by C. J. Box
Marybeth took a step forward and Joe took one back. She was now jabbing him in the chest. He wished she hadn’t said “stupid job.” But he didn’t point that out.
“Don’t you dare blame this on me,” she said. “I think your problem is your problem. You’re working for a man and an agency you don’t believe in anymore. You’re frustrated. You’re finding out that everything you based your career and your validation on might be built on a foundation of sand. It kills you that you’re thinking you’re just another government employee working for a government agency. And instead of admitting it or dealing with it, you’re lashing out. Am I right?”
Joe glared at her.
“Am I right?”
“Maybe,” he conceded. “Just a little.”
“Okay, then.”
“It kind of pisses me off that you’re so smart,” he said, chancing a smile. “I must drive you crazy sometimes.”
She punched him playfully in the chest. “It is a burden,” she said.
AS THEY WALKED back toward the parking lot and the people, Joe said, “I’m still mad, though.”
“You don’t get mad very often, so I suppose you’re allowed to every once in a while.”
“There’s a lot going on here,” he said, gesturing toward the museum and the Scarlett Wing, but meaning the county in general. “We can’t see it happening because we’re too close. I think it’s right there in front of us, but we’re not seeing it because we’re looking for something else.”
Marybeth stopped and searched his face. “What are you talking about, Joe?”
“Where does Bill Monroe fit into all of this?” Joe said. “I can’t figure out his role in it. He’s Hank’s thug, but he seems to be working with Arlen too. How do you square that deal?”
“I don’t know.”
“Something struck me during those speeches,” Joe said. “I was wondering if you picked up on it.”
“What?”
“Think back. What was the biggest difference between how Arlen spoke and Hank spoke?”
“Arlen was articulate and Hank was not?” Marybeth said.
“Hank spoke of his mother in the present tense,” Joe said. “He said, ‘When Mother asks you to say something you say “okay.”’ Remember that?”
“Yes.” The realization of what Joe was getting at washed across her face.
“But Arlen spoke of his mother in the past tense: ‘Opal Scarlett was more than a mother, more than the matriarch of the Thunderhead Ranch. . . .’”
“So what does it mean?”
Joe shrugged. “I’m not sure. But clearly, when Hank thinks of his mother she’s still around. That’s not the case with Arlen. As far as he’s concerned, she’s gone.”
JOE GLANCED UP and saw Arlen making his way through the crowd straight for them.
“Here he comes now,” Joe said, trying to get a read on what the purpose of Arlen’s visit might be.
Arlen ignored Joe and greeted Marybeth. “It’s so good you could come,” he said. He threw an arm around her shoulders and gave her a squeeze, then stepped back. “Thanks to your wife,” he said to Joe, “we are now within sight of making the ranch rightfully ours. She cracked the code in regard to Mother’s accounting system on the ranch.” Arlen gestured with his fingers to indicate quote marks around “cracked the code.”
“I heard,” Joe said.
“She’s quite a woman,” Arlen said.
“I agree.”
“You should be proud of her.”
“I am.”
Arlen stepped away from Marybeth, who had been grinning icily the entire time he was next to her. Arlen’s face was suddenly somber, the look he showed just before he commenced with a speech.
“I heard what happened at your home,” Arlen said. “I heard about those town elk. It’s a damned shame.”
Joe nodded, eyeing him carefully. “I decided this morning to involve myself in the investigation of your mother.”
“Oh?”
“Yup,” Joe said. “My boss said stay away from it, but I’m going to anyway. I have this idea that maybe things aren’t what they seem, Arlen. While I’ve been sitting on the sidelines, no progress I’m aware of has been made on the case. And at the same time, somebody has targeted my family. I think everything that’s happened is connected to Opal’s disappearance.”
Arlen had listened with hooded eyes and a blank expression, offering no encouragement. “Really,” he said. Arlen looked at Marybeth to gauge her opinion, and she stared back impassively. Joe noted the exchange.
