Vicious Circle

by C. J. Box

  “Here’s the thing I can’t figure out,” Joe said. “What are you offering these pals of yours? Don’t tell me they do anything you tell them to just because you’re such a charming guy. Where did you get the money to pay for Marcus Hand to represent you and three thugs to risk their lives for you?”

  Dallas chuckled and patted his massive belt buckle. “Maybe they just want to be close to a champion? Did you ever think of that?”

  “Is there anything you won’t lie to me about?” Joe asked.

  Dallas nodded sincerely and said, “There are a few things. I think you know what they are.”

  Joe didn’t follow up. There was no need to.

  “You know what you did to me, don’t you?” Dallas asked. “You and that county prosecutor got together and sent me to prison on charges that would have gotten anybody else a ticket and a fine—if he wasn’t named Cates. It either eats at you inside or you’re one cold son of a bitch.”

  Joe didn’t argue. There was nothing to argue about.

  “You killed my brother Bull. Shot him right in the face.”

  “In self-defense,” Joe said.

  “That’s your story. Deputy Bonehead’s got his story, too.”

  “Don’t link us together.”

  “Of course not,” Dallas said with a jeer. “You’re Mr. Pure as the Driven Snow and Bonehead is corrupt. Like I really believe that. At least Bonehead wasn’t responsible for my dad’s death and crippling my mother for life. That was all you.

  “And what about my brother Timber? He gets out of prison and goes all the way up to Billings and decides to throw himself off a building? Am I supposed to buy that?”

  Joe said, “The building was a hospital where my daughter was recovering from what happened to her when you kicked her out of your truck. A hospital.”

  Dallas waved off the distinction. “Here’s what I know. One week I’m on top of the world and on top of the rodeo standings. I’ve got a mom and a dad and two brothers and property that’ll someday be mine. The next week, I’m so busted up I’ll never rodeo again, and only my mother is still alive—barely. She’ll never walk again and she’ll die in prison.”

  He jabbed his finger at Joe. “That’s what I fucking know.”

  For a moment, Joe found it hard to breathe or swallow. He knew he could counter everything Dallas had said, but there was no doubt Dallas believed his own version. And what hit Joe the hardest was how much of what he’d said was . . . true enough.

  Gesturing toward the front of the house, Dallas said, “Speaking of: Where the hell is your family?”

  “Not here.”

  “Well, I got that. Did they all run off? Are they scared like you?”

  Joe had no way to answer the question without putting himself on the defensive.

  “They’re on a trip,” he said.

  “What about April? I spent many a lonely night thinking about that girl. Actually, more than thinking about her, if you know what I mean.”

  Joe felt the hairs prick up on the back of his neck and on his forearms.

  “She’s a goddamned tiger in the sack, you know,” Dallas said. “I always wondered where she learned all the things she knows. Was it in that house over my shoulder, or somewhere else?” His eyes were locked on Joe’s face to note his reaction.

  “That’s enough of that,” Joe said through clenched teeth.

  “Or what?”

  Joe heard Dulcie’s voice in his head say, He’s fucking bulletproof right now.

  “I’m guessing they’ll be back soon,” Dallas said. “Tell them they don’t need to be in no hurry. You and me have some issues to work out before they get involved.”

  Joe cocked his head. He had no idea what that meant.

  Dallas raised his hand and gestured to his eyes with two outstretched fingers, then pointed them at Joe’s face.

  “You and me,” he repeated.

  Joe got it even though Dallas was being deliberately obtuse. He’d misread Dallas’s intentions. Joe himself would be first. In a way, it was a relief, because it spared his family.

  Then he realized what Dallas was actually saying, and it was worse than anything Joe could have imagined. Joe would go first, leaving his family alone and unprotected. Then, one by one, they’d be next.

  It was the cruelest thing Joe could conceive of. And Dallas knew it.

  “You know what you did to me, don’t you?” Dallas asked.

  “I do.”

