The Disappeared

by C. J. Box

  Damn, it was cold outside.

  The sensation, as always, was intense: below-zero air on the bare skin of his back and shoulders and burning-hot water below the surface. Both stung, but in different ways. He eased into the pool, felt the gravel surface beneath his feet, until he located the corner closest to the flow intake. He liked to think of this spot as “Wylie’s Corner.” It was close enough to the source of the geothermal spring, called “the lobster pot,” to be extremely hot, but far enough away that his delicate skin wouldn’t blister. He sat down slowly until the hot mineral water rose and washed over his shoulders. Only his head was not submerged.

  It was so cold outside and so hot inside the pool that clouds of thick steam rose from the top of the water and he couldn’t see a damned thing around him.

  Within a minute, as the one-hundred-and-nineteen-degree water stung his skin and the heat began to penetrate into his fat, sinews, and muscles, he took a deep breath of the sulfur-tinted air and closed his eyes. Wisps of steam rose through his scalp into the air like a chimney. The mineral water dissolved the powdered gypsum dust on his skin from hanging drywall all day in his new-and-improved shop. Gypsum rose to the surface in a slick before it floated away and dissipated.

  He had two hours. That was enough time to get in a hot soak, eat a big dinner at the Bear Trap or Duke’s Bar & Grill, and show up for the night shift at the mill. Because of the extra money he was making, his ex-wife had stopped texting him for child support and his shop was insulated and almost completely dry-walled. He could envision spending a lot of time out there with a woodstove blazing and ESPN or rodeo playing on a wide-screen television.

  Life was good for Wylie.

  He wished, though, that he could get that acrid odor of burning hair and roast chicken out of his nose from before. It stayed with him in a way that he found disconcerting.

  He tried not to think about it, but it came back to him at odd times and it was accompanied by a sharp pang of guilt. The owner of the mill was a good man who’d taken a chance on him and seemed to trust him. But it was more than that.

  Wylie hated guilt. He’d had more than enough of it when his marriage broke up. He blamed his mother because she was a devoted Catholic and she’d made him go to church with his sister as a young boy. Many of his friends and coworkers seemed to have no inkling of the concept of guilt, and he envied them.

  *

  WITH HIS EYES CLOSED, Wylie found that his hearing sharpened up. He could hear the lap of the river just outside the wall of the hot springs pool as well as contented clucking from wild ducks on the water. Every once in a while there was an errant shout from a guest who’d ventured outside from the Saratoga Hot Springs Resort across the river. The outtake grate at the other end of the pool sometimes made a slurping sound as hot water flowed through it.

  There were rarely any other people in the hot pool at this time of night, he’d found, even though it was free and open to the public twenty-four hours a day. Locals sometimes brought their young kids earlier in the evening to tire them out in the super-hot water, and drinkers came later at night after they’d done their rounds at the bars. During the day, it was travelers and oldsters. Wylie avoided seeing all that wrinkled old flesh the best he could. He’d had enough of that to last him a lifetime when he’d visited his mother two years ago at her retirement village in Arizona. That’s why he chose to stay here through the winter.

  *

  WYLIE HAD FOUND that twenty minutes in the hot pool was just enough. Twenty minutes heated up the core of his body so he’d stay warm for nearly an hour before he got to the mill shack. His bulbous milk-white body would turn crab red by the time he left. In fact, he would sometimes break into a sweat as he walked from the pool toward his truck when it was five below. Often he carried his blanket instead of wearing it. Wylie had a big gut and that belly fat heated up like an inner tube filled with hot water and it kept him warm. He often wondered how skinny people ever survived the winter.

  Sometimes, when he felt adventurous, Wylie would lumber out of the hot springs, climb over the wall, and plunge into the North Platte River. There were several hot plumes of geothermal water out there as well, and sitting on a gout of hot water while the icy river flowed around him was a unique experience in itself.