“Really,” Joe said.
“Are you telling me this in the hope that I won’t inform Director Pope?”
“I don’t care what you do,” Joe said. “Pope knows about everything I do. The sheriff makes sure of that. Maybe someone else does too.”
“I see.” Arlen’s expression hardened, as if he were concentrating on giving nothing away.
“So I hope you can clear up a couple of things for me.”
Arlen didn’t respond.
“It would help if you told me what your relationship with Bill Monroe is,” Joe said. “I’m trying to figure . . .”
“That’s confidential,” Arlen interrupted.
Joe sighed. “He seems to work for Hank, but Sheridan saw him . . .”
“It’s confidential,” Arlen said in his most stentorian voice, cutting off debate, looking around to see if anyone had overheard them. No one appeared to be listening.
Joe stared at Arlen, taking new measure of the man. At his chiseled profile, his silver hair, his big lantern jaw and underbite, his darting eyes.
“You see that earthmover behind me?” Joe asked.
Puzzled, Arlen glanced over Joe’s shoulder. Marybeth looked at Joe.
“Yes, what about it?”
Joe said, “If I find out you’re playing me, which I’m beginning to believe you are, I’m going to get in that thing and knock this building down. And then I’m coming after you.”
Arlen’s mouth dropped open. He was truly surprised.
“I got a message on my cell phone this morning,” Joe said. “From forensics. The knife that was stuck in our front door matches the collection of knives in your own kitchen. Same model, same manufacturer. ‘Forged German CrMoV steel, ice hardened and glass finished,’ forensics said.”
Arlen said, “Many people have access to my home—employees, ranch hands . . .”
“Right,” Joe said. “And it appears Meade Davis seems to have changed his story to one you liked better. Anything to that? Do you think Meade Davis would stick with the latest version if I brought him in?”
It was amazing how icy Arlen’s eyes had become, Joe thought, how frozen the expression on his face. This was a different Arlen than the glad-handing speechmaker. This was the Arlen Joe had glimpsed in the sheriff’s office baiting his brother into violence, but acting as if he didn’t know what he was doing.
Jabbing his finger at Joe, Arlen said, “You have crossed the line making accusations like that. Do you realize who you’re talking to?”
“I realize,” Joe said. “It’s getting old.”
Arlen shook his head, contemplating Joe, but saying nothing. As if Joe was no longer worth his words.
Arlen turned to Marybeth. “You’ve lost my account. If you can talk some sense into your husband, you might have a chance to get it back.”
Marybeth’s eyes were fiery. “He has plenty of sense, Arlen. We can live without your money.”
ON THE WAY back to the Longbrake Ranch, Marybeth broke the silence.
“So you really think she’s still alive,” she said to Joe as they drove past the town limit toward the Longbrake Ranch. Sheridan and Lucy were touring the museum with Missy, so Joe and Marybeth had the truck to themselves.
“Yup,” Joe said. “I think she’s holed up somewhere on the ranch, just sitting back and watching what goes on. I can imagine her seeing what lengths her sons will go to to get the ranch. Seeing how much they love it and
therefore how much they love her. Everything she’s done over the years fits the theory—the secret wills, the internalized accounting, her obsession with her legacy. It came to me when I thought about Tommy Wayman claiming to have seen her, and Sheridan’s dream. Maybe it wasn’t a dream after all. In both cases, they described the same thing. They said she was smiling.”
Marybeth was lost in thought for a few moments, then she asked, “Do you think Hank knows?”
“No.”
“Arlen?”
Joe shook his head. “Maybe, but I can’t be sure. I was hoping to smoke him out back there, but he’s too damned wily for me.”
After a few miles she turned to him. “There’s only one thing about your theory that might be wrong.”
“What?”
“I don’t think it’s about love at all,” she said. “I think it’s about hate.”
Joe said, “I don’t understand.”
“Look at them,” she said. “She raised them to hate each other and love her. What kind of mother does that?”
