And then the stone in the man’s hand swung in an arc to send a shock through his head. Harold fell, one eye catching the reeling of the stars, the other a red starburst that pulsed and drew down to a point, then pulsed again, opening like a flower before everything went to black.
* * *
—
And now the merciful nothingness of the rest of that night was six periods of indigo darkness behind him, long hours without stars and even the bats gone hunting, and after saying his son’s name one last time, he took the burnt stick and drew another line onto the floor of the cave.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Close to the Chest
Even as Sean stepped out of the Land Cruiser, she was walking toward him, her arms folded across her chest, her body pulled to one side, looking small and vulnerable in too-big Carhartts, as if she’d been hit and was preparing herself for another blow.
She came right up to him, high cheeks under black eyes, and not really a small woman at all. “Whatever you didn’t tell me on the phone,” she said, “tell me now. Is he dead? Is my brother dead?”
“I don’t know, Janice. I’m trying to find him.”
She shook her head. “You’re the first person who’s come here since that woman who wanted me to spit into a cup. He must not count for so much.”
“That isn’t true. We didn’t know when he planned to come out so we didn’t know he was missing. And someone drove his truck away from the take-out. Harold had the key. It was logical to think he’d done it. You know how he is. He’s not the kind of guy who calls in from the road unless he has something to say.”
“So was it him who was hit? The bullet? Did they do the match?”
“Those things take time.”
“I guess they do for some people. So why are you here then? Because now they think he’s a murderer, that’s why. I guess that goes without saying. You think he popped the guy in the river. But he’s no killer. If he killed anybody, it was self-defense.”
“I know that, Janice.”
They’d been standing a few feet away from the Land Cruiser, close enough they could hear the metal expanding and contracting as the exhaust cooled and ticked down. Sean saw her eyes dart past him, then the small shake of her head. She looked levelly at him. The first words had come in a rush, but she appeared calm now, now that there remained the chance that Harold was still alive.
“Is there a call out on the truck?”
“I’m sure there is,” Sean said.
She shook her head. “You’re just like he is. Driving a piece of shit when you don’t have to, like it’s a badge of honor. I’d tell him his old Jimmy has rez written all over it. He should take my truck when he was paying a call on white folks ’cause they notice things like that, but he’d just laugh.”
“Can you help me find him, Janice?”
“I don’t know how. It’s not like I’m in the loop. Harold’s his own loop. He doesn’t need another soul on earth.” She looked down and again shook her head. “Except for that witch,” she said under her breath.
Sean didn’t need to be told that she was speaking about Harold’s ex, Connie.
“What I’m trying to find out is what he was doing before he was sent to the Smith River.”
“You’ll have to ask his super at DCI.”
“Martha Ettinger’s working that end.”
At the mention of the name, she stiffened. Then shrugged.
“None of my business,” she said. “Yours maybe.” A pointed look.
“I know about Harold and Martha,” Sean said. “We’re all grown-ups.”
“Sure you do. The three of you are so evolved. But you don’t know Connie. That woman, she never took the claws out. You can’t talk to him about it. All you can do is hope she takes too much of that poison and dies.”
“Is she a meth addict?”
“No, she’s riding the horse. Harold pulled some strings to send her to rehab. That’s that place down in Phoenix—Native American Connections, they call it. All she got out of it was more sources. I could have told him that before she ever went in.”
“Would Harold have told her what he was doing?”
“I don’t know. He didn’t tell me. All I know is he was associating with bad people. He got those new tattoos, you saw them?”
“Yes, the tracks.”
“I told him it was unbefitting to flash ink around like that. He’d cross his arms so his muscles popped out, and you wouldn’t be looking at his face, you’d be looking at the tracks, think he was a savage or something. He’s such a gentle man, what did he want to do that for? He said he had to look tough. But that was just an excuse for it. Harold, when we walked to school, he’d pick up nightcrawlers in the street after a rain and toss them into the grass so they wouldn’t get stepped on. But he said the people he was associating with, they would sense any weakness in him.”
“These people. Who were they?”
“I don’t know. I think he was undercover, but when I came out and flat asked, he wouldn’t say. Said he’d signed a confidentiality clause. But I heard him speak into a cell phone, one of those burners, and he was using a different name. He said, ‘Charlie here.’ When I asked him, he told me I heard wrong. Bullshit. I heard what I heard.”
“Did he mention anything about Yellowstone Park or drop any names? Job? Jobson?”
She shook her head again. “All I know is he was nervous, and you know Harold, he’s never nervous. That impassive face he puts on, the one you can’t think what he’s thinking, it’s like his calling card.”
“Can I have a look where he stays?”
“Okay. There’s not a lot to see. He never needed possessions. I’m the one has to make sure he has clothes. He’d wear those flannels ’til they were nothing but threads.”
As Sean followed her to the barn, he realized that he had never actually seen where Harold lived before. He’d been to the house several times to pick him up, but Harold had always been standing in the drive, ready to go. He’d never been inside the farmhouse, let alone the barn where Harold had insulated and furnished a room.
