Open Season jp-6

by C. J. Box

  She had slept for a while, but she didn't know how long. A sharp crack--a gunshot from somewhere up in the mountains-had jarred her awake a few minutes ago. She listened for more shots but heard none. She crawled on top of the boulder again and looked down. The woodpile, now coals and ashes, glowed deep red. The lights were still on in the house but she couldn't see the man moving around inside or out. She would feel better if she knew where he was. For a moment, she thought

  about going back down.

  She wished she had some way to defend herself if he found her. She assessed what she had--the horse blanket, a barrette, two pennies from her pockets. She didn't even have a stick. If she were in a movie, she would be able to fashion something clever out of those items to beat the bad guy. But this wasn't a movie, and she wasn't that clever. She was cold--and scared.

  Then she saw the headlights coming down from Wolf Mountain. She watched them as they crossed the river and came down Bighorn Road, The pickup pulled back into the driveway at the front of the house. She heard a door slam but couldn't see who had been driving.

  After a few moments, she saw someone in the house pass by the back

  picture window. The porch light came on and Wacey stepped out. He was

  carrying a rifle.

  "Yoo-Hoo! Sheridan? Are you still with us?"

  Sheridan began to cry. For a moment, she had thought the driver was her father.

  "Answer me, sweetheart, so I know you're okay!" His voice was friendly, as it always was when he started out.

  She was crying hard now, uncontrollably. It was as if something had released inside of her.

  "It's nice and warm inside, Sheridan. I've got some hot chocolate warming up on the stove. Hot chocolate with itty-bitty marshmallows that I found in the cupboard. Mmmmmmm! You've got to be getting a little chilly up there."

  She could not stop crying. She covered her face in her hands. For a few moments, there was silence from below.

  Then: "I can heeeeear you. I can hear you up there. Stop crying, or you'll make me feel bad. I don't want to drink all of this hot chocolate by myself."

  She scrambled down from the boulder. As suddenly as she had started crying, she had stopped. She was horrified that Wacey had heard her crying. Now he knew for sure where she was.

  "You sound pathetic, Sheridan. Why don't you come on down so I don't have to come up and get you?"

  She pushed her way around the side of the boulder through a juniper bush so she could see down into the backyard again. He was still standing in the light of the floods. He had raised the rifle and was trying to see her through the scope but he was looking in the wrong direction, somewhere off to her left. Maybe he didn't know where she was after all. Maybe her sobs had echoed and confused him.

  Either way, he wasn't coming up after her. Yet. It would be different when the sun came up.

  ***

  It was three in the morning in Saddlestring, Wyoming, when Joe Pickett roared in from Billings. The four stoplights flashed amber, and no one was about. The last of the bars were closed, and it was too early for morning activities yet. The town was as dead as it would ever be.

  Joe drove straight down Main Street and pulled around the corner from Barrett's Pharmacy. He stopped and turned off the motor and looked at himself in the rearview mirror. He expected his eyes to glow red, as if he were some kind of demon or alien. He was so tired, so drained. He had not slept in two nights and had not eaten since breakfast, now almost 20 hours ago.

  And he was absolutely enraged. He knew it wouldn't be long before he would explode. The only question remaining was how many people would

  be involved in the blast.

  Dim lights were on inside the pharmacy and Joe pressed his face to the window and looked in. In the parking lot, he had seen the pickup with a magnetic sign on the door that read Hans' Janitorial Service. Hans was in there all right, pushing a vacuum through the aisle that featured magazines and paperback books. Joe rapped on the window, but Hans didn't look up. He couldn't hear Joe over the vacuum. Joe hit the window again so hard he risked smashing it or tripping the alarm. But Hans, who has half deaf anyway, didn't respond.

  Joe took his flashlight from his belt and shined it through the window into Hans' face. Hans twitched and absently rubbed his mouth, not yet aware of what was annoying him. When he finally looked up, he jumped and nearly stumbled back into the bestsellers. Joe turned the flashlight on himself so Hans could see him, and he held his badge to the window. Hans stood thinking it over, his chin in his hand, then motioned Joe around to the backdoor.