23
ON MONDAY MORNING, JOE PULLED ON HIS RED UNIFORM shirt and jeans for perhaps the last time, called Maxine, and drove out into the breaklands to finish up the mule-deer trend count he had started weeks before.
As he cruised down the state highway, he kept a close watch on the blunt thunderheads advancing over the Bighorns. The clouds looked heavy and swollen with rain. “Come on,” he said aloud, “keep on rolling this way.” By his count, it had not rained in twenty-five days. Maxine thought he was talking to her and got excited.
He had one more quadrant to go before submitting his report. The area butted up against the property line of the upper Thunderhead Ranch, Hank’s half.
When his cell phone rang, Joe opened it and expected to hear “Hold for Director Pope.”
But it was Tony Portenson. “Hello, Joe.”
“To what do I owe this pleasure?” Joe asked, keeping the sarcasm out of his voice and wishing that years before he hadn’t given his phone number to the FBI agent.
“We got a call from a contact in Idaho,” Portenson said. “Someone matching the description of Nate Romanowski was spotted at a Conoco station in Victor, headed east toward Wyoming. I was wondering if perhaps you’d seen your old friend recently.”
Joe felt himself smile, but kept the grin out of his voice. “No, I haven’t seen or heard from him.”
“You wouldn’t lie to me, would you, Joe?”
“Nope, I don’t do that.”
Portenson sighed. “I guess you don’t. But you’ll keep me informed if he shows up, right?”
“Nope, probably not.”
“At least tell him I want to talk with him, okay?”
“I’m sure he knows that.”
“You’re not very helpful, Joe.”
“He’s my friend,” Joe said. Then he quickly changed the subject. “Did you ever find that guy you were looking for? The one who shot the cowboy?”
Portenson’s voice dropped. “He’s still at large. We faxed the information to the sheriff’s department but haven’t heard anything from him.”
“I’m not surprised,” Joe said.
Portenson said, “Tell Romanowski I haven’t forgotten about him.”
BY THE TIME Joe found the southeast corner of the quadrant, the dark clouds had redoubled in scale and continued their advance. Thirty miles away, he could see spouts of rain connecting the clouds to the earth, an illusion that made it look as though it were raining up. Rain in any form was a revelation.
“Keep on rolling,” he said again, wishing he could see the secrets and motivations of the people in the valley with the same long-distance clarity.
Instead of mule deer, he happened first on a herd of thirty pronghorn antelope grazing and picking their way in the distance across the tabletop flat of a butte. Their brown-and-white camouflage coloring, which worked for eight months of the year, failed them miserably against the pulsing green carpet of spring grass and made them stand out like highway cones.
Joe fixed his spotting scope to the top of his driver’s-side window and surveyed the pronghorn. Antelope almost always had twins, and the little ones were perfectly proportioned, despite their size, and within days were capable of running as fast as the adults. He loved to watch them play, chasing other newborns around, scampering between the legs of their mothers like shooting sparks.
Joe swung the telescope and found the lead buck. As always, he stood alone facing his herd, prepared at any moment to wade into the throng to enforce his will on them or punish transgressions. As Joe admired the buck through the scope a puff of dust and hair shot out of the buck’s neck and the animal crumpled and dropped. A rifle shot followed, pow-WHOP, the sound of a hit, echoing across the sagebrush. In the bottom of his scope view, Joe could see the buck kicking out violently, windmilling his legs in a death dance.
“Man!” Joe shouted, amazed at what had happened right in front of his eyes.
The rest of the herd ignited as one and were suddenly sweeping across the top of the butte leaving twenty-nine streams of dust that looked like vapor trails in their wake.
Angry, Joe jumped out of his pickup with his binoculars. Antelope season was four months away. Before raising the glasses to his eyes, he swept the hills, trying to see the shooter. Was it possible the poacher didn’t know the game warden was in the vicinity? No, Joe thought, the odds were totally against it. In a district of fifteen hundred square miles, the chance of his actually being there to see the kill in front of his eyes were infinitesimal. The act was a deliberate provocation, a direct challenge.