The barn door was open and they passed four horse stalls, all empty, the horses out to pasture. Nothing but a bobtailed orange tabby perched on a divider rail that arched its head to get its whiskers scratched as Janice walked past.
“That’s Pumpkin,” she said, “world’s worst mouser.”
She led him up rough pine stairs and into Harold’s room. To call it furnished would be a stretch. The dry walls were up, but had yet to be spackled and taped. An insulated Carhartt jacket hung from one sixpenny nail; a cracked felt cowboy hat hung from another. Otherwise, just bare walls. There was a floor mattress by a window that faced east, a wood chair and a simple table with a Mason jar and a gallon of water on it by a window that looked north, up the spine of the Tobacco Roots Range. A lamp with a cracked calfskin shade perched on an overturned crate, serving as an end table. An old issue of Smithsonian was beside a pair of dollar-store reading glasses. Two pairs of cracked cowboy boots stood by the door, and that was all, three hundred or so square feet of nothing much, where someone might sleep, but not really live.
Janice encompassed the room with a wave of her hand. “You see how neat he is in a place nobody sees. His truck, anything visible to the outside world, he’s conscious of where he came from. Can’t bang out a dent, ’cause that’s saying my truck’s better than yours.”
“Does he have a closet?”
“His closet is the rear bench of the truck. He has two pairs of jeans, and three shirts minus one that I gave to that dog handler who needed his scent, and some Muck boots. I know, I bought all of it at Murdoch’s. Harold travels light.”
She shook her head. “He could dress presentable if he wanted to. I know how much money he makes. He supports this place now that Don can’t drive the truck.”
> Sean knew that her husband was a truck driver who hauled horses ranch to ranch throughout eastern and central Montana, and who’d recently had to take a desk job in Bridger at half the pay because a sciatic nerve made sitting behind the wheel impossible without pain killers, to which he’d become addicted before Janice drew a line in the snow and he’d kicked the habit.
“Money doesn’t mean anything to Harold,” she went on. “If he didn’t sink it into the horses or the property, he’d just give it away to some do-gooder organization for kids.”
“I don’t see a bathroom,” Sean said.
“You’re facing the wrong window,” she said. “Yeah, I caught him peeing out of it one night. He just hauled up the window and let fly on my tomato plants. Do you know what he said?”
“It’s traditional,” Sean said.
And both had started to laugh—Janice, who never laughed, wiping at her tears. Then, abruptly, the tears were the more familiar tears, the ones she’d been crying every night for the week now that Harold had been missing.
Sean reached out for her and she pressed her head against him, so that her voice was smothered by his chest.
“You’ll find him for me. Tell me you’ll find him for me.”
“I’ll find him,” Sean said.
When she had gained back her control, wiped at her shiny cheeks with an angry hand, she asked Sean if he wanted to come into the house. She and Harold shared a desk computer. He followed her up porch steps and shut the screen door behind him. It was a single-story rancher not too different from others he’d spent time in, all the rooms built for small people, a living area comfortable if dark, dusty, mismatched everything, an old yellow Lab thumping its tail as it lay before an unlit fire in a stone fireplace. It was the echo of a life that hung on behind hundred-year-old doors while the world outside changed, one subdivided property at a time, the vista compromised as the houses went up, the trout in the overfished rivers becoming as sophisticated as the chardonnay sipped on wraparound decks at six.
Janice booted up the computer. On the evening before Harold had left to float the Smith River, he’d tapped his way to a floater’s map of the canyon with mile markers and all the camps labeled, had Google Earthed the river corridor and clicked on two websites focusing on the rock art in the caves. Nothing unexpected there, Sean thought.
“Harold tell you about his reason for going there?”
“No, he wouldn’t even have told me he was going to float the Smith River. The only reason I know is I’m the one picked up the phone when his supervisor called and took the information.”
Sean nodded. He gave Janice one of his cards, promised to call if there was news, and said goodbye to her at the door, though they lingered.
“What do you know about Marcus?” he asked her.
“I never met him. I heard the mother was Northern Cheyenne.”
“Chippewa Cree,” Sean said.
“You see how much I know. Does he look like Harold? My first thought is that it was a scam, somebody trying to line their pockets. Harold being the soft touch that he is.”
“It’s Harold’s son all right. He never mentioned he might join him on the river?”
“He never even told me he existed. I had to read that in the paper.” She made a dismissive gesture with her hand. “But that’s Harold, right? He plays it close to the chest. Sometimes I don’t think I know him at all.”
Sean got to the end of the drive as he had so often in his life, water all around, surfaces hiding secrets, and a bamboo fly rod for a compass. But this time he had no interest in fishing, and after a minute of indecision, he turned north, and then the phone rang in his pocket and he adjusted his course, still heading north but, as he listened, east now, too, on his way to the end of the world.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
The End of the World
It had taken Martha the better part of the hour to run down the name on the various search indexes, and then to put the name with an address. That was because Rayland Jobson had legally changed his name after his last brouhaha with the law, as convicts and bankrupts often do, to throw creditors, potential employers, and doubters off the trail. As of the past October, he was Job, no other name, and after finding the residence, Martha had drawn a red circle on a Montana map over a blank spot some thirty miles northeast of Winnett.
