.

  Marybeth slid out of bed and parted the curtains, but she couldn’t see what had made the noise. Then she pulled on her robe and went downstairs, back to the computer.

  DAY FOUR

  25

  It was past midnight when Joe reached the summit of the mountain and turned to look back. He could see for miles and even locate the distant thread of highway because of the lights on the few vehicles using it. Twenty-five miles away was the tiny cluster of lights from the headquarters of Big Stream Ranch. The FOB was obscured from view by the ocean of trees below, but he knew approximately where it was by a faint glow of lights powered by generators.

  The mountaintop was bare of trees or any kind of vegetation except stubborn lichen holding on to granite for dear life, and it was illuminated by moonlight and millions of pinprick stars. Underwood and his team were behind him, their horses picking their way up through the icy granular crusts of snow and loose dark shale. The wind blew from the west into Joe’s face, and he kept the brim of his hat tilted down so his eyes wouldn’t tear. The wind was surprisingly cold for August and numbed his face and hands.

  Joe checked his cell phone for bars because sometimes he could get a wayward signal on the top of a mountain at night, but there was no reception. He was glad he’d made contact with Marybeth before, so she knew he was all right. He hated to have left her alone.

  One of Underwood’s team cursed the darkness and the cold, his voice harsh enough to cut through the wind. When the agents were close enough to start to crowd him, Joe nudged Toby on over a wide snowfield that looked like a pond or small lake in the moonlight, and led them over the mountain to the western slope. As he descended, he left the cold wind on top. And as he walked his horse into the thick stand of trees, he left the moonlight as well.

  Deep in the trees, Joe could see only what the yellow orb of his headlamp would reveal. Toby could se
e better than he could in the dark, so he had to trust the horse wouldn’t trap them in down timber or walk over a cliff. When he glanced over his shoulder, he saw the lenses of five bobbing headlamps, and sometimes the wayward beam of one slicing out to the side.

  He emerged into a small mountain meadow where the canopy opened to allow moonlight. He reined Toby to a stop and waited.

  Underwood joined him a few minutes later, and Joe said, “This is ridiculous. We’re only going to get our horses or ourselves hurt trying to ride down this mountain in the dark.”

  “We have our orders,” Underwood said without conviction.

  “Fuck the orders,” one of the team grumbled from the dark. “We need to get some rest, and my legs and butt are numb. If we ran into trouble right now, it would take me five minutes just to get out of this goddamned uncomfortable saddle.”

  The others agreed, and they slowly dismounted. There were plenty of moans from saddle sores and distended knees and aching buttocks. One agent said loudly this was the worst assignment he’d ever had. Joe thought it interesting that Underwood no longer reprimanded them for their loose talk.

  And by painfully climbing off his own horse, Underwood seemed to agree with them. They’d gone far enough for a while.

  One of the agents said, “I guess we’re just supposed to sleep in the open. Oh, thank you, Regional Director, for your excellent planning.”

  Underwood said, “Try spooning. That’s what they did in the Civil War.”

  Joe stifled a grin when Underwood’s suggestion was met with a fusillade of angry curses. He thought for a moment that the expedition might just implode under its own combination of aimlessness and disorganization. That would be just fine with him, he thought. Joe almost felt sorry for Underwood, who was tasked with commanding a mission by a man he didn’t like or respect. He was a professional, though, and his background girded him for unpleasant duties.