  "I probably shouldn't let you in," Hans said as he unlocked the door in the alley.

  "Bill Barrett told me never under any circumstances to let anyone in the store after hours, even him. There's all kinds of narcotics and stuff in the pharmacy."

  Joe thanked him and brushed by.

  "It's official state Game and Fish Department business," Joe answered. "It's lucky you were here."

  Hans grunted and locked the door after them. "I gotta tell Bill Barrett about this."

  "That's fine," Joe said, walking through the store to the photo counter.

  "Hope you don't mind if I vacuum," Hans said. "I went hunting with Jack this afternoon, and I'm running late. Got a buck, though. Finally. Missed a nicer one. You can ask Jack about it."

  "Hans, I've got to ask you something." Hans stopped and stared at Joe. His hands shook. Joe could tell that Hans was trying to recall anything he might have done recently that could be a violation of the Game and Fish regulations.

  "Don't worry," Joe assured him. "You haven't done anything wrong that I'm aware of."

  Hans continued to shake.

  "Do you remember a couple of weeks ago when I drove up on you and Jack after you got that pronghorn buck?"

  Hans nodded his head yes.

  "You asked me about whether or not I had heard of an endangered species in the mountains. Do you remember that?"

  Hans nodded again.

  "What do you know about it?" Joe asked. His voice was firm.

  "Nothing," Hans said. "Honestly. We just heard rumors. You know, bar talk. Somebody said somebody else had found something up there."

  "Who found it?"

  "Somebody said it was Clyde Lidgard," Hans said.

  "Vacuum away," Joe said, waving his hand. He slipped behind the counter and slid out the oversize drawer that held envelopes of developed pictures. The envelopes where alphabetized by name. Joe quickly leafed through them, finding the packets filed under "I ." He found Lawton, Livingston, Layborn, Lane, and Lomiller. But he didn't find what he was looking for. Across the store, Hans fired up the vacuum cleaner. Joe slammed the drawer shut and said, "Shit!" But Hans was oblivious.

  There was a stupidly simple reason, Joe thought, why Clyde Lidgard had no photos in his trailer from the two months leading up to the outfitter murders: he had not picked them up yet from the pharmacy after they'd been developed. But somebody apparently had. Maybe, Joe thought with a grimace, he was about ten steps behind everybody else just as he had been since this whole thing had started.

  But maybe not.

  He pulled open The drawer again and went to the back. Beyond "XYZ" he found a tab file that said "Unclaimed." In the file there were ten envelopes. Three of those were slated for pickup by Clyde Lidgard.

  Joe ripped the first envelope open and slid the photos out onto the counter.

  They looked familiar: blurred, off-kilter snapshots of trees, clouds, Clyde's penis, a manhole cover. Then he saw what he was looking for. There were dozens of them.

  ***

  The Stockman's Bar had been closed since two, but Joe drove by it just in case before he proceeded to the Holiday Inn at the edge of town. He parked under the motel's registration sign, clamped on his hat, and went in.

  Like all night clerks and auditors, the man behind the desk was jumpy. He wore a greasy ponytail and thick horn-rimmed glasses. His eyes, magnified through the lenses, were enormous. He slammed
a Penthouse magazine shut in a night auditing folder but not quickly enough that Joe didn't see it as he approached.

  Joe introduced himself and showed his badge. He said a package was supposed to be sent to him at the hotel in care of Vern Dunnegan. He said he had tried to call to check on it but couldn't get through.

  "Phones are out all over town," the night clerk said. "We can't get in or out."

  Joe watched carefully as the clerk used his finger to go down the registry. His finger stopped on room 238.

  "I can't see a note for any package," he said.

  "Can you check please?" he asked.

  "It should have come in today. Maybe it's still in the back."

  The night clerk clucked to himself and excused himself for a minute. The door behind the desk swung closed after him. Quickly, Joe jumped up and sat on the counter. He reached across the night clerk's desk and slid out the drawer. There were two extra keys for room 238.

  Joe took one of them.