  “You knew I’d come back.”

  “It doesn’t have to be this way,” Joe said. “You could stop it. It doesn’t have to be a vicious circle.”

  Dallas seemed to think about it. At least he was quiet for a long time.

  Then he looked up and said, “I’m not carrying. You have that gun on your hip. You could do a Bonehead move and take me out like you did Bull. Maybe plant a gun to make it look good. You could end it now.”

  “I’m not built that way.”

  “I knew you’d say that,” Dallas said with a smirk. “April told me enough about you.”

  “Don’t come near my family,” Joe said.

  “Oh, don’t worry,” Dallas said. “You won’t be around to worry about that.”

  —

  DALLAS WALKED deliberately close to Joe as he headed toward his truck. Close enough that Joe could smell his animal scent as he passed by.

  Joe turned and focused on Dallas’s wide back. At ten feet, even Joe could hit that target.

  He couldn’t shoot a man in the back, though. Not even Dallas.

  Instead, he closed his eyes and listened to the sound of his own blood roaring in his ears.

  —

  JOE WALKED through every room of his house with his shotgun to make sure no one was hiding out. He checked the closets and under the beds.

  He took his shotgun with him to the barn to feed the horses, and was spooked when a great horned owl sailed from its perch in the rafters and out through a stall opening into the night. He watched it vanish down the barrel of his weapon and breathed a sigh of relief that he hadn’t blasted it out of the sky.

  Inside, he placed the weapon on his dining room table within easy reach as he thawed a package of elk steaks in the microwave. More than once, he glanced out through the living room window for approaching headlights.

  What Dallas had said seemed to hover over him and press down on his head and shoulders.

  You could end it now.

  You won’t be around to worry about that.

  Joe listened to it again on his recorder. He’d need to download the conversation to his home computer so there was a record of it, for posterity. A record for the investigators in case Dallas got to him.

  He checked his phone again. There was no reason to return the call to the governor’s office until the next morning. He ignored the missed call labeled CALLER UNKNOWN.

  Under Rick Ewig’s message, he thumbed CALL BACK.

  “Joe!” Ewig said when he answered. “I heard what happened today. Sorry, man.”

  “Thanks.”

  Joe could hear a television in the background and the yelp of an infant. Ewig had two small children.

  “Hey, I got a lead on our poaching ring,” Ewig said.

  Joe was grateful for the distraction.

  “You know there are a bunch of industrial buildings to the west of town, right? Places where the energy companies have just up and left?”

  “Yes.”

  Joe had seen road after road of abandoned oil and gas company shops outside of Gillette that just a year earlier had been occupied.

  “Well, somebody called and said they’d seen activity in the middle of the night at one of them. The cops checked it out and called me and I found a wild-game processing facility. Stainless-steel tables, wrapping paper, coolers, the whole nine yards. I also f
ound plenty of trace evidence: hide, hairs, blood they didn’t get cleaned up. And out back in an old dumpster were nine or ten carcasses. Mostly does and cow elk, like our ring goes after.”

  “Well done,” Joe said.

  Ewig had photographed the facility and sent both the digital photos and evidence samples to the state lab in Laramie. The Gillette PD was checking it for fingerprints and trace fibers.

  “It’s under surveillance,” Ewig said. “Maybe we’ll catch our boys in the act of butchering a deer.”

  “I hope so,” Joe said. “Keep me posted.”

  —

  AS HE TALKED, he paid no notice to Daisy gathering herself up from where she’d curled at his feet and padding toward the front door. Tube was already there wiggling her backside.

  He didn’t notice Daisy’s tail flitting back and forth like an errant windshield wiper—the way she greeted familiar guests.

  But when he disconnected the call with Ewig and looked up, the threshold of the mudroom door filled with the person of Nate Romanowski.

  “Don’t you return calls anymore?” Nate asked.

  “You must be the unknown number.”

  “Sounds just like me.”

