Force of Nature

by C. J. Box

  Nate looked around him and smiled. He released the parking brake and gunned the Jeep up toward the blind corner. In the thin, still mountain air, he could hear the building roar of the Tahoe coming.

  NATE KNEW that for his tactic to succeed, timing was everything. While he roared up the road and careened around the blind corner, he tried to calculate the speed and distance of the closing Tahoe, and visualize where it would be on the highway when he pulled the trigger on his plan.

  There were no cars on the stretch of road up ahead of him, and he thanked Providence for a clean palette. Then, out of sight from where he’d pulled over moments before, Nate stomped on his brakes and performed a quick three-point turn so the Jeep was headed back down the mountain. He paused for a few seconds, trying to anticipate the progress of the Tahoe, then tapped on the accelerator.

  He coasted around the corner just as the grille of the Tahoe appeared a quarter of a mile below him. The SUV was coming fast. Because the angle of the sun illuminated the inside of the oncoming vehicle, Nate could now make out two forms inside: a driver and a passenger. Dalisay and the girls didn’t appear to be inside, but he couldn’t be sure of it. They might be bound or hunkered down in the backseat.

  At the rate of speed the vehicles were nearing each other, he knew he’d have only a few seconds to make this work. At that instant, he eased the Jeep over to the left so it straddled the center line of the road. He took a quick intake of breath and held it, then gripped the wheel tight and locked his arms and floored it. There was now no way the two vehicles, if they stayed on their present path, could avoid a violent head-on collision.

  The distance between Nate and the Tahoe melted away. He lowered his chin to his chest and braced himself, even though he knew that if the driver of the Tahoe didn’t veer away, it wouldn’t matter what he did to prepare for the impact. As he hurtled toward the SUV, Nate noted that the rear end of the Tahoe was suddenly fishtailing: the driver had hit his brakes. Nate didn’t slow down. He saw a pair of white palms flash up to the windshield of the Tahoe as the passenger panicked.

  Nate bore down.

  A second before he drove headlong into the front end of the Tahoe, it veered right. But not fast enough. The Jeep’s right front bumper clipped the rear quarter panel of the SUV and shattered the taillight. The collision had enough impact to wrench the steering wheel hard, but he fought to keep the Jeep on the road and he slammed on his brakes. Behind him, he heard an even louder crash of metal on metal and the crack of broken wood.

  The driver of the Tahoe had taken the only available option other than hurtling off the mountain or heading for a fiery head-on collision: he’d shot into the same gravel pull-out Nate had used a few minutes before. But he’d done so recklessly due to the situation, and had flattened the guardrail and broken the posts that held it up. The two left tires of the Tahoe hung over the lip of the road and spun lazily, suspended in air.

  When his Jeep finally stopped in a haze of burned tire smoke, Nate slammed the gearshift back and reversed. The side of the Tahoe filled his back plastic rear window and grew larger. But instead of ramming the Tahoe and sending it over the side, Nate jerked the wheel so he slid in next to the SUV with only inches between them. The two vehicles were side by side. Nate kept the motor running in his Jeep.

  He bailed out of the cab and kept low. He’d stopped his Jeep so close to the Tahoe that the occupants were trapped inside. They wouldn’t be able to open the passenger door because his Jeep blocked it, and outside the driver’s side was nothing but thin air.

  Nate crab-walked around the front of his Jeep with his .500 Wyoming Express drawn. He was still low enough that he couldn’t see the people inside, and therefore they couldn’t see him. The splinters from the exploded guardrail posts smelled of pine and creosote.

  He squatted down by the bent rear bumper of the Tahoe. A deep male voice inside shouted, “Keep still! Don’t move or shift your weight!” As Nate reached up toward the back door handle, he knew why they were panicking. The SUV was literally balanced on the lip of the drop-off. He could feel the big vehicle shift slightly to the left, toward the abyss. It was a miracle it was even still up there.

  Even though Nate was ninety-nine percent sure the occupants were operators from The Five, and Dalisay and the girls weren’t inside, he needed to make sure. He stood and threw open the back hatch and leveled his weapon.