  Joe scanned the small office as he waited impatiently for the night clerk to return without a package. He noted the small plastic sign stuck to the wall under the clock, informing all guests that for their convenience, their room key would open the back door of the motel as well as the door to their rooms. The man finally reappeared, apologized, and Joe said good night. Once outside, Joe jumped into the pickup, wheeled around to the side wing of the motel and parked near the exit door. Using the key, he entered and took the staircase steps two at a time.

  Two-thirty-four, two-thirty-six, two-thirty-eight. No one in the hallway. Joe pulled the Velcro safety strap from around the hammer of his .357 magnum and turned the key in the lock. He stepped inside and shut the door after him. No lights were on.

  Joe stood still for a moment, waiting until the objects in the room gradually took shape around him. It was a suite with a wet bar and some stools. A dark couch with clothes piled on it. Buckaroo prints mounted on the walls. A large-screen television. Two interior doors that he guessed led either to the bathroom or to the bedroom. Someone coughed, and he turned toward the room on the left. He walked across the carpet and eased the door open.

  It smelled of stale bourbon and cigarette smoke inside. He couldn't see anyone, but he could sense there was more than one person in the bed. Pointing the revolver toward the bed with his right hand, he searched the wall in back of him with his left for the light switch.

  Table lamps on either side of the bed came on, and Joe swung the revolver around until the front sight was squarely on Vern Dunnegan's sweaty forehead. Vern had thrashed in the sheets when the lights came on but was now sitting up in bed staring dumbly at the big black hole of the muzzle. An older, skinny woman with streaked blond hair clutched the blanket to her mouth. Her eyes were smudged with liner on the outside and road-mapped with red inside. She muffled a squeal.

  "Joe, for Christ's sake," Vern said, his voice choked with sleep and anger. "What in the hell are you doing here?"

  "I'm looking for you," Joe said. "And I found you."

  The woman was beside herself. She was trembling and looking from Joe to Vern.

  "What's your name, ma'am?"Joe asked. He recognized her as a barmaid at the Stockman's Bar.

  "Evelyn Wolters."

  "Evelyn," Joe said. "If you don't get out of that bed right now, you're going to have Vern Dunnegan's brain splattered all over you."

  Evelyn Wolters shrieked and dove out from the covers. She had long pendulous breasts that swung from side to side as she scooped up her clothing from the floor.

  "Evelyn, do you know Sheriff Barnum?" Joe asked.

  She nodded her head yes very quickly.

  "Good. Then get your clothes on and get in your car and drive over to his house as soon as you can. Tell him to get out to Joe Pickett's house right away with every deputy he can find. Can you do that?"

  Evelyn said she could.

  "Aren't you going to check with me?" Vern asked her, thoroughly disgusted.

  Joe stepped aside so she could run past. She didn't reply to Vern as she left the room. Vern and Joe stared at each other in silence, only the sounds of Evelyn Wolters getting dressed in a hurry--grunts punctuated with the snapping of elastic--breaking the quiet. Vern's face was flushed, and his eyes were narrowed into slits. Joe had never seen him so angry.

  The door slammed in the front room, and Evelyn was gone.

  "Joe, what the fuck is going on here? You don't really want to do this. Joe? Do you? This isn't like you at all."

  Joe thumbed back the hammer on the Smith & Wesson. The cylinder turned from an empty chamber to one filled with a hollowpoint bullet. Little muscles in Vern's temples started to throb.

  "Well, Vern, I don't know about that," Joe said, his voice betraying his rage.

  "Maybe you just haven't seen me on a night when my wife gets shot, my baby son dies, and one of my daughters is missing."

  Vern shook his head. His famous chuckle rolled out.

  "Joe, you don't think I had anything at all to do with any of that, do you? I was closing down the Stockman with Evelyn when one of the local boys who'd been out at your place came in and told me about Marybeth being shot. He said Wacey told him to come find me and tell me what had happened out at the Pickett house. Soon after that, Evelyn and I packed it up and came here." Vern paused and shot Joe a look that was both petulant and accusatory.

  "Frankly, Joe, I don't know how you could even imply that I might have been involved in all this stuff that you've been going on about."