He followed the long line of three-strand barbed-wire fence that separated the public Bureau of Land Management land from the Thunderhead Ranch. The fence went on as far as he could see. But behind it—on a ridge, partially hidden by a fold in the terrain—was a light-colored pickup he didn’t recognize.
He raised the glasses and focused furiously.
The pickup came into view.
It was an older model, at least ten years old, light yellow, rust spots on the door. The description was familiar to him, but from where? He didn’t take the time to figure it out. The driver’s-side door was open, and the window was down. A rifle rested on the sill, still pointing in the general direction of the butte.
A man stepped out from behind the door and waved.
Bill Monroe.
He waved again at Joe in a goofy, come-on-y’all wave.
Then Monroe stepped away from the pickup, set his feet, and pulled out his penis: a flash of pink against blue jeans. He urinated a long stream into the dirt in front of him, then leaned back in an exaggerated way, pointed at Joe with his free hand, and Joe could read his lips as he shouted: “This is what I think of you, Joe Pickett.”
A THUNDERCLAP NOT unlike the sound of the rifle shot boomed across the breaklands followed by a long series of deep-throated rumbles. Joe could feel the temperature dropping even as he drove, as the clouds pulled across the sun like a curtain shutting out the light, muting light and shadow.
He had plunged his truck over the rise into the saddle slope of a valley in pursuit of Bill Monroe. There were no established roads that would get him from where he had seen the shooting, across the top of the butte, to the border of the Thunderhead Ranch, so Joe kept his left front tire in a meandering game trail that pointed vaguely toward Monroe’s pickup and let the right tires bounce through knee-high sagebrush. He was driving much faster than he should have, the engine straining. Maxine stood on the bench seat with her front paws on the dash, trying to keep balanced.
Damn him, Joe thought.
Joe hated poachers, and not simply because they were breaking the law he was sworn to enforce. He hated the idea of poaching—killing a creature for sport with no intention of eating the meat. Joe took poaching as a personal affront, and to see it happen this way, to be mocked by Bill Monroe in this way . . .
And Bill Monroe was not yet running. He was still up there, outside of
his pickup, on the far ridge, outlined against the roiling dark clouds. Monroe had plenty of time and distance before Joe got there, and he was in no hurry.
Maybe he wouldn’t run at all. Maybe he would wait for Joe, and the two of them could have it out. Joe thought that sounded fine to him.
He was halfway across the saddle slope when three things happened at once:
His radio came to life, the dispatcher calling him directly by his code number, saying he was to call Director Randy Pope immediately off the air.
The check-engine light on the dashboard flickered and stayed on while the temperature-gauge needle shouldered hard into the red.
And the clouds opened up with a clash of cymbals and sheets of rain swept across the ground with such force that the first wave of rain actually raised dust as if it were strafing the ground.
BILL MONROE WAS still on the ridge, standing in the rain as if he didn’t know it was soaking him. Joe was closer now, close enough to see the leer on Monroe’s face, see his hands on his hips as he looked down at Joe climbing up the slope, aimed right at him.
A moment later, there was a pop under the hood of the engine and clouds of acrid green steam rolled out from under the pickup, through the grille, and into the cab through the air vents. The radiator hose has blown.
Joe cursed and slammed the dash with the heel of his hand. He stopped the truck and the engine died before he could turn the key.
JOE OPENED THE door and jumped out of his crippled pickup. Despite the opening salvos of rain, the ground was still drought dry; the moisture had not yet penetrated and was pooling wherever there was a low spot. The rainfall was steady and hard, stinging his bare hands.
Joe looked up the slope at Monroe.
“What’s wrong with your truck?” Monroe shouted down.
“You’re under arrest,” Joe shouted back.
“For what?”
“For killing that buck. I saw the whole thing.”