  Nate looked trim and tan. His blond ponytail had been bleached by the sun. He wore a long-sleeved shirt with Yarak, Inc. embroidered over the breast pocket.

  “It’s good to see you, Nate,” Joe said. “Welcome back.”

  Nate looked around at the empty house, and his eyes lingered on the shotgun on the kitchen table.

  “Something’s up,” he said.

  “Yup, it is,” Joe sighed.

  PART THREE

  No one fights dirtier or more brutally than blood; only family knows its own weakness, the exact placement of the heart.

  —Whitney Otto, How to Make an American Quilt

  17

  As the senior night-shift security guard of Teton Shadows, Gary Bulla had long ago learned not to be surprised by who stopped outside the gate wanting to be let in. He’d seen movie and television stars, politicians, singers, and other celebrity faces in expensive cars who were vaguely familiar and whom he’d later have to look up on the Internet after he either cleared them with residents or turned them away.

  He’d tried not to stare inside the car when a U.S. senator he’d seen giving a speech at the Democratic National Convention drove up with his trousers bunched around his ankles and the back of a woman’s head bobbing up and down in his lap. He’d tried not to gape when a slim, blond ex–country singer and current pop star last seen on the Grammy Awards appeared at the wheel of a Lexus SUV with mascara running down her face from tears and her chin trembling.

  Professionalism and discretion were important if he wanted to keep his job. So was keeping the riffraff out.

  Bulla wore a handheld radio and a Sig Sauer 1911 Scorpion .45 on his belt. When someone he didn’t know arrived at the gate and said they were there to see one of the thirty-five owners within Teton Shadows, but they weren’t on the official visitation list, he’d ask the driver to wait until he received verbal confirmation that it was okay. He made no exceptions.

  One wall of the office was filled with monitors linked to the bevy of closed-circuit security cameras stationed throughout the gated community. During the daytime, the views were filled with lush green lawns and perfectly trimmed pine trees. At night the grounds looked somewhat garish under the overhead lamps. A portable heater hummed against the late-fall cold.

  Security guard at the exclusive subdivision had been the best job he’d landed since he arrived in Jackson Hole to be an outdoor gear inventor and entrepreneur three years before, only to discover that the combination sleeping pad/sleeping bag/one-man shelter he’d designed in his garage in Milwaukee had already been patented and manufactured and was selling poorly. He’d tried to interest the outdoor-gear manufacturer that had turned him down with another idea—a multi-tool that was both a hatchet and a marijuana pipe—but they’d shot that down as well.

  On his desk inside the small security shack outside the gate was a drawing for a one-man float tube that could double as a shelter for two in the wilderness. He was careful to cover it each time a visitor pulled up so they couldn’t steal his idea.

  When they didn’t arrive in luxury cars or massive vehicles like Missy Vankueren Hand’s Hummer H2, residents as well as visitors showed up on mountain bikes, ATVs, golf carts, and even horses. It wasn’t what they used for transportation that could get them in, it was who they were or who they were there to see.

  What he’d never seen, though, was a bedraggled woman on foot approach the gate pulling a child’s red wagon behind her.

  Bulla squinted his eyes as she got closer, and he could see her better under the entrance lights. She was thin and her clothes were dirty and oversized. Straw-colored hair spilled out of the opening of her pulled-up hoodie and looked greasy in the harsh light. One of the wheels of the wagon squeaked as it rolled.

  He stood up and placed a manila file folder over his drawing so she couldn’t see it. Then he opened the door and stepped out onto the flagstone porch with his right hand, as always, near his .45.

  “You look like you might be lost,” he said.

  The woman with the wagon kept coming until she was just below him on the asphalt entry. When she finally stopped, the squeak stopped as well. He noticed that whatever was in the child’s wagon was covered by a blanket.

  “Is this the place where the Picketts are staying?” she asked. “I’m a friend of the family.”