Martha knew the area slightly. Her uncle Ike had raised sugar beets some fifty miles to the south, out of Roundup, and he and her father hunted turkeys there up in the Breaks, where the Musselshell River flowed north toward the Fort Peck Reservoir. She remembered Winnett as a nothing town with a sense of humor, its slogan written in block letters over the grocery store:
WINNETT, MT: IT’S NOT THE END OF THE WORLD, BUT YOU CAN SEE IT FROM HERE
Martha selected a blue pen from a jar on her stump desk and drew a squiggly line to represent the Musselshell River, which the mapmakers had deemed too insignificant to award notice.
They wouldn’t overlook the river if they’d been stuck in gumbo up there, she thought. She was recalling the one time she’d joined her father and uncle on their annual hunting trip. On the second day in, the Cat Creek Road had turned to snot in the rain and she had missed her senior prom as a result. And so instead of petting on the front bench of Jimmy Ferguson’s dad’s pickup and enduring the boy’s fumbling fingers trying to unsnap her bra, she had huddled under a rain fly before a smoky fire, feeding sage and cow chips to what passed for flames. It was tick season, and she had picked the ticks off her uncle’s and her father’s backs by the light of a Coleman lantern. Then had had the favor returned.
Later, they’d taken turns dancing her around the fire, her father playing the harmonica, the three of them talking and laughing until the whiskey ran dry. Her dad had kept apologizing for her missing the prom, but she hadn’t cared. She liked being one of the boys, far more than being one of the girls. People got her wrong; they had all her life. They thought she hated men. Some even thought she must be lesbian. The truth was Martha loved men. She was practically one herself. She just hated the assholes.
None of this she told Sean as he drove up the 287 past Harrison, to Willow Creek, to the junction with I-90, where he pulled into the Pilot station and put her on speaker as he gassed the Land Cruiser.
“So he’s done this kind of thing before?” he said. Martha had told him that Jobson had a record of game violations.
“The gamut. Outfitting without a license, outfitting with a suspended license, failure to obtain landowner permission to hunt, unlawful possession of trophy game animals, guiding unlicensed hunters, illegally obtaining licenses for out-of-state clients, facilitating transfer of game animals and parts across state lines. So on.”
“Any consequences? Most game violations don’t bring more than a slap on the wrist.” Sean replaced the pump and waited for the receipt.
“Actually, yes. The last conviction for outfitting without a license and possession of an illegally killed elk landed him five years in the Sweet Grass County jail. Plus twenty grand and change in fines and restitution, and loss of all hunting, fishing, and trapping privileges for ten years. That’s been, uh, three years ago. But I think he only served one year in the khakis.”
“Any violations in the Smith River vicinity?”
“Maybe.”
Sean could hear Martha click keys.
“Crazies, west side,” she said. “Bear Paws, UL Wildlife Refuge, that’s up in the Breaks, but not far from the current residence. Here’s one, though. Carroll Ranch in Meagher County. I know that place. It’s up off the Millegan Road. That’s the road up above the Smith, the route you take to shuttle cars to Eden Bridge. Crossing private land without written permission to retrieve a whitetail deer shot in the national forest. I remember because I know Joanne Carroll. Jobson got into it with a ranch hand who told Joanne, who turned him in. As a result, she pulled the ranch out of b
lock management and closed twenty-two hundred acres to public hunting.”
“What’s the address?”
“The ranch or the residence?”
“Where he lives.”
“Tell me when you’re ready.” He was ready, jotted down the location on the gas receipt, and was set to go.
“It’s not that simple,” she said. “You need more than GPS to find places up there. I can get you to the ballpark if you’ll just listen.” She gave him country directions, working from memory, left after the second cattle guard, left again at the Y, and so on, with the caveat that the roads could have changed.
“The Musselshell,” she said. “Nobody who builds there drives into Lewistown to buy a welcome mat. There’s a lot of people this side of loony or that side, take your pick. This Job is a career criminal. He could be cooking meth or building bombs. Either way, you can bet he’s armed.”
“You’re being dramatic, Martha. He has a record of sneaking around behind people’s backs. I didn’t hear one conviction for assault or anything violent in his record.”
“Still, I don’t like you going there.”
“You know me. I’ll be careful.”
“I do know you, and that’s not the word I’d choose.”
“I’ll check in and let you know I’m okay.”
“From where?”
“From wherever I get back into cell range.”
Changing the subject, he asked if she’d got anywhere with Division of Criminal Investigation. She had and hadn’t. Martha’s contact in the department, Kevin Whatney, whom she’d worked with before when a case overlapped, and whom she’d thought well of because he hadn’t tried to bigfoot her, could or would only say that yes, Harold had been working an investigation, but that the state wasn’t at liberty to divulge the details. Certainly she of all people should understand. And by the way, how’s Jack? She wouldn’t know, she’d told him, they’d been divorced seven years. Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. I’m a little busy now, as if Martha wasn’t. Did she hear a condescending note in his voice? Or was he just a man who had the phone halfway to the cradle?
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