  “Raise your hands and press your palms to the roof liner!” he barked. “Both of you. Now.”

  He didn’t recognize either of the men, but the sight of them jarred him, because they didn’t appear to be the righteous fresh-faced warriors he’d expected. They were older than he’d thought they’d be: late twenties, although ripped with lean muscle. The driver had a shaved head and a lantern jaw and wore a single diamond earring and wraparound sunglasses. He had scooted from behind the wheel toward the center of the Tahoe when he looked back. The passenger was dark-skinned and dark-eyed, and had a buzz cut. His shirtsleeves were rolled back to reveal a latticework of tattoos. He was pressed against the passenger door as if willing the vehicle to shift over to level. A stream of blood flowed down the side of the passenger’s nose from a cut he’d received in the crash.

  “You’ve got to let us out of here, man,” the passenger said, pleading.

  The bald driver didn’t move or speak, but Nate could feel his glare even though he couldn’t see his eyes.

  “Nothing happens until you let me see your fucking hands.”

  The passenger shot his arms up and did as he was told. The driver didn’t move.

  “I’m not going to ask again …” Nate said, leveling his weapon at the driver’s head.

  But before Nate could say another word there was the rapid crack-crack-crack of gunshots and the inside of the Tahoe was suddenly filled with swirling debris from the exploded cushioning from the bench seats. The driver was trying to put bullets into Nate by firing through the two sets of seats, and Nate dropped to the gravel. But he wasn’t hit. The steel framework and springs inside had stopped or diverted the rounds.

  He rolled away back to his Jeep and clambered inside. He could hear the two men shouting inside the Tahoe. The passenger was screaming at the driver to stop firing, saying he’d seen the big blond man go down.

  Behind the wheel of his Jeep, Nate cranked the front wheels and drove quickly out onto the road. Then he shoved the gearshift into reverse again and goosed it and T-boned the SUV. The spare tire mounted on the back of his Jeep hit the Tahoe squarely between the front and back doors on the exposed side. Nate’s head snapped back from the force of the collision, but the last thing he saw before the impact and pure blue sky was the muzzle of the driver’s weapon being raised toward the glass of the passenger window.

  The Tahoe made an unholy racket as it rolled down the mountainside, snapping trees and breaking up in showers of glass and plastic and pine boughs until it settled upside down eight hundred feet below in a small rocky ravine.

  In Nate’s mind, the faces of the two men—one of his brethren raising his weapon to try and take him out before the impact—hung suspended in the air. But something about them didn’t jibe. Unlike Nate’s fellow operators in The Five, these guys looked less like cool and efficient warriors than well-conditioned thugs. Either The Five were recruiting a different class of special operators, or he was so far away from his days in the unit that he remembered his brothers with murky nostalgia. He shook his head sharply, trying to make their faces and his thoughts go away.

  HE PARKED in the trees so his Jeep couldn’t be seen from the highway or from his father’s home. He kept in the timber as he skirted the clearing, getting just close enough to confirm there were fresh tracks in the drive from when the Tahoe had come and gone earlier. He suspected there was a third operator of The Five inside, possibly two, and prayed that Dalisay and the girls had been returned unharmed. The operators were no doubt waiting for the two men in the Tahoe to come back and pick them up after dispatching Nate.


  He approached the house from the side, running from tree to tree, keeping low. He had to close a distance of eighty yards from the timber to the siding of the structure. The three windows on the side of the house went to the back bedrooms and the bathroom. All had curtains drawn, but as he made his last desperate sprint to the house over open lawn, he looked up and saw the curtains part on the bathroom window. Nate dropped to a squat and raised his weapon and cocked the hammer in a single move.

  The crosshairs through his scope settled on the bridge of his father’s nose as the old man looked out. He was using the toilet and happened to part the curtains while he stood. Nate saw his Dad’s eyes widen in shock and surprise when he saw him.

  Nate lowered the gun and raised a single finger to his lips to indicate “Sssshhh.”