  She had hollow eye sockets and thin lips. The skin of her face was pitted with the scars of long-ago acne. What he thought at first were gloves turned out to be swirling tattoos on the backs of her hands. A line of ink tears dropped down her cheek from her right eye.

  Bulla was used to seeing hipsters all over Jackson Hole, and they sometimes came to the gate. Baggy clothes, hoodies, strategically unkempt hair, no makeup. But there was always something—designer frames, an Apple Watch, a wristband in support of some fashionable cause or other—that said the hipster was a hipster and not a bum.

  This woman looked more like a tweaker than a hipster.

  “Are they expecting you?” he asked.

  “They should be.” He caught a glimpse of bad teeth. Yes, he thought, a tweaker.

  Bulla knew that Mrs. Pickett was out with Mrs. Hand. They’d gone through the gate toward Jackson twenty minutes earlier in the H2. He hadn’t seen the Pickett girls, but he assumed they were at the Hand residence.

  “I’ll need to see some ID,” he said. “I’ll give them a call.”

  “ID?”

  “ID.”

  “It’s in my wagon,” she said vacantly. “Just a sec and I’ll get it.”

  Bulla sidled closer, curious to see what was under the blanket.

  She reached under the material and groped around. Her fingers appeared to close around something.

  Bulla leaned toward her.

  She slipped the ax out from under the blanket and gripped the handle with two hands and swung it.

  The blade sliced a thin oval of flesh out of the top of his shoulder and made a thunk sound as it buried in his neck.

  —

  “MARCUS WILL BE COMING HOME TOMORROW,” Missy said to Marybeth as she commandeered the H2 on the highway from town.

  Marybeth nodded as she studied her mother behind the wheel. As always, she was speeding, driving nearly seventy in a forty-five-mile-per-hour zone and whipping around tourists who obeyed the law. That hadn’t changed even though everything else about her seemed to have. The take-out Thai food they’d picked up for dinner smelled pungent and filled the interior of the car.

  Marybeth said, “Yes, I heard from Joe and the prosecutor what happened at the trial.”

  “Of course you did.” Then: “Marcus doesn’t lose, you know.”


  Marybeth wanted to say that her mother knew more about that than anyone, but she held her tongue.

  “The only problem with a trial that short is the paltry billable hours,” Missy lamented. “I hope they negotiated a flat rate for an acquittal. It would be a shame if Marcus’s firm could only charge for his few days on the case.”

  “And the fact that a monster who wants to get revenge on my husband is back out on the street,” Marybeth said.

  “Well, there’s that, I suppose,” Missy said breezily.

  “How did Dallas Cates afford to hire Marcus? Where did he get the money?”

  Missy shrugged. “I don’t get involved in those kinds of details. All I care about is that someone is paying the legal bill.”

  “Right.”

  “Let’s not talk shop and have a disagreement. I’ll suggest to Marcus that he not discuss his client around the house.”

  “That’s probably a good idea,” Marybeth said.

  “I’ll also suggest that he not walk around naked while you and the girls are here. He has a tendency to do that. He used to walk outside to get the newspaper naked, but the neighbors complained.”

  Marybeth winced at the visual in her mind.

  “He’ll get used to it,” Missy declared.

  “Get used to what?” Marybeth asked.

  “Oh, nothing. You can still stay as long as you want. As you know, we’ve got plenty of room.”

  “Have you talked to him about it? Is Marcus okay with us being here?”

  “He will be,” Missy said with steel in her voice.

  “So he isn’t now.”

  “He’ll come around.”

  “Joe wants us to stay another week,” Marybeth said. It felt strange to talk to her mother as if she were a real and normal person. Marybeth wasn’t accustomed to it.

  “You can stay longer.”

  “Really?” Marybeth asked. Missy actually wanted them around.

  “We’re all ready to go back,” Marybeth told her mother.

  “I see.” Missy sounded hurt.

  “It’s not that we don’t appreciate your hospitality. We just have to return to our lives. The girls have school, I have my job. I miss Joe.”