  *

  WYLIE WAS SO COMFORTABLE ALONE in the hot pool with his eyes closed that he nearly fell asleep. But he was startled when he heard a particular voice, guttural and flat, that he recognized as the one he’d heard on the other end of his cell phone.

  He couldn’t see them through the steam, but he could hear and track them. The two men were talking low as they exited from the changing room and approached the hot pool. They were above and behind him and Wylie knew that even if the steam cleared, the men wouldn’t be able to see him in there because of the sight lines.

  “Jesus, how hot is it?”

  The guttural voice said, “It’s one-twenty-five at the source. That’s what they say, anyway.”

  “That’s too damned hot. Even in this cold, it’s too damned hot.”

  The guttural man chuckled. Even his laugh was grating, Wylie thought.

  “Well, do you swim in it or what?”

  “Nah. It’s too shallow for that. You just sit in it like it’s a bathtub. They say the Indians used to use it, but I don’t know how true that is. They also say people with breathing problems used to come from hundreds of miles away to sit in it. I call bullshit on that.”

  There was silence for a moment, then a splash of water from the other side of the pool.

  “Goddamn!”

  “Told you,” the guttural man said.

  Wylie felt small wavelets lick his chin and jawbone as the two men entered the pool and sat down in the water.

  “It stings like hell.”

  “You can get out anytime. I’ll meet you in the truck.”

  “You have the keys.” The other man moaned. The guttural man laughed again.

  “It’s getting better now, sort of.”

  The guttural man laughed again. “Yeah.”

  “How often do you come here?”

  “Not often. I’m too busy most of the time. But when I do come, it’s like three or four in the morning. I like to have it all to myself—like now.”

  Wylie remained still. They thought they were alone. He wanted to keep it that way. He hoped he wouldn’t have a moment of flatulence, which sometimes happened when his guts got too hot.

  There were a couple of minutes of silence. He could hear the ducks in the river again. They didn’t quack so much as titter, as if engaging in pillow talk.

  “It’s a hell of a thing,” the other man said. “I was kind of blown away by what you showed me today. Man—the scale of it!”

  “It’s mind-blowing. The amount of money that’s gone into it is fucking crazy.”

  Wylie waited for more. What thing?

  The two men changed the subject to talk about the waitress who’d served them that day at the Saratoga Resort across the river. The other man thought she might have been flirting with him. He went on to recount the signals he thought he’d received from her.

  “In your dreams,” the guttural man growled.

  “You’ll see.”

  “Forget that and get some sleep while you’re here. We’ve got a long day ahead of us tomorrow. We’ve got a lot of work to do before the boss arrives. Everything needs to be cleaned up, like I told you. I don’t want him asking any questions.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And I need to call that fuckin’ rube to set up another delivery. Remind me to call him when we leave here.”

  “So it’s back to the tipi or whatever you call it?”

  “Wigwam burner. Not tipi. Wigwam.”

  “Wigwam,” the other man repeated. “I knew it was some kind of Indian shit.”

  And Wylie realized that the fuckin’ rube was him. His belly shuddered with a growl, but no bad bubbles appeared.

  *

  WYLIE WAITED
FOR another fifteen minutes. He’d been in the pool much too long and was feeling faint. But he didn’t dare move or speak before the two men left. Chances were the guttural man would recognize him. The two men continued to talk, but the subjects were football, gambling, and women they’d met and bedded in different parts of the country.

  “I keep thinking about that one I told you about,” the guttural man said.

  “The blond one?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Didn’t you say she talked too much?”

  “Find me one that doesn’t.”

  “She’s nothing compared to my little hottie waitress.”

  “Fuck you. You never saw her.”

  “True.”

  “So shut up about her.”

  There was a long pause.

  “I didn’t mean to hit a nerve. I was just fucking around, you know?”

  “Don’t fuck around.”

  “Believe me, I’ve got it.”

  “Good.”

  Finally, the other man sighed and said, “I’m getting out.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I feel like I’ve been fucking boiled alive.”