  His father nodded slightly before looking over his shoulder. Then, apparently satisfied no one was watching, he turned back.

  Nate mouthed, “How many?”

  His father mouthed, “One.”

  “Front or back?”

  “Front.”

  “I’m going to ring the doorbell,” Nate mouthed, and illustrated by jabbing his pointer finger. He turned his finger on his Dad. “You answer the door.”

  Gordo looked back at him blankly for a moment, then nodded that he understood.

  NATE KEPT below the windows as he turned the corner from the side of the house. He approached the porch, then reached through the railing to press the doorbell. When the chime rang inside, he heard a series of sudden footfalls. Light and heavy steps. Meaning there were more inside than his father and the bad guy. Dalisay and the girls? He hoped so.

  “Who the hell is that?” an unfamiliar man asked.

  “I’ll get it,” he heard Gordon say.

  “Stay where you are,” the other man said.

  “Who’s here, Mom?” A small girl’s voice. Nate smiled to himself.

  Nate heard and felt the sucking sound of the front door opening out. He pressed himself against the siding of the house with his weapon cocked and pointed up at a forty-five-degree angle.

  A man’s head poked outside, squinting toward the circular drive. The operator was older than the two men in the Tahoe, but his features were just as hard and rough. Heavy brow, close-cropped hair, zipperlike scar on his cheek, and serious set to his mouth. Another thug. At Nate’s eye level, he recognized the blunt round snout of a flash suppressor mounted on the barrel of a semiautomatic long gun.

  The operator sensed something wrong and his head rotated toward the big revolver.

  Nate blew it off.

  As he holstered his weapon and the shot rang in his ears along with shrieks from inside, he thought: Yarak.

  15

  THE NEXT MORNING, Wednesday, outside Saddlestring, Wyoming, Joe Pickett backed his pickup toward the tongue of his stock trailer in the muted dawn light. The glow of his taillights painted the front of the trailer light pink as he tried to inch into position so he could lower the trailer hitch onto the ball jutting out from beneath his rear bumper.

  It was a cool fall day, with enough of a wind that the last clinging leaves on the cottonwoods were releasing their grip in yellow/gold waves. It had dropped below freezing during the night and he’d had to break through an inch of ice on the horse trough. Southbound high-altitude V’s of Canada geese punctuated the rosy day sky, making a racket.

  He’d left a message on Luke Brueggemann’s cell phone that it was time to ride the circuit in the mountains and check on those elk camps they hadn’t gotten to earlier. While he bridled Toby to lead him over to the open trailer, he heard a vehicle rumbling up Bighorn Road from town. Hunters, he guessed, headed up into the mountains.

  Gravel crunched in front of his house and a door slammed, and he leaned around the corner of the trailer to see who it was. It wouldn’t be unusual for a hunter to stop by to verify hunting area boundaries or make a complaint. But it wasn’t a hunter, it was a sheriff’s department vehicle. Joe caught his groan before it came out.

  He stuffed his gloves into his back pocket and walked around the house to the front. Deputy Mike Reed was on his porch, fist raised, about to knock.

  “Hey, Mike,” Joe said.

  “Joe.”

  “You’re out and about early.”

  Reed sighed and crammed his hands into the pockets of his too-tight department jacket. “It seems late to me. I’ve been up most of the night.”

  Joe frowned. “What’s up?”

  “Hell is breaking loose. I was hoping you might offer me a cup of coffee.”

  “Sure,” Joe said. “Just let me go inside and check around first. I’ve got one bathroom and three females in there getting ready for work and school in various stages of undress.”

  Reed nodded. “I’ve got daughters. I remember what that’s like. I used the lilac bushes on the side of my house for eight years, I think. Maybe you could bring the coffee out here.”

  “That would be a better idea,” Joe said, shouldering past the deputy.

  THEY LEANED their arms over the top rail of the corral at the opposite sides of the corner post. Each held a steaming cup of coffee and put a single boot up on the bottom rail. When they breathed or talked, small clouds of condensation puffed out and haloed their heads before dissipating.