  "Shut up, Vern. You're so deep into this you'll never get out."

  "Joe, I ..."

  "SHUT UP!" Joe barked. His finger tightened on the trigger--Vern saw it and even though his mouth was still open, no sound came out.

  "Here," Joe said, tossing the envelopes with Clyde's photos in them on the bedspread. Vern was confused until he shook one set of the photos out. He flipped through each of them, his stubby fingers snapping each photo down on the bed as if he were dealing cards.

  "They're lousy pictures," Joe continued. "Just like all of Clyde Lidgard's work. If you didn't know what you were looking for, you wouldn't even know that all of those brown, furry things sticking out of the ground were the last Miller's weasels on earth."

  Vern returned the photos to the first envelope and took out the next set.

  "Of course, the negatives are somewhere else so don't even consider that option," Joe said.

  Vern seemed to get smaller in the bed as he looked through the photos. A look of utter defeat passed over his features.

  "Now I know the majority of these photos are so bad you can't recognize anything in them. But Clyde did manage to take some pretty good ones of you and Wacey up there in the woods. In one you can even see a package of M-forty-four cartridges sticking out of your knapsack."

  Vern neatly put the photos away, keeping his head down. When he raised it, he looked wounded.

  "Where did you find all of this?" Vern asked. "How did you know where to look?"

  "Barrett's Pharmacy," Joe said. "Clyde Lidgard told me all about it. He told me everything."

  "Clyde Lidgard?"

  "I'm not here to talk," Joe said. "You are the one who needs to talk. But right now, Vern, you have about twenty seconds to get dressed because we're going to walk out of here to go find my daughter."

  ***

  Joe drove out of town on the Bighorn Road with his right hand on the steering wheel and his left hand on his lap holding the .357 Magnum, still cocked, aimed at Vern's big gut. The sky was beginning to lighten to the east, and the stars were not as brilliant as they had been. It was a cold, clear morning and there was no other traffic on the roads. Joe felt like he and Vern were alone in a world of their own making.

  They were headed back toward Joe's house. Joe figured that if Marybeth had told Sheridan to run, there was a chance his daughter might still be somewhere not too far away from the house. It was a place to start anyway.

  Vern wore a pair of baggy sweatpants, a T-shirt, slipp
ers, and a bathrobe. Joe had not given him any more time to dress. When Vern had opened the closet to get his clothes, Joe had seen the butt of a handgun on the top shelf. Joe had ordered Vern to close the damned door and put on something from the dresser.

  "I could use a drink right now," Vern said. "That would help."

  "Shut up."

  "I'm really sorry this turned out the way it did, Joe. I'm sorry you had to even get involved in it."

  "Shut up."

  "I'm an entrepreneur," Vern said, his voice rising. "I'm terribly misunderstood. I'm an endangered species just like you. I'm sorry about not being able to give you that good job when you finally wanted it. Especially now that it's available again. I bet you didn't know that, did you?"

  Joe snorted. Vern just kept trying, Joe thought. He didn't quit.

  "It's hard to believe how this all turned out," Vern moaned. "How screwed up everything got."

  "Speaking of screwed, did Les Etbauer at headquarters owe you one?"

  "He still owes me a couple," Vern sighed.

  "I got him that cushy job and covered for him a couple of times when he was too drunk to function."

  Joe grunted. He had thought it must have been something like that.

  "A lot of people owe me," Vern said. "Some of those favors could be called in on your behalf, if you would just ease up on me a little bit. We don't have to be on opposite sides, here."

  Vern looked over as if to gauge if Joe had softened some. "Joe, what I'm saying here is that we could either get you your old job back or you could work for Inter West Your choice. I can call Etbauer if you want me to. Even Wacey could hire you if I told him to. You've got lots of options, Joe. We really don't have to go through with all of this."

  "Shut up, Vern," Joe gritted out, through clenched teeth.

  "In fact, Joe, you owe me, too. How do you think you got the job after me? Do you realize how many guys wanted this? Wade, from Pinedale. Charley Gardener over in Rock Springs--"