  “You have.”

  *

  HE SAT STILL until he heard a car start up in the parking lot. Then Wylie crawled out of the water with the grace of a walrus. Although he knew the concrete walkway was freezing, it felt good against his skin. He hoped his wet body wouldn’t stick to it when he was ready to get up.

  At last, he raised himself to his hands and knees. The time he’d spent in the hot pool had taken away most of his strength. Plus, he’d jammed himself up for time and he’d have to grab a pizza or a hot dog at the Kum-N-Go instead of enjoying a sit-down dinner. He’d also get a six-pack of Gatorade to replenish all the sweat he’d lost in the hot pool.

  When he shuffled to his truck, he checked his phone. No messages yet.

  But he was sure now he’d get another call later that night.

  The pang of guilt, like an icicle, stabbed at him just below the heart.

  PART

  TWO

  There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.

  —Niccolò Machiavelli

  8

  JOE BEGAN THE THREE-HUNDRED-MILE DRIVE FROM SADDLESTRING to Saratoga as the morning sun winked over the Bighorn Mountains. He’d packed his gear into his pickup the night before so he could get an early start.

  After kissing Marybeth and Lucy good-bye at the breakfast table and unplugging the engine block heater outside in the parking lot, he paused at the door when Daisy padded along behind him. Tube stayed in bed.

  “I’ll see you a little later,” he said to Daisy as he stroked her head, hoping that in her Labrador brain she wouldn’t realize that he meant days or weeks. He didn’t think he’d fooled her, though.

  He’d left a complete copy of the Kate file for Marybeth to read and the original was clamped under his arm.

  . . .

  IT WAS NINETEEN BELOW ZERO. The springs and steering of the truck were stiff at first in the morning cold and it took nearly twenty minutes for the rock-hard frozen tires to become pliable. The streets of Saddlestring were snow-packed and slick. Residents had gone outside to start their vehicles and had left them in their driveways to warm up, creating rising columns of white exhaust.

  The sun cleared the summit of the mountains and soon flooded the valley with cold light. The landscape was white and smooth for as far as he could see, with the exception of skeletal trees near the river and natural hedgerows of maroon buckbrush that caught the sunlight and held on tight. Angus cattle in the pastures had gathered into scrums to keep warm, and their exhalation condensed into miniature clouds.

  Although he’d slept well, he’d arisen with his mind racing with what he’d learned about Kate’s disappearance. There were plenty of gaps to fill and they could only be filled on the ground, by talking with people. He was intrigued to find out what Sheridan knew about Kate, since she’d ridden horses with her. Joe knew that, like fishing with someone, riding with a partner was often an intimate experience. There was time to talk while horses were saddled and tacked up, in the cab of the truck while they were being transported by trailer, and certainly over the hours on the trail.

  Sheridan was a good listener and always had been, and wranglers were like bartenders: people felt drawn to talk to them.

  Three aspects of the assignment bothered him, though. The first was the odd way Michael Williams had responded when Joe asked him about his work on the case. There was something Williams couldn’t or wouldn’t talk about and Joe didn’t know what it was. Williams and the DCI’s investigation appeared methodical and solid. There was a real question about why they’d been taken off the case by Governor Allen, and Joe had trouble believing it had to do with budget cuts and bureaucratic inertia, as Allen had said.

  That led to the second concern in Joe’s mind. Why him? Sure, Allen had found the old Rulon files where Joe had acted as the former governor’s range rider. But with the entire DCI at his disposal, as well as local law enforcement on the scene, why had the governor chosen him? Something didn’t make sense about it. Allen had no special feelings toward Joe. In fact, he seemed to distrust him, as Joe so far distrusted the governor in return.

  The third unknown, and one that hadn’t really been discussed, addressed, or documented, had to do with Saratoga game warden Steve Pollock. Pollock would have been the natural person for the governor to ask to help him surreptitiously. After all, Pollock was on the ground and knew the area, the people, and presumably the situation with Kate’s disappearance. But he was gone and no one seemed to really know what had happened to him. There’d been no interagency gossip about Pollock’s situation.