  “Like I said, long night,” Reed said.

  “Seems like you want to tell me something.”

  “That’s right, Joe.” There was gravity in Reed’s words.

  “Then you’d best get to it,” Joe said. “I’ve got horses to load and a trainee to pick up, and if the sheriff or one of his spies sees us out here talking, he’ll think we’re plotting against him.”

  Reed barked a laugh. “At this point, he’s probably already convinced of that. At least as far as I’m concerned.”

  Joe sipped his coffee and waited.

  “Since I’ve worked at the department,” Reed said, “I can’t remember more of a clusterfuck than we’ve got going right now. And the timing! Just a few weeks until the election. I should be kind of happy, I guess, but I almost feel sorry for that idiot of a sheriff right now.”

  “Meaning what?” Joe asked.

  “Well, the triple homicide, of course,” Reed said. “We’re not getting anywhere on that. We’ve notified the FBI, but we haven’t made a request for assistance. State DCI boys are bumping into each other in the office, but until something breaks, we’ve got nowhere to run with it. Ballistics is inconclusive, other than they were all shot with a big projectile that passed through their bodies and can’t be found. No one’s come forward to link them up, and nobody seems to know anything about why they were in that boat in the first place.”

  Joe looked into the top of his coffee cup, because he couldn’t meet Reed’s eyes.

  Reed said, “On top of all this, we get a call from Dr. Rhonda Eisenstein. She’s a psychologist from Winchester. You know her?”

  Joe shook his head no.

  “She’s … interesting. Anyway, this psychologist was in a house with a man named Bad Bob Whiteplume out on the res.”

  “I know Bob,” Joe said, looking up.

  “Anyway, according to this Dr. Rhonda Eisenstein, she was staying over with Bad Bob at his place Monday night and someone started honking their horn outside about three-thirty in the morning and wouldn’t stop. Bad Bob went outside to see what the problem was in his bathrobe and never came back. She thinks something might have happened to him and she’s raising hell with the sheriff to start a search.”

  “Did she hear an argument or a fight?”

  “No. She was in the back room.”

  “She didn’t see anything?”

  “No.”

  “Why’d she wait two days to call?” Joe asked.

  “Actually, she didn’t,” Reed said. “She called Tuesday. But with everything we’ve got going on, nobody got back to her. That really hacked her off.”

  “I see,” Joe said.

  “So when Bob didn’t show up later and nobody f
rom the sheriff’s department came out, this doctor went on the warpath, so to speak.”

  “So to speak,” Joe echoed.

  “She started calling everybody. The newspaper, the radio station, all the television folks in Billings and Casper. Even the governor. She accused the department of racism because we didn’t respond quickly.”

  Joe looked up. “Well …”

  “I know,” Reed said, shaking his head. “But that sort of thing happens all the time on the res. We all know it. People just kind of come and go. We don’t get too worked up about it until we know someone’s really missing and the Feds give us the go-ahead since they’ve got primary jurisdiction.”

  “Was this your decision not to call her back?” Joe asked.

  Reed shook his head. “No, it was McLanahan’s. But it doesn’t reflect very well on any of us.”

  “Probably shouldn’t,” Joe said.

  “Anyway,” Reed said, “what happened happened. The result was the mayor and the city council called McLanahan in yesterday to demand some answers. Nobody likes it that we’ve got unsolved murders like this, but it’s even worse when the whole department is accused of racism. Nobody likes us making this kind of news, especially the sheriff. I almost feel sorry for him, and I didn’t think that was possible.”

  Joe clucked his tongue. He thought he knew where this was going but didn’t want to encourage it.

  “That’s not all,” Reed said. “About eleven last night, we got a call from the FBI in Cheyenne. They wanted to see if we could confirm the fact that our person of interest in the triple homicides, Nate Romanowski, was the son of one Gordon Romanowski of Colorado Springs, Colorado.”

  Joe felt his throat go dry.

  “Seems a body was found in the senior Romanowski’s place. No ID, but a massive head wound that sounds suspiciously like our three rubes from the boat.”