  When a game warden quit or was fired, it was usually a big deal within the agency. Game warden positions were hard to get and there were hundreds of applicants for every opening. Not only that, but an open district meant that all the current game wardens had the opportunity to apply for it. Seniority was the major consideration to getting a choice district. New game wardens received districts no one else wanted.

  Each game warden had a badge number whose order was based on how long they’d been employed relative to the others. Pollock had been badge number eighteen. Joe was now badge number twenty, meaning there were nineteen wardens his senior and thirty his junior.

  Saratoga, like Saddlestring, was considered to be one of the best districts in the state. It had mountains on three sides, the North Platte River, which was a blue-ribbon trout fishery, and a large concentration of big-game animals. It was kind of a resort area like Jackson Hole, but without the high-priced housing and amenities and the crush of tourists. It was an attractive place to live. Joe had once suggested that he and Marybeth should apply for the district if it ever came open, and his wife had liked the idea—provided it could happen after all three girls were done with school.

  Joe had seen no notices from headquarters about the open position yet, which was curious. It was something he wanted to learn more about.

  Despite that, Joe had no idea if Pollock’s termination was related to the Kate case or simply coincidental. But something about it nagged him. He doubted he would get a straight answer if he called headquarters. His director, Linda Greene-Dempsey, was rumored to be on thin ice with the new governor, and she’d bunkered in with the hope that Allen would forget she was alive. Therefore, she kept her head down and had ceased sending out directives that might call attention to her. She wasn’t the right person to call and ask about what had happened to Steve Pollock—especially if he’d done something wrong. Director LGD would not want any bad publicity concerning game wardens to be heard by the new governor or his staff.

  If that was the situation, Director LGD and her executive team would wait for the smoke to clear and quietly open the district for applications later.

  . . .

>   JOE SLOWED DOWN north of Kaycee on Interstate 25 because the wind had kicked up. Ground blizzards like waves of thick-bodied snakes rolled across the blacktop and obscured the black ice underneath. He kept a tight grip on the wheel with the exception of an imaginary toast to Wyoming icon Chris LeDoux as he drove by the singer’s hometown. He had toasted LeDoux countless times with Nate Romanowski as they passed through and he did it again. But when he was done, he concentrated on his driving.

  The grille of a massive red Peterbilt tractor-trailer filled his rearview mirror and then roared around him in the passing lane. Joe glimpsed license plates from New Jersey. The bulk and momentum of the truck rocked his pickup and stirred up the ground blizzards. For a brief and terrifying moment, Joe could see only white through the windshield and he could gauge his progress only by glimpses of highway markers that shot by on the side of the road.

  He eased off the accelerator and waited for the truck to get far enough ahead of him that the flurry of snow-smoke would clear and he could see again. For a second, he considered going after the driver with his lights and siren on because he could request the authority to cite him for driving too fast for conditions, but the thought of a high-speed chase on ice dissuaded him.

  Eventually, the snow cleared and Joe could see the back of the red Peterbilt a quarter mile ahead of him. It kicked up snow like a powerboat kicked up a wake.

  Driving across Wyoming in the dead of winter was always an adventure. It was the reason so many people never left their small towns or they wintered in Arizona. Joe didn’t mind the winter. In fact, he perversely enjoyed how mortal and small it made him feel at times. Tough winters evened things out because everyone was in the same boat—as long as that boat was a four-wheel drive. He’d explained his reasoning to Marybeth once and she’d simply shaken her head.

  Joe topped a long hill and looked out at the vast black-and-white ribbon of highway to the south to see that the Peterbilt that had roared past him, as well as another semi, were both lying on their sides in the borrow ditch ahead of him. They looked like two large animals that had decided to lie on their sides to rest for a while.